Russell Kirk and the Prospects for Conservatism.

• Author: McDonald, W. Wesley

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) is widely regarded as one of the architects of the postwar conservative intellectual revival. The publication, in 1953, of his The Conservative Mind, a monumental 450-page history of conservative ideas from Edmund Burke to T. S. Eliot, dramatically shaped a nascent conservative intellectual movement then struggling for survival. Kirk's rediscovery and articulation of a viable conservative tradition in the English-speaking world including the United States, during a period when the dominant ideological currents were markedly different, helped legitimize a neglected body of ideas. The book established its young author, then a Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) history professor, as a major intellectual force in American politics and letters.

Still only thirty-five and at the height of his intellectual and literary powers, Kirk then penned six more books in just four years: St. Andrews (1954), a history of the Scottish university town where he lived from 1948 to 1953 and where he wrote The Conservative Mind; A Program for Conservatives (1954); Academic Freedom (1955); Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (1956); The American Cause (1957); and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Conservatism (1957). Newsweek magazine took note of his achievements and hailed the rising young scholar as "one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen for the conservative position." Time magazine, echoing this opinion, shortly thereafter warmly praised him as "a gifted and sorely needed spokesman" for American conservatism. "Kirk is no reactionary," Time's book reviewer insisted. He "is in fact considerably more liberal than many self-proclaimed liberals." [1] Alas, Kirk's subsequent treatment by the establishment press would be far less sympathetic.

His total literary output during the approximately four decades of his most active professional writing was impressive: twenty-four nonfiction works; three novels; three books of collected short stories; approximately two thousand articles, essays, and reviews; 2,687 short articles for his nationally syndicated newspaper column, "To the Point," published between April 30, 1962, and August 3, 1975, and his monthly National Review column, "From the Academy" (November 1955-April 1981), in which he described and decried the state of American education. [2] "Russell Kirk has written more," quipped one of his admirers, "than the ordinary American has read." During the last few years of his life, despite the painful hardships of his growing health problems, his Herculean literary labors continued nearly undiminished. He worked on several books simultaneously, some of which were published posthumously: The Politics of Prudence (1993); The Sword of the Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (1995 ), his long anticipated memoirs; and Redeeming the Time (1996).

Although Kirk never regained the celebrity status he enjoyed as an intellectual figure in the 1950s, his works continued to exert considerable influence during the succeeding decades. Some twenty years after the publication of The Conservative Mind, Donald Atwell Zoll, once a significant voice in the postwar resurgence of conservative ideas, hailed Kirk as "a premier figure in the twentieth century revival of aesthetic conservatism." [3] A steady stream of young disciples over the years made pilgrimages to his ancestral home in rural Michigan to study and learn. Self-identified conservative political leaders also felt indebted to him. The first self-described conservative President of the United States in American history saluted Kirk in a 1981 speech delivered before the Conservative Political Action Conference held in Washington, D.C., as one of the "intellectual leaders" who, because he had "shaped so much our thoughts," helped make possible the conservative political victories in the 1980 election. [4] T hough less well known by the general public at the time of his death, his works continue to be read and re-read by serious students of the conservative intellectual tradition.

A Movement Adrift

In the years following World War II, Kirk and a small embattled group of political thinkers, historians, literary critics, economists, and writers--including Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, James Burnham, Frank S. Meyer, and Friedrich A. Hayek--challenged the collectivist, egalitarian, and utilitarian dogmas then fashionable in intellectual and political circles. Anticommunists, traditionalists, and libertarians formed an alliance based on shared political and intellectual aspirations which during the succeeding decades grew in prominence and political strength.

Conservative euphoria.

After spending decades on the political fringe, these thinkers and their allies felt that history was moving decisively in their direction. For many of them, including Kirk, the triumph of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election portended an age of conservative dominance in American politics and society. No longer could they be dismissed as merely disgruntled and politically marginal. Their moment had arrived. History had given them the opportunity to play a formidable role in America's political and cultural future. Never before had this embattled band of intellectuals expressed their aspirations and purposes with such confidence. rust prior to the 1980 election an elated Kirk expressed the feelings of many of them. We are now "entering upon a period of conservative policies in the American Republic," he proclaimed. "In both the great political parties, I suggest, conservative views will tend to dominate. Men and women who profess conservative convictions will be elected to office. And what matters more, the conservative political imagination will set to work to allay our present discontents and to renew our order." [5] While liberalism seemed intellectually exhausted and moribund, fresh ideas and vigor energized conservatism. Conservatives assumed that their principles and programs would supplant a liberalism then widely regarded as a spent force.

Disappointment sets in.

Within a few short years this self-confident mood began to dissipate. Heady optimism gave way to doubt and gloom, and the unity of conservatives began to unravel. Kirk and his fellow conservatives were soon disappointed by the direction of the Reagan Administration. Despite impressive conservative electoral victories, they questioned whether much of enduring significance had been achieved during Reagan's first term. The ideas of the left continued to dominate in colleges and universities, the media, and the bureaucracy. The march toward what conservatives saw as leveling social policies and intrusive managerial politics had not been significantly abated. Conservatism had not moved America to the right, but rather the right had been pushed leftward. In a 1986 symposium on the state of conservatism published in The Intercollegiate Review, several prominent conservatives, including Kirk, M. E. Bradford, Clyde Wilson, and Paul Gottfried, expressed misgivings about the future of "conservative" ideas. [6] They com plained that such self-identified conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, and Jack Kemp were pursuing power and influence in Washington at the expense of true conservative principles. The traditional commitments to a non-imperialistic foreign policy, minimal government, rooted communities and social hierarchies--once the staple principles of the conservative persuasion--were now rarely voiced. Instead, conservative activists were stressing material opportunity and social uplift, and--in the name of global democracy--an interventionist foreign policy. Moreover, the prospect for reining in the social welfare state seemed increasingly remote.

Division on the right.

The doubts about the coherence and direction of the conservative movement expressed in the 1986 symposium marked the beginning of the "conservative wars." By the mid-1980s, the Old Right began questioning whether the so-called neoconservatives--a group of intellectuals, many of them connected with Commentary magazine, and Cold War liberals who had "broken ranks" with the Democratic Party--could rightfully be called "conservatives" at all. The neoconservatives, many of them Jewish, retaliated by bitterly denouncing Old Rightists such as Kirk as racists, anti-Semites, or xenophobes. [7]

To the contributors to the 1986 symposium, the conservative movement was fragmented, "adrift," and "in trouble." Its character had undoubtedly changed. As a consequence of their influence in government and the media, the neoconservatives had effectively redefined conservatism and steered it in the direction of social democracy. [8] By the early 1990s it was no longer startling to hear conservatives proclaim their support for the social-welfare state, affirmative action, the removal of Confederate flags from public buildings in the South, and global democracy. [9] The "politics of nostalgia" seemed all but dead within the conservative ranks. Instead, Kemp, Bennett, Ben Wattenberg, and others in the media identified with the political right praised the march toward greater equality and glorified material wealth. This brand of conservatism owed little to the traditionalism of Edmund Burke, John Adams, Henry Adams, and Irving Babbitt, or even, for that matter, to the libertarian principles heard in the 1964 pres idential campaign of Barry Goldwater.

Popular, media-inspired impressions to the contrary, the postwar American right is not a single movement, but a congeries of movements emerging out of often conflicting philosophical traditions. To demonstrate the contrast between Kirk and his neoconservative adversaries, I shall explicate and then evaluate the historical consciousness that informs his work. I shall also examine the separation of the political and the historical in the writings of prominent neoconservative thinkers who have been in the forefront of Kirk's...