Includes bibliographical references and index.

The founders and the classics -- Relativism and the Declaration of Independence -- Federalist 10 and American Republicanism -- Civility and citizenship : George Washington on civil and religious liberty -- Perpetuating the republic : education and politics -- A new birth of freedom : Abraham Lincoln, Harry V. Jaffa, and the founders -- Three waves of liberalism -- Woodrow Wilson and the statesmanship of progress -- Constitutional decline and the administrative state -- From citizenship to multiculturalism -- Barak Obama and the future of liberalism -- The old new left and the new new left -- Reagan's unfinished revolution -- What's wrong with conservatism? -- Democracy and the Bush doctrine -- Culture, creed, and American nationalism -- Trump and the conservative cause -- Thinking about Trump : morality, politics and the presidency.

"American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary 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 American liberals herald their "living Constitution," a term that implies the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or "transformation" (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social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, made possible by man's increasingly god-like control of his own moral evolution. Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. It takes controversial stands on matters political and scholarly, describing 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 refounding 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, so far unavailing despite many famous victories, to restore the founders' Constitution and moral common sense. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, what have conservatives learned and where should we go from here?" -- Dust jacket flap.

"If Conservatism is to succeed and thrive, it must return to its American roots (not Burke or the common law, or Kirk and traditionalism, or libertarianism and Hayek) Donald Trump understands, in a common sense and political way, the principles of the Founding and how they should be applied to forge a new governing coalition. The neoconservative foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration has more in common with progressivism than with the American Founding. Politics is not "downstream from culture" because politics, especially political foundings, create the culture of a country. Multiculturalism and identity politics, and their notion of group rights, is incompatible with the nation state, citizenship, and the protection of rights as America's Founders those things"--

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