Four Problem Categories for Conservatives

These four problems are taken from Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953):

1. The problem of spiritual and moral regeneration; the restoration of the ethical system and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. Spiritual restoration cannot be a means to social restoration; it must be its own end.
2. The problem of leadership, which has two aspects: the preservation of some measure of veneration, discipline, order, and class; and the purgation of our system of education, so that learning once again may become truly liberal.*
3. The problem of the proletariat. The mass of men must find status and hope within society; true family, respect for the past, responsibility for the future, private property, duty as well as right, inner resources that matter more than the mass-amusements and mass-vices with the which the modern proletarian seeks to forget his lack of an object.
4. The problem of economic stability. This does not mean the security of plenty for everyone: no social program, least of all the planned economy of the welfare state, is likely to succeed in gratifying the material appetites of all humanity. But it does mean the establishment of a rational relationship between endeavor and reward. It means the adjustment of the American economy to the real capacities of American production, which cannot permanently supply the demands of half the world with a flow of manufactures and agricultural commodities.

Even though these problems were written in the 1950s they are still valid today because they transcend time. People at the core level are the same throughout history. Kirk was saying these are problems with the human condition that conservatives have to face and try to solve or moderate as he put it.

 

*He means classical liberal as in libertarian.