Conservative Minder

Birzer could easily have omitted the date, and his point would have been just as valid. The Kirk of the 1980s and ’90s was just as much out of tune as the Kirk of the 1950s with the populist or pseudo-populist political conservatism of 2016.

Kirk’s influence, from the start, has always been more cultural than political, as Birzer recognizes. In any case, Kirk’s own political views never conformed to those of any party or movement, despite his friendships with politicians like Michigan governor John Engler and President Ronald Reagan. Birzer points out that Kirk, though not a pacifist, found himself unable to support any war in which the United States had been involved, from the American Revolution up to the Gulf war, including the Civil War and the war in which Kirk himself served, World War II.

Kirk made what Birzer calls “a nearly fatal error” when, criticizing what he saw as the bellicosity of neoconservative foreign policy, he commented: “And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, among others, understandably took offense at the remark, regarding it as evidence of antisemitism. Birzer offers no brief for the comment but defends Kirk himself against the charge of antisemitism, noting that “not a single person has left an account of any negative comments Kirk ever made in conversation, casual or otherwise, about Judaism or Jews,” adding that the same is true of his letters. Kirk, Birzer documents, “founded Modern Age to defend the views of famed scholar Leo Strauss, and he departed the journal because of the rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism there.” Birzer concludes that, although Kirk “might very well have chosen poor words when fearing that American national interests were succumbing to Israeli interests, that this one comment—very much taken out of context by his opponents—should or even could brand Kirk an anti-Semite is simply untenable.”

Birzer contends that Kirk’s importance lies not in his political interventions but in his success in articulating an American conservatism that might serve “as a means, a mood, and an attitude to conserve, to preserve, and to pass on to future generations the best of the humane tradition rather than to advocate a particular political philosophy, party, or agenda.” Kirk’s first, and probably most influential, book was The Conservative Mind (1953), which Birzer calls his magnum opus. The importance of The Conservative Mind can be measured by the comment of so thoughtful a critic as Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination (1950) that, in the United States, there were no conservative ideas in circulation, only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

The Conservative Mind refuted the notion—conventional wisdom in the 1950s—that liberalism stood alone as the sole intellectual tradition alive in the United States by pointing to figures such as John Adams, whom Kirk considered “the founder of true conservatism in America.” Adams’s influence remained alive, Kirk contended, “in the middle of the twentieth century” when, despite the inroads of progressives and liberals, the United States was still “the most conservative power remaining in the world, still standing for Adams’ principle of political balance, liberty under law,” and still maintaining the federal form of government Adams saw as a bulwark against radicalism.

Kirk ended the first edition of The Conservative Mind with tributes to three thinkers who had been especially important to him: Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. None engaged in partisan politics, though all three reflected on the danger of taking democratic political ideas about the equality of all individuals to an extreme that ends, paradoxically, by empowering not the individual but the state.

Babbitt, Kirk wrote, saw “the Federal Constitution and the Supreme Court and other checks upon immediate popular impulse are to the nation what the higher will is to the individual.” Unlike the agnostic Babbitt, More believed that religion, specifically Christianity, was not only true but necessary for human life. Kirk quotes More affirming that religious belief “is a necessary counterpoise to the mutual aid and materialistic greed of the natural man, and the conservatism it inculcates is not the ally of sullen and predatory privilege but of orderly amelioration.” Santayana was a philosophical materialist, but he shared the critique of popular liberalism articulated by Babbitt and More. Kirk accurately paraphrased Santayana’s prescient verdict:

The Conservative Mind was vulnerable to criticism because of its inclusion of John C. Calhoun among its roster of American conservatives and its omission of Abraham Lincoln. Birzer poses the question: “What could the slave-autocrat Calhoun have in common with the plain Abraham Lincoln, promoter and defender of the abolitionist Thirteenth Amendment?” He fails, however, to provide any answer beyond the enigmatic assertion that “Kirk found much to like in each man, for each, from his perspective, embodied some timeless truth made sacramentally incarnate.”

If the answer is vague, his question is also misleading: Calhoun is treated as a real, though flawed, conservative in The Conservative Mind, while Lincoln is mentioned only incidentally.

Better to defend Kirk by noting that The Conservative Mind, despite its historic importance, was written while he was still a young man and recognizing that Kirk’s thought evolved and deepened through the decades. In The Roots of American Order (1974), which, pace Birzer, may be considered Kirk’s true magnum opus, Kirk offered a learned and thoughtful assessment of Western civilization from its beginnings in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to the American present. In Roots he barely mentions Calhoun but pays his respects to Lincoln: “In Abraham Lincoln, the American democracy would find, at its sternest crisis of disorder, its most capable and self-sacrificing man of order.” For the later Kirk, the example of Lincoln “proved that a democracy of elevation can uphold resolutely the public order and the moral order.”

Bradley Birzer makes a strong case for the continuing importance of Russell Kirk as thinker, writer, and all-round “man of letters.” Kirk wrote novels such as Old House of Fear (a bestseller in the early ’60s) and short stories, his works in both genres usually involving ghostly or supernatural events and all illustrating the power of what Kirk, following Edmund Burke, called “the moral imagination.” The title of his autobiography, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, emphasizes his identity as a man of letters rather than the leader of a political movement. Kirk’s Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century is recognized as a masterwork of literary criticism, even by those who do not share Kirk’s (and Eliot’s) conservatism.

The short-run future of political conservatism in the United States seems dire; but in the long run, the work of Russell Kirk, with its always-relevant reminders of what he called the “permanent things,” seems likely to endure.

James Seaton, professor of English at Michigan State, is the author, most recently, of Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative.