The Audacious Russell Kirk

This new collection, On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, is welcome and timely, and not just on account of the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is also timely on account of the current state of our culture and politics. Among its virtues: it affords readers an excellent opportunity to revisit one of the most misunderstood quotations in Russell Kirk’s lexicon. Kirk was fond of quoting T.S. Eliot’s saying: “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” These words can give hope to beleaguered defenders of The Permanent Things in our corrupt age. But they are not designed and should not be taken to excuse withdrawing from political struggles or defending business as usual in a time, such as ours, of deep crisis. 

Neither Eliot nor Kirk would justify surrender in the face of conflict, especially when order in the commonwealth is at stake. Vague gestures toward cultural continuity, civility, and the possibility of renewal at some future date are woefully insufficient when our patrimony stands on a knife-edge. As the volume’s postscript, “The Constitution and the Antagonist World,” makes clear, since the cataclysm of 1914

“whole peoples have been uprooted or transplanted, or perhaps extirpated; complex patterns of life have been devastated or totally supplanted; political systems have vanished almost without trace; classes have been effaced, ancient rights abolished, the cake of custom ground to powder. Constitutions written and unwritten have been subverted almost overnight by conventions of political fanatics, and innovating substitute constitutions in their turn have been expunged within a few years, making way for yet more novel political structures—no less evanescent.”

Even the British culture Kirk saw as central to our own traditions has “experienced much constitutional alterations” (by now one might say has been completely overthrown) in recent years. And America’s own constitutional order, long thought beyond possibility of destruction, before the end of the 20th Century already was in danger. “We confront an armed doctrine and are divided in our own counsels.” The doctrine has morphed from simple communism to a strange brew of socialism, race hatred, and radical Islamism but remains armed and determined to destroy our civilization. 

Read more from Bruce P. Frohnen at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.