Russell Kirk: Patron Saint of Populism’s Golden Age?

Michael Lucchese's On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776 reminds us that Russell Kirk’s conservatism was a way of seeing before it was a way of voting.

The second half of the 20th century had no greater teacher of the roots of American conservatism and guardian of our nation’s values than Russell Kirk, the sine qua non of American conservatism’s intellectual tradition. Ronald Reagan rightly Kirk among the “intellectual leaders” who had shaped the movement’s mind, him as the “prophet of American conservatism” who “taught, nurtured, and inspired a generation.”  

In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence, Kirk published one of the great works of American identity and self-understanding: The Roots of American Order. Today, as the United States approaches its semiquincentennial, Michael Lucchese has returned readers to similar themes with On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, a new collection of Kirk’s essays on American heritage and culture. 

Kirk’s conservatism was a way of seeing before it was a way of voting, as was clear in his doctoral dissertation-turned-conservative landmark, The Conservative Mind. First published in 1953 and repeatedly revised until 1985’s seventh and final edition, The Conservative Mind introduced its readers to a great company of men like Edmund Burke, John Adams, and T. S. Eliot, disclosing in their words, deeds, and lives a disposition toward order, virtue, moral imagination, and prudence. 

Like his other writings, On America is not a simple history or a set of facts to be mastered, but an introduction to “what makes our country worth loving,” as Lucchese explains in his overview of the volume. Kirk offers up many human examples of what Augustine the “common objects of love” that should constitute a virtuous American conservatism: John Adams and Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Frost, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. As a communion of memory and affection, conservatism can transcend ideology and form a living wellspring for political renewal. 

Read more from John Shelton in Civitas Outlook.