Russell Kirk’s poetics of power

On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, Russell Kirk, edited by Michael Lucchese, Creed and Culture, £20

This collection of essays, edited by Michael Lucchese, published to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, has the obvious aim to introduce Russell Kirk’s ideas about the fundamentals of American politics. Yet it achieves more than that: it also provides a great insight into Kirk’s general ideas of politics as part of cultured human cohabitation.

Russell Kirk was an exceptional kind of conservative intellectual: he had both a talent for deep intellectual work on politics, but also a practical bent, an ability to find his way both to the general public, but also to the powerful, in order to try to make his own theoretical work useful. While most conservative intellectuals are intellectuals in the sense of being unable to enter the world of practical politics, for Kirk intellectual work was not a substitute for politics. Rather, it was his contribution to politics.

In the final, summarising essay of the volume, entitled ‘On America’, Kirk presents in a rather refined manner an astonishing, unconventional connection between two ancient forms of activity – poetry and politics. Edmund Burke appears as a hero of both of these realms: ‘at once the most imaginative and most practical of writers and doers in our political tradition of the English-speaking people’. It is exactly because of this two-fold nature of Burke’s talent that Kirk admired him as the most reliable guide on the troubled waters of politics.

Why is this duality so important? An obvious response would be that poets, as we know them in (post-)modernity, are not by nature political animals, and most politicians have no poetic sensibility. Yet this is exactly the specific requirement Kirk identifies as the distinguishing mark of the promising character of a right-wing politician.

Interestingly enough, he sets out to support and substantiate his argument regarding the relationship between poetry and politics in an essay about President Ronald Reagan. The argument is that audacity is a requirement of true statesmanship, as, in the Postmodern Age, it is ‘a weapon reserved for the friends of order and justice and freedom’. Yet without ‘the poetic imagination’ it is not available.

If so, why? The answer is given with the help of a third concept, prudence. This is the political virtue par excellence, ‘the art of foreseeing the long-run consequences of decisions and actions’. This virtue is not only consonant with ‘clever audacity’, but, according to Kirk, and his reading of Burke, it depends on the above-mentioned poetic imagination. Kirk claims that ‘poetic images draw us towards a politics concerned with the actual circumstances of living men and women, as contrasted with the grim abstractions of the ideologues’. In other words, poetic imagination helps to grasp reality as it is, in its particularities, which helps to foresee the long-term consequences of potential choices. In other words, the logical link leads from poetic imagination to prudence, and from prudence to audacity, which is required from the statesmen of the day.

In his essay on Reagan, originally published in 1982, that argument is used to prepare the ground for Kirk’s positive view of the president as a statesman. Reagan was earlier a professional actor, and ‘no practised actor can be altogether unaffected by the poetic imagination’. And rhetoric is a natural tool of the actor. Therefore, his presumption is that Reagan has all the abilities to become an audacious statesman, as he knows ‘how to employ the weapons of rhetoric and poetry’. In this respect, Kirk has found Reagan comparable to Franklin Roosevelt – even from as early as 1964, much before he actually gained power. But the test of his audacity comes with his gaining the presidency, because ‘there will come audacious measures to hold the Soviets in check’. This way the new president can provide what America badly needs – moral instruction.

Introducing Kirk’s views on America, the opening chapter is about the 4th of July. In it, he claims that the Declaration is to be understood in the context of the religious convictions of the founder’s generations: that ‘America is a religious nation’. There ‘all law is the reflection of certain great moral convictions’. The same applies to the Declaration, which therefore is itself the expression of the religious convictions of the nation.

The role and function of religion in the nation’s life is brought up in another of Kirk’s essays on the foundations: when discussing the American tradition, he claims that, religiously, it is a Jewish-Christian heritage, while socially, it is a British tradition. Importantly, the essay included here, on the American traditions, come from a collection of essays, published in 1956 (‘Beyond the Dream of Avarice’), years before his actual conversion.

Yet, even here, he does not speak about Protestantism – or Catholicism, for that matter. Instead, he uses the term Christianity. He mentions the Germans and Irish, as themselves dominant in defining American traditions, and, surely, they had different religions. And yet, even in that context, the author does not distinguish between religious denominations. He keeps emphasising the traditional nature of American society. One of his references in this respect is the German exile, Professor Carl J. Friedrich, who wrote: ‘To all intents and purposes, the United States is today a highly traditional society.’ Kirk means by American tradition ‘prescriptive social habits, prejudices, customs, and political usages’. It is less and more, he claims, than ‘political ideology’. It means manners on the one side, a plea for piety on the other one. This is why he denies that democracy or individualism, values usually associated with US society, would belong to its tradition. He argues for the local traditions, instead of democracy, which is an abstraction, and he claims individualism was not present in social discussion until the 1920s.

It is in this context that we can understand an earlier essay in this collection, ‘A Revolution Not Made but Prevented’, actually written decades later. He relies on the editor of Burke’s works, who claimed that an early British event, that of 1688-89 was ‘a revolution not made but prevented’. Kirk quotes Burke: ‘The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government, which is our only security for law and liberty.’ In other words, if it was a revolution, it was a revolution in the original sense of the word: a return to normality, back to the original position. This is the meaning Kirk attributes to the founder’s deeds – except for Jefferson, who he identified as a French-style radical.

Kirk seems to suggest that culture is upstream from politics. This is why there is a need for an essay about the American culture of the period. It is culture built on British roots, making it possible to defend ordered liberty in the political realm – in the extreme case, even against the concentrated power of the British monarch. It is exactly this way that the American settlers could preserve continuity. The lesson they left for posterity is that people should cling to the inherent values of their cultural heritage as much as possible – it is from this perspective that Kirk is able to demonstrate the futility of the ideology of multiculturalism.

The first essay on Kirk’s favourite leaders takes as its subject John Adams, the elder. It is not surprising that Kirk presents him as his hero, as a conservative statesman. Kirk positions Adams between ‘the centralizing and acquisitive principles of Hamilton and the beetling defiance of Ames’. He is presented as an experienced and clever politician, who was ready and able to make useful and reasonable compromises. For him, a good decision-maker is one who can keep his politics in balance. To arrive at such self-discipline is indeed a great virtue, and, for Adams, a statesman’s real achievement is his virtues. And certainly, what he had in mind was the practical virtues – this is why Kirk calls him a representative of ‘practical conservatism’.

After his ideal types, the less than ideal. Kirk was shocked ‘how evil a public man’ Lyndon Johnson was. He frames his account of his bad guy with a discussion of what he calls Caesarism. With this term he describes a very timely phenomenon: ‘the general long-term drift of America’s pattern of politics is toward increased concentration of power in the person of a crowd-pleasing arbitrary president’.

An overview of Kirk on modern American literature has to finish with T.S. Eliot. After all, this poet played a major role in Kirk’s magnum opus, The Conservative Mind. The young Kirk and the elderly Eliot maintained a friendship. This essay, reflecting on the chances of society’s regeneration – the very theme of the close of the previous essay – presents two poets, in fact: together with Eliot, Kirk writes about Robert Frost as well. Not exactly similar in their attitude towards politics, and specifically, conservatism, both of them seem to serve very well Kirk’s intention here: to show that, indeed, ‘(n)o less than politicians do, great poets move nations, even though the generality of men may not know the poets’ names’. And not only move – they also help members to learn how to connect. This is his Burkean understanding of Eliot. ‘Through the whole of Eliot’s writing there runs the idea of a community of souls: a bond of love and duty joining all the living and also those who have preceded us and those who will follow us in this moment of time.’

Here we return to where we began: Kirk wants us to realise the political importance of great poetry – no matter if its topic is political or not. Poetry is politically relevant as it can bring people closer to each other – this is where beauty and love meet. And no doubt, this connection of poetry, politics and simple love dictates to the editor that they finish this part of the book on poetry with Kirk’s description of his closest homeland – Mecosta County, where he was born and where he remained throughout his life, getting married and bringing up his children there.

It is by living here, and the way he was living here, in his family circle, hosting friends, visitors, but never giving up the intellectual habits of reading and writing, that Kirk tried throughout his life to preserve the constitutional principles as he learnt them from Burke: to rely on ‘the common experience of a people over a considerable lapse of time’, to have religious faith, to show ‘the function of a natural aristocracy’, and to balance ‘freedom’ and ‘order’.