[D66] America’s Leading Authoritarian Intellectual Is Working for Trump

[A.O.]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/americas-leading-authoritarian-intellectual-works-for-trump.html

America’s Leading Authoritarian Intellectual Is Working for Trump
By Jonathan Chait


The most intellectually important essay of the 2016 election cycle, and 
possibly of the whole political era that has begun, is “The Flight 93 
Election.” Its previously anonymous author turns out to be former Bush 
administration speechwriter Michael Anton, reports Michael Warren. Anton 
is now working as a senior national security official in the Trump 
administration. Anton’s role in the administration lends his signature 
essay all the more importance as a statement of Trumpism. The essay has 
many interesting aspects, which made it the subject of fervent debate 
during the election. But its most notable characteristic is its almost 
textbook justification for authoritarianism.

The premise of democracy is that — unlike dictatorships, in which the 
winning side gains total and essentially permanent power — the losers 
can accept defeat, because they know they have a chance to win 
subsequent elections. Without that predicate in place, the system 
collapses. Anton’s essay makes the case that conservatives should 
support Trump because, despite his manifest flaws, they cannot survive a 
single election defeat.

Anton makes the case through the metaphor that carries his essay. 
Conservatives are like the passengers on Flight 93, an aircraft that has 
been hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists and is headed for destruction. 
Anton presses home the motif through an evolving series of duplicative 
metaphors. “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you 
die,” he begins. And then: “If you don’t try, death is certain. To 
compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette 
with a semi-auto.” And then: “We are headed off a cliff.” Switching from 
metaphors to direct argument, Anton predicts in the essay that a Hillary 
Clinton victory would usher in “vindictive persecution against 
resistance and dissent.”

Anton describes the government (pre-Trump) as “the junta.” This cannot 
be dismissed as mere rhetorical exaggeration. To Anton, the rising share 
of the nonwhite population is a foreign invasion: “The ceaseless 
importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, 
or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more 
Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally 
American with every cycle,” he writes. He describes the children of 
immigrants as “ringers to form a permanent electoral majority.” The 
racial and political implications of this argument are both clear and 
extreme: Anton believes the white Republican base is the only legitimate 
governing coalition. Democratic governments are inherently illegitimate 
by dint of their racial cast.

Race is integral to Anton’s sense of his own persecution. He sees the 
enthusiasm for Trump among avowed white supremacists as more reason to 
support Trump: “The Left was calling us Nazis long before any 
pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes,” he argues. “And how does 
one deal with a Nazi — that is, with an enemy one is convinced intends 
your destruction? You don’t compromise with him or leave him alone. You 
crush him.” It is a fascinating line of reasoning: There are Nazis 
supporting his chosen candidate, therefore the left will crush 
conservatives like Nazis, therefore his chosen candidate’s triumph is 
all the more necessary.

If there is a single passage of the essay that most succinctly 
summarizes its case, it is this: “I want my party to live. I want my 
country to live. I want my people to live.” Anton equates all these 
things — his party, his country, and his people, insisting that four 
more years of a Democratic presidency will extinguish all three. This is 
a textbook example of the kind of reasoning, the conviction that a 
single election defeat will usher in permanent destruction, that liberal 
theorists see as inimical to democratic government.

It would be a mistake to attribute too much power and influence to a 
single essay. “The Flight 93 Election” did not change very much. As I 
argued a few months ago, currents of authoritarianism have run through 
conservative thought for years. What Anton’s essay did was to synthesize 
and intellectualize the right-wing case against democracy and marshal it 
on behalf of the Republican party presidential nominee. And now that 
nominee has won, and his administration has appropriately brought 
onboard the author of authoritarianism.

Tags: the national interestpoliticsdonald trumpmichael anton