The other conservatism

I recently had occasion to revisit Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953), a book widely acknowledged to have kick-started the rise of modern-day political conservatism in the United States. I had read Kirk’s book in college and warmly remembered it as being a quirky history of ideas more than a call to arms or manifesto, which given Kirk’s point of view, makes perfect sense. He was the last man one would expect to appropriate the poses and gestures of Karl Marx, even if his ends were anti-Marxist. Not so the many conservatives who have followed him, however, for many contemporary, so-called conservatives glory in the kind of willful deception and simplisms that mark revolutionary fervor. Indeed, sometimes I marvel at the lack of self-awareness an avowed conservative must conjure to support some of the loonier elements of what passes for conservatism these days. Where Kirk stood for the individual, modern conservatives appear comfortable borrowing from Marxism’s library of political maneuvers. They organize. They activate the base. They demonstrate. I think Kirk would find all of this to be quite foreign.

Conservatives might well say that to do otherwise would be to bring a knife to a gunfight, but obviously, when you pick through Kirk’s book and then compare some of his positions to those of today’s Right, there are some serious gaps. Some of that may owe to the fact that Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind long before the Left made its play for power in the 1960s; however, my impression is that today’s spokesmen for conservatism exhibit a somewhat selective memory of what Kirk stood for.

The most remarkable passage in The Conservative Mind appears in the book’s final chapter, forebodingly titled “The Recrudescence of Conservatism.” In it, Kirk takes on what he sees as the corrosive effects of consumerism, which at first glance, seem not to square with his support for market capitalism as such. In mocking some of the popular notions of the day (and ours) regarding America’s role in the world and in what manner it can bring democracy and culture to the rest of the world, Kirk composed the following passage:

America’s contribution to the civilization of the future (Mr. Williams’s premises granted) shall be just this: cheapness, the cheapest music and the cheapest comic-books and the cheapest morality that can be provided. This is the degradation of the Utilitarian dogma, James Mill on India brought up to date. After more than a century of industrialization and popular education, the American masses are not conspicuously eager for ‘better and more satisfying things’; but this easy suggestion is tossed as a sop to ‘intellectuals’ (the most hideous and presumptuous of Marxist terms, incidentally), who are to Mr. Williams, one suspects, the mere froth of life. This indeed would be the revolution of revolutions, the hell of universal vulgarity. This is Cyrus P. Whittle, telling himself that not only is America the biggest thing on earth, but it is soon going to wipe out everything else; and in the dazzling delirious joy of that consummation, forgetting to ask what will happen afterward.

This American revolution cherished by the imaginary Cyrus P. Whittle and the very real David C. Williams already is stamped upon the wax of contemporary Europe. The money-changers—literally within the porch at St. Mark’s or Milan—who grin their anxiety to buy the dollar at free-market rates; the hideous file of enormous motion-picture theaters that dominates Brussels; the American weapons that equip the divisions of France and Italy; the tone of the periodicals on the news-vendors’ racks; the brand-advertisement billboards that make the Piazza del Duomo an abomination; the jazz or sentimental refrain that blares from the radio, in English, in Copenhagen or Lausanne; the desperate endeavor of a Neapolitan youth to dress like a filing-clerk à la Broadway—these spell out the ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ flaming in neon against the flimsy walls of twentieth-century European culture. America is at once the voluptuous dream and the object of chicane of the common man of Europe—more and more, indeed, of the common man in India or Egypt or Brazil. The grossness of the hopes thus encouraged among the masses is sad enough; but what is still worse, those hopes never can be substantially gratified, American resources and American institutions lacking; and thus the cultures of the older world are drained of their strength as a prelude not to a gorgeous new prosperity, but to a terrible conflict of appetites that neither the state nor nature possibly can assuage—supposing the present passion of material desire increases unchecked.

Can anyone imagine a prominent voice of conservatism uttering such a passage today (that “hell of universal vulgarity” is simply beautiful)? Perhaps George Will on a good day, but even Mr. Will tends not to satisfy my desire for authenticity, for if modern consumer culture truly repulses him, he doesn’t often demonstrate it. Needless to say, any conservative who would utter this passage more or less verbatim in public today would be deemed suspect by conservative fellow travelers.

What many young conservatives today might find surprising is that Kirk’s distaste for consumer culture was not particularly rare in strands of 20th century conservative thought. For many conservatives, such a culture offended their religious sensibilities; by contrast, today’s religious conservatives seem to institutionalize crassness rather than sermonize against it. Witness the slick marketing surrounding vehicles such as The Left Behind series and countless other “Christian” media, or witness the theme-park attractions of mega-churches like Saddleback Church in California in which the trappings of a disposable culture are so neatly intertwined into the Gospel that one hardly notices them as corruptions. For many, it would seem, Christ provides the bread, mega-churches the circus.

Further, today’s young conservatives might find Kirk’s position vis-à-vis consumerism uncomfortably similar to thinkers and writers who were decidedly not conservative. Take, for instance, the following quotation from the poet Theodore Roethke (1908-63) in comments made at Northwestern University in the year of his death:

I take it as the poet, the intuitive man, I am entitled to, am expected to, throw out what suggestions, what hints I can from my own work, from my own life. I think of this life as an instrument, as an example; and I am perfectly willing to appear ridiculous, absurd, if a real point can be established, a real dent can be made.

I had reason to be delighted with Mr. Bracken’s letter: after all he quoted from my work four times. An all-time record. ‘Nice young man,’ I thought, ‘either going to go far, or go entirely mad.’ Besides, his prose was better than mine. I felt that, in Kierkegaardian terms, we had reached the true state of education in one bound: the student was teaching the teacher. Behind his letter and the various statements I received, one could sense a real hunger for a reality more than the immediate: a desire not only for a finality, for a consciousness beyond the mundane but a desire for quietude, a desire for joy. Now this desire is what the drunkard, the saint, the mystic hankers for in varying ways:—a purity, a final innocence—the phrase is Mr. Spender’s. I think we Americans are very wistful about it. Yet we continue to make a fetish of ‘thing-hood,’ we surround ourselves with junk, ugly objects endlessly repeated in an economy dedicated to waste.

Clearly, when one reads to any depth in Kirk’s and Roethke’s generation, one discovers that thoughtful men and women of all political persuasions warred against the easy gratifications of the market. While Kirk and Roethke started from different premises, they arrived at the same place, Kirk the philosopher, Roethke the poet; one the historian, one the aesthete.

What many strands of this mid-century anti-consumerism held in common—because it certainly wasn’t politics—was elitism. For the Left, it was an article of faith that the proletariat must be led by the nape; for the Right, the industrial classes were simply too unenlightened and too crass to make wise decisions; therefore, in each case, access to decision making—whether by the ballot box or otherwise—must be limited. In Kirk’s vision of America the hard-right position that is the natural end of such thinking is never reached because he believed in three peculiarly American characteristics that made representative government possible: “a constitutional system generally more friendly to liberty than any other in our age; an amenity of conduct and disposition which pervades, despite exceptions, all orders of society; and a spirit of responsibility not yet senile.” One might add that the hard-left position is never reached for quite the same reasons. Although I have my doubts regarding these three key features and their durability given the stresses upon and fractures within the American political system, Kirk’s vision of conservatism, grounded as it is in the classical liberalism of Edmund Burke, is still a handsome one, a much richer and more complex political philosophy than many of his so-called students (and certainly, his enemies) are willing to grant.