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Entry: The Pragmatism of Russell Kirk Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_pragmatism_of_russell_kirk#3644 Post contents: Red, you wrote that "Clearly there were liberal elements and a lot of liberal rhetoric, but the average man on the street and the actual society on the ground was not liberal." But that's always true, in every society, throughout history. Tradition, in and of itself, is conservative, and given the nature of man, very few of us can ever fully break the bonds of tradition. Society, as a whole, never can. The most conservative social orders in the 20th century may well have been Eastern European societies under communist rule. None of that, however, goes to the point that I made about the lack of a single "Protestantism." Instead, you simply fell back on the argument that I'd already questioned, when you wrote: "The reason I brought up the Catholic issue is because, in my experience, many of the 'America has no conservative tradition' folks are Catholics who think that America was corrupted/inherently liberal because of our Protestantism." There are numerous Protestantisms in America, and the ones that have been dominant throughout most of our history have been liberal. Trying to construct an American conservative movement on the demographic fact that there are more Protestants in this country than there are Catholics, while ignoring the equally obvious fact that many of those Protestants are far from conservative, is a recipe for failure. But beyond all that, if "our embrace of capitalism, our veneration of 'success,' and the Protestant work ethic" lies at the center of the American conservative tradition that you believe exists, then it's not simply "liberal conservatism," it's liberalism. The Continental counterrevolutionaries that Paul, among others, admires certainly wouldn't call this conservatism. (And, by the way, it's not a mistake that the "Continental counterrevolutionary" tradition is often called the "Catholic counterrevolutionary" tradition.) Sent at: 2008 09 06