Crisis of the Two Constitutions : The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness (Hardcover)

"If Conservatism is to succeed and thrive, it must return to its American roots (not Burke or the common law, or Kirk and traditionalism, or libertarianism and Hayek) Donald Trump understands, in a common sense and political way, the principles of the Founding and how they should be applied to forge a new governing coalition. The neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration has more in common with progressivism than with the American Founding. Politics is not "downstream from culture" because politics, especially political foundings, create the culture of a country. Multiculturalism and identity politics, and their notion of group rights, is incompatible with the nation state, citizenship, and the protection of rights as America's Founders those things"-- American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders' Constitution, as amended and as grounded in the natural and divine rights and duties of the Declaration of Independence. American liberals herald their "living Constitution," a term that implies that the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or transformation (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social democracy ruled by a Woke elite.

Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. It takes controversial stands on matters political and scholarly, describing the political genius of America's founders and their efforts to shape future generations through a constitutional culture that included immigration, citizenship, and educational policies. Then it turns to the attempted progressive refounding of America, tracing its accelerating radicalism from the New Deal to the 1960s' New Left to today's unhappy campus nihilists. Finally, the volume appraises American conservatives' efforts, so far unavailing despite many famous victories, to revive the founders' Constitution and moral common sense. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, what have conservatives learned and where should they go from here?

Along the way, Charles R. Kesler argues with critics on the left and right, and refutes fashionable doctrines including relativism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and radical traditionalism, providing in effect a one-volume guide to the increasingly influential Claremont school of conservative thought by one of its most engaged, and engaging, thinkers.