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Prophet of the Heartland
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10524 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1986 |
3,263 Words |
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Samuel T. Francis
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The conservative movement in the United States has come a long way, politically and intellectually, since the death of Willmoore Kendall in 1967. Although the successes of conservatism could not easily have been predicted in the early 1960s when Kendall's thought flourished, they would not have surprised him, for it was the essence of his political thought that the American people were profoundly committed to conservative principles and deeply hostile to liberalism and ideological experimentation with their lives and government. On the other hand, certain recent trends in conservative thought and politics--a seeming preoccupation with "respectability" and "credibility," and an inclination to dilute the expression of its commitments in return for acceptance by the establishment--would surely have angered him. Kendall called himself an "Appalachians-to-the-Rockies patriot," and he was both temperamentally and philosophically incapable of living in peace with the dominant structures of the Northeast. Nor, were he living today, would Kendall have been silent about such trends. In his last years he was working on a book that was to deal with the contemporary "sages" of the renaissance of conservative thought in the 1950s (Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr., among others), and what we know of this project suggests that he had some critical, even unkind, things to say about his colleagues. There is a legend about Kendall that at National Review he was never on speaking terms with more than one associate at any one time. He was not a man to allow personal friendship to stand in the way of what he took to be philosophical truth and political rectitude, nor would he have permitted political success to deflect his perception of truth and rightness.
Kendall's understanding of what constitutes conservatism is often described as "populist," and it is true that the persistent theme throughout most of his work is that the locus of political virtue in the United States resides in the American people and is expressed in their majority will though the deliberate processes of the Constitution. Only in his last years did he incline to the view that a "select minority" must keep the people virtuous and to the natural rights theory put forward by Leo Strauss. Despite these flirtations, the characteristic of Kendall's political thought is his unrelenting defense of the historic mainstream, the heartland of American society, against a radical and basically un-American establishment. The value of his ideas for political conservatism today is that they offer a framework for attacking that establishment. It is likely that Kendall, a Rhodes Scholar and Ivy League professor, knew the temptations of celebrity and accommodation to which intellectuals, whether conservative or not, are particularly susceptible, and that is why his polemics with his conservative colleagues were so fierce and his criterion of true conservatism so strict.
Yet if his standard was strict, it was not narrow. It was not Kendall's intention to exclude from conservative ranks everyone but himself, and indeed much of his criticism of rival conservative theorists dwelled on what he took to be their own idiosyncratic, dogmatic, and narrow doctrines that effectively ostracized everyone but themselves. "I make no sense, he wrote: of calling "Conservative" the man who takes a dim view of his country's established institutions, feels something less than at home with its way of life as it actually lives it, finds it difficult to identify himself with the political and moral principles on which it has acted through its history, dislikes or views with contempt the generality of the kind of people his society produces,
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