Michael Anton Agonistes—2

The former Trump administration official thinks he alone upholds "natural right." The truth is he merely has poor judgment.

“Michael Anton joins Laura Ingraham to Discuss the War between the States,” Fox News, October 19, 2021. (YouTube)

This is the second half of a two-part post. Part 1 can be read here.

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As I explained in detail in Part 1 of this post, Michael Anton’s account of our past interactions is a cartoonish distortion of reality. But having enumerated his lies or convenient errors of memory, I’m eager to move on to a more substantive engagement with Anton’s indictment of his “former friends,” as he describes us.

As far as I can tell, the one thing linking me together with Gabe Schoenfeld, Bill Kristol, Christian Vanderbrouk, Charlie Sykes, and Jonathan Last (beyond our various ties to The Bulwark) is, supposedly, that, unlike Anton himself, we no longer uphold “natural right.” This is hardly the first time Anton has hurled this accusation at his rather long list of enemies—much as his mentor, Harry Jaffa, grew fond of doing the same during the final, cranky decades of his very long life.

Anton summarizes what he means by “natural right” in the follow passage:

[Natural right is] the doctrine or assertion that good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, etc.—exist by nature and are not mere products of human will or preference. This idea undergirds not merely the regime of the American founders and the very idea of “human rights,” but also the entire notion that anything political can be good or bad, right or wrong. For example, when NeverTrumpers speak of the alleged danger from Donald Trump to “Our Democracy™” and declare this to be bad, they are—wittingly or not—endorsing natural right. 

Anton sometimes writes as if the six figures he criticizes in his piece are guilty of having abandoned or rejected natural right. We’ve become positivists or historicists or relativists or nihilists because we fail to recognize that in our time Donald Trump (of all people!) is natural right’s great ally and defender against its myriad enemies. But Anton also makes the somewhat different claim contained in the final sentence quoted above: the very act of opposing Trump by appealing to a higher standard of democracy, rights, or the rule of law demonstrates that we, too, continue (implicitly and no doubt inadvertently) to endorse some notion of natural right.

I actually think the second position is closer to the truth than the first, but Anton’s whole way of discussing these issues badly obfuscates the matter. That’s because he so desperately wants to claim that he and his political compatriots are alone in upholding eternal moral standards. The rest of us might posture about right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, but we’re the bad guys because we supposedly consider these ideals to be “mere products of human will or preference.”

Hey, if Anton believes he possesses fixed, eternal knowledge of moral truth, far be it from me to try and shake his faith. But I don’t think he can appeal to Leo Strauss as an authority to back up his deeply felt conviction.

Natural Right and the Judgment of the Wise

It’s easy to see how Anton could become mistaken on this point. Strauss’ best-known book is, after all, titled Natural Right and History, and as students of Jaffa love to point out, the book begins with Strauss highlighting the “self-evident truths” enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as an example of the kind of intrinsic political and moral standard that is denied by numerous strands of modern thought and that Strauss himself endeavors to defend in the book.

The problem is that once readers move beyond the book’s brief, edifying introduction—written, no doubt, to appeal to idealistic and patriotic American readers—Strauss’ argument becomes increasingly complex and enigmatic. By the middle of the book, in chapters titled “The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right” and “Classical Natural Right,” Strauss reveals that, for Plato and Aristotle, natural right wasn’t some table of self-evident moral commandments written in the book of nature, easily discerned by common sense or the exertions of ordinary reasoning and easily applied to the United States of 1953 (when the book was published) or 2022.

To badly summarize an incredibly subtle and intricate argument, Strauss suggests that natural right is nothing more or less than the outcome of a wise man’s prudent deliberation on the right course of action in a given situation. There is, therefore, such a thing as natural right, but its content changes in different circumstances, and its very rightness often can’t be definitively established at the moment it is articulated. People disagree about who is truly wise. It’s often possible to know only in retrospect, after the consequences have unfolded, whether one course of action or another is right. And even then, the determination will often be contestable. Politics at its peak unfolds with maximal uncertainty and subject to contingencies that can thwart the efforts of the wisest statesman or political philosopher.

Rather than talking about natural right in these fluid and exigent terms, Anton acts as if he instead possesses fixed knowledge of some moral standard that makes perfect sense of all political circumstances, and then he lashes out in vituperation at those who disagree sharply with him about what that standard amounts to, as if the difference must follow from his critics’ intentional dismissal or misconstrual of natural right.

The Right to Revolution

Anton’s latest fixation—loudly defending the right to revolution—serves as an illuminating example of how this plays out. Earlier this fall, Anton gave a speech at the conservative Philadelphia Society, later published in American Greatness, in which he made the exceedingly uncontroversial point that the American constitutional framers believed in a fundamental right to revolution. He also claimed that the spread of “historicism” had led some to deny the existence and legitimacy of this right. When the published form of this speech inspired some (including Bill Kristol) to criticize it, Anton naturally treated this as evidence that the critics had succumbed to historicism and abandoned natural right.

But of course, Anton’s critics weren’t taking issue with the right to revolution as such. Kristol, for example, is well known for favoring regime change in dictatorships around the world, which certainly sounds like he believes in a right to revolution! What Anton’s critics were taking issue with was his insinuation, made throughout his published remarks, that the present-day U.S. is itself fast approaching the point at which well-meaning citizens will find it necessary to act on this right in order to overthrow what Anton calls the “increasingly anti-white regime” of modern progressivism. (Like nearly every deployment of “regime” on the Trumpian right these days, this is a terribly debased distortion of Strauss’ discussion of the ancient Greek word and concept of politeia. But that’s a topic for another post.)  

This isn’t a dispute between those who believe in natural right and those who do not. It’s a dispute between someone with poor practical judgment about what natural right calls for at the present moment and those who possess considerably better judgment.

The Trump Judgment

For further explication of the point, consider the different ideological trajectories of Kristol, Anton, and Straussian (and long-time Harvard professor) Harvey C. Mansfield over the past few years. Just before Anton launches his lengthy attack on Kristol in his American Greatness essay, he makes a point of noting his fondness and respect for Kristol’s teacher Mansfield. I wonder, then, what Anton makes of a recent Mansfield interview with the Harvard Crimson. The interviewer asks Mansfield if he’s a Trump supporter. This is his answer:

No. I voted for him in 2020. … [T]o a Republican like me, there were some good things that I liked, like his Supreme Court appointments, tax cut, the turn against China, things like that. But then, the January 6 thing, I crossed him off my list totally. I never want to see him again. Because that was what I feared and a lot of other people feared would happen during his presidency, but didn’t quite. I think he’s had a very bad influence on America and on the Republicans, and they need to get rid of him.

This illustrates the character of natural right very nicely.

Anton looked at the GOP nominee in 2016 and decided he wouldn’t merely hold his nose and vote for him but that it was absolutely essential for conservatives to vote for him in order to avoid the supposed existential catastrophe that would follow from electing a former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State from the other party.

Kristol, by contrast, decided long before the 2016 election that Trump was a dangerous demagogue whom American patriots must forthrightly reject.

Mansfield took a middle position. He remained friendly with Kristol, appearing on his video and audio podcast several times during the Trump years to discuss, among many other topics, Trump’s status as a demagogue and the risks he posed to self-government in the United States. Mansfield nonetheless voted for him, for pragmatic reasons very different than the existential ones that motivated Anton. But the events of January 6 were a bridge too far because they vindicated Mansfield’s own worries and the worst warnings of people like Kristol (and the others Anton attacks in his American Greatness essay).

Those three positions—Anton siding early and with maximal and unwavering commitment to Trump; Kristol just as firmly rejecting him; and Mansfield voting for him pragmatically and then cutting him loose when he acted on his worst demagogic impulses—amount to a sharp disagreement and dispute about natural right. Kristol’s position is very similar to my own. I think Mansfield’s prudential judgment was flawed in this case, but I respect his willingness to revisit his prior position and am happy to include him in the ranks of those who now see Trump as the threat he’s always been.

The Distorting Haze of Righteous Indignation  

And Anton? Ever since he published his notorious “Flight 93” essay, he’s struck me as a man addicted to the intoxicating thrill of his own righteous indignation, and eager to view politics through its distorting haze.

I take a very different approach to understanding politics, preferring instead to follow the example of Plato’s Socrates, who speaks with great eloquence about the importance of reason taming and dispelling anger, and the danger of allowing (let alone actively encouraging) anger to overpower it.

Why Anton (along with so many other people with ties to the Claremont Institute) has staked out such a different position after receiving such a similar education is something I can’t answer. I would only urge Anton to begin asking himself the kinds of questions I list toward the end of the recent post that was the occasion for his angry and dishonest swipe at me in his essay. In that passage, I point toward the need to blend the philosophic study of politics with the aspiration toward self-knowledge. Continually posing such questions to oneself may be the only, and best, way to ensure that philosophy culminates in wisdom rather than mania:

What am I seeking in the philosophic study of politics? What longings do I hope to satisfy? What is it about certain passages of these books that excite me? Why do I find certain questions alluring and specific answers compelling? Why do I think I will find fulfillment or completion in contributing to the political project proposed in these pages? Are such expectations sound? What in me rebels against or draws back in disgust from certain modern trends? Is that reaction reasonable? What are its sources in my soul? Is my intensely negative response proportionate to the provocation?

Posing such questions to oneself isn’t any kind of guarantee that one will maintain equanimity in the effort to find one’s way through the political and philosophical thickets. But it’s how I’ve managed to keep myself from making the kind of leaps into the dark that have seduced so many in our moment—very much including Michael Anton.