Ten years ago this September, an essay appeared in the Claremont Review of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus that Dan Proft described at the time as the most important essay of the 2016 election cycle. The Flight 93 Election, by what would not remain a pseudonym for long, argued that the 2016 election was a charge-the-cockpit-or-die moment for the American right, that all sixteen of Trump’s Republican primary opponents would have guaranteed more of the same Obama-era trajectory, and that a Hillary Clinton presidency represented Russian roulette with a semi-automatic while Trump at least offered the possibility of spinning the cylinder and taking a chance on survival.
The author was Michael Anton, now the Jack Roth Senior Fellow in American Politics at the Claremont Institute and former director of policy planning at the State Department, who joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer ahead of the release of his new book Dispatches from the Late Republic, available June 30th, and a second book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy, arriving in August.
Anton said the piece feels like longer than ten years ago because he has had his nose in the two new books for months and has been doing fundamentally different work, pulling back from the day-to-day of political commentary toward longer-term philosophical inquiry that he hopes will have lasting value well beyond any particular election cycle. He also spent a brief period inside the Trump administration, but left after concluding he was not making any meaningful difference, was living away from home, and was losing money, and decided his value was better deployed elsewhere.
Asked to assess the decade with Trump as the central figure on the right, he offered a mixed verdict. He said the right has genuinely gotten better in some ways, has recognized certain truths, and has partially shed its Reagan-era obsession with solutions designed for a stagnating 1970s economy that do not map onto the actual challenges the country faces today. But he said zombie Republicanism, the reflexive conservatism that dominates a lot of party thinking and is essentially reactive rather than transformational, is still pervasive. The experiment has not produced as clear an answer as its more optimistic advocates might have hoped.
On the title Dispatches from the Late Republic, Anton said he intended it to be deliberately ambiguous. The late republic in the historical sense refers to the final period of a republican form of government before it gives way to something else, as in the Roman Republic’s last decades before the transition to the Principate. But it could also simply mean the republic has already ended. He said he did not want to resolve the ambiguity, that both meanings were in his mind, and that he is naturally a pessimistic person who tends to focus on the genuinely bad things he can see while perhaps abstracting away countervailing positives. He said everyone should be optimistic about the very long run but that he is not particularly optimistic about the near and medium term.
On the Thucydides trap framing that Xi Jinping deployed at the Beijing summit, Anton said bluntly that it is a Chinese Communist Party talking point designed to advance their specific agenda. He said the message embedded in the Thucydides trap rhetoric is that the United States needs to accept its status as a declining power, defer to China as the rising one, and give Beijing what it wants on Taiwan and everything else. He said he does not count himself among those who want to amp up tensions with China in ways that risk armed conflict, which he thinks would be disastrous, but that rejecting the war option does not mean accepting the CCP narrative and knuckling under whenever China demands something.
The deeper conversation turned to what lessons long-term historical thinking offers for a republic that is either in late-stage decline or already past the point of no return. Anton said he is not a believer in the one-to-one mapping of historical precedent onto the present. The United States is not Rome, and technology, economics, and communications have changed the variables in ways that make direct analogies misleading. But he said if human passions remain constant, which he believes they do, then patterns recur even if they do not repeat exactly, and the study of antiquity retains direct relevance for understanding the present even without being predictive of it.
On the debt problem, he said there is not a single sentient person alive who does not understand that the United States has a massive fiscal imbalance between legally required future spending obligations and likely revenue streams. He said he long ago concluded that this is probably an unsolvable problem through normal politics and will only be forced toward resolution when the system genuinely seizes up or the country actually goes broke. He acknowledged that blaming human nature for the failure to address a known and solvable problem is somewhat like yelling at the weather, but said that if human nature is the cause, the prognosis does not change by wishing it were otherwise.
He invoked the Roman historian Livy’s observation about Rome’s late republic that the people could no longer bear either their ills or the cures for them as a formulation that maps accurately onto the current American situation, a society that knows what is wrong and cannot stomach what would be required to fix it. Whether the American republic, at 250 years to Rome’s nearly 500, has the runway to find a different path is a question he left unresolved.