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The Claremont Institute, Harry Jaffa, and the Temptation of Theory

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“The Claremont Institute, Harry Jaffa, and the Temptation of Theory”

Thomas Merrill | The Bulwark | November 15, 2021 | Book review / essay

Summary

A critical review of Glenn Ellmers’s The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America (Encounter Books, 2021). Merrill is a political theorist writing from outside the Claremont orbit; his piece is the most rigorous external diagnosis available of why the Claremont Institute was so susceptible to Trumpism — and how much of that susceptibility traces back to Harry V. Jaffa himself.

Key Claims

Philip Jaffa: Harry Would Not Have Supported Trump

Merrill opens by noting that Philip Jaffa (Harry’s son) told him directly that his father would not have supported Trump. The question “What would Jaffa have thought of Trump?” is, Merrill says, ultimately the wrong question — an example of the “presentism” that turns historical figures into partisan tokens. But the answer to the factual version is clear.

Ellmers’s Book: Partisan, Too Close to the Subject

Merrill praises Ellmers for making Jaffa accessible and for correctly pointing out two things: (1) Jaffa’s mature “best regime” thesis is similar to Hegel’s — like Fukuyama, Jaffa believes liberal democracy is the best final regime and that history has in that sense “ended” at the level of principle; (2) Jaffa’s argument that the American Founding resolves the tension between reason and revelation on the political level is a genuine contribution to the secondary literature.

But Merrill’s assessment is largely negative:

  • The book is “about as positive an account of Jaffa as one can imagine — something like ‘Jaffa’s view of Jaffa’”
  • Ellmers is “too much under the spell of Jaffa’s authority” to offer a critical portrait
  • He takes Jaffa’s later grandiose claims (e.g., that Aristotle “would have written something very closely approximating Locke’s Second Treatise”) at face value when they should be rejected as “mood affiliation”: I like Aristotle and I like Locke, therefore they must agree
  • Ellmers passes over in silence Jaffa’s “truly absurd opinions about homosexuality”

Jaffa’s Feuds: Shooting at Friends

Merrill identifies Jaffa’s long pattern of feuding with fellow Straussians (Harvey Mansfield, Walter Berns, Martin Diamond, Joseph Cropsey) as a significant character problem — and one that his heirs at Claremont replicated.

The key exchange: at a 1996 conference, Harvey Mansfield accused Jaffa of shooting at his allies instead of his enemies:

“You call yourself an academic scribbler. I wish! You are not even a loose cannon because a loose cannon does some of its harm, or maybe all of its harm, by accident. What you do is stand behind the front lines, and point your weapon at the backs of your friends and shoot!”

Mansfield’s point: Jaffa consistently treated people broadly sympathetic to his project — who disagreed with him on particular points — as heretics and traitors rather than allies. Joseph Cropsey made the same point in a 1984 letter, calling Jaffa “a pastiche of Don Quixote and Mrs. Grundy.”

Jaffa always interpreted these charges as attacks on his moral character; Merrill argues they were attacks on his intellectual character — his inability to recognize who his actual opponents were.

Jaffa vs. Strauss: The Unacknowledged Rupture

Merrill identifies the deepest unresolved issue in Jaffa’s corpus: his mature defense of the Founding is actually incompatible with Strauss’s own reading of Locke. Strauss’s interpretation of Locke was “esoteric” — Locke’s hidden views were godless, low, and anti-natural law. Jaffa’s solution was to claim the Founders understood only Locke’s “exoteric” (public, religious, natural-law) teaching, not the hidden atheism. But as Merrill points out, this avoids the central question of whether Strauss was right about Locke at all.

The implication: Jaffa’s feuds with fellow Straussians may have been a proxy for the deeper dispute with Strauss himself — one Jaffa could not or would not make explicit out of “filial piety.” His attacks on peers may have covered up the critique of Strauss that, by his own logic, he should have made.

Merrill: “One wishes that Jaffa’s students and admirers would acknowledge that their position is not Strauss’s; that would at least bring some clarity to the situation.”

The “Temptation of Theory”: Why Claremont Fell for Trumpism

Merrill’s central diagnostic argument is about the characteristic danger of intellectuals with grand theories:

“The characteristic danger of the intellectual is not simply in having a theory of the world. The danger is that you might become so invested in your theory that you can’t see what’s in front of you clearly.”

Once you have a theory that divides the world into an existential conflict between civilization and its destroyers, several pathologies follow:

  • Where others see an incompetent, incoherent establishment, you see a unified malevolent force
  • You persuade yourself that literally everything rides on a single election
  • You persuade yourself that your candidate — however unattractive in other respects — is the last hope for the principles you stand for
  • You find it hard to believe your candidate lost, because that would imply the “silent majority” doesn’t actually want to be saved by you

This is the Manichaean logic that drove the Claremonters toward Trump and toward the “Stop the Steal” narrative after 2020.

Claremont as Lagging Indicator, Not Leading Cause

Against commentators who argued that Claremont caused Trumpism, Merrill argues the causal arrow runs the other way: the Claremont school is “more a reflection of the mood of today’s conservatism than a cause of it — a lagging indicator rather than a leading one.” The movement carried the intellectuals along. The intellectuals then provided post-hoc rationalization.

The exception: John Eastman, whose January 6 memos were a genuine intellectual contribution to the coup attempt — active, not merely reflective.

Ellmers’s Rhetoric: “America’s Natural Aristoi”

Merrill skewers Ellmers’s opening address to his readers as “spirited moral gentlemen, America’s natural aristoi.” This is, Merrill argues, flattering to vanity and counterproductive to the stated goal of democratic statesmanship:

“I seem to remember an American authority saying that ‘the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.’”

The rhetoric is designed for “disaffected young men who want to complain about the modern world.” Governing requires understanding people who disagree with you — something the Claremont school has demonstrated it cannot do.

What Is Worth Preserving in Jaffa

Merrill does not dismiss Jaffa. He argues that Crisis of the House Divided (1959) is a genuine masterwork — its brilliance lay in Jaffa’s “marvelous political sense,” especially his ability to reconstruct Stephen Douglas’s point of view sympathetically while disagreeing fundamentally. That empathetic imagination is the opposite of the Manichaean framework his later career embodied.

Other elements worth preserving: Jaffa’s resolute anti-racism; his recognition that alongside the Declaration’s equality doctrine, America has persistent traditions of racial subordination that did not die in 1865; his emphasis on political agency and statesmanship. These are the parts of Jaffa’s legacy that a responsible conservative politics could build on — and that the current Claremont school has abandoned in favor of immigration restriction and anti-”woke” culture war.

Significance for the Wiki

This is the most analytically precise external account of the Jaffa-Claremont-Trumpism connection available. Several things it adds:

  1. The “lagging indicator” thesis directly challenges the simpler account in which Claremont’s theory caused Trumpism — suggesting instead that the theorists were captured by a popular movement they rationalized after the fact

  2. The Jaffa-Strauss rupture is an unresolved tension in the West Coast Straussian literature that Claremont school members have papered over

  3. The Mansfield and Cropsey charges add primary detail to the character portrait of Jaffa that helps explain the institutional culture his students inherited

  4. The “temptation of theory” diagnosis is a useful analytical frame for understanding not just Claremont but the broader New Right intellectual tendency toward catastrophism and friend/enemy Manichaeanisam

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