He was once credited as the leading figure of the “Conservative Intellectual Movement” (to borrow George Nash’s phrase) but today Conservatism Inc. wants to keep Russell Kirk in obscurity. Luckily,Bradley Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Professor of History at Hillsdale College, has written what may be the definitive Kirk biography Russell Kirk: American Conservative. It will hopefully have the valuable effect of showing how what masquerades as “American conservatism” has almost nothing to do with the vision or values of the man who once defined it.

Birzer’s impressive accomplishment is especially noteworthy because there’s been no lack of Kirk biographies. Two such works, one by my late colleague H. Wesley McDonald and the other by Gerald Russello, were published by University of Missouri Press with my heartfelt recommendations. But neither book shows the breadth and exhaustiveness of Birzer’s Herculean research.

Clearly the author was aiming at being thorough. He covers just about everything his subject published and left behind in his correspondence over a fifty year period. Unlike the commendable works of McDonald and Russello, Birzer is not offering an engaging picture of Kirk, viewed from a particular angle. He is telling us everything that one might care to know about a leading figure of the post-World War Two “Conservative Intellectual Movement”.

But aside from his obvious appreciation of Kirk as a mentor, Birzer may have undertaken this labor of love to rescue his subject from the oblivion to which Conservatism Inc. has consigned him. After the publication of The Conservative Mind in 1953, Kirk was considered the leading thinker of the American Right. Today, a widely-consulted list of the one hundred most influential conservative books by Goodreads doesn’t even bother to mention Kirk’s once-widely praised books The Conservative Mindand The Roots of American Order. Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism places fifth on the same list.

There’s also been an increasing trend of publications such as National Reviewpromoting some of Kirk’s intellectual opponents, such as the late Harry Jaffa, into conservative icons [Harry Jaffa, RIP, by Richard Brookhiser, National Review,January 12, 2015]. Jaffa stressed “equality as a conservative principle” and viciously disparaged Kirk whenever the occasion presented itself. In his work, Birzer quotes Jaffa-disciple and Reagan biographer Steven Hayward, who extolls Reagan for having saved “conservatism” from a fate worse than death—that is, from “having gone in the direction of Russell Kirk, toward a Burkean tradition-oriented conservatism.” [The Vindication of Harry Jaffa, PowerLineBlog, July 4, 2011]

Birzer is understandably upset by this, and by Jaffa’s relentless invective against Kirk as someone who had been “rabid in his denigration and disparagement of the Declaration of Independence and of the principle of human equality.” But Kirk’s critics are writing generally as defenders of the present version of “liberal democracy.” Meanwhile, they attribute a “counterrevolutionary” impetus to a political holding action that barely even delayed the assault of radical egalitarianism. The truth is Russell Kirk became a convenient punching bag for the Establishment, and men like Jaffa simply swung away.

As Birzer surely recognizes, Kirk was never in tune with American political realities. His “gothic imagination” and his fondness for English romantic critics of the Industrial Revolution never fit in with what passed for the American Right, especially in political and journalistic circles. Kirk’s gifts, like those of his friend Flannery O’Connor, were literary. On this point I agree entirely with my longtime adversary David Frum, who depicted Kirk as an aesthetic conservative who left behind an arresting literary vision. Kirk offered us “a vivid and poetic image—not a program, an image” of what a good society would look like. [The legacy of Russell Kirk, New Criterion, 1994]

Kirk’s version didn’t fit with the Beltway. Kirk’s vision was premodern and aligned with early nineteenth-century classical conservatism. Kirk praised its defense of social hierarchy, its stress on the sacramental and supernatural elements of human experience, and Kirk’s revulsion for all efforts at homogenizing human societies. There was nothing in this vision that could possibly appeal to the present Republican establishment or what calls itself mendaciously the conservative movement. I speak as Kirk’s personal friend—Birzer presents me as his subject’s political ally in the Sisyphean task of opposing the (probably inevitable) neoconservative takeover of Conservatism Inc.

Jack Kerwick, who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Temple University and teaches at various colleges in the Philadelphia area, is a talented polemicist as well as learned academic. For those who want to sample the unleashed Jack Kerwick, I recommend his recent anthology The American Offensive, available in Kindle or paperback.

Jack is a commentator on multiple websites, and (unlike myself) is allowed to post on the GOP Establishment forum Townhall.com. As I read over his pieces there, I sometimes gape in disbelief. Jack is one of the few commentators on Townhall who pushes the anti-PC envelope. (Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter do too, but both of these celebrities are far better connected than Jack—and no doubt harder to get rid of).

Not surprisingly, not all of Jack’s pieces are accepted by Townhall or by the neoconservative FrontpageMag, which is also one of his outlets. Those of his commentaries that seem (to use his term) “too insensitive” for Conservatism, Inc. go on to his BeliefNet page, and from there at least some of them have found their way into The American Offensive.

Jack covers lots of topics, including theology (he is a traditional, practicing Catholic); the growing epidemic of PC on American campuses; and the “reality” of race. Jack rarely discusses the media, the two institutionalized parties and his fellow academics without going for the jugular. He is tough-as-nails on the anti-white rage of “civil rights spokespersons” (What else would one expect from a white Catholic ethnic from Trenton, N.J.?). But reserves his harshest invective for whites who excuse blacks for their astronomic crime rates.

One truly fascinating commentary is his analysis of “blackism” as the recognizable worldview of our president. In contrast to the representatives of Conservatism, Inc., Jack does not view Obama as first and foremost a “socialist” without a foreign policy. Rather he sees him as a blackist who “affirms an explicitly—and thoroughly—racial conception of history.” Bam’s socialism does not drive his ideology.

As a “proponent of blackism,” Obama embraces socialism, because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that it will benefit his race. Blackists further believe, Kerwick says, that

…white racism is endemic…Whatever gains black Americans and formerly colonized peoples of color in other parts of the world have made over the decades, white racism remains as formidable, and destructive, a force as it has ever been.

Blackism also requires from “all of its adherents in good standing” that they “express some measure of indignation or rage regarding the historical injustice suffered by blacks and the persistent omnipresence of—what else?—white racism.” Blackists “unabashedly heed the call for ‘social’ or ‘racial justice’” for this means, in effect that ”a robust and activist government…will possess the power necessary to compensate blacks for the past harms that had been visited upon them by white racism.”

Finally in what Jack describes as “the Cliff’s Note” of blackist ideology, obviously absorbed by President Obama and his black supporters, “is the idea of ‘racial authenticity.’ Racial authenticity can be achieved, it promises, by way of the very simple act of affirming blackism!”

Jack quotes Malcolm X on the cultural implications of blackism, particularly the exhibition of revulsion for Christianity as the religion of white colonists and the association of America’s founding with anti-black racism. In the words of Malcolm X, blacks “didn’t land on Plymouth Rock” but “Plymouth Rock landed” on blacks.

Jack acknowledges that Obama, who in the last election won 38% of the white vote, has had to cloak his blackism. But he cites Obama’s speeches and comments to show that the same ideology and resentments that were found in Malcolm X periodically surface in the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Jack argues that it’s perfectly compatible with “blackism” that Obama, in his National Prayer Breakfast reminder of Christian iniquities in what was supposed to be a criticism of ISIS violence, turned his remarks in a blackist direction: “In one and the same breath he speaks of both a white segregationist’s refusal to associate with blacks and an Islamic fanatic’s refusal to grant mercy to a person he cages and eventually burns to death.”

It is not just Obama’s “historical illiteracy” and “moral idiocy” that account for these rhetorical eccentricities. There is an anti-white, anti-Western ideology that drives it. Thus when “he talks of ‘we’ in implying moral parity between Islamic violence and the violence perpetrated by Christians in the past,” “what he is really saying is that you—all of you white Christians—must not shed any of that white guilt that’s paid off so well for the Barack Obamas of the world.”

Donald Trump has been dominating American news ever since he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination six months ago. Trump is known to be a deeply divisive figure, who in a two-way race with his likely Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, would lose the distaff vote by about seventeen percent. He has also emerged as the major domestic villain of the establishment Republican-neoconservative press. In fact no one has rattled our political-journalistic establishment as often as has “the Donald,” as this billionaire real estate mogul refers to himself and is referred to by his numerous fans. From his speeches about sending back our 11 million plus illegal immigrants (instead of amnestying them) to their homelands, mostly south of our border, to his persistent announcement “I’m not politically correct,” “the Donald” is everything that our establishment is not. He revels in needling the Left, takes no prisoners, and projects a macho image that reminds one of Putin (with whom he shares a mutual admiration society.)

There’s already been very loud talk from such establishmentarians as George Will and Bill Kristol and throughout the GOP media empire (paid for mostly by Rupert Murdoch) that it may be necessary to create a new Republican Party that would reflect the “moderate” views of past ( that is, glaringly unsuccessful) presidential nominees such as Mitt Romney and John McCain. The establishment favorites this year, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, have not done well against Trump according to the pre-primary election polls, and Bush may soon drop out for want of popular interest as someone whom Trump has publicly ridiculed as having “low energy.” The state Republican committees have been busily working against an eventual Trump victory by changing rules for who gets to vote in their primaries. Since Trump enjoys a backing that goes beyond his technical party affiliation, state committees want to allow only registered party members to vote for the Republican nominee.

One might easily suppose that establishment donors and more surreptitiously, neoconservative pundits would try to cut a deal with the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who would be more congenial for this power elite than Trump. The establishment GOP, to whatever extent it has social views, holds mostly the same ones as a left-leaning Tory like David Cameron in England. They hope to court the gay and feminist perspectives; they express “liberal” views on all immigration-related issues, except for allowing especially dangerous-looking Muslims to enter the country; and they call for getting tough with “the Russian thug” and standing up “for human rights” throughout the world by “projecting American strength.” An effusive endorsement of the Israeli Right is de rigueur among establishment Republicans. And this has less to do with courting Jewish voters (who vote overwhelmingly left) than as it does with the Republican Party’s donor base. Establishment Republican “think tanks” and politicians like Marco Rubio are awash in funds from wealthy Zionists, like the Las Vegas casino owners Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn. Needless to say, Boeing, Haliburton and other producers of military hardware have not stinted in their support of the GOP establishment.

It is not that Hillary would feel especially beholden to neoconservative deal-makers if they helped get her elected. But their positions generally mesh well, if we discount the posturing that establishment Republican candidates engage in when they’re trying to appeal to the Evangelical vote. In all probability, it would make no difference to most of this establishment which party they linked up with, providing their foreign policy concerns and need for sinecures were met. Even the Obama administration has not been totally impenetrable to neoconservative aspirations, and one of their leading publicists Robert Kagan has seen his wife Victoria Nuland rise to high position as a foreign policy adviser in the present administration. Trump, by contrast, scares the bejesus out of the neoconservatives, as one immediately discovers from reading such organs of theirs as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.

The reason for this has far less to do with Trump’s actual positions, which are often nebulous, than with the difficulty that the neoconservatives and the GOP establishment would have in managing him as a candidate or as president. Trump is the opposite of the amiable dolt who occupied the White House before Obama, and whom advisers talked into launching a “preventive war” against Iraq. Trump cannot be scripted. He pays for his campaign out of his considerable fortune and makes fun of his opponents “for belonging to other people.” He also sounds insufficiently belligerent about “leading from the front,” which is a favorite slogan of Rubio and Jeb. Although Trump has promised to “wipe out ISIS,” and although his pro-Jewish sentiments cannot be questioned (his daughter is married to an Orthodox Jew), he speaks about “negotiating” with rather than confronting Putin. The Republican establishment candidates want nothing less than a showdown with the Russian government, which they tell their constituents is an extension of the Soviet tyranny or else a repressive nationalist regime that persecutes homosexuals.

The last reason on Earth that the Republican establishment and the neoconservatives are resisting Trump is the one they often give: “he’s not a real conservative.” This charge does have, on its face, some substance, since Trump as late as 2008 was a Hillary Clinton supporter and until recently, fit in easily with GOP establishment donors. His politics were very much the same as those of the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, who subsidizes most of the leading neoconservative PR organs (including the Jerusalem Post). Like Murdoch, who has now turned against Trump as a political nuisance, “the Donald” used to be liberal on most social issues, including immigration, as well as friendly toward Israel. His movement toward the right has been a recent occurrence, and when Trump tells his Evangelical audiences about his conversion from being pro- to anti-abortion or his rediscovery of his Presbyterian identity, one is justified in questioning his sincerity. But those who accuse him of political hypocrisy while claiming to be on the right, like Jonah Goldberg at National Review have happily acclaimed the legalization of gay marriage and still endorse amnesty for illegals. Moreover, the Christian traditionalists in the Republican presidential race, like Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, have not been the favorites of those accusing Trump of being a faux conservatives. Although Cruz has been in striking distance of Trump, the neoconservatives and establishment Republicans have gone after him as well. He’s been denounced by them as a religious extremist (Cruz has openly opposed gay marriage), most conspicuously in a WSJ editorial by Max Boot.

Recent troubles at Yale, Missouri, and other campuses have made me think about how the academic culture has changed – much for the worse I believe. But a former colleague (who recently passed) used to tell me how much better the academic world seemed to him now than when he was a graduate student circa 1970.

My friend, as he explained, enjoyed strolling to class from his house a few blocks away and was glad there were no foul-smelling protestors to heckle him as he stepped on campus. Unfortunately, he was comparing unlike things, large state universities during the height of the Vietnam War and the small college in the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside where we taught.

A better comparison would have been between our place of employment in the 1960s and the same institution fifty years later.

Back then we were dealing with a distinctly religious college, with strict dress and behavioral codes, prohibitions against bringing alcohol on to campus, and required prayer sessions. Now the same college barely mentions Christmas (as opposed to Kwanza and Black History Month), has mixed dorms with lots of sexual mingling (in all senses), and features diversity as its highest value.

In the 1960s, students across the country were demonstrating or rioting against the Vietnam War and occupying campus buildings to dramatize their antiwar fervor. Early this November, the president of the University of Missouri had to resign after black students and their supporters (including members of the football team) demanded his immediate resignation. His administration was accused of not having investigated energetically enough alleged racial slurs against blacks.

Needless to say, slurs against whites coming from a Black Studies department or against white men coming from a Women’s Studies department would not have made news or occasioned any protest . Those engaging in such differently viewed slurs would be treated as honest scholars calling attention to “social injustice.”

To see how things have changed in the academic world, consider Professor Leonard Jeffries. He chaired the Department of African-American Studies for eons at City University of New York, where he presented the white race as intrinsically inferior “ice men” in relation to spiritually superior black “sun people.” No one, not even Jews who were bothered by Jeffries’s anti-Semitic effusions, demanded that the university chancellor must resign because a handsomely paid faculty member denigrated whites.

These days , officially designated victims on American campuses don’t hold back from venting their anger at “white-bread” Americans. We find racism “institutionalized” as at the University of Delaware, which requires all residence hall students to acknowledge that “all whites are racist” and to attend “therapeutic” classes aimed at curing them of their inborn collective defect.

Black and Latino students are not obliged to attend similar therapy sessions since, as privileged victims, it would be impossible for them to be “racists.” To my knowledge, white parents have not complained about this unequal treatment. How passive the supposed victimizers have become in the face of their own degradation.

Universities today are far less tolerant than they were at the height of the antiwar protest movement. I noticed this lessening of academic freedom and the eroding belief in the value of honest debate during my own academic career.

Allow me to suggest two reasons why this has happened.

First, in the 1960s students and faculty strongly opposed the Vietnam War. Many were soft on communist totalitarianism, but these positions did not seep into everything they said and wrote. Compartmentalization was still possible. I encountered many students and even professors who were frantic antiwar protestors and even fans of the Vietcong but who were still capable of responding in a non-ideological fashion to political theory, artistic movements and historical events.

I had colleagues who opposed the war but described themselves as sympathetic to monarchy. I even knew one “comsymp” (that’s what I called such people back then) who rooted for the Communists everywhere but had written a dissertation favorable to James I in his battles with Puritan parliamentarians.

Moreover, the protesters were addressing the bigness and impersonal nature of universities. Those were and are genuine problems. Traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet wrote books that engaged many of the same grievances as those the students highlighted. Such complaints were far more thoughtful than such current academic concerns as “microaggressions.”

As a young professor, I noticed that my students and colleagues were sometimes pointing to real issues. Mega-universities processing students in return for rising tuitions and a seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia were serious issues. They didn’t simply bully people into going along with whatever notions came into their heads.

What we hear these days from campus feminists and Social Justice Warrior types are almost always manufactured grievances or pure hoaxes, often pushed by administrators trying to justify the presence of diversity deans and minority consciousness-raisers on their staff. I still recall the manufactured incident of a noose suddenly appearing on the door of an education professor at Columbia in October 2007, who was about to be let go because of plagiarism. Protests were mounted on campus and the apparently outraged prof brought a suit for $200 million. It was soon discovered this outrage was committed by friends of the aggrieved party, but one had to search hard in the New York Times for this embarrassing revelation. I remember speaking to a colleague at the time who indicated that even if this specific incident had not occurred, it was typical of the institutionalized racism and sexism that are rampant on our campuses.

Around the time of my retirement, my college vibrated with excitement, and even a thinly disguised ecstasy, when a gay student discovered that someone had scrawled the word “fag” on his dorm door. The student had been in everyone’s face playing up his lifestyle and alienated even politically sympathetic classmates.

Still, it was not clear whether a fellow-student had been responsible for the act or whether it had been an outside job. No matter! We had a case of spine-tingling insensitivity without having to invent one, the way some other “institutions of higher learning” have done. Sensitivity classes were organized, and the failure to reveal the “full extent” of the incident, according to some on the faculty, indicated that we had become morally callous.

Around the same time it was reported that someone had scrawled unkind comments on the dorm door of a black student. This was an added reason for required sensitivity training for everyone, although it turned out that the scribbling had been done by someone outside the college sneaking into the dorms.

Second, victimology hysteria together with the loss of academic dignity and intellectual freedom are the results of changes undergone by the Left since the 1960s.

When I started my professorial career, most leftists whom I encountered identified themselves as Marxists. They railed against large corporations and the military-industrial complex and attributed the war in Vietnam to a late form of capitalism. Although I found such thinking to be simplistic, it did follow an internal logic; and one could respond to an opponent’s assertions by showing they were empirically false.

Just as I was beginning to despair that Goucher College’s most famous graduate among contemporary historians Jonah Goldberg had lost his talent for offering revelations about the past, Jonah surprised me yesterday with a learned discourse on the Middle Ages as a prolonged period of primitive barbarism. For those who may have forgotten this nugget of wisdom, Jonah informed us in 2001 that Palestine “was largely empty” when settlers arrived there from Eastern Europe to create a Jewish state. In fact unlike the Americans who killed numerous Indians, Jewish settlers in Palestine did not have to engage in atrocities when they occupied a demographic vacuum. I also learned from Jonah that the French counterrevolutionary Catholic Joseph de Maistre was not a conservative but a raving leftist because he did not believe in universal human rights. Goldberg even compares the supposedly leftist Maistre to today’s liberals who want to assign jobs and admit applicants to elite universities on the basis of quotas. Like these liberals, Maistre stressed the distinctness of peoples and the value of different national traditions, which, we are told, proves his leftist credentials. I also took away from Goldberg’s best-selling study Liberal Fascism that architects of the present Democratic Party (but of course never Republican advocates of the welfare state) affirmed the same ideology as did European fascists, and even German Nazis. Although I did research on fascism for decades, I never suspected its incestuous connection to the Democratic Party until Goldberg, a Republican publicist, pointed this out.

But now Goldberg has furnished new historical insight in a hymn to Premier Netanyahu, on the occasion of the Israeli premier receiving the Irving Kristol Prize from AEI. Apropos of Netanyahu’s observation that “the core of the conflict in the Middle East is the battle between modernity and early primitive medievalism,” Goldberg reveals to us the true character of the medieval world. It seems that the Middle Ages represented the polar opposite of everything that Goldberg believes we should prize: “modernity, pluralism, secularism, democracy and, in many cases, even science.” So abhorrent does Goldberg find the Middle Ages that he believes that “medievalism,” more than “terrorism” or even “Islamism” describes the enemy we now face. In his considered judgment, ”primitive medievalism highlights the real divide not just between modern Westerners and the barbarians but between modern Muslims and the barbarians.”

Given Goldberg’s exalted position as a Fox-news Allstar and a bestselling author on fascism, it may be necessary to defer to him in his recognition that the Middle Ages was the enemy of civilization and science. Perhaps I should throw away the misleading history books that I read as a graduate student, say Herbert Butterfield’s study of the medieval and early modern origins of science, or J.R. Strayer’s study of the medieval creation of the modern state, not to mention all the silly texts I once pored over about medieval universities, philosophy, theology, economics, poetry, architecture and music. Nor should I believe what I was told about the Gothic cathedrals and inner cities in Europe being constructed during the Middle Ages, which I now know was a period of unmitigated barbarism. My entire view of European civilization must be changed in order to be in line with Goldberg’s pronouncements about the intellectual vacuousness and savagery of the Middle Ages.

As evidence of his subtle, dexterous mind, Goldberg qualifies two of his judgments in what starts out as a tribute to Netanyahu and as a critical assault on the medieval foundations of our civilization. Goldberg notes that “I would rather live under medieval Christians than under the Islamic State, but that’s beside the point.” Although Goldberg does not give any reasons for this preference, it should be taken seriously because of the authority of the one expressing it. After all, not everyone has been given the honor of appearing regularly on Fox-news as an expert on everything. Goldberg also stresses that while he agrees with “the progressive ideology that modernity is preferable to the customs of the past,” “as a conservative” he thinks “progressives often go too far,” but are undoubtedly right on the “big picture.” Since Goldberg is listed on Wikipedia as “a conservative syndicated columnist,” it may be unfair on my part to question his ascribed world-view. Still I’ve never found anything Goldberg says that would qualify as notably “conservative, save for his ritualistic defenses of the GOP and his opposition to increases in the national debt, especially when the Democrats are in charge.

Sarcasm aside, I’m not sure that Goldberg understands the “Whiggish idea that modernity is preferable to what people believed in the bad old days, although he signs on to this notion. Whigs, by which is meant nineteenth-century liberals, would not have believed what Goldberg, as I would gather from his columns, associates with “modernity,” e.g., gay marriage, feminism, and the march toward social equality. As Hebert Butterfield stresses in his famous critique of the “Whig interpretation of history,” Whig historian and politicians praised the establishment of “religious tolerance.” But they were not interested in establishing a secular mass democracy founded on “human rights.” Nineteenth-century Whigs had no problem with restricting the suffrage to tax-paying male property owners and held decidedly traditional views on marriage. What they opposed were the remnants of serfdom and royal monopolies, not those inequalities resulting from acquired or inherited wealth or higher and lower social positions. What is wrong with Goldberg’s terminology is its ridiculous anachronism. It is hard to see how the current Cultural Marxist agenda, much of which Goldberg and other authorized “conservatives” accept, has anything to do with what Whigs in the mid-nineteenth century wanted to advance. (The intermittent feminist and quasi-social democrat J.S. Mill was not a Whig but a radical democrat. The opponent of universal suffrage, Walter Bagehot, was indeed a self-described liberal or Whig.) Although this may be too much to request of a leading “conservative” intellectual, perhaps one day Goldberg may be persuaded to learn some history. But I wouldn’t hold my breath until that happens.