Listen live on the cspan radio app. Election night on cspan, your place for anunfiltered view of politics. Good evening to the students in our audience and our viewers, welcome to coaldale college, im, vicepresident of the college. The college of course is based in coaldale michigan and we are near the colleges washingtondc campus. Also the puppy school of government. The nations capital. You can find out more about our programs at dc. Hillsdale. Edu. But where in the library with Michael Antone who is a college lesser Research Fellow here and were going to be discussing his new book the face, america at the point of no return welcome my area glad youre here. You might know michael from his previous work, he wrote my election, under certain time, he was working the private sector at the time. He wrote under a pseudonym until he was outed and then you went to work for the Trump Administration in the national securitycouncil. That worked, they saw the election 2016 as an x essential question and now you tell us that were at the point of no return so im tempted to ask right off the top, what do you say to those who consider you to be an alarmist but of course i look around me and i see what is going on all around us right now. What is going on . What is your general assessment of things to set up our conversation. I would agree with those people, im an alarmist so thats not the question the question is am i right or wrong . Im comforted by the fact that people who said this sounds insane in 2015 come around and said you might have been right after all or im now cancompletely convinced. I say im comforted but to be vindicated by that is only somewhat comforting. Id have rather just been wrong and had everything turn outokay. So i wrote the bulk of the book for the lockdowns and before the local riots for the 1619 rights as our teacher charles holden. They serve as sort of further indication of the countries headed in a bad direction but again, its something id rather not happen but id rather be proved wrong and have everything become harmonious and i can go down in history as a crack who wrote one alarmist thing that turned out to have been accurate. Id be much better, my own reputation would suffer everyone else would be a lot happier. Both of these books are about elections. Is something about where we are in our history such that are all elections going to be of this magnitude or is this a temporary thing . Its definitely temporary. But thats also not a comforting answer because one way you can solve the problem is at one more election , lx the Democratic Party. Let them amnesty, if you leave joe biden in, are essentially promising to bring in or through accommodation of amnesty and immigration, a 52 million americans and all on a path tonaturalization and citizenship. The highest correlation of liberal or democratic voting for a district whether thats a congressional district, a state, a county or whateveris the percentage of foreignborn and the democrats have been saying this for decades. That more immigrants coming to the country and the more democratic and this will be a great way to build a permanent democratic majority so thats just one example of what i think was on the table in 2016 and is on the table in 20 20 so one way to stop having 93 elections is to have not happen elections or have meaningless elections forever. In california estate of every gubernatorial and other elections are serial because Everybody Knows the outcomes are not going to support a conclusion and whoever wins is going tohave the same program as everybody else. The country could become like that shortly as is what im most worried about. So one more general question and i want to walk through some meaty parts of the book. The 2016 election, the 20 20 election is the 2020 election more existential if you will and i preface that by pointing out that the founder of the transition integrity project which is a Bipartisan Group with john podesta. Miles gilman has tweeted that you were the number rasul of our time and should be treated as such he was executed for working with the nazis read what is he doing wrong . Is this election more heightened. It was std executed for writing articles without a trial. And this person has been criticized by some of our friends and has refused to apologize or back down as it were all totally justified and is extremely wellfunded and hes mine nominally presages that he works for as apparently no problem with him tweeting up Death Threats as did a lot of the left to endorse it. So what does that tell us about where we are . I think where we are is the left expected to win the 2016 election by a landslide. Expected a transition to a oneparty state to be smooth and uneventful. In which they could justbegin the implementation of their program. They were shocked the election of trump. They were shocked it was still enough effective resistance in the country and in a very angry and vengeful mood the 2016 election and that angry vengeful mood as it a fever pitch in 2020 and i fear that if they get total power in 2020, i believe that the transition to total power in 2016 had occurred would have been smoother and less eventful and i think its going to be extremely turbulent if they get it now in part because theyre going to be out to settle scores. One person who my notes slightly and i havent spoken to in years has called for a truth and Reconciliation Commission and this is something that happens when a totalitarian dictatorship fall and you dont want to put everybody in jail, you these tried to paper over the differences by having people come forward and confess. What crimes are there to confess for making an argument for the president and for his programs . If were talking about the truth and Reconciliation Commission, there are no democratic parties and theres no justified opposition, there one side and enemies. Lets back up and kind of work through the books and get some of your arguments. Flight 93 election was an essay that was turned into a book is more of an extensive work that thinks through some of the underlying problems that we face. You open this book with the extended essay if you will from a chapter about california. Im from california. You spent some time in california. But you present california as a study of americas possible future. So backing away from the immediacy of the election, do you see really a larger trend going on here which thats a representation. California has effectively had oneparty rule for decades. The schwarzenegger interregnum notwithstanding but not to go into the weeds but Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor on the recall effort and that less than two years trying to govern as a kind of centerright moderate conservative was defeated in every respect and spent his second term governing as a liberaldemocrat even though he never formally switched parties and had a super majority in both houses of the legislature, a congressional delegation of 45 to 7 or overwhelmingly democratic. Its had oneparty governance at the state level and its pretty much every county level with a Large Population there are these counties in the world but those red counties and red people, there are millions of them in california. They have no effective vote or say. Theyll be outvoted on everything important so california shows what happens when the Democratic Party and modern left a complete power and what they do particularly illustrative of the modern Democratic Party has left and is an especially well represented by california by finance interests, the managerial class. The socalled knowledge economy workers, things like that. These are people that cram that ribbon up and down the california coast , come up with all kinds of enthusiasms and impose them on the rest of the state and its a very, its not a warts and all portrait of california, a mostly warts portrait because california propaganda about the Natural Beauty and Silicon Valley innovation and all these things, everybody hears that, we all know that side of the state and im not denying that its there but im saying underneath that tip of the iceberg theres a giant rest of the iceberg which isdysfunction and dk and people dont hear about it and they need to know about. So what literally makes it the example of where things are going . Obviously there is this culture of washington but how it actually operates. How the state works. All of the above, i start almost at the beginning of the book with former mayor of new york city and briefly a president ial candidate in the democratic primary, while he was running came out to california and he said this is a model for the future. Bloomberg is a prototypical oligarchic type, i dont know how much money he has and he founded his company, not taking away from his success but he very much is all about the knowledge economy, the finance economy, high tech economy and with no concern for the middle class or manufacturing and so on. His vision of new yorkused to call it a quote unquote luxury product meaning yes its very expensive to be here and all kinds of things dont work but it works for those at the top and thats what matters. These keynotes of the Global Economy are what matters and he dont seem to care about the rest of the country in any significant way. Mike bloomberg was a candidate for the coastal elites. And the parts of california that he was praising are the only part that seemed to work and he neglected the rest. Id say the same about gavin newsom and Mark Zuckerberg and schwarzenegger and all the ones you think about when you think about the great california Success Stories and palo alto and laguna beach and a handful of other places are doing okay. California is working, modesto and fresno and the foothills and the Cascade Mountains and the high desert and low desert and inland empire, not only do they not care aboutthose places, they dont know theyre there. So theres a sense now to juxtapose back with you also talk about you refer to a parchment regime, so the old regime, theres a certain just to position between this new regime which is a model of where things seem to be going and this other old regime thats this parchment regime. I want to come back later to an analysis of the regime analysis but i want to talk about those two models, the california model but this parchment regime we talked about, the older america. Tell us how you analyze that and the confusion in the left and the right after that. The main thrust of chapters 2 and three is to say this is how were supposed to be governed but were not anymore and in a way its meant to shake conservatives by the lapels and and say i revere the constitution and declaration and bill of lights and organic laws and so on just as much as you do but its time to own up to the fact that the United States is no longer governed by this thing, its governed in a different wayso i dont give much of a civics lesson about how its supposed to be governed. Its five or six pages because its all well covered elsewhere but i spend a lot of time in chapter 2 discussing the tax on the original understanding of how america is supposed to be governed and i spend more time on rightwing attacks than on leftwing attacks partly because i think the leftwing attacks have been amply covered elsewhere by many scholars and by myself rightwing attacks havent gotten as much attention. Lets dig into those for a bit because in hildale among other places we spent a lot of time talking about the founding and Core Principles behind of the declaration of the constitution and we think those are important to defining our regime. But its also the case which some of our own teachers have talked about many times that you go into some depth about how theres been a debate within the right for some time over how to understand the founding but has that kind of taken the conservatives, the defenders of the founding off on the wrong path . There maybe is two ways i can put this. For the first is they are interrelated, theres a conservative attack which says the founding is, let me put it this way. Im trying to those conservatives who look at the world of 20 20 and say i dont like this, something has gone terriblywrong and needs to be fixed and when we sit down and make our list , whats a list of things you dont like . My list and their list looks about the same but how did we get there and then theyll say one of maybe two things to oversimplify. The founding, all men were created equal, this universalism that was wrong from the beginning and the related attack is its the enlightenment or monetarily where the finding is simply about byproduct of. Its i dont mean to disparage bloom, i love the closing of the American Mind but he parodied america in that book which came out in 1987 as nothing but a lock in a petri dish, like click to life on a politicalstage. So i tried to answer neither one of these charges is true. Its a deviation from the founding that got us into the mess were in now, not adherence to the founding principles and the founders in fact were not straight up lockeans or libertarians or concerned only with the private satisfaction of appetites and things like that and just built up a regime thats all right with no duties, weve heard all of these critiques before. They were doing the best they could and the best anyone could with the circumstances of 1776 which in fundamental ways still prevail today and in the sense that we still live in the modern world as opposed to the classical medieval world, were still in the christian world. At least we live in a world where civil and religious law has been separated. I think were not in the ancient world, i dont want to get into the philosophy too deeply but many of the circumstances will prevail and the answers that are proposed by the right reject the founding or are things that i think areunviable and i think they know that because they never spell them out. They chip away a lot of the founding and they that maybe its blood and soil, maybe its this kind of old new right that comes from nietzsche and nietzsches orbit in the 20th century. I find all of those ultimately unsatisfactory. I find some aspects of some of those things reasonable interpreted in the right way if theyre welded on or included with other elements and i tried to sketch on the south very much not me. Im trying in chapter not to bash the rightwing critics of the founding 20 20 correct as i dont see how that helps anything. Im trying to say im with you on the diagnosis. I dont think youre righton the cure and you got your me out. The one effort minimally is saying i had bought this through and ive been on the defense but thats literally like five people told me that maybe one. But thats an importantaspect of your book i think. People will come to your serious criticism of current policies of conservatism and modern aspects of the movement if you will, but that really stems from a misunderstanding or a failure to comprehend the grounding of the founding. Is that a fairstatement . Its not an original case, i guess is most original about chapter 2 is putting it all in one place trying to directly address criticism have been seen over the last 10 years. So im not going into old debates between pale ale ponds and neocons from the 70s. Im not reciting the civil war, not going into any of that. This is all about more addressing serious rightwing critics of the regime as it hasdeveloped in the last couple of decades. A regime which i oppose and i think its far afield from what it should be but i think diagnosis thereasons why inaccurately. So lets then talk about the on the left been a little bit. Today we had the 1619 project just closing. The first 1776 projects, what do you make of all that . Essentially the roof of what has gotten us here. Thats a good question, the root of what has gotten ushere. Isolate two movements, one is capital the progressivism in the 20th century. 60s leftism and beyond. The 1619 project, the original p prevent his whatever things of the scholars, i find some good in them one thing i find good in them is none of them were antiamerican but theres Something Different about them. They wanted to reinterpret thefounding. Not an antifounding at the top bought that it was bad at the time, think of them as somebody coming to estate of the art computer and finding software from a commodore 64 on. Thats the way they look at america. The constitution is outmoded software and it cant possibly work on this complex machine today but they loved and the machinearea. Wilson wanted tobring about progress. By the time you get in the 60s radicalism, the machine is terrible, where the sledgehammer, im going to break it. What happens there . It arises from a kind of i dont know, irrational passion. A utopianism. Residual marxism. Maybe theres just a lot of discontentment up into the system. Some of it i think arises from critiques such as we been telling our history one way and lots of people have been left out. A lot of this begins with an argument for inclusion, why are they telling the story and not this story andthen it begins youre right, you should tell all the stories. And it becomes why dont we emphasize, change the matter of emphasis until we get to where not going to tell the story anymore or only tell it in a disparaging way and everything has to be aboutthe stuff was formally excluded. Theres a momentum to it that takes on a life of its own and culminates. I will say its about the 1619 project if you then watching it had a rough week or two where they are starting to deny ever said some of the most radical things they said at the New York Times and have gone so far as to disingenuously retroactively change websites and take down tweets but as they say the internet is forever. These things havebeen captured somewhere and its being thrown back intotheir face. Thats sort of a , for purposes of our talk ill make a distinction probably you make your between the intellectual shifts that are going on but also structural practical things that are happening as well area one of the things that many of our friends and scholars point out about the progressives is what theycall the Administrative State. Theres doctoral things that are happening below their intellectual critiques and arguments. But because of that so theyre connected. Go back to the software analogy, p progressivism say