Book Review: ‘The Stakes’ by Michael Anton

Book Review: ‘The Stakes’ by Michael Anton

Two months before the 2016 presidential election, an anonymously published essay titled “The Flight 93 Election” urged Americans to “charge the cockpit” by casting their votes for Donald Trump.

The author of that seminal piece, Michael Anton, has followed up that pivotal essay with a gripping analysis about the tactics of the left and the consequences to the country if it prevails.

In other words, the stakes have never been higher.

“The Stakes” is both a brilliant yet disturbing analysis of what is at stake in November’s election. In a nutshell, the work is a strategic assessment of the status of the red-blue battle for the direction of the nation.

Anton uses both the past and the present to demonstrated how the country’s elite class have plans to enrich themselves and to control regular Americans. One particular chapter hit home as he reviewed the state of California and how it devolved into one-party rule. Absorbed in inane social justice and environmental policies that no longer takes care of the civil and infrastructure needs of the rest of the population, the ruling party has led California off the cliff.

The books if loaded with gems cut from Anton’s meticulous research, engaging analysis, and a bit of dark humor to make key points. Perhaps some of the hardest passages for me to read were those on the Republican (and supposedly conservative) intellectuals who were supposed to enact the policies they said they were promoting. I have been shocked by their response to the president, who is actually doing the work that set said needed to get done.

To the extent that the Republican Party is animated by ideas — a laughable assertion today, but one that was true within living memory — it will need an entirely new intellectual class. Establishment conservatism — its institutions and scholars, its think tanks and magazines, its handful of professors at elite universities—is a spent force. Many legacy conservatives are fine people with sound opinions, especially compared to what passes for conventional wisdom today, but they have shown themselves to be unequal to the task before conservatism today. Conservative intellectuals aren’t merely waging the last campaign —t hey’re forever fighting the 1980 campaign.

Anton also looked at “cancel culture” and the role of Big Tech.

If you think we have mass surveillance already, just wait. The government and the tech companies already work hand in glove, the latter helping the former in exchange for favorable tax, regulatory, and immigration treatment. When the last checks on this collusion in the executive branch are gone, expect their joint censorship and oppression of dissent to increase by orders of magnitude. The left has finally found a way around the First Amendment: consolidate all “speech” and public expression onto a handful of private-sector platforms run by oligarchs and staffed by Wokerati; let them do whatever they want and when anyone complains, reply that “these are private companies that can run their business however they want; you don’t have to use their platforms and if you don’t like it, start your own.” Through all this—and more — the left knows it can count on the idiot, friendly-fire-spraying libertarians to sing that tune the loudest. Free speech as we have known it — as our founders insisted was the natural bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule.

The book is an incredibly engrossing read, especially for those who love history, politics, and our country. I give it 5 out of 5 stars, and I recommend it be read before this election and that it be kept in the library to read before every election from now on.

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