Wolfe’s Howl
It is hard to understand why those who are not cognitively challenged write inexplicably stupid things. Although Professor Allan Wolfe and I would not agree on much politically or philosophically, from all accounts he is an intelligent man. In June 1999 he wrote a reasonably perceptive review of my book After Liberalism for The New Republic, the publication in which his multi-paged rage against Russell Kirk has just appeared (sorry, it’s not available to non-subscribers online). Since I was then already under the ban of the neoconservative media empire and its army of drones, the attention he bestowed on my work was appreciated, even though Wolfe quite inaccurately referred to me as an extreme “anti-liberal,” a description that would not have made the slightest sense if he had pondered the argument of my book. (It was I, and not my left-liberal critic, who represented traditional “liberalism.”) But my question today is why Wolfe has allowed his diatribe against Kirk or against George Panichas’s selection of Kirk’s writings to be published in The New Republic.
Granted that its editors are dotty about some subjects, e.g., goyim living in small towns in the American hinterlands and meeting in drugstores to express politically incorrect ideas or the putative responsibility of Christian civilization for the Holocaust (TNR was among the first publications to give maximal exposure to Daniel Goldhagen’s undetermined thesis on Christian guilt for the murder of European Jewry), there is still no justification for the nonsense Wolfe put into this piece. He should have known better.
This does not mean that there is nothing in his mostly rambling screed that merits attention. But unfortunately even those scattered bits of truth are mixed together with garbled commentary. For example, it is unfair to assert that what “Kirk says about religion and the social order” is “breathtakingly unoriginal.” Quite to the contrary! It is Kirk’s bold attempt to assimilate the American political experience to a European conservative matrix, as I point out in my book on the American Right, which is the strikingly original part of his work. Wolfe notices this fact more or less but then goes on to claim that Kirk is merely restating Charles Beard’s view that the Framers came out of “upper-class backgrounds.” That is not the point of Kirk’s presentation of the founders as “pillars of order.” What he had in mind is something closer to the British squire class of the eighteenth century, an analogy that comes through in his historical writings and in much else of what Kirk wrote. Although Wolfe is justified in raising questions about Kirk’s understanding of the American founding, he should try to read Kirk whole instead of seizing on snippets to be held up to ridicule. But Wolfe is correct to suggest, albeit in graceless fashion, that the times have not been kind to Kirk. Although National Review Online has rushed to defend him against his accuser, some if not all of these expressions of indignation seem perfunctory. Indeed Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind did not even make on to the National Review list, printed last year, of the “ten most important books for the conservative movement.” The tributes to Kirk from such movement conservative publications are becoming entirely formulaic, a situation that tells more about the current conservative movement than it does about the quality of Kirk’s oeuvre.
Wolfe is correct to note that Kirk assumes that ideology is almost always a characteristic of the Left, albeit one that Kirk finds in Nazism as well. Wolfe observes accurately on the whole but without the slightest sympathy for his subject that “of all the crimes committed by the Nazis, the proclivity for human perfectibility is an odd one to choose.” Kirk’s real view here is not hard to fathom, as his son-in-law Jeff Nelson notes in NRO: namely, ideologues are driven by utopian schemes of social reconstruction far more than the traditional Right and that the Nazis shared this typical leftist proclivity, a trait that rendered Hitler and his crew a lot more dangerous to deal with than mere counterrevolutionaries. As Wolfe also implies, however, Kirk did not fill in all of the dotted lines in putting forth historical generalizations; he often simply assumes that his reader is on the same wave length. Would that Wolfe had left his critique at that point and not raised bizarre charges against his subject and against those whom Kirk saw fit to praise!
Some of Wolfe’s attacks on Kirk are shockingly gratuitous, and when first shown them, I could barely believe my eyes. The book under Wolfe’s review, The Essential Russell Kirk, “leaves you with a vivid sense of the smallness of the man.” Moreover, Kirk is “contemptuous of the truth, mangling his facts and distorting the history of the country he claims to love.” He is “provincial, resentful, bigoted,” and the anthology of his writings are full of “the grumblings in a small-town drugstore by men convinced that somehow the somehow the world has passed them by.” Elsewhere his writing is called “repellent,” but it is hard to figure out why we should think this is so. Kirk’s chance remark that pornography was shown on a television at a hotel where he stayed “tells us something about his late-night taste in film.” But this judgment is wildly off the mark. One has only to go onto the TV menu or look at the leaflets placed next to the TV set in many hotels in order to grasp that pornography is being featured. There is nothing in the passage quoted that would suggest that Kirk is a pornography addict. We are also told that Kirk had “enslaved” the female members of his family because of his presumed failure to condemn John C. Calhoun and Aristotle for their defense of slavery. One can only hope that such charges are a misguided attempt to be humorous. The alternative explanations, such as senile dementia, may be even more painful to consider.
On historical matters, Wolfe does not do much better than he does in telling us about Kirk’s defects as a moral actor. Although Wolfe spends several pages on Kirk’s mercurial religious tastes, he never indicates that he converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1964, a fact that would affect most of what Wolfe writes about his religious skepticism and theological vacillations. A statement that is so full of unproved premises that one would not know where to start refuting it is as follows: “Kirk admires John C. Calhoun, whom he calls a disciple of Burke, because Calhoun defended the conservative idea of an organic constitution. In reality, however, Calhoun was willing to tear up the Constitution written in Philadelphia if the defense of slavery required it.”
Since Wolfe devotes several paragraphs to assailing Kirk for not condemning Calhoun “who denied the fundamental equality of all human beings,” it might pay to point out that Calhoun never called for ripping up the Constitution. He was a strict constructionist in interpreting that document, but was less inventive than Professor Wolfe and his friends, who have used “a living constitution” to mandate the destruction of eight month fetuses and the imposition of homosexual unions on the unwilling American majority. Allow me to surprise Professor Wolfe with a historical fact: Landed classes here and in Europe were the group who in the nineteenth century typically defended “organic constitutions,” and if Kirk is looking for examples of such a defense on American soil, Calhoun would be a good figure to start with. Significantly, John Stuart Mill, a feminist and social democrat (but hardly a typical nineteenth-century libertarian as Wolfe claims) admired Calhoun almost as much as did Kirk. Calhoun’s theory of concurrent majorities was debated among European political theorists well into the twentieth century, and by people who had no conceivable interest in reviving slavery. As a biographer of Carl Schmitt I was struck by the fact that this German legal theorist presented Calhoun as a premier defender of a “liberal theory of sovereignty.”
Wolfe’s appeal to “human decency” and “equality” are intended to halt our discussions, in the same way that cries about racism, anti-Semitism, or homophobia have the effect of shutting up dissenters at our illiberal institutions of learning. I for one remain defiantly unmoved when Wolfe pontificates that he and other liberals believe in “human rights” (a magic word, like the name of the Deity in the Old Testament) and that because of this belief “they view slavery as the institution most destructive of those rights ever invented by the mind of man [we’ll let this sexist reference go].” Wolfe goes on to cap his point with this klutzy rhetorical gesture “But not Kirk.” And not Gottfried either. Why is slavery worse than crushing the head of an eight-month fetus in the womb of its mother, who is asserting her feminist right to infanticide, and doing this while we pretend that the execution is protected by the U.S. Constitution?
I could also cite examples of politically incorrect “indecencies” that Wolfe as an “auto-critical liberal” would undoubtedly condemn, depending against whom they were expressed. Somehow I doubt that he would care as much about inequality if the targets were not authorized victims but white males, and particularly white male Christians. These are not the kinds of “indecencies” or violations of “equal rights” that Wolfe would likely protest. (Having reviewed several of his books, I can speak to this subject with authority.) Wolfe belongs to his times and environment as surely as did Calhoun. Nonetheless, he expects us to treat his sensibilities and his sense of outrage as being of transcendent importance. Obviously Kirk had failed to genuflect before his sentiments often enough and must have been, as we learn, an anti-Semite (which is a totally undemonstrated charge) and a good deal else that is “indecent.”
A few other loose ends need to be tidied up. Wolfe sounds as illiterate as his fellow-liberal Jesse Jackson when it comes to the “infamous three-fifths clause” in the Constitution. As I was taught in grade school, when Wolfe and I attended such an institution in the early 1950s, the three-fifths reference had nothing to do with attributing to blacks no more than 60% of their humanity. It was a method of giving greater electoral power to Southern states, in order to get them to ratify the Constitution. It was also arguably a way of limiting the power of the slave-owning class, who wished to have fuller representation in the national government. Women, who didn’t vote at the time, were also included as part of the demographic base.
Even weirder is Wolfe’s real or pretended ignorance of the extent of Christian influence in the early American Republic. His attempt to use a document sent to North African potentates by John Adams in 1797, in regard to the Barbary Pirates, in order to prove that the US “was not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,” does not indicate that the US was then committed to building a secular society. That document accompanied the signing of an accord with the government of Tripoli, one that was intended to show that the American federal union “felt no enmity against the laws, religion and tranquility of Mussulmen.” Such a diplomatic situation was not likely to produce a ringing endorsement by the American government of the Nicene Creed.
Wolfe would do well to read such historians as Barry Shain and Alan Heimert, both of whom document the extent of Protestant Christian influence on local government and civic association in early America. As late as the 1930s, Supreme Court majority decisions referred to the Protestant Christian character of the American republic, and as late as the 1830s there were established state churches, although not an established national church in the US. If Kirk is guilty of reading too much of European conservatism into the American founding, Wolfe goes even farther in the other direction, by assuming that the American Constitution from the beginning prepared the way for the kind of left-liberal regime that he fancies. But the alternative for Wolfe may be too unsettling to think about, a country of disgruntled gentiles sitting around in drugstores in places like Mecosta, Michigan and venting their “bigotry” and “small-mindedness.” Thank Heavens for broadminded, worldly intellectuals like Wolfe occupying endowed chairs at Boston University!
Comments
Nice work, Professor Gottfried. A very fine piece.
Gerald Russello
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Congratulations on a well-written piece. “Senile dementia” would be a kind explanation for Wolfe’s silly review. Obviously, Wolfe is jealous of Kirk’s fame and genuinely puzzled why anyone would waste their time on the ridiculous rantings of a conservative curmudgeon when there are fine liberals such as himself to be read. Given the viciousness of Wolfe’s uninformed attacks, I wonder if Paul’s erudite response doesn’t give them an undeserved dignity.
By the way, I hope everyone has purchased a copy of Russello’s wonderful book, “The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk.” It is, bar none (including admittedly my work), the most learned treatment of Kirk’s thought yet.
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First and foremost of Russell Kirk’s sins was his defining a Neoconservative as one who believes the capital of the United States is Tel Aviv. That is why Wolfe and friends hate him. His allegiance to Israel was at best secondary.
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Dr. Gottfried - “If Kirk is guilty of reading too much of European conservatism into the American founding, Wolfe goes even farther in the other direction, by assuming that the American Constitution from the beginning prepared the way for the kind of left-liberal regime that he fancies.” I suspect your soon to be released book will address this, but what are you suggesting? That the American “Founding” really was predominantly classically liberal? I understand your issues with the nomenclature, but then are you defending classical liberalism? Or are you suggesting a classical conservatism that never really existed here or was poorly defined/articulated by Kirk and others? Some liberal/conservative combination? Something else? I think the overt religiousness that you speak of among other things argues against the “Founding” being purely classically liberal. The rhetoric was certainly more so than the “facts on the ground.”
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Paul’s comments capture several major points that
Allan Wolfe either avoids or chooses to ignore:
Russell Kirk, for whom I was assistant in 1971-72,
was a synthesizer, taking equally from history, from
literature, from poetry, from philosophy. His intent
was not to create a symmetrical ideology, but rather
to illustrate that a belief in and devotion to
inherited Norms ran through the thoughts and writings
of various post-French Revolutionary personnages,
and that these thoughts, writings, poetry, etc.
were illustrative of a worldview that was both
Christian and organic. Rejection of these Norms has
led to the disasters we’ve seen and experienced in
modern life and in society. Paul Gottfried understands
that, and his response to Professor Wolfe is on
target and well stated.
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Paul: Great job, as usual. I really enjoy your work.
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An insightful and rhetorically pleasing effort as always. Thank you.
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Russell Kirk goes out of his way to point out the European conservatism of the American Founding Fathers. Protestantism is not a ‘conservative’ force. It is revolutionary; hence Protestantism is inherently non-conservative. Second, a majority of the FFofA were Masons. Some were Deists.
What the FFofA wanted to do was to create a Novus Ordo. They purposely rejected the Old Order of Europe. To say that the FFofA were conservatives is a hoot. They were Nihilists. The American revolution was just that Nihilist. Anything that destroys, undermines the Old Order, is Nihilism. The FFofA were not strident Nilhilists like communists or socialists; they were soft nihilists.
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Mr. Wheeler, returning to the Christianity of the New Testament was conservative/restorative. Hence, Protestantism can be conservative. Adding to the Gospel, despite warnings not to, is certainly not conservative.
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Protestantism never was conservative. Individuals
interpreting the word of God without tradition and
authority has led to chaos and atheism.
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When I read Wolfe’s review, I couldn’t help picturing a cartoon in which a puny character futilely flails away at a giant who holds him at arm’s length while gazing away at something else in utter boredom. The illogic, the pettiness, the utter stupidity of Wolfe’s review, and the absolutely complete failure to grasp either the MAN or the THOUGHT of Kirk--a failure that could not escape anyone who had known Kirk closely as both my wife and I did, or who had read him extensively, as we both have done--are obvious on the face of the review. The sad thing is that someone in Wolfe’s position would feel so envious, or bitter, or spiteful toward a far greater man that he would vent his spleen so viciously. The performance would not, of course, have surprised Kirk, whose experience and reading were wide enough that he must have seen the like hundreds of times. But it would have saddened him--not as a commentary on himself, but as a commentary on Wolfe. Professor Gottfried, you have answered Wolfe cogently but not completely--and that is fine, because Wolfe’s screed doesn’t deserve a thorough answer. To give it one is to take it seriously, which, though Wolfe might be foolish enough to do, mature readers will not.
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So NRO actually allowed gave a podium for Kirk’s son-in-law to defend Kirk against Wolfe’s attack? I’m frankly surprised, because Wolfe’s outlook sounds a lot like the one that prevails at NRO these days. I’m pretty sure that if Kirk were alive in March 2003, he’d be included among the “Unpatriotic Conservatives” being lambasted by David Frum and his type.
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Mr. Wheeler - It is bootless to try to discern uniform theologcal or political outlook amongst America’s Founders. They ran the gamut from Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Roman Catholic landowner from Maryland, to John Witherspoon, a clergyman of the established Chuch of Scotland, and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University); from the Unitarian Federalist lawyer from Boston, John Adams, to the conventionally Anglican Federalist Virginia planter, George Washington, to the mildly anti-Federalist Deist Jefferson to the strongly anti-Federalist advocate of established Anglicanism, Patrick Henry.
The significance of Freemasonry in the American Revolution has also been much overstated. Roman Catholic anathemas against Freemasonry, which you seem to have in mind, were promulgated with the politicized and anticlerical Freemasonry of France and Italy in mind. British freemasonry lost whatever political content it had after the failed Jacobite rising of 1745, and never was anti-clerical in the way the Continental variety was. Although Washington and Lafayette were Freemasons, so were Lord Cornwallis and the Duke of Sussex (one of the sons of George III). Its net effect, insofar as the American Revolution is concerned, was insignificant and neutral.
To apply the description “nihilist” to Carroll, Witherspoon, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Henry - as if they had anything in common with Raskolnikov - is merely to render it meaningless, in the way other such epithets, e.g., “racist” or “anti-Semite,” become, when too broadly used.
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One of the tenets of Masonry is the “brotherhood of man”. America is based on that. Second, the American revolution was called at the time “The Presbyterian War” because it was this radical Protestant sect that fomented the war against the society that upheld the Anglican creed and therefore the monarchy.
Benjamin Franklin was a Quaker, one of the most heretical of the Protestant sects which is akin to Masonry.
The FFofA rejected Aristocracy. They rejected Monarchy. Certainly, there is NO uniform ideology or philosophy amongst the FFofA except they wanted to recreate or reinvent a social order different from Old Europe. Montesquie purposely stated that Commercialism destroys religion. The FFofA purposely instituted commercialism as a basis of America. On this they all agreed on commercialism, the rejection of aristocracy, and the Indo-European social order. Again it is Quaker, and Masonic, NOT to have an established Church.
There was no uniform ideology amongst the FFofA. I totally agree. America is not only nihilist but also a Farrago, an incomprehensible mixture of incompatible things. The FFofA implemented a Masonic, secular, novus ordo, with a predominantly fundamentalist Christian population. As Paul A. Rahe, says in his masterful three volume work, “Republics, Ancient and Modern",--"America is a regime without a regimen”.
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Mr. Wheeler and others, there is nothing conservative about corrupting the Gospel, but perhaps that is for another thread. “...with a predominantly fundamentalist Christian population.” That was partially my point about “the facts on the ground.” How much of what the Founders wrote was just flowery rhetoric is debatable. But the society itself was a conservative one, esp. the South.
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Mr. Wheeler, the Founders did not repudiate aristocracy. Washington, Jefferson, Peyton Randolph, Charles Pinckney and many other founders were members of the gentry class with family connections to titled nobility which are well documented. They proudly used their armorial bearings on their silver, china, bookplates, and other personal possessions. They had no desire to eliminate social distinctions and pursued nothing like the Jacobins’ deliberate program of effacing or destroying displays of coat-armor. Some states, including Massachusetts, preserved the legal institutions of primogeniture and entail well into the nineteenth century. There was, to be sure, a reaction against titles of nobility, but this has to be placed in the context of the eighteenth-century practice instituted by Walpole of ministries awarding them to “placemen” on the basis of political loyalty rather than as a recognition of any real merit or service to the monarch. Particularly in the South, the idea of aristocracy was admired.
The franchise was not promiscuously extended but remained essentially as it was before American independence for fifty years or more - confined to those who met a property qualification. Universal manhood suffrage did not become the norm until after the War Between the States, and even then was often restricted to those who had paid a poll tax.
Many American states had established churches which persisted for years after the Revolution. The First Amendment’s establishment clause was NOT meant to create a Jacobinical policy of “laïcité” for the United States. It was intended to protect the established churches in the several states from Federal interference. Connecticut, for example, had an established (Calvinist) state church until 1818. Massachusetts had one until 1833. Virginia’s established Anglican church was disestablished under Jefferson, but against the strong protests of other Founders who wished to retain it, such as Patrick Henry. The current interpretation of the establishment clause is a perversion of the Framers’ original intent, and should not be imputed to them.
You seem to have a bee in your bonnet about Freemasonry. I shall neither defend nor condemn it here, but will merely ask - in what significant way did it influence the public conduct of (for example) Paul Revere or George Washington, that it did not influence that of the Lord Cornwallis or the duke of Sussex? Far too much has been made (often by Masons) of Freemasonry’s rôle in the American Revolution.
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It is certainly true that American Freemasons often point out that many of the FFofA were Freemasons, and that the connection is undoubtedly exagerated.
The assertion, “… it is Quaker, and Masonic, NOT to have an established Church"is incorrect, as Freemasonry in the U.S. and Britain has no policy (and cannot have a policy) on whether there should or should not be such a thing, because discussion of rleigion and politics is banned within its Lodges. It is not aligned to a specific Church, if that is what the comment means.
Likewise: “The FFofA implemented a Masonic, secular, novus ordo, with a predominantly fundamentalist Christian population.” Historically speaking, most Freemaons in the U.S. were Episopalian at least into the 19th century, and seemed to have been instrumental in establishing that Church (often funding building work, etc.). Not all of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons, so I am unsure why they should be singled out, though the suggestion seems to be that they are the evil hand imposing their world-plans on unwitting Christians, which is the sort of suggestion that would seem at home in a Dan Brown novel.
In regard to the comment, “… a majority of the FFofA were Masons. Some were Deists.
What the FFofA wanted to do was to create a Novus Ordo. They purposely rejected the Old Order of Europe. To say that the FFofA were conservatives is a hoot. They were Nihilists,” this surely suggests that Freemasons were progressives who wanted to reject the old order. In some cases this was undoubtedly so (e.g., Voltaire), though Freemasons spannd the political spectrum, with some promoting revolution and some condemning it. Much of the development of Freemasonry in the 18th century is a reaction against revolution, and against secularism. Notably Joseph de Maistre was a Freemason, and believed that the sole purpose of Freemasonry was to reunite all of the Churches into one Catholic Church.
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More than 30 years ago, I drove my teacher, Russell Kirk, from Hillsdale College to his home in Mecosta. He showed me a nut letter responding to one of his columns. Typed badly, rich in multi-colored ballpoint marginalia, it was a classic of its kind. The writer said that he had always admired Kirk’s writing but that there was one important issue unaddressed in his oeuvre, namely “the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers.” He asked if Kirk was somehow “unaware of this conspiracy – OR PART OF IT?” The last line was underlined at least a dozen times, in perhaps four colors of ballpoint ink. I asked Dr Kirk how he would respond: “I-I-I-I already did,” he stammered. “And I told them I had studied this issue for years, and I have categorical proof that it is all a front for the Jesuits.” He chuckled, eyes twinkling, and added: “B-b-b-by the time that he works that out, w-w-w-we shall all be long dead.” Dr Kirk an anti-Semite? Codswallop.
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This is a good post, but could you link to Wolfe’s review of your book?
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Dr. Gottfried,
Excellent thrashing of the confused Professor Wolfe. Men such as he should not be allowed near pen and paper.
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