Michael Anton Agonistes—1

The former Trump administration official seeks revenge against one-time friends, including me.

Michael Anton speaking at an Intercollegiate Studies Institute conference in April 2022. (YouTube)

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.)

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Part 2 of this post will appear on Friday.