A serious conservative grounded in 'first things'

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RUSSELL KIRK AND THE AGE OF IDEOLOGY

By W. Wesley McDonald

University of Missouri Press, $44.95, 243 pages

REVIEWED BY ROGER FONTAINE

I discovered Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind" 10 years after its publication in 1953. It is fair to say reading it changed a college-kid liberal into, well, something else. Now it is 10 years since the death of Russell Kirk and few, even within American conservatism, would pause to remember. A pity, but Wesley McDonald's new book should help put matters aright.

The author's analysis of Russell Kirk is not an easy read, nor is it meant to be. Kirk addressed serious questions in a serious way. He was concerned with ideas and their consequences. Although the sage of Mecosta, Mich., could unleash a polemic as well as anyone, it was "first things" that he brought to a tiny minority, a natural aristocracy that might preserve what was left of the Anglo-American tradition. Or so he hoped.

Kirk's contribution, in fact, is enormous and Mr. McDonald, a professor of political science at Elizabethtown College, is up to the task of reminding us why. He argues that Kirk made postwar American conservatism intellectually respectable by launching a formidable riposte to a smug, but decadent, modern American liberalism.

True, Russell Kirk may be largely forgotten by many of today's conservatives because, with few exceptions, he was not much interested in fashioning a programmatic conservatism. What he thought about tax cuts or getting the government out of the marketplace or foreign policy isn't known, since he wasn't much concerned.

A "Contract with America" he would find either amusing or alarming. This attitude led him to countless quarrels with others inside the conservative tent.