With the campaign run by John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008, the world saw what conservatism had become—and the sight was not pretty. McCain’s decision to reject the positions on immigration that once gave him the reputation of a maverick, Palin’s memorization and delivery of talking points supplied to her by the McCain camp, the absurd adoption of Joe the Plumber as a wise man, all showed the extent to which conservatism had become little more than catechism. Name any issue—guns are good, tax cuts are essential, our enemies are evil—and the candidates mouthed all the expected platitudes. Nothing was original, nothing daring, nothing unexpected. Conservatism, the message was clear, knows what it believes and has stopped thinking.

Was conservatism always like this? Surely there must have been a golden age in the past when right-wing ideas attracted great minds curious to explore the paradoxes of human existence. The brilliant Edmund Burke, after all, was a conservative. So were leading American politicians such as John Adams and John C. Calhoun. Major twentieth-century poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound held right-wing views, and we still admire them for their art, although not their anti-Semitism. If we go far enough back into the past, conservatives, or so one hopes, can offer up ideas more nuanced than the platitudes of Palin.

One person conservatives frequently cite as they consider the major thinkers produced by their tradition is Russell Kirk (1918–94), a Michigan–born-and-bred thinker whose rejection of modern life’s seductions—cars, television, cities, and, toward the end of his life, computers were things he avoided—contributed to his reputation as an against-the-grain critic filled with homespun sincerity. A writer of gothic fiction, an expositor of Burke, and, most importantly, the author of the classic 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Kirk has been undergoing something of a rediscovery in recent years as his writings are reprinted and as conservative foundations promote his work and conservative colleges teach them. Ronald Reagan called him one of his favorite philosophers. Kirk may not be as famous as William F. Buckley Jr., but when young conservatives gathered at a retreat in Santa Barbara in the summer of 2006, Kirk was on the lips of all.

It is certainly true that Kirk was comfortable discussing thinkers—George Gissing, Orestes Brownson, Irving Babbitt, George Santayana, Paul Elmer Moore—unknown, it is safe to say, to Sarah Palin. But the distance between him and today’s right-wing attack dogs such as Ann Coulter, no matter how much Kirk himself disdained the media, is not all that great. For Kirk too was a catechistical writer. His was the kind of conservatism that knew all the answers and then searched for the questions capable of best reiterating them.

From the very first sentence of The Conservative Mind, which wrongly quotes John Stuart Mill, Kirk’s canonical book is marked by his insistence that liberalism lacks what he called “the higher imagination.” The trouble with liberals, Kirk argued, is that they insist on facts, believe in the efficacy of reason, and promote something they call happiness. Conservatives know better. They worship the glory of God, distrust progress, question democracy, and appreciate the need for order. Kirk’s dismissal of John Dewey perfectly sums up why he preferred conservatives over liberals: “Veneration was dead in Dewey’s universe; indiscriminate emancipation was cock of the walk. This was the imperialistic craving of America and the twentieth century given a philosophical mask. Babbitt, More, and Santayana, in their several ways, defied this apotheosis of appetite.”

Throughout his career, Kirk searched for what he called “permanent things,” rocks of stability onto which the enlightened can fasten themselves as whirlwinds of change blow about them. Three such objects of stability in particular attracted him: the American constitution, religion, and the free market. It is, alas, with the permanent things that Kirk became a man of ideology rather than a man of ideas; his treatments of all three are marked by a failure to explore the paradoxes of any of them.

The American constitution not only allowed slavery to continue but strengthened it through the so-called “three-fifths clause,” which gave the states in which slavery was legal disproportionate representation in Washington. Slavery was Russell Kirk’s single most glaring blind spot; in his chapter dealing with John C. Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke in The Conservative Mind, Kirk waxes indignant at Northern industrialization and the imperial designs of Reconstruction without shedding a single tear about people who, because of their race, were owned lock, stock, and barrel by others. But this is where Kirk’s simpleminded conservatism had to lead him. To view the Constitution as a permanent thing is to warn against tampering with its provisions. But if the Constitution perpetuates something that is evil by its very nature, how can any moral person view it as permanent? Not all permanent things are good things, but Kirk, unlike his hero Edmund Burke (who supported the American Revolution while condemning the French), never gives us a guide to how to distinguish one from the other.

As it happens the same Constitution that permitted slavery also, if we include the Bill of Rights, separated church and state, something of a problem for a writer who insists on adherence to religion as providing the moral glue necessary for the exercise of political authority. “Without a knowledge of fear,” Kirk once wrote, “we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition.” This is why citizens of a democracy need to fear God; otherwise, they will fall into hedonistic anarchy.

Yet it is not God in general that instills fear but the specific Gods associated with separate and distinct religions. Kirk’s is the Christian God. (Kirk was a convert to Roman Catholicism). As a personal matter, that is his business. But because the United States has no established religion, the only way fear of God can work in this country is if everyone fears their own; it violates our Constitution to set up the one God we all must fear in common. Does a society in which every single individual chooses the God they will fear, or chooses no God at all to fear, simply mimic the same anarchy as a society that no longer fears God at all? A serious conservative would answer such a question. Kirk just asserts the need for God in a religiously pluralistic society and leaves the matter at that.

What, finally, are we to do about that engine of impermanence called the free market? To his credit, Kirk understood that libertarians—whose commitments to the free market are inflexible—were not conservatives; he once described them as “humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull.” One might think, then, that Kirk would find himself, like the nineteenth-century defenders of the South he so admired, firmly in the anticapitalist camp. But one would be wrong. During the century that intervened between the South’s loss in the Civil War and the publication of The Conservative Mind, business interests had become part and parcel of whatever passed for conservatism in America. Kirk dealt with the potential contradiction between his respect for business and his fear of the changes that always accompany capitalist progress by ignoring the issue. Always quick to denounce Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill, he restrained his anger when discussing Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer.

There was a decidedly ugly tone to some of Kirk’s ramblings. In one of his essays he talks about his love for Little Black Sambo, a book that is to African Americans what The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is to Jews; to Kirk, the whole idea that this dreadfully stereotypical product of diseased white minds ought to be dismissed as racist is “one symptom of the growing silliness of our time.” In The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote that “A stripe luxuriant, Eastern, perhaps Semitic, runs through [Benjamin] Disraeli’s sparkling imagination, even more characteristic of the man than were his flamboyant clothes.” It is for reasons such as these that, in a 2007 review of Kirk’s writings published in the New Republic, I described his writings as like the grumblings of a drugstore crank convinced that the world had passed him by. Kirk, I concluded, had deserved the obscurity into which he had been cast.

But obscurity, it would seem, is not to be Kirk’s fate. Over the next few years we are likely to see the conservative coalition that emerged under Reagan split into its component parts. As that happens, the libertarians will still have Adam Smith and the neoconservatives Leo Strauss. Who will play the role of intellectual godfather for the traditionalists, those who believe that the whole modern world was one gigantic mistake? If they were leftist critics of modernity, they could have a host of postmodernists to choose from. But they are conservative critics of modernity instead, and the best they have, as bad as he may be, is Russell Kirk.

Alan Wolfe, author of The Future of Liberalism and many other books, is a professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. A contributing editor of the New Republic, the Wilson Quarterly, and CommonWealth Magazine, he also writes for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Washington Post. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.