Russell Kirk

I, I mean, I think a lot of your critique is not brand new in this sense.

I mean, you know, people like Russell Kirk 70 years ago, 80 years ago, and even earlier conservatives than that were always saying-

I, uh, this is ...

I, I knew Russell Kirk.

He wasn't 70 years ago.

[laughs]

Right.

Yeah.

Well, you know, this is not a, I mean, I think a lot of your critique is not brand new in this sense.

I mean, you know, people like Russell Kirk 70 years ago, 80 years ago, and even earlier conservatives than that were always saying...

I knew Russell Kirk.

He wasn't set 80 years ago.

I personally knew Russell Kirk.

Oh, did

you? I was very young.

And also people who have those good faith, fusionist starting points, commitments, those first principles, can disagree about whether, for example, the hawkish response to the Soviet Union, even during that era, was a good idea.

So you had fusionist libertarians and even some fusionist conservatives, like Russell Kirk, who was a traditionalist conservative.

He's one of the main historical characters in the story that I tell in the book.

Russell Kirk believed that the draft was essentially a form of slavery, right? Conscripting people into fighting a foreign war against their will is not consistent with the classical liberal tradition.

And so he, despite being a conservative, had a lot of problems with some of the policy implications of the foreign policy hawkishness.

We can start from the same starting points and disagree about policy, and we can also say that something that makes sense in one time and place might not make sense in a different time and place without feeling the need to therefore jettison that dual commitment to liberty and virtue that is how I'm defining fusionism.

Uh, I mean, read Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor?, getting to that period of time.

You see, the problem is, as, as Russell Kirk pointed out, once the war is over, I mean, read R.L. Dabney.

The South has become marginalized, and the South really was the conservative section.

It was the drag on this notion of progress, this reformist progress that all the North began to adopt.

Conservatism is a body of universal truths about human nature and political order available in any century to anybody who can think clearly.

Russell Kirk is a great exemplar of this.

And we'll get to Kirk later in episode four when we're talking specifically about America.

The third is the situational conception, and it's the one Huntington endorsed personally.

Of course, at heart, political issues are moral and religious issues.

That's what Russell Kirk famously said, a famous conservative, but it is so, so true.

All of the problems that we're facing in our country today, all of the things that we debate day to day, that we watch go on in politics, all of the evil and all of the brokenness, this is all spiritual.

And if the church had more conversations about the things going on in our world and, and applied things more closely, they would definitely be having an impact.

Yeah, there's a lot going on.

Um, I w-- before we get to this National Conservative Conference, uh, which is not, it's not conservative, it's ideologically driven, and Russell Kirk, the great Anglo conservative thinker, said that conservatism is, by definition, the absence of ideology.

One thing that's clear is that this conference taking place now in Israel is nothing but driven by ideology.

So it's maybe right-wing, ethnonationalist, um-