Russell Kirk: "Contemptuous Conservative"

Alan Wolfe reviews a new Russell Kirk anthology for TNR, and he doesn't like what he sees. The penultimate graf:

George W. Bush once called himself a compassionate conservative. Russell Kirk is a contemptuous conservative. Kirk is contemptuous of people, or at least those whose very existence prevents gentlemen aristocrats from sitting in front of the fire reading Aristotle while their slaves, or their wives, prepared their dinner. He is contemptuous of ideas, or of those ideas with which he disagrees, and prefers caricaturing them to arguing with them. He is contemptuous of the world in which he lived, always exaggerating the bad and having nary a word to say about the good. He is contemptuous of the truth, mangling his facts and distorting the history of the country he claims to love. His is not the conservatism of the country club; Kirk is no northeastern aristocrat determined to protect the exclusivity of his turf. His is the conservatism of George Babbitt, not Irving Babbitt: provincial, resentful, bigoted. If you collected all the grumblings in a small-town drugstore by men convinced that somehow the world had passed them by, and then added a few literary and historical references, you would have The Essential Russell Kirk.