From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the
Powerline Show with your host Steve Hayward. Well, hi everybody, and welcome
to a classic format Powerline Conversation today featuring Daniel McCarthy talking with me about Wilmore
Kendall. Kendall was one of the great political scientists of the post war era,
and he's been back on our minds lately for a number of reasons.
He was a heterodox champion of Joe McCarthy back in the nineteen fifties, a
critic of the place of John Locke in American political thought, and a defender
of majority harry and deliberation, and as such, his provocative ideas are making
a comeback in our age of nationalist populism now. Kendall died at the way
to an early age of fifty eight, way back in nineteen sixty seven,
following a brilliant, if somewhat erratic and always controversial academic career. In addition
to a scholarship in teaching, he worked as a journalist in Spain or in
a civil war in the nineteen thirties, and this is where he acquired his
anti communism. He worked as a CIA spy, and he even wrote a
book about baseball, as well as helping to found National Review magazine in nineteen
fifty five and being a major mentor to William F. Buckley. At the
time of his death, Kendall left behind an unfinished book that touched off a
controversy that is still raging today, entitled The Basic Symbols of the American Political
Tradition. The book was rounded off and finished by George Carey, and there
has always been a little bit of controversy about Carry's modifications of what were early
lectures and early drafts of Kendall, but leave that beside. The greatest critic
of the book after it appeared was Harry Jaffa, who took hard after the
book when it appeared posthumously in the early nineteen seventies. And yet jaff and
Kendall were warm friends. They used to have long telephone conversations in the middle
of the night. This is back when long distance rates were very expensive up
until eleven PM. I've heard a recording of Jaffa in nineteen seventy calling Kendall
my good friend, more than three years after Kendall's death, and here's a
short clip from Jaffa speaking to the Philadelphia Society in nineteen seventy one about Kendall.
But before I expressed my disagreements, I wanted to pay what I think
is a tribute to Wilmore Kendall. I think that Wilmore was the best teacher
of political philosophy of his generation in this country, at least the best native
teacher that he can sit at the feat of several other teachers. Himself,
whom he acknowledged as his master's will. War was I think a true disciple
of Socrates. He managed to contradict just about everything that anybody said to him,
and when he ran out of antagonists, he contradicted himself if he had
a foot. I think that he loved his country, not wisely, but
too well. And I think he came to believe, certainly by the end
of his life, that the picture of the virtuous Republic deliberating sage lely and
wisely under God was the highest view of the American Republic that he could take,
and he believed that that was the true American political tradition. But there's
a brand new edition of one of Kendall's key books, The Conservative Affirmation edited
introduced by Dan McCarthy, who was currently the editor of Modern Age and a
well known self identified paleo conservative. What's a paleo conservative? You ask,
Stan Evans joke that a paleo conservative is a conservative who has been mugged by
a neo conservative, and I'll go with that sol Dan. It turns out
so I was lucky enough to catch up with Dan recently for a long chat
about Kendall and his legacy. So let's get started. So, Dan McCarthy,
before we get into most recent book, you've edited the reissue of Wilmark
Kendall's classic work, The Conservative Affirmation. I want to acquaint listeners with Dan
McCarthy and so give us a little sketch of intellectual biography. I know that
you're currently the editor of Modern Age, where I've been pleased to publish for
a long time a journal that was whose first editor was Russell Kirk. So
it's got a great lineage and I think kind of an ironic name because you
know, Modern Age for pre modern people. But more seriously, yeah,
a little bit about your intellectual background, and is it a calaween to describe
you as a paleo con or? Is that a slander or is that a
dame you own up with? And anyway, go ahead and started, I
would very happily plead guilty to being a paleo conservative. So my interest in
politics, conservative politics in particular, really started in my high school years,
which basically spanned nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety six, and of course,
in nineteen ninety two, Pat Buchanan runs for president against George H. W.
Bush. In nineteen ninety six he runs for the Republican nomination against Bob
Dole. So already in that period, in the nineteen nineties, questions of
what the real conservative position should be on questions like free trade, immigration,
foreign policy, foreign interventionism, these questions were already up, and Pat Buchannon
answered them in the paleo conservative way, which was critical of free trade,
very skeptical of mass immigration, and also very much opposed to wars in the
Middle East, the Gulf War one in nineteen ninety one. But then,
you know, already there were folks, you know, Bill Crystal and others
who were calling for Gulf four two, which we eventually get in two thousand
and three. So that was sort of my entree into politics. You know,
and I started reading things like Modern Age and Chronicles magazine. Back in
my undergraduate years from ninety six to two thousand. Where were you in college
that interpid? Yeah, I was at Washington University in Saint Louis. I
was studying classics and history. There good sort of conservative background, one might
say. And actually I was already involved in conservative activism in various ways in
college. One of the things I did is I edited a campus conservative paper.
Actually I founded one called The Washington Witness, and that was supported by
ISISI is the inter Collegiate Studies Institute. It has a division called the Collegian
Network, which supports campus conservative and independent publications across America. And my life
is kind of a circle because now I'm in charge of the Collegian Network.
So the very program that helped to, you know, sort of give me
my start as a campus journalist is now something that I'm able to give back
to as isis vice president for the Collegian Network, right right, And then
so I know, well, let's see I do have to say, and
then we'll start drawing into some issues that if I mean, I was always
somewhat critical the paleocons, not you know, not categorically so, but boy,
if anybody can claim vindication, it certainly is the paleocon warnings about all
the three issues you mentioned, trade, globalization, immigration, unrestricted immigration,
and then a foreign policy that simply is okay, we could go on a
long time about all that, anything else you want to add. I mean,
you were at The American Conservative for a while, and that magazine said
its ups and downs. But nowadays it seems to me, you know,
they're twenty years old, right, they're celebrating the twenty eight Time to take
a victory lap for them and the paleocons more widely, I think, Yeah,
you know, the American Conservative got started in two thousand and two because
so Takie Theodore Acopolis one of the founders. Yeah, he was supporting a
section within a New York based publication called the New York Press, and Tackie
provided some funding for a section called Talkie's Top Drawer within the New York Press.
And the New York Press ran into some financial difficulties and the question became,
should Tackee just buy the New York Press outright or should he take the
money and start a national conservative publication nationwide Conservative publication for basically the same cost,
and his friend Scott McConnell advised him to start a national publication. And
Scott and Tackey, even though you know they both have very long careers in
journalism, they're not you know, sort of brand names for the average you
know, sort of conservative at home, where's Pat Muchanon was? And they
were both friends with ste Buchanan and Scott had worked on Buchanan's A two thousand
campaign. So that's how the American Conservative got started. But what's interesting about
it is, you know, Scott McConnell had a background actually with the New
York Post, and he came from a background that you would normally think of
not as paleo conservative, but perhaps even closer to neo conservatism. So whether
that's the New York Post, whether it's the fact that you know, Scott
has a PhD from Columbia University, you know, so he and he comes,
you know, from New York. He comes from a you know,
sort of old wasp family. So Scott brought a sensibility to the American Conservative
that made it a slightly different kind of paleo conservatism than what you were getting
from Chronicles magazine. Which was the more long established Midwestern based paleocon magazine.
So paleo conservatism is a house with many mansions, you know, there was
because paleo conservatism was such a such a different variety of the right from what
had been dominant even in the nineteen eighties, and certainly in the nineties and
two thousands. There was a lot of infighting and a lot of paleo conservatives
felt very ill used by, you know, the conservative establishment, and so
there was a lot of personal bad blood, and I think that influenced for
a very long time how people thought about paleo conservatism's issues. They thought,
oh, these are just cranky guys who can't get along with anyone, and
so we don't need to take seriously what they're saying about immigration or trade or
foreign policy. And then in foreign policy, you know, I have to
say it was after the Cold War Americans, you know, America's foreign policy
leadership that the establishment was rather intoxicated by the idea of you know, sort
of what was Madeline all Bright's phrase, the you know, basically the Fukuyama
thesis of the end of history was something that you know, Madeline Albright and
various others. Indispensable nation, I think was her phrase, and there were,
you know, many people were intoxicated by that view. But interestingly enough,
there were some folks, you know, conservatives who were not identified as
paleo conservatives, who were also very skeptical of the idea that the United States
should have a mission to police the world after the Cold War. Jeane Kirkpatrick,
of course, was one of those people. So there is this realist
tradition on the right which in some ways parallels paleo conservatism skepticism about foreign engagements.
Yeah, that's right, it's yeah. I mean, even as someone
who you know, I knew and admired as much as Charles Crowdhammer was talking
about America's unipolar moment, and he was kind of speaking descriptively and factually,
but there's an undercurrent there also of using this great you know, we can
run the world. And yeah, more and more people I think are coming
around realizing, as I said a moment ago, you know, the pain
Ucons were right. We should have paid more attention to that then. And
so anyway, but we're we're really here to talk about your reissue of Wilmore
Kendall's The Conservative affirmation, and I'm going to quote your first sentence be introduction
in a minute. But I'll just mention to you because I don't think I've
ever had before Wilmore Kendall's book The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition.
That was the first serious book on American politics I read in college, and
I was much bold over by it. I know, I'm more mixed view
of it, but I'm I'm a fan of Kendall. But you begin in
a bold way, and we'll draw on the book this way. But I
love your opening sentence, which listeners goes as follows. Wilmore Kendall is the
most important conservative philosopher of the twenty first century, even though he died in
nineteen sixty seven. So explain yourself. Well, he is the philosopher,
and he was, you know, a professor of government at Yale University.
He had real you know training, you know, as a scholar. He
was someone who was an admirable of Eric Vogeland, and his admiration for Vogelin
comes through in the Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, which you mentioned,
and also of Leo Strauss. So Kendall is at an intersection of some
very interesting and important philosophical confluences, philosophical you know, rivers of conservatism.
And he himself was a brilliant man, a cantankerous man, someone who was
you know, had some various personal problems, but he is the philosopher of
the kind of conservatism that is most salient in America right now, which you
know, one phrase for it might be illiberal democracy, a kind of populism
that is willing to re examin the sort of verities of you know, the
kind of liberal democratic mindset right now. Of course, on the right,
there's a lot of debate over the place of liberalism, whether American conservatives simply
are liberals, you know, which is you know, Joah Goldberg and others
make the claim that American conservatism is just the old liberalism. And then you
have others who identify themselves define themselves as postliberals. And Wilmore Kendall was ahead
of this whole debate by many decades because he was someone who embraced the idea
of democracy, which you know, many conservatives are not comfortable with. And
yet he was also someone who's very critical of liberalism from the beginning and said
that America was not in fact founded as a lockey in liberal kind of polity.
Yeah, so let's break this down a little bit and start, I
guess with populism. You know, my working definition of populism is when the
wrong person wins an election. But it is true though, the populism,
you know, it's usually the people against the powerful, and I think more
or less historically it's thought of as a phenomenon of the left or a progressive
You think of William Jennings Bryan and the populist part of eighteen nineties, and
no all suddenly with Brexit and Trump, populism as the phenomenon of the right,
and that's why, of course was deplored by all right thinking people.
But Kendall was early on, you know, sort of a defender of populism
and defending a maturey terrianism in ways that are challenging and hard to make out.
And he also sort of changed his mind along the route. So I
don't know how you wanted to code that, because it is complicated. So
Wilmore Kendall, as was the case with many early twentieth century conservatives, went
through a phase where he was a socialist, or even a fellow traveler of
communist, not a cardcaring communist himself, but someone who was close to,
for example, some of the communist activists in Spain before the Spanish Civil Wars.
Interrupt to say that that's always struck me about Kendall's biographies. He went
to Spain as a journalist, didn't he? He did? It was it
was sort of a side gig as he was also studying at Oxford University,
So I'm not sure exactly how he balanced those two things. There's a recent
biography of Kendall by a Christopher Owen that's well worth looking at, but even
there I wasn't quite clear from that narrative how he goes from being in Oxford
as a student to going to Spain as a as a journalist. Well,
it's a little murky. But the reason I bring it up as you think
of the people who went to Spain during the Civil War in the thirties and
includes orwell, Arthur Kessler and Kendall, and there's people who had you had
been on the left round left a sympathies, had their eyes open to what
communism is. That's exactly right. So and he tendis get forgotten when you
think about the people who went to anyway. Sorry, oh no, you're
you know, you're exactly right. So Kendall was in Spain a little bit
before the Civil War broke out. So but you're exactly right that the experience
he had is a close parallel for Orwell and others, because he had many
friends on the non Stalinist hard left of Spain. And when the Spanish Civil
War breaks out, it turns out that those non Stalinist leftists had more to
fear from the Stalinist leftists, even more than they had to fear from Franco.
And you know, the right, right, that's right, that's that
story is receded in the memory along with the memory of the war. By
the way, in reading Christopher Owen's biography of Kendall, something finally clicked,
you know, something I had i'd you know, i'd known in a kind
of abstract way, but had never really felt before. And that is the
reason why so many of these former Trotskyists. So that includes James Burnham to
some extent, it includes Wilmore Kendall later on, it includes figures like Irving
Crystal, a whole variety of people who move from a version of Marxism into
the right. But the reason why many of them wound up with US intelligence
connections is because if you are the US intelligence community, what are the values
you find in the Trotskyist Well, there are two things that are really helpful
about them. First, they actually know the enemy, they know Stalinism,
they know Communism. But second, they are the people you can most rely
upon to hate Stalin because you know, anyone else you know that they may
feel indifferent, but the Trots, you know, they have a very personal,
visceral reason to hate Stalin. So I think that's you know, a
part of the twentieth century history that's important, but that i'd never quite fully,
you know, sort of comprehended before. Yeah, they think, if
they thought, they think politically, and you know, both high and low
sense of the word. I mean, you know, we're here at this
conference together, and some people it's an occupational hazard. They tend to lap
to the abstractions. You know, that's your day job here, professor.
And yeah, the people you mentioned they think more politically, and so here
we are. But I should bring this back to a question you raised a
moment ago, which is to what extent did Wilmore Kendall change his way of
looking at things, particularly h you know, where the question of majoritarianism is
involved. So he writes his PhD thesis as a reevaluation of John Locke as
a majoritarian rather than a liberal. And there is this through line in Kendall's
thinking where he has always devoted to the idea of popular self government of democracy
properly understood, although what the proper understanding of democracy is changes for Kendall over
time, and he certainly changes his evaluation of Locke based upon his reading of
Leo Strauss. So initially, you know, from his own study of Locke,
he thinks of Locke as being a majoritarian and a democrat rather than a
liberal and a natural rights guy. When he reads Leo Strauss, he comes
away and decides, Ah, actually Locke is a very subversive figure who does
not believe in, you know, a virtuous majority rule. Actually, what
he wants to do is subvert you know, Christianity and subvert you know,
kind of Aristotelian natural law. And so Kendall changes his mind on Locke,
and but his his majoritarianism, I think it gets more articulated as opposed to
being erased so early on. His understanding of majoritarianism is probably what many listeners
would think of it's just, you know, okay, whoever has the most
votes, you know, gets everything. But Kendall, you know, through
his study of the federalist papers, through his careful study not just of you
know, the Constitution, but of the documents that lead up to the Constitution,
going back to things like the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,
basically Kendall develops a sense of majoritarianism that is mixed with both the idea
that you have to have a pre existing commitment on the part of the people
to a higher truth basically to God or to some you know, transcendent metaphysics,
and at the same time that you have a certain ultimately articulated in the
Constitution procedures that allow you to take what is still a majority rule system,
but to make sure that it is a little more deliberative, a little more
sort of self reflective and examining, and so you can still have majoritarianism,
but it's actually a majoritarianism that is quite localized, that is also you know,
sort of wrapped together into federalism, and that has many filters, and
they're they're popular filters. That's the key thing that I think many conservatives get
wrong. And Kendall is very clear to argue this against other conservatives. Many
conservatives say, Aha, the Constitution has all these checks on the people.
Kendall says, that's wrong. Actually, these are checks by the people on
the people. So it's not that there is an aristocracy or some other you
know, non popular element that is coming in and you know, correcting the
people. It's rather that the people are you know, have through through representatives
and through the framers of the Constitution, found a way to correct themselves.
Yeah. I mean the way I try and explain it to students, and
usually not directly Brandon Kendall, is that all those devices that you reference the
founders had in mind creating majorities that think you mentioned deliberation and Kendall's additional I
should say, or i'd say secret sauce is virtue. You want to have
a virtuous people, and that's going to depend on you know, piety,
religion, Christian faith, and you know, so you brought up you know,
his talking about the Fundamental Ords or Connecticut, the Mayflower Compact and other
compacts that are also reminiscent of covenants of the Old Testament. Right. And
and there's an important point because no, no, that it actually sets up
a key element of Kendall's thought, which is there's a difference between a social
contract, which articulates something, and a social contract which is seen as creating
x niolo a new order. So Kendall rejected a Lockian and certainly a Russoian
view of a social contract, which is simply, okay, we're going to
create not only the law and not only the state, but even morality itself.
All of these things are just a matter of social convention. Kendall totally
rejected that. He said, instead, what you have is a people who
already possess revelation. They already possess, you know, historical practices that may
be sound. They already possessed a very high degree of virtue. Otherwise they
would have been extinct, they would never have made it to the New World.
But you take these pre existing elements, and then you can have a
social compact that brings these elements into play and reformulates how they relate to one
another. So Kendall's idea of the constitution and of this tradition, going back
to the Mayflower compact, is one in which the social contract is a specifying
contract, not a creation of order from a kind of you know, a
metaphysical wasteland, right or you know, Plato's Republic or something like that.
Although you know, we're going all over the place, but it's just fun
with Kenball because he was all over the place in some ways. You probably
know that one of his provocations in class, and he taught at Yale and
Dallas and elsewhere was maybe the Athenians were right to execute Socrates. And that's
sort of simple majoritarity, isn't But he was trying to get students to think
about the fundamental question of well, first of all, you shake people out
of the complace and easygoing modern liberal view that Socrates was a good guy and
so therefore how horrible the Athenians to execute him for impiety? And what he's
trying to bring out is, yeah, but you understand that that kind of
philosophical inquiry can undermine the pietistic foundations of a social order. That's the beginning
of a long tradition of you know, okay, but Kendall would bring it
up and confront students with it and they can work through it and there's some
wisdom. Right. Oh, absolutely so kendall In he believed correctly. I
think that every society, every community, has to have a public orthodoxy,
and that is what constitutes and defines it. Now, let me use this
analogy for a reader, for listeners who might be kind of shocked at this
idea of you know, yes, Athens was right to execute Socrates. But
imagine there was a magic word. It's a word, but if you utter
it, it will actually dissolve your community, destroy it, unleash anarchy and
disorder. If there were such a magic word that had that that material power,
I think most people would say it's quite reasonable for government to say,
Okay, that's one word you can't say. You can say almost anything else,
but you can't say that magic word. Well, what if the word
is not magic. What if it's just a regular kind of argument or an
argument against, you know, the very foundations of your society. If that
has exactly the same consequences as this magical word I've hypothesized, I think most
people would still say, you know what, yeah, maybe maybe there does
need to be some restriction because if that really is the consequence of this idea,
and it leads to, you know, the destruction of your society.
So it's the idea that the safety of the public order may require some constraints.
In fact, it always requires some constraints upon a freedom of speech and
freedom of expression. And you know, I think people look at Kendall's argument
here and they say, ah, this is a censorious guy. This is
a guy who hates, you know, free speech, doesn't want to argue
or whatever. That's exactly wrong, because again Kendall has this commitment to deliberation,
which he thinks is, you know, deliberation is the secret sauce that
makes majority rule and that makes representative government function. You can't have deliberation without
a pretty large degree of free speech. So his point is not to get
rid of free speech, but rather to say, the basis, the thing
that authorizes or legitimizes free speech is deliberation, which has a political goal,
and it has a goal under you know, the you know, metaphysical horizons
of the community. That is, that is the kind of free speech you
can have. Whereas if you try to get rid of those metaphysical horizons,
if you say, we're not going to have God, We're not gonna have
you know, truth, basically, we're not gonna have anything transcendent. Then
you know, okay, you have free speech, but you know what else
you have? You have a society with no no, you know, rational
or revealed basis for you know, its laws. It's just a matter of
pure force. Yeah. So let's uh, I want to come back to
the Conservative Affirmation, the book you put together, but I'm having too much
fun wandering around, so we'll end with it is what we'll do. But
what I want to do is, so there's two or three data points.
We mentioned that Kendall died in nineteen sixty seven, I think it was.
He was only fifty nine years old, I think, or fifty seven he
had it. You mentioned he had an alcohol problem and bad health, and
and so the next point I make is we were deprived, not like just
a great man on the merits of it, we were also deprived I think
of what would have been an epic intellectual debate that I think would have gone
very well on the merits of it because he died kind of didn't. And
that was with Harry Jaffer, right, because by the way, you know,
you know, and everybody's noted that Jaffa took after Kendall posthumously for the
Basic Symbols book. Again, I've heard they used to talk to each other
on the phone for hours in the middle of the night because rates are cheap
back then. And I've heard the recording of Jaffa from nineteen seventy one,
I think, referring to his late good friend Wilmore Kendall. And then the
book comes out, and so we'll talk about I mean, this may be
an overcrude summary, but Kendall, who, as you say, came to
Strouss later, he didn't study with Strouss, but he came to know him.
That a correspondence, Kendell and Jaffa knew each other. Kendall gave a
mostly favorable review to Jaffa's most famous book, but he worries at the end
about where this is going. And then you may have seen this. There's
some evidence that Kendall wanted to take on jaff on this question of the place
of equality in America, and whether Jaffa and his followers, like you know
me or Charles Gusterer, pushed the Lincoln example too far. That would have
been absolutely sparkling conversation, and because the two men knew and admired each other,
it would have been entired. It might have betten very strong, but
it wouldn't have been as you know the sequels that Okay, But anyway,
so let me try and briefly summarize, and then you help me refine it
to something more precise. The argument of basic symbols of the American political tradition
was the basic symbol really is this compact theory. We've already made reference to
it, you know, based on insand like Covenant and that equally it sort
of downplayed lock in equality and natural rights and the way that has unfolded in
American politics. I've extrapolated a little bit and said, and I had this
argument with a lot of my friends that Kendall may or not. You know,
you can quarrel with Kendall's accountabis On the other hand, it is certainly
true that the idea of equality has metastasized in the modern world. Behold the
world with even now of equity. And I know all the counter arguments about
why that was mistaken and wrong and the old principles right, But now I've
rambled a long time sorry, Dan, but I think that you know,
that book was an interesting provocation and here we are today and I'm not sure
who has the best of this. Yeah, I agree, there would have
been a fascinating ongoing battle. Yeah, I'm sorry. If there's a letter
that Kendall sent to Strauss where he kind of hints, I'm going to take
on Jaffa and Strauss, I'll keep mum about it. That would have been
like nineteen what would have had have been sixty eight or so? So anyway,
sorry for sixty six. I don't know anyway. Yeah. So Kendall
reviews Crisis of the House Divided by Harry Jaffa in National Review magazine, and
as you say, it is a mostly favorable review except the last few paragraphs
where Kendall says, if you have a philosopher king or a philosopher president,
and he takes this abstract idea equality and makes that the heart of the political
order, what is to prevent some next, you know, some flawed philosopher
or flawed president from coming along next, taking that concept, distorting it and
basically, you know, running rough shot over the constitutional order with it,
and a lot of conservatives, I think, even those who are not necessarily
engaged in the Jaffa Kendall debate would say, this is exactly what has happened
that the concept of equality, which had you know, very defensible, uh,
you know, roots in the Declaration of Independence and in the way in
which you know Lincoln used it himself, has nevertheless gotten away from any kind
of limitation or control and you know, lends itself to equality of outcome.
Uh. You know, now this idea of equity which you know, we're
just going to say, let's just you know, kind of redistribute in order
to get the just outcomes that we have predetermined are going to be justice,
right, that we're not going to have leave anything to chance. So equality,
you know, does get out of control. And nowadays, you know,
many of our friends who are you know, very close to the Jaffa
tradition would happily agree, yes, equality got out of control. But they
would say that Kendall went too far in trying to minimize the role of equality
in both the Declaration and the American tradition in general, and perhaps also in
you know, fearing that Lincoln was the beginning of a corruption. For Kendall,
it's it's not that America is founded on an idea, because it's not
it's not founded upon this, you know, sort of natural justice conception or
natural right conception of equality, or of anything else you find in the Declaration
of Independence. Rather that you already have a pre existing virtue, partly through
revelation and partly through you know, sort of well the philosophical tradition that Americans
had inherited from Aristotle, that Americans in the colonial period already were a virtuous
people who understood themselves to be making their decisions under God, and that this
is the basis for the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. Ultimately
to some degree also it is the Declaration of Independence, and then finally the
Constitution. And Kendall's warning that if you take this element from the Declaration,
this idea of equality in the abstract, apart from democratic deliberation, and you
say that from this we're going to derive, you know, the rights or
the procedures that will govern our society. That's what he thinks of the fatal
flaw and will lead to what we have today. Yeah, my own hunch,
and it's only that or an opinion, is that he had a waste
too. Well, that might have been not been his last word on the
subject. I think there's other evidence that, you know, he was very
taken with Richard Weaver late in his life in ways I can't quite remember now,
but he thought we had some unique insights into this question of how do
you create a virtuous people? And well, yes, in fact, i'll
jump in because this does relate to the Conservative affirmation. So the Conservative affirmation.
This volume of Wilmore Kendall's from nineteen sixty three, which has now been
reissued by Reregunary with a new introduction by yours truly. The book is modeled
after Leo Strauss's What Is Political Philosophy? As listeners may know, What Is
Political Philosophy consists of a number of essays followed by a selection of book reviews,
and Wilmore Kendall's book also is a number of essays followed by a rather
large number of book reviews, and included in those book reviews are the review
of Harry Jaffers Crisis of the House Divided, and also a review it may
not be of ideas have consequences, but in any case it's a review of
one of Weaver's books, and he is praising Weaver, although I have to
say, in preparing my introduction, I went back and reread that review,
and I realized that Kendall was less favorable towards Weaver than he might have sounded
on my first reading. But basically, the problem that any kind of regime
faces is how can you make sure the sovereign is virtuous? And a lot
of people would like to solve that by saying, well, you know,
one particular form of regime is always virtuous, and other forms of regime like
democracy, are always vicious. And Kendall, I think was quite wise in
recognizing that's false, that in fact, you know, the thing you have
to have is one who's able to teach virtue to whatever kind of regime you
have. So in a democracy, in a representative republic, you still have,
if anything, the office of the teacher is more important than ever because
you have to educate and perpetuate the virtue of a larger and larger group of
people. So I think Kendall looked at Leo Strauss and Eric Vogelan and Richard
Weaver, despite having some criticisms or differences with all of them, and said,
this class of person. This kind of teacher is exactly what America needs
if it's going to maintain virtue, and you need to maintain that virtue in
order to maintain the republic. Yeah, so it's so I've talked about.
You know, he would have quarreled with Jaffa. He did. He didn't
think much of Russell Kirk. I don't remember if I know. This is
a whole separate essay in another book of his, the what we call the
Sage and We Cost or something, and he was really hard on Kirk.
Well, so I don't think much of Frank Meyer's fusionisms. I'd say a
little bit about yet other people. Wilmore Kendall started writing a book. In
fact, it probably would have been the book he would have written if he
hadn't published The Conservative Affirmation. He started writing a book which basically was a
series of chapters demolishing every rival Conservative. So Frank Myer is in there,
the Sage of Woodstock, Clinton Rossiter is in there, right, Russell Kirk
is in there. James Burnham was going to be in there. Basically it
was going to be Wilmore Kendall versus everyone. And in fact there is you
mentioned the people versus Socrates Revisited, which is one of Kendall's famous essays.
The collection of essays in which that appears is called Wilmore Kendall Contramundum against the
World. And sure enough, you know, Kendall was willing to take on
all comers. He was going to write this book of criticisms, and in
fact Wilmore Kendall Contramundum includes these, you know, chapters that he he created
for the book that he didn't write. His criticism was he thought Kirk was
Unamerican. He thought, you know, Kirk was too interested in British conservatism,
too interested in the idea that you know, you need to have a
maybe a landed aristocracy, or just in general, that Russell Kirk was temperamentally
out of touch and out of sync with his own country. And you know,
I think Kirk would agree to some extent. You know, there's a
reason he goes and gets his doctorate from Saint Andrew's University in Scotland. He
really did feel out of step with the America of his day and age.
Although I think, you know, to defend Kirk, he would point out
that, you know, his tradition is ultimately one of a kind of northern
agrarianism or a variety of the Southern agrarian tradition, which is very American.
So it's not just a matter of trying to import Europeans into the American bloodstream.
I met Russell Kirk several times, and I liked him personally. I
didn't get to know him well, but you know, I always enjoyed his
company and being around him. But I agree with Kempbell about it. Well,
let's let's suck get directly into concern. We keep ted at about everything
else but conservative affirmation. It has his chapter defending Joe McCarthy, and of
course that was a big part of his life. I have to confess I
have forgotten his chapter on the two majorities of American politics. Can you remind
me when it was? Quickly, Steve, I know, I think this
is the most important essay. Is a different please first stated form me because
I'm a mangle. Ah No, it's it's it's you know, and it
is the kind of thing you have to revisit once in a while in order
to refresh your memory. So the two majorities are, on the one hand,
the left wing progressive plebacyitary majority. And this is where basically you take
a majority, but there's no internal differentiation, there is no filter. It
is just, you know, it's basically what progressives even now are arguing,
in fact, even more forcefully than they were in Kendall's own time. What
do they say? They say the president should be directly elected. They say,
you know what, why do we have every state represented by two senators
rather than proportionally? And they look at Congress and they say, why do
we have districts where we should have basically maybe at large representation. In fact,
if well, if they got their way, what they would do is
they would have at large proportional representation, not only by state, but they'd
ultimately say, why even have states, you should just have take the entire
United States and just have you know, a mass vote. Everyone goes out
on you know, maybe they don't do it all on the same day,
but they all vote, and then you know, the powers that be decide
who gets you know what slice. So that's that's one kind of majority.
That is the left's you know, idea, both in Kendall's day and ours,
of what democracy means. That's that's precisely what it is. And and
Kendall's criticism of that is when you have an electorate that vast and when it's
when it when it when it is not organized into localities, Um, what
you do is you wind up getting an affirmation for everything and nothing. And
I think Barack Obama in his campaigns in O eight in twenty twelve was a
perfect illustration of the kind of leader you get when you have that plebiscitary mentality.
What did Obama stand for? Hope and change? These utterly banal,
meaningless you know, abstractions exactly, so you take so so when you have
that vast electorate that has no particular you know, sort of differentiation or focus,
you can then you know, claim that you have democratic legitimacy or authorization
from that majority. But in act, what you really have is such an
abstract mandate you can do anything you want. So it's a kind of suicidal
democracy. It's actually not democratic at all. The other majority, which is
the kind that Kendall supports, is the Madisonian form of majority, and this
is one where it is localized. You do have districts, you have filters,
you have you know, all the complexities of our constitution, which again
Kendall insists this is not antidemocratic. This is not an aristocracy imposing its will
on the people. This is actually making sure that the people has maximum deliberation
through different chambers, through different states, through different districts, and this through
the electoral college, and this kind of deliberation produces a much better kind of
majority, a much better kind of government, and a more legislative kind of
government in his theory, at least than the pletistary, universal kind of you
know, disordered democracy that you find the progressives endorsing. The I recently get
confused is that there's a lot of later work in political science on two majorities
that differ from the simple we're simple minded. But part of it was,
you know, we started seeing with Nixon and then later Reagan a presidential majority
and a congressional majority, and a lot of factors to all that, but
it represented different current opinion. Kendall. It would have been fascinating to see
if Kendall lived through those years to have him update this and reflect upon that,
because he would have said, I told you so, there's a deeper,
deeper meaning to what's going on here. Yeah. In fact, let
me update the argument there, because Kendall precisely did see that that there were
different kinds of majorities for the president and for Congress. And Kendall was always
on the side of Congress. And as you say, this was I mean,
this is coming off of you know, decades of the New Deal and
Harry Truman. You know, Dwight Eisenhower was not Yeah, Dwight Eisenhower was
not someone that you know, most you know, people on the right,
we're all that enthusiastic about. So Wilmore Kendall didn't like presidential majorities, which
he thought tended to embrace this kind of abstract, you know, blank check
rhetoric. He preferred aggressional majorities because there you have the people organized in districts,
organized in localities, having concrete discussions and having deliberation. Now, in
the nineteen seventies, I think, shortly after the Nixon era, perhaps in
the midst of the Carter years, Jeffrey Hart, who was a senior editor
at National Review, decided to revisit Kendall's thought on this, but to argue
the other side and to say, basically, the only way to reign in
the administrative state is with a powerful president who has a mass mandate and so
Heart kind of turned around Kendall's argument and said, actually, Kendall was right
about what happens, but he was wrong to take the side of Congress as
opposed to a vigorous executive, who is the only kind of power you can
have that can take on At that time, it was the administrative state that
a Heart was worried about. But today a number of conservatives would say you
need that kind of presidential caesarism. And in fact, caesarism was the very
word that both Kendall and James Burnham used in discussing this. They say,
you need presidential caesarism not only to take on the administrative state, but also
to take on the media, big tech, all these powers that are outside
of government but in fact rule our lives. Yeah. Boy, that's a
very live theme right now. So I mentioned one mention. One last chapter
and we'll draw here to a close. Is this chapter on freedom of speech
right in the middle, and I think this is his essay that you talked
about the full circle in the world in a small world. That drew upon
the work of one of my teachers who was a liberal, Leonard Levy,
famous constitutional historian. It was in the late fifties. It was very scrupulous.
His story, the funny story that you might appreciate. He did a
lot of work showing that at the time of the Founding and even after the
First Amendment, that the understanding of free speech was very different than it came
in modern times. And the fact that esectually it ratified Kendall's idea that it
really does need to be a public orthodoxy and that you defend against. And
I know that. Oh one of his books, I remember, the one
that Kendall liked, was showing that Thomas Jefferson, the great civil libertarian,
was those complete hypocrite when he was in office, arresting newspaper editors, suppressing
the media. And Levy told me one time that Felix Frankfurter, who he
knew quite well the Supreme Court, saw the manuscript and begged Levy not to
publish it. This is dangerous to the cause of civil liberties today. But
Levy was scrupulous, honest guy published it. And then Wilmore Kennaball picks up
on it and runs with it. And let me say, Levy was a
liberal be with actually the guy, but he always sort of like, oh
my god, I didn't know this national your conservatives are gonna grab my arnor
anywhere. Funny stuff, but but still worth reading. And that's a great
it's a great book. It's Jefferson and Civil Liberties, The Darker Side,
And I think it is one of the books that Kendall reviews and the Conservative
Affirmation, So I think that's in there, or at least some discussion of
Levy is in there. Yeah, Kendall, he thought that I don't think
he's correct about this, that the John Stuart Mill variety of absolute free speech
and which is a corollary to this idea of an open society. He thought
this was an innovation, this was something that did not exist in the American
founding. And certainly Jefferson's own record, you know, supports the idea that
Jefferson was not a million you know, free speech absolutist, and I mean,
you know, just by the bye, I mean, you know this
story as well. Jefferson really prided himself on starting the University of Virginia.
And but Jefferson was really worried about the fact that he had histories by David
Hume in the University of Virginia because David Hume who you know, is often
not seen as the radical right wing Mastrian or something. But David Hume,
you know, at various times, because he's an honest historian, gives the
Tory side of British history and says, actually, maybe the Tories are right
and maybe the Whigs were bad. And Jefferson thought, well, that's subversive,
we might so Jefferson actually commissioned, I think someone to go through and
produce a you know, apracy, a compressed version of Hume's history that eliminated
the Tory buyas. So Jefferson was not above censorship in a public as well
as a private as well as public capacity. So yeah, Kendall rejects the
idea of you know, a million absolute free speech. He also, very
astutely in this essay in The Conservative Affirmation, points out that in fact,
the whole million position the open society is a fraud and that actually when whenever
these progressives gain power, what do they do? They shut up their opponents.
And you know that was true in Kendall's day in the nineteen sixties,
it is true in spades today. So yeah, I always prefer our universities
these days as our East German universities complete with their own stas to force orthodoxy.
Well, last question, that's really kind of a comment, but you
can turn into question if you want. The main thing thing they mean about
Kendall is that he was not always changing his mind, but you could see
him following things and adding on to and modifying his views and seeing new things,
much more so than a lot of scholars who, although they developed new
thoughts, they sort of follow more familiar pathway and it seems more zig Zaggy's
not quite right. But there's something fascinating and utterly unique about him. That's
what makes him compelling to me. Yeah, there's a sense in which his
thought is a work in progress, which is, you know, some people
might say, oh, that's a criticism that he didn't have, you know,
a final doctrine that we can all agree with or disagree with. But
actually, when you delve into his work, what is so wonderful about it
is you can see a powerful mind working through these fundamental questions, and that
I think is one of the most inspiring things a teacher can do. So
his text will still do that for you. The other really fascinating thing,
and I think this is a great compliment to his character. Is that Wilmore
Kendall even when he was you know, he had been a don at Oxford
Universe, sorry, a don at a Yale University. He was, you
know, someone who had considerable achievements of his own. He was always willing
to revise his own thought based upon reading someone who basically was a peer of
his. So he would read Leo Strauss and say, wait a minute,
I was wrong about John Locke. Leo Strauss is right about Locke. He
would read Eric Vogelin and say, ah, here are some of the answers
I've been looking for to understand how revelation and reason and a tradition relate to
one another. And similarly with Richard Weaver. Even though I think again he
may not be quite as enthusiastic about Weaver as one might immediately think based on
this review, he does think that Weaver has you know, clearly stated this
need for an overarching metaphysics in a way that that Kendall himself finds very valuable.
The phrase in that review is that you know, Kendall says, you
know, with maybe one or two slight modifications, he would vote for,
you know, Richard Weaver to be the captain of the conservative intellectual team,
which which indeed is high praise. So I think what we'd say is he
was open minded in the right sense of that term. Well, he was.
He was his mind was always working, yea. And I think that's
that's that's an important distinction because you know, I mean, we've talked about
paleo Conservatism and some of these other conservative schools of thought. One of the
things that frustrates me about almost all of them is that they reach a point
of a where it's simply, you know, rain or shine, you're carrying
the same umbrella. And in fact, you know, the world is a
very complex place, and there's a need constantly to be you know, not
changing our minds, but rather refining and deepening or understanding. With Wilmore Kendall,
that sense of ongoing deepening is there. And so I disagree with people
who think that Kendall is inconsistent. I think rather there is a logical sequence
to the development of his thought and tracing it and then following it beyond where
he went because of course, you know, as you mentioned, he dies
quite young, and there's a lot of unfinished work, a lot of you
know, sort of Machiavelli, as you know, has this wonderful you know
image early in The Prince where he talks about how a tradition is like a
wall where there's a brick sticking out, because you use that brick to build
the next component of the wall. In the same way with Wilmore Kendall,
the very fact that his ideas are in some ways in unfinished means that there
is this call for other scholars and thinkers to come and to you know,
take the bricks that are hanging out and start building that next component of the
great Wall of Western civilization. Yeah. No, he gave us a great
model on how to keep thinking. And congratulations Dan on this collection and we'll
put it in our bags and think from here. Thanks Steve. So.
I think Virgil Thompson's The Plow that Broke the Planes is the right bumper exit
music for any discussion of Wilmore Kendall. I hope you'll go get the Conservative
Affirmation. Check out also the links in the show notes for this episode for
contrasting points of view about Kendall, and always come back on Saturday for the
three whiskey Happy Hour, and don't forget to milk the soft power dividend.
Bye bye, everybody, Ricochet. Join the conversation.