“The Conservative Mind” at 70 for Europe

'America is European or nothing, and that conservative ‘European’ America is the only root of and hope for America itself'. I've been beating this drum for years!

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Marco Respinti

In “The Conservative Mind,” Russell Kirk, the father of American modern conservatism, said plainly that America is conservative or nothing, that America is European or nothing, and that conservative ‘European’ America is the only root of and hope for America itself.

 At 70, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is a young book. That work can be approached and described in several different ways, and in almost three quarters of a century, it has been indeed. One of the theoretically most evident of those ways, yet often neglected at a practical level, looks at it as a genealogy. It is in fact the line of descent of a family of thought that has its progenitor in the Irish statesman Edmund Burke, offering intellectual portraits and cameos of a number of different, authors sometimes difficult to pair, if not exactly for their direct and indirect, total or partial Burkean ascendence.

Burke was one of the most prominent proponents and defenders of the natural law tradition, understood in an Aristotelian-Christian perspective, in the eighteenth century, probably even the most lucid. His philosophy stemmed from the practical political and legislative actions he exerted in the London parliament for almost three decades and was tempered by peculiar international and pivotal stress-tests, among which the assertion of the rights of the British colonists in North America and the rise of an anti-Christian state sanctioned by the French Revolution (1789–1799) are the most relevant. In many regards, these movements stand at the opposite end of the political and cultural spectrum, projecting their respective progenies on the following centuries.

In The Conservative Mind, Kirk traces the Burkean lineage on both sides of the Atlantic (as he was fond to say) as offering a specific Anglo-American response and refutation to the French Enlightenment and Jacobinism. Within this framework, he then founds and crafts a specific American way of thought, which he calls Conservatism.

While the term has been used, and abused, since the publication of Kirk’s magnum opus in 1953, at that time the word was rarely applied with soundness and wit to culture and politics. It was in fact Kirk who knighted and ennobled conservatism, locating it precisely within the Burkean lineage. Thus, for Kirk conservatism results in a basically natural-law centered and Christian (in the broadest sense) rebuttal of ideologies, as the antipodes of the Enlightenment (especially that of the French mold) and Jacobinism. And not only conservatism in general, but specifically American Conservatism.

It should be asked whether conservatism as such is a distinctively English-speaking phenomenon, possibly the response of the Burkean Anglosphere to Jacobinism, given the fact that the word itself seems to have originated among the Burkean circles in France, especially in “Le Conservateur”, the review that existed for 18 months, from 1818–1820, in Paris by François-René de Chateaubriand and other like-minded anti-revolutionaries. In this case, similar manifestations of anti-revolutionary thought in other cultural spheres of the world would merit different names, but of course it is not a mere a question of names and nominalism. For sure, Kirk sees conservatism as Burkean and the genuine America as Burkean conservative. His work on Burke’s philosophy, the American Constitution, and America’s British culture testify to this at length and in depth. But, rather consciously, all this has a distinctively European flavor.

The British colonists of North America were European (the British Isles were always European, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out), the French Revolution was indeed a devastating European event, and Burke, the defender of the first and the first critic of the second, was European. Of course, the European origin of Kirk’s conservatism is not an incident of birth. As he shows in his 1974 The Roots of American Order—a book that gives its best if read in parallel with The Conservative Mind, and vice versa—the colonial mind of North America and the Founding of the new nation, the United States in 1776, are an original rebranding of European culture that never severs its ties with its forefathers, and never should. In Kirk’s understanding and in his prophetical announcement, only this consciousness and identity can provide America the antidotes to resist and battle and possibly win over the sirens of ideology and ideocracy that originate from and build upon the French Revolution and its legacy, as continued by all tyrannical regimes and totalitarianisms, either shaped as armed doctrines (as Kirk said) or relativistic in nature.

Kirk’s approach is both original and fraught with consequences. It has also been misunderstood or confused with other spurious semi-ideologies. But for Kirk, as The Conservative Mind makes clear, is diriment. Open to intelligent discussion and contributions as he was, he was altogether unmovable: conservatism is Burkean or it is not. And America is Burkean conservative or it is yet another dismal experiment in progressivism–of the disastrous kind denounced by J.R.R Tolkien in his 1931 poem Mythopeia: “I will not walk with your progressive apes, erect and sapient. Before them gapes the dark abyss to which their progress tends if by God’s mercy progress ever ends, and does not ceaselessly revolve the same unfruitful course with changing of a name.”

The European reader should duly take note. For one of the brightest minds of the twentieth-century Anglosphere, one of the most influential American man of letters and intellect, and the father of American modern conservatism said plainly that America is conservative or nothing, that America is European or nothing, and that conservative ‘European’ America is the only root of and hope for America itself.

Kirk describes the American conservative lineage, parallel to conservatism’s Burkean genealogy, revisiting the rather common dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem. For Kirk, the composite, rich legacy of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, amalgamated by Christianity, was in fact assumed, “translated,” and re-created by London to produce, in Philadelphia and Washington, the American colonial order at a time of salutary neglect from the Leviathan (as he deems it).

Focusing on this description, in The Conservative Mind Europeans find more than just an interpretation, but a hermeneutics of continuity that offers a radically different approach to genuine America than the liberal vulgate’s, one that should at least be considered a viable working option for deeper studies and reflections. Among Europeans, Italians especially—given the classical Roman relevance for America that Kirk outlines—may find useful tools to understand why today’s heirs of Jacobinism (liberals, socialists, communists, and fascists), who aimed at destroying classical and Christian Europe from which Kirk reasons America came, are also grossly anti-American… as are those culturally lapsed Christians who are accustomed to be dhimmi in front of those ideologies.