Dispatches from the Late Republic: The Culture, Politics, and Prophets of American Greatness, Decline, and Rebirth
By Michael Anton
Encounter Books, 640 pages, $35
This past September, Michael Anton left his perch as the State Department’s director of policy and planning, where he oversaw the completion of President Trump’s National Security Strategy. His service in that post was brief but consequential because, along with Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, Anton has been one of the principal intellectual architects of the Trump administration’s approach to the world, prioritizing homeland and hemispheric security and deterrence of China while encouraging burden-sharing in Europe and the Middle East. Anton has returned to scholarly pursuits at the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College, and this April, a collection of his essays will be published by Encounter Books with the title: Dispatches from the Late Republic: The Culture, Politics, and Prophets of American Greatness, Decline, and Rebirth. (RELATED: Michael Anton: Trump’s ‘George Kennan’ Pick for Cold War II)
The essays span a 15-year time-period and range from musings about California to paying homage to Anton’s teachers and intellectual heroes (Tom Wolfe, Tom West, Angelo Codevilla, Harry Jaffa, John Marini, Michael Uhlmann), to our civilizational difficulties, to foreign policy, and finally to personal diversions. If there is an overarching theme to the book, it is Anton’s concern about the future of America at home and abroad due to the intersection of culture and politics. Our culture is too often influenced, when not dominated, by what Anton calls “San Francisco values” propagated by leftist oligarchs who control city and state governments in California and elsewhere in the United States.
Anton is not sure that the republic can be saved, even though he applauds President Trump’s attempt to do so.
In lamenting San Francisco’s decline, Anton explains, “Yesterday’s kooks are today’s mayors, supervisors, and state senators — their kookiness having not faded away but become mainstream.” Anton’s description applies equally well to the leftists in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, and many other “blue” cities, and to leaders in California, Minnesota, Maine, New York, New Jersey, and other “blue” states.
Writing during the Biden administration, Anton saw this cultural and political decline manifested at the national level. “[I]n all important respects,” he wrote in December 2021, “our country is no longer a republic, much less a democracy, but rather a kind of hybrid corporate-administrative oligarchy.” Angelo Codevilla wrote a book about this cultural-political oligarchy titled The Ruling Class, while John Marini focused on the elite’s control of the “deep state” in his Unmasking the Administrative State.
Anton listed the policy priorities of our cultural-political elite in 2021: “outsourcing, open borders, financialization, toadying to tech monopolies, democracy wars, critical race theory, race riots, defunding the police, school closures, vaccine mandates, censorship, cancellation, and drug and gambling legalization.” Not much has changed since then, except that Donald Trump gained back the presidency after that ruling class tried to destroy him, just as it had destroyed Nixon over Watergate. And our cultural-political elite has made it clear that if and when they return to power, they will try again to destroy Trump.
In the meantime, our cultural-political elites, Anton writes, promote “every imaginable historic form of degeneracy,” acting like “cultural locusts devouring everything in their path.” They want the abnormal to become normal. They not only engage in “defining deviancy down,” to use Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s immortal phrase, but they also seek to render the word “deviance” meaningless. Anton describes them as “anti-American, anti-white, anti-conservative, anti-rural, anti-Southern, anti-Red state, anti-redneck, anti-working class.”
Anton’s essays on foreign policy foreshadowed in some respects the 2025 National Security Strategy. China, he writes, has a greater interest in Taiwan than we do based on history, geography, and culture, yet the island may become a flashpoint for great power war between China and the U.S. The best course for the United States, he writes, is building a credible deterrent that will preserve “the status quo for as long as possible.”
Russia, meanwhile, is not nearly the threatening power portrayed by European leaders and our own foreign policy establishment who have revived the “lessons of Munich” and the “domino theory” to rally support for Ukraine. Anton includes in this book a lengthy piece on George Kennan, the American diplomat and historian who changed from hawk to dove during the “long twilight struggle” known as the Cold War, and who later opposed NATO enlargement in the post-Cold War world. Anton describes Kennan as a “Machiavellian” who was “clear-eyed and hard-headed about the cold realities of international relations and his country’s true, core interests” and an instinctual conservative “who shared more opinions with today’s populist Right than with the contemporary Left.”
Anton is not sure that the republic can be saved, even though he applauds President Trump’s attempt to do so. Trump is, after all, engaged in an existential struggle against what Anton calls the “unconstitutional” and “anti-constitutional” administrative state which “steamrolls the separation of powers, ignores the limits set by the enumeration of powers, and further rejects any limits either to government’s means or ends” and is “unwilling to tolerate rivals.” And in this struggle against Trump, the administrative state has the support of many federal judges and the mainstream media. Perhaps that is why Anton writes that if he had to bet on America’s future, he would place his chips “somewhere between imminent collapse and drawn-out decline.”
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