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Entry: The Pragmatism of Russell Kirk Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_pragmatism_of_russell_kirk#3577 Post contents: I thank the author for this article. I would ask responders: Do we really have something called "Conservatism" in Amaerica? Have we ever? Is the idea and movement as foreign to Americans as European Christian democracy? To define terms: "Liberal" and "conservative" have become almost meaningless terms, or meaning now the exact opposite of what they once meant. Chateaubriand coined the word; his movement ought to own it. For clarity's sake, I mean by "conservatism" what Europeans mean by it: the Counter-Revolutionary movement of Möser, Burke, De Maistre, in its Storm and Stress version in Chateaubriand, and in its more Romantic conception, Adam Müller. Karl Mannheim's great essay on Conservatism is a good summary. I'll call it "Real Conservatism" Ironically, "America" also needs defining. America was founded in 1861 by Lincoln and his fellow Hamiltonian Whigs, and has not really changed. Granted, there were two prior foundings. The First, complete by the early 18th C, was the founding by 4 immigrant groups from England: The VA Cavaliers, the New England Puritans, the Delaware Valley Quakers and their German Anabaptists and Pietist allies, and The Borderer-Backcountry people. The first of these four we indeed Stuart Conservatives, but by 1776 they were Whigs. The second two were religious foundings. The last was proto-Jeffersonian. The 2nd founding was 1775-1800. At the end of this founding, Hamiltonianism was defeated, and Jeffersonianism triumphant. Randolph and Calhoun were Jeffersonians. Clay struggled to keep Hamiltonianism alive. At the 3rd and final founding, The Hamiltonian-Clay partisan Lincoln completely distorted the 2nd founding. The Declaration's central concept is NOT equality. The Constitution makes the Federal govenment only the agent of the STATES, and the States gave it ONLY 18 things to do. Lincoln made all this a dead letter. The 10th Amendment is a dead letter, if not the whole Constitution. Not to return my thesis in the first paragraph: We have 3 main political traditions in America, none of them Conservative. 1. Jeffersonianism. The Jeffersonian Party was defeated for good in 1861, and was destroyed by Wilson. It survives only in the various strands of Libertarianism. Ron Paul is trying to keep it alive. 2. The Whigs in the Federalist, Whig, and Republican Parties, currently embodied in the "Neoconservative" movement (which is Whig not Conservative). This movement believes in 4 things: i. Total centralization in a vast nation-state, the states only franchises of the central government. ii. Federal control of the currency and banking iii. corporate welfare iv. Imperial expansion 3. Socialism, begun by Wilson, and finally implemented by his two undersecretaries: Hoover and Hoover On Wheels (FDR). The only Counter-Revolutionary Real Conservative in American History is Eliot. He got most of ideas from Maurras and the Caroline Divines. And Eliot left America. Kirk was not defending a American tradition. He was trying to bring something into being. Pragmatism, I would submit if a facade that the 3 movements supra try to use to make reasonable their ideologies. True, Burke and the counter-Revolutionaries were against ideology (another almost meaningless word. Burke used "armed doctrine"). Still there movement, and Kirks is an ideology by the European meaning of the word. Kirk was the first serious student of Burke in American intellectual history. He seems to have known nothing of the Continental Counter-Revolutionaries. He also, though Catholic, seems unaware of Rerum Novarum, Catholic Social teaching, and the Zentrum-Christian Democrataic movement (which isn't conservative either). I invite comments. Sent at: 2008 09 06