Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness

by Charles R. Kesler

Overview

American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders’ Constitution, as amended and as grounded in the natural and divine rights and duties of the Declaration of Independence. American liberals herald their “living Constitution,” a term that implies that the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or transformation (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social democracy ruled by a Woke elite.

Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. It takes controversial stands on matters political and scholarly, describing the political genius of America’s founders and their efforts to shape future generations through a constitutional culture that included immigration, citizenship, and educational policies. Then it turns to the attempted progressive refounding of America, tracing its accelerating radicalism from the New Deal to the 1960s’ New Left to today’s unhappy campus nihilists. Finally, the volume appraises American conservatives’ efforts, so far unavailing despite many famous victories, to revive the founders’ Constitution and moral common sense. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, what have conservatives learned and where should they go from here?

Along the way, Charles R. Kesler argues with critics on the left and right, and refutes fashionable doctrines including relativism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and radical traditionalism, providing in effect a one-volume guide to the increasingly influential Claremont school of conservative thought by one of its most engaged, and engaging, thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641771023
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Pages:	472
Sales rank:	675,580
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles R. Kesler is editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, and the coeditor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edition of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling one in the country. In 2017, Politico magazine named Kesler to its annual Politico 50 list of “the key thinkers, doers, and visionaries who are reshaping American politics and policy,” and in 2018 the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation awarded him a Bradley Prize.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part I The Founders' Constitution

1 The Founders and the Classics 3

2 Relativism and the Declaration of Independence 33

3 Federalist 10 and American Republicanism 47

4 Civility and Citizenship: George Washington on Civil and Religious Liberty 83

5 Perpetuating the Republic: Education and Politics 101

6 A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln, Harry V. Jaffa, and the Founders 119

Part II The Progressives' Constitution

7 Three Waves of Liberalism 143

8 Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress 169

9 Constitutional Decline and the Administrative State 196

10 From Citizenship to Multiculturalism 218

11 Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism 257

12 The Old New Left and the New New Left 273

Part III Conservatives and the Two Constitutions

13 Reagan's Unfinished Revolution 291

14 What's Wrong with Conservatism? 318

15 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine 341

16 Culture, Creed, and American Nationalism 354

17 Trump and the Conservative Cause 369

18 Thinking about Trump: Morality, Politics, and the Presidency 383

Acknowledgments 401

Notes 405

Index 435

Editorial Reviews

Charles Kesler is one of America’s foremost conservative intellectuals, and in this hard-hitting, thought-provoking but witty analysis of the United States’ present discontents he reminds us why. His laser-like pinpointing of the profound dichotomy between the Founders’ constitution and the Progressivists’ constitution explains much of what ails America today, but it also provides the key to the way out, when people recognize how profoundly superior the former is to the latter.”—Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Despite its conceits of bow-tied eccentricity and rugged individualism, American conservatism too often traffics in lockstep groupthink: Never Trumpers mechanically affirm the idol of Reagan while MAGA boosters indiscriminately applaud Trump’s celebrity. What these bitterly opposed factions share is a disregard for the substance of the problems we face — a candid acknowledgment of which was the key achievement of Trump’s revolutionary 2016 campaign. Charles Kesler is one of the few conservatives to transcend the factionalism that distracts us from our problems. He ably connects the legacy of conservative thought to the situation of the present, and he does it with wit and good cheer. This volume is an essential corrective for our desperately distracted time.”—Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Almost any one of the thousands of paragraphs herein could be the subject of a three-hour seminar that would seem to pass in an instant. The book traces an elegant arc beginning with the deepest, most erudite Constitutional philosophy and ending with brilliant, novel, and profound political analysis. All the while, it is historically authoritative, cool, balanced, and witty. Herein you will find striking revelations about the deepest and most complicated roots of the American experiment, as well as masterful, often magisterial, historical and contemporary political analysis. No one loves the Constitution more than Charles Kesler, except perhaps James Madison.” —Mark Helprin

From the Publisher