Michael Anton can catalog sixty-three genders, parse every Straussian sub-school, and see demographic warfare in every new family that moves to town, and he cannot name the parish that closed in Adams County or the co-op that held when the grain cartel came for it. James Rosen, reviewing Anton’s Dispatches from the Late Republic in National Review, walks the reader through a book-length exercise in sophisticated grievance. Here is a conservatism that has spent a decade diagnosing the culture war and never once diagnosing the dissolution of the actual communities it claimed to conserve.
I will grant Anton his strongest point first. American institutions — the academy, much of the media, significant portions of the administrative state — have developed a genuine contempt for the people and communities they were built to serve. The cultural hostility toward traditional religious life, toward the working-class family, toward the small town that does not perform its credentials for the coastal overclass — that contempt is real, and the people who bear it are right to be angry.
But here is what Anton cannot see, or will not name: the thing that was taken was not taken by a gender-studies seminar. It was taken by the very movement he serves — the fusionist right that promised to conserve family, community, place, and settled work while delivering the financialization of everything, the looting of every rooted institution by people who have never set foot on the ground they strip-mined.
I traded agricultural futures in Chicago. I watched the basis between cash corn at the local elevator and the December contract flow year after year to whoever owned the futures book — and the man who owned the futures book was never the farmer. The farmer delivered the commodity; the elevator named the price; the basis, the carry, the hedge pressure all flowed to the entity that could sit at a CME terminal. I know precisely how little the men in those buildings think about the men in the field, because I was one of the men in those buildings. And I came home to a county where I can name every loss Anton’s book does not mention: the railroad jobs that Union Pacific cut after the 1995 absorption of the Chicago and North Western; the last passenger train out of Adams, the Twin Cities 400, on July 23, 1963; the regional paper mills that closed one by one, the Verso mill in Wisconsin Rapids idling in 2020 with a thousand jobs; the family dairy farms consolidated into center-pivot operations growing potatoes for Frito-Lay on contract; the VFW hollowed as the veterans of the older wars died and the younger ones came home too broken to sit on a committee; the 1884 Catholic parish thinned as the Diocese shuttered its rural churches. That is the inventory a conservative should be taking. Anton is writing about Susan Sontag.
The “great replacement” chapter is where the betrayal cuts deepest. Anton looks at immigration and sees demographic warfare. I look at the same immigration and see the concentrated power that profits from a precarious workforce — the same agribusiness that dissolved the family farm, the same meatpacker that busted the union, the same developer building the seasonal lake subdivision on ground that used to produce a living. The migrant did not come to replace you. He came because the rentier needed someone cheaper than your neighbor, and the movement Anton belongs to made sure the rentier would never be asked to pay the real cost.
Welcome-the-stranger is not a liberal sentimentality. It is a religious commitment — the oldest one, older than the Republic, older than the Constitution, older than the Claremont Institute’s reading list. You fire on the man who profits from the precarious workforce. You do not fire on the stranger.
And underneath the replacement theory lies the Christendom that makes it feel righteous. Anton’s conservatism is a faith fused to a nation, a Christianity that needs a border to feel secure — which is to say, it is the very thing Kierkegaard spent his last years attacking. A nation cannot be Christian. Only a person can, and only with difficulty. The state has no business enforcing a moral order, and faith made automatic by the state is faith destroyed. When the cross becomes a tribal lapel pin, the pearl of great price has been sold for the REIT dividend, payable to a pension fund in another state.
Rosen notes that Anton bets on “somewhere between imminent collapse and drawn-out decline.” This is what a man says when he has confused the culture war with the actual world. This county has been hollowing for fifty years. The work left. The church thinned. The railroad stopped running passenger trains on July 23, 1963, and has not run one since. And yet people are still here. The cooperative still operates. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered right here in Friendship, still serves its member-owners across twelve counties — not because of anything Michael Anton wrote or any administration he served in, but because farmers decided to own their own utility and did it. The co-op does not appear in Anton’s civilizational calculus because it is not dramatic enough, not sufficiently declinist, not reducible to a Straussian framework about the rights of man. It is just people, in a place, owning something together.
That is the counter-model, and it is the thing Anton’s brand of conservatism has no language for: the distributed answer that centralizes nothing. The credit union that keeps the town’s money in the town. The mutual insurer owned by its policyholders. The farm cooperative that lets the independent producer survive another year against the grain cartel. Subsidiarity — the principle that what a smaller body can do, a larger body should not absorb — comes from Quadragesimo Anno, paragraph 79, written in 1931 by a pope who had watched both concentrated capital and concentrated state crush the communities in between. Anton appears to have read everything in the Western canon except, apparently, the encyclicals.
Rosen closes by noting his greater faith in the endurance of American democracy. I am less sanguine than Rosen and less pessimistic than Anton, for the simple reason that neither of them is talking about anything real. Democracy does not live in the Straussian seminar or the National Review editorial meeting. It lives in the annual meeting of the electric cooperative, where member-owners vote on who runs their utility. It lives in the church council that decides whether the food pantry stays open another winter. It lives in the co-op board where the farmer and the truck driver and the retired schoolteacher sit at the same table and argue about the price of seed corn. Those institutions are not dramatic. They will not save Western civilization, because Western civilization is not the kind of thing that gets saved — it is the kind of thing that gets tended, one rooted institution at a time, by people who will never write a book about it.
Anton has produced a sophisticated, learned, witty defense of a conservatism that conserves nothing — no town, no parish, no co-op, no working landscape, no dignity of labor, no institution a child could name. It conserves only the theory. The co-op that feeds this county is still here. The annual meeting is next month.