This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Claremont Review of Books 25th anniversary gala, held at the Metropolitan Club in New York City on November 6, 2025.

Ladies and gentlemen: it is a great pleasure to be with you tonight in the People’s Republic of New York. Two days ago the voters in their wisdom elected as mayor by a comfortable margin Zohran Mamdani—a socialist, an immigrant, a critic of Israel and of Zionism, son of a movie director and a Columbia professor of postcolonialism, the holder of a degree in “Africana Studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience extends to co-founding the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and being a backbench New York State assemblyman for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Except for being a member of Democratic Socialists of America rather than the Democratic Party, Mr. Mamdani is in every respect a worthy successor of Barack Hussein Obama as a modern-day progressive statesman.

In a book I wrote about Obama several years ago, I predicted that the Democrats’ accumulating problems, both fiscal and philosophical, would pressure them into either abandoning liberalism for socialism properly so called, or into getting out of the liberalism business altogether in favor of strongman leadership into the future, whatever the future brings. I fear that both predictions may be coming true, though not exactly as I’d foreseen. Many young progressives grow increasingly pro-socialist and in some cases even anti-American. Other leftists, and even many young reactionaries, grow increasingly post-American, that is, not exactly enemies of America but disillusioned critics of her—resigned to her best days being behind us, condemned, as they imagine it, to living ignobly with America’s betrayal of her own unrealized, or unrealizable, ideals.

However the proportions of anti-Americans to post-Americans work out, Mamdani is poised to be a leader of the new movement, and New Yorkers some of its earliest victims. So…welcome to the Red Apple, as the New York Post beat me to saying! But who knew in these strange times how many nominally right-wing think tanks and social media personalities would find themselves obsessed with visiting, and revisiting, the bizarre question whether Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler was the bad guy of the Second World War, or whether Israel or Hamas was the good guy in the latest bloody Middle Eastern wars. Why, if Harry Jaffa were alive today, as President Gerald Ford might have said, he’d be turning over in his grave. It falls to this magazine, therefore, to help to vindicate the country against its woke critics, whether on the left or on the right.

Twenty-five years of the Claremont Review of Books, which we are here to celebrate tonight, bring with them a prodigious accumulation of gratitude to our readers, subscribers, donors, publishers, writers, and editors. Let me begin by recognizing our editorial band of brothers and asking them to stand for your well-deserved applause: our indispensable managing editor John Kienker, senior editor Bill Voegeli, production editor Patrick Collins, associate editor Spencer Klavan, editorial assistant Ryan Gannon, and our contributing editors Christopher Caldwell and Christopher Flannery (Flan, due to illness, could not make it tonight, alas). In a special category all his own, permit me to offer my profound thanks to our art director of a quarter century, Elliott Banfield, whose grace and genius render each issue, and this whole evening at the Metropolitan Club, so beautiful, inspiring, and fun.

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The CRB’s progenitor was the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, founded in 1979 by a handful of graduate students at Claremont Graduate School (later CGU)—you can tell the Institute’s academic ambitions from the way its name falls trippingly from the tongue. Though students of Harry Jaffa, these young men studied closely with Harold W. Rood, William B. Allen, Leonard Levy, and other local scholars, too. Among its early projects, under its founding president, Peter Schramm, was a newsprint tabloid called the Claremont Review of Books, which published 18 issues from 1981 to 1988. The late George Forsyth, alongside Jack Barlow and William Flannery, edited the first five, Doug Jeffrey the last two, and Ken Masugi the intervening numbers. Published on a wing and a prayer, the whole thing was remarkably good, but eventually succumbed to scarce resources and personnel.

The journal was reborn in 2000, by Larry P. Arnn, the Institute’s president at that time. He was soon, like Aeneas, to migrate, carrying the local household gods on his shoulder, to another land where he would establish, or renew, a great city (in Aeneas’s case, Rome; in Arnn’s, Hillsdale). Before Larry departed, however, he decided to relaunch the CRB as the Institute’s flagship journal, almost immediately passing the torch to Thomas B. Silver, the Institute’s incoming president. Virtually Larry’s final act as president was to recruit me as editor. From the beginning, we sought to make the CRB a national publication that would command the attention of conservatives, liberals, and bibliophiles alike. The inaugural issue, with Tom Silver as publisher, appeared in fall 2000. After Tom’s untimely death the next year, Brian Kennedy succeeded him as publisher and Institute president, serving for more than a dozen years. Michael Pack (2015-17) and Ryan Williams (since 2017) joined us, in turn, in the same distinguished roles.

Since Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, and our firm support for it announced by Michael Anton writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus in the CRB’s digital pages, the magazine has been connected with the Trump protest, administration, and phenomenon. Although true, this is not the whole truth. The CRB was a distinctive voice of American conservatism long before Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy.

Consider, for example, Tom Silver’s brilliant diagnosis, “Why Conservatives Lost the War of Ideas,” from the Winter 2001/02 issue.

There is an obvious logic to the progressive dynamic. So long as there is no realistic prospect of dismantling the administrative state whose foundations were laid by Wilson and built upon by the New Deal and the Great Society, the movement of history must be in a progressive direction. Every major conservative political victory becomes a victory for the status quo; every major liberal victory becomes another step forward. Progressives are always just one electoral victory away from resuming the forward march of history.

Tom put it pungently later in the piece: “From our vantage point more than 20 years after Reagan took office, it is evident that the man who would overthrow the New Deal rode into Washington as Saint George and rode out as Don Quixote.”

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Although Ronald Reagan was for decades the CRB’s beau ideal of a politician—next to Abraham Lincoln, of course—we were always duly critical of Reagan’s lapses and failures, particularly on the domestic front. Not only did he fail to put affirmative action and other race-based discrimination on the road to ultimate extinction, he didn’t manage to break the progressive hold on American electoral politics, either. Ours were not so much libertarian as deeply conservative (or better yet, American) criticisms of that great conservative.

We were only four issues into the magazine when the awful attacks of 9/11 occurred. CRB supported the decision to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq but remained deeply skeptical of bringing Jeffersonian democracy to those unfortunate countries. Shortly after 9/11, I phoned our late friend Angelo Codevilla, the feisty strategist and political analyst then teaching at Boston University, to invite him to contribute to a new feature which I proposed to call “Victory Watch.” The nature of the attacks had raised the depressing prospect of an endless war against shadowy terrorist groups, which could have no definable end point, no victory. Angelo would write the vast majority of the Victory Watch series, but I recruited the gifted novelist and war commentator Mark Helprin to contribute as well, and I pitched in when needed. The prescience of the idea was confirmed by the fact that the series continued for more than a decade, because so did the war, which ended (as we had foreseen) without victory. Codevilla, Helprin, and I did have the honor, however, of being criticized as “Superhawks” by our old friend Norman Podhoretz.

From the beginning, the CRB has distinguished itself by calling for a renewed emphasis on the first principles of a distinctively American conservatism. Those principles, found in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address, and elsewhere in our history and memory, while incapable of easy export to the Middle East, were quite fit for use, and study, and devotion in the United States. The centrality of these principles of natural and political right was perhaps the main thing that Jaffa’s students learned from him. This patrimony preceded Donald Trump, and will, God willing, continue long after his presidency. Jaffa’s famous couplet—“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue”—though written for Barry Goldwater in 1964, could easily have been endorsed by Trump in 2016 or 2024.

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Something else not as well known as it should be is that Jaffa’s students, and the CRB, soon became more conservative than he was. He had a soft spot for immigration, even illegal immigration, and opposed California’s Prop 187, which aimed to cut illegals off from public benefits like welfare and public schools. As I recall, all or almost all of his students favored it, as did the magazine’s editors. Jaffa was with us, however, on Prop 209, the prohibition on race-based affirmative action, the successful campaign for which was captained by the great Larry Arnn, working alongside Ward Connerly, Manny Klausner, and the brilliant and indefatigable Sally Pipes, and many other good friends.

The CRB performed a certain midwifery as well with respect to Angelo Codevilla’s argument about “the ruling class,” which he previewed and developed in many essays in our pages. His book on the theme, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (2010), later became influential to the Trump movement and its ethos. Angelo’s take-no-prisoners style had something to do with that. He was cantankerous and absurdly self-confident. I know because I had to edit him! Nonetheless, The Ruling Class was probably the most important book by an American conservative foreshadowing Trump’s, and his movement’s, rise. Not that Americans needed a book to alert them that something had gone badly wrong in their systems of government and culture. They had sensed that not only since Nixon and the Silent Majority, but since Bill Buckley had gotten the conservative ball rolling in the 1950s. They had heard it over the radio, too, in songs by Merle Haggard and other populist troubadours.

Despite the rather non-angelic nature of our Angelo, he was a serious Catholic of the John Courtney Murray school, always sensitive to the natural law and Christian roots of the American political order. Today, perhaps the most well-known school of Catholic conservatives is led by Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame. It takes roughly the opposite view of the mutual dependence of Christianity and the American Founding. I regret to report that the Trump Administration seems friendlier to Deneen than to Angelo or Jaffa on this vital question.

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Still, one thing is certain. Donald Trump was the only major candidate in the last three elections with the potential to unsettle and defy both political parties’ establishments simultaneously. In his heyday Reagan came close, perhaps, to achieving this level of disruption, but the times were unfavorable to him: the Democratic Party was stronger then, the Republicans weaker, and the Cold War all-commanding. In comparison, Trump is far freer to pursue dramatic departures in domestic and foreign policy than Reagan ever was. In its present-day woke phase, progressivism is more contemptuous of ordinary Americans than it used to be (as Angelo noticed), which in turn liberates Trump to be more contemptuous of progressivism. Nothing is inevitable in politics, and we shall see how Trump and his movement capitalize on the hitherto favorable political conditions confronting him. Every good has its inconvenience, as Machiavelli suggests. Even favorable conditions carry drawbacks. Mamdani may signal trouble ahead. In any event, Trump has no model for constitutionalizing the modern state, or restoring common sense to politics and civil society. Americans know how to found and operate a Constitution and a government based on it. Or at least we used to. But we don’t have a lot of experience reforming or dismantling an unconstitutional, and in some respects even anti-constitutional, government. Given the difficulty and urgency of this task, Trump has made many, and will make more, mistakes.

Because the Left doesn’t concede that task’s legitimacy, they can only view it as conservatives’ perverse opposition to what President Obama called “the right side of history.” For progressives, being on history’s right side implies that their reforms, and only theirs, are permanent. Reagan used to say that a government program was the nearest thing to immortality on earth. For liberals, that’s no joke. Indeed, for them, nothing is closer to God than the evolving social and political rights expressing the zeitgeist, which justify every government program. FDR named his socio-economic programs a “second bill of rights,” but progressives long ago moved on to the third and fourth bills, at least.

That’s why the Claremont Review of Books is still needed, and will long be needed in the struggle to restore self-government in America. And it is why I am so grateful to you, our readers, writers, and supporters, for helping sustain us in these noble and necessary efforts. Thank you, and good night.