American conservatism finds itself in a strange place. A resounding electoral victory was achieved in the 2024 election by a Republican party that, while modified from its Goldwater-Reagan standard, remains comprehensible to the conservative temperament. Conservatism is the form of the Republican party, or the party ceases to exist. Yet, conservatism has never agreed on the measuring rod of its activity. What precisely does it want to achieve, such that it knows the truth of its strategies and tactics?

One thinker who has been teaching, writing, and editing in ways that help us answer these essential questions is Charles Kesler, the founding editor of The Claremont Review of Books and a Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. His political essays and editorship of the CRB are widely known across conservatism. Kesler has also formed the minds of graduate students who have assumed leading roles in academia, politics, journalism, and non-profit work. A new book of essays, titled Leisure with Dignity, by former Kesler students bids us to consider Kesler’s career because his teaching and writing bear close study for the conservative cause and our constitutional republic.

We live in a season of thoughtful and, at times, highly contested grappling with the question of how conservatives recover an America paralyzed, if not broken, by progressive ideology. I interviewed Kesler and read his scholarly output to better understand his political thinking and what it means in this period of national tumult. Kesler’s distinctiveness is best understood through those who influenced him and shaped him to be a thinker capable of political writing who joins foundational principles with current events and circumstances to produce essays that enlighten our understanding, helping us understand pitfalls and opportunities.

His essays, for example, on President Trump, argue that the Founders’ Constitution needs a sturdier defense than the Republican party has offered it. President Trump has proven consequential in certain forms, especially identity politics, Kesler notes. Yet Kesler’s essays on the failures of conservative politicians to join their policies and arguments to a reinvigoration of the Constitution also should serve in any analysis of what Trump could accomplish. Kesler has also emerged as a distinctive critic of the so-called New Right in both its National Conservative and postliberal elements. But he has done so with a robust articulation of American constitutionalism and the virtues it demands. Members of these schools will profit from reading his arguments. This essay will further analyze what conservatives have missed in their overall mission and, by considering Kesler’s thinking on the Founders’ Constitution and Reagan’s presidency, outline how a reformed conservatism might recover a constitutional refounding.

Buckley-Mansfield-Jaffa

Kesler relates that he came to conservatism early in his life—a teenager, no less—and at the hands of William F. Buckley, Jr. Kesler notes that Buckley was “like a second father to me.” An avid reader of National Review since he was 12, Kesler developed a tremendous appreciation for the star of the growing house of conservatism. This admiration deepened after Kesler watched Buckley’s famous confrontation with Gore Vidal in 1968. Upon learning that Buckley was to lecture at the nearby West Virginia Institute of Technology, an ambitious teenager, Kesler, asked him for an interview that would appear in his high school newspaper that he edited. Buckley granted the interview, which Kesler conducted on a car ride to the airport. Their lifelong friendship was born. Kesler was 16.

He served as an editorial intern for National Review in 1978 and, after that, visited Buckley frequently. Buckley taught Kesler the capacity of political writing, when joined with principles, to positively affect the nation’s course.

Kesler states that Buckley was the “progenitor of conservatism.” He “created a magazine for the nascent right that helped mold conservatism into a self-conscious position.” Buckley could “unite the various persuasions,” ensuring that conservatism did not mean “just soloists” who would were content to fight alone, if not die alone. “Buckley pulled together the anti-communist movement by presenting a thoughtful and deeply pro-Western, pro-reason, and pro-revelation form of conservatism.” Buckley “was a great man,” and the success that conservatism found in its early decades is, in many respects, attributable to his personal capacity to organize people, ideas, and institutions in a body of conservative thought. From Buckley, Kesler learned the value of the political essay to shape and inform thinking by instilling principles amidst whatever public controversy had prompted the written intervention. This is obviously more than punditry, more than most of our current pugilists demonstrate. Rather, Buckley’s notion is a responsibility to write and speak in a manner worthy of the Founders within the current confines of American life.

On a visit to Buckley in the final month of his life, he told Kesler, “You’re the only person who can help me.” The personal item here was the need to complete Buckley’s column. Accordingly, Buckley dictated to Kesler what became his last column, who typed it for him on ancient WordStar. Kesler, we might say, returned the favor to Buckley for having been one of the formative influences in his life. Buckley had written letters of recommendation for Kesler to Yale and Harvard. Kesler offers “that going to Harvard had made all the difference” in his intellectual life. There, he studied with Harvey Mansfield, James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, and Samuel Huntington, among others. It is a most impressive roster of teachers.

At Harvard, Mansfield became the second significant influence on Kesler. Mansfield “taught me how to read a book.” He stressed that every book worth reading possesses an argument, a purpose for its existence. Mansfield stated that “finding the book’s argument was the key to understanding a book.” Also, Mansfield underscored, “real learning requires humility.” On political theory and America, Mansfield reasoned that “the institutions of government, including those of the American founding, emerged from political philosophy broadly understood.” Underneath this was Mansfield’s counsel that “modern political thought could not just be disparaged. It emerged because it intended to solve certain problems, so we need to understand and evaluate it on that basis.” And Mansfield would probably add that such thought must be understood and conjugated in conjunction with the old learning. “Harvey Mansfield never got the honor he deserves,” Kesler concludes. 

Progressives justify their treatment of conservatives as the enemies of progress, seeking to exclude them from the public square, and stripping their rights from them until they reconcile themselves with the future.

In Leisure With Dignity, former Kesler students Michael Anton and Glenn Ellmers argue that Mansfield taught Kesler how to combine classical and modern political thought rather than separate them. Human nature doesn’t change, and the virtues and vices of political life must be confronted with the best political wisdom we can muster, no matter its provenance. That seems evident in Kesler’s essays on the American Founding. “Federalist #10 and the American Republic” notes the salutary measure of the new science of politics such as extending the republic’s size to stave off the rise of faction. This principle, Kesler stresses, is one of the founders’ most important innovations. But there is also the need for virtue, cardinal and republican.

Publius’ reflections in Federalist #10 not only enlighten our understanding of the virtues and possibilities of the modern republic as opposed to the classical republic but serve a higher position and a more ennobling form of citizenship. Ultimately, the difficulty of any one faction controlling a large, diverse republic whose sphere has been enlarged should not be the end of political analysis. Americans, Kesler notes, can and will have many disagreements arising out of the use of their faculties and interests, but the hope and practice must be that an underlying principle of natural rights in property, opinion, and citizenship, is one that there is no real disagreement on because this standard undergirds the republic and serves as a model for Americans to understand who they are as citizens. Amidst the clashing of interests, Kesler states, an unwritten constitutional principle must be unchanging and should inform our patriotism.

After completing graduate school in political theory at Harvard, Kesler landed at Claremont University in 1983. Harry Jaffa was close to retirement, although not officially till 1989. This fact amazed me. I remember hearing Jaffa lecture at a Claremont Institute program in 2009, and his mind still snapped and crackled with intense pressure, easily imparting the subject matter. Jaffa had already impacted Kesler’s mind, as evident in a 1979 piece he wrote in National Review about Jaffa’s distinctly American conservatism. Kesler lists him as the third formative influence on his thinking. Jaffa, he observes, “spotlighted Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, and the American Founding as integral to any proper American conservatism.” Kesler states, “The appreciation most conservatives have of Lincoln largely stems from Jaffa.”

This stream of thought contributed to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, which Jaffa, in certain respects, guided as a speechwriter. Kesler conveys that Jaffa “liberated conservatism from a Neo-Confederate position, helping it come to terms with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Even Goldwater had not immediately accepted this line of thinking. Jaffa stressed throughout his scholarship that natural rights applied to all human beings because of who they are as human persons. But, as Kesler argues in other essays, not all people are ready for the burdens of republican government, even if they might have a firm desire for freedom.

From Buckley, Mansfield, and Jaffa, the careful reader discerns the form of Kesler’s teaching, scholarship, and political writing. This body of work enlightens and deepens our appreciation of the American founding, doing so with both ancient and modern political philosophy. Kesler leads us to the practical political recovery of American constitutionalism in the face of so much opposition, mainly from the progressive project but recently, the postliberal right, which shares with progressives an equal revulsion toward the founding of America. We should turn to Kesler’s work to better understand the sources and tablets containing the perennial wisdom in our nation.

Kesler argues that conservatism is engaged in the battle between the Founders’ Constitution as amended (most notably by Lincoln), and the Progressive Constitution. This is not only or primarily a struggle to preserve federalism or the separation of powers, or for that matter, to vanquish the administrative state. All of these are necessary goals to pursue. But we must come to terms with what the Constitution is about as a matter of politics. Is it merely a procedural limitation on power that facilitates democracy? Should we judge it solely by the space for liberty it makes possible? Again, these are laudable goals, but the primary question is what makes us constitutional people.

Kesler demands that American conservatives ask themselves the following questions: Who are we as Americans, and what are we conserving? Writing in 1979 in National Review, he argued that “American conservatism sometimes resembles [a] false love of liberty, its self-examinations concluding in nothing more lasting than ad hoc reactions to the New Deal, the Great Society, the New Frontier.” But “revulsions” against the depredations of the New Deal, or we might add, Biden’s hyper-spending, open-borders policies, and DEI programs do not provide the essential content needed to provide conservatism with meaning. Similarly, Kesler notes that “root and branch libertarianism” also fails to provide a necessary foundation. The end of all our striving cannot be just liberty.

In the place of either traditionalism or libertarianism, Kesler argues that “what conservatism needs is an understanding of our political tradition that will free it from reaction and open it to action—action for the sake of the genuine love of liberty as expressed in the principles of that tradition.” Therefore, “conservatism, rightly understood, is less a commitment to the past, than a commitment to certain truths, applicable to past, present, and future.” This requires conservatives to understand who they are as Americans in terms of the Declaration of Independence. But this crucial document didn’t drop from the sky or, rather, the mind of Jefferson, nor does it stem solely from the Enlightenment. The Declaration is the culmination of the American Revolution, whose principles Jefferson and Adams stated were firmly implanted in the public mind; they were part of the practical reason and judgment of the statesmen, soldiers, and citizenry who pressed the case for American freedom and independence, that a republican constitution would protect.

Conservatives, Kesler observes, are confident of what they believe while failing to understand how their many ideas and sentiments connect to the truth of who they are as human persons and what this means for constitutionalism and the necessary politics to recover it. The politics of most Republican officials, Kesler argues, is only rarely conceived to be more than a valuable instrument for policy victories. Why is the goal not much higher? The aim should be to vindicate a politics devoted to constitutional citizenship informed by natural rights. Progressives do not neglect in their transformations of our country the goal of leading Americans to new ideas about equality, citizenship, and justice. They articulate publicly how their politics, policy, and leadership redefine the constitutional framework and reshape how Americans understand who they are as citizens.

Kesler adds that “success, sobriety, the virtuous people, deliberation, limited government, are all important principles,” but the truth “that all men are created equal” is the “foundation on which all else is built.” Of course, when we grasp why we are equal under the law, we also know how significant liberty is. Equality and liberty go together, so we must speak about them correctly.

Many conservatives might acknowledge this, begrudgingly or without sufficient thought to its import. Other conservatives, Kesler stresses in the 1979 essay, think that equality is not the foundation of American constitutionalism. Reason or their understanding of constitutional history does not support it, and its emphasis leads to centralized government. Why talk about equality at all?

Kesler lists thinkers like Willmoore Kendall, Irving Kristol, or Martin Diamond, who did not come to terms with the natural right philosophy of the American Revolution. These key conservative theorists emphasized other aspects of the American experience, more capable of rebuilding America after progressivism’s onslaught. Kendall homed in on the deliberating, virtuous people who lived republican government’s mores in their hips. Lincoln was dangerous, Kendall thought, a man whose improvisations risked permanently marring the republic with egalitarianism. Kendall correctly identified that progressivism was the great derailment of our republic but didn’t stress that natural rights philosophy was the measure for overcoming it. Diamond located the republic’s essence in its low and sturdy ground of self-interest, which meant citizens were free to pursue gain. Kristol downplayed the revolution, more specifically, the right of revolution. But doing so, Kelser thinks, neglects a philosophical component that the American government rules in the name of natural rights. Should it turn against them, then it loses its legitimacy. If these rights aren’t worth defending, they are scarcely worth advocating. Of course, many contemporary conservatives may have only a passing familiarity with this group of thinkers. But in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Kesler’s articulation of the philosophical anchor of constitutionalism remains apt for the challenges of our day and the varied yet similar misunderstandings that still confuse conservatives.

The rise of the postliberals and their analog cousins, the National Conservatives, is instructive, Kesler thinks. This thinking, led by Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, views the natural rights philosophy undergirding the Founding as the grand error of liberalism, one that betrays the nature of the human person and, as such, is fully explanatory of America’s social and cultural ills. We are an ill-founded nation. But is natural rights philosophy the product of desiccated philosophical thought? Kesler grounds natural right, ontologically and anthropologically, as the soundest set of principles for understanding ourselves as beings caught between God and the Devil, the angels and the beasts.

Natural rights do not mean a scaffolding for atomistic individualism, which creeps into a comprehensive egalitarianism. Rather than rights being an opening to isolated or unencumbered individualism, Kesler’s essay argues that “virtue and reason are essential parts of liberty if liberty is grounded in the equality of man properly understood. That equality, the equality of natural rights, is the central idea of our political tradition—the principle from which all others radiate. And as liberty is not complete without virtue and reason, so equality of rights is not complete without duty.” Kesler defends natural rights with the awareness that man is not just a being with rights and no duties but has a nature that includes a rich dimension of duties: citizenship, patriotism, and family. One element of that duty is “dedication” to the justice that grounds those rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Only when we know and pursue our duty as citizens with unalienable rights can we consent to the government created to protect them.

Kesler’s essay “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism” squarely confronts the philosophical nominalism that undergirds National Conservatism’s call for an “American and British nationalism.” What does a singular British and American nationalism even mean, Kesler asks? We are two separate countries, after all. A sharply contrasting republican principle has shaped America. The chief difficulty is that “the Natcons risk supplanting Americans’ actual political inheritance with a faux inheritance, all in the name of tradition.” The Natcons assert an inheritance that departs from that “advanced in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist.” Kesler repairs to the old standard,

The principles of our nationalism derive from the founding documents of the republic. For Americans, as the Declaration and countless other public affirmations make clear, the nation itself is or conceives itself to be the result of a choice by individuals, enjoying certain inherent and unalienable rights, to join together as a people for their mutual safety and happiness, and to form a government for themselves to secure those rights and effect those ends.

We have “a republican nationalism,” a “nationalism limited and shaped by human equality, liberty, and consent.” The Natcon intervention is a distraction from the central dispute of our politics.

The Two Constitutions

According to Kesler, his dispute is between the two constitutions: the Founders’ Constitution and the Progressive Constitution. The Founders’ Constitution employs federalism and separation of powers in a robust republican constitutionalism whose aim is guarding the natural rights of its citizens. The civic virtue of statesmanship is also required to uphold this Constitution. This constitutional statesmanship is built on prudential wisdom, whose essence is knowledge of the good and the judgment of how to achieve it given the circumstances of the time. The maintenance of the constitutional order cannot be divorced from classical virtue, Kesler states forthrightly.

Kesler also provides a philosophical grounding for the Progressive Constitution that would make Woodrow Wilson jealous. He states Wilson’s position better than he did and that is a liberal service that leads to proper understanding. Wilson argued in Congressional Government (1885) that Americans engage in an “undiscriminating and almost blind worship of [the Constitution’s] principles.” What was needed was a “fearless criticism.” For Wilson, “Strong presidential leadership, combined with a highly developed and expert administrative apparatus, could succeed in liberating the national government from the straitjacket of separated powers.” The constrained constitution had to be jettisoned. Politics oriented toward the future and a scientific belief in policy administration replaced the constitution of limits and its concern with liberty and good government.

Ultimately, progressives believe that time itself, specifically the future, takes on moral qualities, replacing our souls and our reason in determining the criteria of truth and error. The future is the place where the perennial social ills of man are alleviated. No more poverty, racism, hunger, war, inequality, or those pesky unwanted babies. As Kamala Harris intoned on the campaign trail, “We aren’t going back.” Why? “Ours is a fight for the future. And it is a fight for freedom.” As Kesler deadpans recently in the Claremont Review of Books, Harris’s thinking must mean “that the past is immoral.” But her rhetoric echoes Obama’s and represents the hollowing of the liberal mind. In Harris’s view and that of progressives writ large, those opposing this perfecting future are the reactionaries, and it is fitting that they are regarded as the adversaries of an ever-growing list of emancipatory rights. In this way, progressives justify their treatment of conservatives as the enemies of progress, seeking to exclude them from the public square, and stripping their rights from them until they reconcile themselves with the future.

Such is the foundational thinking of Wilson’s and other progressives’ statements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the Constitution was written for the horse and buggy era or for the era when Newtonian science held sway, as opposed to evolutionary science and what it demands of politics. Kesler’s 1989 essay “Leaders of Men” states Wilson as the father of American liberalism who ushered a new regime based upon a claim of knowing the outcome of history. The political import of Wilson’s “New Freedom” was a constitutional transformation because the ends of government were no longer fixed or permanent. There was only a desire for better things, and that could only happen if we, as a people, freed ourselves from what had been our first principles of constitutional government.

Wilson’s transformation or transvaluation entailed the rejection of human nature altogether and eliminated it from being a guide for moral and political life. Government in its ends and its means could not be settled but were contingent on the demands of history. But, here, Kesler points out that the progressive love affair with executive power becomes necessary, which Wilson reconceives as “leadership” or a conscious rejection of statesmanship and its tie to prudence or classical wisdom. Given that Wilson’s political theory demanded a new account of human nature, one determined by the good in history, the president’s job was to peer into time, to understand what it demanded of the people and, through his vision and compassion, to bring the “masses” into right alignment with the future. Thus, we can see the theoretical basis for progressive constitutionalism as a series of histrionic milestones laid by its economic and social rights programs, each new stone providing an ascent to an improved period of political and social existence.

Kesler helps us recognize that our disdain for progressive failures must not be the final word. That word must go to our love for our Constitution and its principles.

And this, Kesler observes, is why we can’t go back. If we do, the progressive claim to govern is exposed as false. They lose the mantle of heaven. That is why the Dobbs majority opinion had to be leaked, to stop the unthinkable return to an America that deliberated through elected representatives the contours of abortion policy rather than through a majority of Justices who understood why and how the future demanded the liberation of women from pregnancy and motherhood.

In the essay “Liberal Century: Three Waves of Liberalism,” Kesler analyzes Wilson’s “New Freedom,” FDR’s “New Deal,” Johnson’s “Great Society,” and finally, the program of the New Left that erupted in the late 1960s and whose immediate consequences we are still grappling with in American life. Kesler concludes, “Political liberalism began with a rejection of the Constitution and the morality underpinning it.” Wilson’s New Freedom is the basis of this rejection, connected to the New Left, whose belief is that there is no ground for human experience, only radical assertion of one’s race or gender or life experiment. As Wilson destroyed natural rights, he also eviscerated reason, logic, and truth. The only way to find the truth became authentic and emphatic political assertion, which led to the New Left’s radical and illiberal claims about government and society. One difference, Kesler notes, is that the old Left of Johnson or FDR wanted to bring America into a respectable space of reform. America could be fixed per their progressivism. But the New Left despised America, thought it irredeemable, and turned their ire on the American people. This realization by the American people during the 1970s and 1980s that liberalism and its political instrument in the Democratic Party had turned against them led to Reagan’s election and re-election, Kesler argues. Still, a broad cross-section of Americans realizing that progressives and increasingly the education system, the media, and much of federal and state level bureaucracies had turned against them wasn’t enough.

Reagan’s Americans

Kesler thinks Reagan “was more thoughtful than most conclude he was.” Reagan “knew how hard it would be to return to the pre-liberal constitution, we might say.” But “Reagan, got close to it,” even though he never finally grasped it. Interestingly, Kesler thinks that Kendall’s version of constitutionalism “had more of an effect on Reagan than Jaffa’s recovery of Lincoln and natural rights.” Reagan, as Kendall taught, believed there was an authentic American people who couldn’t necessarily articulate American republican philosophy, but they embodied it. This is the “consensus that Reagan is trying to reconnect to. But to do this, he needed to re-found, to re-argue, to get beyond the progressive redefinition of American life.” That is, Kendall is correct in arguing that the people themselves have a better understanding of American constitutionalism than progressive elites, even if the people cannot articulate it. However, the progressive attempt to redo constitutionalism had also left its mark on those same people. Reagan could invoke their wisdom and appeal to their judgment, but more would be needed after the revolutions of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the New Left.

One problem that Reagan had to surmount was the progressive leadership paradigm that Wilson launched. “He had to use it, not for progressive ends but on behalf of the Constitution.” There was also the issue of “the failure to transmit America’s ideals and goodness to succeeding generations, a failure Reagan understood.” In 1972, Reagan stated, “Some of our young people find little to love or defend in this country. There is an increasing tendency to believe the system has failed.” In his Farewell Address, Reagan admitted that it was a problem he didn’t remediate. Such disbelief in America still marks our younger generations.

In response, Kesler reasons that Reagan appealed to his conservative “living constitution” found in the people who could be activated by populism to be an ongoing embodiment of the founding. Reagan followed this approach beginning with his powerful 1964 address on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign: “That government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.”

In Reagan’s understanding, the people were the virtuous ones, betrayed by an elite who ruled them at their own expense. As he said in his first inaugural address:

From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

Reagan also spoke a language of values in many of his presidential speeches. Kesler’s 2015 essay “The Obama Transformation versus the Reagan Revolution” concludes that Reagan identified with the people rather than the institutions of government because he trusted the people’s values more. Most would say, yes, obviously. But values should be shaped into constitutional principles, Kesler resounds. In making this choice Reagan’s statesmanship could not rise to the level of constitutional statesmanship, Kesler judges. While significant and certainly one to be praised, his presidency never achieved the constitutional and citizenship transformations that Reagan and the conservatives sought. The policy victories improved our lives, but Reagan did not substantially challenge the categories of constitutional meaning that progressives laid. For Reagan, “We the people embodied the cause of American constitutionalism, forming both its substratum and its living expression. This was a conservative version of living-constitution theory, dispensing with social science experts and progressive leaders in favor of business experts and commonsensical leaders who appreciated Americans’ genius for freedom.”

But FDR had reshaped American citizenship, its expectations around economic rights, and the sense that more rights would be offered as circumstances demanded. The people would lose control over their liberties but, in return, would be provided with a conveyor belt of positive rights in new areas of life. Our boldness as we approached and shaped our history was the only limit to their attainment. FDR provided a new meaning of justice, equality, and redefined the limits (there were none) of the Constitution. Indeed, Kesler notes that the transformative elections of 1800, 1860, and 1932 moved in those heady constitutional categories. How does Reagan’s presidency compare to that?

The opening had been provided by progressive policy failure and the sneering disdain many progressive figures had shown for the American people who enjoyed living abundant American lives, as prosaic as they seemed to the self-anointed clerisy. Reagan walked into progressive-induced failure and delivered economic prosperity, in part, by relying on supply-side tax theorists like Jude Wanniski and Robert Mundell. He defeated the Soviets by unlocking American technology and innovation. “The Natcons,” Kesler adds, “give him very little credit for these victories.” But they’re both beautiful achievements.

Reagan, however, could not overcome America’s “ambivalent patriotism.” The sign that the Reagan Revolution never materialized, Kesler argues, is found in his Farewell Address. He hadn’t changed our institutions or patriotism precisely because he failed “to pursue the constitutional question more seriously as FDR did on behalf of the New Deal Constitution.” Reagan’s Farewell Address polishes his policy trophies but leaves us with the regnant Progressive Constitution:

Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood. … Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. … But now we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.

Reagan never recognized and did not attempt to overcome the split between who the people were and the principles of American constitutionalism. The people’s ambivalence meant that they needed standards and constitutional principles to be taught and proclaimed so that they could know their rights and duties as American citizens. Progressive definitions needed to be canceled right in front of them. The people Reagan appealed to were surely disgusted by the American Left’s more tawdry antics. Yet, they had also slowly approved the New Deal and Great Society and reconciled themselves with much of the New Left’s sexual liberties revolution. Their virtue needed constitutional formation.

Such questions loom over conservatives as they confront the difficulties that lie ahead, even as they take confidence in a president and a political party that has secured, at least for the present, the affections of a majority of voters in the country. But conservatives have been here before, achieving important presidential, congressional, and state-level victories that secured important fiscal, regulatory, educational, and foreign policy reforms. Yet, the quest for transformation of the country in a constitutional direction has proven illusory. The response has been frustration. Witness the so-called “New Right’s” insistence on new replacement categories of thought that American patriots should appeal to reclaim their country: Orban’s Hungary, postliberal integralism, the 10 Commandments, or obscure English common law lawyers, among others. Except for integralism, these are all critical categories of thought, but taken alone, they are certainly insufficient for American conservatives.

Kesler provides helpful distinctions for thinking about President Trump. He has surely issued the most formidable challenge of anyone on the Right to the Left’s political correctness and identity politics, offering conservatives the opening to push against it in almost previously unthinkable ways. The Bush-McCain-Romney Republican party had largely accepted identity politics, but Trump has not, and we should be grateful. Our conservative judges keep disciplining the administrative state on its overreaching power, including in crucial areas of race, gender, and environmental policy. And those victories are surely, in part, the work of a reinvigorated conservatism. But now, Trump’s presidency must articulate constitutional principles, making these the basis of policy and statesmanship so that a conservative transformation on behalf of the American Mind, as Jefferson termed it, can again rise.

Kesler would likely argue that the challenge is to recognize that our disdain for progressive failures must not be the final word. That word must go to our love for our Constitution and its principles, which must be resuscitated, breathing life into the America that our Constitution was ratified to guard and protect. Failure here will only repeat past conservative wins that proved as ephemeral as the seasons passed.