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In the comments of my last response to Michael Anton, someone quoted a passage from one of Anton’s posts in our back and forth. For the sake of brevity, no doubt, the commenter clipped out some of the original text. There were a lot of good comments in that post, but that one stuck with me because of the bit about not wanting to be ruled without consent, which is a topic I have addressed in many posts, podcasts and even a speech I gave last autumn.

I rummaged through his post and found the exact passage. Here is what Anton wrote in the first part of that paragraph, “I don’t want to be ruled without my consent and I don’t want to submit to a fake aristocracy. Those are, in fact, among my chief objections to the present regime: it rules me without my consent, and it rules not for the common good but for the private good of a fake aristocracy.” That is a pretty clear statement of the ends he seeks with his natural rights arguments.

As an aside, what is a fake aristocracy? He never bothers to explain what makes one aristocracy fake and another authentic. The closest he gets is, “This points to a fundamental problem with hierarchy. The trad Right rejects nature as the standard for politics because, they say, nature is abstract, universalist, corrosive, etc. But for a hierarchy to have any meaning, it must be based on some evaluation of higher and lower, better and worse.”

Higher than what? Have meaning? Who in the hell is the trad Right? Note that he employs cognitively meaningless statements to illicit an emotional reaction from the reader in order to trick him into a false conclusion. You see, the bad men like fake hierarchy which is bad because fake is a bad word, so putting it next to the word hierarchy makes it bad too. This sort of linguistic guilt by association is clever, but it is what makes his writing so muddled.

Putting that aside, what about this consent business? Specifically, his demand to live in a society in which he is ruled only with his permission. That is, after all, what it means to consent to something. When you consent to something you are voluntarily giving your permission for someone to do something. Sure, you may have needed some convincing, but consent assumes you have a choice. To consent to something, you must voluntarily grant your permission.

When we say “consent of the governed” we mean the permission of those over whom some group of people will rule. That sounds good, because Americans have been conditioned to associate that phrase with positive ideas. It is right there in our holiest of holy documents, the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The goodness of government only flows from the consent of the people.

Now, before we go much further, we have to address the elephant in the room and that is the fact that the signers of that document were lying. Most of them owned other human beings and none of them bothered to ask the freemen in their employ about their decision to revolt against the king. When it came to forming a new government, they had two tries at it and never once sought the consent of the governed. It was a nice sentiment, but the framers were practical men.

That naturally leads to a question. Is such a society possible? Is it possible to have a society in which men are free of coercion? After all, that is what Anton is rebelling against in that post. Consent is permission for something to happen or a voluntary agreement to do something. The alternative to consent is coercion, which is the use of force or the threat of force to obtain compliance. How would one structure a society in order to eliminate coercion?

Here is where we must notice something important. A consensus is not the same thing as majority rule. If ten people get together to decide on where to get lunch, the consensus is the place everyone can accept. The final choice may not be the first choice of anyone, but it is on the list of acceptable choices. If six people pick the lunch spot, pull guns on the other four people and force them to go along, then that is coercion, even though the majority voted for the lunch choice.

In other words, if you put things before the people and ask them to decide, you will most likely have some people who oppose the majority decision. In fact, some of those dissenters may categorically reject the choice of the majority. No amount of persuasion or enticement will change their minds. If the choice is where to go to lunch, no great shakes, but if it is how much to pay in taxes or whether to go to war, the dissent becomes a serious issue.

Right away we can see two problems. One is that a society of any size is going to have irreconcilable disagreements. Anyone who organized a lunch order knows how hard it is to reach a consensus. In the end, dissent must be overruled. The other problem is that putting matters to a vote will always result in coercion. The majority will force their preferences on the minority. Since in every vote there is a minority and the composition of that minority changes, everyone is subjected to coercion.

No matter how much consideration the rulers give to the opinion of the people, no matter how hard they try to get the consent of the governed, some people will simply refuse to give their permission. The choices at that point for the majority, as well as the rulers, are stasis, anarchy or coercion. No society larger than the Dunbar number can operate without some coercion. At any given time, some people will be compelled by the rulers to do that which they would prefer not to do.

Now, the few remaining libertarians will no doubt chime in and say that a libertarian or an anarchist society would be free of coercion. After all, all human interaction would be voluntary and individual. While such an arrangement would be free of coercion, it would also be free of all of the things we associate with human society. It is just random humans living in walking distance of one another. It is why there are no libertarian or anarchist societies outside of East Africa.

To be fair to Anton, let us assume he knows this and what he really means is he wants a society with the least amount of coercion. Humans are not perfect so what we create will always fall short of perfect. The societies we create will therefore be as flawed as the people who make them. The question then turns from how to create a coercion free society to how to reduce coercion. How should one organize society in order to reduce coercion to the minimum?

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, is that nature provides us with the answer to this question. Evolutionary biology tells us that people are most cooperative with those who are closest to them genetically. If you populated an island with Michael Anton clones, they would operate like a multi-celled organism. Each member would intuitively know the preferences of the other, because they would have the same preferences, due to their genetic sameness.

Obviously, that is not possible, but luckily nature provides us with lots of close examples to use as a proof. We know that the first human organizations were kin groups and that larger human societies were built on related kin groups. Ten thousand years ago related kin groups began to settle around stable food sources in order to defend and exploit those food sources. We also know that within these groups men would die for two brothers or eight cousins.

At first blush it might not seem that inclusive fitness has much of a role in reducing coercion in human society. What does your willingness to die for your people have to do with coercion? Well, consensus and cooperation require sacrifice. It does not always require you to sacrifice your life, but when you volunteer to cooperate or you agree to a compromise, you are sacrificing something in order to do it. It is the glue that binds the two sides in the transaction.

In other words, it is not just like-mindedness that fosters cooperation through sacrifice, but it is like bloodedness. This is what nature tells us. If you are looking to increase cooperation and therefore reduce coercion, you want to decrease biological distance between the members. Put another way, the key to being ruled with your consent is to live in a society populated by and governed by your people or people who are no more than distant cousins. Diversity is the death of consent.

Interestingly, Anton seems to know this. In the essay that made him famous, he wrote the following, “Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.” Note he used to argue from tradition and now he argues against tradition.

When you go back and read the Flight 93 essay, you cannot help but note a difference in tone and substance. Assuming Anton knew his own mind when he wrote that essay, he certainly knew how the phrase “third world” would be read. His deliberate use of the phrase “no taste for” makes clear that Anton thought at the time that non-European people were unfit for a society based in European values and traditions. There is no other way that can be interpreted.

So, what changed? That passage quoted at the start offers a clue. Here is the second part of that original passage. Anton wrote, “I still think whatever you’re planning won’t work; or, to be more precise, I don’t think you’ve done much planning at all. I don’t think you’ve even begun to think through how you’ll organize your new post-natural-rights society, which is why I expect it either to be a mess or else to revert to natural rights without admitting it.”

Let us unpack those two sentences. Anton says he is sure that what I am planning will not work. Then he says I am not planning anything at all. In fact, he says I have not even started planning, but he is sure that when I get around to planning, it will be a mess or I will end up planning whatever he is planning. This is the content of just two sentences written by one man, but it reads like the work of a committee of people not on speaking terms with one another.

Putting that aside, I think we have a clue as to why he has issued a fatwah against me and those on this side of the great divide. It is not that he disagrees with the point I made at the start of this exchange. It is that he thinks it should not be said. He prefers to prattle on about elves carrying natural rights because that is less likely to get mean words from the people who control the moral framework. In other words, he feels he must submit to their moral coercion.

In this post responding to Paul Gottfried’s argument in favor of the Anglo-American tradition, he notes that he and Paul are not Anglos. Anton is Mediterranean and Gottfried is Jewish. Here is what he wrote, “Neither of us, therefore, is Anglo, and neither is related by blood to any of the men who founded the United States, or even were Americans at the time of the founding. It seems to me, then, that neither of us can be, strictly speaking, heirs to the Anglo-American tradition.”

That is an interesting passage for a number of reasons. As far as this topic, it may explain why he has reverted back to the banal civic nationalism that he seemed to reject in the Flight 93 essay. Even though the logic of his own arguments leads to something like Yoram Hazony’s ethnic nationalism, this creates a problem for the people in charge and that creates a problem for Michael Anton. Instead he is looking for a way to argue within the prevailing moral orthodoxy.

That explains that muddled passage about what he thinks of my plans. He is not arguing against my reasoning. How could he? His arguments from Straussianism arrive at the same place as my arguments from evolutionary biology. It is that he assumes that I will soon realize that saying these things out loud is bad for business. In other words, he is projecting his own fears about his position within the conservative industrial complex onto me and the empirical right.

That horse left the barn a long time ago. It turns out that I am far less tolerant of coercion from “fake aristocrats” than Michael Anton. In fact, the starting place for understanding dissident thinking is the assertion that conservatism failed because it was supposed to fail. The men in it traded their souls for expensive homes, fancy suits and the company of people they must treat as their betters. The dissident right is the rejection of that form of politics.

In closing, I will return the favor and offer Mr. Anton a bit of advice. The project to achieve conservative ends within the neoliberal moral framework has been tried by smarter men than either of us. That project began when Buckley capitulated on race back in the last century. It is why conservatism has been a failure. When you accept the moral claims of your opponents, you inevitably accept their conclusions, which is why conservatism managed to conserve nothing.

The reason Michael Anton and his cohorts in the conservative ecosystem feel the need to address dissidents directly is they are losing control of the narrative. Every day more and more people wake up from the 20th century. Much of that awakening is driven by demographic and cultural reality, but another part is the realization that the causes of these problems are not political or economic. They are systemic. The system is failing because it rests on false assertions.

Even though Anton has hurled a lot of invective my way, I bear no ill will toward him, now that I have reconsidered his position. The fatwah he has issued against me will be up on the wall next to other fatwahs. In fact, I wish the entire crew the best of luck, even though Chris Buskirk and Ben Boychuk refuse to reply to my e-mails. When you live in the valley of the damned, you get used to such behavior. After the revolution, I will see that you get sent to a good camp.

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