He was once credited as the leading figure of the “Conservative Intellectual Movement” (to borrow George Nash’s phrase) but today Conservatism Inc. wants to keep Russell Kirk in obscurity. Luckily,Bradley Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Professor of History at Hillsdale College, has written what may be the definitive Kirk biography Russell Kirk: American Conservative. It will hopefully have the valuable effect of showing how what masquerades as “American conservatism” has almost nothing to do with the vision or values of the man who once defined it.
Birzer’s impressive accomplishment is especially noteworthy because there’s been no lack of Kirk biographies. Two such works, one by my late colleague H. Wesley McDonald and the other by Gerald Russello, were published by University of Missouri Press with my heartfelt recommendations. But neither book shows the breadth and exhaustiveness of Birzer’s Herculean research.
Clearly the author was aiming at being thorough. He covers just about everything his subject published and left behind in his correspondence over a fifty year period. Unlike the commendable works of McDonald and Russello, Birzer is not offering an engaging picture of Kirk, viewed from a particular angle. He is telling us everything that one might care to know about a leading figure of the post-World War Two “Conservative Intellectual Movement”.
But aside from his obvious appreciation of Kirk as a mentor, Birzer may have undertaken this labor of love to rescue his subject from the oblivion to which Conservatism Inc. has consigned him. After the publication of The Conservative Mind in 1953, Kirk was considered the leading thinker of the American Right. Today, a widely-consulted list of the one hundred most influential conservative books by Goodreads doesn’t even bother to mention Kirk’s once-widely praised books The Conservative Mindand The Roots of American Order. Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism places fifth on the same list.
There’s also been an increasing trend of publications such as National Reviewpromoting some of Kirk’s intellectual opponents, such as the late Harry Jaffa, into conservative icons [Harry Jaffa, RIP, by Richard Brookhiser, National Review,January 12, 2015]. Jaffa stressed “equality as a conservative principle” and viciously disparaged Kirk whenever the occasion presented itself. In his work, Birzer quotes Jaffa-disciple and Reagan biographer Steven Hayward, who extolls Reagan for having saved “conservatism” from a fate worse than death—that is, from “having gone in the direction of Russell Kirk, toward a Burkean tradition-oriented conservatism.” [The Vindication of Harry Jaffa, PowerLineBlog, July 4, 2011]
Birzer is understandably upset by this, and by Jaffa’s relentless invective against Kirk as someone who had been “rabid in his denigration and disparagement of the Declaration of Independence and of the principle of human equality.” But Kirk’s critics are writing generally as defenders of the present version of “liberal democracy.” Meanwhile, they attribute a “counterrevolutionary” impetus to a political holding action that barely even delayed the assault of radical egalitarianism. The truth is Russell Kirk became a convenient punching bag for the Establishment, and men like Jaffa simply swung away.
As Birzer surely recognizes, Kirk was never in tune with American political realities. His “gothic imagination” and his fondness for English romantic critics of the Industrial Revolution never fit in with what passed for the American Right, especially in political and journalistic circles. Kirk’s gifts, like those of his friend Flannery O’Connor, were literary. On this point I agree entirely with my longtime adversary David Frum, who depicted Kirk as an aesthetic conservative who left behind an arresting literary vision. Kirk offered us “a vivid and poetic image—not a program, an image” of what a good society would look like. [The legacy of Russell Kirk, New Criterion, 1994]
Kirk’s version didn’t fit with the Beltway. Kirk’s vision was premodern and aligned with early nineteenth-century classical conservatism. Kirk praised its defense of social hierarchy, its stress on the sacramental and supernatural elements of human experience, and Kirk’s revulsion for all efforts at homogenizing human societies. There was nothing in this vision that could possibly appeal to the present Republican establishment or what calls itself mendaciously the conservative movement. I speak as Kirk’s personal friend—Birzer presents me as his subject’s political ally in the Sisyphean task of opposing the (probably inevitable) neoconservative takeover of Conservatism Inc.
And there may be very little in Kirk’s vision that could now translate into any political movement, even of the Right. The current celebration of Donald Trump as the bane of the Leftist-neocon establishment may have much to recommend it. But what I and many VDARE.com readers like about Trump has nothing to do with what Kirk set out in The Conservative Mind as “canons of conservatism.” Trump is not defending the diversity of human experience or inherited social hierarchy. He is simply taking a wrecking ball to the Leftist establishment.
Even Kirk had to compromise to a changing American society. He watered down his canons in successive editions of his seminal work, lest he offend the changing readership of the movement that he supposedly helped created.
