Crisis of the Conservative House Divided

Trump’s political balance sheet is by now thoroughly known, even if his financial balance sheet isn’t. The main political arguments for him—his victory will be a rebuke to the media and political correctness; he’ll keep the Supreme Court nominally in Republican control; his economic policy is vastly preferable; he’s serious about immigration control; he isn’t Hillary Clinton, full stop—are all plausible. His doubtful character, uncertain ideology, inexperience, inconsistency, rhetorical deficiencies, short attention span, and the prospect that a Trump administration might destroy the GOP for a decade or more are considerable reasons to withhold a vote.

Everyone has his own perspective on these factors, and I won’t try to audit them again nor reproach anyone on either side of the divide. The air is thick with attacks and recriminations already. Lots of Trump sympathizers are mad at The Weekly Standard, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington-based conservative think tanks, and nearly every Republican congressional leader. Trump skeptics are equally antagonistic toward Breitbart, Fox News, and the so-called alt-right. But it is the stance of one corner of the right that is raising eyebrows and puzzlement all around: the writers associated with the Claremont Institute—aka the “Claremonsters”—and their fellow travelers.

Several Claremont eminentos appear prominently on the recent list of “Scholars and Writers for Trump,” including Charles Kesler, Larry Arnn, Thomas West, Hadley Arkes, Brian Kennedy, and John Eastman. Good friends all, as is “Publius Decius Mus” of “The Flight 93 Election” fame. In fact, the pseudonymous writer previewed a draft of that notorious Claremont Review of Books essay on the deck of my house that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, accompanied by a fine bottle of Bordeaux that “Decius” thoughtfully brought along. (I mention this gratuitous detail only to preserve our smug coastal elite street cred.) It is also worth adding that the Claremonsters on this list are typically at odds with many of their fellow signatories who hail from the “paleocon” and libertarian neighborhoods of the right—another indication of the extraordinary ideological scrambling effect of the Trump campaign.

Knowing my own deep Claremont roots—I earned a Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School while working at the Claremont Institute in the 1980s—several people have asked me to explain: “How is it that a group known for its emphasis on the idea of high statesmanship, and on the importance of serious political rhetoric, can champion Trump?” After all, one person noted, the full name of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the Claremont Review of Books, includes “for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.” This circumstance seems like one of those old SAT questions about which term doesn’t belong with the others: “Lincoln, Churchill, Trump.”

Claremont stands out for its defense of the idea that statesmanship is a political concept that can be understood intelligibly and rigorously, which mainstream political science, swallowed up by value-free quantitative methodology, rejects. “Statesmanship is not much respected,” the late Herbert Storing wrote; it “is almost un-American. The word has an elitist and obsolete ring.” Claremont-trained thinkers believe questions of character, insight, and prudence (as Aristotle understood it) ought to be the primary focus of a political science centered on cultivating statesmanship. Harry Jaffa, rightly regarded as the founder of the Claremont school with his magisterial study of Lincoln’s high statesmanship, Crisis of the House Divided, wrote that “political science, properly so-called, would have at its heart the study of the speeches and deeds of statesmen.”

For someone of this orientation, political rhetoric is not mere marketing. Indeed, one of the first academic books the Claremont Institute published in the 1980s was on the importance of recovering the older tradition of serious oratory and its essential connection to political leadership. Glen Thurow, the editor of Rhetoric and American Statesmanship, wrote that “political speech cannot be judged solely by how well it appeals to its audience. Political speech must serve the ends of statesmanship. .  .  . A political speaker never aims, like a pedagogue or entertainer, simply to instruct or amuse his audience.” Cue Donald Trump, the most inarticulate presidential candidate ever. Trump’s obvious inability to sustain even the simplest political arguments suggests the unlikelihood of high statesmanship from a Trump presidency, let alone a leader who can persuade Americans of the work necessary to reshape the republic.

Still, the Claremont sympathy for Trump needs to be better understood, because it differs fundamentally from the typical candidate scoring mentioned above. If Trump can’t live up to the idiosyncratic Claremont understanding of the meaning of his candidacy, the Trump phenomenon nonetheless opens a window onto the failures of conservatism that made Trump’s candidacy possible and perhaps necessary. Even if you reject Trump, there are vital things to be learned from him if we are to confront the crisis of our time.

What is that crisis? It’s not the litany of items that usually come to mind—the $20 trillion national debt, economic stagnation, runaway regulation, political correctness and identity politics run amok, unchecked immigration that threatens to work a demographic-political revolution, and confused or unserious policy toward radical Islamic terrorism. These are mere symptoms of a much deeper but poorly understood problem. It can be stated directly in one sentence: Elections no longer change the character of our government.

Understanding what this means requires first clearing away a popular confusion. A number of critics on the left and right, such as Michael Brendan Dougherty of the Week, Jeet Heer of the New Republic, and Sam Tanenhaus this week in the New Yorker, see the Claremonster enthusiasm for Trump as another manifestation of the split between the “West Coast” and “East Coast” Straussians. Claremont, the center of West Coast Straussianism, is supposedly fascinated with “Caesarism” and “cataclysmic moments” in U.S. history—crises that only the “great man” can address. It is hard to decide whether this caricature is grotesque or cartoonish.

The unwritten rules of Straussian fight club are no doubt opaque to liberal observers and many conservatives too; as in the film Fight Club, the participants don’t talk about it clearly to outsiders. Leo Strauss wrote very little about American politics, but the late University of Chicago professor’s many gifted students have written a lot, naturally falling into recondite arguments about theoretical issues related to the character of the American Founding and the nature of philosophic inquiry. Jaffa and his West Coast followers think America is close to the classical ideal of the best regime emphasizing human virtue and excellence, while the East thinks America is a “solid but low” regime of self-interested Lockean individualism. These disputes have little if any bearing on the question of Trump. Most of the so-called East Coast Straussians share the West’s abiding interest in Lincoln, Churchill, and the centrality of statesmanship.

The closer source of the Claremont sympathy for Trump (though it should be noted that they are far from unanimous—several Claremonsters are Never Trumpers) is found in another aspect of the Claremont argument about which there is near-complete harmony among East, West, and everyone in-between: the insidious political character of the “administrative state,” a phrase once confined chiefly to the ranks of conservative political scientists, but which has broken out into common parlance. It refers not simply to large bureaucracy, but to the way in which the constitutional separation of powers has been steadily eroded by the delegation of more and more lawmaking to a virtual “fourth branch” of government.

The political character of the administrative state is more important than the economic inefficiency or arbitrariness of bureaucracy that is the usual target of conservative ire, because it represents a new answer to the classic political question: Who should rule? The premise of the Constitution is that the people should rule. The premise of the administrative state, explicitly expressed by Woodrow Wilson and other Progressive-era theorists, is that experts should rule, in a new administrative form largely sealed off from political influence, i.e., sealed off from the people. At some point, it amounts to government without the consent of the governed, a simple fact that surprisingly few conservative politicians perceive. Ronald Reagan was, naturally, a conspicuous exception, noting in 1981 in his first Inaugural Address, “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” (Emphasis added.)

Wilson’s theoretical writings about the purpose of elections are opaque and hard to make out, but in one sense modern contests don’t even live up to one of his simpler themes—elections express a general direction for the country, and the experts should be left to figure out the details for us. There have been several Republican landslides in the last 40 years based on the explicit premise of reimposing limits on the nation’s government, but they have led to very little fundamental change. Newt Gingrich likes to talk about what he calls “70-30” issues—areas in which survey data show a large majority of Americans agreeing with the conservative view, but which are nonetheless trampled on by Washington. And polls show a growing majority of Americans believe the government is an active threat to their liberty. There may be good reasons—excuses?—for the practical inability of Republicans to block or roll back these predations against the people, such as the president’s veto, the Senate filibuster, and undue judicial deference to administrative power, as well as the collective action challenges of the fractious House GOP caucus. But these are second-order problems. The salient political fact is this: No matter who wins elections nowadays, the experts in the agencies rule and every day extend their rule further, even under Republican presidents ostensibly committed to resisting this advance. We still nominally choose our rulers, but they don’t reflect our majority opinions. No wonder more and more conservatives regard the GOP leadership in Washington as “collaborationists” with Democrats.

The profound understanding of the insidious political character of the administrative state is not original to the Claremonsters. Parts of it are visible as early as James Burnham’s masterful 1941 book The Managerial Revolution (recalled recently in The Weekly Standard by Matthew Continetti). For more than 30 years, Prof. John Marini of the University of Nevada, Reno, a Claremont Institute stalwart, has gone beyond Burnham to work out a complicated account of the unconstitutional character of the administrative state, explaining why it is more than just centralized bureaucracy, the erosion of the separation of powers, the corruption of Congress, and the disgraceful complicity of the judiciary. It requires a high degree of constitutional literacy to understand fully; just try explaining it to a GOP officeholder (as I have tried many times) and watch the eyes glaze over. I’ve argued for a long time that the defect of the Claremont insight into the administrative state is that it is severely limited in practical politics if it requires a Ph.D to understand.

But one of Marini’s astute observations is easily accessible and ought to arrest even the dullest politico: For most of the last 50 years, nearly all successful presidential candidates, of both parties, have made their principal appeal as outsiders, running against Washington. Even Barack Obama, a sitting senator, ran largely in this mode. Does this not indicate fundamental disharmony between the people and their rulers? Never mind that Democrats are insincere when they speak of “the mess in Washington.” The administrative state is the partisan creation of liberalism and serves the ends of liberalism—a fact Republicans either do not clearly discern or fail to confront directly. If that statement seems hyperbole, try this simple thought experiment: If you’re a federal bureaucrat, which party is more likely to defend your professional interest and policy domain?

In opposition to the slow-motion Progressive assault on self-rule by the people, the conservative establishment has been offering mostly what can be called “checklist conserv-atism,” i.e., policy ideas with indirect or negligible political effect. What do Progressives stand for? Justice, equality, and the “right side of history”! What do conserv-atives stand for? More tax cuts, school choice, enterprise zones, a balanced-budget amendment, medical savings accounts, a statutory cost-benefit standard for regulation, and other policy wonkery. All worthy ideas, to be sure, but none of them reach very far to halt the steady unraveling of constitutional government.

In other words, while much of the conservative establishment is talking about policy (as the slogan “ideas have consequences” is typically misunderstood), the Claremonsters are talking about governance. But along with the increasing concentration of power in the hands of unaccountable experts is the equal concentration of authoritative public opinion in the hands of the experts and their media-academic allies. As Marini, a Trump supporter, told me last week, “Public opinion is in the hands of a national elite. That public opinion, the whole of the public discourse about what is political in America, is in the hands of very few. There’s no way in which you have genuine diversity of opinion that arises from the offices that are meant to represent it.” A good example of the defensive crouch of Republicans accepting the elite-defined boundaries of acceptable opinion was Sen. Ted Cruz’s comment shortly after the 2012 election that conservative social policy must pass through “a Rawlsian lens,” an astonishing concession to the supercharged egalitarian philosophy at the heart of contemporary leftism.

The enforced conformity of public opinion is also not a brand-new thought. Walter Lippmann perceived in the 1920s how elite dominance of public opinion would shape and constrict our political horizons, and you can hear the distinct echo of Tocqueville as well. But in recent years the combination of administrative sovereignty and authoritative public opinion has taken a menacing turn with liberalism’s full embrace of political correctness. It’s one thing for liberalism to organize and minister to society according to specific economic interests and ethnic group solidarity, which provided the practical glue for old-fashioned pork barrel politics. During the Obama years the boundaries of acceptable opinion have shifted sharply to an identity politics rooted in radical grievance that rejects wholesale the justice of American democracy. Marini summarizes it thus:

This is no longer just a campus fetish. It has broken out, with examples including the federal government threatening to cut off funding to any public school district that wishes to keep its single-sex bathrooms, the social pressure to punish anyone who opposes same-sex marriage like former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, and the legal vise-grip being applied to religious institutions that resist various government mandates. Liberalism today goes beyond wanting to control your pocketbook; it now demands to control how you think. It resembles the state of play that Lincoln noted in his Cooper Union address in 1860—that the South would not be placated by toleration of slavery, but demanded that we “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. .  .  . Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.” Just as in 1860, the tacit platform of today’s Democratic party is that the Republican party is illegitimate unless Republicans surrender their principles and get on “the side of history.”

Trump’s disruptive potential explains therefore his attraction for Claremonsters. More than just a rebuke to political correctness and identity politics, a Trump victory would be, in their eyes, a vehicle for reasserting the sovereignty of the people and withdrawal of consent for the administrative state and the suffocating boundaries of acceptable opinion backing it up. A large number of Americans have responded positively to Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” because they too see Trump as a forceful tribune against the slow-motion desiccation of the country under the steady advance of liberalism.

Does Trump understand any of this himself, or is his reflexive rejection of the establishment of both parties merely coincidental with his towering self-regard and boorish manner? Trump seems more like a stopped clock, right twice a day by chance. The difficulty with the Claremont argument is that it bids to understand Trump better than Trump understands himself. While a Trump victory on November 8 would represent a massive and salutary blow against our bipartisan ruling class, what happens after January 20, when governing begins? No one should want another administration staffed with K Street Republican factotums, but the presumed Trumpian alternative—private-sector business executives with little or no political experience (“the best people!”)—is unlikely to be any more effective in taming the administrative state. Washington bureaucracies eat business managers for breakfast. Could Trump carry them by his relentless bluster and force of will? Most of the Claremonsters admit this defect; even “Decius” says only that Trump “might” do some of the right things, whereas we know that a Hillary presidency will be hopeless.

The Trump disruption thesis is not held uniquely by the Claremonsters. David Gelernter offered a version of this argument in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, and Victor Davis Hanson has been arguing along these lines for months. But it does seem out of harmony with the Claremont focus on the high-minded understanding of the need for statesmanship. Is there a statesman lurking underneath Trump’s glitter and grimace?

The exacting demands of statesmanship have seldom been put better than by Hillsdale’s Thomas G. West, one of the most fervent Claremont pro-Trumpers, in a 1986 essay: “A president who would successfully lead the nation back to constitutional government must have the right character, be able to present the right speeches, and undertake the right actions to guide the people to elect a new kind of Congress.” Last week, I asked West whether and how Trump could measure up to this understanding of what is necessary today. West points to what he calls Trump’s “civic courage,” i.e., his intransigence in the face of relentless attacks, his willingness to call out radical Islamic extremism by name while noting the guilt-infused reluctance of Obama and Hillary Clinton to do so, his willingness to question the bipartisan failures of foreign policy over the last 25 years, and his direct rebuke to the collapse of the rule of law in cities with large black populations. West thinks Trump’s breathtaking stubbornness and shocking candor are the ingredients for the kind of restorative statesmanship the times demand.

I’ll leave to others to debate whether what West sees as Trump’s courage is closer to the recklessness that is the defect of courage. Perhaps Trump’s intransigence and self-regard would serve him well in office, but his likely failure at the polls next month ought to raise a serious question for those of us who hold aloft the banner of high statesmanship. We’ll never know whether a candidate of Trump’s disposition without his baggage and defects would succeed in winning in 2016 and governing effectively in 2017 and beyond. Did not James Madison warn that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm”? If the restoration of the republic depends more than ever on the contingency of a wise and forceful statesman winning election at the right moment, then it suggests the crisis of governance is so far advanced that we need more than just a great president to reverse our course.

Perhaps everyone has put too much emphasis on finding the supreme virtuous statesman—another Reagan—to lead us out of the wilderness. The failures and shortcomings of the Reagan presidency, whose experience and lessons are strangely unstudied by conservatives, ought to be a source of searching reflection. (I took a lot of criticism from some Reaganites for the conclusion of my book on his presidency, The Age of Reagan, for being less than fully triumphant about the greatness of the Gipper. I wrote that “Reagan was more successful in rolling back the Soviet empire than he was in rolling back the domestic government empire chiefly because the latter is a harder problem.”) It ought to be added, though, that this Waiting for Godot outlook is less fanciful than that of our legal friends who keep hoping that appointing the right Supreme Court justices and generating the right cases will chip away at “Chevron deference” and other constitutionally dubious props of the administrative state.

Still, I can’t help but think back to Willmoore Kendall’s admiring review of Crisis of the House Divided. While appreciating Jaffa’s profound understanding of Lincoln, Kendall worried that it set the bar for statesmanship at a level so high that it would elide inevitably into the requirement that we be governed by an endless series of Lincolns. But true statesmen are exceedingly rare things, and a constant emphasis on the statesman would become willy-nilly a Caesarism that would favor the left, the chief example of our time being Obama. Trump certainly looks like an example of Caesarism run amok, though he may be better understood as an example of how low our standards have sunk, that someone as crude and ill-equipped as Trump can appear bold and fresh. That Trump can be made out to be the only candidate since Reagan who has represented a fundamental challenge to the status quo puts in stark relief the attenuation of conservative political thought and action over the last 20 years and the near-complete failure of aspiring Republican presidents to marry their ambition to a serious understanding of why the republic is in danger.

Lincoln famously said in 1854, “Our republican robe is soiled.” We need only capitalize one word to adapt it to our time: “Our Republican robe is soiled.” The cleanup is going to be excruciating. But nothing is more necessary and important.

Steven F. Hayward is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Patriotism Is Not Enough:

Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism (forthcoming from Encounter Books), from which this article is adapted.