In the New Republic‘s August 10th issue Katherine Stewart published a long and learned account of the now openly anti-democratic polemicizing at the Claremont Institute, titled “The Claremont Institute: The Anti-Democracy Think Tank” (https://newrepublic.com/article/174656/claremont-institute-think-tank-trump) pointing out that what was once a sort-of normal conservative think tank has since 2015 become something much uglier: “In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism…Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example.”
With a couple of trivial caveats, this seems right. Stewart distinguishes Jaffa, Mansfield and Strauss from their post-2015 mutant epigones, but maybe not enough. Jaffa & Co. were sometimes nuts, but along with Strauss they seem to have believed that democracy should be defended, in Strauss’s case because democracy was the only regime more or less permitting philosophy. Jaffa’s strange conviction that the Founders were strong Aristotelians seems to have prohibited any enthusiasm for fascistoid insurrectionism, and I know of no evidence that Mansfield ever defended an American coup, or anything like: he believed in a very strong executive’s right to take emergency measures, but not with immunity after the emergency had passed, which is a very different proposition. I do not think earlier Struassians were committed racists masking this belief with a fraudulent show of enthusiasm for Frederick Douglass—after all, Jaffa thought Lincoln was right, Douglass not so much. The earlier Straussians were not fascists, whereas the post-2015 Claremontagnards are openly anti-democratic, and the openness of their views is at least as much an opportunity as it is a danger. Very few Americans are on record supporting the use of violence to overturn elections, and stressing the genealogy of the Claremontagnards risks minimizing their radicalism.
I don’t think the genealogy of the Claremontagnards matters, and with any luck they won’t matter, either. Contempt for democracy and the rule of law in a possible Republican administration matters, but neither Trump nor De Santis needed to learn that contempt from some loons on the West Coast. Trump and Co. have been quite capable of coming to this view on their own, and I do not think the presence of Michael Anton in Trump’s administration was any kind of sine qua non. When given the opportunity, which Trump’s remarks often do, Biden should talk calmly but plainly about what’s at stake. He might want to let it be known that he’ll of course use armed force to defend the Capitol in 2024, and to defend every federal courthouse now.
As to why Claremontagnards are now malevolently illiberal anti-democrats aligning with racists and mad misogynists: maybe not because of their intellectual genealogy, but because they’re losing elections, educated women and younger voters are their worst and most inveterate enemies, and they may be openly flirting with avowed white supremacists because they despair of attracting enough minority and non-college voters voters to Rightist culture war politics. The electorate doesn’t love Biden, but in every poll it loves Trump much less. The Claremont Institute’s violent apocalypticism, very much part of the broader Trumpean idiom, is almost certainly one of the things the majority of the electorate doesn’t like.