Americas Leading Authoritarian Intellectual Is Working for Trump as a National Security Official

[muriel_volestrangler]

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.
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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.

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

From the Weekly Standard (yes, I know, right wing, but anti-Trump) article that revealed the identity of 'Decius':

After working as a speechwriter and press secretary for New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, he entered Bush's White House in 2001 as a communications aide for the National Security Council—a job that took on greater weight after 9/11. Anton was part of the team that made the case within the administration and to the public for invading Iraq—and he was enthusiastic about the war. That team** helped craft one of the more infamous sentences in a State of the Union address, from Bush's in 2003: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
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His evolution on the issue of Iraq is perhaps Anton's most notable shift, but it's not the only one informed by his experience as a member of the governing class he so artfully assailed as Decius. After leaving the Bush administration in 2005, Anton was a speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch at the media conglomerate News Corporation, then the director of communications at megabank Citigroup. For the last year and a half, he's been a managing director at the investment firm BlackRock. With that résumé, it's no wonder the man who referred to the "Davos class" as a "junta" and wrote that it would "be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice" chose to write under a pseudonym. Anton would no doubt happily accept that he is a "traitor to his class," which is what his Journal of American Greatness compatriot Julius Krein called Donald Trump in these pages. (Anton himself has contributed many pieces to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and its website, as recently as last year.)

Anton may also be a traitor to his class of conservative intellectuals, though his writings on Trump rejected by the Claremont Review of Books in early 2016 eventually found their home there by the end of the election. More consequential, in his new position as senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, he brings his brand of intellectual Trumpism right to the White House and the locus of power. The job was initially given to Monica Crowley, the writer and television pundit, with the intention that she be a public face for the Trump White House on national-security issues. But Crowley was forced to withdraw just days before Trump was inaugurated after reports revealed she had plagiarized her last book and her Ph.D. thesis. Anton's role will likely involve less camera time and more shaping of the White House's national-security message behind the scenes.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/decius-unmasked/article/2006623