William F. Buckley Jr. reviewed the first edition of Willmoore Kendall’s The Conservative Affirmation in the April 23, 1963, issue of National Review. He had nice things to say about this collection of essays by his former professor, who had been a senior editor at the magazine since its founding some eight years before. Kendall, Buckley wrote, was “one of the most superb and original political analysts in Christendom.”

The endorsement was not total, however. Buckley’s review had a passive-aggressive quality. He praised Kendall’s “supremely elegant” writing style, but also noted its “annoying personal mannerisms.” His mentor’s conservatism was “of a very special sort,” he wrote. “Some might even say it is custom-made.” He admitted that “the satisfactions derived from reading this book are difficult to describe.” And he declared that, whether you followed Kendall’s teaching or not, “either way you have not forfeited your membership in the conservative club.” Reading Buckley’s piece today, one is not surprised that Kendall resigned from NR a few months after the article appeared.

What was it about Willmoore Kendall that made him so polarizing, so difficult, and yet so fascinating? Start with his biography. Kendall, born in Oklahoma in 1909, was a child prodigy. He became an expert in baseball, a game he never played, by reading box scores aloud to his blind father. He was a polyglot who graduated from high school when he was 13 years old. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Oklahoma when he was 18, studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford during his twenties, and, after a stint as a journalist covering the run-up to the Spanish Civil War, finished his doctorate in political science at the University of Illinois when he was 31. After working for a predecessor of the CIA during World War II, Kendall wound up at Yale, where his brilliant lectures and idiosyncratic mind gained a following, and where he met his most famous student.

Kendall did not play well with others. He fought with colleagues, broke off friendships, and was married three times. His letters to the philosophers Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin reveal a man engaged in a search for authoritative, almost paternal, guidance. His contemporaries recall that Kendall argued constantly, most of all with himself. His name conjures up stories — of the “Willmoore Kendall memorial couch” in NR’s first office, of Yale buying out his tenure, of intellectual highwire acts that ended in drunken antics. Not only Buckley but also Garry Wills, Saul Bellow, and, most recently, biographer Christopher H. Owen have memorialized Kendall and tried to capture his deep and restless intellect. Yet it often seems as though his wild side receives more serious attention than his ideas.

Regnery Gateway’s 60th-anniversary reissue of The Conservative Affirmation will help to right the scales. As Daniel McCarthy observes in his introduction to this edition, Kendall organized the book along the same lines as Strauss’s What Is Political Philosophy? Each of its seven essays is more complex and significant than the last, and almost half of the text is devoted to book reviews. The intrepid student who has the patience to read Kendall’s serpentine prose, and to overlook the occasional typo, will discover an American conservatism that places duties above rights, orthodoxy above “openness,” the Constitution and The Federalist Papers above the Declaration of Independence, and Congress above the presidency.

Kendall’s conservatism is an “affirmation” of the “Great Tradition of Western political philosophy.” That tradition, which he traces back to the ancient Greeks, says that contract and consent are subordinate to “the true purposes of society, clearly understood to be those of justice and right.” And the meaning of justice and right is not up for debate. For Kendall, the Judeo-Christian ethic of the Great Tradition holds the answers to most questions. Communities establish, through norms and laws, an orthodoxy that upholds these answers in different circumstances. Problems start when modern philosophers reopen questions long thought settled and attempt to base societies on individual consent.

The eventual result is anarchy. According to Kendall, when everything is up for debate, when there is no transcendent standard of right and wrong, “the society in question will descend ineluctably into ever-deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can conduct its affairs by discussion, and so into the abandonment of the discussion process and the arbitrament of public questions by violence and civil war.” Kendall had in mind the authoritarians who emerged from the rubble of the Spanish Republic, and the Nazis who exploited the weaknesses of Weimar Germany. In Kendall’s nightmare vision, the “consensus society” is replaced by an “open society.” It comes apart. Deliberation is cast aside. Force rules.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau called this process the “dispersal of opinion.” It was Kendall’s greatest fear. He believed that, in order to prevent the open society from eroding the foundations of American democracy, free institutions must censor or suppress opinions hostile to the Constitution and the form of government it created. The reason liberals became so exercised over Senator Joseph McCarthy, Kendall argued, was that he challenged their conception of a society in which adherents of every political persuasion, including communism, deserve a hearing in the public square and are entitled to jobs in the State Department. “America is a society whose essence is still to be found in the phrase ‘We hold these truths,’” Kendall wrote. “It can therefore proscribe certain doctrines and beliefs, and in the presence of the doctrines and beliefs of the Communists it cannot hesitate: It must proscribe them, and preferably long before they have had an opportunity to become a clear and present danger.”

American conservatives, Kendall argued, were just beginning to understand their role in the “resistance” against the ongoing “Liberal Revolution.” The aim of the Liberal Revolution is to replace the checks and balances of the Constitution with a strong president who enacts the whimsical mandates of ever-shifting plebiscitary majorities. Animated by the leveling spirit of egalitarianism, liberals seek to overturn the constitutional structures that constrain arbitrary executive, administrative, and judicial power.

Kendall was concerned less with this or that welfare scheme than with the means by which such measures become law. He defended the Electoral College, the Senate, and the legislative filibuster, along with strict constitutional interpretation, because they served as guardrails against rash and imprudent decisions. Kendall wrote that his “objection to Liberal proposals for the ‘reform’ of our political system is precisely this: Those proposals would (by eliminating deliberation) render impossible the expression of that deliberate sense — or, for that matter, any sense that would be, properly speaking, that of the community.”

Kendall favored Congress over the presidency because its members must stay close to the people. Congressmen, moreover, are elected according to procedures that remain “pretty much what the Framers intended them to be.” And Congress acts as a brake against executive overreach. Think, for instance, of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema shrinking President Biden’s Build Back Better proposal. Congress also can lead: In recent years it has spent more money on defense than Biden requested and shamed the president into doing more to help Ukraine fight off Russia.

But Congress is under siege. The relativists and egalitarians want to turn it into a unicameral legislature that rubber-stamps executive action. In the most controversial review in the book, Kendall wrote that the legislative branch’s outsized position in the Founders’ design is threatened by “an endless series of Abraham Lincolns, each persuaded that he is superior in wisdom and virtue to the Fathers, each prepared to insist that those who oppose this or that new application of the equality standard are denying the possibility of self-government, each ultimately willing to plunge America into Civil War rather than concede his point — and off at the end, of course, the cooperative commonwealth of men who will be so equal that no one will be able to tell them apart.”

This critique of Lincoln appeared in Kendall’s review of another conservative classic, Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (1959). Kendall, a southerner, praised Jaffa’s achievement. But he also recognized the revolutionary potential in placing the Declaration’s equality clause at the center of American thought. As he explained in his posthumous Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970), co-authored with George W. Carey, Kendall saw the Declaration as just one element in a tableau that stretched from the Mayflower Compact of 1620 to The Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. He wanted to balance the truths of the Declaration with the goods mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution: justice, tranquility, the general welfare (as the term was understood in the 18th century), a more perfect union, and the blessings of liberty.

Kendall is often described as a “majoritarian” who trusted the sentiments of the people rather than the opinions of a scientific elite. That is true enough, but there is some danger in assuming that Kendall’s majoritarianism is the same as contemporary nationalist populism. “He speaks for the populist position,” writes Daniel McCarthy, calling The Conservative Affirmation “the best philosophical account of right-wing populism.” Kendall would no doubt oppose the latest advances in the Liberal Revolution, from critical race theory to gender ideology to proposals to abolish the filibuster and Electoral College and grant statehood to the District of Columbia. And he would no doubt share the populists’ indignation at elite snobbery and their fury at what he called the “Liberal Propaganda Machine.”

And yet, as I reread this book, I began to grow uncomfortable with the image of Kendall in a red MAGA cap. He was a “Better Dead Than Red” anti-communist and lifelong Democrat who preferred weak presidents to strong ones. One of the reasons he supported Joe McCarthy, after all, was that he understood McCarthyism to be an assertion of congressional prerogative. How would Kendall assess a twice-impeached chief executive who said “I alone can fix it,” who took a maximalist view of presidential power, and who urged his vice president to throw out Electoral College results he did not like? How would Kendall view the “LOL nothing matters” Right, or the traditionalists looking to Europe for inspiration, or those students of Harry Jaffa who pine for an American Caesar? How can a party that in the 2020 election received 48 percent of the national House vote and 47 percent of the presidential vote call itself majoritarian?

Rather than playing the guessing game and using Kendall to justify our current positions, it may be more beneficial to study his thought as the basis for a renewed constitutionalism and program for conservatism that is both exceptionally American and enduringly relevant. “What I do take sides on,” Kendall wrote, “is the thesis of the Federalist Papers, namely: That America’s mission in the world is to prove to the world that self-government — that is, self-government by the people through a representative assembly which, by definition, calls the plays — is possible.” These are words that every conservative ought to affirm.