Randal Hendrickson is the host of PODOPTICON, a politics, history, & philosophy podcast. The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in southern California, came to prominence during the Trump years. Founded in 1979, the organization aims to deliver high-sounding lessons … Continue reading It’s Manly Man Summer at the Claremont Institute
I guess great minds think alike. I was just in the middle of writing my own recommendation of Tom’s essay, when Laura and George wrote theirs. Still I’ll triple down on the recommendation. Tom Merrill (American University) has a piece in the Bulwark today that is truly outstanding. Framed as a review of Glenn Ellmers’s, The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America, Merrill undertakes a profound analysis not only of Harry Jaffa and the Claremont Institute, but of intellectuals more generally. I liked it especially for this line: “There is some foolishness that only intellectuals … Continue reading The Foolishness of Intellectuals
Tom Merrill, who is an associate professor at American University and a Hume scholar, has written an excellent, super-sober review of Glenn Ellmers’ new book, The Soul of Politics (which is a book about Harry Jaffa). Merrill doesn’t ignore the fact that Ellmers has recently indulged in some truly ugly polemics, but he takes the book on its own terms, and elevates the tenor of the “What the Hell Happened to Claremont” debate a couple notches. He renders all the questions that inform this discussion about as interesting and subtle as you could hope for. Which to say that Merrill … Continue reading Recommended Reading: Tom Merrill on the Claremont Institute
The Constitutionalist’s Regular Contributor, Laura K. Field, distills the essence of her series of political warnings in this new piece in The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/163939/pro-trump-professors-plot-authoritarian-america Continue reading The Emerging Threat
The Claremont Institute released a statement this morning defending John Eastman against charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election by giving Vice President Pence a road map for impeding the Electoral College. It lodges two complaints. The first amounts to a claim that the media has misrepresented the precise manner in which Eastman advised Pence to subvert the voters’ constitutional will. This is like a player of the game Clue saying that Colonel Mustard was a good dinner guest because he actually committed the murder in the conservatory with the lead pipe rather than in the conservatory with … Continue reading Claremont Plays the Victim Card
Laura K. Field is a writer and political theorist, Scholar in residence at American University, and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. She is a regular contributor to The Constitutionalist. Counter-majoritarianism isn’t in and of itself always a problem. But when it’s … Continue reading The GOP’s Minoritarian Defense and Justificatory Schema
This is the second in a series of several essays by different authors on the issue of conspiracies. This series is sponsored by Claremont McKenna’s Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom. Laura Field is a scholar in residence at … Continue reading Sinister Syncopation: The “New Conspiracism” Meets the Intellectuals of the Reactionary Right
