Election 2008
Who are the conservatives?

There is much hand wringing and name calling in the ranks of the Grand Old Party. Seems as if John McCain, the nominee in waiting, is not “conservative” enough. Bill Buckley died the other day, the same day as Myron Cope [if you do not know who he is you are not a Stillers fan]. Buckley was considered the modern re-maker of conservatism in this country. And, he did stand against the liberalism that corroded American virtues and aided the development of the “meism” of today. Alas, Buckley’s heirs are the neo-conservatives who are peopled by those who want to export democracy to make the world secure for global trade.

Before Buckley, Russell Kirk was considered the individual who brought back conservatism from the dead. Now, a new book by Gerald Russello entitled The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, questions whether Kirk was the first postmodern thinker. In fact, Kirk early on used the term post-modern to describe the failed liberal confidence in rationality. But, he was not one who wanted to give up on permanent things. And he spent his literary life defending tradition, community, faith and permanent things against its destruction by modernity.

Russello claims that Kirk was anti-ideology and saw true conservatism as being maintained and strengthened by “redeemed imagination” [thus, the title]. Kirk saw ideologies, such as liberalism, as destructive to all that has been believed as good, true and beautiful. All falls prey to the drive for individual liberty and the exercise thereof without the constraint of tradition, institutions or authority. Kirk announced the death of liberalism as non-imaginative in 1955, in “The Dissolution of Liberalism”:

The liberal system attained popularity because it promised progress without the onerous duties exacted by tradition and religion. It is now in the process of dissolution because, founded upon an imperfect and distorted myth, it has been unable to fulfill its promise, and because it no longer appeals in degree to the higher imagination. It has been undone by social disillusion.

These are not the words of a man who embraces the postmodern sense of no truth and no authority except me.

Now, that is not to say Kirk is faultless. The late Sam Francis believed that the still vital classical conservatism Kirk argued for, using Edmund Burke as his example, was long gone. Francis saw the problem not as conserving a now decadent order, but rather, how to change it. So, in reality, liberals and conservatives alike were in the changing business. And, that brings us around to Election 2008.

John McCain may not be a “traditional” conservative, but neither is any other potential nominee, nor their predecessor. Kirk was right about a redeemed imagination and that those of the liberal stripe have none. Where is the imagination in just turning everything into a government program? Every time we look to “power” instead of “imagination” to solve problems we give up liberty, what liberals are supposedly all about. The real conservative is one who looks to imagination, innovation, and ideas to solve problems without relying on the power of the federal government.

As Kirk has said about conservatives:

[they] must stand firm against centralization, legislation that offers to substitute a passing “security” for prescriptive liberty, and the conversion of republican government into plebiscitary democracy.

So, as the election continues to heat up, think about this whole idea of who the conservative is. Is it the person interested in power and exercising it…no matter his/her party affiliation? Or, is it the person of vision who wants to find solutions to problems by unleashing the imagination, innovation and ideas of the private sector? It’s not the conserving where and what we are now…it is reclaiming permanent things with “redeemed imagination.”