May

18

Tom Woods Asks - Do Conservatives Hate Their Own Founder?

Filed Under Conservative, Republican Party, Ron Paul, Russell Kirk, Thomas Woods | Leave a Comment

“Toward the end of his life, Russell Kirk, one of the great founders of American conservatism, became contemptuous of Republican militarism. Didn’t know that? Neither do most readers of National Review, for which Kirk wrote for so many years.

Kirk’s opposition to relentless war makes him a “liberal” in NR’s lexicon. Now it would be kind of hard to describe the key founder of modern American conservatism as a liberal, harder even than NR’s task of making the obviously corrupt (and personally sleazy) former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani seem like something we should want in a U.S. president. So the whole Kirk problem is simply passed over in silence.

Young conservatives, take note: what you are about to encounter is the voice of the real thing, whose opinions are worth more than those of a million talk-show ignoramuses put together. That these views would never, ever get published in the typical “conservative” magazine today tells you all you need to know about the state of the “conservative movement”: so remote is it from the genuine article that Kirk himself would be unwelcome.”

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