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Prophet of the Heartland
| Article
# : |
10524 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
3,263 Words |
| Author
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Samuel T. Francis
Samuel T. Francis is deputy editorial page editor of the
Washington Times. |
The conservative movement in the United States has come a long way, politically and intellectually, since the death of Willmoore Kendall in 1967. Although the successes of conservatism could not easily have been predicted in the early 1960s when Kendall's thought flourished, they would not have surprised him, for it was the essence of his political thought that the American people were profoundly committed to conservative principles and deeply hostile to liberalism and ideological experimentation with their lives and government. On the other hand, certain recent trends in conservative thought and politics--a seeming preoccupation with "respectability" and "credibility," and an inclination to dilute the expression of its commitments in return for acceptance by the establishment--would surely have angered him. Kendall called himself an "Appalachians-to-the-Rockies patriot," and he was both temperamentally and philosophically incapable of living in peace with the dominant structures of the Northeast. Nor, were he living today, would Kendall have been silent about such trends. In his last years he was working on a book that was to deal with the contemporary "sages" of the renaissance of conservative thought in the 1950s (Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr., among others), and what we know of this project suggests that he had some critical, even unkind, things to say about his colleagues. There is a legend about Kendall that at National Review he was never on speaking terms with more than one associate at any one time. He was not a man to allow personal friendship to stand in the way of what he took to be philosophical truth and political rectitude, nor would he have permitted political success to deflect his perception of truth and rightness.
Kendall's understanding of what constitutes conservatism is
... (1999 of 20371 Characters)
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