You may have heard that 2020 is the most important election of our lifetimes. Changes are at work across the United States that, if not halted, will fundamentally transform the country into something much worse. America is becoming unrecognizable to us and at odds with the Founding Fathers’ vision.
If you’re old enough, you may remember hearing this every four years for your entire adult life.
In The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Michael Anton gives us the latest iteration of the quadrennial argument. Anton is the once-pseudonymous author of the influential 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” and his argument has changed little in the intervening years: To save the country, we must reelect President Trump. That sounds dramatic, and it is meant to, but the story Anton tells here is enough to give any conservative (or centrist) pause.
Anton begins with the plight of his native state, California. Once the vanguard of middle-class success, according to Anton, the state has become in the past few decades a neofeudal hellscape. Restrictive zoning regulations have created an epic housing shortage. The state’s infrastructure and education systems, once the envy of the nation, now cannot bear the strain of overuse and underfunding. Yet this lack of funding is not the result of low taxes — California has some of the highest taxes in the nation, but they are wasted on a vast welfare state and on multibillion-dollar boondoggles such as a high-speed rail to nowhere.
If California is America’s future, we have plenty of reason to fear. Some of its problems are unique to the region. The wildfires that plague the state every year are particular to the climate of the far west, as is the limited supply of fresh water. Mountains also cause transportation bottlenecks that are far less common in the east. But California once functioned perfectly well despite these difficulties. Indeed, California’s triumph over these natural limitations through technology, as in the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, once looked for all the world like the future of America.
Anton describes some broader social trends that are by no means limited to California. Primary among them is immigration. Anton sees the 1965 liberalization of our immigration laws as the main driver of California’s, and America’s, problems. In its drive for ever more immigration, he argues, the upper class has betrayed the U.S. worker. Anton believes that unlike the large waves of immigration in the early years of the republic and during its post-Civil War expansion, the current wave is and always has been economically unnecessary and socially harmful. He posits that it has struck a blow against our national identity and has been so large that we need a moratorium to ensure that the immigrants who have already arrived get assimilated, as past immigrants were.
That argument would be easier to swallow if immigration had led to mass unemployment. But it didn’t. Labor force participation did decline after the Great Recession, but before the pandemic, unemployment was dropping to the lowest level seen in decades. Millions of immigrants joined the country between 1965 and today, and yet, before the coronavirus-induced crash, nearly everyone here could find a job if he or she wanted one. Likewise, the countercultural trends at work since the 1960s were driven by the native-born, not newcomers to our shores.
But Anton is not wrong to ask whether the benefits of immigration have been spread unevenly. To the argument that we need immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do,” he offers the obviously true riposte: People will do those jobs if the employers pay enough. He likewise dismisses the argument that only immigrants can make up for declining native birth rates by noting that we haven’t actually tried anything to increase native fertility. Mass immigration solves these problems, but it is not the only solution, just the cheapest and easiest one for the upper class.
How does this ruling class stay in power despite constantly undermining the average voter’s earning capacity? Anton suggests that it is through “woke capitalism,” which he defines as a combination of liberals’ belief in rule by experts, the 1960s counterculture’s disdain for authority, and an elevation of group rights over individual rights. (Anton claims the idea of group rights has its roots in the concurrent majorities theory of John C. Calhoun, the antebellum intellectual champion of the slaveholding South, but this seems more a matter of coincidence than causation.) Often seen as an offshoot of competition-oriented, consumer-driven “neoliberalism,” woke capitalism has, in Anton’s words, given us “economic globalism and financialization [and] consolidation of power in an ostensibly ‘meritocratic’ but actually semi-hereditary class.”
Anton believes that the only way to hold back woke capitalism is with four more years of Trump. A Democrat in the White House means more immigration, more free trade, and more foreign wars. Trump’s agenda is the reverse, restoring an America that is closer to, if not exactly in line with, our founding documents.
Is it, though? Anton’s diagnosis of the corporate-liberal juggernaut is hard to dispute, but his remedies are less certain. Trump’s rhetoric on these issues has been strong. His pronouncements have pushed Republicans toward protectionism and support for blue-collar workers. But that realignment is still mostly theoretical. As Anton acknowledges, Trump has done far more pontificating than legislating.
Constructing an intellectual framework for Trumpism is a thankless task. Anton does creditable work here in trying to translate the president’s vibe into a coherent theory. The trouble is, it’s unclear whether this theory is at all related to the actual president. On some issues, such as trade protection, Trump has been consistent for decades. On others, the search for solid meaning vanishes time and again like a will-o’-the-wisp. Maybe that distant light is real, a serious agenda hidden by all the bluster. Or maybe it’s just swamp gas.
It is not wrong to say that Trump gestures in the right direction. That, at least, is better than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who would take us farther down the road of neoliberal decline. But it is equally possible that neither Trump nor Biden will actually do much of anything to shake America from its 50-year torpor. It’s hard to see this as the most important election of our lifetime if the choice is between a party that does the wrong thing and a party that sometimes says the right thing but rarely does it.
Anton suggests that although the Republican establishment now views 2016 as a fluke, Trump’s reelection will show that the change is permanent and will force the party to reckon with his ideas. Maybe. One can certainly imagine a second-term Trump who focuses on a patriotic, pro-worker agenda, eschews Twitter beefs, and engages in hard-nosed negotiations with Congress to make his ideas into law. It’s a pleasant dream. After nearly four years, however, it’s one that has little basis in reality.
Kyle Sammin is a lawyer and writer from Pennsylvania and the co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleSammin.
