The Election to End All Elections

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Anton, now a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, again urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California. In the book’s final chapters, he lays out several paths that the current struggle for America’s future might take....

As Anton puts it: “[t]here’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.” Then he adds what is really radically new about the 2020 election: should the Democrats win, the ruling Left—which includes just about everyone who controls American government and society’s commanding heights—is ready, willing, and eager to implement plans that would make it virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win national elections again. These plans include the importation and counting of non-citizen voters. Elections by mail would shift power from voters to those who count the votes, just like in Venezuela. Though reelecting Trump makes the republic’s survival possible, and preserves all manner of good options, it guarantees nothing. Trump’s defeat guarantees disaster—like in 2016, only much more so....

This ruling class now explicitly denies that “all men are created equal.” It asserts for itself the right to rule by decree by virtue of expertise, and the power to assign different rights and obligations to classes of people, “protected” and less so. ...

Anton’s section on “Propaganda and Censorship: Narrative, Megaphone, and Muzzle” is particularly worth reading....

Anton gives us a remarkable chapter on how thoroughly latter-day immigration has scrambled all things American. His point is that the past half-century’s immigration—very differently from our prior policy—seems to have been intended to do just that. This, he argues, not only degrades ordinary Americans’ lives, it also throws a wild card into the ruling class’s own plans for control—of which their approach to immigration is arguably the key element. In short, the ruling class has unleashed a bunch of tigers on America, which for now it is riding....

Before or afterward [the 2020 election], were conservatives not unanimously to roll over, and were a few incidents to result in loss of life and conflict between police forces on opposite sides of the affairs, America might well experience an explosion of pent-up rage less like the American Civil War of the 19th century and more like the horror that bled Spain in the 20th....