Michael Anton was working in his small home office, almost four years ago to the day, when his wife came in and told him the news. Rush Limbaugh was reading it, on the air, right now. ‘It’ was his essay, a now notorious essay, a soon to be life changing essay, called ‘The Flight 93 Election’. Anton had published it, pseudonymously, with the Claremont Review of Books a few days before. Like any writer, he wanted people to read his work, but, like every writer, he wasn’t too surprised when he wasn’t read. ‘Flight 93’ was posted on Labor Day, a Monday, and did a little traffic. Tuesday: the same. Wednesday? Well, Rush Limbaugh read the whole thing out, all 4,257 words, for three hours, to 13 million people.
The Claremont Review website crashed. Anton had the essay hosted on American Greatness — then that website crashed. ‘So there was a period of five or six hours on that Wednesday when nobody could read the essay,’ Anton explains, ‘because it kept crashing every site that hosted it.’
But people did read ‘Flight 93’. That essay deployed the most strident metaphor in modern political writing. ‘Charge the cockpit or you die,’ Anton told Republicans, before adding another one. ‘A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinders and take your chances.’
‘Flight 93’ remains a combative, stormy, iconoclastic, macho, mocking, midnight hour indictment of the American status quo, and the conservative movement, as it was in 2016. (It was possible, reading it, to think: this was it. Someone with a postgraduate education was doing it. This was the intellectual voice of Trumpism — entertaining and somewhat anxiety-making all at once.) Here was a style that dared you whether to take it literally or not. Its key metaphor also appalled many on the right, who thought it was in extraordinarily poor taste.
Trump won that November, which Anton, like most of the planet, didn’t see coming. American voters charged the cockpit. Anton entered it too, serving 14 months on the National Security Council. Today he is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College. I’ve called him to discuss his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. As the title suggests, this is not a sunny read.
It opens with the story of California’s fall from middle-class paradise to woke-managerial dystopia. ‘I’m a profound lover of California, at least as it was,’ Anton, a native of the state, says. ‘It’s hard to love now, given the way its governed, in a way that is both incompetent and soft-tyrannical.’ He argues that this could be America’s future. He writes that ‘the state is grotesquely unequal, with a tiny number of winners taking virtually all the spoils while a serf class of immigrants, legal and illegal, do much of the work…and nearly all of the grinding toil.’ Saul Bellow once memorably described Chicago as ‘the contempt center of the USA’; for Anton it’s California, a state where the good has been driven out, and only the worst remains.
The book goes on and goes further into what has gone wrong. There’s a civics lesson on the American founding, a taxonomy of the ‘Ruling Class’ and the motivations of its followers, an analysis of the media and propaganda, a long chapter that attacks pro-immigration arguments and a national populist policy wish list. (‘If anybody in power wants to talk about how to put it into action, I’d happily talk to them,’ Anton says.)
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