Lastly, that there is only one perfect form of dictatorship, and it will never be of this world, so don’t even try.
Bkmk
Well, there you are! Or more accurately, there I am!
A very insightful essay.
Excellent. Kirk reminded me why I discarded Libertarianism some twenty years ago.
Marking for later
Thanks for posting.
I doubt most self-named conservatives agree with certainly the first, and probably most of these tenets.
Ditch the first and all you have is a disorganized, pointless mess.
I have always admired Russell Kirk’s erudition ever since I read “The Conservative Mind” over forty years ago. But today, after witnessing the slow collapse of the freedom and liberty movement and the relentless rise of Leviathan government during that intervening period, I have come to the conclusion that this country is not interested in preserving our culture and traditions. People today wouldn’t know the value of Constitutionalism and the American system of government if it bit them in the ass. And they have no desire to know, since the entire corpus of writing outlining the freedom and liberty philosophy is available at no cost in archives readily available on the Internet. We truly live in the end times of a degenerate culture and are witnessing the collapse of the new Roman Empire in real time every day.
Russell Kirk is one of the godfathers of modern conservatism. A brilliant man. I wish I had read him 40 years ago.
I think missing from the list is that conservatives favor truth over fiction. And also that conservatives would rather be right and unpopular than wrong and popular.
Thanks for the post, Mr Mojo
It’s time to revisit Kirk, methinks. A fresh read is in order.
But, this is very insightful and, moreover, succinct.
So what, exactly, has Kirk’s conservative principles actually, you know, conserved over the past, say, 50 years? Practically, his principles have failed. Just like the Constitution has failed.
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Thank you for this article.