The case for a conservative canon
The conservative movement is deeply confused today. Although America’s Republican Party has won considerable electoral success by opposing the worst excesses of the Left in recent years, it is difficult – if not impossible – to say that the governing populist coalition has conserved much of anything at all. From ballooning federal deficits to spiralling global security crises, not to mention unabated cultural decline and the near-total hegemony of social liberalism, by any objective measure, American conservatism has fallen considerably from the triumphs of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and victory in the Cold War.
In this sad moment of loss and retreat, then, perhaps the conservative movement can rediscover strength by looking back to its forebears and the principles they so nobly advanced – especially Russell Kirk and his vision of an imaginative conservatism. He sought to orient conservatism not toward temporary success in day-to-day political controversy, important as that may be, but rather around what he called the ‘Permanent Things’ that constitute the ‘unbought grace of life’. He aimed to found a conservative movement that is poetic rather than political, patriotic rather than critical, philosophic rather than ideological. If the conservative movement is to endure beyond a series of 24-hour news cycles or even four years of a presidential administration, then it must return to this older, dispositional conservatism.
Kirk’s most profound articulation of this disposition came in his 1953 book The Conservative Mind. More than any other text, it can best be considered the founding document of the conservative movement. Originally produced as a dissertation at the University of Saint Andrews, it quickly became a bestseller because the American people were desperate for something with greater moral substance than the New Deal liberalism then dominating public affairs. Readers were deeply frustrated with both the rationalist central planners governing the nation from Washington and the relativists who were beginning to take the commanding heights of culture and academia. The Conservative Mind offered them an unapologetic defence of their actual way of life – a great intellectual blow against the revolution of the 20th century.
In some ways, though, it may be surprising that a book like The Conservative Mind could have such an influence. Kirk indeed concerned himself with the deeds and speeches of great statesmen, such as Edmund Burke, John Adams, and Benjamin Disraeli, and with the political thought of great minds, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, and Irving Babbitt. But much of the book is more concerned with literary figures such as Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Henry Adams. Kirk believed that even more than written constitutions or abstract political theories, literature can express the true essence of a people and the fundamental roots of social order that we must strive to conserve. If conservatism hopes to conserve anything of true worth, then it must be more than a political movement – it must be understood as a literary tradition.
Read more in Englesberg Ideas.
