Way back in the 1970’s Ronald Reagan embraced the principles developed by America’s greatest 20th century conservative thinker, Dr. Russell Kirk of Mecosta, Michigan. . Kirk was long-time fixture at Michigan state university and developed a cogent argument for American Cultural and Political Thought.

I met Dr. Russell Kirk and his wife Annette, when I taught and coached at La Lumiere School, LaPorte, Indiana. – the alma mater of Chief Justice John Roberts. A social studies teacher by the name of Tracey Elliot, now a banking officer in South Bend, was a devoted student of Dr. Kirk and made the introductions – “‘Mr. Hickey is a Daley Democrat and therefore not unfamiliar with the principles of American conservatism. “ ‘Dr. Kirk was a wonderful conversationalist and a generous humorist. Dr. Kirk’s heart and head live in the Russell Kirk Center at his home on Piety Hill.

Kirk’s genius is lost on the baggy-pants loudmouths foaming out vitriol and long-dead canards against John McCain. Though, McCain has touched a chord in the hearts of American voter, he is villainized by Limbaugh, Scarborough, Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, and their lesser lights.A brilliant guy by the name of James Joyner wrote yesterday in Beyond the Beltway

“The Conservative movement has morphed from a handful of intellectual true believers trying to shape the debate into something approaching a civil religion with loyalty tests and a clergy that has the power to excommunicate.”

Joyner does them too much credit -these goofs are akin to barn-burners and back-shooters in American culture. These screamers would do well to visit the principles demonstrated by Ronald Reagan in the 1970’s, as he embraced John McCain as a foot-soldier’ in the Reagan Revolution. The revolution turned into a reign of terror and rain of the shrill.

Here is one of the finest arguments for Conservative Principles developed by Dr. Russell Kirk.

“Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.”

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/rkc/detail/ten-conservative-principles/#six
Read it and try to live by it.

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Patrick Hickey writes occasionally for The Chicago Daily Observer.