Michael Anton

Michael Anton (born 1969) is an American conservative essayist, speechwriter and former private-equity executive who was a senior national security official under the Trump administration.

Quotes

 * It’s like these mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics who worked construction, on the docks, and in the police and fire departments never existed, were never part of the scene. In modern San Francisco’s self-conception, there were the Native Americans who had the land stolen out from under them—then fast-forward to the hippies, the gays, the hipsters, the techies, and the oligarchs. American California isn’t merely gone; it never was.
 * The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Skyhorse Publishing (2020)

Unprecedented: On the novelty of our cultural predicament
Vol. 40, No. 4 (Features December 2021)




 * America has yet formally to transform (if it ever will) from republic to empire. Yet in all important respects, our country is no longer a republic, much less a democracy, but rather a kind of hybrid corporate-administrative oligarchy.


 * Multi-ethnic polities are hardly unknown to history. Of these, Aristotle gives several examples—all of which ended up fighting civil wars along ethnic lines. The most common (one may say only) way that multi-ethnic societies have been successfully governed is centrally, from the top, by some form of one-man rule, whether monarchical, Caesarist, or tyrannical. This, ultimately, is how Rome “solved” the problem of admitting so many foreigners to citizenship, to say nothing of its far-flung conquest of peoples whom it never made citizens. In more recent times, one may think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Consider, now, the contemporary United States of America. At first glance, it seems to belie Aristotle’s implied assertion that regime-ending ethnic conflict is unavoidable wherever more than one group lives under the same government. Americans pride themselves, and their country, on their exceptional track record of assimilating peoples from all over the world. Yet before we congratulate ourselves overmuch, let us reflect, first, on the fact that the United States has not merely abandoned but utterly repudiated the traditional understanding of assimilation, which is now denounced by all elite opinion as “racist” and evil. Not only does no American institution encourage (much less demand) assimilation, they all foment the opposite. Immigrants to America are exhorted to embrace their native cultures and taught that the country to which they’ve chosen to immigrate is the worst in world history, whose people and institutions are intent on harming them, and that their own cultures are infinitely superior. In this respect, one supposes, immigrants are encouraged to “assimilate”—to the anti-Americanism of the average Oberlin professor.


 * The “Great Replacement” is happening, not just in America but throughout the West. Elites both deny and affirm it. When they write op-eds in The New York Times entitled “We Can Replace Them,” that’s a good thing and the phenomenon under discussion is absolutely right and just. When you notice and express the mildest wish not to be replaced, it’s a racist conspiracy theory that you are evil for even mentioning—your evil being further proof that you deserve to be replaced. They get to say it; you’re required not merely to pretend that you didn’t hear it but also to insist that they never said it. No majority stock in any nation has ever deliberately sought its own replacement, much less insisted that those who might have misgivings lie to themselves that it’s not happening.


 * Tyrants or ruling classes that despoil their countries for personal gain are nothing new. If that were all we had today, our situation would be much more understandable. And we do, in part, have that. Our ruling class is rich and rapacious—rich because rapacious, and eager to be richer still by taking what little you have left. Yet elite enthusiasms extend well beyond mere greed. There is a malice in them atypical to the native despot, one found historically only or largely among the most punitive conquerors. A tyrant fears a healthy population, to be sure, because such is always a threat to his power. This fear typically inspires little beyond efforts to ensure that the population is dependent and unarmed—two aims of our overlords, it need hardly be added. Tyrants or ruling classes that despoil their countries for personal gain are nothing new. But our elites also go much further. They seem determined to make the American population fat, weak, ugly, lethargic, drug-addled, screen-addicted, and hyper-sexualized, the men effeminate and the women masculine. Those last two actually barely scratch the surface of the agenda, which includes turning males into “females” and vice versa—or into any one of a potentially infinite number of “genders.” (The number varies depending on which source you check; sixty-three is the highest I could find. Needless to say, no establishment source stops at “two.”) The regime promotes every imaginable historic form of degeneracy—and then invents new ones undreamt of by Caligula, the Borgias, or Catherine the Great.


 * An odd feature of our time is the coupling of mass hyper-sexualization with mass barrenness. Some argue, plausibly, that the link is direct: hyper-sexualization disconnected from procreation inevitably leads to fewer babies. The degree to which crashing fertility is simply an effect of modernity versus a deliberate plan by our rulers is an open question. It is certainly true that every economically and technologically developed society, regardless of region, culture, race, or religion, suffers from cratering birthrates.


 * The promotion of ugliness deserves special attention. The autocrats of old wanted to be known for their patronage of beauty, the arts, and great works. This is one meaning of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and also of Augustus’s boast that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble (to say nothing of having commissioned the Aeneid). A stroll through any city in Europe, and in most of the Americas, finds the same sentiment everywhere—until about the middle of the twentieth century, when suddenly everything turned brutalist, and brutally ugly, and not just the buildings, but the art, the literature, the music, almost everything.