A serious conservative grounded in ‘first things’

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.

Kirk brooked no compromise, as the author repeatedly demonstrates. He pretty much lumped libertarian free-marketers with Benthamite utilitarians, and, by extension, modern-day liberals. In short, he did not worship at the shrine of unfettered capitalism.

If he were alive today, the Enron debacle would neither embarrass nor surprise him. He would only stop to remind us of man’s sinful nature and what is wrong with a culture that encourages individual greed over the needs of the community.

And that brings us to Edmund Burke. If Russell Kirk did nothing else, “The Conservative Mind” recovered Burke from the dustbin of liberal contempt. And that would be enough.

Rather than provide policy alternatives to the proponents of the modern-day welfare state, Kirk sought more. He knew that the underpinnings of American liberalism were weak and insubstantial, and that it could not hold off challenges from those who would be even more extreme.

How right he was, as we endured the tidal wave of New Age cant that was the hallmark of the 1960s and 1970s. There was then (and even now) little sense of Burke’s belief that the living form a compact with those who have passed on and those who are yet to come. A radical, generational break with the past, in brief, was opening the gates of hell.

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