Michael Anton (b. 1969) became a principal interpreter of nationalist conservatism in the United States during the first quarter of the twenty-first century. He did not build a mass movement, win elective office, or found a lasting institution. His influence rests on articulation. He gave the post-2016 American right a vocabulary of civilizational crisis, and he converted scattered anxieties about demographic change, bureaucratic consolidation, elite legitimacy, national sovereignty, and cultural fragmentation into a single regime-level account. That work of synthesis made him a defining figure of the conservative realignment that followed Donald Trump’s (b. 1946) first victory.
Anton brings together elite traditions that ordinarily stay apart. He combines the West Coast Straussianism of the Claremont Institute, the strategic outlook of the national security bureaucracy, the message discipline of corporate finance and media, the aesthetic instincts of aristocratic conservatism, and the insurgent rhetoric of populist nationalism. The result reads as neither conventionally academic nor conventionally populist. He writes as a regime theorist working inside the ruins of a managerial order he once helped administer.
Born in California, Anton followed a path that diverged from the standard pipeline of conservative media. He attended the University of California, Davis, then enrolled at St. John’s College in Annapolis, whose Great Books curriculum shaped his intellectual style. St. John’s set students before classical texts rather than narrow disciplinary specialties. They moved through Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Shakespeare, and Tocqueville in a structured seminar. The training left lasting marks on his prose. His writing favors historical analogy, regime analysis, and classical rhetoric over technocratic policy language.
He completed graduate study at Claremont Graduate University, where he absorbed the West Coast Straussian tradition of Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015), itself descended from Leo Strauss (1899-1973). The split between East Coast and West Coast Straussianism organized his early worldview. The East Coast school, associated with Allan Bloom (1930-1992) and Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932), stressed philosophical skepticism, elite cultivation, and the quarrel between reason and revelation. The Claremont school treated the American Founding as a moral achievement grounded in natural right and republican virtue. Jaffa and his followers argued that the Declaration of Independence states universal truths while sustaining a particular constitutional order rooted in civic character and national cohesion. Charles R. Kesler (b. 1956), editor of the Claremont Review of Books, served as the living head of this circle and as Anton’s closest mentor.
From this formation Anton inherited a governing conviction: a political regime is a moral and civilizational structure, not merely an administrative system. States endure through cultural confidence, elite legitimacy, and shared national narrative as much as through procedure or growth. That premise underwrites every major argument he later made.
Before his emergence as a nationalist writer, Anton spent two decades inside elite institutions. He worked for California governor Pete Wilson (b. 1933), wrote speeches for New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (b. 1944), and joined the administration of George W. Bush (b. 1946), where he served under Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954) at the National Security Council This experience made him a dissident. He watched the American foreign policy apparatus operate at the high tide of post-Cold War liberal internationalism, when many in Washington assumed American power could remake the globe through intervention, democracy promotion, and technocratic management. Anton came to read that project as strategic confusion and institutional hubris.
He argued that the permanent foreign policy class had detached itself from concrete national interest and become a self-perpetuating system devoted to ideological universalism and its own continuity. Military interventions, humanitarian wars, and global managerial frameworks served abstract aims cut off from American civic solidarity. The class measured success by institutional survival, international prestige, and elite consensus rather than by strategic restraint or national cohesion. This placed Anton within the broader post-Iraq turn among conservative intellectuals skeptical of intervention, though his version stayed distinct because it fused realist foreign policy with regime analysis. He read failure abroad as a sign of moral exhaustion at home.
After government Anton entered a different elite sphere. He wrote speeches for Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931) and held communications posts at Citigroup and BlackRock. The years in finance and media deepened his picture of managerial systems and transnational elite culture. He observed at close range a corporate world increasingly loosed from national identity. Out of this came a central theme of his later writing: modern elites had stopped acting as stewards of national continuity. Anton did not reject elites as such. His sensibility remained aristocratic to the root. What he rejected was the character of the present ruling class, which kept its technical competence while losing its civilizational confidence and its moral seriousness.
Unlike mass populists who prize anti-elitism for its own sake, Anton admired hierarchy, discipline, cultivation, and excellence. Under the pseudonym Nicholas Antongiavanni he wrote The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, a treatise on dress, presentation, and self-command modeled on Machiavelli’s prose. He took tailoring and classical dress seriously as expressions of order. For Anton, civilization shows itself in standards. Clothing, rhetoric, architecture, manners, and institutional decorum register self-command and hierarchy rather than ornament, and cultures decline when standards dissolve and elites cease to embody them.
This aristocratic instinct created a tension with the movement he came to defend. Trump’s political style rejected much of the refinement Anton admired. It ran on media aggression, popular resentment, and anti-institutional energy. Anton resolved the contradiction by arguing that the ruling class had already destroyed the legitimacy of traditional elite authority, so populist disruption became a tactical necessity rather than a model of culture. He treated the populist moment as a corrective force needed to break a decaying order.
That logic reached its fullest expression in 2016 with “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. The essay became a foundational text of Trump-era nationalism. The pen name carried a coded argument before the first line. Publius recalled the authorship of The Federalist. Decius Mus named the Roman consul who devoted himself in sacrifice during a moment of existential danger. The composite signaled to readers trained in classical thought that extraordinary conditions might license extraordinary action.
The pseudonym shows that Anton absorbed Strauss’s regime analysis and his account of how careful writers communicate. Anton often writes on more than one level at once. Allusions, pseudonyms, and analogies carry argument beneath the surface, and he assumes that political language frequently conceals the structures of power it claims to describe. Words such as norms, equity, stakeholders, and international order function in his reading as instruments of the managerial class rather than as neutral terms.
“The Flight 93 Election” argued that the contest of 2016 marked an existential crisis rather than a routine partisan choice. Anton compared a vote for Trump to the passengers who stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. He held that conventional conservatism had failed to halt the consolidation of managerial rule, demographic transformation, ideological capture of institutions, and cultural fragmentation, so support for Trump amounted to a desperate act of regime preservation. The essay landed because it named a shift already moving through the American right. Earlier conservatism assumed the durability and neutrality of liberal institutions. Anton argued that institutional neutrality had collapsed, that universities, media, bureaucracies, and corporations increasingly worked as ideologically aligned enforcement bodies, and that elections had become struggles over the survival of competing regime visions. The piece traveled far beyond think tanks, circulating among donors, activists, journalists, and operatives as an early attempt to set Trumpism inside a theory of regime conflict.
Anton reads political orders as vulnerable to internal exhaustion long before formal collapse appears. Late republican Rome, Weimar instability, and bureaucratic sclerosis hover behind much of his writing. He composes less like a campaign aide than like a historian of regime senescence. On his account, decline begins in the mind and the spirit before it shows in administration. Elites lose confidence in their own civilization, stop reproducing coherent standards, and trade substantive national identity for procedural management, and by the time ordinary citizens grasp the depth of the crisis the capture is already advanced. Critics hear apocalypse in this. Anton hears diagnosis.
He joined the first Trump administration as Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council, a post that marked the partial entry of nationalist intellectuals into Republican governance. His tenure also exposed the factional strains inside Trumpism, which held populist nationalists, establishment Republicans, interventionists, libertarians, and corporate conservatives at the same table. Anton left during the period when John Bolton (b. 1948) gained influence, a departure that confirmed how loosely the nationalist faction sat within the governing apparatus.
Out of office he deepened his ties to Hillsdale College and the Claremont network and broadened the original essay into a fuller position. After The Flight 93 Election and The Stakes (2020) tried to systematize the worldview latent in the 2016 piece, and The Stakes popularized the phrase Red Caesarism, the contested idea that a corrupted republic might require extraordinary, even extra-constitutional, executive action to save its substance. He also co-edited Leisure With Dignity, a volume honoring Kesler. During these years Anton took his place in the wider post-liberal turn among conservative intellectuals, alongside Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968), Sohrab Ahmari (b. 1985), and Christopher Rufo (b. 1984), all in revolt against the fusionist consensus that had governed Republican thought since the Cold War.
Yet Anton stayed distinct within that company. Deneen approached liberalism philosophically and through community. Vermeule approached it through law and administration. Hazony stressed nationalism and biblical political tradition. Anton kept his focus on regime conflict, elite formation, strategic asymmetry, and institutional decay, and he never gave up his admiration for excellence and cultivation. The unresolved tension in his thought follows from this. He defends populist disruption while holding that civilization needs disciplined elites. His answer is transitional rather than utopian: populism breaks a decadent managerial order so that a more serious elite might re-form. In this he resembles earlier critics of ruling-class degeneration such as James Burnham (1905-1987) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) more than he resembles classical democratic populists. Every society, on his view, requires elites. The question is whether its elites still possess the moral seriousness to sustain the civilization in their care.
Anton’s return to government in Trump’s second term carried these ideas to the center of state power. He became the 33rd Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State on January 20, 2025, serving under Secretary Marco Rubio (b. 1971), and he wrote the 2025 National Security Strategy as its principal author. He also took part at the expert level in the 2025 negotiations between the United States and Iran. His time in the post proved short. Reporting placed him at odds with the personnel operator Sergio Gor and with the administration’s foreign policy process, and he left in September 2025, succeeded by Michael Needham (b. 1981). Anton returned to his perch as the Jack Roth Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a lecturer at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center.
His critics cast him as a theorist of emergency politics whose rhetoric corrodes trust in democratic institutions and reframes ordinary disagreement as civilizational war. His defenders answer that he saw earlier than most how far the managerial institutions had consolidated ideological power. His historical significance rests less on policy than on conceptual change. He moved conservative argument away from tax rates, deregulation, and procedural constitutionalism toward sovereignty, elite legitimacy, cultural continuity, bureaucratic consolidation, and national identity. He turned nationalism from a diffuse emotional posture into a structured account of regime conflict.
Whether later historians judge him a prophetic diagnostician of institutional exhaustion or an accelerant of democratic breakdown will depend on the path the American order takes. What stands already is that Anton became a principal interpreter of a transition: the collapse of the post-Cold War conservative consensus and the rise of a nationalist right convinced that procedural liberalism can no longer hold the country together.
Alliance Theory
The primary difference between left and right, the authors argue, is not what values people hold but whom they count as allies. Apply that to Anton and you stop reading him for his thought and start reading him for his coalition. His allies are the historic American nation, white Christians, the military, the working-class heartland, the populist base, and Trump. His rivals are the credentialed managerial class, the journalists, the academics, the foundations, the administrative state, the thing Codevilla (1943-2021) taught him to call the ruling class. Lay his beliefs over that map and they fit the map, not a philosophy. The regime talk is the moralization stacked on top of the alliance.
The theory predicts that a coalition this heterogeneous will generate ad hoc and often incompatible principles, and that the inconsistencies are not failures of thought but the normal shape of coalition-serving belief. Anton supplies the inconsistencies on schedule. He venerates the rule of law and constitutional fidelity, and he floats Red Caesar and extra-constitutional action. He is a free-speech absolutist against the managerial censors, and he wants a regime that forms virtue and would restrain much that the censors permit. He reads the founding through Jaffa as a universal creed open to all who embrace the principles, and he drifts toward a blood-and-soil account of peoplehood in his writing on immigration and citizenship. He attacks the administrative state as unaccountable usurpation, and he wants a strong executive to seize and wield that same apparatus. Anton spends enormous effort trying to make these hang together as one philosophy. Alliance Theory says stop looking for the thread. There is none. Each position serves a specific ally or a specific rival, and the contradictions appear because the allies and rivals do not share a logic, only a side.
The propagandistic biases the paper names show up in Anton in clean form. Perpetrator bias is the rationalizing of an ally’s transgression and the magnifying of a rival’s. The Flight 93 move is perpetrator bias raised to an art. Extraordinary action by his coalition is regime preservation, a desperate necessity, the passengers storming the cockpit. The identical concentration of unreviewable power in the managerial state is tyranny. Same act, opposite valence, sorted by who does it. Victim bias is the embellishing of an ally’s grievance, and Anton’s entire posture runs on it. His coalition is the dispossessed nation, the country class crushed by a hostile ruling class, the conservatives persecuted by a regime that has captured every institution. That is competitive victimhood in the paper’s exact sense, the right’s claim to be the truly oppressed pitched against the left’s oppression narratives, each side striving to establish that it suffered more. Attributional bias is the last piece. Anton assigns his allies’ decline to external causes, the elite betrayal, the open border, the managerial capture, and assigns the rivals’ success to illegitimate seizure rather than merit. The losers-of-globalization story is the external attribution the authors describe, told from the right.
The paper’s treatment of morality lands hardest on Anton because it explains his register. Claiming moral conviction, the authors argue, is a propagandistic tactic. It creates common knowledge that your side is moral and the other immoral, which draws third parties and emboldens allies to attack rivals without cost. Anton’s natural-right gravity, his tragic cadence of Rome and decline, his talk of virtue and the permanent things, all of it functions to build that common knowledge at the highest available altitude. Flight 93 is not a philosophical treatise. It is a mobilization document. Its work is to move wavering conservatives into the Trump coalition by recoding a partisan choice as an existential moral emergency. The Straussian depth is the recruiting instrument, the way you dress a coalition fight in timeless moral truth so that joining feels like rescue rather than alignment.
Alliance Theory also explains the company Anton keeps. The authors note that libertarianism fused with Christian fundamentalism not through philosophy but through a strategic alliance struck in the 1970s, an alliance uncommon elsewhere. Anton’s coalition is the same kind of strange-bedfellows assemblage, Silicon Valley money beside Catholic integralists beside Protestant evangelicals beside ethno-nationalists beside classical-liberal refugees beside the online blood-and-soil right. These do not converge by argument. They converge by shared rivals. Anton’s regime theory is the patchwork narrative that tries to make the assemblage cohere, the story a coalition needs once it exists. The postliberal, natural-right, nationalist, and Caesarist strands are not a philosophy arriving at one conclusion. They are a set of allies in want of a teller, and Anton volunteers.
The authors grant that political scientists have long found the masses lack coherent ideology, and then they push further, insisting that elites are just as inconsistent and are merely better attuned, or more loyal, to their society’s contingent alliances. Calling elite opinion more coherent or sophisticated or deep, they say, is misleading. Anton is the elite theorist who stakes everything on the opposite claim, that his side has the real philosophy and the masses merely feel what he can articulate. Alliance Theory reads his coherence as an artifact of loyalty. He is not deeper than his opponents. He is better attuned to his coalition’s needs and more skilled at dressing that attunement as thought. His motivated reading of every managerial move as capture, his refusal to grant the ruling class a shred of good faith, is in the paper’s terms an honest signal of loyalty, the price of being trusted as a true ally. The esoteric method, the hunt for the hidden subversive teaching, becomes a reliable way to produce readings that signal allegiance.
Now the honest limit. If all belief systems are patchwork justifications for alliances, then Anton’s natural right is coalition propaganda and so is the claim that natural right is coalition propaganda. The theory cannot debunk his philosophy while exempting its own picture as the view from nowhere. What it can do, and does, is strip the special authority Anton claims. He presents himself as a man who reads the moral order and reports it. Alliance Theory returns him to the field as one more partisan, well-attuned and well-armed, producing the story his side requires and calling it the truth about the regime.
The Tacit
Anton owns several tacit skills. He reads old books the way a master reads them, catching the turn beneath the surface that the untrained reader walks past. He judges prose and dress and manners with a connoisseur’s speed, and his menswear treatise, written as Nicholas Antongiavanni, is a document of taste that cannot be reduced to a checklist. St. John’s and Claremont were apprenticeships where a young man sat with texts and teachers until the judgment soaked in. Stephen Turner would call it individual skill built by habituation.
The trouble starts the moment Anton asks that skill to deliver more than it can.
Esoteric reading is the first place it breaks. The Straussian claim is not only that careful reading is a craft. It is that the great writers hid a teaching, that the teaching is a real thing sitting in the text, and that the trained reader recovers it, the same teaching the author buried. Recovery is the load the claim must carry. Turner’s argument in The Social Theory of Practices goes straight at this. A tacit content cannot be shipped intact from one mind to another, let alone across two thousand years and a dozen languages, and arrive as the same content. There is no organ that loads Plato’s secret doctrine into the reader’s head. What happens instead is that a man trained in a particular school produces a reading, and his training shapes what he produces. The Straussian who finds the hidden Plato is not retrieving a stored object. He is generating a reading that his apprenticeship taught him to generate. And the agreement among Straussians about what Plato secretly meant, which they treat as confirmation, is the agreement of men schooled to read alike. Convergence among the similarly trained is not evidence of a recovered doctrine. It is evidence of similar training. Turner dissolves the recovery claim into a habituation claim, and the hidden teaching loses its standing as a thing out there waiting to be found. It becomes the school’s output, attributed to the text.
This matters more for Anton than for an ordinary Straussian, because he runs the same move on the present. His politics rests on a collective tacit object he calls the ruling class or the managerial elite. The picture is of a class that shares an unspoken worldview, a post-national framework operating beneath the surface, enforced without ever being stated. This is the precise entity Turner says cannot exist as a shared tacit substrate. There is no shared framework loaded into every bureaucrat and editor and program officer. What there is, on Turner’s account, is a large number of individuals with overlapping trained dispositions, similar incentives, similar feedback from similar institutions, producing similar output. Turner does not deny the similarity. He denies the hidden shared mind behind it. The difference is the whole game. Anton needs the shared mind because a shared mind can be unmasked, opposed, and defeated as a single adversary. Distributed habit cannot be unmasked, because there is nothing concealed to bring to light, only a pattern of separate men behaving alike for reasons that are mostly visible already. The frame leaves Anton his pattern and takes away his enemy. He has reified a statistical resemblance into a willful collective agent with a buried doctrine, and that reification is the same error he commits when he reads a secret teaching out of Plato.
Anton, through Jaffa and Strauss, treats the regime as a moral and civilizational whole held together by shared character, shared confidence, a common tacit sense of the country and its purpose. His decline story depends on this. Elites lose confidence in their civilization, cease reproducing the standards, and trade the substance for procedure, and the rot spreads through the shared thing before anyone can see it. Turner’s skepticism falls hard here, because shared civic character and collective cultural confidence are the collective tacit entities his book exists to deny. What Anton describes as a regime losing its soul is, in Turner’s terms, a large set of individuals whose trained dispositions and incentives have shifted, each in his own causal history, until the aggregate output looks different. The change is real. The shared soul that supposedly carries it is the fiction. Anton’s tragic prose, the late-Rome cadence, the sense of a single organism sickening, all of it imports the one object Turner refuses to grant. The decline might be occurring. The thing Anton says is declining is not a thing.
Turner’s interest in the tacit always came back to authority. A man who claims tacit knowledge claims something no outsider can audit. He sees what others cannot see, and when asked how, he cannot fully say, because the knowledge is tacit. That unauditability is the source of the authority and also its weakness. Anton’s whole public stance is an expertise claim of this kind. He perceives the crisis the ordinary observer misses. He reads the regime. He sees the hidden structures of power under the neutral words. Pressed for his method, he offers the trained eye, the Straussian ear, the long formation, which is to say he offers tacit knowledge as his credential. Turner’s suspicion of the managerial expert who governs by unarticulated judgment lands with full weight on the man who built his name attacking that expert. Anton’s prophet posture is itself an unauditable claim to tacit insight. The seer who tells you the experts cannot be trusted because their authority rests on knowledge they cannot show you is resting his own authority on knowledge he cannot show you.
The Set
Compared to Elon Musk’s room, the light is dimmer in Michael Anton’s room. The books are older, and the men are more likely to quote a dead Greek than to pitch a fund. Anton shares the center with his teachers and his texts in a way Musk never would. Anton spent the opening months of Trump’s second term as Director of Policy Planning at State and wrote the 2025 National Security Strategy, then left. That movement, from the seminar room to the State Department and back, defines the set. These men want to think and to rule, and they believe the two belong together.
The deep root is West Coast Straussianism (pro-Trump compared to other Straussians). Leo Strauss (1899-1973) is the grandfather, and his student Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015) is the founder of the specific school, the man who read the American founding and Lincoln through the lens of natural right and gave Claremont its creed. Charles R. Kesler (b. 1956) is the living head, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Anton’s mentor, the man whose festschrift Anton co-edited. Around Kesler sit the Claremont scholars: Thomas G. West on natural rights, John Marini on the administrative state, Glenn Ellmers, Kevin Slack, Ryan Williams who runs the Institute, and Tom Klingenstein who chairs the board and funds the operation. Larry Arnn (b. 1952) runs Hillsdale and keeps the alliance between the two schools tight. The departed shape the set as much as the living: Angelo Codevilla (1943-2021) gave them the ruling-class-versus-country-class frame, and James Burnham (1905-1987) gave them the managerial revolution to fight against.
A wider tent surrounds the Claremont core, and Anton moves through all of it. Yoram Hazony (b. 1964) runs the National Conservatism conferences and the Edmund Burke Foundation, the meeting ground where the intellectual right assembles once a year. The postliberal Catholics form their own wing: Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), who argued liberalism failed by succeeding in Why Liberalism Failed, Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968) with his common-good constitutionalism, Sohrab Ahmari (b. 1985) at Compact, Gladden Pappin who decamped to Hungary, and Rod Dreher (b. 1967), who did the same. R.R. Reno (b. 1959) holds First Things as their journal. The younger and more online right circles the edges: Curtis Yarvin (b. 1973), whose case for a national CEO and against democracy feeds the Red Caesar talk, Auron MacIntyre, and the activist Christopher Rufo (b. 1984), who turns the theory into school-board fights and policy. Julius Krein runs American Affairs as the economics-and-statecraft organ. In government the set has Vice President JD Vance (b. 1984), who speaks their language and cites their books, and Russ Vought (b. 1976) at OMB, who carries the war on the administrative state into the budget.
What they value is the regime question. The phrase is old, from Aristotle, and it means more than government. It means who rules, by what right, toward what end, and what kind of human being the order produces. They value statesmanship over management, the founder over the engineer, the man who can name the good and order a people toward it. They prize the permanent things, the Western canon, the Declaration and the Federalist read as serious philosophy rather than as documents. They love the text and the close reading of it. Strauss taught them that great writers hide their boldest teaching beneath a surface for the careful few, and they read each other and the classics this way, hunting the hidden argument. They value virtue, hierarchy of the soul, and the cultivation of citizens, and they hold these against what they see as a managerial order that flattens men into consumers and clients.
Their hero system runs on the philosopher-statesman who sees the regime clearly and acts to save it at the decisive hour. The model is Lincoln in Jaffa’s telling, the man who refounded the nation on its first principles when it was about to lose them. Anton’s famous essay supplies the image the whole set lives by: the passengers on Flight 93 charge the cockpit because the alternative is certain death, and a man of courage acts even when the odds are bad and the act is ugly. The hero tells hard truths the regime does not want to hear, takes the abuse, and is vindicated by history. For the bolder wing, the hero shades into Caesar, the one man who restores order when the republic has rotted past saving by ordinary means, and Anton has done more than anyone to make Red Caesar a phrase people argue over. Death, in this story, is the death of the regime and the forgetting of the founding. Immortality comes through the nation preserved, the truth restored, the name remembered alongside the founders and the great statesmen. A man wins by writing the essay that moves history or by standing in the room where the regime is saved or lost.
The status games turn on erudition and on access. The first currency is mastery of the texts. A man earns standing by showing he has read Strauss and Aristotle and the Federalist to the bottom, by catching the hidden argument others miss, by writing prose dense with the tradition. The second currency is the essay that lands, and Flight 93 is the gold standard, the piece that escaped the seminar and changed an election. Writing under a Roman pseudonym, as Anton did with Publius Decius Mus, signals that a man plays the old game of the hidden teacher and the careful reader. The third currency is power, the proof that the philosophy reached the prince. To be read by the president, to write the National Security Strategy, to place students in the administration, raises a man’s standing inside the set the way Sacks going to the White House raised his among the founders. The Claremont fellowships work as initiation and gate. Publishing in the Review or the American Mind marks you as in. Being called a fascist or an authoritarian by the liberal press pays, because it proves you frighten the ruling class. The losses come from inside, from the charge that a man has misread Jaffa, sold out the natural-right teaching for raw power worship, or gone soft on the regime.
Their normative claims are dense and contested. Natural right is real and knowable, and the American founding rests on it, with the Declaration as the philosophical core and equality meaning equal natural rights rather than equal outcomes or equal worth in any leveling sense. The regime should form virtue, not stay neutral among ways of life. The administrative state is a usurpation, an unelected fourth branch that rules without consent and must be broken. The ruling class, the credentialed managerial elite that staffs the agencies, the universities, the press, and the foundations, is illegitimate and hostile to the people it governs. The nation is a real thing worth preserving, immigration should serve the people already here, and globalism dissolves the bounded peoplehood that self-government needs. The boldest claim, the one that splits the set, holds that when the constitutional order has decayed past repair, extraordinary executive action, even action that strains or breaks the forms, can be justified to save the substance.
The essentialist claims. They all reject the progressive faith that man is infinitely malleable and that history moves toward ever-greater freedom. Strauss taught them to fight historicism, the idea that all values are products of their time, and to insist on permanent questions and permanent truths about human nature. Man has a nature, fixed and knowable. Nature gives a hierarchy of souls, the wise and the foolish, the few who can rule and the many who consent. The family is natural, the difference of the sexes is real, and a sound politics conforms to these rather than fighting them. Here the set fractures. The Jaffaites hold the founding as universal and creedal, open to anyone who embraces the principles, a people defined by a shared idea. The newer right pushes toward blood and soil, a people defined by ancestry, language, religion, and place, and Anton has drifted in that direction with his writing on immigration and citizenship, against the more universalist reading his teachers held. The postliberal Catholics add their own essence claim, that man is made for a transcendent good and that a regime which refuses to name that good corrupts him. The Yarvin wing strips the nature talk down to a colder thesis about power and order. They share the enemy and the founding texts. They do not share an account of what America is, and that quarrel runs through every conference and every essay.
Anton bridges the natural-right Claremont core, the nationalist turn, the Caesarist provocation, and the corridors of the State Department, which is part of why he matters and part of why each faction watches him for signs of drift. The bonds hold because these men share Strauss and the regime question and the conviction that the country is in a late and dangerous hour. They fight over the founding, over whether the nation is a creed or a people, over whether to save the republic or to refound it. They circle the same texts, rank each other by who reads deepest and writes boldest, and present a common front against the ruling class they mean to dispossess.
How does Anton deal with people in his Alliance with whom he passionately disagrees?
Anton’s pattern is to keep the fight inside the family and argue it on the merits, in print, by name, while saving his contempt for the people outside the tent. The ferocity that makes him famous points at the ruling class and at the NeverTrump right. Within his own alliance he argues rather than excommunicates, and he is willing to share a stage with men whose conclusions he will not sign.
The clearest case of disagreement with an ally is his exchange with Mark Helprin (b. 1947) on Ukraine in the Claremont Review of Books. The two split hard. Helprin backs Western support for Kyiv and accuses Anton of inventing reckless pro-war rhetoric. Anton answers in the same pages, names the dispute as whether Ukraine is worth the risk of antagonizing Russia, quotes his sources back at Helprin, and gives no ground. The fight is real and sharp. It also stays a fight between two men of the same tradition in the same journal, conducted as argument, with each treating the other as a serious opponent rather than a traitor. That is how Anton handles a passionate disagreement with someone he respects. He publishes against him, by name, and keeps him inside the family.
The Yarvin case shows the other half of the pattern. Anton gave Curtis Yarvin nearly two hours on the Claremont podcast to make the case for an American Caesar and a tech-CEO monarch. Anton does not share the monarchism, and he presses where they part, including how long the present regime lasts if no one moves against it. He does not endorse Yarvin’s most extreme ideas. He platforms the man, engages the argument as a real argument, and lets the disagreement stand in the open without either capitulation or anathema. He treats a heterodox ally as an interlocutor worth two hours, which is a way of keeping him in the coalition.
Two habits make this possible. First, he subordinates the disagreement to the shared diagnosis. With Yarvin he agrees early that the regime is a kind of theocratic oligarchy run by a progressive priesthood, and treats the quarrel over the cure as secondary to the agreement about the disease. The common enemy holds the alliance together, and Anton keeps the enemy in view so the family quarrels stay family quarrels. Second, the Straussian training lets him hold a position without spelling out its full implications. He floats Red Caesar as provocation and as a question, not as a signed manifesto. That reserve lets him sit at the same table with the natural-right Jaffaites who recoil at Caesarism and with the Yarvin wing that cheers it. He can mean more than he says and say less than he means, which gives the coalition room to disagree without splitting.
When the disagreement is with men who hold power over him rather than fellow writers, the pattern changes. He exits. Reporting on his departure from the State Department had him frustrated with Sergio Gor and with the administration’s foreign-policy process. He did not wage a public war. He finished the National Security Strategy, left, and went back to Claremont and Hillsdale. Argument is for the family of writers and thinkers. With the operators and the process, he withdraws to the perch where his weapon, the essay, still works.
Constitutional Dictatorship
Levinson (b. 1941) and Balkin (b. 1956) wrote “Constitutional Dictatorship” in 2010 as constitutional lawyers, while Anton talks about Red Caesar as a Straussian essayist, but they all reach for the same tools: the Roman dictatorship, Cincinnatus and Caesar, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) on the commissarial and the sovereign dictator, Machiavelli’s (1469-1527) Discourses on Livy, Clinton Rossiter (1917-1970) and his 1948 book Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, Lincoln (1809-1865) as the paragon case, and the Federalist on energetic executive power. Put Anton’s phrase next to their article and you find two men handling the same animal from opposite ends. They want to cage it. He is half-calling it forth.
Both reject the clean line between democracy and dictatorship. Both take the word back to Rome, where the dictator held a real constitutional office for a fixed term and a stated purpose. Both treat emergency and the strong executive as permanent features of any republic rather than aberrations. And both organize their thinking around Schmitt’s distinction, which is the hinge of the whole comparison. The commissarial dictator is constituted by the existing order, takes power for a limited time to save the regime, and gives it back. The sovereign dictator uses the crisis to overthrow the order and found a new one. Levinson and Balkin spend their article arguing that the American presidency is a commissarial dictatorship, bestowed by framework statutes rather than seized, latent until a crisis activates it, distributed across agency heads who each hold unreviewable discretion in their patch. Anton’s Red Caesar lives on the same map. The only question is which of Schmitt’s two figures he is describing, and the answer is where the two projects split.
Levinson and Balkin write to warn and to design. Their whole second half is Machiavellian in the strict sense of the Discourses: build the emergency office into the constitution in advance, separate the body that declares the emergency from the man who wields the power, add sunset clauses and supermajorities and escalator clauses, consider a no-confidence vote and an emergency council of former officials. They place themselves on the side of Hamilton and the Florentine. Their fear is the slide Rossiter charted and Weber (1864-1920) predicted, the drift toward Caesarism, the president who governs through manufactured emergency, the Ponzi scheme of one crisis stacked on the last to keep the public scared and the executive unchecked. For them the constitutional dictator who refuses to return power is the nightmare the design exists to prevent.
Anton inverts the valence. He wants the strong executive. He treats the managerial order, not the presidency, as the standing tyranny. For him the Caesar talk is a remedy rather than a disease. Where Levinson and Balkin see the danger and engineer against it, Anton sees the cure and dramatizes the need for it. This is the first real divergence. Same diagnosis of where unaccountable power sits, opposite prescription.
Levinson and Balkin locate the constitutional dictatorship in the administrative state, distributed among Bernanke at the Fed, the head of the CDC, the director of the NSA, the faceless officials who exercise unreviewable discretion under old framework statutes. The administrative state is the distributed dictatorship, and their reforms aim to thread accountability back through it. Anton agrees that the administrative state is the seat of unaccountable power. He draws the opposite conclusion. For him that apparatus is the ruling-class regime that has captured the country, and the Caesar is the man summoned to break it and take it back. So Anton’s Caesar is, in Levinson and Balkin’s own terms, an attempt to re-concentrate the distributed dictatorship in a single person, to pull the scattered unreviewable power of the agencies up into one will. That move runs from the commissarial toward the sovereign. It is the very tendency their design tries to forestall.
The law professors’ Part III describes the president’s power to define reality, to frame a situation as existential crisis, to make resistance look parochial and futile, to act on the framing and confirm it. They call it governing through emergency and treat it as the engine that produces the powers of constitutional dictatorship. Flight 93 is that move in the form of an essay. Charge the cockpit or die. The framing licenses the extraordinary act. Anton is the rhetorician of exactly the emergency construction they diagnose. Where they study the move with a cold eye and warn against its normalization, he performs it with skill. Read their Part III and his 2016 essay together and he reads as their case study.
Then comes Cincinnatus against Caesar, which the article frames as the ambivalence at the heart of the institution. The dictator can return to the plow or he can have himself named perpetuus. Rome ran the whole arc, from the limited six-month office through Sulla to Caesar, who mocked Sulla for giving power back. Levinson and Balkin say the entire point of constitutional design is to secure the Cincinnatus outcome and block the Caesar outcome. Anton names the Caesar outcome and tries to rehabilitate it, or at least to argue that a republic this far gone may require it. By their lights, to name Caesar with approval is to give up on the design and to welcome the slide that Rossiter and Weber feared. That is the disagreement in one image. They want the man who returns power. Anton entertains the man who keeps it, on the ground that the order he would be returning power to is not worth preserving.
The commissarial dictator preserves an order assumed to be legitimate. Anton’s premise is that the order is already illegitimate, already refounded by the managerial class against the people, so there is no legitimate constitutional order left to preserve. That premise collapses the commissarial option from the inside. If the standing regime is itself a usurpation, then the man who breaks it is not overthrowing a legitimate order but restoring the true one, and Anton can claim the commissarial mantle, saving and refounding, while in practice endorsing the sovereign move that founds a new order. The Schmittian categories flip depending on which order you treat as real. For Levinson and Balkin, the constitutional dictator who will not give power back is the tyrant. For Anton, the managerial state that never gives power back to the people is the tyranny already in place, and his Caesar is the commissarial answer to it. Each can call the other’s order the dictatorship, and that is the crux of the whole comparison.
Both camps reject the comfortable view that American tyranny is impossible. Levinson and Balkin take direct aim at the tyrannophobia argument that the country has never come close to a dictator and never will. They say it already has one, distributed and latent. Anton also holds that America is already under a kind of tyranny, but he names the managerial class rather than the presidency as the tyrant. They start from the same refusal of complacency and walk to opposite culprits. Second, Adrian Vermeule sits in both worlds at once, the Schmittian administrative-law theorist whom Levinson and Balkin engage and an ally in Anton’s postliberal orbit, which shows how small the room is and how the same Schmittian vocabulary serves a liberal warning and a postliberal program in the same years.
The Structural Similarities Between Straussianism & Post-Colonialism
The Straussian esoteric reading doctrine is structurally self-sealing in a way that does resemble a closed world. If a text says X on its face, the Straussian can hold that the real teaching is not-X, hidden for the careful reader, with the surface piety placed there to protect the author or to screen the vulgar. Once you grant that move, textual evidence stops being able to refute a reading. A plain statement is the exoteric cover. A contradiction is a deliberate signal. A silence is the loudest speech of all. The method can absorb almost any datum and turn it into confirmation, which is the defining trait of a system immune to evidence. This is not a hostile caricature. It is the core of M.F. Burnyeat’s (1939-2019) attack in (“Sphinx Without a Secret”), where he argued that Strauss kept finding his own views buried in the great books and that the secret teaching was mostly Strauss talking to himself. Shadia Drury pressed the same charge from another direction, that the hidden teaching turns out to be a Nietzschean elitism the school will not state plainly. Quentin Skinner (b. 1940) and the Cambridge contextualists built a whole rival method on the claim that reading for hidden meaning lets the interpreter say whatever he wants. The critics disagree about the content of the supposed secret. They agree the practice resists falsification. On that axis the analogy to a hermetic, self-validating world holds.
The lineage structure deepens the resemblance. West Coast Straussians venerate Jaffa as Jaffa venerated Strauss, and a reading gets its warrant from the school rather than from any public method an outsider could run. Agreement among the initiated then counts as proof, when it is really the convergence of men trained to read alike. Add the gatekeeping, the Claremont fellowships as initiation, the in-group vocabulary, the standing contempt for mainstream political science and academic history of philosophy, and you have the social form of a closed circle: you are inside or you are one of the vulgar who cannot see. The flattering epistemics of the few who can read are real, and they do insulate the group from outside correction, because outside correction can always be dismissed as the complaint of a man who never learned to read.
Now the differences. A sealed world does not spend fifty years at war with itself. The East Coast and West Coast split is a sustained, bitter, public quarrel about the deepest questions, reason against revelation, the standing of the American founding, whether the Declaration states a universal truth or a useful myth. Jaffa fought Mansfield and the Bloom-Pangle line for decades and gave no quarter. Anton sits inside a school that argues ferociously over exactly the things that define it. A community immune to critique would not host that. The closure points outward, against the academy and the vulgar reader, more than inward.
Strauss’s own work on Maimonides (1138-1204), Spinoza (1632-1677), and the medieval Arabic philosophers rested on a falsifiable historical claim, that some writers under persecution did hide their meaning, and that claim has real evidence behind it. The book to read against my own thesis is Persecution and the Art of Writing, where the esoteric idea is argued rather than assumed. The closure enters when the historical thesis becomes a universal license, when every text is read as hiding a teaching whether or not the author had reason to hide. And the closure tightens further on the West Coast political branch, because there the reading serves a coalition and a program. A method that already resists evidence resists it harder when a political identity rides on the result. Anton is a product of that branch, which is the most motivated and the most sealed part of the tradition.
Convenient Beliefs
Start with the master one. Natural right is real and knowable. Everything in Anton rests on this. His authority to read the regime, his claim that the founding states a moral truth and not a preference, his standing to say the country is in decline against a fixed standard, all of it presupposes that there is a knowable natural standard and that he has access to it. The amount riding on the belief is total. The amount of scrutiny he gives the belief itself is near zero. He argues from natural right constantly and almost never argues for the proposition that natural right can be known by a man and applied to a regime, because that is the proposition he cannot afford to lose. If natural right is not knowable in the way he needs, he is not a reader of the moral order reporting its dictates. He is a partisan with strong opinions and a good vocabulary. The belief survives by convenience. The cost of doubting it is his whole vocation, and so he does not doubt it.
The regime as a moral and civilizational whole is the second. Anton treats the regime as a thing with a character and a soul, a unity that can keep its confidence or lose it, sicken, decline, and need saving. This is convenient in a precise way. It supplies the object his prophetic role requires. A man can diagnose the decline of a soul and call for its rescue. He cannot do anything so heroic with a loose aggregate of institutions, habits, statutes, and individuals each changing for its own reasons. If the regime is the aggregate rather than the soul, there is no single patient to diagnose and no single rescue to lead, and the tragic register goes flat. Anton never tests whether the regime is the kind of thing that can have a soul, because the test threatens the role the belief makes possible. He asserts the whole because the whole is what he needs to address.
The ruling class as a coherent, hostile, illegitimate agent is the third. Anton’s politics requires that the managerial elite be a unified actor with a shared mind and a will to dispossess his coalition. The convenience runs two ways. It supplies a single enemy that can be named, opposed, and one day broken. And it explains his side’s defeats without requiring his side to look at itself, because the losses become the work of a coordinated adversary rather than the result of his coalition’s own weaknesses. Examining the belief would mean asking whether the ruling class is one agent or many separate people behaving alike for ordinary reasons, and whether his coalition’s decline owes something to its own failures. Both questions are expensive, so neither gets asked. The enemy stays unified because a unified enemy is convenient.
The recoverable hidden teaching is the fourth, and it is the one that pays him most directly. Anton holds that the great writers concealed a true teaching and that the trained reader recovers it. This belief grants him an authority that cannot be checked, since the meaning lives beneath the surface where only the careful reader can see it. That is exactly the kind of belief Turner expects to find protected, because everything Anton does as an interpreter depends on it and nothing he does ever puts it at risk. He cannot test whether his recovered teaching is in the text or in his training, because the test would expose his readings to ordinary checking and strip the privilege the belief confers. So the doctrine stands, untested, doing its work.
Red Caesar and the existential emergency are the fifth. The belief that the crisis is so severe that extraordinary, even extra-constitutional, action is warranted is convenient because it licenses what Anton already wants, a strong executive that breaks the managerial order, while letting him keep the language of constitutional fidelity and regime preservation. The emergency framing relieves him of the harder task of defending the action on ordinary grounds, where it would have to answer to the rules. He does not examine whether the emergency is as total as he says, because the totality is what does the licensing. A smaller crisis would demand smaller measures and ordinary justification, which is the burden the convenient belief exists to remove.
Underneath these sits the oldest one, the belief that the wise few see what the many cannot. It is convenient because it places Anton among the few and turns every objection from outside into evidence that the objector is one of the many who fail to understand. The belief immunizes his judgments against correction. He cannot inspect it, because inspecting it would mean submitting his insight to the same public checking he denies the many, and that is the exposure the belief is shaped to prevent.
Turner Against Essentialism
Turner is a nominalist (a philosopher who believes that abstract concepts do not exist in reality, instead the world only consists of individuals and concrete things) about the social world, and his anti-essentialism is the working edge of that nominalism. The error he hunts is the slide from a noun to a thing. We have the word, so we assume there is an entity, and then we assume the entity has an essence, a defining inner nature that makes it what it is and sets its boundaries. Stephen Turner denies the entity and the essence both. What exists are particulars, individual people with individual habits formed by their own histories, and the apparent essence is a name laid over the scatter plus a back-projection that treats the name as if it pointed to a substance. His second move is sharper and more useful here. Essence claims do political work. To assert an essence is to naturalize a boundary, to take a contingent and contestable line and present it as a discovery about being. That is what he means by the politics of essence. The man who names the essence gets to police the boundary and call the policing metaphysics.
Anton is essentialist nearly all the way down, and the essences are the structural members of his thought. He posits a human nature that is fixed, knowable, and hierarchical, with the high-agency man as a kind of person you can identify by what he builds and the many as another kind fit to consent rather than rule. He posits the nation as a real thing with an identity, the people as a unity with a character. He posits the regime as a moral and civilizational whole with a soul that can keep its confidence or lose it. He posits the West as a civilization with an essence worth preserving. He posits natural right as a real order in the structure of things. And he posits the ruling class as a coherent kind, a managerial elite with a shared nature and a single will. Turner’s response to each is the same. There is no essence there. There is human variety and trained disposition, not two fixed types of man. There is a large population of people with overlapping habits, not a national soul. There is a set of institutions and statutes and individuals each changing for its own reasons, not a regime with an inner life. There is a tradition of texts and practices, not a Western essence. There is what people believe and enforce, not a natural order standing behind it. There is a distribution of similarly trained officials, not a ruling-class mind. In every case the noun has been mistaken for a thing and the thing endowed with an essence it does not have.
Notice that Anton’s internal quarrel runs between two essentialisms rather than between essence and its absence. The Jaffa line holds that America is an idea, a nation defined by an essential proposition in the Declaration. Anton’s later drift holds that America is a people defined by ancestry, religion, and place. Turner dissolves both with one stroke, because both commit the same error. The creedal nation and the blood-and-soil nation are each an essence claim, one locating the essence in a proposition and the other in a lineage, and neither names a thing that has an essence to locate. The fight Anton takes as the deepest question of his tradition is, on this reading, a fight over which essence to assert about an object that has none.
Anton’s essences each draws a line his coalition needs and then presents the line as nature. The essence of the nation decides who is really American and licenses the immigration position. The essence of the regime decides what the country really is and licenses the diagnosis of decline. The essence of human nature decides who is fit to rule and licenses the hierarchy. The essence of the West decides what must be defended and licenses the enemy. Turner’s point is not that these boundaries are wicked. It is that they are constructed and contestable, and that calling them essences is the move by which a man hides their construction and exempts them from argument. You do not debate an essence. You either see it or you are blind to it, which is the same authority structure Anton wants for every one of his claims.
Turner’s Explaining the Normative picks up exactly where the essentialism leaves off. The anti-essentialism removes Anton’s entities. Explaining the Normative removes the bindingness those entities were supposed to generate. Even if you granted Anton a nation or a regime or a human nature, you would still face the further claim that these ground oughts, that natural right obligates, that the founding binds us, that the regime ought to cultivate virtue, that a Caesar would be justified. Turner’s target in that book is normativism, the view that normative facts are basic and cannot be reduced, that a binding ought is a real extra feature of the world over and above what people believe, want, habituate, and enforce. He argues that the appeal to such facts explains nothing. The only evidence for the norm is the behavior the norm is invoked to explain, so the norm adds a circle, not a cause. A naturalist account does the work without the residue. There are habits, mutual expectations, sanctions, and the empirical facts of practice, and the word binding names how those feel from inside, not an additional thing in the world.
Anton’s natural right is normativism in its strongest form, and Strauss is the reason. Strauss made anti-historicism a creed, the insistence that there are permanent questions and permanent normative truths that philosophy recovers and that stand above any age. Turner’s book is the patient naturalist refusal of that creed. Normativity, he argues, is not the kind of thing that has eternal truths waiting to be found. It is a way of talking that converts dispositions into obligations. So when Anton says the founding’s principles bind the living, Turner asks what the binding adds beyond the fact that some Americans were raised to revere those principles and will sanction those who flout them. When Anton says the regime ought to form virtue, Turner asks what the ought adds beyond Anton’s preference and his coalition’s willingness to enforce it. When Anton says the Caesar would be justified, Turner asks what the justification is, in non-normative terms, other than that Anton and his allies want the outcome and would back the man who delivers it. In each case the deflation cashes the binding ought as want plus enforcement, and the word duty turns out to be the honorific a faction gives its own preferences when it wants others to feel obligated by them.
Every strong normativism smuggles in a we. We ought, we are bound, the norm holds for us. The neo-Kantians and the space-of-reasons philosophers, Brandom (b. 1950) and Habermas (b. 1929) among them, try to ground the ought in the conditions of a shared we, and Turner answers that the we is the same illegitimate collective entity his anti-essentialism already rejected. Natural right binds whom? The American people, the regime, mankind. Those are not unified subjects that can be bound. They are populations of separate men. So the binding has no one to bind except by Anton’s say-so, and the say-so is exactly the authority the normative claim was meant to establish. The argument runs in a circle, and the circle is the point. Anton’s moral cosmos, run through both frames, comes apart into two residues and nothing else. The essences become names for distributions of particulars. The oughts become preferences his coalition will enforce. What presents itself as a science of the regime grounded in permanent truth turns out, on Turner’s accounting, to be a set of contingent boundaries called nature and a set of contingent wants called duty.
