Michael Anton, author of the “Flight 93 election” scenario from 2016, a former member of the Trump administration, and currently employed at Hillsdale College, believes it is time for Americans to redraw the national electoral map. Specifically, he thinks it is time “to allow counties, cities, and towns unhappy with their current state government to join another. This would be a practical, and practicable, way to ease Blue and Red Americans’ present discontent and exasperation with each other.”
Whatever one thinks of either the logic or the logistics of Anton’s suggestion, his argument—at least as presented in his essay “Red Lines” (at American Mind)—is nothing but a hysterical denunciation of an imaginary reign of terror Anton insists “Blue” states and cities are engaged in against their helpless “Red” citizens. “Sure,” says Anton, “all the Red folk get to vote. For the ruling class, this alone satisfies the requirements of justice, of ‘democracy.’” But, he complains, “The Reds are outvoted every time, their preferences never considered, and their interests never respected.”
Thank the Founders for the Electoral College, says Anton, which at least gives “the Reds” a fighting chance. That very institution, however, is currently in jeopardy, being “viciously attacked and despised”. Anton is not referring to the protestors who attempted to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes on January 6, or to the legislators who voted against accepting the state-certified electoral results. For Anton, it is “our overlords” who are doing the attacking and the despising of the Electoral College:
“This is why fundamentally republican but not purely democratic institutions such as the Electoral College are so viciously attacked and despised. They hinder the operation of “democracy.” In this understanding, the 2016 election was illegitimate simply because Hillary won the popular vote. But consider: she won California alone by 4.3 million votes—and lost the other 49 states by 1.4 million. Of course, the founders created the Electoral College specifically to prevent brute-force voting from crushing underfoot all regional, sectional, cultural, religious, economic, and other differences. But that matters not a whit to our overlords—except as proof that the Electoral College is “anti-democratic” and so must go.” 1
It is just possible—and I am by no means qualified to make this assessment—that Michael Anton suffers from paranoid delusions; for instance, he believes, as mentioned above, that America is controlled by “overlords”. He also believes Americans come in either “Blue” or “Red,” with no other colors, no shades of Grey, and no mixed loyalties; and he makes it clear that one of those two American tribes is being persecuted by the other. Red Americans, he says, find themselves “harassed by a hostile government” and “mocked by the ruling class”. How bad is it? Anton quotes Joel Kotkin, who confides that “the worst thing in the world to be is the Red part of a Blue state.” 2 Anton whines, “Not only do [Reds] get nothing but abuse from the political system, increasingly they don’t even get to talk. Any dissent against regime ideology is swiftly and ruthlessly censored on Blue media platforms, which is to say, all of them,” says the man who has consistently found media platforms from which to air his complaints.
Conservative ideologues (that phrase was once an oxymoron; roll over, Russell Kirk, and tell Michael Oakeshott the news) are increasingly high on their own supply. I cannot think of any other explanation for the nonsense they are spewing about “ruling class diktats” and attempts to “overturn the will of unruly voters”. Michael Anton was for democracy, I believe, before he was against it, but it has come to this: “Blues perpetually outvoting Reds and ruling unopposed,” claims Anton: “This, and only this, is what ‘democracy’ means today.”
Yet Michael Anton, Flight 93 hero that he is, does not despair; he believes it is time to take another shot at charging yet another cockpit. “Reds, increasingly, are catching on,” he explains. “They know the game is rigged, that they cannot win, and the veneer of their participation and consent is a sham. This is why the gaslighting is being dialed up to the lumen levels of blue stars. Every objection to Blue despoilation is now openly ascribed to ‘white supremacy’.” 3
That, of course, is patently untrue; some objections to Blue despoilation are ascribed to “white supremacy,” but others are ascribed to homophobia, to toxic masculinity, to general misogyny, to willful ignorance, to the Dunning-Kruger effect, etc.
Eventually Anton arrives at his proposal: a kind of “secession-lite” in which cities, towns, and counties reaffiliate themselves with more hospitable state entities (presumably with some geographic proximity, such as eastern Oregon and western Idaho). As someone who has long thought, and publicly suggested, that eastern Montana should be annexed by North Dakota, I have no immediate objection to Anton’s idea, so long as it does not result in northern Idaho jumping ship to Montana; we in the Treasure State have enough problems of our own already.
In his conclusion, Anton unconvincingly pretends he just wants us all to get along:
Perhaps paradoxically, it is through greater pluralism that Americans can achieve greater comity. Today, every petty disagreement turns into a bitter Red-Blue fight. We could live together better if we could give each other a little more space, become a little more willing to leave one another alone.
Anton’s “secession lite” is the political equivalent of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option”: let the elect separate themselves from the heathens, the better to prepare for the eschaton. Unlike Dreher, however, Anton cannot help issuing a thinly veiled threat: “If the ruling class refuses to allow reorganization to proceed, refuses so much as to give it a fair hearing—then one day in the not-so-distant future we will look back with fondness to a time when “secession” as a future prospect meant only redrawing state lines.”
It is beyond me how Michael Anton restrained himself from closing with “Let’s roll!” I do not know how much longer he can avoid the Blue gulag, but I hope his students at Hillsdale College (itself a Red oasis in the Purple state of Michigan) appreciate his heroism.
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1 It is true that many on the political Left would like to do away with the Electoral College; some have even sought ways to effectively neuter it. Whatever the “Founders’” intentions, and whatever the fairness or unfairness of the Electoral College as it currently stands, substantive criticism of it does not seem ipso facto illegitimate—as opposed to simply claiming that its results are “crooked,” “rigged,” or “the biggest political fraud in the history of this country”.
2 If Joel Kotkin cannot imagine anything worse than "being the Red part of a Blue state," his imagination is tragically limited. What about being a square peg in a world of round holes? What about being the only one in your class to show up naked for the final exam? What about being Sisyphus, except instead of pushing a huge rock up a mountain you are condemned to fact-checking Fox News for eternity?
3 To be fair (and balanced), some on the Left are also concerned about the future of American democracy, though for very different reasons. See, for instance, Sean Illing’s interview with David Faris: Why Democrats must pass major democratic reforms - Vox Credit where credit is due: neither Illing nor Faris refer to Republicans as “overlords”. On the other hand, former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes writes (American Demons: Ben Rhodes's 'After the Fall' Excerpt - The Atlantic) that Americans “face a battle between people who live in the reality of the world as it is and people who are choosing to live in a false reality made up of base white-supremacist grievances and irrational conspiracy theories—and seeking to impose it on the rest of us,” a comment on which the likes of Michael Anton are sure to capitalize.
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