A Conservative Mind
You can see that here.
[Side-Note: If you join the ISI's readers club, you'll receive IR.]
Just now I was about to type up an excerpt from The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George Nash, but it seems that such an excerpt is already online. I highly recommend you read it.
Kirk had developed a distaste for big business, big labor, and big government. Unions, he told a friend, were often "more restrictive and selfish than the soulless corporation." He praised the trustbuster Thurman Arnold and hoped that he would run for president. Kirk's year or so at Ford did nothing to change his attitudes; his letters during this period expressed his scorn of unions, management, and federal "parasites." Indeed, his dislike of bureaucracy was, if anything, increasing. He denounced the military draft as "slavery." He was furious at the government's removal of Japanese-Americans from their homes on the west coast shortly after Pearl Harbor.
...Although sympathetic to the Allies (he followed the Italian- Ethiopian sector closely), he had opposed American intervention in World War II and had believed that President Roosevelt was deliberately trying to maneuver America into the war. In 1944 he even voted for the Socialist Party's Norman Thomas for president to reward Thomas's anti-imperialist speeches before Pearl Harbor. Kirk's wartime letters showed the persistence of his libertarian convictions; his correspondence was replete with disgust at conscription, military inefficiency, governmental bureaucracy, "paternalism," and socialist economics. He denounced liberal "globaloney" and feared that America was doomed to live in a collectivistic economy.
On The Lew Rockwell Show, Tom Woods read a paragraph or two from an essay by Russell Kirk called "Conservative Thoughts on Foreign Policy." Click here to listen.
