Park MacDougald, Unherd: Michael Anton: Purge the FBI, break up the CIA
On Day 3 of the National Conservatism conference, Michael Anton, a former deputy on Trump’s National Security Council and the author of the infamous “The Flight 93 Election” essay, offered some explosive suggestions on how to reform America’s embattled national security state: purge the FBI, abolish the CIA, and increase political control over the major remaining agencies.
First, Anton apologised to libertarians who warned about the expansion of the US surveillance apparatus:
Right after 9/11, the libertarians said, don’t [pass the Patriot Act], it will be used against you. This is a terrible power to give to the government and we shouldn’t do it. And a lot of conservatives said, ‘No we need this, it’s only going to be used against foreign enemies, don’t be soft.’ Libertarians were completely correct and we all owe them an apology.[...]We need more adult supervision of the national security state. There are too few political appointees over these agencies, and they don’t have enough power. When I started in the Bush administration in 2001, the top six people in the CIA were presidentially appointed. That’s too few. But today it’s two. There are 28,000 people in that agency, only two are presidentially appointed, and everyone else is a bureaucrat who’s loyal to the agency above all.
Read the rest here.
Under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton penned the essay The Flight 93 Election. It was published on September 5, 2016, two months before the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America.
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
Not to pick (too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer—“even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.
Read the The Flight 93 Election in its entirety here.
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