CRANK UP THE VCR :

A big thank you to Ed Driscoll who sends word that C-SPAN'S American Writers will feature Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, & the Conservative Movement on June 30th beginning at 3pm and on July 5th starting at 8pm. I've not yet dug down to the box of books that has God and Man at Yale, which made Mr. Buckley notorious at an early age. But we do have a review posted of my favorite of his books : The Unmaking of a Mayor. It recounts his run for mayor of New York in 1965 and should be required reading for anyone who seeks to understand American conservatism, the 1960s or just the strange dynamics of a political campaign, but it is sadly out of print. It's one of those books that I buy every time I see it used and then give away, like samizdata in the old USSR.

Regular readers will know, and likely be tired of the fact, that I revere Russell Kirk. His The Conservative Mind : from Burke to Eliot (1953) was one of the seminal attempts to demonstrate that there is a coherent, substantial and enduring body of conservative thought. The book came out at a time when not only was conservatism thought to be dead, some claimed it had never even existed. Emblematic of the Left's dismissal of what it saw as mere reaction was this passage from Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination :

[I]n the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.... It is the plain fact [that] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...[only]...irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.

Kirk put paid to that foolish nation and the many like it with an immensely readable style and a happily quirky survey of the thought of conservative authors and politicians through the decades. (This book is in print in a very nice edition, though it looks like the Hardcover is back-ordered.)

There's much to recommend the book but I found two aspects of it particularly gratifying. First, there is an awesome consistency to conservative thought over the last two hundred years (he dates conservatism from Edmund Burke) and to an extraordinary, and somewhat depressing, degree, the concerns expressed those two centuries ago are identical to those of conservatives today. Moreover, the conservative critics have been consistently right (no pun intended). Their (our) message remains the same not because they are stuck in a rut but because liberalism just keeps trotting out new bad ideas to try and then watch fail, while conservatives warn them against the attempt. The other thing that one notices is that, contrary to popular (i.e., Left) opinion, the quality of the literature produced by the Right is every bit as good that which the Left cranks out, though admittedly less voluminous.

At any rate, with Kirk having laid the intellectual groundwork and Buckley beginning the nuts and bolts work of building a movement (National Review was founded in 1955), conservatism was launched as a fast rising force in American politics. Within ten years, as Rick Perlstein so brilliantly chronicles in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), conservatives had nominated their first presidential candidate. Though the rise to power from there was rather choppy, it seems fair to say that since 1976 it is conservative ideas that have completely dominated Republican politics and since 1980 it is conservative ideas that have dominated American politics. It is impossible to overstate the influence that these two men, especially Buckley, had on causing this about face.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 20, 2002 8:35 PM