Editor | Charles R. Kesler |
---|---|
Managing Editor | John Kienker |
Senior Editor | William Voegeli |
Frequency | Quarterly |
Circulation | 14,000 [lower-alpha 1] [ citation needed ] |
Publisher | Ryan Williams |
Founded | 2000 |
Company | The Claremont Institute |
Country | United States |
Based in | Claremont, California |
Language | English |
Website | claremontreviewofbooks |
ISSN | 1554-0839 |
OCLC | 184908708 |
This article is part of a series on |
Conservatism in the United States |
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The Claremont Review of Books (CRB) is a quarterly review of politics and statesmanship published by the conservative Claremont Institute. A typical issue consists of several book reviews and a selection of essays on topics of conservatism and political philosophy, history, and literature. [1] Authors who are regularly featured in the Review are sometimes nicknamed "Claremonsters." [2] [3]
The editor is Charles R. Kesler. The managing editor is John Kienker, and the senior editor, William Voegeli. [4] Joseph Tartakovsky is a contributing editor. Contributors have included William F. Buckley Jr., Harry V. Jaffa, Mark Helprin (a columnist for the magazine), Victor Davis Hanson, Michael Anton, Diana Schaub, Gerard Alexander, David P. Goldman, [5] Allen C. Guelzo, Joseph Epstein, Hadley P. Arkes, and John Marini.
Legal scholar Ken Masugi was editor of the first iteration of the Claremont Review of Books which existed for just under two years in the mid-1980s. According to Jon Baskin, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education , it "looked more like a college newspaper," and had about 600 subscribers. [4]
The Review was re-established in 2000 under the editorship of Charles R. Kesler in what The New York Times described as "a conservative, if eclectic, answer to The New York Review of Books ." [1] In 2017 it had about 14,000 subscribers. [4] [ citation needed ]
According to historian George H. Nash, the editors and writers at Claremont are Straussian intellectually, heavily influenced by the ideas of Leo Strauss and his student Harry V. Jaffa. In their view, the Progressive Era culminating in the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson marked an ideological and political repudiation of political ideals of the Constitution and the American Founders, replacing a carefully limited government with government by experts and bureaucrats who were insulated from popular consent. They saw similar threats in the presidency of Barack Obama. [6]
The Review took a pro-Trump position during the 2016 election campaign, with an article by Charles Kessler criticizing the Never Trump movement. "Conservatives care too much about the party and the country to wash our hands of this election," he wrote. "A third party bid would be quixotic.". [7] Nevertheless, the Review published articles by both Trump supporters and "Never Trumpers" during the 2016 campaign, moving after his election to a thoroughly pro-Trump position. [1] According to the New York Times, in the spring of 2017 the Review was "being hailed as the bible of highbrow Trumpism." [4] [1]
Jon Baskin understood the Review's pro-Trump stance as "an expression of the belief that conservative intellectuals can cut a path between the East Coast Straussians' political reticence and the ineffectual tinkering of the think tankers," but was at a loss to explain "how a group so attached to the principles of the Constitution could place its faith in the author of The Art of the Deal ." [4] According to senior editor William Voegeli, the reason lies in Kesler's scholarly examination of the origins of American progressivism. [4] In a series of articles and in his book I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism, Kesler has argued that Woodrow Wilson and the first generations of American technocrats with PhDs earned at American universities produced the modern American "administrative state." To Kesler and the other Claremonsters, the administrative state has not only produced a series of costly and ineffective social programs, it has eroded democratic norms, substituting the shallow certainties of social science. In Baskin's phrasing, "one of the things that is most disturbing about Trump for liberal and conservative elites (including some East Coast Straussians)—his utter disdain for expertise and convention—is what is most promising about him from the point of view of the Claremonsters." [4] As Voegeli put it, "Our view is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas progressives are inclined to think that government derives just powers from the expertise of the experts." [4]
During the George W. Bush administration, the Review "made a conservative case against the war in Iraq." [4]
Kesler's "Democracy and the Bush Doctrine" [8] was reprinted in an anthology of conservative writings on the Iraq War, edited by Commentary Managing Editor Gary Rosen. The CRB was party to a high-profile exchange in Commentary between Editor-at-Large Norman Podhoretz and CRB editor Charles R. Kesler and CRB contributors and Claremont Institute senior fellows Mark Helprin and Angelo M. Codevilla over the Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq War.
In September 2016, two months before the US 2016 presidential election, the Review published an online-only article entitled "The Flight 93 Election." [9] Written by Michael Anton under a pseudonym, the essay compared the election to choices that faced the passengers on Flight 93, one of the four hijacked planes used in the September 11th attacks. When the article was read by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, the sudden surge in demand to read it crashed the CRB website. [10] Addressing an audience of Republicans and Never-Trump conservatives, Anton argued that allowing the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to become president by abstaining from voting was the equivalent of not charging the cockpit.
David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.
William Kristol is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark and has been the host of Conversations with Bill Kristol, an interview web program, since 2014.
Leo Strauss was a German-American scholar of political philosophy who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
National Review is an American conservative right-libertarian editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs. The magazine was founded by the author William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. Its editor-in-chief is Rich Lowry, and its editor is Ramesh Ponnuru.
Neoconservatism is a political movement that began in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1960s during the Vietnam War among foreign policy hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, grounded in a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength." They are known for espousing opposition to communism and political radicalism.
The American Conservative (TAC) is a magazine published by the American Ideas Institute which was founded in 2002. Originally published twice a month, it was reduced to monthly publication in August 2009, and since February 2013, it has been published once every two months.
George Frederick Will is an American libertarian conservative writer and political commentator, who writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NewsNation.
Mark Helprin is an American novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. While Helprin's fictional works straddle a number of disparate genres and styles, he has stated that he "belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend".
Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist, and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont Graduate University, and was a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times".
The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank based in Upland, California. The institute was founded in 1979 by four students of Harry V. Jaffa. It produces the Claremont Review of Books,The American Mind, and other publications.
Charles R. Kesler is professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University. He is editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of several books. He also serves on the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida.
Thomas G. West is an American academic. He is a professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, and the author of three books.
The Reagan era or Age of Reagan is a periodization of recent American history used by historians and political observers to emphasize that the conservative "Reagan Revolution" led by President Ronald Reagan in domestic and foreign policy had a lasting impact. It overlaps with what political scientists call the Sixth Party System. Definitions of the Reagan era universally include the 1980s, while more extensive definitions may also include the late 1970s, the 1990s, and even the 2000s. In his 2008 book, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008, historian and journalist Sean Wilentz argues that Reagan dominated this stretch of American history in the same way that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy dominated the four decades that preceded it.
Bradley C. S. Watson is a Canadian-born American political science educator, lawyer, and writer, and a member of the "West Coast Straussian" school of political thought.
There has never been a national political party in the United States called the Conservative Party. All major American political parties support republicanism and the basic classical liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, emphasizing liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, the consent of the governed, opposition to aristocracy and fear of corruption, coupled with equal rights before the law. Political divisions inside the United States often seemed minor or trivial to Europeans, where the divide between the Left and the Right led to violent political polarization, starting with the French Revolution.
Michael Anton is an American conservative essayist, speechwriter and former private-equity executive who was a senior national security official in the Trump administration. Under a pseudonym he wrote "The Flight 93 Election", an influential essay in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
American Affairs is a quarterly American political journal founded in February 2017 by Julius Krein. The editors describe the journal as blending the literature and philosophy of the Claremont Review of Books with the political interests of National Affairs.
John Marini is an American political scientist. He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the author of two books about the administrative state and the co-editor of two more books.
Seth Leibsohn is a conservative talk show host and author. He is also a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and was the producer for Bill Bennett's Morning in America, a syndicated talk show in the 2000s. Most recently he was the co-host, along with Chris Buskirk, of the Phoenix-based talk show, The Seth and Chris Show. He resigned from the show in order to run for the House Seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. However, when the consulting group his campaign hired to spearhead the campaign failed to collect the required number of signatures to appear on the ballot, he was forced to withdraw from the race. Currently he hosts The Seth Leibsohn Show on KKNT in Phoenix.