Free Republic

The Constitution of the United States was and is rooted in the experience and the thought of earlier times—which is a major reason why the American Constitution has not perished or been supplanted by some different political system. No civilization could survive for a great while if somehow its political constitution should be swept away and no tolerable new constitution substituted. Deeply rooted, like some immense tree, the American Constitution grew out of a century and a half of civil social order in North America and more than seven centuries of British experience...The aim of a good constitution is to...

“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

Russell Kirk isn’t known as a policy wonk. The Great Books, not the mathematical or statistical models of economic technicians, were his organon of choice. He devoted essays to broad, perennial themes like “the moral imagination,” “liberal learning,” and “the permanent things.” Read his numerous columns about higher education, however, and you might come away with a different impression, one of Kirk as a political strategist with a strong grasp of educational policy. Kirk wrote on a wide variety of issues involving higher education: accreditation, academic freedom, tenure, curriculum, vocational training, community colleges, adult education, college presidents, textbooks, fraternities and...

The anti-Trump demonstrations we now see in the streets are not just examples of the immaturity of many modern secular liberals, who seem to think that everyone else is somehow obligated to agree with them. They’re also a symptom of the distorted influence politics now exercises over our culture. But in addition to being a symptom of our culture, the dominance of politics in every aspect of life is also a consequence of liberalism itself. The tendency of liberalism has always been to politicize everything. Thanks to liberalism, we have a politicized media that has abandoned journalistic standards in a...

One of the little known aspects of recent American history is that Russell Kirk served as one of Barry Goldwater's most important intellectual advisors, 1959-1964. The two talked frequently, met frequently, and strategized frequently. In private and public, Goldwater acknowledged Kirk's role a number of times. Only recently, however, did I discover that Kirk wrote a number of speeches for Goldwater. The one that intrigued me most (as Goldwater praised Kirk innumerable times for writing it; Goldwater considered it one of the best speeches he ever delivered) was the talk that Goldwater gave in February 1962. After a very exhausting...

snip To understand these words "civilization" and "culture," the best book to read is T. S. Eliot's slim volume Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948). Once upon a time I commended that book to President Richard Nixon, in a private discussion of modern disorders, as the one book which he ought to read for guidance in his high office. Man is the only creature possessing culture, as distinguished from instinct; and if culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man and the brutes that perish. "Art is man's nature," in Edmund Burke's phrase; and if the human arts,...

In Kirk's view the main Roots of modern political theory are found in the spirit of the Renaissance and in the mind of the Enlightenment. He connects the former with "the theological and moral confusion from which our society has suffered since the sixteenth century."[7] More specifically, Kirk explains, "In some ages - the period we call the Renaissance conspicuous among these - the overweening ego claims too much."[8] The problem is essentially one of pride, the most ancient and cardinal of vices and evils: "Man was only a little lower than the angels...having it within his power to become...

Conservatives are engaged in deep introspection these days. As they reconsider their direction, they would do well to look back to the formative period of their movement. They may find something there of great value—something many conservatives think their movement embraced, but in truth rejected. By 1952, liberal candidates had not only captured the last five Democratic presidential nominations but the past five Republican nominations as well. Most observers considered conservatism dead—a philosophy unsuited for modern times. A small number of intellectuals disagreed. They believed that—if redefined—conservatism might be resuscitated. But they passionately disagreed about how it should be redefined....

Who lost the libertarians?” It’s a question you hear a lot from conservatives of late. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has followed the conservative movement’s internecine intellectual frictions over the last decade — or decades. Self-described libertarians are a minority, even among the ranks of people one could properly describe as libertarian. On many, or even most, contentious public-policy issues — economics, gun rights, health care, free speech, regulation, constitutional interpretation — most support for the libertarian position actually comes from people who describe themselves as conservatives. In other words, conservatives tend to be libertarian, but libertarians...

Believe it or not, it is possible to make a conservative case for academic freedom without mixing opposites. In fact, one of the conservative movement’s sages, Russell Kirk, made the case quite eloquently more than half a century ago. “The principal importance of academic freedom is the opportunity it affords for the highest development of private reason and imagination, the improvement of mind and heart by the apprehension of Truth, whether or not that development is of any immediate use to [society],” Kirk wrote. This put him somewhat at odds with one of the movement’s other great “thought leaders” William...

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/essence-1957/ A very good list of the essentials of conservatism. Russell Kirk - “Conservatism is something more than mere solicitude for tidy incomes.”

The critic of his time must accept the risk of being accused of negativism, but he can console himself with the knowledge that serious criticism has its source in a definite position with its own standards, values and objectives. By the 1950′s, with the work of such men as Albert J. Nock, T. S. Eliot, Richard Weaver and Eliseo Vivas, among many others, the criticism of liberalism had grown into a substantial literature; what was lacking was a point of view, or attitude, movement together and give it coherence and identity. It was the great achievement, one can say historic...

Conservative student group Turning Point USA caused a stir last week by posting pages online from a textbook used at the University of South Carolina. The book calls Ronald Reagan “sexist” and says conservatives “take a basically pessimistic view of human nature” — one in which “people are conceived of as being corrupt.” Several avowed conservatives balked not just at the negative portrayal of Reagan but also at the idea that the conservative persuasion contains a measure of pessimism. On this point, the textbook is right and they are wrong. Russell Kirk was the man credited by William F. Buckley...

In the early to mid 1950s, especially after publishing The Conservative Mind, Kirk began to develop his own own three pillars of a good society, “Order, Justice, and Freedom” as he would frequently put it in the 1970s and 1980s. In this 1954 article (excerpts below), published in the University of Notre Dame’s Review of Politics, Kirk–fully within the Christian Humanist tradition–considered the virtue of Justice from a classical as well as a Christian perspective. Harmony, not contention, brought together the two traditions. Only a true Justice–the recognition of “giving each man his due”–would allow the flourishing of a well-ordered...

A conservative is not, by definition, a selfish or a stupid person; instead, he is a person who believes there is something in our life worth saving. Conservatism, indeed, is a word with an old and honorable meaning—but a meaning almost forgotten by Americans until recent years. Abraham Lincoln wished to be known as a conservative. “What is conservatism?” he said. “Is it not preference for the old and tried, over the new and untried?” It is that; and it is also a body of ethical and social beliefs. The word “liberalism,” however, has been in favor among us for...

There is no one among America's Founding Fathers who provides as articulate and discerning a vision of genuinely conservative thought as John Adams. John Adams: The Most Conservative of Founding Fathers Jack Kerwick, Ph.D. | The New American 04 July 2013 As Russell Kirk suggests in his classic, The Conservative Mind, there is no one among America’s Founding Fathers who provides as articulate and discerning a vision of genuinely conservative thought as John Adams. Adams was a man of great learning and genius. He also is among the most prolific political authors that the United States ever produced. Kirk...

Some in the post-modern snobby, secular academy view these Christian faith-based perspectives as not being academically respectable. They hold to a rigid, narrow dogmatic “establishment of unbelief” (Marsden). Our faculty members, by contrast, think it is intellectually dishonest and stultifying to examine the large questions of truth, beauty, evil, community, the physical world and the human mind as though Christian religious ideas have nothing to say about them. So faith is foundational to everything we do here on this campus. My old friend the late Russell Kirk use to put it this way—As he watched students lining up, as they...

One myth has been prevalent, if not pervasive, throughout the entire debate over health care reform, from President Barack Obama’s first overtures for universal coverage to this very moment. When the left is thrown on the defensive over a point of principle or policy, they almost always resort to invoking this singular myth. What’s the myth? Let me summarize it: “'ObamaCare' is a conservative health care law whose main tenet (the individual mandate) was originally created by the conservative Heritage Foundation and proposed as a bill by conservatives in 1993. Now, a conservative-appointed Chief Justice leading a conservative Supreme Court...

As a card-carrying member of the media elite, it’s hard for me to say something nice about Newt Gingrich. But here it is: He doesn’t wear blue jeans in public. [SNIP of SNARK due to excerpt limit] For many Republican primary voters, the only thing worse than a regular elite is an intellectual elite or a media elite or especially a liberal intellectual media elite. [SNIP] More to the point, does the fact that a guy reads books and deals in ideas disqualify him? For many Americans, it does. Anti-intellectualism has been a consistent theme throughout American history. The political...

Russell Kirk wrote, “Conservatism is not a political system, but a way of looking at the civil order.” Put more plainly, it is a world view. People often confuse being a conservative with being a Republican. However, Republican is a political party not a way of thinking. All republicans are not conservatives. In fact as we have seen over the years there are even some republicans that are not republicans. Being a conservative is really about the embrace of an idea. [...] The natural rights of man emanate from this simple truth: God made man free and independent. As free...