The MAGA New Right

How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right

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“How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right”

Author: Elisabeth Zerofsky
Year: 2022
Genre: Longform journalism (institutional profile)
Publication: New York Times Magazine, August 7, 2022

Core Argument

Zerofsky’s piece is the definitive journalistic account of the Claremont Institute’s transformation from a small Straussian think tank into the intellectual command center of the MAGA New Right. The argument: Claremont’s institutional readiness (a coherent constitutional theory, a fellowship pipeline, an ideological framework emphasizing catastrophe and corruption of the founding) made it uniquely positioned to provide what Trump needed — intellectual legitimacy and a narrative of the permanent crisis.

The key figure of merit: Thomas Klingenstein’s honest admission that Claremont views itself as fighting a “cold civil war” in which normal democratic norms (compromise, accepting losses, negotiating with opponents) no longer apply.

Institutional History

  • Founded 1979 by four of Harry Jaffa’s students: Larry Arnn, Peter Schramm, Tom Silver, and Chris Flannery — at the end of the Carter administration, after Vietnam and stagflation, as a “rickety little organization” mailing opinion essays to local newspapers.
  • Publius Fellowship (six-week summer graduate seminar): the pipeline that produced a generation of conservative elites. Alumni include: Tom Cotton, Josh Hammer, Christopher Rufo, Ben Shapiro, Jack Posobiec (Pizzagate propagandist), Babs Hough (Marjorie Taylor Greene aide).
  • Lincoln Fellowship: secondary fellowship program.
  • Charles Kesler was among the first Publius fellows (summer 1980); came from Harvard, where he’d been mentored by William F. Buckley.
  • Michael Pack was president before Ryan Williams; left to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media under Trump, promptly purging its leadership.
  • Ryan Williams became president at ~35, hired a cohort of young staff, launched The American Mind as a “punk-rock CRB.”

The Clarence Thomas Connection

One of the most significant institutional facts in the article: Clarence Thomas, as chairman of the EEOC under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, hired Claremont scholars Ken Masugi and John Marini as aides. They were, in Thomas’s description, theorists “who understood Lincoln.” During what Thomas recalled as a period of “great intellectual development,” they spent hours discussing Jaffa’s teachings on natural law — and Thomas began citing the Declaration of Independence in his jurisprudence. The Claremont-Thomas connection explains a significant strand of Supreme Court reasoning.

Key Figures Quoted

Thomas Klingenstein (board chair): “If you’re actually in a war, even if it’s a cold war, you behave differently. You’re less inclined to compromise. You’re more aggressive. In war, you don’t negotiate until you’ve won.”

Ryan Williams (president): described the administrative state as now being put to use for “expert administration of social justice.” Wants Congress to start “legislating again” rather than delegating to bureaucracy. On counterrevolution charge: “One of the goals of the more polemical stuff is to wake up our fellow conservatives.”

Charles Kesler: “I’ve always thought that Trump lost [in 2020].” On January 6: “constitutionalists should be aghast at what happened.” On Eastman’s advice: “I disagree with John. I think it was a bad idea.” Kept Eastman in the CRB debate nonetheless.

Michael Anton: “In many millions of voters’ minds, those highly decorous political types, they saw them as timid and weak and not sufficient to the challenge.” On Trump’s “smashmouth style” as indispensable.

William Voegeli (CRB senior editor): posed the central dilemma — whether it’s a bigger mistake to keep fighting for a republic that may be “beyond resuscitation” or give up on one “whose vigor might yet be restored.”

Arthur Milikh (Center for American Way of Life director): “A great deal of money is funneled into higher ed, and broadly speaking that money is a system of fraud.” Argues states should defund universities teaching “social-justice ideology.”

Philip Jaffa (Harry’s son): “I have come to watch the Claremont Institute embody the very things that my father criticized in the conservative movement.” Cited Christopher Caldwell’s Robert E. Lee essay in CRB as directly contradicting his father’s teachings.

Laura Field (quoted): “I think there’s a story here about the insularity of the conservative world… Claremont has been pretty much unchallenged by broader academia.” Identified as “a political philosopher and scholar in residence at American University, who has published several sharp critiques of Claremont over the last year in The Bulwark.”

Budget and Donors

  • Budget in 2019: approximately 2.5M, roughly half)
  • Budget by 2022: approximately $9 million
  • Major donors (beyond Klingenstein): Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation; Bradley Foundation
  • DeSantis: Arnn called DeSantis “one of the most important people living”; Hillsdale has assisted DeSantis’s Florida education reforms

Post-January 6 Split

The divide over Eastman crystallized the institute’s internal tensions:

  • Chris Flannery (co-founder) called Eastman “an American hero.”
  • Matthew Continetti stopped contributing to the CRB.
  • Klingenstein: Eastman is “one of ours” — kept him.
  • Kesler: disagreed with Eastman’s advice but ran the CRB debate anyway as a way of “shutting the Pandora’s box.”
  • Williams: “We’re not going to throw him under the bus just because his representation of the president was controversial.”

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