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A Revolution Prevented: Russell Kirk and the Legacy of 1776 · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reim.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pleasure to welcome Michael Lucese to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Michael is the founder and CEO of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law Liberty magazine, and a contributing editor to the Providence Journal.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to these roles, he was a Charles Krauthammer Fellow with the TICFA Fund, a visiting scholar at Liberty Fund, and an aide to U.S.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Ben Sass.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: He was also a former TFAS Public Policy Fellow.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Michael's writing on national security and the American founding has been widely published, and he is the editor of a recently published collection of essays by conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, titled Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, thank you for being here.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me on, Roger.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, congratulations on this wonderful new book, Russell Kirk on America, published earlier this summer.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you also for acknowledging your connection to TFAS in it.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're grateful for that.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: You've been kind to join us in Macosta when we take our Woodhouse Public Policy Fellows there each fall to give them the opening lecture about Kirk, a great survey of his ideas and influence.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: But before we explore the essays in the book, let's begin with just a couple basic questions, especially for people who might not be familiar with Kirk.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, who was he and why was he important?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, those are great questions.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Russell Kirk was a Michigan writer, born in 1918, died in the early 1990s, who really gave the conservative movement its identity.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: In 1953, he published his dissertation as the conservative mind, sort of survey of ideas from Edmund Burke and John Adams up to T.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Eliot and Robert Frost.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And Kirk was really an advocate of what we might call an imaginative conservatism.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: He certainly supported Republican candidates and was in favor of things like a strong position on the Cold War and free trade.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, he wanted to focus on the sort of imaginative elements of conservatism, literature, poetry, big ideas.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that in a lot of ways, Kirk gives a perhaps more expansive view of what conservatism is than we often get from the sort of new right of today.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's not concerned with these narrow partisan questions, but broad questions of philosophy and poetry and politics.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what prompted you to publish this book on his writings related to the American founding, though not they aren't exclusively all on the founding as such, other than the obvious fact that we just recently celebrated America's semi-quincentennial.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So a while back for national affairs, the journal that Yuvol Livin edits, I wrote a piece titled Russell Kirk's Revolution of Memory, which was about how Kirk thought about the revolution.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: What makes his ideas about the revolution a little different than mainstream scholarship, perhaps?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: The emphasis that he puts on continuity as opposed to radical change.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: That essay sort of developed over time into this book.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I find that a lot of people misunderstand Dr.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk and his ideas about the revolution.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so the idea behind this book was to sort of celebrate the semi-quincentennial by looking back through Dr.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's eyes, as it were, trying to understand 1776 not as a break with the past, but as the culmination of Western civilization in a lot of ways.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've read a lot of Kirk over the years, but I think his understanding is much more nuanced and more interesting as I read it this year, around the time of the semi-quincentennial.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I really appreciate you putting these essays together.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Early on, one of the first essays, maybe it's the second chapter, he talks about the word revolution.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Very interesting word to be discussed as he does.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: You capture in the title of that chapter that unlike France, unlike the Russian Revolution, for example, Kirk called ours a revolution not made but prevented.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Could you expand on that concept here?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's sort of counterintuitive.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: We have this idea that the American Revolution, Thomas Paine said, we had it in our power to start the world over again.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's certainly what some people, Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, that's certainly how they thought about the revolution.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also a more conservative view of the American Revolution that some of the founders held.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams being three primary examples.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: They saw the revolution as the restoration of rights that the American colonies had long enjoyed.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Self-government was a reality of the British Empire in the 17th and early 18th centuries.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so the real revolutionaries from this conservative point of view was Parliament, who were changing the laws.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were imposing this centralizing tyranny on the Americans.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: They were trying to prevent this revolution against self-government and restore those principles.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, when independence became politically necessary, we had to build a new government.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there were certainly hopes that that government could achieve a measure of justice that was not seen in the old world.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, what Kirk emphasizes throughout all of his writing is that the founders were guided by what some called the lamp of experience.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: They looked back to history for lessons about the unchanging nature of the human person, about the importance of liberty and the limits of power.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so Kirk sees all of this as a great continuity, not as a break with the past, the way that Payne may have seen it.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so he contrasts the French and the American Revolutions in this way.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he argues that this is why the American Revolution was successful.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: It did not have this totalitarian longing for radical change or anything like that.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: They viewed Parliament as the revolutionaries.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't say the King or King George III, yet in the Declaration, I don't think they reference Parliament, right?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's all directed at the King.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is a funny quirk of history.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, because the Declaration emphasizes the King and his role in all of this, we tend to have this simplified narrative of the tyrant King George trying to accumulate all these powers.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, compared especially to the Stuart monarchies of a generation or two before, the Hanoverian monarchy that King George III represented was incredibly weak compared to Parliament.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Parliament was really the leading driving force.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And many of the founders make appeals to the king to intervene on their behalf against Parliament.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the king doesn't do this.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: He supports Lord North's ministry and his sort of goals of centralizing the empire, which is why ultimately they make that break.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But for the founders, for the early patriot movement, it was really important that the colonial legislatures were governing these local people, not the parliament.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: These were sort of separate and equal bodies within the British Empire.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Strangely, what this can teach us is just how important federalism was from the very beginning.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted local government and they were fighting for local government against centralizing tyranny.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Kirk talks about the framers' references to the ancients.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Kirk has a little different take on that.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that they are borrowing a lot of the ideas of the ancients, but that their knowledge about the fact that many of the democracies that the ancients established didn't really work and failed.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that was very interesting.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in Federalist Nine, Publius says that he surveys the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy with sensations of horror and disgust.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: They saw Greece and Rome as failed civilizations in a lot of ways.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't properly balance power, and therefore the one, the few, and the many uh competed over power in a way that destroyed these societies.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so when the founders built the constitution, they certainly looked back at the history of Greece and Rome and they were inspired by it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's a reason why they founded a republic, after all.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, though, they were willing to admit the limitations of this and build something new based on those old principles.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a really important lesson for conservatives.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Conservatives are sometimes painted as being sticks in the mud, you know, choosing not to change things, not to reform things.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Kirk and the founders as he sees them, they don't fall into that stereotype of sort of opposing all change.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: What they understood was that not all revolutions are going to truly reform society.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you need to be thoughtful about these things, which maybe makes them slow about change, but I don't think it makes them total opponents of change or anything like that.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And as I recall, Kirk argues that what they mostly drew from as they established these new institutions was more recent history, from, as you noted, from the British experience and from perhaps some Enlightenment ideas, but also learning from both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek and Roman experiences.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: In Dr.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's book Roots of American Order, which we of course study with the public policy fellows now, and which I drew on for this book, he really paints this vision of Western civilization as a kind of spiritual inheritance.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about what he calls heritage cities, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London, which all sort of culminate in Philadelphia, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk rejects the kind of blood and soil nationalism that was so common in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries by stressing this sort of spiritual inheritance.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's spiritual and not this physical, you know, we're tied to the land and it's all about who my ancestors were, Kirk certainly thinks land and ancestry matter.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately for Kirk, conservatism is about preserving what he calls the permanent things, these spiritual truths that are universal facets of the human condition: love, loyalty, justice, faith.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really the thing that the founders were drawing on when they built the foundations of our republic.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Kirk notes the first few paragraphs of the declaration tend to be a little more abstract and theoretical in their discussion of the laws of nature and nature's God and equality, and states that part of that was Jefferson wanting to win over the French to the American side.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Is that an idea worth expanding on a little bit?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: From a survey of the historical record, I think this is plainly true.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Enlightenment ideas were strong in France in a way that they weren't strong in Britain or America.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Paradoxical as it seems, the people perhaps most committed to the revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment were in the court of King Louis.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's right about that.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to note, though, also that Kirk doesn't reject the abstractions of the Declaration of Independence.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: What he is combating is this unfortunate tendency to see those abstractions and forget about the context.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, what that does is it turns America into this sort of revolutionary force in the world that's going to totally remake everywhere all the time.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, these things are abstractly, self-evidently true.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: All human beings are created equal.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: What Kirk is really trying to draw our attention to is the way that we can't just treat these abstractions as though that there is no context.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: We have to narrow in on what do they mean for a particular people at a particular time?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's one of the great things about the statesman that I tried to sort of profile in the book with selection from Dr.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's work, is in very different ways, right?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: John Adams and John Randolph of Roanoke, two of the figures profiled in the book, they did not care for each other.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: They despised each other.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Randolph called Adams a tyrant.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Adams dismissed Randolph as unserious.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: But what they have in common is they're both trying to find ways that they can take those seemingly abstract principles of the founding and make them concrete.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: How can we actually live with these ideas in a practical way?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's, I think, the great conservative contribution to the American founding.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: It must have been a challenge to make your selection here.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: You've got essays on Adams and Randolph, you've got a chapter on Ronald Reagan, what Kirk writes about Reagan.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: You have T.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Elliott and Robert Frost, two poets, and you talked at the beginning about Kirk's view of the importance of poetry.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about that process of selecting chapters and why you included at least Reagan and the poets.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are three sections in the book.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: The first section is a collection of Dr.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's most important writings on the founding, generally speaking.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: What are the causes of the American Revolution?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: How did we frame our constitution?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second section is about the great conservative statesman of the American Republic.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: John Adams is sort of the founding conservative of Kirk's American tradition.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I also profiled John Randall Varono, who I mentioned, a uh Virginia senator who was more of a Jeffersonian until he uh thought he wasn't.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, until he thought Jefferson had had rejected his principles.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then I have a previously unpublished essay on Abraham Lincoln.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's a chapter on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, two politicians Kirk was not a big fan of, actually.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: He calls them American Caesars.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: The last essay in that is on Ronald Reagan, who's a personal friend of Dr.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Reagan referred to Kirk as the prophet of American conservatism.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: People know that Kirk worked with Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign, but I think Kirk's relationship with Reagan is a little bit less understood.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: He really admires him.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: He praises his virtues and compares him to another conservative hero, Benjamin Disraeli, in that chapter.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I really wanted to highlight this wasn't just sort of Dr.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's sitting around in the groves of academia, but really he was interested in the political process and wanted to participate.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last section is on American letters.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Literature was really for Kirk where the rubber hits the road for conservatism, as it were.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of the conservative figures he wrote about were losers.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: John Randolph of Roanoke and John Adams, they were political losers in their time.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really in literature where these ideas about the permanent things are manifest and sort of incarnate, even.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I draw together some of his most important writings on American authors to try to highlight what the conservative heritage in literature is.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And there's another previously unpublished essay in this section on Mark Twain, interestingly.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right, Huckleberry fan.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love Mark Twain.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up reading Mark Twain.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh when I discovered this in the archives at Macosta, I was I was really pleased.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I immediately asked Annette Kirk, his widow, if I could, if I could publish it for the first time.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm grateful to the Kirk Center that they they allowed me to do that.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm reading the massive biography of Mark Twain now by Ron Chernow.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's fascinating.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: He's a fascinating American writer.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Kirk is somewhat ambivalent about Twain because he he worries a little bit that there's something almost nihilistic in Twain's humor.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: But in the end, he sort of redeems Twain by pointing out uh, well, the the these are stories about boyhood and growing up.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a really important thing for Americans to remember, especially, you know, even though America's 250 years old, we're still a pretty young country.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so those stories about growing up, I think, really matter to us as a people.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just now you mentioned Macosta, an important place for Russell Kirk.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: We take our public policy fellows there every fall and start the program with them not just looking at Kirk and conservatism, but being there in Macosta.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Brad Burzer, in fact, has an introduction here which references this.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: So talk a little bit about the importance of Macasta to Kirk and what it means today and the existence of now the Russell Kirk Center there.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Macosta is a small village in northern Michigan, which is sort of the ancestral home of the Kirk family.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and after he went to graduate school, he moved back to Macosta, to his ancestral home, which is called Piety Hill, very fittingly, for a man who really stressed the importance of the conservative virtue of piety.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Fewer than 500 people lived there.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's this little tiny town, uh it's an hour and a half outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's there that Kirk sort of built a community, an intellectual community around the conservative ideas that he promoted.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: During the Cold War, he and his wife Annette, who I mentioned earlier, they actually hosted uh refugees from all these communist regimes, Ethiopia and Vietnam and Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: He tried to live out conservatism not just as a political ideology or something like that, but as a way of life.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Russell Kirk Center is still there.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's this really beautiful place, a place where you can retreat and contemplate.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I went there as a public policy fellow.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: I went there several times when I was a student at Hillsdale College.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the Kirk Center is really, I think, one of the great representatives of this kind of imaginative conservatism to this day.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they really just are trying to advance his principles.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think those principles are what the conservative movement most needs now.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm I'm so grateful for the work of the Kirk Center and everything that they do and represent.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me uh do a little lightning round here.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'll name a few terms that are important to Kirk, and maybe you could kind of define what he means by that prudence.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Prudence is the chief political virtue.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's something Plato and Burke teach us, and it's the application of timeless principles to the circumstance we have to confront in time.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: How about piety?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Piety Hill.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Piety is, you know, the great virtue that we've inherited from the Romans.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sort of faithfulness to our ancestors and our ancestors' ideas, and not just uh our literal ancestors, but also our spiritual ancestors.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And seeing the way that that ancestry transcends borders, I think, is important to Kirk.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And what about the word liberty, which is important to the libertarians among us?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk Kirk, of course, was uh no libertarian.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: He denounced libertarians as the chirping sectaries in one essay, but he still was really concerned with liberty.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: He sees liberty as a consequence of order.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: So freedom and justice and order are for Kirk the three most important sort of political values that we have to preserve.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so always Kirk was an opponent of centralizing tyranny because he didn't think we could live out traditional lifestyles without a measure of liberty.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So liberty is something that is very important to Dr.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk, even if he was a little critical of the libertarians.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll throw out one other word that probably needs some definition here, but fusionism, which is now the title of a book uh by our friend Stephanie Slade, and I'll be having her on this podcast in a f in a month or two.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: But not so much whether Kirk was a fusionist, but it's a blending of tradition, order, and then on the other hand, liberty.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: What would Kirk say if we said asked him to talk about fusionism?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk got in some fights with uh the sort of founder of fusionism, Frank Meyer, but Stephanie points out that they were perhaps closer in their practical politics than it might seem.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure Dr.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk would consider himself a fusionist, but I do think that liberty and virtue or or freedom and tradition, these are things that he definitely thinks we have to sort of balance.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I guess what Dr.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk perhaps would say, if you allow me to channel him, is maybe that freedom and tradition, liberty and virtue, these are all consequences of good order.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we have been fortunate enough as Americans to inherit a good order.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, it's of the utmost importance that we preserve that order and understand it as its founders understood it.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're just over two months beyond the semi-quincentennial celebrations of July 4th.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: How'd we do?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think we uh adequately celebrated them?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: I've had three other guests on this year who have written books on the Declaration of Independence, including Brad Burser.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think yours is a great book because it really gives good context to that moment and uh kind of fills in a lot that might be missing in a book that's strictly about the Declaration.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: But what ideas from our founding do you think we need to reclaim today or bring back into our culture that might have disappeared?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was pleasantly surprised by how many Americans really committed to celebrating the semiquincentennial.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that shows that the American people still love this country and still love the principles it represents.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think chief among those principles that we have to preserve is, of course, liberty.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're in a moment right now where there's a kind of populism of the right and left.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Left that doubts the value of liberty, that doubts whether human beings can actually live free.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: That frightens me a little bit.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think at the same time, the obvious love of the founding that Americans have and demonstrated this summer, I think that's a great rebuke of that kind of populism, actually.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the other thing I think that goes along with that liberty is a sense of limits.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of the problems with populism, socialism, any kind of central planning is this idea that we can go over and beyond our limits, that that limits aren't important to us anymore.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what Dr.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk would remind us is the founders were fully convinced that human nature is a limited thing.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, original sin is a real problem that the founders wrestled with.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: The folly of central planning is something that they wrestled with in their own way.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I think remembering those limits that the Constitution respects, I think that's another important lesson we can take away from the American founding today.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, your firm is Pipe Creek Consulting.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you take that name from the farm that Whitaker Chambers owned and the family still owns in Maryland.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me about your interest in Chambers and why you adopted that name for your firm.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Chambers, of course, was a contemporary of Dr.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk's.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: He was a big advocate of the conservative mind.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: When it was first published, helped get Time magazine to review it very, very favorably.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: He called it one of the uh the most consequential books of the decade, which I think has turned out to be an accurate prophecy.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um Chambers was uh an ex-communist.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: He uh worked for the Soviet underground for many years.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then during the outbreak of World War II, he sort of realized the evils of Soviet communism and broke with them at great personal cost, uh, turned in former and sort of exposed just how deep the Soviet conspiracy and American government got.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and he became one of the, with Dr.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk, one of the founders of the conservative movement.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: I first read his memoir, Witness, when I was in college.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it came out um in 1952, just a year before the conservative mind was released.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Witness is one of the most beautiful pieces of American writing I've ever read.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: The profundity of his spiritual reflections is unmatched by any other memoir I've read.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Chambers understood the stakes of the moment that he was in.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: He understood the problems of centralizing government, and he understood the danger posed by the Soviet regime abroad.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so he really was trying to rally the American people around a conservative vision of the future, like Dr.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I named my firm Pipe Creek Consulting uh to sort of honor Whitaker Chambers and everything that he sacrificed for the country and everything he did to found the conservative movement.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need a lot more of the spirit of Whitaker Chambers and Russell Kirk today.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm hoping that a young generation of conservatives, especially those who have gone through TFAS programming, uh, like the Public Policy Fellowship, might learn some of these lessons that Kirk and Chambers and others were trying to teach them.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: How was that fellowship helpful to you, Michael?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: It reconnected me with the Kirk Center.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: It it sort of re-engaged my interest in these conservative writers of the 1950s and the Cold War.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it introduced me to a broader intellectual community where I've been able to talk about some of these ideas: conservatism, fusionism, how should we think about the founding today?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: And really since then, TFAS has become one of my real intellectual homes.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm very, very grateful for everything TFAS has done for me.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: You have another intellectual home, uh Law and Liberty, uh associate editor there.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, why don't you just say something about that?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Law and Liberty is an online magazine published by the Liberty Fund, which is a nonprofit educational organization in Indianapolis.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: We cover politics, culture, the history of political thought, economics, law, a little bit of everything.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: We publish two essays a day.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you can uh uh find more at lawliberty.org.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's remarkable the productive nature of the people there that you are every day.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm greeted by your email with interesting essays.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: So congratulations.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on to talk about your book, Russell Kirk on America.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: I highly recommend it.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's must-reading for people who really want to understand our founding, understand a great intellectual of the conservative movement.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for putting it together.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Last question was there a essay that didn't make the cut?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Was the last one you would have liked to have in there on someone or some subject?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I was collecting essays for this book, I obviously was focused on Kirk's writings on American figures.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Edmund Burke is a figure that was really important to Dr.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: And to the founding.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, he's an Anglo-Irish statesman.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was in Parliament during the American Revolution, an advocate in in some ways of the American Revolution.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Dr.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Kirk really emphasizes his contributions, intellectual contributions to the American Founding.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's mentioned throughout, and I think this is one of Kirk's great contributions to scholarship, is he he shows just how similar Burke's views were to the mainstream of the American Founding.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: If I have to pick a it would be a chapter on Edmund Burke, although I don't quite know how I would fit that in.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you very much, Michael.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Michael Lucese, author of Russell Kirk on America.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Roger.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.