RE: http://www.firstprinciplesjour...241&theme=home&loc=f


A most stimulating article! Mr Taylor does well to cite the work of the Kolkos, who criticize state capitalism from the Left; he might well have alluded to the current economic crisis as demonstrating the inherent cosiness between big business, especially 'Wall Street' and big government. Where does Goldman-Sachs end and the Department of the Treasury begin? As seasoned readers of Modern Age will tquick to tell, American conservatism in its more robust manifestations has never involved uncritical support of 'capitalism'--a term essentially invented by Marxists, as Russell Kirk was always quick to point out. I have a spiritual exercise for those on the Right who are uncritically accepting of capitalism and capitalists: concentrate on a mental image of that Ueberfinancier, George Soros.

I do, however, have serious problems with Mr Taylor's thesis. Most prominently, it is difficult, to say the least, to inscribe in the Jeffersonian tradition the author of The Conservative Mind, who devoted an entire chapter to a positive assessment of the political philosophies of John Adams and Fisher Ames. I do not have to hand my cherished forty-year-old copy of the second edition of Kirk's great study, but I do recall that he writes that Jefferson had 'half a mind, and sometimes more than half a mind to be a conservative'. But Jefferson, on the whole, remained for Kirk a figure of the radical enlightenment, a Francophile enthusiast of Jacobinism. Let me pose a double contrafactual: if Russell Kirk had been alive in 1804, and if Alexander Hamilton had lived to challenge Jefferson for the Presidency, whom would Kirk have supported?

Nor could Russell Kirk, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a 'populist'. He was a strong believer in hierarchy and in the necessity of elites of various sorts as a counter-balance to the threat of democratic tyrrany that Tocqueville so presciently foresaw in the wake of the Jacksonian social revolution of the 1830's. I remember that Kirk shocked the poo-bahs of pure democracy by stating, 40 years after the fact, that direct election of U.S. senators had been a mistake (Zell Miller made the same suggestion at the 2004 Republican convention. Lots of luck!)

Kirk did, of course, support Pat Buchanan in 1992. But Buchanan has become the Harold Stassen of our day; or more precisely, he is to the Republican Party what Ralph Nader is to the Democrat. In fact, there is an acknowledged affinity between these two ideologues. I consider myself a Burke-to-Kirk conservative, and I felt no contradiction in voting in 2000 and 2004 for Bush 43 with a prudent degree of enthusiasm. Imagine if Buchanan had taken just a thousand votes more in Florida, and Captain Planet had been elected, then re-elected in 2004. Consider what a Gore Supreme Court would have looked like: no Roberts and no Alito, rather clones of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Those of conservative temperament would do well to remember the fate of Edwin Arlington Robinson's Miniver Cheevy:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.