For those who watch contemporary youth on the right with dismay — the interest in organizations that simply stoke the fires of partisan vitriol, the gravitational pull of unserious political figures — last Tuesday night at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., could soothe fears. Several hundred guests attended an event held by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and sponsored by, among other organizations, the National Review Institute in celebration of the 70th anniversary of Kirk’s seminal work The Conservative Mind. Notably, a significant swath of the audience was quite young.
“Young people today increasingly see liberalism as hollow; they find themselves yearning for permanent things and worthy objects of devotion,” Baylor University political-science Ph.D. student Shane Leary, who delivered Tuesday night’s invocation, told National Review. “While post-liberal fanfare may offer some immediate reactionary satisfaction, Kirk offers far richer threads from the Western tradition which run through the American founding.”
Those threads of which Leary spoke featured prominently in the night’s address from former vice president Mike Pence, whose speech was unplanned and whose appearance was a surprise even to the event’s organizers. But the evening’s main event was a panel of young people: Elayne Allen, political-theory graduate student at the University of Notre Dame; Christina Lambert, a professor of English at Hillsdale College; Michael Lucchese of Pipe Creek Consulting; and John Wood Jr., national ambassador for the Braver Angels organization, which focuses on political depolarization.
Those featured on the panel discussed not how to harness popular discontent to serve political purposes or the merits and drawbacks of certain policies but greater, more significant concepts. Allen spoke about Catholic saint John Henry Newman — whom Kirk, as she pointed out, described as “the master of political conservatism in the Victorian age” — and his study of the development of ideas. Lambert quoted T. S. Eliot and impressed upon the audience the “call to be honest about our pasts and hopefully and humbly continue good work in our present.” And Lucchese in his prepared remarks emphasized Kirk’s “politics of prudence” — the balance between conservatism and innovation, the role of the statesman who puts the good of the nation over factional interests. These are not, of course, concepts that one would commonly associate with young people. All the better, said Samuel Goldman, executive director of the John L. Loeb Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values program at George Washington University, who was in attendance Tuesday.
“I would like to think that it reflects an interest in not only a more politically and morally substantive conservatism, but also in a more elevated form of expression and conversation,” Goldman told NR. “And I think one of Kirk’s great achievements, whether one agrees with his specific views on one issue or another, is his accomplishment as a genuine literary man who was able to articulate and express a sensibility through his work, and not only to make the case for specific political conclusions.”
Goldman said the prevalence of young conservatives in the audience is a sign of hope for the movement’s — and the country’s — future.
“I was surprised and pleased to see so many young people taking an interest in one of the pioneers of modern American conservatism,” he said. “I sometimes feel as if our collective memory has receded to about 15 minutes, possibly as a consequence of social media, and as a result, it often seems as if we are having the same arguments again and again. One way to make our disagreements more valuable is to return to some of their sources, and Kirk is prominent among them.”
Despite the very real concerns about social-media outrage and the type of politics it produces, and the fears over young people lacking any interest in intellectual history and deeper discussion of the roots of our society, it appears, at least in some corners, that the kids are all right.