The Academic Home of Trumpism

Jon Boskin:

Did the Motley regulars know that, less than 400 yards away, the academic vanguard of the Trump administration had been provided with office space and tenure?

Charles R. Kesler, whose class on The Federalist Papers I would be attending that afternoon, is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and presiding chieftain of an obscure (until recently) tribe of political philosophers known as the “West Coast Straussians” — named for the émigré philosopher Leo Strauss. Kesler is also the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, the conservative magazine that The New York Times says is “being hailed as the bible of highbrow Trumpism.” “Like Richard Nixon in ’68,” Kesler wrote in May 2016, in one of his many prescient columns, “Trump felt that this election might test whether the center could hold, whether a silent majority could be mobilized on behalf of the country itself. The issue was not so much a showdown over liberal or conservative policies, but the simpler, more elementary question of whether a majority still wanted America to be great again.”

Noting the virulence of the opposition to Trump on his own liberal-arts campus, Kesler also predicted that, if Trump were to win, “the next four years may be one long demonstration,” as had been the case after the election of 1968. That prediction may yet bear out, but, beyond the fliers, I saw little evidence of unrest as I made my way from the coffee shop to a nondescript basement classroom in the Claremont Graduate University.