Daniel McCarthy and Winston Elliott III--too strong? It would be impossible to exaggerate the critical historical moment of Kirk’s resignation from Modern Age. The divorce of Kirk from the journal profoundly altered the future of conservatism and especially traditionalist conservatism. As others would note when Kirk passed from this earth, the conservative movement had lost its mind. Yet, it this loss had occurred long before Kirk’s death in 1994. It had taken place in 1960. While only slightly hyperbolic, one could state that the separation of Kirk from the poetic, academic, well-respected, and far-reaching periodical allowed conservatism to become more populist, less intellectual, more political, and more commercialized and commodified. Without Kirk to shape a conservative movement as a mood, a predilection, and a predisposition, the separation allowed conservatism to narrow and divide, permitting one part of it—the political—to represent the whole. As of the writing of Russell Kirk: A Conservative Life, loud, obnoxious, and plastic radio and television personalities dominate the voice of conservatism as understood by the American public. What a far cry a rant against a liberal-arts major on a popular radio show is from the time when Kirk employed a specific editor merely for the poetry to be published in Modern Age. The conservatism of a Kirk in 1959 has almost nothing in common with the populist, popular conservatism of today’s modern media. One might as well be comparing the Platonism of Petrarch with the brutality of Machiavelli. And, while Modern Age survives to this day, it has never attained the intellectual and liberal breadth it had under Kirk’s loving care.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 01:01:38 +0000
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