A Bridge to Somewhere: Willmoore Kendall’s Teaching on Democracy

Complex and perceptive, Willmoore Kendall’s ideas remain relevant as the most important intellectual defense of the American people’s right to rule itself rather than to submit to the tyranny of experts. He is the man who engineered the foundation, structure, and superstructure of a bridge to democracy with his own formidable intellect and tremendous erudition.

Several years ago, when first reading Willmoore Kendall’s work, I realized I had been thinking in cliches most of my life. For too long I had thrown around words like freedom, democracy, and equality without really thinking about what they meant. Kendall’s unwillingness to parrot commonly-accepted terminology forced me to stop and reconsider my own presuppositions. Like lots of Americans, to provide one example, I had always drawn a distinction between equality of outcomes (which meant socialism and forced redistribution of income) and equality of opportunity (which seemed a simple matter of fairness compatible with a free society). Yet Kendall demolished my naivete in a few sentences by taking the word equality seriously. Equality, that is, means exactly the same, identical. Thus, to establish real equality of opportunity means that everybody has to start life with no advantages or disadvantages. Such equality therefore demands destruction of the family and one hundred percent estate taxes lest anyone benefit from good parents or inherited wealth. Real equality of opportunity requires a hyper-intrusive Spartan-style barracks state. In our own day, trying to think forward with Kendall, equality of opportunity would demand genetic engineering to insure no one starts with greater intellectual ability, more athletic potential, or different sex hormones. Equal human beings must be made not begotten. By refusing to use words sloppily, by delving into their deepest meaning, then, Kendall penned startling prose. Whether readers agree or disagree with him, a phrase almost inevitably pops into their minds: “I never thought about it that way.”

Willmoore Kendall’s thought, then, quickly stood out to me as distinctive and intriguing. Reading further, his work often struck me as prophetic. In 1964, for instance, Kendall (who died in 1967) predicted that the United States Supreme Court, against the desires of the public, would one day ban “public creches and invocations and benedictions at school graduation exercises.” These predictions came true. The Court banned Christmas creches in courthouses in County of Allegheny v. ACLU (1986) and prohibited clergy-led prayer at public school graduations in Lee v. Weisman (1992). As Kendall had predicted, most Americans opposed both decisions, but judicial decree overrode their desires. On another matter, Kendall wrote in 1958, that “no community can afford a freedom for teachers to undermine its way of life [nor will allow such undermining] once the community realizes what is involved. Ordinary people can stop the harm done by professional educators by transforming the significance of our elections of members for boards of education.” Reading this sentence in 2022 instantly turns one’s mind to the current parental revolt—stretching from Virginia to San Francisco—against school boards. Even more importantly, Kendall suggested in 1956 that an unholy and unelected trinity of federal officials, mass media, and academics, a combination he called the “Great Bureaucracy,” had joined hands to push forward a liberal agenda which most Americans opposed. Accurate or not, this claim sounds eerily familiar, sixty-six years later, to the politics of populist push-back in our own time. So novel argumentation and political prescience quickly made me take Kendall seriously. What ultimately held my attention, however, was his unique and intricately constructed political theory. That theory is the subject of today’s talk.

In 1966 UD President Donald A. Cowan suggested to faculty that the rapidly-growing University of Dallas was “a keystone in this age’s arch of history.” A jaded Kendall, deeply scarred by bitter academic battles at Yale, likely smirked. Nevertheless, he did believe in the university’s mission and in the importance of his work here. Well-known as a co-founder of National Review, notorious as a rare conservative in the political science profession, and possessing a flamboyant personality, Kendall made a big splash when he arrived on campus in 1963. Kendall took pleasure that at UD liberals dwelt “in the fox-holes” while “Right-wingers flew the MIGs.” In turn, university authorities greatly valued Kendall’s contributions to the institution. As Dean Damien Fandal put it, the university counted “heavily on him to lend his name, his philosophy and his pedagogy to the institution.” Some students wore sweat shirts emblazoned with his portrait and captioned “Kendall for King.” In the spring of 1966 Kendall was busy planning to launch a new PhD program in politics at the university. He had great hope for this program, knew there was demand out in the country for it, and hoped to use it to advance his own political theories. In June 1967 after a successful first year and shortly before his death, Kendall told a friend that he viewed his work on the graduate program “with more satisfaction than anything I’ve ever done.”

In pondering the program’s purposes, Kendall sometimes used the image of a bridge. Specifically, he claimed Dallas would serve as an intellectual bridge between the ideas of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. In adopting Kendall’s metaphor of a bridge, however, I will not focus on his efforts to reconcile Strauss and Voegelin, though such reconciliation was part of his larger task, and we will address it. Rather, I mean to show how Kendall constructed his political theory over many years and from many parts. His was a long-term intellectual construction project, and it had a goal, a landing point. When I say Willmoore Kendall was building “A Bridge to Somewhere,” I mean mostly that he was not a utopian. For Utopia, as readers of Thomas More will know, literally means nowhere. Liberals, thought Kendall, were the utopians. Their dreams were unrealizable, for they sought change for its own sake and change without end. They wanted progress without knowing what they were progressing to. On the other hand, Kendall hoped and believed his ideas would help promote, protect, and extend democracy, especially but not exclusively in the United States of America. Voegelin and Strauss supplied some vital raw materials for this bridge, but so too did Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, R.G. Collingwood, and James Madison. But the designer and builder of this bridge to democracy—the man who engineered its foundation, structure, and superstructure with his own formidable intellect and tremendous erudition—was Willmoore Kendall.

Kendall’s bridge, built in several discrete sections, took thirty years to reach a state of near completion in 1967. After sketching out the early and middle phases of construction, aka Kendall’s political theory up to about 1960, we’ll look at its later sections, that is, his political theory as it developed just before and during his Dallas years. Those last years revealed where Kendall ultimately took his theoretical stand, the landing point of his bridge. Willmoore Kendall, that is, arrived in Dallas with much of his political theory worked out, his bridge mostly built, then put the finishing touches on it here. His scholarship in these final years remained of the highest quality and was still developing when he died at age 58. One key contention of my book, Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall, is that the man’s political theory demonstrates considerable consistency over time. As he changed from Trotskyist, to cold warrior, to subtle Madisonian—Kendall remained utterly committed to majority rule. Kendall’s goal–empowering the people to rule democratically and to uphold a functional, just, tranquil, and cohesive polity—remained the same throughout his career. But his ideas about the best means to achieve this goal—about how to reach the landing point of lasting democracy—changed. Each intellectual phase pushed the bridge forward. As his thought entered a new stage, the previously erected intellectual scaffolding mostly remained in place, extended and buttressed rather than abandoned.

Kendall built part 1 of the bridge before World War II. At LSU and the University of Illinois, he started to take Rousseau seriously, ruminating upon Rousseau’s conundrum that “men are born free but everywhere they are in chains.” In 1939, for example, Kendall argued that political scientists paid lip service to majority rule but seldom “sought out the arguments that might be urged in its favor.” He also suggested “that between those who accept the majority principle as the differentia of democratic government, and those who repudiate it, a wider gulf is fixed than that which separates the latter from the defenders of Fascism.” Kendall at this point called himself a communist but despised Stalinism. His disdain for bureaucrats and intellectuals who claimed to know best for the people appeared forcefully in these years and never left him. Any enemy of the people’s right to rule was Kendall’s enemy.

In 1941 Kendall published his first book, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule. In a close reading of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, Kendall showed that Locke supported the right of the community to rule itself—that is, majority rule—up to and including imposition of the death penalty. This fact contradicted Locke’s other focus which was that individuals possessed natural rights—life, liberty, and property—which no government might legitimately violate. Kendall concluded that Locke must have had a tacit premise that the people were responsible enough never to take away rights which individuals rightfully possessed. Kendall thus maintained that Locke, like himself, belonged in the camp of the majority-rule democrats. During the war Kendall served as an intelligence officer, mostly producing propaganda for newspapers and radio. In 1946 and 1947 he served as head of Latin American intelligence for an early version of the CIA and discovered that American intelligence agencies were riddled with Russian agents. Indeed, he helped expose Maurice Halperin, one of the Soviet Union’s most effective spies. Seeing Soviet infiltration first hand pushed Kendall to the right. By 1947 he called himself a conservative.

That same year he landed a job at Yale. Here Kendall refined his position of “absolute majoritarianism.” Thus, his emphasis on democracy survived the transition from communist to anti-communist. He set out to expand upon his previous position “that in any decision-making group one half of the members, plus one, have a right to commit one half of the members, minus one, to any policy they see fit to support.” Majority rule, if taken seriously, meant that individual liberties had to come second to the people’s right to enforce principles they believed important and true. Moreover, a democratic society had the right to impose its political orthodoxy upon dissidents. At discretion, the community might provide wide latitude for disagreement, but it retained the power to discipline citizens who threatened to undermine its principles. Most famously, Kendall argued in the mid-1950s that the people of Athens had been within their rights to put Socrates to death. When the philosopher refused to moderate his condemnations of the Athenian lifestyle, the Assembly of Athens, whose very reason to exist, said Kendall, was “to preserve the city’s society and way of life,” came to see Socrates as a public enemy. Meanwhile, Socrates recognized that the Assembly possessed legitimate authority over him. He refused to flee, accepting the principle (later Kendall’s principle), that the people possessed legal authority to silence citizens. For Kendall this majoritarian scholarship (what one scholar has called his McCarthyite Socrates) was tied up with Cold War concerns. How much, that is, should the USA tolerate communists?

Continuing to chew over the ins and outs of democracy, Kendall soon recognized problems with his position. With Rousseau, he valued social consensus wherein members of society agreed on fundamentals. Kendall felt the allure of primitive democracy, Swiss peasants gathered under their oaks or pilgrims covenanting on the Mayflower. But he knew that to promote consensus, or preserve orthodoxy, in modern nation-states was difficult. So Kendall schematically blew up the New England town meeting to show how large countries might remain democratic. Town meetings, he argued, entailed regular discussion until citizens reached consensus. Officials remained directly responsible to the citizenry. In a larger setting, direct linkage between officials and citizens was not possible so big democracies were representative. The people had to elect representatives to oversee the business of government. The purpose of these representatives, said Kendall, was to “ride herd” on officials to see that they carried out the people’s will. Government, that is, requires bureaucrats, and democracy requires elected representatives to keep bureaucrats in check. So Kendall now moderated his fifty percent plus one democratic absolutism to focus on the necessity of elected representatives and the importance of their discussions for making policy. Deliberation among representatives was necessary for a democracy to reach a modicum of consensus, serving as a practical alternative to all citizens deliberating together in an assembly.

About this same time, the mid-1950s, Kendall carefully read the works of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. He began to revamp his theory in light of their insights. Both scholars included ethical elements in their writings somewhat lacking in Kendall’s previous theory. Till then Kendall worked on the premise that democracy was itself the chief good because the people would, in general, do the right thing. From Strauss, Kendall accepted that political philosophy should seek to know, and thereby encourage, the good through rational inquiry. He adopted Strauss’s view that political philosophy, since Machiavelli, had promoted efficiency and acquisition rather than seeking truth or goodness. By reading Voegelin, Kendall came to believe that there were God-given designs which existed within history but which also transcended historical experience. By desiring to bridge Athens and Jerusalem, then, Kendall meant that political philosophy was chiefly an ethical endeavor which drew upon both reason and revelation to discern what ought to be. Focusing on the “ought” of politics, rather than merely the “is,” Kendall, along with his two muses, broke with the increasingly quantitative focus of political science. The ethical answers these three thinkers sought could not be reduced to numbers.

In 1963—just before he arrived in Dallas—Kendall published his book The Conservative Affirmation. In a group of essays he presented an increasingly polished version of his political ideas. In “What is Conservatism,” for instance, Kendall developed a “battle-line” metaphor. Conservatives were those disparate groups coalescing politically to resist “the Liberal Revolution,” a revolution which aimed at destroying the American tradition and removing all social barriers which might inhibit achieving its impossible goal: absolute equality of everybody. In another essay, “The Ultimate Issue,” Kendall argued that conservatives were those who accepted the “Great Tradition,” stretching back to Aristotle, which embraced the use of reason to discover the “higher law” and to base social institutions on this higher law. Such society would allow the best aspects of human nature to flourish, and individuals were morally bound to obey its rules. Liberals, on the other hand, sought a society built on “self-preservation,” created by human convention. Its members were bound only to promote their own personal interests. Lockeans, then, said Kendall, were liberals. Another astute essay defended the importance of Congress against charges of sloth and parochialism. Finally, Kendall assailed the notion of an “open society” based on limitless individual liberty as both impractical and destructive of genuine freedom.

In the fall of 1963, then, Kendall arrived in Dallas with his intellectual bridge to democracy mostly built. Here he extended and clarified his ideas. Kendall was the rare conservative from the period who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He believed these laws, enacted by duly elected representatives in Congress rather than mandated by the Supreme Court, reflected a new consensus among Americans: state-sanctioned racial discrimination must end. He also believed the laws would reduce chances of violent societal conflict by bringing African-Americans into the American political system as real participants. It was also at the University of Dallas that the anti-utopian character of his thought emerged quite distinctly. Willmoore Kendall, for example, hated Barry Goldwater’s 1964 speech, written by Strauss disciple Harry Jaffa. Hearing the famous line: “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue,” Kendall responded that: “There’s nothing wrong with that statement that couldn’t be put right with a hundred thousand well-chosen words.”

Uncompromising moral rectitude in politics, he believed, was destructive of democracy. By embracing it, whether from the right or from the left, a society precluded negotiation and deliberation. And Kendall had come to see careful deliberation among elected legislators—each representing the interests of one unique slice of the country—as the very heart of American democracy. The incurably righteous, he told one university class, “are going to do justice, let heaven fall where it may. And I say to them, heaven can indeed fall and that it can hurt the heads it hits mighty bad.” Extremism for liberty or justice or equality, that is, could lead to severe social upheaval, perhaps to civil war, perhaps to World War III. Kendall thus demanded recognition of the costs of righteous radicalism. According to Kendall’s political theory, then, the way forward in a democracy was to talk things through, not fight them out; to negotiate, not impose; to work patiently for change, not demand its immediate realization.

At the end of his life, if one had to characterize Kendall as the disciple on any one thinker, that thinker would not be Rousseau or Strauss or Voegelin. It would certainly not be John C. Calhoun as Jaffa maintained. (Had Jaffa linked Kendall to Henry Clay he would have been closer to the mark, as I say in the book). In the end, however, Kendall’s chief inspiration was James Madison. The best form of government for Americans, Kendall argued in his unpublished book The Sages of Conservatism, was “that stipulated in the Constitution of the United States, as explicated and justified in The Federalist.” Moreover, the goals of American society should be “to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” This last line recites the preamble to the Constitution. But Kendall, as per his style, did not airily quote this phrase, for he had pondered its meaning for decades. Based on such meditation, he concluded that democracy was a balancing act. To survive and prosper, that is, no democratic society could pursue justice while allowing riots and mayhem in the streets (or vice versa); or promote liberty, while leaving huge swathes of the country mired in poverty (or vice versa). All six principles of the preamble, that is, needed to be held in balance lest the entire democratic edifice collapse. All were vital, but no one principle was more crucial than the others.

So Kendall thought political philosophy necessary to discover the lasting ethical truths needed to build and maintain the good society. He also believed deeply in democracy. He could not therefore adopt Plato’s solution of a philosopher-king. Wanting to promote the good but knowing that few citizens would ever master political theory, Kendall wondered how democracy might be maintained long term. Here he latched on to Voegelin’s ideas of symbols. These symbols developed over time and served as shortcuts to help citizens remain loyal to their community—and to democracy—without mastering the philosophical or theological intricacies of its founding principles. Kendall believed the most important American symbol was elected representatives deliberating together within a context of Christian morality. Indeed, maintaining a virtuous people, one that remained devoted to democracy, justice, and freedom, was itself more important than any document. Citing the Madison of 1788, for example, Kendall argued that the Bill of Rights was a parchment barrier which the government, when pressed, could and would violate at will. A people dedicated to defending its rights and protecting its truths, on the other hand, was far more difficult to get around. Here I borrow from what Professor Leo Paul de Alvarez, long-time UD stalwart, said at the time of Kendall’s death. Reading the social critic Richard Weaver convinced Kendall that a key component for democracy’s survival was the training of a “select minority.” This small band of scholars would not dictate to the people but rather guide them. The group would remind the people of its own strength, of the need for principled resistance to tyranny, and of the right of a virtuous people to rule itself. These counselors of the people comprised the last span Kendall needed to complete his bridge to democracy.

The UD graduate program in politics was meant to produce this select band of guides. Kendall died before the group grew very large. I was fortunate to meet and interview some of its members in the process researching this book. All of them were helpful, and all of them were impressive people. Thankfully, Dr. de Alvarez and Pat Smith remain with us, but Drs. John Murley and John Alvis, and Sister Mary Brian Bole have now passed away. Sister Mary Brian in particular waxed eloquent to me about the profound effect Kendall had on her thinking. He was, she recalled tearfully as she looked back over a long life as a teacher and academic administrator, her “intellectual father.” I am not sure that any real band of Kendallian teachers remains today, but I would like to say, particularly in this place, that Kendall’s ideas demand further exploration and explication. Complex and perceptive, they remain relevant as the most important intellectual defense of the American people’s right to rule itself rather than to submit to the tyranny of experts. I’d like to say to you—take up Willmoore Kendall’s torch and march boldly across his intellectual bridge into a democratic future—but my guess is he would have smirked to hear those words.

This essay was given as a talk at the University of Dallas in March 2022 and is republished here by gracious permission of the author.

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