We are hear here at here at the washington, d. C. Campuses where im also the dean of the school of government here in the nations capital. You can find out more about our programs at dc. Hilt hills take. Edu. Were in the ply area with library with Michael Anton whos a Research Fellow here, and were going to be discussing his new book, the stakes america at the point of no return. Welcome, mike, glad youre here. You might know michael from his previous work, he wrote flight 93 election, under a pseudonym at the time. He was in the private sector, so he wrote under a pseudonym until he was occupanted, and then he went to work with for the Trump Administration in the National Security council. That work, i think its safe to say, saw 2016 as an existential question. And now you tell us were at the point of no return, so im tempted to ask right off the tough what do you say to those who consider you to be an alarmist . I look around [laughter] and i see what is going on all around us right now. What is going on . What is yourassessment of things . You know, set up our conversation. Well, i would agree with those people, i am an alarmist. The question is am i right or am i wrong. Im comforted, somewhat, by the fact that a lot of people who said this is insane in 2016 have come around and said, i dont know, you might have been right after all. Or even im now completely convinced. To be vindicated by bad events is only somewhat comforting. Id have rather just been wrong and had everything turn out okay. So i wrote the bulk of the book before the lockdown, before the riots or the 1619 riots as our teacher called them. Right. And they serve as sort of further vindication that the countrys headed in a bad direction. But, again, its vindication id rather not have. Id rather have everything get fixed, everything become harmonious, and then i could go down in history as a crank who wrote one alarmist thing that turned out to be inaccurate. Thatd be a much better outcome. My own reputation would suffer, but everyone else would be a lot happier. [laughter] right. Well, both these books are about elections. Is something about where we are in our history such that are all elections going to be of this magnitude, or is this a temporary thing . Well, its definitely temporary. But thats also not a comforting answer because one way you could solve the problem is just have, you know, one more election, elect Democratic Party, let them am nsse amnesty if you read the biden harris immigration plan, theyre essentially promising to bring in through a combination of amnesty, 52 million americans if they become president and all on natural sawtion, citizenship. The number, the highest correlation of liberal and democratic voting for a district whether thats a congressional destruct, a state, a county or whatever is the percentage of foreign born. And they know this. The democrats have been saying this for decades that the more immigrants come into the country in certain states, the more they tip democratic, and thisll be a great way to build a permanent democratic majority. Thats just one example of what i think was on the table in 2016 because its on the table in 2020. So one way to stopping having flight 93 elections is to stop having elections. Everybody knows what the outcome is in california, you know whos going to win. And whoever wins is going to have the same program as everybody else. The country could become like that shortly, is what im most worried about. So one more general questions, then i actually want to walk through some meaty parts of the book. The 2016 election, the 2020 election, is the 2020 election more existential, if you will . And i preface that by pointing out that the founder of the transition integrity project, which is a Bipartisan Group with john podesta [inaudible] nice gilman has niles gilman has tweeted that you are the robert [inaudible] of our time and should be treated as such. Well, he was executed for working with [laughter] what is going on . Is this election more, more hyped finish. Worse than that, he was executed for writing articles, right . Without a trial. And this person has been criticized by some of our friends and has refused to apologize or back down. Totally justified. And extremely wellfunded think apparently has no problem with him tweeting out threats. What does it tell us about where we are . I think less expected to win the the left expected to win the 2016 by a landslide. They expected the transition to a oneparty state to be smooth and up eventful. They were uneventful. They were shocked by the election of trump. They were shocked that there was still enough effective resistance to their program, and theyve been in a very angry and vengeful mood since the 2016 election, and that ang ily, vengeful mood has hit a fever pitch in 2020, and i fear that if they get total power in 2020, i believe that the transition to total power in 2016 add that it occurred would have been smoother, less turbulent. I think its going to be extremely turbulent if they get it now in part because theyre going to be out to settle scores. For example, one person whom i know slightly, havent spoken to in years, has actually called for, quoteunquote, truth and Reconciliation Commission for the posttrump age. This is something that happens when a totalitarian dictatorship falls and you dont want to put everybody in jail, you at least try to smooth over the differences by having people come forward and confess. What crimes are there for making an argument for the president and for his programs . If were talking about a truth in Reconciliation Commission, were admitting there are no democratic politics, no justified opposition anymore, theres just one side and enemies, and thats the way they see it. Right. Well, lets back up and really kind of work true the book through the book some and get to some of your argument. The flight 93 argument was turned into a booklet, but this is really now more of an extensive work that thinks through some of the underlying problems that we face. You opened this book with the extended essay, if you will, from a chapter about california. Im from california, as are are you spent some time in california i was born and raised the revolting generation. Okay. But you predict california as a study of americas possible future. Right. So backing away from the immediacy of the election, you see really a larger trend going on here which thats representation california has more effective lu had oneparty rule for decades. The interregnum notwithstanding, not to go into the weeds, but arnold is schwarzenegger spent less than two years trying to govern in the kind of centerright modern republican conservative and was defeated in every respect and spend his entire second term governing as a democrat. Even though he never switched parties. The congressional delegation, ive forgotten, its Something Like 457, overwhelmingly democratic. It has had oneparty governance at the state level, city level and pretty much every county level with a large population, there are some red counties in rural areas, but those red counties and the red people, there are millions of them in california, they have knowfective vote or say. They can vote, it just doesnt matter. So california shows what happens when the Democratic Party and the modern left take complete power, what they do. Its particularly illustrate thive, because the modern Democratic Party are especially well represented by california, by finance interests, tech interests, the managerial class, the socalled knowledge economy workers, things like that. These are the people that cram that little ribbon up and down the california coast, come up with all kinds of enthusiasm and then impose them on the rest of the state. And its a very, you know, its not a warts and all portrait of california. It is a mostly wartsz portrait because i feel like californias propaganda about the Natural Beauty and Silicon Valley innovation, all of these things, everybody hears that. We all know that side of the state. Im not denying that its there, im just say underneath the tip of the iceberg is a big, giant iceberg of decay, and people dont hear about it, and they need to know about it. So the what literal lu makes it the literally makes it the example where things are going . Obviously, theres cultural questions cultural questions how it actually operates yeah, all of the above. I mean, i start, almost begin the book with mike bloomberg, former mayor of new york city and very briefly a president ial candidate in the democratic primary, while he was running came out to california and said this is the model for the future. Bloombergs a prototypical kind of oligarch type. I dont know how much money he has, 50 billion. Not taking anything away from his success, but he very much all about the knowledge economy, the finance economy, the hightech economy and with no concern for the middle class or manufacturing and is so on. His vision of new york, he used to call it the, quoteunquote, luckily products luxury product. Yes, its very expensive to be here and all kinds of things dont work, but it works for the top. And thats what matters. He doesnt seem to care about the rest of the country in any significant way. Mike bloomberg was very much a candidate for the coastal elite, the coastal oligarchs. And the parts of california that he were praising are the only parts that really work, and he seemed to neglect the rest. I would say the same about gavin newsom and Mark Zuckerberg and schwarzenegger and all the names you think of when you think of the great california success story. As long as palo alto e and San Francisco and a laguna beach and a handful of other places are doing okay, californias working. Modesto, lodi, fresno, the foothills and Cascade Mountains and the high desert and the low desert and the inland empire, not only do they not care about those places, they dont even know theyre there. So theres a sense, and i want you to juxtapose that with you also talk about, you refer to like a parchment regime yeah. Theres a certain juxtaposition in your book between this new regime, californias model of where things seem to be going, and this other, old regime, this parchment regime. I want to come back later to your analysis, but just i want to talk about those two models, the california model but this parchment regime you talk about, the older america. Tell us more about how you an lose that. You also talk about the confusion both within the. [laughter] and the right over that. Yeah. The main thrust of chapters two and three is to say this is how were supposed to be governed, but were not anymore. And in a way, its meant to shake conservatives by the lapels a bit and say i reveer the constitution and the bill of rights and civil war amendments just as much as you do. But its time to own up to the fact that the United States is no longer governed by these things. Its fundamentally governed in a different way. So i dont give much of a civics lesson about how its supposed to be governed. I think five or six pages because its covered elsewhere. But then i spend a lot of time in chapter two discussing attacks on the original understanding, and i spend more time on rightwing attacks than leftwing attacks. Including by many hillsdale scholars including myself, but the rightwing attacks havent gotten as much attention. Lets dug into those for a little bit. At hillsdale we spend a lot of time talking about the founding and the Core Principles behind it, the declaration and the constitution. We think those are very important to defining our regime. But its also the case with some of our own, our teachers have talked about many times that you go into some depth about how theres been a debate within the right for some time over how to understand the founding. But to what extent has that kind of taken the conservatives, the defenders of the founding, off on the wrong path . Well, theres two, theres maybe two ways i can put this. First is that theres, theyre related. Theres a conservative tack which says its the the founding is well, let me put it this way. Im trying to speak to those conservatives who look at 2020 and say i dont like this. Something has gone or terribly wrong, it needs to be fixed. And when we sit down and make our list, you know, whats the list of things you dont like, my list and their list looks about the same. Simply a byproduct of. I dont mean to disparage but he caricatures america in the book which came out in 1987 is nothing but a kind of lock put to life on a political stage. I tried to answer, neither of these charges is true. It is deviation from the mess we are in now. Not adherence to the founding principle and the founders in fact were not straight up locksians are libertarians or concerned only with the private satisfaction of appetites and things like that and build a resume that is all right and no duties. We halted all of this before. They were doing the best we could and the best anyone could under the circumstances of 1776 which in fundamental ways still prevail today in the sense that we still live in the modern world is ups to the classical a label will probably still live in a christian world, we live in a world in which civil and religious law have been separated as they were not in the ancient world. I dont want to get into the philosophy too deeply but many fundamental circumstances still prevail and the answers that are proposed by people in the right are unviable. I think they know that because they never spelled out. They chip away a lot of the founding it in maybe it is kind of a new right that comes from nietzsche or people in nature absorb it. I find all of those unsatisfactory. Some aspects of some of those things are reasonable if interpreted in the right way and included with other elements and i tried to schedule this out. Is very much not me. Im trying not to bash rightwing critics of the founding, it doesnt help anything. Im saying im with you on the diagnosis. I dont think you are right on the cure. Hear me out and from what i have heard minimally, i hadnt really thought this meant that on the fence but i have been convinced by that. Literally 5 people have told me that. That is an important aspect of your book. We will come to your serious criticism of current policies of conservatism and modern aspects of the movement if you will but that stems from a misunderstanding or failure to comprehend the grounding is that a statement . Its not an original case, the most original about chapter 2 is putting it all in one place and trying to directly address criticism that gained steam over the last 10 years. Im not going to old debates from kaleocontacted neocons from the 70s, not refighting the civil war. It is all about addressing serious rightwing critics of the regime as it has developed in the last couple decades, a regime which i oppose it is far from what it should be but diagnose the reasons why. Host on the left a little bit, we had the 1619 project, the first 1776 project, what do you make of that . That is the root of what it has gotten us here. That could question. I isolate capital progressivism of the Twentieth Century and second 60s leftism, the 1619 project, the original progressives whatever one thinks of them, skeptical to say the least, i find some good in them. One thing is none of them were antiamerican. They wanted to reinterpret they were antifounding but not in that they thought it was bad at the time, they just thought, think of them as somebody coming to a stateoftheart computer and trying to run software from a, 64. That the weather looked at america. The constitution is outmoded software that cant work on the complex machine today, we need new software but they left the machine. Wilson wanted to bring about progress. When you get to 60s radicalism the machine is terrible and we are trying to break it. What happens there . Arises from a kind of irrational action, utopianism, residual marxism, maybe just a lot of discontentment built into the system. Some of the arises from just critiques such as telling her history one way and lots of people have been left out. A lot of it begins an argument for inclusion. Why we only telling the story about this story and then it becomes we should tell all the stories as well. Why are we emphasizing, change the matter of emphasis you get all the way to we are not going to tell the story him anymore only to let in a disparaging way and everything has to be about stuff that was formally excluded. There is a momentum to it i guess the took on a life of its own and culminates, what you have been watching the last couple days, theyve had a rough week or two where they are starting to deny they ever said the most radical things they said and even gone so far as to disingenuously retroactively change websites and take down tweets but they say the internet is forever. All these things have been captured and has been thrown in their faces. Host for the purposes of i will make a distinction you make. The term intellectual shifts that are going on but also structural practical things are happening as well, one of the things many of our friends and scholars point out about the Administrative State, structural things are happening below their intellectual critiques and arguments. But because of that. Host they are connected. The constitution of 1786 is old software for a machine that is too complex for it. We need to come up with new software. Part of the problem is the old Software Says let the people decide all these questions, you cant have that anymore because the questions are too complicated for people to decide. They need to be decided on the basis of expertise or Scientific Authority and implemented in a nonpartisan way. And in order to do that we have to build this incredible apparatus. They do it cleverly, still formally only 3 branches of government, the Administrative State, not quite but almost entirely built within the executive branch but becomes an unaccountable fourth branch, people are not you nonresponsive to elected authority. There is a chart, the executive branch sits at the top, little lines on the box to secure the ceo of the company you would think these people report to me and ceo, that is more or less true, you have a lot of leeway, the president doesnt. The Administrative State is so insulated from political authority. The breaking away between the parchment regime, the regime of the fou