At Law & Liberty, Richard Reinsch: Charles Kesler’s Struggle for the Founders’ Constitution. From the introduction:
American conservatism finds itself in a strange place. A resounding electoral victory was achieved in the 2024 election by a Republican party that, while modified from its Goldwater-Reagan standard, remains comprehensible to the conservative temperament. Conservatism is the form of the Republican party, or the party ceases to exist. Yet, conservatism has never agreed on the measuring rod of its activity. What precisely does it want to achieve, such that it knows the truth of its strategies and tactics?
One thinker who has been teaching, writing, and editing in ways that help us answer these essential questions is Charles Kesler, the founding editor of The Claremont Review of Books and a Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. His political essays and editorship of the CRB are widely known across conservatism. Kesler has also formed the minds of graduate students who have assumed leading roles in academia, politics, journalism, and non-profit work. A new book of essays, titled Leisure with Dignity, by former Kesler students bids us to consider Kesler’s career because his teaching and writing bear close study for the conservative cause and our constitutional republic.
We live in a season of thoughtful and, at times, highly contested grappling with the question of how conservatives recover an America paralyzed, if not broken, by progressive ideology. I interviewed Kesler and read his scholarly output to better understand his political thinking and what it means in this period of national tumult. Kesler’s distinctiveness is best understood through those who influenced him and shaped him to be a thinker capable of political writing who joins foundational principles with current events and circumstances to produce essays that enlighten our understanding, helping us understand pitfalls and opportunities.
His essays, for example, on President Trump, argue that the Founders’ Constitution needs a sturdier defense than the Republican party has offered it. President Trump has proven consequential in certain forms, especially identity politics, Kesler notes. Yet Kesler’s essays on the failures of conservative politicians to join their policies and arguments to a reinvigoration of the Constitution also should serve in any analysis of what Trump could accomplish. Kesler has also emerged as a distinctive critic of the so-called New Right in both its National Conservative and postliberal elements. But he has done so with a robust articulation of American constitutionalism and the virtues it demands. Members of these schools will profit from reading his arguments. This essay will further analyze what conservatives have missed in their overall mission and, by considering Kesler’s thinking on the Founders’ Constitution and Reagan’s presidency, outline how a reformed conservatism might recover a constitutional refounding.
Posted at 6:07 AM