Eventually, I will get back to some of the essays I promised in late December, under the title of “Democracy—Our Word, Not Theirs.” In the second of the two essays I penned for that, I at one point shared my sense of how we might best ground the newer populist-conservative emphasis so many conservatives have adopted:
[Populist-conservatism] must also feature demands for more democratic say and democratic participation. What makes my approach unique is the way it offers a conservatism that is unabashed about its deep connection to democracy, that is, to classic republicanism.
I’ve come to belatedly realize, but with help from Peter Lawler’s last book, co-authored by Richard Reinsch II (of Law & Liberty), that Willmoore Kendall could become key to my thinking on this. Seems like he might turn out to be the bridge between Publius’s “republican” semi-Lockean political prudence and Wilson Carey McWilliams’ “democratic” uber-Aristotelian localist vision that my thinking craves. I don’t know yet because I haven’t yet done the reading—I only just ordered a few of his books today—but Reinsch recently did a fascinating interview with the writer of a new biography of Kendall, Christopher Owen, and it’s what got me really interested.
For the summary details about Kendall’s career, such as his involvement with the early National Review, I can’t do any better than the interview itself, so do check it out.
Even more recently, Reinsch penned his own essay on Kendall—it’s not as rich as the podcast interview, but is quite worthwhile, containing also some measured criticisms of recent claims to “common good” or “post-liberal” conservatism.
Kendall sounds excellent on how to interpret The Federalist Papers, worthwhile on Locke, but not above a few questionable or cheap moves here and there—such as his provocation-centered half-defense of the Athenian jury that tried Socrates, or his fulsome defense of Joseph McCarthy. Still, some of his attacks—on J.S. Mill’s absolutist free-speech assertions, on Harry Jaffa’s maxim/speech “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” and on the Anti-Federalists when they focused on states rights, seem basically on target to me. Sounds also like he was attracted to the good sides of Rousseau (these do exist!), and it is obviously a plus that late in life he became interested in the thought of both Voegelin and Strauss.
I suppose some may chide me for never having done my homework on a thinker as key to American conservatism as Kendall, but for various reasons, most “American conservative studies” tended to bore me during my first decade or so being a conservative, and have only really begun to interest me since the big shifts of 2015-2022. When I came to work with Peter Lawler on the original Postmodern Conservative group-blog back in around 2009, I understood well-enough what made its approach to conservatism distinctive, but I still had little desire to explore intra-conservative debates, unless it was a debate about how to best interpret a particular text. Any readers who know Kendall are thus invited to chime in on what his most important writings are, the better to school me.
Here’s images of a famous work by him, one collection about him, the new Owen biography, as well as of the somewhat Kendall-influenced Lawler/Reinsch book mentioned above.
Keep us posted on ur developing studies. Isn’t there a Wilmoore Kendall anthology (with an intro by WFBuckley)?