On Three Conservative Minds by Edwin Feulner or why American conservatism is not very convincing

These are remarks by my former boss! They represent a nice, concise summary of conservative thought in America over the past 80 years or so.

"Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., is the founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation"

What distinguishes classical liberalism from conservatism or where did Ed Feulner err: 

1. He made no mention of individual liberty and responsibility/accountability
2. He made no mention of a limited and small government
3. He made no mention of federalism, the right to secede, separation of power, term limits
4. He espouses Kirk's principal no. 5 "adherence to custom, convention, and prescription" without any qualification. Unfortunately, all three are subject to voluntary and reasonable modification over time as open and free societies evolve and move on
5. Technological progress is too often derided or reviled

Where do classical liberals and conservatives agree:

1. Natural inalienable rights
2. All lives matter (born and unborn). Every life is precious
3. Constitutional law and democracy
4. Law and order. Due process
5. Freedom of speech
6. And more ...

According to Feulner, Russel Kirk was partially a conservative out of touch with  or ignorant of technological progress and the enormous opportunities it offers like a grumpy old man.

"Conservatives with at least a basic grasp of the history of our movement know that the victory of 1980—when the former governor of California was first elected president, launching the Reagan Revolution—began in an unlikely place: the ashes of defeat. And not just any defeat, but a decidedly crushing one: the election of 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson.

Yet ... conservatives can trace the triumph of the 1980s even further back. At least a decade earlier, in fact—to 1953, when three highly influential books were published: Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community, and Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind. ...
Yes, William Buckley’s seminal volley, God and Man at Yale, had come out in 1951, but it was still a relatively new work, and National Review wouldn’t debut for another two years. Derided by the intelligentsia, ignored by the media, and unsung even by its adherents, conservatism was so ill-regarded that the very notion of a “conservative mind” was considered oxymoronic. Left-liberalism, then in its post–World War II heyday, appeared to be the wave of the future. Who could challenge its seeming hegemony? ...
Strauss demonstrates that the idea of “natural right”—that there is such a thing as immutable truth, which remains true for all ages—goes back at least as far as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and it can count the United States of America among its progeny. But later political philosophers rejected the idea of natural right. ...

According to Strauss, this rejection is not only ahistorical; it’s a recipe for disaster. As he writes in Natural Right and History, the relativism it spawns “leads to nihilism”—the rejection of all moral and religious principles in the mistaken belief that life is ultimately meaningless. ...
Nisbet, however, noted the deterioration of such institutions as the family, the church, and the neighborhood had not, as many intellectuals had predicted, liberated man. Instead, it had produced alienation and despair. The simple fact is that, to quote the historian George Nash, man cannot live in “Hobbesian isolation.” As Nisbet points out, “The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the most powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.” ...

Civil society is the antidote. To live in freedom, man must break the bonds between himself and the state through a revitalization of intermediate associations, such as the family, the church, and the neighborhood, the “little platoons” of life about which [Edmund] Burke spoke so eloquently. ...

Speaking of Kirk, although his best-known book is not a work of enchantment, it certainly broke the spell under which American conservatism had languished for more than one hundred years. The publication of Kirk’s landmark study, hailed by Whittaker Chambers as one of the most important books of the twentieth century, changed all that. Kirk showed conclusively that conservatism had an illustrious lineage, and he proved that many of the finest British and American thinkers, including Burke, Coleridge, John Adams, and John Calhoun—to say nothing of luminaries such as Tocqueville, Newman, Disraeli, Santayana, and Irving Babbitt—espoused this philosophy. He also demonstrated that much of America’s success derived from her conservative principles. ...

His book was not only, as Lee Edwards asserted, “a brilliant distillation of conservative thinking over the past 150 years,” but also “a scathing indictment of every liberal nostrum, from the perfectibility of man to economic egalitarianism.”  ...

Kirk unmasked the shallow rationalism of the cynical French philosophes and unveiled the egotistical underpinnings of Rousseau’s romantic sentimentalism. He exposed the heartlessness of utilitarianism and the absurdity of its founder and disclosed the spiritual bankruptcy of materialism in all its malefic forms. ...

Kirk’s book sets forth six “canons” or principles that provided a credo for American conservatives: 

1) belief in a transcendent order, including natural law; 

2) respect for the “variety and mystery of traditional life”; 

3) recognition that civilization requires classes and orders; 

4) acknowledgment of the crucial link between freedom and private property; 

5) adherence to custom, convention, and prescription; and

6) awareness that change is not necessarily reform, and agreement that Providence plays the final role in the affairs of men.

...

A critic for all seasons, he [Kirk] denounced the automobile as “a mechanical Jacobin” and reviled television as an electronic demon. No friend of modernism, he condemned materialism and all its works, including secularism, utilitarianism, positivism, statism, progressivism, and atheism, to say nothing of “power-tipsy professor[s],” “Behemoth” universities, and “quarter-educated” collegians. 

... "

Three Conservative Minds - Intercollegiate Studies Institute