Crisis of the Two Constitutions
The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness
Will be published approx. on 25. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
472 pages
978-1-64177-383-6 (ISBN)
Description
American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures and 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 American liberals herald their "living Constitution," a term that implies that the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or transformation (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social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.
With a new preface addressing the consequences of the 2024 elections, Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to, and what is at stake in, our increasingly divided America, as well as what we should strive to commemorate as the nation approaches its 250th birthday. It describes 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 reconstruction 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, largely 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, 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.
With a new preface addressing the consequences of the 2024 elections, Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to, and what is at stake in, our increasingly divided America, as well as what we should strive to commemorate as the nation approaches its 250th birthday. It describes 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 reconstruction 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, largely 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, 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.
Reviews / Votes
Charles Kesler is one of America's foremost conservative intellectuals, and in this hard-hitting, thought-provoking, but witty analysis of the United States' present discontents he reminds us why. His laserlike pinpointing of the profound dichotomy between the Founders' Constitution and the progressivists' constitution explains much of what ails America today, but it also provides the key to the way out, when people recognize how profoundly superior the former is to the latter.-Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Despite its conceits of bow-tied eccentricity and rugged individualism, American conservatism too often traffics in lockstep groupthink: Never Trumpers mechanically affirm the idol of Reagan while MAGA boosters indiscriminately applaud Trump's celebrity. What these bitterly opposed factions share is a disregard for the substance of the problems we face - a candid acknowledgment of which was the key achievement of Trump's revolutionary 2016 campaign. Charles Kesler is one of the few conservatives to transcend the factionalism that distracts us from our problems. He ably connects the legacy of conservative thought to the situation of the present, and he does it with wit and good cheer. This volume is an essential corrective for our desperately distracted time.
-Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Kesler also offers a deep and engaging assessment of the mania according to which America is systemically and irredeemably unjust, especially as that mania plays out on campuses. The education of citizens, he argues, is insufficient without anchoring moral truths.
-Greg Weiner, National Review
Almost any one of the thousands of paragraphs herein could be the subject of a three-hour seminar that would seem to pass in an instant. The book traces an elegant arc beginning with the deepest, most erudite Constitutional philosophy and ending with brilliant, novel, and profound political analysis. All the while, it is historically authoritative, cool, balanced, and witty. Herein you will find striking revelations about the deepest and most complicated roots of the American experiment, as well as masterful, often magisterial, historical and contemporary political analysis. No one loves the Constitution more than Charles Kesler, except perhaps James Madison.
-Mark Helprin
[Kesler is] talking about the emergence of almost a rival constitution, let's call it the progressive constitution in contradistinction with, well, let's say the real one...it makes so much sense of what we are dealing with in the world today.
-Dinesh D'Souza
I think it's a really terrific volume, it's a kind of wonderful overview of American political history, of some of the key issues that we're facing in the country in the twenty-first century, and it's written in this clear and luminous prose, so I really recommend it to all of our listeners.
-Brian Anderson, City Journal's 10 Blocks
Charles Kesler is one of the finest writers on the conservative side and one of the wisest...
-Andrew Klavan, The Andrew Klavan Show
Charles R. Kesler's new book brings together the classical beginnings of the study of politics with the story of our nation in thought and deed.... To recover that story of America is to learn to live it again. This is a deeply conservative undertaking, but it points toward an American kind of conservatism. The effort is conservative in seeking to recover old and splendid things. It is liberal in seeking to lay the ground again for the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the citizen, which are inseparable.
-Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College
Professor Kesler is one of the preeminent conservative intellectuals of our day.
-Pacific Research Institute's Next Round Podcast
[T]he book is an interesting and often insightful take on constitutional history and theory.
-Ilya Somin, Reason
The crisis in Crisis [of the Two Constitutions] is this: "Every republic eventually faces what might be called the Weimar problem. Has the national culture, popular and elite, deteriorated so much that the virtues necessary to sustain republican government are no longer viable?" Have we arrived at our Weimar moment? Not yet, according to Kesler. But "it is not too early to wonder."
-Gerard V. Bradley, First Things
Kesler's new book ... provides the clearest and most thoroughgoing explanation of the political worldview that drives many of those who are convinced that our country is going straight over the cliff.
-R. Shep Melnick, Law & Liberty
Very, very timely. Very relevant to what's taking place.
-Mark Levin, Life, Liberty & Levin
Kesler leads us to the practical political recovery of American constitutionalism in the face of so much opposition, mainly from the progressive political 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.
-Richard M. Reinsch, II, Law & Liberty
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 41 mm
Weight
703 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-64177-383-6 (9781641773836)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Charles R. Kesler is editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, and the coeditor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edition of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling one in the country. In 2017, Politico magazine named Kesler to its annual Politico 50 list of "the key thinkers, doers, and visionaries who are reshaping American politics and policy," and in 2018 the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation awarded him a Bradley Prize.