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2020-

2020-10-14 e
WHAT IS AT STAKE - II

The Election to End All Elections

Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge.

On September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93’s passengers defied armed hijackers and fought to take over the cockpit regardless of danger or odds because they realized that certain death was the alternative. Michael Anton’s 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” written for the Claremont Review of Books and later expanded into a book, argued that although Americans did not know what kind of president Donald Trump would be, they should risk all to elect him because they could be very sure that the alternative would be our republic’s death.

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Anton, now a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, again urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California. In the book’s final chapters, he lays out several paths that the current struggle for America’s future might take.

Anton’s commentary on the 2020 election does not belabor the obvious: it is a binary choice. The unprecedented level of opposition President Trump has faced explains, but does not excuse, some of his shortcomings. As Anton puts it: “[t]here’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.” Then he adds what is really radically new about the 2020 election: should the Democrats win, the ruling Left—which includes just about everyone who controls American government and society’s commanding heights—is ready, willing, and eager to implement plans that would make it virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win national elections again. These plans include the importation and counting of non-citizen voters. Elections by mail would shift power from voters to those who count the votes, just like in Venezuela. Though reelecting Trump makes the republic’s survival possible, and preserves all manner of good options, it guarantees nothing. Trump’s defeat guarantees disaster—like in 2016, only much more so.

The bulk of this well-written book juxtaposes accounts of life under what had been the American constitutional regime with the ruling-class politics that have gone a long way to destroy it. It opens with a bittersweet description of California, then and now. Anton, a young man, is old enough to remember it a near-paradise. Those of a certain age have even more idyllic memories of the Golden State’s unrivaled beauty and plenty, crowned by freedom, ease, and safety. Millions flocked to work and raise families here.

Yet in 2020 productive middle-class families are fleeing California—so much so that the state will probably lose a seat in the House of Representatives after this year’s census. And all because its government—controlled by oligarchs in the entertainment and high-tech industries, as well as the state bureaucracy and public sector labor unions—raised taxes, imposed regulations, let public services decay, stopped defending against criminals, and empowered left-wing social activists. Today’s California is for government-favored oligarchs and those who service them. You want a career? If you don’t conform every word and action to the ruling orthodoxies, your work and talents will be wasted. You want your children to grow up intelligent and decent? The schools will teach them little reasoning and much depravity. Like you, they will also learn to compete by favor-seeking rather than by performance. You see crime rising, sense that you have to protect yourself, but know that, in most of the state, the police will arrest you for it. And you are sick of paying for it all. That is why you want to emigrate from California into the United States of America.

Having held up California as the example of what full-throttle liberalism looks like, Anton offers a defense of the American regime in the face of criticisms from what one might call the nativist Right as well as from the Left. Impressive in its logic and concise in its comprehensiveness, it shows the partial truths on which these critiques are based in the full light of history. All that the United States is really does follow from the founding generation’s understanding of human beings’ inalienable equality before God. The principle of majority rule has no other foundation. Already by the time of the founding, however, America, like every other nation, had acquired a distinct character—language, religion, and customs—that it meant to preserve and defend. A nation of immigrants, to be sure. But the country was never open to just anybody for any reason. Anton cites the 1795 Naturalization Act that specifies agreement with the Constitution and disposition to help the country as conditions for admission. For almost 200 years the Constitution, the American people’s basic “deal” with one another, channeled our strivings and disagreement into deliberations and compromises that allowed us to live the mostly decent lives our culture prescribed. Adherence to its restraints preserved our capacity to continue dealing with problems in more or less predictable freedom.

But, beginning in the 1930s, America’s ruling class pushed aside the Constitution, reducing to a bad joke the civics class description of the regime: “Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts resolve individual disputes about them.” In today’s America, Anton writes,

The real power…resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. The real power resides with their donors, the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.

This ruling class now explicitly denies that “all men are created equal.” It asserts for itself the right to rule by decree by virtue of expertise, and the power to assign different rights and obligations to classes of people, “protected” and less so. Despising any divine or natural authority and contemptuous of America’s history, those in the ruling class make war on the American people’s culture and national identity. (read more)

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