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America will not be saved, the State Department’s Former Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton told students at a Sept. 29 lecture.

Anton delivered the talk, titled “Prospects for the Late Republic,” at the invitation of Hillsdale’s politics honorary, Pi Sigma Alpha. Anton, who worked in the second Trump administration, gave the talk the same week as his CCA I lecture, titled “Needed Adjustments on Post-Cold War Policy.”

“Can America be saved? Of course it can,” Anton said. “The more interesting question is, will it be saved? My prediction is no.”

Anton clarified that by “saved,” he meant “a restoration of constitutional government.”

“Working of the regime as the regime is meant to operate. Real separation of powers. Real limits on Article I and Article II powers, but also a real reassertion of Article I powers that the Congress has let lie fallow or ceded to the administrative state,” Anton said.

Republicans will lose the political game because the Left already won the institution game, Anton said.

“They just simply have a lot more than we do,” Anton said. “They’ve got the universities. Yeah, we got Hillsdale, but what else have we got? They’ve got the media. We got Fox, but it doesn’t outweigh ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, all the rest of it.”

That power combines with a dangerous attitude Anton sees on the political left.

“You think, ‘Can we just kind of chill out about this and recognize our common American-ness and try to have some semblance of civic friendship?’” Anton said. “And right now, my read on the mindset of the typical blue American is no, we can’t. Not until we have won, you have been defeated, and we’re in charge, and we get our way on everything because our way is right and true and just, and you’re evil.”

Professor of Politics Thomas West said he enjoyed Anton’s talk.

“Anton is one of America’s top political analysts,” West told The Collegian in an email. “His talk was outstanding. His thesis is that the Left wants to destroy the older American way of life and replace it with a degraded form of egalitarianism, in which everything high and noble is harnessed into the service of the low and vulgar.”

West said he hopes the talk encouraged students to take action.

“Anton’s talk was an antidote to the defeatism I see too often among young people on the right,” West said. “The fact that Anton was a major official in the Trump administration shows the way. Students should take heart from his success and aspire to join the fight in their own best ways, as Anton said in answer to one of the student questions.”

Senior Jackson Casey, secretary of Pi Sigma Alpha, said the honorary was grateful to host Anton.

“I was very impressed with the talk Anton gave,” Casey said. “I was very happy that the event allowed for an opportunity for him to comment on domestic affairs because it came along in addition to his remarks at the CCA over two lectures, which were more focused on foreign policy. So I’m quite happy that this event, through the politics honorary, allowed him to speak to domestic issues and the problems facing the American regime.”

While he agrees with Anton that conservatives may only have Hillsdale for a college education, Casey said he believes Hillsdale is enough.

“I think everyone in the politics department, for the most part, and I think students across departments at the college understand the mission that we play as parts of an institution, which is really trying to reclaim the legacy of a kind of liberal arts education, which doesn’t exist as it does here and anywhere else in the country,” Casey said. “There are really only a few other institutions like Hillsdale doing what we do.”