During the Cold War the destruction of the American republic under a barrage of Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles was considered a remote but distinct possibility. Today, we again face the possible end of the American republic. This cataclysm, however—should it come to pass—would not be the result of a foreign military occupation, but of a division among our fellow citizens. Abraham Lincoln warned of this possibility in 1838. The greatest threat to American republicanism, he said in his Lyceum Address,
must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad…. [We] must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Our current state of affairs would not have surprised Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015), the intellectual founder of the Claremont Institute. When four Jaffa students—Larry P. Arnn, Christopher Flannery, Peter W. Schramm, and Thomas B. Silver—created the Institute in 1979, American conservatism was still finding its legs. It was not even clear what it was trying to conserve. The movement’s flagship publication, National Review, oscillated between two peculiar forms of nostalgia—a Southern agrarianism that flirted with neo-Confederacy and a Catholic wistfulness for the medieval confessional state—and an easygoing form of libertarian anti-statism. Through lectures, debates, and essays, Jaffa undertook a decades-long effort to reorient the conservative movement around the Spirit of ’76 and the American understanding of natural rights and social compact theory. His attempt to remedy conservatism’s intellectual defects, and prevent the calamity we now face, was the central purpose of his political project—a project carried on today by the Claremont Institute.
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