Russell Kirk: Patron Saint of Populism’s Golden Age?

The second half of the 20th century had no greater teacher of the roots of American conservatism and guardian of our nation’s values than Russell Kirk, the sine qua non of American conservatism’s intellectual tradition. Ronald Reagan rightly ranked Kirk among the “intellectual leaders” who had shaped the movement’s mind, praising him as the “prophet of American conservatism” who “taught, nurtured, and inspired a generation.”  

In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence, Kirk published one of the great works of American identity and self-understanding: The Roots of American Order. Today, as the United States approaches its semiquincentennial, Michael Lucchese has returned readers to similar themes with On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, a new collection of Kirk’s essays on American heritage and culture. 

Kirk’s conservatism was a way of seeing before it was a way of voting, as was clear in his doctoral dissertation-turned-conservative landmark, The Conservative Mind. First published in 1953 and repeatedly revised until 1985’s seventh and final edition, The Conservative Mind introduced its readers to a great company of men like Edmund Burke, John Adams, and T. S. Eliot, disclosing in their words, deeds, and lives a disposition toward order, virtue, moral imagination, and prudence. 

Like his other writings, On America is not a simple history or a set of facts to be mastered, but an introduction to “what makes our country worth loving,” as Lucchese explains in his overview of the volume. Kirk offers up many human examples of what Augustine called the “common objects of love” that should constitute a virtuous American conservatism: John Adams and Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Frost, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. As a communion of memory and affection, conservatism can transcend ideology and form a living wellspring for political renewal. 

Kirk’s central theme in this volume and in all his works is the “permanent things” that make up the moral order. Words, no matter how beautiful or how deeply engraved in law, are not enough. Even the Constitution, as Lucchese notes, cannot “mechanistically preserve” moral order. As Adams warned, it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other than a moral and religious people. The strength of our American way of life rests on a substrate deeper than law: religious conviction, social custom, public virtue, and other ingrained habits of civility. It is ironic that, despite postliberalism’s desire to recover virtue while downplaying liberal proceduralism, right postliberalism today seems most disdainful of the old Roman virtues that made presidents like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln great: gravitas, pietas, constantia, and clementia. For Kirk, Washington was “a grand gentleman of the old model,” whose “unbought grace of life” set the standard for leadership in the American regime. 

To this point, the American Revolution was a “revolution not made but prevented.” It did not raze society and reconstruct it according to theory, as in the French Revolution, but sought to defend inherited liberties and the old virtues against imperial hubris and arbitrary power. Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding, the founders were not Jacobins but Englishmen who understood that law and liberty require deep moral and cultural roots to render them intelligible. 

Moral imagination is another great theme of Kirk’s. His essays on Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, and the broader literary tradition show why politics cannot be understood apart from culture. Literature trains the soul in the knowledge of tragedy, sin, nobility, and human finitude, “draw[ing] people to humane politics, as against ideological politics,” Kirk writes. Hailing Reagan’s silver tongue, Kirk observed that “the audacious statesman… must know how to employ the weapons of rhetoric and poetry.” He will often fall short of his purposes “unless he is endowed… with the poetic imagination.” 

But literacy and literature are not just a matter of political efficiency. “In the decline of American English,” Kirk warned, “may be also seen the decline of the American as human being.” A politics of TikTok, memes, and algorithmically fueled outrage is vulgar, yes, but more than that, it is spiritually malnourishing. Without poetry and literature to leaven the language, citizens lose the capacity for proper judgment and affection. 

Kirk’s reflections on the descendants of John Adams in “History Without Providence” seem especially pertinent to recent debates about the merits of tracing one’s ancestry back to the founding. While Adams and his son John Quincy Adams stand near the zenith of American public virtue, Kirk reminds us that this was no guarantee of the moral and religious character of their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Henry and Brooks Adams may have been “the end-product of four generations of exceptional probity and remarkable intelligence,” but the family’s religious reputation had clearly withered on the vine; “losing their great-grandfather’s piety,” Kirk writes, “Henry and Brooks Adams lost all taste for life.” Heritage is a precious and fragile gift, not to be dismissed or trivialized, but actively received in love and ever renewed for posterity. 

The contemporary struggle over Kirk is also a struggle over the future of the conservative movement. Decades after his death in 1994, factions across the political right still read him with mutual admiration, if not agreement, regarding the significance of his legacy and ideas.  

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has repeatedly invoked Kirk as a resource for the populism of the day, arguing in 2023 that The Conservative Mind offered a guide for “younger conservatives hoping to inherit Trump’s leadership in coming years.” In a 2025 essay on America’s supposed “Golden Age,” Roberts again appealed to Kirk’s “permanent things” in support of Trump’s protectionist agenda. 

Kirk was no libertarian. He was suspicious of economic absolutism. But Kirk’s anti-utopianism also resists the kind of “hoo-rah” Golden Age triumphalism in which Roberts attempts to enlist him. As the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, was fond of saying, “in Washington, there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats.” Or to quote one of Kirk’s favorite lines from Eliot, “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” Kirk’s conservatism, as Miles Smith IV reminds us in his own response to Roberts, was far too sensitive to the tragic dimensions of political life to ever indulge any Pollyannaish pablum of a golden age ushering forth from the president’s Liberation Day tariffs and nationalization of private industries. 

Feulner offered a more salutary reading of Kirk, in an essay he coauthored with former Vice President Mike Pence for National Affairs. In contrast with the current Heritage president’s populist Kirk, the 48th vice president and the founder of Heritage painted a picture of a principled Kirk, stressing his commitments to virtue, order, and moral clarity: “conservatism is not a rigid ideology promising utopia; it is a disposition — a state of mind grounded in timeless principles.”   

Another challenge to this principled conservative reading of Kirk has come from the postliberal right. In a Chronicles essay defending Roberts, John Howting dismissed the Declaration as little more than “an ordinance of secession from the British Empire” and the Constitution as “an old list of laws and political compromises.” He suggested that fighting for them would be like running into a fire to rescue a drawer full of old legal documents. Howting later appealed to superficially similar passages from Kirk in his defense.  

Perhaps anticipating such silly claims, Birzer does not mince words in his preface to the volume: “for Kirk, the Constitution was the single finest political document in all of history.” As Lucchese writes in a separate response to Howting for Law & Liberty (“The Postliberal Mind Virus”), it was precisely because Kirk rejected abstraction that he loved the particular habits, memories, and forms of American heritage, including the Declaration and the Constitution. As Kirk warns in the essay “Renewing a Shaken Culture,” included in the volume, “if people forget the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods, the consequences soon will be felt.” 

What On America provides conservatives in the age of America 250, then, is not a program, a factional manifesto, or permission to baptize whatever political mood happens to be ascendant. This collected volume of Kirk’s essays offers readers a recovery of memory and affection, reminding them that the revolution, properly understood, was America’s return to old liberties, virtues, and sources of order. The task before conservatives today is not merely to celebrate America, but to pursue its ongoing renewal. 

From his perch in Mecosta County, Kirk loved America enough to recognize its fragility. He admired its founders without mistaking them for anything more than men. He praised America’s founding documents without imagining ink and parchment alone could save a decadent people. He treasured tradition while warning that our cultural inheritance could be squandered and lost. At a moment when conservatives are tempted by golden-age delusions, ‘post-constitutional’ impatience, race-based nostalgia, and the allure of progressive policies, Kirk calls them to something greater and more enduring: America, as a prized inheritance of memories, virtues, and people: to be loved, understood, defended, and handed on. 

On America is a reminder that the conservative mind must be continually renewed by its loves. For first-time readers, Lucchese’s collection is an excellent introduction, featuring staple selections. For those well-catechized in Kirk, Lucchese has unearthed previously unpublished essays on Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, deepening our appreciation for Kirk’s admiration of America’s great statesmen and writers.  

The legacy of 1776 is neither self-sustaining, as many liberal proceduralists believe, nor exhausted, as postliberals insist. If Americans would understand their country as a cherished inheritance within the great tradition of Western civilization, they will find within Kirk’s newly collected essays the resources for its renewal. 

John Shelton is the Vice President of Policy at Advancing American Freedom. He previously served as a policy advisor in the United States Senate and House of Representatives.