Michael Anton Predicts Wrack and Ruin

In his latest anthology of essays, Dispatches from the Late Republic, Michael Anton, the Claremont Institute intellectual who has served in both Trump administrations, devotes a chapter to “Teachers and Heroes” and honors therein John Marini. A political scientist also affiliated with Claremont, Marini is perhaps best known for arguing that Watergate, at its core, was a power struggle between Richard Nixon and the administrative state. Anton states that the true subject of Marini’s Unmasking the Administrative State (2019) is “‘regime change,’ how we got from ‘there’ — our Founders’ understanding of justice, morality, and politics — to ‘here’: the tradition-and-history-destroying, common-good-denying, anarcho-tyrannical, pathologically altruistic dystopian oligarchy currently throttling the West.”

This also describes Dispatches: a thoughtful if gloomy exploration of how American elites came to embrace woke doggerel and its attendant consequences — some discernible, others still forming — for the rest of us. Deeply grounded in the Western canon and much else, from the workings of the executive branch to pop culture, Anton writes with urgency, trenchancy, and biting wit. He and I met cursorily in the White House press office during the first Trump administration and have since corresponded about our shared idolatry of Tom Wolfe, whose influence on Anton reverberates throughout this book.

About the Author

James Rosen

James Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986–2001.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Donald Trump

Conservatism

In his latest anthology of essays, Dispatches from the Late Republic, Michael Anton, the Claremont Institute intellectual who has served in both Trump administrations, devotes a chapter to “Teachers and Heroes” and honors therein John Marini. A political scientist also affiliated with Claremont, Marini is perhaps best known for arguing that Watergate, at its core, was a power struggle between Richard Nixon and the administrative state. Anton states that the true subject of Marini’s Unmasking the Administrative State (2019) is “‘regime change,’ how we got from ‘there’ — our Founders’ understanding of justice, morality, and politics — to ‘here’: the tradition-and-history-destroying, common-good-denying, anarcho-tyrannical, pathologically altruistic dystopian oligarchy currently throttling the West.”

This also describes Dispatches: a thoughtful if gloomy exploration of how American elites came to embrace woke doggerel and its attendant consequences — some discernible, others still forming — for the rest of us. Deeply grounded in the Western canon and much else, from the workings of the executive branch to pop culture, Anton writes with urgency, trenchancy, and biting wit. He and I met cursorily in the White House press office during the first Trump administration and have since corresponded about our shared idolatry of Tom Wolfe, whose influence on Anton reverberates throughout this book.