Claremonsters and The Shipwrecked Mind
Back in the day I was a student for a year at Claremont Men’s College, today known as Claremont-Mckenna, in Southern California. My father sent me there hoping I would be influenced by Leo Strauss and some of his famous students, who had somehow ended up in the Los Angeles suburbs. A few ideas rubbed off but for the most part I treated Claremont as a chance to enjoy what I saw as Californian freedom, little of which involved studying political theory. Ironically, as it turns out, many of my best friends were Hispanics who were trying to organize and agitate their way (this was 1970 after all!) into Claremont’s conservative Anglo heart.
This was long ago and only lasted a year, but still I am surprised that I had not heard the term “Claremonster” until today, when I read a review in the New Yorker of Mark Lilla’s new book The Shipwrecked Mind. ‘Claremonster’ refers to the militant wing of West Coast Straussians who inhabit the Claremont Institute and publish the Claremont Review. Among the things that they oppose and loath (they are defined for the most part by their dislikes) are political correctness, Ivy League elites, and Barack Obama, not necessarily in that order. A number of them are close to Clarence Thomas, and Thomas has acknowledged the influence of the ur-Claremonster, Harry Jaffa. Jaffa is famous for penning parts of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech but in Claremonster circles is better understood as the founder of the Abraham Lincoln cult that most subscribe to.
The Shipwrecked Mind deals with a slew of 20th century thinkers, including Strauss, who were backward looking and obsessed with discovering ‘where things went wrong.’ That something awful is wrong with modern life is the starting point for their thinking, and while for a Strauss or Eric Voegelin who lived through Nazi Germany and WWII this is not hard to understand, it seems problematic to apply the same dire lens to the United States, as is the habit of many of today’s Straussians. (And not, in my admittedly limited understanding, of Strauss himself).
Now, in the Claremonster universe someone must be to blame for today’s American horror show of political correctness and federal overreach and rule by unelected intellectual elites, and after searching high and low they have hit upon…Woodrow Wilson. Wilson it seems is the symbol of Progressivism and the creator of the modern bureaucratic, technocratic state. (Whether this is true, or a bad thing, is debatable, but since it isn’t debatable that Wilson was an unadulterated racist, perhaps the Claremonsters can make ironic common cause with Princeton agitators who want Wilson effaced from campus).
Lilla distinguishes ‘reactionaries’ from conservatives because of their revolutionary inclinations—to set things right by correcting whatever the great historical error was. Here is where the danger of Claremonsterism comes to light, because it is one thing to do intellectual battle with Machiavelli or Gnosticism or Hegel’s historicism or whatever intellectual trend you think is undermining Western civilization, but another to think, with the Claremonsters, that Donald Trump is a potential savior of the Republic. They believe Trump’s shortcoming—things like chronic lying, racist scapegoating, threatening political opponents with violence, and conspiracy-mongering–are forgivable because he is right on the Big Issue, rejecting the political correctness and identity politics that are the products of progressivism.
What is the Claremonsters’ not-so-secret dream? A central figure of the cult, John Marini, wrote in July that “Regardless of his motives, therefore, Trump has gone to the heart of the matter and made a political issue of these intellectual and social crises. Trump has not attempted a theoretical justification for doing so. That remains to be made by the thinkers.” Once one stops laughing at the idea of Trump attempting a theoretical justification of anything, the historical mission of the Claremonsters becomes clear. Look soon for an essay on the “inner greatness” of Trumpism.