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1 week ago | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Charles Kesler |John Rosenthal |William Voegeli |Carnes Lord
Download When the 28-year-old Bill Buckley wrote to his new pen pal, Whittaker Chambers, asking permission to come and meet him for the first time, Chambers, recovering at his Maryland farmhouse from another heart attack, replied cheerily, “By all means come.
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Mar 5, 2025 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Charles Kesler |Michael Kochin |Jeffrey Anderson |Christopher Flannery
The capital is rattled. The headlines tell the story. From The Wall Street Journal: “DOGE Staffer Arrives at Internal Revenue Service Headquarters.” “DOGE Aides Search Medicare Agency Payment Systems for Fraud.” “Musk Moves with Lightning Speed to Exert Control Over the Government.”Well, that last one, though an actual headline, is a little ahead of the facts.
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Mar 2, 2025 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Christopher Caldwell |Kyle Smith |Charles Kesler |William Voegeli
The amazing thing about Donald Trump’s arrival in office for his second term has been the sheer consequentiality of it. What felt like an inflection has proved a revolution. Dreams that seemed alive to some people just six months ago—transcending binary sexuality, for example—are dead and discredited. So are the state mechanisms by which such dreams were imposed—affirmative action, speech codes, and so on.
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Feb 24, 2025 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Daniel Mahoney |Mark Helprin |William Voegeli |Charles Kesler
This fall, celebrity intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates moved on from demanding reparations for America’s racial sins to comparing Israel with the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stronger and more intense than in Israel,” Coates writes in his new book, The Message.
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Feb 23, 2025 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | David Goldman |Charles Kesler |Karl Rove
In Jules Dassin’s 1960 comedy Never on Sunday Melina Mercouri’s Piraeus demimondaine weeps at the awful denouement of “Medea,” but cheers up when the actors take their curtain call.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Charles Kesler |Edward Feser |Jeffrey Anderson |Theodore Dalrymple
Donald Trump and the Republican Party had a triumphant Election Day, gaining ground in all parts of the country and among almost all voting sectors. He won all seven of the ballyhooed swing states, by comfortable margins except in the blue-wall states of Wisconsin (where his margin of victory was 0.9%), Michigan (1.4%), and Pennsylvania (1.8%). Still, he won all three blue-wall states twice—in 2024 as in 2016—something no Republican had managed since Ronald Reagan.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Craig Kennedy |Charles Kesler |Martha Bayles |Theodore Dalrymple
Ask Americans to name a charity and most will mention their church, a local food bank, the community theater, or, at Christmastime, the Salvation Army.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Harvey Mansfield |Charles Kesler |Michael Barone |David Azerrad
CRB editor Charles R. Kesler recently sat down with Harvey C. Mansfield at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a wide-ranging conversation, the distinguished Harvard professor of government, who retired from teaching last year at age 91, discussed his life, Harvard’s woes, Leo Strauss, Niccolò Machiavelli, the two greatest books on American politics, and more.
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Aug 25, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Mark Helprin |Charles Kesler |Algis Valiunas
Political SolutionsAn illusion of the Claremont worldview is that theories of politics shape actual politics. Claremont theorists typically assert that tragic errors of understanding were made in the early and mid-20th century. That was when Progressives and other ideologues sold our leaders on a far larger national regime than the American Founders ever imagined. Supposedly, that error must be reversed in order to confine government to its proper sphere.
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Aug 25, 2024 | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Charles Kesler |Mark Helprin |Jean M. Yarbrough
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, of blessed memory, proceeded under the banner “Let’s Finish the Job.” When it became clear that the job had finished Biden or at least his candidacy, the Democrats replaced him as coldly and firmly as they had cleared the way for him, at the expense of Bernie Sanders, in early 2020. It was nothing personal; just business. With as little compunction, the party shifted its message, too.
