A Fine Claremont Statement on (Cough) Nearly Every Major Issue
Excerpts from Ryan Williams' Latest, with "Illustrations"
…political wisdom is primarily good judgment about unprecedented, particular situations…
David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” History of Political Philosophy
Ryan Williams is the President of the Claremont Institute, which among other things means he is the publisher of the essential The Claremont Review of Books, and of the website/magazine, The American Mind. Most readers of this substack already know about the Institute, an association of scholars who broadly endorse a number of principles of political philosophy and American history; this “school” is often referred to as “West Coast Straussianism,” as its principles were largely established by a particular student of Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, and are not shared by all Straussians and Strauss-influenced thinkers.
I once sketched the West-Coast position, and a few of Postmodern Conservativism’s differences with it, as part of a defense of the Claremont scholars Charles Kesler and Michael Anton from some hyperbolic wake-of-J6 criticism from Shep Melnick. You can also learn a great deal about the institute from its own website. You’ll see how a number of their leaders and fellows are key intellectual leaders for the conservative movement: Kesler, Anton, James Poulos, the Powerline guys, Hadley Arkes, and Christopher Buskirk, and you’ll also notice a number of less-in-the-public-eye but quite important scholars like William Allen, Colleen Sheehan, Allen Guelzo, Glenn Elmers, John Marini, Edward Erler, Mark Blitz, Ken Masugi, and my friend Lucas Morel, and I’ll conclude this list of appreciation with a mention of two of the most “Claremont-y” of the bunch that are very much worth reading, Ronald Pestritto and Thomas West.
Anyhow, Williams recently published “What Must Be Done,” the lead editorial for a symposium at The American Mind, and while several of the pieces are worth reading, his is a solid and artful summary statement of what he thinks ought to be the main Claremont positions on contemporary politics. It could be regarded as “institutional boilerplate,” I suppose, but it has quite a few moments of eloquence and passion for a summary piece. Williams indicates he seeks to lay out the “non-negotiable qualifications for holding high office as a Republican,” i.e., the correct stances on the following subject areas: Woke Leftism; Education; Immigration; the Administrative State, the DOJ/FBI, Foreign Policy, and Economic Policy; there is also a section on Big Tech, The Media, and the Intelligence Community.
You should read the piece yourself-- about 3,500 words. But if you’re impatient to know its main points, and what criticism my headline hints at, in what follows I excerpt about 40% of it, interspersed with a few comments, but also, with illustrations...
So here’s Williams:
…The question “what next for the Right?” is an urgent one because we find ourselves, as we have for the last six years at least, in a kind of rolling constitutional crisis.
This crisis is the culmination of a more than century-long assault on the Declaration of Independence, the principle of natural justice, the American Constitution, republicanism, and free government. The perpetrators of this assault may be variously referred to as Progressives, or the Left, or any of the other anti-American interest groups which have slowly but surely fused into one coalition. The word “Woke” has emerged as a useful shorthand for the modern version of this coalition. The term, originally one expressed with pride on the Left as a sign of proper ideological orthodoxy, has been appropriated by the Right to identify and deride the latest priorities of leftism. These priorities include nothing less than destroying the tenets of American justice and constitutionalism…
(A quibble: not sure this is a helpful definition of “Woke,” since the term has previously been used by critics to designate an extreme and cancel-happy form of identity-politics. It would be confusing to label positions like Green New Deal, vaccine-mandates, more military aid to Ukraine, etc. as “Woke.”)
…the woke have seized control over American life and public discourse. It is to the Right’s shame that the full scope of the problem evaded systematic analysis…until at least the 1990s. Many of my colleagues at the Claremont Institute… have conducted and continue to write just such analyses. …
…a long tradition of hostility to the Constitution and the American way of life…roots in the late 19th century… came to fruition in the 1930s under FDR, experienced explosive growth in the second half of the 1960s under LBJ’s political coalition, and has now reached full maturity...
…The…most consistent tenet of the modern Left’s project is that “expert” rule…must be given free reign if we are to achieve justice. …Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. or Woodrow Wilson (or even LBJ!) certainly didn’t envision Ibram X. Kendi’s proposed Department of Antiracism. But the spirit of this constitutional monstrosity…would be right at home in the Progressivism of the 1890s, the liberalism of FDR, or LBJ’s Great Society.
…the spirit of modern leftism, especially its commitment to bureaucratic rule over normal politics, now infuses nearly every major political, cultural, and educational institution in America. In other words, we are not now and have not been for some time engaged in the business of “normal” politics. We are fighting over constitutional fundamentals—over the type of regime or way of life we are to have in America...
I’m all about defending constitutional fundamentals, but I have some additional reasons for why we’re way beyond normal politics:
…The rollback of this entrenched regime will require statesmanship of a high order. A multi-generational political coalition must be assembled, drawing and building upon current American electoral trends. National electoral successes will have to be secured at the presidential and congressional level and shrewd political and policy reforms will need to be coordinated, advanced, sold to the public, passed, and implemented….
…The good news is that this herculean task creates opportunities for a Hercules or two. ….any worthy candidate for the presidency, indeed any political leader of national prominence, needs first to understand the current crisis and orient himself accordingly. These are the main issues, ranked loosely in order of more to less urgent, facing Americans today.
The Cancerous Spread of Woke Leftism: …America is not perfect, because no nation has ever been or can be. But wokeism teaches that nearly the entire political and economic history of America prior to the 1960s (or even to this day, if one consults the bleeding edge of academic leftism) is a tale of unmitigated racism, sexism, colonialism, xenophobia…
Any worthy national leader must oppose Woke at every possible turn, while relentlessly illustrating to the persuadable segment of the American public that this [is a] totalitarian ideology.
A common objection from many who are similarly concerned about this issue is that wokies are too entrenched across major institutions—corporate, educational, and public—and so this task is hopeless. You’ll suffer Don Quixote’s fate rather than Hercules’. But as usual, the Right has only just begun to try. We ought to embark on “bold, persistent experimentation” in this arena. There will be many tools lying around with which to bludgeon wokery…—to take just one example: the salaries for diversity make-work jobs...
Education: The rise of Woke leftism is directly indebted to its deeply sunk roots in education from pre-school through graduate school... The federal government’s role in the creation and durability of this ideological capture is vast. …Fight to get “critical race theory”—wokeism’s formal expression—out of all our schools. That emphatically includes public universities, which must be entirely free of CRT or lose public funding from red states. …
Immigration: …Right now, at the mid-point of one term of the Biden Administration, it’s quite possible that we have allowed 5-10 million illegal immigrants into this country (nobody knows the actual number…A goal that was mostly implicit in the designs of many that pushed for the transformation of immigration policy in the 1960s is now explicit, even celebrated, across the Left: the cultural and demographic transformation of America…millions of new voters that disproportionately vote for the party of the Left.... The woke logic of it makes sense. A “too-white” America spent 2/3 of its history oppressing the “Global South,” the narrative goes, so it’s only right and just that America pays reparations, so to speak…
Assimilation of new immigrants, especially through education and acculturation, is vital to the long-term political stability and success of a multiethnic democracy. There are limits to assimilation.... This is doubly true if you have what America has built in earnest over the last 50 years at least: a state-sponsored educational curriculum that relentlessly pushes the opposite of assimilation. …The first step for any president, of course, is stopping the flood of illegal immigration. Then come the hard policy questions and tradeoffs. A ten-year immigration moratorium, with some rare exceptions built in, would be a good place to start.
BTW, this is one place where I do part ways, slightly, with Williams on policy—while I would welcome public debate about such a moratorium, I’m don’t think I would be convinced to support it. That said, I’m generally with the Claremont position on immigration—see Michael Anton’s chapter on this in his essential 2020 book The Stakes, or the one in Thomas West’s Vindicating the Founders.
The Administrative State: …the rise of the administrative state and the bureaucracy has effectively ended normal politics at the national level on all but a very circumscribed set of issues. President Trump made…not a dent in the real problem: the bureaucracy’s insulation from political accountability. The “schedule F” reform, at the very tail-end of the Trump Administration, was a step in the right direction. As would be the REINS Act, a proposed law that would require significant regulations to be approved by Congress; …the goal of any serious administration and its allies in Congress should be “disrupting, discrediting, and destroying” the permanent, unaccountable, and un-republican fourth branch of government. …
The Department of Justice and the FBI: …the trend in the culture at the Department of Justice has been toward neutrality or even independence from the executive branch and the president. While a DOJ unscrupulously wielded as a political weapon can be a dangerous thing, the Department does not stand above or outside the normal chain of command. …the next AG needs to be appointed with one supreme task above others: a merciless house cleaning...
As for the FBI, its abolition, or a reorganization amounting to in effect the same thing, is probably in order (the same goes for the CIA). …
Here, here!
Big Tech, The Media, and the Intelligence Community: … it’s hard to determine where one of these institutions ends and the others begin. Insofar as Big Tech puts its thumbs on the scale of a good portion of online public deliberation, it is the equivalent…of a domestic misinformation operation …
It seems that with this subtitle, Williams is referrring to the recent speech-suppresion scandals revealed by Elon Musk and Missouri v. Biden, but of course, the Biden-admin/big-tech speech-suppression story is linked at the hip with another, one that has to do with the primary excuse used for the unprecedented suppressions. See Aaron Kheriaty, a Cali conservative like many of the Claremontians:
Foreign Policy: A restoration of a truly “America First” foreign policy …the [present] foreign policy establishment, takes its bearings from modern progressivism (and this is true of the establishment in both parties). …
Economic Policy: The middle class is the bulwark of all healthy republics. Whatever the originally intended outcomes of economic policy since the Reagan years, it is a lamentable fact that those policies have disproportionately benefited the financially and politically connected at the expense of normal working-class and middle-class Americans.
…As Jeffrey Anderson put it recently in the Claremont Review of Books, we’re on a “glidepath to insolvency.” The problem is there is right now very little appetite among the public to care or demand action about it. …even less desire among the political class… We just keep kicking the can down the road. The best a president can do is probably prepare to address the issue aggressively and intelligently when the inevitable sovereign debt and/or currency crisis comes…
https://rumble.com/v275t8i-youre-a-monster-canadians-heckle-and-shame-tyrant-trudeau-whenever-he-appea.html
So, what next for the Right? Support an agenda, in word and deed, from local school boards to the President of the United States, that understands the current crisis. Shun candidates and proposals that dismiss this existential threat. And do it all in good cheer and with the goal of persuading one’s fellow citizens and being magnanimous in victory...
There’s lots to like in what Williams has written. It is a perfectly fine piece for 2019, or, for another planet. And even for our time and place, Williams’ message that liberal democracy in America, and across the world, faces an “existential threat,” and that key elements of the threat are to be found in Wokeness, bad Education, the Administrative State, corrupt media and intelligence agencies, and financial profligacy, is urgently necessary.
But he apparently wants to talk about these things as a crisis without talking about the other Big Issue which my illustrations highlight: The Covid/Vax Disaster.
That, I am sorry to report, has become the Claremont way: no discussion, no mention of the vax-harm issue presently haunting society. A few unkind words said about lockdowns and maybe mandates, but as far as considering the mere possibility that the mRNA meds are proving unsafe, about the most one notices is a 2022 Theodore Dalrymple piece in the Review that panned the The Real Antony Fauci (he reported the very opposite of what Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying did, that when one checked on the voluminous references, one found errors).
This chosen Silence is sad, because the Disaster perfectly illustrates the danger of the Administrative State. And of progressivist Narrative-Allegiance. One reads the pages of Kheriaty’s brilliant The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, and sees no reason why a Claremonter couldn’t have written it. The Disaster shows that the Claremont people were quite right to issue the warnings they did over the years.
It is baffling, because on about all other issues, the Institute is bold. For example, it still employs John Eastman! Or notice above the way Williams seriously recommends total destruction and rebuilding of the FBI and the CIA!
So it sure feels like leaders at the Insitute are being pressured by someone internal to the organization, or by some external force, to stay mum on the vax-harms. One notices they haven’t even issued a statement that they are avoiding discussions of this topic, let alone a justification for doing so.
But who can say? I know zip about the Institute’s internal dynamics. And as I’ve quoted Bolotin on Thucydides at the outset of this piece, it seems wise to do so one more time:
…[Diodotus] warns especially that the city is harmed when speakers accuse one another of being corrupted by money, since fear then deprives it of counselors.
The Claremont scholars generally have been most excellent and loving counselors to the American republic. Thus, if there is any pressure at work in this case, I cannot believe that it would work by means of money…as it sure did in the case of Fox News…something else, which touches on higher considerations, would have to be the main bait. This is a mere point of speculation, though. I know nothing, have “caught wind” of nothing, and accuse them of nothing.
However, I do warn them that whatever their reasons for the silence, they are by this point defacto aiding the coordinated news-blackout. For that reason alone, I suspect some permanent damage to their reputation is being sustained.
Imagine a “self-aborting Lincoln,” who in 1854 would declare all his principles, but would not mention the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or a “self-aborting Churchill” in 1936 who would similarly declare all his, but wouldn’t mention the Nazis and their rearming of Germany. I do not claim that those men and women presently covering-over the vax-harms pose anything like the threat that Hitler did—what I rather want to stress is that Williams, who means the best for America and has the knowledge to help heal it, has fatally undermined his witness by ostentatiously choosing to not talk about the issue that will most define the coming years, and that will long be regarded as near the heart of our nation’s existential crisis.