The Claremont Review of Books is everything that is great about Claremont McKenna extracted from everything that is wrong with it. When you read it, you get the liberal arts education you ought to have gotten in college. It really is a graduate degree's worth of knowledge in every issue.
If you haven't been reading their work, you ought to -- if only because it is so true, so important, and so worth reading. Of course I say this as a man very low on the totem pole in that organization -- as a stable keeper, really, and perhaps, as my critics make clear from my Facebook, not a very good one. You can take that comment with the grain of salt, but that doesn't obviate the truth.
Below you have The Claremont Review of Books' editor, Charles R. Kesler, explaining what the CRB is about. I often get into arguments with other conservatives as to what kind of conservative I am. This is a good summation of what I believe.
If you haven't been reading their work, you ought to -- if only because it is so true, so important, and so worth reading. Of course I say this as a man very low on the totem pole in that organization -- as a stable keeper, really, and perhaps, as my critics make clear from my Facebook, not a very good one. You can take that comment with the grain of salt, but that doesn't obviate the truth.
Below you have The Claremont Review of Books' editor, Charles R. Kesler, explaining what the CRB is about. I often get into arguments with other conservatives as to what kind of conservative I am. This is a good summation of what I believe.
Yet we should not delude ourselves into thinking that conservatism is in robust good health, either. It is surely better off than liberalism, but the Right has its own problems, perhaps best signified by the gap between the political possibilities suddenly raised by the Tea Party's emergence and the rapid electoral repudiation of President Obama's statist agenda, on the one hand, and the confusion over what, exactly, a return to constitutional government could possibly mean, on the other.
Which is why the CRB seeks to reinvigorate the American mind by returning to its first principles. Here we follow the lead of the Claremont Institute itself, which is pledged to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our public life. As Harry V. Jaffa has argued wisely and often, a return to the principles of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address requires something like a revolution not only against modern liberalism but also within modern conservatism.
Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. While we respect both thinkers and their schools of thought, we begin instead from America, the American political tradition in all its genius and profundity, and the relation of our tradition to revealed wisdom and to what the elderly Jefferson once called, rather insouciantly, "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." We think conservatism should take its bearings from the founders' statesmanship, our citizens' loyalty to the Declaration and Constitution, and the scenes, both tender and proud, of our national history. This kind of approach clears the air. It concentrates the mind. It engages and informs the ordinary citizen's patriotism. And it introduces a new, sharper view of liberalism as descended not from the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, nor (God forbid) Abraham Lincoln, but from that movement which, a century ago, criticized George Washington's and Lincoln's Constitution as outmoded and, as we'd say today, racist, sexist, and antidemocratic. The Progressives broke with the old Constitution and its postulates, and set out to make a new, living constitution and a new, unlimited state, and the Obama Administration's programs are merely the latest, and worst, installment of that purported evolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment