Donald Trump Splits the Claremont Institute: The Allure of Power in the Politics of Regime Crisis

 As you can see from a selection of my many posts on Trump and the Claremont Institute (here, here, here, here, and here), I have struggled to understand why the people at the Claremont Institute decided to become the leading academic intellectuals supporting Trump, even to the point of helping him plan his attempted coup to overturn the presidential election of 2020.  Recently, an article by Ross Douthat and another article in the Washington Post have helped me to think more about this.

The Claremont Institute was founded in 1979 by students of political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa, who himself had been one of the leading students of the political philosopher Leo Strauss.  Beginning in 1964, when Jaffa became a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (as in "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"), many Straussian scholars of political philosophy have engaged in partisan American politics, usually in support of conservative Republicans.  

This raises the question of the proper relationship between political philosophy and political partisanship.  Should political philosophers avoid such partisan political activity, because the desire for political power tends to corrupt one's philosophic study of politics?  If political philosophers do engage in partisan politics, can their political philosophizing give them standards for partisan political judgment?  So, for example, does the American political founding illustrate how a Lockean political philosophy of natural rights can be applied to American political practice, as Jaffa and his students have suggested?  But even if this is true, how do we decide whether supporting Trump and his political movement is the best way to preserve or revive those principles of the American founding?  It seems that even within the Claremont Institute, and certainly within the scholarly community of Straussian political philosophers, there is disagreement over how to answer these questions.

In February of 2021, I wrote a post with the title "The Claremont Institute Repudiates Trump.  So What Took Them So Long?"  I was writing about the winter 2020/2021 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which had three articles criticizing Trump--by Andrew Busch, William Voegeli, and Charles Kesler--and only one offering a tepid defense--by Michael Anton.  But I was mistaken to see this as evidence that the Claremont Institute had withdrawn its support of Trump.  As the Washington Post article makes clear, Trump has split the Claremont Institute into two opposing camps.  Charles Kesler, the editor of the Claremont Review, has never been enthusiastic about Trump; and Trump's conduct after the 2020 election has convinced Kesler that Trump must be repudiated.  Kesler now says that the Claremont Institute is split between some "who continue to believe that the election was stolen and some who have denied that from the beginning."  He also says that John Eastman was wrong in advising Trump to attempt to overturn the election outcome.  But on the other side of the debate, Ryan Williams, President of the Claremont Institute, has always been enthusiastic in his support of Trump and in support of Eastman and Trump's lie about the election being stolen.

As I have indicated previously, the pro-Trump people at the Claremont Institute have repudiated the political thought of Harry Jaffa.  When I asked some of these people to provide some evidence in Jaffa's writing suggesting that he would have supported Trump, they could not come up with any good answers.  Moreover, Philip Jaffa, Harry Jaffa's son, sent me a long statement about how his father had complained in the last years of his life that the Claremont Institute had rejected his thinking.  Philip said that his father had often repeated these words: "They did not want to bury the teaching with the teacher.  What they are trying to do is put a top hat on Jefferson Davis and call him Abraham Lincoln, and put the dust cover of the Nicomachean  Ethics on Atlas Shrugged and call it Aristotle."  The recent Washington Post article ends by quoting those words.  Would Jaffa have said that supporting Trump's January 6th insurrection is taking the side of Jefferson Davis?

What explains the support for Trump among so many of the Claremont Institute scholars of political philosophy?  Ross Douthat might have the best explanation: it's their "enthusiasm for a politics of crisis."  The Claremont Institute story of the American regime is a story of three regime crises.  First, there was the crisis of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Founding.  Second, there was the "crisis of the house divided" that led to the Civil War and Lincoln's triumphant "new birth of freedom" that was a re-founding of the regime.  Third, there was the crisis of corruption during the Progressive Era in which the Founding was overturned in favor of the Administrative State.  Now, we need a new transformative crisis to restore America to its original founding principles.

A crisis is turbulent, chaotic, violent, and risky.  It might turn out to be a disaster.  But we must take the risk to avoid the triumph of the evil ones who want to destroy America.  That was the message of Michael Anton's "Flight 93 Election" essay.

A crisis is alluring to politically ambitious people who see it as creating an opportunity for them to exercise some political influence in the halls of power during a transformative period of history.  Kesler told the Washington Post: "Trump was such an amateur that he didn't have contacts even with the establishment conservative think tanks in Washington, like Heritage and AEI.  That was an opportunity for us to have a little more influence as an outsider."  And, indeed, people like Anton found positions in Trump's White House.  

Thomas Klingenstein is the chair of the Claremont Institute's board and its main funder.  Appearing on Steven Bannon's "War Room" show last week, Klingenstein said the Claremont Institute has been widely "recognized as the intellectual basis for Trump," making this "a great time for us. . . . Our budget is going way up.  The Washington Post is going to write a hit piece on us, and we take great pride in that. . . . It tells you that they think we're important, and we're not just a group of political philosophers."

That explains it all.  We're important, and we're not just a group of political philosophers.

The Trump supporters at the Claremont Institute think they can be important if they provide "the intellectual basis for Trump" that allows him to lead the country through a crisis in such a way that he can found a new American regime.  Advising Trump as to how he could overturn the presidential election of 2020 was part of this project because Trump needed a second term in office to complete his re-founding of the regime.  

I have seen four problems with that grand project.  And here I am restating some points elaborated in previous posts.

The first problem is that Trump has never clearly defined the content of the new American regime that he is going to found.  For example, the most common theme from the Claremont Institute is the "deconstruction of the administrative state," as Steve Bannon called it.  But there was very little evidence for this in Trump's four years in office.  Although there was some slowing in the growth of new administrative regulations, there was no real reduction in regulation.  The Trump Administration lost most of the court cases involving its regulatory changes.  And Trump relied mostly on presidential decrees that can easily be rescinded by a new President.  If the Trump Administration had been serious about "deconstructing the administrative state," they would have supported legislation to radically reduce the power of the administrative state by having the Congress reclaim the lawmaking powers that it has delegated to the administrative agencies.  There was no attempt to do this.

Trump did not do this because he does not have the moral and intellectual virtues required for transformative leadership.  That's the second problem--Trump's bad character.  This is a man who stumbled through his presidential term, spending most of his time watching television and sending out tweets vilifying those people who don't love him as much as he loves himself.  This man is not Abraham Lincoln.

The third problem is the foolish belief that Trump can become a transformative leader without the democratic legitimacy that comes from winning the support of the majority of the voters.  He has never persuaded a majority of Americans to support him or his policies.  This points to the strange incoherence of Trump's unpopular populism.  Populist rhetoric depends on the claim that there are only two groups--the Elites and the People--and that the Populist demagogue speaks for the People.  But this makes no sense if the Populist leader speaks only for a minority of the People.  I made this point at a Claremont panel at the 2017 American Political Science Convention, and the panel members dismissed this with disdain.

Moreover, the problem here is not just that Trump is unpopular, but that the Republican Party generally is unpopular at the national level.  As Anton has said, "a national popular vote guarantees a Democratic win in every presidential election henceforth."

That explains why John Eastman had to try to overturn the will of the majority in the last presidential election to preserve the power of a minority faction.

This is related to the final problem--the tendency of those in Trump's minority faction to demonize their political opponents--the majority of Americans--by saying that they are not real Americans, and that they are actually subhuman animals.  Last year, the Claremont Institute published an essay by Glenn Ellmers declaring that most people living in the United States--those who elected Joe Biden as President--"are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."  The only real Americans are those who voted for Trump, who should be identified as "Claremont conservatives."

"Authentic Americans are men, not gerbils--or robots," Ellmers explained.  "If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman.  Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading."  (Amanda Gorman is the young black woman who read one of her poems at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration.)

So now the Trump supporters at the Claremont Institute are dehumanizing the majority of their fellow citizens as being gerbils, zombies, or rodents.  We have heard that kind of hateful political rhetoric before, and it didn't lead to anything good, and it's certainly not going to bring about the re-founding of a great American regime.

For these reasons, we can predict the failure of the Trump political movement.  Especially in the last few weeks, we have seen signs that it's the beginning of the end for Trump.

Oddly, while the Claremont Institute provided intellectual support to Trump's rise to power, it could now determine his fall.  John Eastman was the linchpin to Trump's plan for the insurrection and the attempted coup.  If Eastman were to flip and tell the truth about what was done, it would all be over for Trump.