Michael Anton Agonistes—1
Michael Anton Agonistes—1
The former Trump administration official seeks revenge against one-time friends, including me.
I’ve had more than one acquaintance tell me I shouldn’t respond to Michael Anton’s recent over-the-top takedown of several “former friends,” including Gabe Schoenfeld, Bill Kristol, Christian Vanderbrouk, Charlie Sykes, Jonathan Last, and me. The advice is sensible. If the response comes off as defensive, it runs a risk of giving the author the satisfaction of knowing he struck a nerve. The response might also end up confirming the charges in the eyes of readers who were predisposed to side with the accuser. Then there’s the fact that Anton’s piece was published in American Greatness, a marginal pro-Trump website. Why risk bringing his claims to a wider audience?
Despite these reasonable concerns, I’ve nonetheless decided to go forward with writing a response—for three main reasons. First, because Anton is a former member of the Trump National Security Council and will be on a short list for a top job the next time a Republican wins the White House, making him a pretty powerful guy who shouldn’t be spreading calumnies uncontested. Second, because Anton’s account of our past interactions is riddled with errors that I would like to correct in the public record. And third, because his indictment of me and the others draws on a reading of Leo Strauss that I think is quite wrong. Anton and his allies at the Claremont Institute are free to say childish things about morality and politics if they wish. But their effort to portray Strauss as the source of their foolishness demands a rebuttal. I will provide that in the second part of this post, which will appear on Friday.
In the meantime, Part 1 focuses on more personal matters—specifically, Anton’s highly tendentious and dishonest account of our past interactions. Responding to these passages requires a brief, preliminary foray into autobiography.
Once Upon a Time
For those who don’t know much about my background, I completed my Michigan State University Ph.D. in 1998, taught political science for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Brigham Young University, and then, despairing of finding a tenure-track job, chose to leave academia for a career as an opinion journalist. My first job after BYU was a six-month stint as a speechwriter for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. I quit that job rather quickly because I applied for and got a job as associate editor at First Things magazine, a position better suited to my talents and temperament. Over the following 3-1/2 years, I wrote several lengthy essays for the magazine, was promoted to be its editor, and then quit to write a critical history of the religious intellectuals surrounding the journal.
During my final semester of teaching at BYU, when I was trying to land a job outside the academy, I wrote a lot—essays and reviews for every right-of-center magazine or newspaper that would have me: The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, Policy Review, and others. The editors at these outlets, as well as program officers at several New York and Washington think tanks, were aware I was looking for a job. That’s how the possibility of working for Giuliani arose: An editor at Commentary told me Giuliani’s communications director, a man with ties to the Straussian world, was looking to hire a speechwriter. Was I interested? I certainly was. So the editor passed along my name and an interview followed.
I recount these details because Anton portrays this whole episode rather differently, claiming that our mutual friends in the conservative intellectual world pressured him to hire me and that in the month or so it took for the job offer to appear I called him repeatedly, “demanding to know what was the holdup and when the whole business would be resolved.” That sounds like pretty pushy behavior—and a very good reason not to hire me. The truth is I never reached out to pressure Anton for a decision. I was far too unsure of myself, convinced the delay meant the interview hadn’t gone well—which is why I was genuinely surprised and delighted when the offer finally materialized after several weeks of silence.
A Man with a Plan
But Anton’s portrayal of me as an aggressive and conniving climber is necessary preparation for his full indictment: “He used his friends to get them to use me to get him a ticket to New York, where he knew he needed to be in order to infiltrate conservative intellectual circles and fulfill his plan.” There are just a few problems with Anton claiming “the whole thing was an op”—a set-up designed to enable me to publish a “tell-all memoir” and remake myself as a “former conservative scourge of the right.” For one thing, I worked at First Things for a lot longer than “a year or so,” as Anton asserts, making my supposed act of subterfuge quite a long-term proposition. Another is that the book I wrote after I quit wasn’t a “tell-all memoir” but rather a polemical work of intellectual history with just a handful of pages drawn from my personal experiences at the magazine.
But the biggest problem is that Anton insinuates he knew all about my malign intentions before I’d even started at First Things—because I confessed it to him. I supposedly laid it all out “at length,” he claims, in a conversation during my time working for the mayor.
Linker explained … how morality is incoherent, justice isn’t real, and natural right is a coping device for the deluded who can’t handle the truth. To the extent that philosophers discuss those things, they do so “exoterically,” hiding their real opinions, and pimping myths to the suckers who need them and who aren’t smart enough to see through the surface to the core.
Let’s see if I follow: While working for the Republican mayor of New York, less than a year removed from a happy experience teaching at a Mormon university, and shortly before starting a position at a conservative religious magazine, I confessed to my right-wing boss that I think morality is for saps, suckers, and chumps—and he didn’t immediately fire me and call Richard John Neuhaus, the founder and editor-in-chief of First Things, to warn him that he had just hired a nihilist who was the intellectual equivalent of a spy and a terrorist?
If that sounds implausible, that’s because it is.
Setting the Record Straight
I don’t know if Anton is lying or conveniently misremembering events from 22 years in the past, but either way, he has badly mangled the facts. In the conversation to which Anton refers, which took place on one of my last days on the job while standing on the majestic front steps of City Hall, I talked about my recent conversion to Catholicism (which had taken place about a month before then), my excitement about moving on to First Things, and my mixed feelings about my graduate education. I told Anton that I had encountered some people in grad school who held views like the ones he now attributes to me, but that I had recoiled from them, leaving me ambivalent about my studies, which were very different than what Anton had experienced studying with Harry Jaffa and others in the Claremont orbit.
I don’t remember anything else about the conversation, except that Anton and I parted on amicable terms—which is hardly what one would expect had I just confessed my intent to betray Anton’s ideological compatriots, not to mention the sum and substance of “natural right.”
The truth is much less gripping than the conspiratorial and vaguely sinister story Anton spins in his essay. When I failed to land a tenure-track job, I set out to find an alternative that would enable me to think and write. Working for Giuliani was a fabulous opportunity, but I didn’t enjoy devoting myself to providing the mayor with remarks on trivial topics that he seldom read. A job as an editor and writer for an intellectual magazine was a much better fit, but First Things turned out to be far too ideologically and theologically doctrinaire for me. Ever since, I’ve tried to find my own way as a thinker, editor, and writer. That’s something for which Michael Anton appears to have nothing but contempt.
(I have much more to say about this turbulent and formative period of my life—from grad school through my time at, and eventual break with, First Things—in my recent appearance on the “Know Your Enemy” podcast.)
Part 2 of this post will appear on Friday.
This fits with the pattern that anyone who spends too much time flying close to Donald Trump develops a flawed relationship with the truth.
I read Michael Anton's (in)famous essay ("The Flight 93 Election") shortly after it appeared and was struck by two things: (1)-the utter hyperbole throughout (implying that a potential Hilary Clinton presidential win would be tantamount to the world coming to an end) and (2)-the gall of analogizing his discontents with the Democrats with the desperate and heroic acts of the passengers of the real Flight 93 in combatting the plans of the 911 terrorists. Even though I am a Leftie--I can appreciate a reasonable argument coming from Republicans or Conservatives. This was not a reasonable argument. It actually proposes to cure what Anton identifies as an illness by killing the patient with the medicine. It did not put Anton in a sympathetic or respectable light with me. And now--reading Anton's latest statement in American Greatness that view is reinforced. I am struck again, this time by something very ad hominem-ish about his outburst which I read with some incredulity--because even if any of it is true--(or he thinks it is true)--it is not about ideas at all, but a rather puerile listing of the presumed mean or maneuvering actions of others, as if he, Anton, were a snot-nosed kid in the 5th grade bent on tattling to the teacher about the mischievousness of the other boys in the school yard--all rather reminiscent of the way Trump talks about things and "elaborates" them with his usual ad hominems and slurs, beyond any grain of truth that might be in any story. I almost felt embarrassed reading it. It would seem there must be more grown-up ways of getting points across.
Moving from style to substance, as far as any emergencies before us: I recently heard some comments by Right-wing writer and pundit, Ann Coulter (which may be old comments) in which she was defending the position of Americans who supported Trump's (never-built) wall at the southern border. I don't remember her exact words, but the point was that these Trump supporters were ordinary Americans, not terrible people, who happen to love their country and its culture, and don't want to see any of that compromised by masses of incomers who might change everything. The implication here is that those in opposition to Trump supporters, in some way, do not love their country and its culture. But--if Ann Coulter and the Trump supporters (of whom Michael Anton is one) love their country and their culture--why would they support a man who is hell bent on flouting and even subverting the Constitution, and the entire system it supports--and who was engaged in destroying the whole set-up of checks-and-balances which has been such a fundamental feature of the American system from the very start of this republic? And how can they see people, who are very disturbed by the subversion of this absolutely fundamental feature of our country, as being "anti-American"?
However Anton might try to square that circle, I will conclude by saying that since I discovered Damon Linker's writings in The Week, I always found them interesting, thought-provoking and--most importantly--flexible; not doctrinaire. I appreciate that sort of flexibility which I think is necessary in these troubled times, even where one may come down on one side or the other in the voting booth.