You may subscribe, and its a publication of the claremont institute, a conservative think tank here in california. Host how did the review books begin . Guest it began 16 years ago. Because of necessity, really. There had been for many years a leading liberal book review in the country, the new york review of book, the sunday New York Times book review, the new public pages. But there had been no place for conservatives to engage in longform book reviews and essays about books, and bookish ideas. And also we felt there was a conservatives needed that, point one. Point two, they needed an intellectual Playing Field where the debate still very much going on about what services is and should be, could be, fairly thought out at a high level among conservatives. Host is it like the new york review of books in the sense that there are several essays that arent necessarily book related . Guest yes, it can be. We do they are a more comprehensive book review than we are because they come out many more types, 20 times a year, and they have a lot of power and money behind them, which we alas do not. They set out to review all kinds of books for all kinds of academic readers, and i would say they have a much more academic reading class to feed than we do so our books are more concentrated in history, politics, philosophy, religion, war, literature, classic literature. We do a little bit less current hit tour, more classic literature, than they do, and we do much less in the way of arts and decorations and furniture and all the kinds of interesting things which say, in the Times Literary Supplement to take another imminent example with utter abandon. Host Charles Kessler, what two books have recently been reviewed in the claremont review . Guest well, we recently reviewed Charles Murrays book, coming apart one of the most important books on the American Social class and society at large that has been published in probably 20 years. We review all kinds of books, of course, not just books by conservatives, although Charles Murray is a kind of libertarian writer and we also review, you can say, the counterpart to his book, our kids, a book byputnam, political scientist at harvard. And helped receive long, interesting, meaty, reviews which said a lot about the state of the peculiar state of american politics and society these days. We have not yet had our big piece on donald trump but im writing it now. Host when witness ill be published . Guest that should be published in the spring issue. Host which comes out in may. Guest comes out in may. Thats right. Host what is the peculiar situation in american politics and Society Today that you are reviewing . Guest well, something strange has happened in american politics. For one thing the trump example shows some evidence for this. White working class people are becoming less democratic and more republican. Upper middle and upper class are voting very reliably democratic and very liberal democratic these days, and Neither Partys social composition has adjusted to that fact. So both parties are sort of out of phase with their own social bases and Neither Party is quite ready to embrace the new voters who want to elm brace embrace it, or embrace some of the candidates it could produce. Bernie sanders on the one hand, a donald trump or even a ted cruz to some extent on the other. But that, i think, the cold war ended 25 more than 25 years ago now, and a lot of things are still working themselves out through american politics, and its going to be different. After this race, the Republican Party is going to be different from what it was before. The Democratic Party, a little bit less so issue think, but im not really sure where the republicans are going to end up in 2017. Host are you a fan of donald trump . Guest i dont admire him itch find him interesting and to some extent amusing. Think that he is hard enough to watch. Theirs something about him which is attractive and fascinating in a way that makes you slightly ashamed of yourself for being so fascinated, but i dont think he is some of my friends are very upset by him and think he spells the doom of republican government in america. I dont think so. Dont think he is a caesarrist sort of personality. If anything, he is more interested in Caesars Palace than in caesarrism. I think he is probably if he were to be elected he would proof to be something closer to schwarzenegger than to berlusconi. I dont think he is as serious a politician as berlusconi. If we do have a president trump, well see a lot of drift and uncertainty in his administration, just as we saw here in california with schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger needed a script. He was very good at performing but he didnt know what he was supposed to say. He didnt know what he was supposed to back as a politician in office, and i fear the same would be true of trump. That he is fascinating in the pursuit of office, but opposite hes got once hes got it i wonder if he will be bored. I wonder if he will fail the test of seriousness that any president has to pass. Minimal test. Host booktv is here at Claremont Mckenna college. Whats the setup out here . Is there several different colleges but theyre interrelated . How does it work . Guest well, its articles of confederation. So, we good back this is not the constitution. This is articles of federation. Five independent undergraduate schools and the graduate school two graduate schools, each on seven campuses, cheek by jowl, and theyre linked together as a kind of Permanent League of friendship, and so each has its own faculty, its own administration, own president and so forth. And its own fundraising responsibility. We share in common a library, before the the size of dartmouths library, and we share a steam plant, and some property. But otherwise its every tribe on its own bucket, and each campus focuses on something slightly different academically. So Claremont Mckenna has a disproportionate number of political scientists and economists. We have a vastly disproportionate number of majors in economics, finance, Political Science, International Relations and those fields, but if you want to study classics, want to study latin or greek you have to go to pomona or scripps to they can those courses, but they can come here and study Political Science if they wish to, and so you have a kind of balance, and a typical student spends maybe a fourth of his courses off campus or, as we like to say here, abroad. Host is this a conservative college . Guest Claremont Mckenna is more conservative than any other the other claremont colleges and more conservative than any other highquality topten liberal arts college in the country. But that means that contemporary terms we have probably 15 professors who may be republicans, consecutive republicans. 15 out of 130. However, if you go next door to pomona you will find far, far fewer than 15, if you find any at all. Who are registered as republicans. And every now and then students range outside the campus and track down that data because you can fine out what a persons registration is. Charles kessler is also a professor of government here and the author of the book i am the change barack obama and the future of liberalism. In the claremont review of books, theres a quote by you you cant teach at an American College these days without wondering if and some schools you wonder when its going to happen. Student, fellow faculty member or administrator is going to charge you with finding them. Guest yes, im afraid thats true. Still hasnt happened to me, happily, or to i think any of my friends here at Claremont Mckenna, but you can see that the National Trends are bad, and they are all moving in that mostly moving in that direction. Its a terrible thing because it leads to a kind of invites a kind of selfcensorship, and i do hear my colleagues occasionally saying, im not going to be teaching that. But its just too risky, just too tough in the current sort of environment, whether its because it offends against income inequality or black lives matter or whatever sort of trendy Political Movement of the day there is. Were aware of that. Professors are aware of that, and students are aware of it, too. So last november we had some disturbances on this campus, on Claremont Mckenna. I wrote a piece about it a week later in the wall street journal in november, and the within 48 hours it was over, but that is to say within 48 hours, administration had conceded almost every demand that the protesters, some 30 or 40 of them, at most, had asked. 30 or 40 students out of 1300 undergraduates, to put it in a little bit of perspective. But for me the leaving aside my political disagreements with the administration, the most worrisome thing was it was very difficult to get students to talk about what had happened. The very next week, i tried to have a discussion in my classroom. Was teaching freshman american government. One student gave actually a very sort of speech in favor over them demonstrators, but no one would second him or object to him itch couldnt get them to say anything. So i talked to them in office hours, and i asked them, why are people unwilling to speak . They said theyre afraid, and i asked, afraid of what . Are you afraid of your of the administrators or your faculty . Are you afraid of your fellow students . And without exception each one of them only talking four or five students here put each one of them said to me, my fellow students. And id never really heard this before. It was interesting. It was not just fellow students. It was their fellow students on social media that they were afraid of. It was being denounced on facebook or one of the other comparable sites, and i never heard a student say this before but it was quite interesting. You see its a kind of generational change. Now for the first time we have student whose have green up with social immediate grown up with social media and spent their whole lives on social media at this point. They dont know a time before social media existed. What was interesting was theres something ill liberal about social media which their comments revealed in me in a way id never understood. I mean, email and other kind of similar technologies are not illliberal. Theyre a continuation of a conversation or letter but just by other means and faster. But theres something that is more like a mob on facebook and twitter than like a letter or a conversation, a thoughtful conversation. And that was, it seemed to me, what they were getting at. You can have 80 people denounce you in seconds. And theres something about that which they were they found deeply disturbing. Host unhappily you write, campus is estopped in the spirit of the lincolndouglass debates or any debate for that matter. Guest yes. One of the things we have lost i, too, have come to realize how much we have lost it is when oratory when survey courses existed, a lot of kids read jon Stewart Mills on liberty. Read classics of free speech. They read jefferson and tocqueville. Fewer student does that now. I must say its pretty sound on that narrow question. But one of the unanticipated consequences of dropping so many required courses and books is that the free speech classes are no longer as known as they once were when i was in knowledge. Must have rather in four years i must have read jon Stewart Mills on liberty, four or five times during class. It kept coming up. And now you can easily go through most schools, including c c, without ever reading on liberty even once. And so one used to be able to assume that there was a kind of common culture of liberty or free speech that you could fall back on, and i think thats less true now. But it has sort of inspired me to begin to assign liberty in freshman american governments and other courses where i wouldnt necessarily have assigned it before. Just to get it in at some early phase in an established curriculum. Host what other book do you astein guest the Lincoln Douglass debate. Every time i teach freshman american i teach frederick douglass. Is a tough back, a controversial book. The nword is used multiple times. Both n words are used multiple times, negro as well as the other one. Negro is offensive to of course, fashion changes in these matters all the time but lincoln and douglass, what a story, what a drama. Seven debates. Three hours each. No microphones. No reporters except ones taking notes. Just the two guys, one talking for an hour, one talking for an hour and a half, and then the first guy getting a right of response for 30 minutes at the close. And students love it. Think its a highlight of the year because theyre not running for president. They were running for senate in illinois. They would be douglass and lincoln would be opposing each other two years later for president. This was sort of a dry run for that. But it raises all the same kinds of questions and deep questions about how you how a politician speaks to voters in a democracy and what the relationship is supposed to be between a politician and a voter, especially if, as is usually the case, you can be completely candid with them. And you certainly see that sort of thing lincoln doesnt want to talk about if he can avoid it, same thing with douglass, but its a merry debate and a very serious debate tilt. Host have you faced a backlash for assigning that . Guest that is one of the things that i regard as an eventuality but it has not happened yet. Im glad to say. I, too done i was using i think trigger warnings before trigger warnings were cool, because i think its fair to tell people, look, youre going to be this is not youre going to be seeing the nword, youre going to be seeing some very candid discussion about what are the just how equal are blacks to whites and what does that mean . What shouldded mean in american politics . But i think the debates are so powerful and charming that they have never failed to work their magic so far. Host whats your take on what has been going on at your alma mater, harvard, and at princeton, about renaming some of the buildings, some of the schools because of controversy . Guest well, host renaming Woodrow Wilson institute, et cetera. Guest and Cecile Rhodes is under fire in england, too. Well, would say, if there was any cause that might have it would have been repealing woodrow will wilsons presence. He is one of the founders of modern progressivism. But of course it is you know, that way leads to madness. I mean, you have nothing then but a regime of continual censorship, deciding who is going to be allowed into your mind and your consciousness, and on your campus, and who is not. But there are serious issues which princeton ought to think about in regard to Woodrow Wilson. His expungement is not one of them. Really what his politics were like, where his political principles and values came from. Those are all legitimate questions. Hardly look at very seriously for a long time. Host i am change, barack obama and the future of liberalism, is your most recent book. Whats it about . Guest it was an attempt to give a serious account by a conservative of a liberal president s political thoughts. I wrote it in 2012 11 and 12. Came out in 2012 and then a paperback after the election. Its most live about obama but also about his tradition. Which i tike be a president ial tradition of liberal leadership. So Woodrow Wilson, lbj, fdr and lbj are the three other main characterness the book. Its a sort of comparison of four great democratic president ial statesmen, and the conceit of the book is whether or not obama is going to deserve to be placed on the liberal mt. Rushmore after his term, his second term in office. I would say now, probably so. I he has had a very successful he has turned a political situation, which was not all that favorable, into a really pretty successful liberal presidency, think. His reelection was not a huge reelection. It was a meager reelection. He lost votes. He stood in his first electoral cycle and thats unusual. Thats a sign of president ial weakness. And his party is decimated. I dont think its really seeped into peoples consciousness that at the if you look not just at the national level. Senate and house, but also at governorships and state house seats, that the Democratic Party is enough at its lowest point since the 1920s. I mean, if this had been a good two terms for obama, i hasnt been a great two terms for his party. And thats one of the stories going into this president ial cycle that is underreported, i think. Nonetheless, from the point of view of his personal success as a president , he has managed to take a relatively weak hand and he has played it very well. Host among other things, Charles Kessler is editor of the claremont review of books and has been our guest on booktv. Guest thank you so much. Heres a look at the current bestselling nonfiction books according to the Harvard Book Store . Cambridge, massachusetts, topping the list is all the Single Ladies in which rebecca tracer, writer at large for new york magazine, detail this contributions 0 unmarried women throughout american history. An examination of end of life care in being mortal. Up next, winner of last Years National book award, look advertise current state of black america, in between the world and me. In evicted matthew desmond, harvard sociologist and explores the rise in evictions for low income families. And in by ghetto print the history of race in the world today. Npr host, diane ream, discusses how he debt with the death of her husband and the right to death movement. And a shadow of women in politics in rads american women, as to z and the New York Times reporter explores how to increase productivity