Paleontology – Must Read By Michael Anton for American Greatness
If I thought the paleoconservative appeal to tradition alone were sufficient to support all the policies sketched near the beginning of this article, I would submit to it cheerfully.
To make a long story short, Brion McClanahan attacked the 1776 Commission report. I thought that was imprudent and said so. Now he’s back. So I am too.
But I’d prefer not to be fighting with paleoconservatives, above all not with Chronicles. I have many reasons not to want to. Some are self-interested: I appreciate Darrel Dow’s generous review of my book The Stakes, and I appreciate the editors’ willingness to publish it. I found my last exchange with Paul Gottfried on this website cordial and productive. I also appreciated his recent clarifying remarks on the relationship between Leo Strauss, one of my (indirect) mentors and inspirations, and neoconservatism.
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On a more practical level, my school—which I recently termed the “Claremont-Hillsdale School” and is mostly coterminous with the older phrase “West-Coast Straussianism”—and the paleoconservatives all have the same enemies who make no distinctions among us. To them, we are all retrograde and evil, and richly deserve the fate they are busily planning for us. Especially because both our schools, unlike the collaborationist “Right,” are fighting the present regime’s descent into absolute despotism.
Beyond this, both my school and the paleoconservatives want the same things: justice, law and order, equal protection under law, an end to anarcho-tyranny, a border wall, strict immigration enforcement, patriotic reform of our idiotic immigration policies (i.e., the opposite of the kind of “reform” the ruling class wants), America-first trade and foreign policies, protections for free speech, use of state power to attack the tech monopolies, cleansing our school system of “Critical Race Theory,” policies that support family formation . . . I could go on for pages before reaching a single item on which we disagree, assuming there are any.
What we disagree about is the basis for these policies. This is not an unimportant disagreement, nor is it merely of theoretical interest. Though personally, I’m interested in theory and prefer to be right about the theories I hold regardless of their practical consequences.
But this one—the right basis for a good political order—by its very nature has practical consequences. And it may soon have even more of them if I’m right that the present regime is a thing that can’t go on forever, and may even be nearing the end of its appointed time. As I put it in The Stakes, “if conservatism’s professed account of human nature, of the nature of politics and society, is true, then our current ruling arrangement must eventually break against the rocks of natural limits.”
