The Conservatives Dreading—And Preparing for—Civil War
Updated at 4 p.m. ET on October 5, 2021
“Let me start big. The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” says Ryan Williams, the organization’s president, looking at the camera, in a crisp navy suit. “We’ve always aimed high.” A trumpet blares. America’s founding documents flash across the screen. Welcome to the intellectual home of America’s Trumpist right.
As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with him, publishing essays that seemed to capture why the president appealed to so many Americans and attempting to map a political philosophy onto his presidency. Williams and his cohort are on a mission to tear down and remake the right; they believe that America has been riven into two fundamentally different countries, not least because of the rise of secularism. “The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people,” Williams told me. It’s possible that violence lies ahead. “I worry about such a conflict,” Williams told me. “The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs.”
[Read: Republicans like Bob Corker have nowhere to go]
That almost is worth noticing. “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two,” Williams said. Trump has left office, at least for now, but those he inspired are determined to recapture power in American politics. My conversation with Williams has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Emma Green: What do you see as the threats to Western civilization?
Ryan Williams: The one we have focused on at the Claremont Institute is the progressive movement. [Progressives think that] limited government, in the Founders’ sense—checks and balances, robust federalism, a fairly fixed view of human nature and the rights attendant to it—all has to give way to a notion that rights evolve with the times.
The biggest institutional part of [the progressive movement] is this large bureaucracy or administrative state,
