The Californian think-tank that applies intellectual gloss to MAGA
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S everal years ago John Rigolizzo, then a fresh college graduate, spent two-and-a-half weeks by the beach in southern California with a dozen other young Republicans. They were not there for the surf or the sun, but to study Aristotle, Plato and Socrates at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think-tank. Together they learned the meaning of telos and read America’s founding texts. They watched “Top Gun: Maverick” with Michael Anton, a Claremont scholar who, in 2016, made an early intellectual case for Donald Trump. Mr Rigolizzo was already pro- MAGA before this crash course, but he says it gave him the philosophical and historical foundation to defend the Trump doctrine. Someone in his cohort called it an “intellectual bootcamp for the revolution”.
Mr Rigolizzo would later host a podcast for Gen Z MAGA fans with two friends from the fellowship. They disbanded when Mr Trump won re-election; one got a job in the White House and the other at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The head of OMB, Russell Vought, is also a former Claremont fellow—or a Claremonster, as they call themselves.
Claremonsters are everywhere in the Trump administration. By one count at least 70 hold or have held jobs there, from the vice-president’s chief of staff to the deputy director of the CIA, down to an army of special assistants and speechwriters. Matthew Peterson, who used to run Claremont’s educational arm, says that after the inauguration he couldn’t walk down a hallway in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building without bumping into a fellow.
Before Mr Trump came along, Claremont was peripheral. Founded in southern California, it scorned the neoconservative Beltway blob. It saw the Republican establishment as full of squishes: deluded about the Iraq war, pro-amnesty for unauthorised immigrants, unwilling to smash the administrative state, complacent about multiculturalism. Nearly all conservative intellectuals shunned Mr Trump initially, but Claremont saw that he was a crusading outsider who shared its enemies. It was among the first conservative think-tanks to recognise the opportunity and turn it into access and influence. Its trajectory mirrors a broader shake-up on the right, where policy shops have either MAGA -fied (like the Heritage Foundation) or stuck to their principles and faded into irrelevance (like the American Enterprise Institute).
Claremonsters have a talent for adding intellectual gloss to Trumpism. Mr Anton drafted the National Security Strategy, which seeks to rationalise the president’s resource-grabs in Venezuela and Greenland, and to bring coherence to a foreign policy driven by personalism. John Eastman, a lawyer at the institute, helped hatch the “fake electors” scheme to try to overturn the 2020 election. For his service to Mr Trump, he was indicted by state prosecutors in Arizona and Georgia.
Unlike other think-tanks, Claremont does not churn out policy papers. Its focus, says Brian Kennedy, a former president, is on history and principle. It aims to teach young conservatives “how the great statesmen of the past thought” and what later went awry in America. If that sounds grandiose, it is. “Everyone who engages with the Claremont Institute has a sneaking suspicion that something at the deepest level has gone wrong in our country and that it’s up to public-spirited people to try to understand it and fix it,” says Charles Correll, a 31-year-old a former fellow and a speechwriter for John Barrasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming.
Claremont was founded by students of Harry Jaffa, a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and an adviser to Barry Goldwater, who wrote the latter’s applause line: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.” Early Claremonsters argued that America went off the rails in the Progressive Era. They viewed remedial programmes of the 20th century—welfare, affirmative action—and the bureaucrats who designed them as un-American. Establishment Republicans were content to cut taxes and regulations: an approach inadequate for the task at hand. “The problem is not just high taxes or that government has gotten too big; it’s that we’ve slipped away from the consent of the governed,” says Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont fellow.
This sort of thinking—that too much has been lost, that the world has come undone—can quickly slip into catastrophism. Take it further and radical solutions beckon. Mr Kennedy says he no longer calls himself a conservative, but a counter-revolutionary. Matthew McManus of Spelman College says people have long conflated conservatism with the American right writ large. That is inaccurate. Conservatives believe that existing institutions and hierarchies evolved for a reason, and should be altered only with care. William F. Buckley said the job of conservatives was to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’”. Rightwingers of the Claremont variety, by contrast, think little is worth conserving.
They came from Planet Claremont
Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, says Claremonsters agree more on their diagnosis of America than on prescriptions for it. Some find the current arrangements intolerable and want to overthrow them immediately; others are more cautious. Mr Kesler thinks Mr Trump is “rough” but an “amazingly effective political animal”. Asked how he would compare the president with Lincoln, who freed the slaves and whom Claremonsters regard as a model statesman, Mr Kesler hardly pauses: “Like Lincoln, he’s a defender, really, of human rights.” ■
논증 분석
유형: causal
핵심 주장
Claremont Institute는 주변부 싱크탱크에서 Trump 행정부의 지적 토대를 제공하는 핵심 기관으로 부상했으며, Trumpism에 철학적·역사적 정당성을 부여하는 역할을 담당하고 있다.
논리구조
- 전제: Claremont Institute는 젊은 보수주의자들에게 Aristotle, Plato 등 고전철학과 미국 건국 텍스트를 가르치는 ‘지적 부트캠프’로 기능하며, 이를 통해 MAGA 이념에 철학적·역사적 기반을 제공한다.
- 논거: Claremonster들은 Trump 행정부 전반에 걸쳐 포진해 있으며, 부통령 비서실장부터 CIA 부국장, OMB 수장 Russell Vought에 이르기까지 최소 70명이 행정부에서 일하고 있다.
- 진단: Claremont Institute는 Trump 등장 이전부터 공화당 기득권을 ‘이라크전에 환상을 가지고, 불법이민 사면을 지지하며, 행정국가 해체를 거부하는 겁쟁이들’로 보고, 체제의 근본적 문제를 진단해왔다.
- 논거: Claremont Institute는 정책 보고서 대신 역사와 원칙에 집중하며, 미국이 Progressive Era 이후 올바른 방향에서 이탈했다는 서사를 핵심 교의로 삼는다. 복지, 적극적 우대조치, 관료제는 ‘비미국적’인 것으로 간주된다.
- 논거: Claremont Institute는 보수(conservative) 싱크탱크들이 Trump를 외면했을 때 일찌감치 그를 ‘기득권의 적’으로 인식하고 지지함으로써, 접근권과 영향력을 선점했다. 이는 Heritage Foundation처럼 MAGA화하거나 American Enterprise Institute처럼 원칙을 고수하다 주변화된 다른 싱크탱크들과 대비된다.
- 논거: Claremonster들은 Trumpism에 지적 광택을 입히는 역할을 수행한다. Michael Anton은 2016년 Trump 지지 지식인 논거를 최초로 제시했고, 국가안보전략 초안을 작성했으며, John Eastman은 2020년 선거 전복을 위한 ‘가짜 선거인단’ 계획을 고안했다.
- 반론: Claremont 식의 사고—너무 많은 것이 상실되었다는 인식—는 파국주의(catastrophism)로 빠질 수 있으며, 기존 기관과 위계를 신중하게 변화시켜야 한다는 전통적 보수주의와 근본적으로 다르다. Matthew McManus는 이들이 보수주의자가 아니라 반혁명가에 가깝다고 지적한다.
- 결론: Claremonster들은 미국의 문제에 대한 진단에서는 일치하지만 처방에서는 분열되어 있으며, 일부는 급진적 전복을, 다른 이들은 점진적 접근을 선호한다.
결론
Claremont Institute는 단순한 정책 싱크탱크를 넘어 Trumpism의 지적·철학적 정당화 기구로 기능하며, 그 영향력은 Trump 행정부 전반에 걸쳐 실질적으로 구현되고 있다.
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