The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

by Michael Anton

What if, rather than trying to socially and culturally Manhattanize the entire country, they instead eased back and allowed red states, counties, towns, and people to remain red? You know, to pray openly, own guns, and segregate public bathrooms by sex. Refrain from unleashing torrents of national media hatred on innocent high school boys. Cease resettling foreign refugees far from the homes of those whose consciences demand they be admitted to the country. And, while they’re at it, end the practice of relocating into red communities the urban underclass who happen to live on real estate that big-city builders are salivating to redevelop.

The core purpose of mass immigration for the left specifically (as opposed to the ruling-class passion for cheap labor) is demographically to overwhelm red America so that, first and foremost, no Republican can ever win the presidency again and, second, the Republican Party becomes irrelevant in as many states, counties, and cities as possible.

The left is very close to accomplishing task number one. Indeed, their 2016 tantrum arose in part because more than a decade of talk of the “Emerging Democratic Majority” had convinced most of them that they already had achieved it. To learn otherwise, at the hands of Donald Trump of all people, was the shock of their lives.

The ruling class has absolutely no problem screwing over their fellow citizens; to the contrary, they seem to relish it. Will they be as willing to limit the future prospects of their own children and grandchildren simply to maximize their own material comfort well into their declining years? Will keeping three homes plus a pied-à-terre, each with its own staff, be more important than seeing thriving grandchildren embark on fruitful, productive lives? Will ours become the first upper class in the history of the world to be not merely uninterested in the caste-status of its own offspring but instrumental in lowering it?

My purpose in this chapter (for the whole book, really) is to deliver a warning to anyone who will listen, in hopes of advancing such a restoration. But, specifically, to the ruling class: your selfish, immoderate, pedal-to-the-floor insistence on more, more, more of every aspect of your agenda, coupled with your obvious inability or unwillingness, on vivid display in May and June 2020, to control your most radical foot soldiers may soon crash the very regime over which you rule and from which you derive by far the most benefit. And to the “conservatives”: your constant surrenders, retreats, sellouts, and backstabbings—your refusal to stand up for your voters, your country, or the Constitution that you claim to love—amount to material support for those you claim to oppose. If America’s constitutional order is overthrown through your cowardice and incompetence, you will have earned and will deserve a lion’s share of the

Punchline

they implicitly accept Fukuyama’s thesis: that history has ended and American democracy is its culmination.

a thing that can’t go on forever won’t, then sooner or later leftism will end and life can revert to “normal.” Which to the conservatives means 1985: a popular Republican president, low taxes, 4.2 percent GDP growth, a strong military, a less vulgar pop culture, religion seemingly honored—and every facet of the 1960s revolutions in place, unquestioned, inviolable. But the kind of epochal change recounted in the histories and biographies lining conservatives’ bookshelves is, to them, unthinkable.

My personal fantasy

Most of them already live in red states. Should the left achieve permanent dominance, more are likely to move to one. And many—I would bet a clear majority—are not merely politically conservative gun owners serious about their faith but are also wary of federal overreach.

It’s not hard to imagine such an administration blundering into a Ruby Ridge or Waco-like fiasco. The first federal hammer blows would very likely fall swiftly, decisively, and without opposition. But after that? After some obviously unjustified and disproportionate use of force against civilians, would the clingers necessarily sit back and suck up whatever followed? Maybe. But maybe not. It’s at least possible that red America might quietly—at first spontaneously, but later perhaps through more explicit cooperation—start to make federal operations on their turf more difficult. It might (say) become inconvenient for an FBI or ATF or BLM agent to buy gas, or get table service in truck stops, or friendly smiles from motel clerks in the hinterlands. Over time, unfriendliness might give way to passive and even (mildly) active obstruction. What if red America started implementing its own version of woke lockouts and de-platforming? Sorry, sir, our credit card machine is down, and we don’t take cash! The feds might appeal for help to the local police and sheriffs, but whose side would they take?

Even if said powers dared try a military solution, is it reasonable to expect the U.S. Army to occupy, pacify, and hold some large portion of the interior of the continental United States for an indeterminate period? This is a question both of will and capability.

It is thus at least possible to imagine red states and counties effectively carving out something like a millet system for themselves over and against federal opposition. Call it “federalism-or-else.” The wiser and cooler among the ruling class might resign themselves to an informal understanding under which federal authority quietly, never explicitly, but unmistakably eases back from red America so long as no part of red America moves toward open rebellion or outright secession.

The Millet System solution

As every wily leader knows, complacency breeds division while fear of an external foe fosters cohesion.

Indeed, it’s already hard to imagine blue America accepting a Trump win in 2020 on any terms whatsoever. If the election were not able to be overturned—in the courts, through boxes of “found” ballots, or by some other means—that alone might trigger “Calexit,” followed by other states. The “state compacts” forged between contiguous groupings of blue states during the coronavirus crisis could form the nuclei. But whenever it were to happen, should blue America once again find the federal government in the hands of a red president they despise and whose authority they do not recognize, and further find that they can’t easily or immediately get rid of him, that could be the spark that causes some to say, “We’re out.”

Yet as much as blue America hates red, I don’t think they want to let their errant cousins go. They’d much rather tax, lecture, chastise, punish, and humiliate them. Also, blues intuitively fear that they can’t run this thing on their own, that the blue metros are not quite as self-sufficiently independent of the red prairies as their boasting would have one think. On some level, leftism knows that it is parasitic on conservatism—just as vice is parasitic on virtue, incompetence on competence, consumers on producers, and disorder on order—which makes separation frightening to many leftist elites. Perhaps the deepest reason, though, that blue America won’t want to let red go is that the blues are hell-bent on punishing the reds. To the left, letting red America, or any part of it, go without forcing it to answer for its “crimes” would be fundamentally unjust. A bill is due, which must be repaid. Punishment is deserved and must be administered. Which, in practical terms, means redistributing remaining red wealth to blue constituencies.

That’s because Caesarism sometimes, though not always, offers the prospect of avoiding conflict. It may be sad to witness a proud old republic surrender its liberty to the rule of one, but if the alternative is bitter and bloody civil war, it becomes more difficulty to condemn such a transition out of hand.

That still leaves the question of the formal mechanism. The two most common ways a Caesar comes to power are by military coup and by winning office legally and then refusing to give it up when his term ends, or maneuvering things in such a way that he’s begged to stay.

that “the courts would never allow that!” is therefore irrelevant. The mere possibility of Caesarism presupposes a degeneration of politics well below levels at which laws and courts are obeyed. Caesar’s contemptuous reply to the courts would echo Andrew Jackson’s: you’ve made your ruling, now let’s see you enforce it.

Such paranoia is preposterously unfounded and arises almost entirely from projection. The left pretends to fear being ruled by the right because it knows that its own deepest desire is to rule the right without consent or constraint. By contrast, if most on the right had their way, they’d prefer to disconnect from the left and let them do whatever they want—on their own space, on their own time, on their own dime.

In any case, while it may seem fantastical to imagine a serious religious revival in the age of iPhones and internet porn, real calamity makes the unthinkable become the imaginable. God doesn’t depart the scene just because we—temporarily—stop paying attention to Him.

For virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin; and similarly, from ruin, order is born; from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune.

The West does not, these days, seem especially healthy, robust, or spirited. Consider the mostly passive, obedient response to the coronavirus shutdowns—a passivity that continued long past when it was plain to all that the initial predictions of a doomsday plague were wrong. Consider also the swift capitulation to every woke demand, no matter how ridiculous or destructive, on the part of nearly every ostensibly “conservative” defender of American and Western civilization, from politicians to intellectuals to think tank presidents.

More fundamentally: where do you think we’d be without him? Even if you’re disappointed with less than two hundred miles of wall, remember that leading Democrats not only insist that every single new inch is a moral atrocity, but they want to tear down sections that already exist.

there’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.

What’s needed, then, is a Trumpist political party focused squarely on “old economy”—rural, manufacturing, and blue collar—interests. Which means, in most if not all cases, a party actively opposed to the program of the ruling class. If the Republican Party can become that, all to the good. If it can’t, it should go out of business.

Republican free-trade, low-tax, no-regulation dogma stopped serving the interests of at least half of Republican voters decades ago. The wing of the party that still sings from that hymnal today is nothing but a controlled-opposition adjunct of the ruling class. Its dogma will have to be smashed.

Fifty-year-old men asserting a fundamental “right” to change in front of eleven-year-old girls in YWCA locker rooms is not the moral equivalent of ending Jim Crow—and despite the left’s caterwauling, few Americans see it that way. What they lack are politicians with the spine to stand up to the nonsense. In other words, the Republican Party needs to become more like the old Democratic Party—more worker-friendly, more concerned with wage and wealth inequality—but also the opposite of today’s Democratic Party: openly nationalistic on economics and trade, stalwartly traditional on morality and culture. If the Republicans can so transform themselves, they have a chance. If they cannot, then the party will have to be destroyed and replaced, or else left to wither in the ruling class’s anteroom, its dwindling adherents the last to realize their own irrelevance.

coalition. To update for our time Milton Himmelfarb’s 1968 quip that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans,” Asian Americans earn like Ashkenazis and vote like Somalis.

The inherently paradoxical propaganda script is already written: the fact that you don’t win votes of color proves that you’re racist and bad; the only way to redeem yourselves is to court voters of color; but any voter of color who votes for you is a race traitor.

Heads they shoot us, tails they hang us. This 24/7 hysterical Megaphone propaganda will be hard to overcome. But Republicans will not only have to try; they’ll have to succeed.

Keeping the floodgates open in a time of mass unemployment is the surest possible sign that our country is controlled by a hostile elite or has gone insane. Or both.

States today is a combination of the latter two. My own view is that America right now does not need any immigration at all. There should be a pause, at least until the country returns to full employment following our economic recovery from the shutdown disaster.

finishing the wall—a real wall, not some “virtual wall” that senators, lobbyists, and party hacks can support because they’re confident it won’t work.

While we’re at it, let’s end the idiotic and self-contradictory practice of “dual citizenship.” No person can simultaneously be loyal to more than one sovereign state at a time.

There’s no other way. If our politics continue as they are, then we have no chance of ever getting a handle on the debt. If we insist that the debt be our priority now, we’ll break the country. We’ve lived in and on debt for a long time. Yes, it’s unsustainable over the long term—but what is “long term”? If it’s next year or even the next decade, then we’re already finished: there’s no way we can solve the problem in that short a time. If it’s a generation or more, then we have a chance. But to have that chance, we have to create the political conditions for a political consensus to emerge. Which means, in the medium term, more debt on the road to less debt.

To get ahead of, and avoid, the “universal basic income” freight train—a key stop on the road to serfdom—Republicans will have to drop their reflexive opposition to government benefits. Thirty

Expand medical school admissions. We need more doctors. Our present “solution” is to keep importing them from abroad, which—and no one seems to care about this—is not exactly great for the countries those doctors leave behind.

The sensible Progressive Era reforms were scrapped by Jimmy Carter in the name of, you guessed it, “ending discrimination”—in this case, discrimination between well qualified applicants and everyone else. That reversal should be reversed. Restore a sensible and rigorous civil service selection and advancement process. Make bureaucracy competent again.

One thing that might help would be a new relationship with Russia. Rapprochement with Moscow seems almost impossible to imagine after four years of unhinged—and almost entirely false—anti-Russian propaganda. Yet our two countries share a number of common interests on which we could profitably cooperate if the nonsense could be put behind us. Russia is a “threat” to Europe only insofar as Europe’s leaders allow themselves to be threatened—for instance, by voluntarily yoking their countries’ energy supplies to a pipeline Moscow can turn on and off at will.

A top priority must be to attack, relentlessly, the legitimacy of the ruling class—to deprive them of any pretense of legitimacy. They are unpatriotic, hostile to the common good, ignorant and uneducated (despite their endless list of credentials), selfish and venal, corrupt, seditious, foreign-influenced, hypocritical, racist (but the “good” kind), above the law, moralistic and hectoring, anti-constitutional and anti-democratic. Ridicule them. Constantly expose their corruption and hypocrisy.

Student debt exploitation is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government—and by law impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Repeal that law. Allow students to get out from under such debt and put the matriculating school, not the taxpayers, on the hook for it. But for undergraduate degrees only.

Impeachment is a constitutional—and political—remedy for removing officials who abuse their enumerated powers. Judges who legislate from the bench should be forced to explain their rulings to the American people. Actual removals would no doubt be difficult, but a few impeachment trials might do wonders toward deterring the worst excesses of our robed masters.

The most important thing we need to do is unquestionably the hardest: create, and elevate, a new elite. Here is what Sam Francis proposed in the wake of the failure of Pat Buchanan’s first (1992) presidential campaign:

Middle American Right should begin working in and with schools, churches, clubs, women’s groups, youth organizations, civic and professional associations, local government, the military and police forces, and even in the much-dreaded labor unions to create a radicalized Middle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and understand how it can be resisted.

The people are more important than the Constitution, which exists to serve the people and not vice