The Intellectual Case For Trump: A Debate
The editor of the Claremont Review, and really the face of the institution, is Charles Kesler. A professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College (which is unaffiliated with the Claremont Institute), Kesler is what I’d call a measured thinker. He supported Trump but was always very careful about how he expressed it.
Kesler is out with a new book, called Crisis of the Two Constitutions, so I reached out to him to talk about the appeal of Trump. There was nothing mystifying about the popularity of Trump among the conservative base. He was a godsend to anyone who lived to see the libs triggered. But Kesler and the authors at Claremont are different. They saw in Trump an opportunity, perhaps the last opportunity, to turn the country around.
In this conversation, I press Kesler to explain what, exactly, he saw. Does he think the country is in mortal peril? And if so, why was Trump the solution? Kesler is a serious person, and at times, this is a frustrating exchange. But I believe it offers some insight into what the intellectuals who backed Trumpism are thinking, and why the American right is where it is now.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
The tone of your book is not reactionary, but it did strike me as the lament of a reactionary, someone who really does believe that the country is on the brink. Is that how you feel?
Charles Kesler
I guess it depends on what you mean by “on the brink.” I don’t think we’re on the brink of anything immediately. The trends are certainly bad, and I don’t see a lot of healthy influences. But I don’t think anything’s inevitable in politics. I’m definitely worried about my country, if that’s what you mean.
Sean Illing
No, that’s not really what I mean. We’re all worried. But there are many who think we’re in an actual political emergency.
Charles Kesler
I wouldn’t say we’re in an emergency now. We’re approaching a crisis unless things happen in between. I begin the book by pointing out that our politics could change considerably if some extraneous event happens, if a major war breaks out, or if the little green men land from outer space. There could be a game reset if the conditions really were to change suddenly.
But Covid-19 was a pretty big extraneous factor, and it seemed to make very little difference in our politics. It was easily absorbed into the ongoing disagreements. We just had more things to disagree about. We could argue about masks, and shutdowns, and opening up, and all the things that we have been arguing about in addition to the usual stuff from the past year.
Sean Illing
I’ll be honest: I think you think we’re in a political emergency, but you don’t seem quite willing to say that — at least not in the book.
There are lots of familiar conservative arguments in there about cultural decline, and, frankly, I’m sympathetic to some of it, but my sense is that you’re hesitant to signal your genuine alarm. And this is most clear when it comes to Trump, whom you never fully endorse but you’re obviously not not endorsing him. For someone like you, a serious person with a real grounding in history, even a muted openness to Trump feels like an act of desperation.
Charles Kesler
An act of desperation?
Sean Illing
I mean someone like you understands what Trump is, what he represents, and supporting him suggests you think things are sufficiently bad that the system has to be blown up in order to be saved.
Charles Kesler
I did, in fact, vote for Trump. And I published Michael Anton’s infamous “Flight 93” essay back in 2016. So I can’t be exonerated of Trump. But I honestly don’t think there’s an emergency.
I wrote my dissertation on Cicero, so I know something about Roman republican politics. And in that case, you had essentially 100 years of civil war, off and on, before what we would now recognize as the end of the republic. And it’s not clear that at any moment in that process, you could’ve said, “This is it. This is the last spiral, the last hundred years of republic. We’re doomed.” I think it’s very hard to read that. And we’re far from having pre-civil war conditions.
I don’t agree with Ross Douthat’s account of America as a decadent society, though. His argument is that our decadence is more fundamental than our polarization, and that we could have many more centuries of continued rich decadence, and of being a superpower, without any impending catastrophe to worry about.