The destruction of the First and Second World Wars, and the ideological struggle of the Cold War in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust, made this quasi-religious belief in the onward march of progress seem laughable, absurd or offensive at least in Britain (although the messianic belief in national history as „progress‟ was taken up in the US through the Whig Party of mid-19th Century US politics and then subconsciously absorbed in to the US-dominated field of economics). This was pointedly noted by Herbert Butterfield whose The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) criticised many traditional assumptions of the Whig history that liberal parliamentary democracy was the best form of government to which all people should aspire. Whig history had interpreted British economic prosperity as built on the progress of liberty and democracy „won‟ by the triumphant struggle against tyrannical oppression, in which secure property rights was a rallying cry against an authoritarian, „Popish‟ monarchy. But was it? Butterfield began the re-examination of this „state-building myth‟. He noted that the opposing political faction (the „Tories‟) which emerged as the counterforce to the Whig political grouping clearly did not want any authoritarian rule from Rome subverting their political and economic rights or making their property rights „insecure‟; rather they were concerned in maintaining what they saw as the effective political rights of „the old constitution‟, upholding existing political traditions of the monarchy and the Anglican church, while avoiding the risk of reopening the political confrontation of the previous decades.