Glenn Ellmers
Claremont Institute senior fellow; visiting research scholar at Hillsdale College; author of “‘Conservatism’ is No Longer Enough” (American Mind, March 2021); “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term”
Who He Is
Glenn Ellmers is a Claremont Institute senior fellow and Hillsdale College visiting research scholar whose March 2021 American Mind essay represented a crystallization of post-January 6 Claremont extremism. He also appears in Chapter 11 of Furious Minds in connection with masculinity themes.
”’Conservatism’ is No Longer Enough” (March 2021)
Published in American Mind in March 2021, this essay was described by Field as offering “a crystallization of the relentless divisiveness and delusional self-regard that fueled Eastman’s actions.” The essay was topped by a stock-art photo of a boxer wrapping his hands for a fight.
Core claim: “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” The people in question: those who voted for Joe Biden (“the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism”). The “real” and “authentic” Americans: the seventy-four million people who voted for Trump — “the vast numbers of heartland voters who still call themselves Americans.”
John Ganz wrote at the time: “Its themes of pervading national corruption and decadence, and the need for a counter-revolution and a national rebirth put this text firmly in the radical reactionary or fascist ballpark.”
The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America (2021)
Ellmers wrote a book-length study of Harry V. Jaffa for a general audience, published by Encounter Books in 2021. Thomas Merrill’s review (The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory, The Bulwark, November 2021) is the most substantive external assessment.
Merrill’s verdict: the book reads as “something like ‘Jaffa’s view of Jaffa’” — Ellmers is too close to the subject, too invested in using Jaffa as a patron saint for today’s Trumpist movement, to offer an impartial account. The book’s opening address to readers — “you, spirited moral gentlemen, America’s natural aristoi” — exemplifies the problem: rhetoric designed for disaffected young men rather than anyone with a thought-out desire to govern.
Two genuine contributions Merrill acknowledges: (1) Ellmers correctly identifies that Jaffa’s “best regime” thesis is structurally similar to Hegel’s — like Fukuyama, Jaffa believed liberal democracy is the best final regime and that history has “ended” at the level of principle; (2) Ellmers makes a useful attempt to explain Jaffa’s mature argument about how the Founding resolved the tension between reason and revelation. But 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, and he “passes over in silence Jaffa’s truly absurd opinions about homosexuality.”
Merrill’s structural diagnosis: the book exemplifies the “temptation of theory” — Ellmers is so invested in Jaffa’s grand narrative of civilizational crisis that he cannot see Jaffa’s actual flaws, just as the Claremont school cannot see Trump’s actual flaws.
Cross-References
- Claremont Institute — his institutional home
- Hillsdale College — visiting research scholar
- January 6 2021 — the post-January 6 environment his essay crystallized
- The Claremonters — the movement he represents
- Michael Anton — fellow Claremonter; Flight 93 emergency logic that Ellmers pushes further
- Hard Right — Field groups Ellmers with the fascist-adjacent wing of the New Right
- Harry V. Jaffa — subject of his book
- The Claremont Institute Harry Jaffa and the Temptation of Theory — Merrill’s critical review of the book