The Dilemmas of American Conservatism

Russell Kirk: Traditionalist Conservatism in a Postmodern Age

Russell Kirk Traditionalist Conservatism in a Postmodern Age GERALD J. RUSSELLO Russell Kirk (1918–1994) is widely credited as one of the architects of postwar American conservatism. The author of more than thirty works of intellectual history, literary criticism, and biography, Kirk was a longtime newspaper columnist, an early contributor to National Review, and the founder of two quarterly journals, Modern Age and The University Bookman. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (in later editions expanded to include T. S. Eliot) created for a nascent conservative movement an intellectual genealogy to counter the dominant story of America as a liberal nation. Kirk is often pigeonholed as a hidebound traditionalist, but he himself had a different view, which also casts light on his work as a whole. Kirk describes himself in an essay collection entitled Confessions of a Bohemian Tory as “a connoisseur of slums and strange corners, I have dwelt in more garrets and cellars, forest cabins and island hovels, than I can recall.” Writing in the early 1960s, Kirk staked a claim for a conservative countercultural position: “A Tory, according to Samuel Johnson , is a man attached to orthodoxy in church and state. A bohemian is a wandering and often impecunious man of letters or arts, indifferent to the demands of bourgeois fad and fable. Such a one has your servant been. Tory and bohemian go not ill together: it is quite possible to abide by the norms of civilized existence, what Mr. T. S. Eliot has called ‘the permanent things’: and yet to set at defiance the sot securities and sham conventionalities of twentieth-century sociability.”1 126  Gerald J. Russello Though a Tory, Kirk was not yet attached to a particular orthodoxy in church; his conversion to Roman Catholicism still lay some years in the future. Nor do his condemnations of the “bourgeois fad and fable,” “sot securities,” and “sham conventionalities” trace the usual conservative pieties; were not these the very things conservatives ought to be conserving ? Kirk was charting a different course: of orthodoxy, yes, but not of the expected kind. As he recalls in his memoir, “some readers began to fancy that there were two scribbling Russell Kirks.”2 And indeed, in a sense, there were two. The one composed long works of biography or intellectual history. The other produced stories of the occult for collections such as Love of Horror and was given the “high distinction” of being made a Knight Commander of the Order of Count Dracula by the Count Dracula Society, for his books The Surly Sullen Bell and The Old House of Fear. The intervening decades, however, have partially obscured the signi ficance of Kirk’s interpretation of conservative principles. Some conservative writers, such as scholar Walter Berns and polemicists such as Frank Meyer, offered sharp critiques. More recently, Alan Wolfe published a vituperative review of a collection titled The Essential Russell Kirk, claiming, among other things, that Kirk had no lasting intellectual depth and that his brand of conservatism was really a dangerous reactionary posture. Nevertheless, some have proclaimed Kirk “redivivus” in American intellectual life.3 Though remaining well respected, Kirk’s vision of a person centered in a community guided by what he calls the “permanent things” of human existence remains an embattled position on the Right. For some, Kirk represents a futile nostalgia for a time that never was; for others, his thought, whatever its attractions, has no place in an ideological “movement” seeking political victories. Nevertheless , Kirk’s intellectual legacy remains in a number of places, and its echoes are found throughout the intellectual landscape. Concretely, the journals he founded continue to appear, and his books remain in print. In a series of books, Bill Kauffman has outlined a defense of regionalism that is very much Kirk’s in spirit. Kauffman wants to reclaim the particularities of the American experience from the domination of big government and the monotone culture emanating from Hollywood, Washington, and New York. His lyrical prose elevates half-forgotten episodes and figures in American history and weaves them into a compelling countercultural story that includes Dorothy Day, Norman Mailer, Henry Clune, Calvin Coolidge, and others. Rob Dreher, in his provoca- Russell Kirk  127 tive book Crunchy Cons, explicitly draws support from Kirk for his view of a localist, organic lifestyle. Modeled on Kirk’s suspicions of the cult of technology and his faith in science, the...