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After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose
In September 2016, the provocative essay “The Flight 93 Election” galvanized many voters by spotlighting the stakes ahead in November and reproaching complacent elements of the Right. It also drew disparagement from many who judged it too apocalyptic in its assessment of the options facing the electorate.Its author, Michael Anton—writing as “Publius Decius Mus”—addressed the main criticisms of his argument soon afterward in a “Restatement on Flight 93.” A new criticism emerged later that he had painted a dire scenario to be averted, but no positive vision.Here, Anton presents the positive ideal that inspired him—a distillation of his thinking on Americanism and the West, refined over decades. He lays out the foundational principles of the American and Western traditions, examines the biggest threats to their survival, and underscores the necessity of continuing to defend them.
96 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 5, 2019
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April 7, 2019
Michael Anton is the man who today best communicates the fractures among the Right. He identifies, and exemplifies, growing incompatibilities among conservatives, both on the issues of the day and in beliefs about desirable political structures. Anton first came to public notice under a pseudonym, Publius Decius Mus, writing in 2016 during the brief life of a pro-Trump blog, the "Journal of American Greatness." In September of that year, Anton published a famous essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” His first point was that, like the passengers of Flight 93, Americans opposed to the permanent boot-stamping dominance of the Left had an existential choice. They could, as it were, charge the cockpit by taking a chance on Trump. Or they could passively accept Hillary, and face certain political death. His second point was that their behavior when faced with this choice showed that the conservative movement, as it exists now, was wholly worthless. These claims were, no surprise, controversial.
Within a few weeks Anton revealed his identity; after the election he worked for several months in the Trump White House, in the national security apparatus, until the swamp creatures managed to come to dominate the West Wing and the populism of Trump’s early months evaporated. So he departed for Hillsdale College in Michigan, and, for now, the life of a public intellectual. I hope he doesn’t spend the rest of his days in that role; he would probably agree that we have enough public intellectuals and not enough doers. My guess is that soon enough, in the unsettled times ahead, he will find a new role.
This 2018 pamphlet reprints the original “Flight 93” essay, a follow-up “Restatement” also published prior to the election, and a new essay, “Pre-Statement on Flight 93.” This last tells us what, exactly, it is that Anton wants our politics to be, to meet the criticism that he had earlier offered only a negative vision. In all these essays, Anton’s basic point is the same one as I am always hammering—we are in a new thing in American history, an existential struggle between the forces of Right and Left, respectively good and evil, and there can be only one. The Left has always known this and acted accordingly, with malice aforethought; the Right, or part of the Right, is coming to realize it. Between the modern Left and the principles of virtue there is no middle ground; there is no compromise; there is no universe in which the principles of the Left can continue to be allowed a seat at the public table. They must be defeated, and suppressed, root and branch. We must awake, and those Lotos-Eaters putatively on the Right who refuse to rouse from slumber must be thrown overboard. So says Anton, in essence, and I could not agree more.
Anton begins with a “Note,” a recap of the reception of his original essay. This primarily means its reception on the Right; the Left didn’t pay much attention then, deafened by their collective baying for Hillary’s imminent ascension, and has not paid much attention since, either, which is probably a mistake. Within the Right, because the sclerotic organized Right of think tanks and little-read journals was Anton’s main target, the backlash against Anton was fierce, though it was all of the pearl-clutching variety, free as a bird from all logic or reasoning. Those same segments soon enough coalesced into the noisome #NeverTrumpers, rats following their diminutive, tubby Pied Piper, Bill Kristol, who has unfortunately not led them into the mountain to disappear forever. Here, and in the “Pre-Statement,” Anton in his usual pithy style refutes what few coherent objections to his claims have been made. I will note those late, but Anton is willing to admit one, and only one, failure in his earlier essays—that in his original essay, he was insufficiently generous to and appreciative of Donald Trump.
In his “Note,” Anton also explains his choice of pseudonym at more length, a name borne by two Roman men, father and son, who each sacrificed himself on the field of battle. He cites interpretations by both Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield to rebut his critics, using close readings of my favorite Machiavelli text, "Discourses on Livy." Anton’s basic point is that Machiavelli “says that a republic may be led back to its beginnings ‘either through the virtue of a man or through the virtue of an order’ and goes on to say that ‘such orders have need of being brought to life by the virtue of a citizen who rushes spiritedly to execute them against the power of those who transgress them.’ In other words, orders and men are both necessary and neither is superior to the other; virtuous men are necessary to execute good orders.”
Anton here leaves some ambiguity as to his own goals. He says that “In 2016, I judged the modes and orders of my time—and especially of conservatism—to be exhausted and imprisoned within an inflexible institutional and intellectual authority. I believed that its conclusions on the most pressing matters were false and pernicious and that its orthodoxy therefore required smashing.” Despite Machiavelli’s warning that “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders,” Anton chose to do so. But to what end? He refers to being led back to beginnings, but he also speaks of new orders. Which is it? That is one of the things I will examine here, after first evaluating the three essays.
In the original Flight 93 essay, Anton notes that all American conservatives agree that things are very bad in America, have been for some time, and are getting worse. If conservatives truly believe the critical importance to society of all the problems we face, from family breakdown to out-of-control government to an inability to win wars, they must conclude “we are headed off a cliff.” But—they don’t really believe it, as Anton illustrates with an article from the Weekly Standard (ironically, in retrospect, given that journal’s fate), recommending for all problems the usual tired litany of conservative solutions, such as decentralization, federalism, and civil renewal. “Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. . . . ‘Civic renewal’ would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve ‘civic renewal’? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.”
This is the gravamen of Anton’s complaint—conservatives keep offering the same solutions that have solved nothing, to solve problems that only get worse, as their power gets less and the Left grows ever more dominant. You can’t believe that things are awful and getting worse, but also that they can continue on their current path indefinitely; it is a contradiction. And that’s what today’s conservatives, that is, those in the public eye, believe. (In fact, since Anton wrote, “leading” conservatives such as Jonah Goldberg have come right out and admitted that they are happy to lose and for the Left to win completely, just a little slower, please.) Even those few conservative solutions that have been tried have failed or been quickly erased by the Left. “The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole and ongoing success is its own self-preservation.” Such claims have made Anton a prime target of the happy losers whom he attacks, ranging from Goldberg (who specifically targeted Anton in his terrible 2017 book, Suicide of the West) to Michael Gerson. For reasons I will discuss below, Anton’s only organized allies appear to be the Claremont Institute, and perhaps The American Conservative magazine—both powers on the Right, to be sure, but isolated from the invitations to cocktail parties and pats on the head from the cultural elite of the Left that are so important to Goldberg, Gerson, and the other similar indistinguishable nonentities who cluster together.
So what passes for today’s American conservatism is of little or no value. I can get behind that. That doesn’t mean all alternatives are virtuous, or desirable. Anton makes a point I am often found making, that Trump’s mere existence is a sign of the times, not of good times, but as of an angel breaking a numbered seal. “Only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.” Sure, if you’re part of the professional-managerial elite, the past two decades have been pretty good to you. For everybody else, and for the fabric of society, the opposite is true, and if you can’t see it, you’re too embedded in the ruling class, or too dependent on their tolerance and largesse for your daily bread. Others have expanded on this point, from Tucker Carlson to Richard Reeves to Kurt Schlichter, though few have made the focus of their ire the conservatives who are supposed to care about such things.
The non-Trump Republican presidential candidates, had any of them won, wouldn’t have done anything to stop or turn back the tide of the Left, since “their ‘opposition’ is in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support.” But a Hillary win would be a fatal disaster for America, cementing its destruction. It “will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire progressive-Left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled by a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ‘advanced’ Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the social justice warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.”
That all this would have come true is proven by the Left’s behavior since the election. They do what they would have done under Hillary, but lacking the power of the executive branch, the damage they can do is somewhat limited. On the other hand, their rage at losing to Trump has fueled the fire. Not having executive power, for now, doesn’t stop, among other evils, endless violence against any public display of support for Trump; aggressive campaigns on the state level to legalized infanticide and push the latest in sexual fluidity as the moral equivalent of abolitionism; mass censorship of conservatives on all social media platforms; and the personal destruction of anyone within their reach, or within the reach of their allies in all large corporations, the media, or the universities. And, most of all, we see it in their two years of whipping up hate in the media and using bogus “investigations” to cripple Trump and persecute anyone associated with him.
Swinging around again to his punching bag, the weak betas of Conservatism, Inc., Anton notes that they certainly aren’t going to lead resistance to the horrors of a Hillary administration. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, since all opinion-making is controlled by the Left. But they don’t want to; they “self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Our ‘leaders’ and ‘dissenters’ bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them.” (I have complained before, for example, of the conservative lust for pre-emptive apologies, a perfect example of what Anton complains of.) What we need instead is a leader who will fight, who will punch back. He will stop importing millions of Third World migrants, who erode our economy’s strength and vote in lockstep for the Left. He will adopt trade and antiglobalization policies that benefit all Americans. “Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow. Nearly all the gains of the last twenty years have accrued to the junta anyway.”
What we can’t have is Hillary. Conservatism, Inc., is “objectively pro-Hillary.” Anton concludes that if we do get Hillary, in the longer term, “the possibilities will seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie as far as the eye can see . . . which, since nothing lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28 percent top marginal rate.” We will return to these options, and whether any are desirable, below.
Anton’s initial piece got just about the warmth of reception one would expect. Actually, it got no reception at all, until Rush Limbaugh read the entire thing on his radio program. (That conservatives dominate talk radio is intolerable to the Left, and censoring it a prime goal of theirs, even though talk radio can never set what the news is or what polite public opinion is allowed to be, and the ability of new thoughts like Anton’s to gain traction through that medium is why.) But then a wave of hatred and bile from those conservatives attacked (that is, nearly all of them) crashed into Anton, along with some tut-tutting from a few conservatives who saw that their rage was merely proving Anton’s point. Anton responded a few days later with “Restatement on Flight 93.”
Here he briefly addressed the most cogent attacks on him. Using the passengers of Flight 93 as a metaphor was simply standard drawing of inspiration from heroes. It wasn’t “disgusting.” “It’s quite obvious that’s what really disgusting to these objectors is Trump.” Trump isn’t too immoderate to be President; he may be a “buffoon,” but “one must wonder how buffoonish the alleged buffoon really is when he is right on the most important issues while so many others who are esteemed wise are wrong.” Trump is not too radical; in fact, on the surface he’s more progressive than other recent Republican presidential candidates. He’s actually quite moderate in his policies of “secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” The problem is that he is a threat to what is now called the Deep State, as outlined by John Marini: he might win, and he threatens “the current governing arrangement of the United Sates, [which] is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state.” Trump is not “authoritarian,” which is a meaningless term as used here (and as I have shown at length by analyzing post-election writings, merely means in practice “erosion of the power of the Left.”). Trump does not want to “trash the Constitution,” which anyway is laughable, given that the Left’s entire, open and acknowledged, program of the past hundred years is to trash the Constitution.
No, reiterates Anton, he was right the first time. Conservatism is a miserable failure. Doom is at the door, and if you choose to let it in, your fate will be upon your own head.
We all know what happened next. Trump won. The Left lost its mind, and unleashed fresh helpings of savage hatred upon the land. (I did not predict this; I predicted a new era of optimism and limited comity. More fool me.) They marshaled all their resources, from that disgusting hate group the SPLC to Rod Rosenstein to Facebook to the FBI to Jonah Goldberg, to stop Donald Trump from fulfilling any of his promises. And we are still living through these days of rage, which are, probably, merely the foothills of our own coming hot civil war.
Anton, however, appears to have been stung by the claim that he only offered a negative vision, although on its face that claim is untrue. He therefore wrote a new piece, “Pre-Statement on Flight 93.” Anton seems grudging about writing it; noting that since the Left’s project is destruction, of all opposition and of all non-Left “people, institutions, mores and traditions,” “It’s a bit rich to be accused by nihilists of lacking a positive vision.” This piece is, I think, the least successful. It’s not that it’s bad; it’s excellent. The problem is that while it rejects what Conservatism, Inc. has to offer, it repeats an equally unrealistic prescription, namely a turn back to the Constitutional and political framework of 1787 and 1865.
A combination of political philosophy, political argument, and history, in the Pre-Statement Anton cites Aristotle for the basic claim that all human activity aims at some good. Beyond food, shelter, and security, “mere life,” the good life is happiness or felicity, which is achieved by developing our capabilities to reach the telos of man, “the completion or perfection of those traits which are uniquely characteristic of man.” “Radical individualism and private hedonism,” the goals of (though Anton does not say so) the Enlightenment, undermine human flourishing. This much has been known, in the West at least, since the Greeks, but the American Founders brought political order in the service of these goals to near perfection (which was perfected by the post-Civil War amendments). Federalism, limited government, and representative republicanism created the best system ever. But it is not one that can be exported to all peoples in all times, nor can it work if there is inadequate “commonality in customs, habits, and opinions.” As everyone with any sense knows, diversity is the opposite of our strength.
This near-perfect system has been attacked repeatedly since 1787, Anton tells us. First, by the followers of John Calhoun, unsuccessfully. Second, by the early-twentieth-century Progressives, successfully and causing great damage. And third, fatally, by the acolytes of John Rawls, purveyors of so-called social justice and of forced equality, and the New Left, advocates of the tearing down of America, group rights, and oppression theory. All these attacks are incoherent and destructive, but they have collectively succeeded in destroying the Founder’s vision, and erecting in its place a system that maintains many of its outward forms but within is crawling with decay and worms. As the Left’s power grows ever greater, they must either “compound the lies, or suppress and punish dissent.” They choose both, following the dictates of Herbert Marcuse and his heinous “repressive tolerance.” We need to “return to life and the conditions of life: the rule of law, responsible freedom, confidence in our civilization, patriotism, and concern for the common good instead of only the particular good of groups claiming oppression or disadvantage.”
[Review completes as first comment.]
Within a few weeks Anton revealed his identity; after the election he worked for several months in the Trump White House, in the national security apparatus, until the swamp creatures managed to come to dominate the West Wing and the populism of Trump’s early months evaporated. So he departed for Hillsdale College in Michigan, and, for now, the life of a public intellectual. I hope he doesn’t spend the rest of his days in that role; he would probably agree that we have enough public intellectuals and not enough doers. My guess is that soon enough, in the unsettled times ahead, he will find a new role.
This 2018 pamphlet reprints the original “Flight 93” essay, a follow-up “Restatement” also published prior to the election, and a new essay, “Pre-Statement on Flight 93.” This last tells us what, exactly, it is that Anton wants our politics to be, to meet the criticism that he had earlier offered only a negative vision. In all these essays, Anton’s basic point is the same one as I am always hammering—we are in a new thing in American history, an existential struggle between the forces of Right and Left, respectively good and evil, and there can be only one. The Left has always known this and acted accordingly, with malice aforethought; the Right, or part of the Right, is coming to realize it. Between the modern Left and the principles of virtue there is no middle ground; there is no compromise; there is no universe in which the principles of the Left can continue to be allowed a seat at the public table. They must be defeated, and suppressed, root and branch. We must awake, and those Lotos-Eaters putatively on the Right who refuse to rouse from slumber must be thrown overboard. So says Anton, in essence, and I could not agree more.
Anton begins with a “Note,” a recap of the reception of his original essay. This primarily means its reception on the Right; the Left didn’t pay much attention then, deafened by their collective baying for Hillary’s imminent ascension, and has not paid much attention since, either, which is probably a mistake. Within the Right, because the sclerotic organized Right of think tanks and little-read journals was Anton’s main target, the backlash against Anton was fierce, though it was all of the pearl-clutching variety, free as a bird from all logic or reasoning. Those same segments soon enough coalesced into the noisome #NeverTrumpers, rats following their diminutive, tubby Pied Piper, Bill Kristol, who has unfortunately not led them into the mountain to disappear forever. Here, and in the “Pre-Statement,” Anton in his usual pithy style refutes what few coherent objections to his claims have been made. I will note those late, but Anton is willing to admit one, and only one, failure in his earlier essays—that in his original essay, he was insufficiently generous to and appreciative of Donald Trump.
In his “Note,” Anton also explains his choice of pseudonym at more length, a name borne by two Roman men, father and son, who each sacrificed himself on the field of battle. He cites interpretations by both Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield to rebut his critics, using close readings of my favorite Machiavelli text, "Discourses on Livy." Anton’s basic point is that Machiavelli “says that a republic may be led back to its beginnings ‘either through the virtue of a man or through the virtue of an order’ and goes on to say that ‘such orders have need of being brought to life by the virtue of a citizen who rushes spiritedly to execute them against the power of those who transgress them.’ In other words, orders and men are both necessary and neither is superior to the other; virtuous men are necessary to execute good orders.”
Anton here leaves some ambiguity as to his own goals. He says that “In 2016, I judged the modes and orders of my time—and especially of conservatism—to be exhausted and imprisoned within an inflexible institutional and intellectual authority. I believed that its conclusions on the most pressing matters were false and pernicious and that its orthodoxy therefore required smashing.” Despite Machiavelli’s warning that “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders,” Anton chose to do so. But to what end? He refers to being led back to beginnings, but he also speaks of new orders. Which is it? That is one of the things I will examine here, after first evaluating the three essays.
In the original Flight 93 essay, Anton notes that all American conservatives agree that things are very bad in America, have been for some time, and are getting worse. If conservatives truly believe the critical importance to society of all the problems we face, from family breakdown to out-of-control government to an inability to win wars, they must conclude “we are headed off a cliff.” But—they don’t really believe it, as Anton illustrates with an article from the Weekly Standard (ironically, in retrospect, given that journal’s fate), recommending for all problems the usual tired litany of conservative solutions, such as decentralization, federalism, and civil renewal. “Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. . . . ‘Civic renewal’ would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve ‘civic renewal’? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.”
This is the gravamen of Anton’s complaint—conservatives keep offering the same solutions that have solved nothing, to solve problems that only get worse, as their power gets less and the Left grows ever more dominant. You can’t believe that things are awful and getting worse, but also that they can continue on their current path indefinitely; it is a contradiction. And that’s what today’s conservatives, that is, those in the public eye, believe. (In fact, since Anton wrote, “leading” conservatives such as Jonah Goldberg have come right out and admitted that they are happy to lose and for the Left to win completely, just a little slower, please.) Even those few conservative solutions that have been tried have failed or been quickly erased by the Left. “The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole and ongoing success is its own self-preservation.” Such claims have made Anton a prime target of the happy losers whom he attacks, ranging from Goldberg (who specifically targeted Anton in his terrible 2017 book, Suicide of the West) to Michael Gerson. For reasons I will discuss below, Anton’s only organized allies appear to be the Claremont Institute, and perhaps The American Conservative magazine—both powers on the Right, to be sure, but isolated from the invitations to cocktail parties and pats on the head from the cultural elite of the Left that are so important to Goldberg, Gerson, and the other similar indistinguishable nonentities who cluster together.
So what passes for today’s American conservatism is of little or no value. I can get behind that. That doesn’t mean all alternatives are virtuous, or desirable. Anton makes a point I am often found making, that Trump’s mere existence is a sign of the times, not of good times, but as of an angel breaking a numbered seal. “Only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.” Sure, if you’re part of the professional-managerial elite, the past two decades have been pretty good to you. For everybody else, and for the fabric of society, the opposite is true, and if you can’t see it, you’re too embedded in the ruling class, or too dependent on their tolerance and largesse for your daily bread. Others have expanded on this point, from Tucker Carlson to Richard Reeves to Kurt Schlichter, though few have made the focus of their ire the conservatives who are supposed to care about such things.
The non-Trump Republican presidential candidates, had any of them won, wouldn’t have done anything to stop or turn back the tide of the Left, since “their ‘opposition’ is in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support.” But a Hillary win would be a fatal disaster for America, cementing its destruction. It “will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire progressive-Left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled by a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ‘advanced’ Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the social justice warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.”
That all this would have come true is proven by the Left’s behavior since the election. They do what they would have done under Hillary, but lacking the power of the executive branch, the damage they can do is somewhat limited. On the other hand, their rage at losing to Trump has fueled the fire. Not having executive power, for now, doesn’t stop, among other evils, endless violence against any public display of support for Trump; aggressive campaigns on the state level to legalized infanticide and push the latest in sexual fluidity as the moral equivalent of abolitionism; mass censorship of conservatives on all social media platforms; and the personal destruction of anyone within their reach, or within the reach of their allies in all large corporations, the media, or the universities. And, most of all, we see it in their two years of whipping up hate in the media and using bogus “investigations” to cripple Trump and persecute anyone associated with him.
Swinging around again to his punching bag, the weak betas of Conservatism, Inc., Anton notes that they certainly aren’t going to lead resistance to the horrors of a Hillary administration. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, since all opinion-making is controlled by the Left. But they don’t want to; they “self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Our ‘leaders’ and ‘dissenters’ bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them.” (I have complained before, for example, of the conservative lust for pre-emptive apologies, a perfect example of what Anton complains of.) What we need instead is a leader who will fight, who will punch back. He will stop importing millions of Third World migrants, who erode our economy’s strength and vote in lockstep for the Left. He will adopt trade and antiglobalization policies that benefit all Americans. “Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow. Nearly all the gains of the last twenty years have accrued to the junta anyway.”
What we can’t have is Hillary. Conservatism, Inc., is “objectively pro-Hillary.” Anton concludes that if we do get Hillary, in the longer term, “the possibilities will seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie as far as the eye can see . . . which, since nothing lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28 percent top marginal rate.” We will return to these options, and whether any are desirable, below.
Anton’s initial piece got just about the warmth of reception one would expect. Actually, it got no reception at all, until Rush Limbaugh read the entire thing on his radio program. (That conservatives dominate talk radio is intolerable to the Left, and censoring it a prime goal of theirs, even though talk radio can never set what the news is or what polite public opinion is allowed to be, and the ability of new thoughts like Anton’s to gain traction through that medium is why.) But then a wave of hatred and bile from those conservatives attacked (that is, nearly all of them) crashed into Anton, along with some tut-tutting from a few conservatives who saw that their rage was merely proving Anton’s point. Anton responded a few days later with “Restatement on Flight 93.”
Here he briefly addressed the most cogent attacks on him. Using the passengers of Flight 93 as a metaphor was simply standard drawing of inspiration from heroes. It wasn’t “disgusting.” “It’s quite obvious that’s what really disgusting to these objectors is Trump.” Trump isn’t too immoderate to be President; he may be a “buffoon,” but “one must wonder how buffoonish the alleged buffoon really is when he is right on the most important issues while so many others who are esteemed wise are wrong.” Trump is not too radical; in fact, on the surface he’s more progressive than other recent Republican presidential candidates. He’s actually quite moderate in his policies of “secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” The problem is that he is a threat to what is now called the Deep State, as outlined by John Marini: he might win, and he threatens “the current governing arrangement of the United Sates, [which] is rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state.” Trump is not “authoritarian,” which is a meaningless term as used here (and as I have shown at length by analyzing post-election writings, merely means in practice “erosion of the power of the Left.”). Trump does not want to “trash the Constitution,” which anyway is laughable, given that the Left’s entire, open and acknowledged, program of the past hundred years is to trash the Constitution.
No, reiterates Anton, he was right the first time. Conservatism is a miserable failure. Doom is at the door, and if you choose to let it in, your fate will be upon your own head.
We all know what happened next. Trump won. The Left lost its mind, and unleashed fresh helpings of savage hatred upon the land. (I did not predict this; I predicted a new era of optimism and limited comity. More fool me.) They marshaled all their resources, from that disgusting hate group the SPLC to Rod Rosenstein to Facebook to the FBI to Jonah Goldberg, to stop Donald Trump from fulfilling any of his promises. And we are still living through these days of rage, which are, probably, merely the foothills of our own coming hot civil war.
Anton, however, appears to have been stung by the claim that he only offered a negative vision, although on its face that claim is untrue. He therefore wrote a new piece, “Pre-Statement on Flight 93.” Anton seems grudging about writing it; noting that since the Left’s project is destruction, of all opposition and of all non-Left “people, institutions, mores and traditions,” “It’s a bit rich to be accused by nihilists of lacking a positive vision.” This piece is, I think, the least successful. It’s not that it’s bad; it’s excellent. The problem is that while it rejects what Conservatism, Inc. has to offer, it repeats an equally unrealistic prescription, namely a turn back to the Constitutional and political framework of 1787 and 1865.
A combination of political philosophy, political argument, and history, in the Pre-Statement Anton cites Aristotle for the basic claim that all human activity aims at some good. Beyond food, shelter, and security, “mere life,” the good life is happiness or felicity, which is achieved by developing our capabilities to reach the telos of man, “the completion or perfection of those traits which are uniquely characteristic of man.” “Radical individualism and private hedonism,” the goals of (though Anton does not say so) the Enlightenment, undermine human flourishing. This much has been known, in the West at least, since the Greeks, but the American Founders brought political order in the service of these goals to near perfection (which was perfected by the post-Civil War amendments). Federalism, limited government, and representative republicanism created the best system ever. But it is not one that can be exported to all peoples in all times, nor can it work if there is inadequate “commonality in customs, habits, and opinions.” As everyone with any sense knows, diversity is the opposite of our strength.
This near-perfect system has been attacked repeatedly since 1787, Anton tells us. First, by the followers of John Calhoun, unsuccessfully. Second, by the early-twentieth-century Progressives, successfully and causing great damage. And third, fatally, by the acolytes of John Rawls, purveyors of so-called social justice and of forced equality, and the New Left, advocates of the tearing down of America, group rights, and oppression theory. All these attacks are incoherent and destructive, but they have collectively succeeded in destroying the Founder’s vision, and erecting in its place a system that maintains many of its outward forms but within is crawling with decay and worms. As the Left’s power grows ever greater, they must either “compound the lies, or suppress and punish dissent.” They choose both, following the dictates of Herbert Marcuse and his heinous “repressive tolerance.” We need to “return to life and the conditions of life: the rule of law, responsible freedom, confidence in our civilization, patriotism, and concern for the common good instead of only the particular good of groups claiming oppression or disadvantage.”
[Review completes as first comment.]
May 3, 2019
Read this book if you hate Trump (Left or Right). Read it if the outcome of 2016 shocked you. It took me less than one hour. It’s the most insightful, succinct, and in my opinion, correct summation of the true conservative role for government and what was at stake in 2016. Anton, one of the leading conservative intellectual voices, efficiently highlights the failures of both sides and a path forward.
When I initially read Anton’s essay in September 2016 I thought he was too tough on conservatives by calling them ineffective losers that act as paper tigers for the Left to slay on the road to expansive government. In retrospect, I now think Anton nailed it on the head. Conservatives were happy to conserve the status quo that kept them employed as useful speed bumps (a delay but not an obstacle) to liberal policies but were completely ineffective at selling or implementing conservative ideas. I found Anton’s writing refreshing because he seems one of the few that isn’t driven insane by Trump (i.e. he is still capable of rational thought and not prone to emotive outbursts) and is able to give measured assessments of policies and beliefs. He's neither a MAGA, a NeverTrumper, nor a Leftist. Anton freely admits that Trump’s a buffoon but doesn’t find any tyrannical tendencies. His point: if conservatives (constitutional originalists) lose 2016 we might as well give up on 2020 and 2024.
The restatement is Anton’s response to major criticisms his essay and expands his insight as to why people were so frustrated by Trump. Deep down inside they were afraid Trump could in fact win which challenged the ruling class (both Left and Right). “…Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did…The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump Victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. ” [p 84] I think Anton more effectively summarizes this point in the preface when he identifies President Trump as the “real” resistance to the mission creep of the Administrative state and how both the Right and the Left benefited from it.
In sum, Anton drew heavy criticism from the left and right for his initial essay but the majority of his points have been proven correct in the aftermath. We haven’t devolved into a tyrannical dystopian society (I’m not wearing a red robe or white bonnet) and Trump is successfully appointing judges who adhere to the Constitution (some of whom then oppose his policies) at a rate greater than every president save one: George Washington.
My biggest complaint of the book was the amount of space Anton devoted to why he chose his pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. It was overly academic, boring, and somewhat self-aggrandizing (look how erudite I am).
Below are some quotations that I particularly enjoyed from the book.
“These are dangerous times. The Left has made them so and insists on increasing the danger. Leftists hold virtually every commanding height in our society – financial, intellectual, educational, cultural, and administrative – and yet they affect the posture of an oppressed and besieged ‘resistance’. Nonsense, the real resistance is led by President Trump. It is resistance to the Left’s all-consuming drive for absolute power, its hostility to all American and Western norms – constitutional, moral, prudential – and its boundless destructive enmity.” [p 11]
“In truth, the post-1960s Left co-opts the language of ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ as a rhetorical device to get what it wants: the transfer of power, honor, and wealth between groups as retribution for past offenses. Since the concept of social justice denies both natural rights and revelation, its real basis is simply will: we want these things and therefore they are good. We don’t like you and therefore you are bad.” [p 52]
“Democracy is no longer defined as a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Instead it is a government of the people, by left-liberal experts and oligarchs, without consent. Globalism, wide-open trade, financialization, mass immigration, foreign war without end or clear connection to national interest…are simply held to be nonnegotiable. Dissent is punished.” [p 58]
“If you haven’t noticed our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but do nothing with them.” [p 69]
“Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition to his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults.” [pp 73-74]
“Still and all, for man – potentially me included – life under perma-liberalism will be nice. If you are in the managerial class, you will probably do well – so long as you don’t say the wrong thing. (And, as noted, the list of ‘wrong things’ will be continuously updated, so make sure you keep up)…For the rest of you – flyover people – the decline will continue.” [pp 93-94]
When I initially read Anton’s essay in September 2016 I thought he was too tough on conservatives by calling them ineffective losers that act as paper tigers for the Left to slay on the road to expansive government. In retrospect, I now think Anton nailed it on the head. Conservatives were happy to conserve the status quo that kept them employed as useful speed bumps (a delay but not an obstacle) to liberal policies but were completely ineffective at selling or implementing conservative ideas. I found Anton’s writing refreshing because he seems one of the few that isn’t driven insane by Trump (i.e. he is still capable of rational thought and not prone to emotive outbursts) and is able to give measured assessments of policies and beliefs. He's neither a MAGA, a NeverTrumper, nor a Leftist. Anton freely admits that Trump’s a buffoon but doesn’t find any tyrannical tendencies. His point: if conservatives (constitutional originalists) lose 2016 we might as well give up on 2020 and 2024.
The restatement is Anton’s response to major criticisms his essay and expands his insight as to why people were so frustrated by Trump. Deep down inside they were afraid Trump could in fact win which challenged the ruling class (both Left and Right). “…Trump might win. He is not playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did…The professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump Victory will finally make their irrelevance undeniable. ” [p 84] I think Anton more effectively summarizes this point in the preface when he identifies President Trump as the “real” resistance to the mission creep of the Administrative state and how both the Right and the Left benefited from it.
In sum, Anton drew heavy criticism from the left and right for his initial essay but the majority of his points have been proven correct in the aftermath. We haven’t devolved into a tyrannical dystopian society (I’m not wearing a red robe or white bonnet) and Trump is successfully appointing judges who adhere to the Constitution (some of whom then oppose his policies) at a rate greater than every president save one: George Washington.
My biggest complaint of the book was the amount of space Anton devoted to why he chose his pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. It was overly academic, boring, and somewhat self-aggrandizing (look how erudite I am).
Below are some quotations that I particularly enjoyed from the book.
“These are dangerous times. The Left has made them so and insists on increasing the danger. Leftists hold virtually every commanding height in our society – financial, intellectual, educational, cultural, and administrative – and yet they affect the posture of an oppressed and besieged ‘resistance’. Nonsense, the real resistance is led by President Trump. It is resistance to the Left’s all-consuming drive for absolute power, its hostility to all American and Western norms – constitutional, moral, prudential – and its boundless destructive enmity.” [p 11]
“In truth, the post-1960s Left co-opts the language of ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ as a rhetorical device to get what it wants: the transfer of power, honor, and wealth between groups as retribution for past offenses. Since the concept of social justice denies both natural rights and revelation, its real basis is simply will: we want these things and therefore they are good. We don’t like you and therefore you are bad.” [p 52]
“Democracy is no longer defined as a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Instead it is a government of the people, by left-liberal experts and oligarchs, without consent. Globalism, wide-open trade, financialization, mass immigration, foreign war without end or clear connection to national interest…are simply held to be nonnegotiable. Dissent is punished.” [p 58]
“If you haven’t noticed our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but do nothing with them.” [p 69]
“Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition to his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults.” [pp 73-74]
“Still and all, for man – potentially me included – life under perma-liberalism will be nice. If you are in the managerial class, you will probably do well – so long as you don’t say the wrong thing. (And, as noted, the list of ‘wrong things’ will be continuously updated, so make sure you keep up)…For the rest of you – flyover people – the decline will continue.” [pp 93-94]
December 23, 2019
It’s a bit rich to be accused by nihilists of lacking a positive vision.
This is a collection of three essays; the middle, The Flight 93 Election, is the first, written before the 2016 presidential election. It’s a diatribe against the so-called intellectual right—“Conservatism, Inc.”—who, like their counterparts on the left complain about a crisis that they clearly don’t believe in. If they believed in their crisis, they’d act differently. They’d act like there was a crisis.
Instead, when faced with someone doing something about the crisis they claimed existed, they do a 180. You can see this recently on the left when suddenly war in Syria became a moral imperative, or when they create as many greenhouse gasses as possible compared to the average person. On the right, the exemplar is probably Jonah Goldberg, who wrote books such as The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas and Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, but who, in the Trump era, supports the same tactics from the left and the media that he’d earlier made money complaining about.
Anton uses the example of the Washington Generals, whose “job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid.” It’s an apt analogy, and one I first saw in the comments section at the Ace of Spades HQ, starting around 2009, first about the Illinois Republican Party and later about John McCain. “It’s like he wants to be known as the best player on the Washington Generals.”
Anton’s essay is very smart, and of course pissed off a lot of previously Conservative pundits who had turned against, now that it was coming from Trump, the very conservatism they’d once claimed to fight for.
The third essay is a response to some of those critics, whose criticisms seemed utterly off the deep end of the pundit pool, although there are still, three years into his presidency, people who complain publicly of Trump being a tyrant; it seems, as in the case of Syria and the Tyranny of Clichés, that they don’t really believe it—they are, after all, making a good living off of something that, if true, would put them in the modern equivalent of Siberia.
In this third essay, Anton makes the prescient claim that Trump…
…is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule.
Which, as an aside, mirrors a statement about the end of the Roman Empire from the book I’m currently reading, How the Irish Saved Civilization:
the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal;
The first essay is much longer and very different than the second and third; it was written after the election as, ostensibly, a foundation for what it ought to mean to be Conservative if conservatives don’t want to be the Washington Generals of politics. There’s a lot of reference to the classics, including his choice to use the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” for the pre-election essays. It’s very much what you would expect from a conservative intellectual magazine such as the Claremont Review (where the pre-election essays appeared) or the New Criterion (where this post-election essay first appeared).
I think it may also have been an I-told-you-so, as when he writes that “What the Kavanaugh affair has made clearer to me than ever is that the left will not stop until all opposition is totally destroyed.”
It’s the longest and, while interesting as background, the least readable of the three essays. It goes deep into the philosophy of human nature without actually going deep into its sources. I think it was probably a mistake to put this essay first, and might recommend reading the essays in order of publication instead of their order in the book.
All of these essays are available online, although the first essay is “in somewhat different form” from its online version, Founding Philosophy. This means that the least readable of the essays is the best reason for buying the book.
July 28, 2021
Far better than I would like to admit. Anton’s case is quite compelling.
August 12, 2019
Most of humanity lead lives of quiet desperation. Yes, I think I��ve heard that somewhere… We awake, we go to work, we fight with a colleague or eat too much for lunch and then back home fighting traffic – feed the baby; bath; bed. Sure, we strive to be noticed. Maybe employee-of-the-week; a banquet in our honor, realtor of the year for having offloaded the most sub-prime mortgages on an unsuspecting public. We try and get by on our fading looks; our better-than-average car; our nicer-than-most vacation which we Instapost on Facegram in the not-at-all-desperate search for more hate-likes than others with whom we compare ourselves (I may not have a castle like Brad Joley – but I can afford a sea-view at Sandals, and I want you to know it!!) We like to hold our lives as a prism against those of our peers; it’s part of the natural order of things – and Angelina Pitt does it too – wondering what Amal had for dinner, and if the castle grits were somehow more sumptuous on the other side of the pond. Powerlessness, it is the true human condition in a world of seven-billion-plus souls. There are simply too many of us; and the prizes too mean – too fleeting – too few-and-far-between to stroke our emaciated egos. We are all measured and found wanting, it is for us only to choose the rod.
Yet occasionally, very occasionally in fact, we humans do something extraordinary. Think Jesse Owens winning the Gold Medal in Berlin with old Adolf glaring on. What would have happened if Owens had gotten a cold that day? Maybe he would have run the race four years later – and won, but with his victory not juxtaposed against the dower gaze of a racist tyrant, would it have been remembered? Futile inquiry, because that isn’t what happened – and Owens, a poor lad from Phoenix, defied history’s most evil man; if only for a moment (though a very public one). It is a comedy of errors which leads some people to a flash of fame; after which they fade away, always remembering – pointing back to the moment when they did something remarkable, when they were noticed, when they – for a flash – were important; and then they are gone, never to be heard from again.
It is easy to live in those moments. You wake up thinking “I did this!” and go to bed with your last breath one of gratitude at being selected for meaning, if only for an instant.
So I just finished “After The Flight 93 Election” by Michael Anton (no longer Publius Decius Mus). This book includes a new essay, an old(ish) essay responding to his critics (a way to stoke the controversy I suppose in the hopes that another ember will yet again ignite some dried timber of outrage still lying around), and is built around a reprint of Anton’s famous article “The Flight 93 Election”, published in September of 2016 for the Clairmont Review of Books (I’d never even heard of that journal before Anton’s article) which crystallized the impressions of many of us regarding the erstwhile candidacy (and potential presidency) of Hillary Clinton, as Anton efficiently summarized, “One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.” BOOM!
This article marches into history, taking its author with it and joining the likes of Robert Kaplan with “The Coming Anarchy”; Francis Fukuyama and the “End of History”, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”, Lina Sergie Attar’s “The Land of Topless Minarets and Headless Little Girls” (and my own “Suicide of Venezuela”, of course) in crystalizing the narrative surrounding something epic happening at a particular moment in time. “The Flight 93 Election” may in fact have paved the way for a Trump presidency – or not, its hard to prove a counterfactual. But it was Anton’s courage and clarity of thought which brought the piece into existence at the right time to help us consider the dangers which might have befallen our benighted republic with another eight years of Obama/Hillary madness.
Michael Anton himself has continued writing and reading and studying; pleased with the role he played in a pivotal moment in our nation’s history and content (one would assume) to have had the privilege to be heard. And that itself is a remarkable thing.
Maybe we are not so powerless after all…
Yet occasionally, very occasionally in fact, we humans do something extraordinary. Think Jesse Owens winning the Gold Medal in Berlin with old Adolf glaring on. What would have happened if Owens had gotten a cold that day? Maybe he would have run the race four years later – and won, but with his victory not juxtaposed against the dower gaze of a racist tyrant, would it have been remembered? Futile inquiry, because that isn’t what happened – and Owens, a poor lad from Phoenix, defied history’s most evil man; if only for a moment (though a very public one). It is a comedy of errors which leads some people to a flash of fame; after which they fade away, always remembering – pointing back to the moment when they did something remarkable, when they were noticed, when they – for a flash – were important; and then they are gone, never to be heard from again.
It is easy to live in those moments. You wake up thinking “I did this!” and go to bed with your last breath one of gratitude at being selected for meaning, if only for an instant.
So I just finished “After The Flight 93 Election” by Michael Anton (no longer Publius Decius Mus). This book includes a new essay, an old(ish) essay responding to his critics (a way to stoke the controversy I suppose in the hopes that another ember will yet again ignite some dried timber of outrage still lying around), and is built around a reprint of Anton’s famous article “The Flight 93 Election”, published in September of 2016 for the Clairmont Review of Books (I’d never even heard of that journal before Anton’s article) which crystallized the impressions of many of us regarding the erstwhile candidacy (and potential presidency) of Hillary Clinton, as Anton efficiently summarized, “One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.” BOOM!
This article marches into history, taking its author with it and joining the likes of Robert Kaplan with “The Coming Anarchy”; Francis Fukuyama and the “End of History”, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”, Lina Sergie Attar’s “The Land of Topless Minarets and Headless Little Girls” (and my own “Suicide of Venezuela”, of course) in crystalizing the narrative surrounding something epic happening at a particular moment in time. “The Flight 93 Election” may in fact have paved the way for a Trump presidency – or not, its hard to prove a counterfactual. But it was Anton’s courage and clarity of thought which brought the piece into existence at the right time to help us consider the dangers which might have befallen our benighted republic with another eight years of Obama/Hillary madness.
Michael Anton himself has continued writing and reading and studying; pleased with the role he played in a pivotal moment in our nation’s history and content (one would assume) to have had the privilege to be heard. And that itself is a remarkable thing.
Maybe we are not so powerless after all…
February 15, 2019
Using Flight 93 - the hijacked plane that crashed in Penn. on 9/11 - as a comparison to the election of Trump is so crass & disrespectful (and how sleazy do you have to be to put it in the title too?). If this was truly meant to be a respectable, well-thought-out approach to this idea, a legitimate author would work harder, rather than resorting to the exploitation of anything having to do with 9/11, in order to earn success and credibility. Hard to believe somebody would lower themselves to publish this after the original essay; guess money outweighs dignity and respect.
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January 28, 2025Rereading this after Trump's 2024 win and I have a lot thoughts. I'll try to summarize the thrust of them here.
It is appalling how few conservative institutions took this essay's message to heart back when Rush Limbaugh read it on air, when they still had some shot at redemption. It wouldn't have been (that) hard to salvage their wounded reputation in those first couple of chaotic Trump years. In January of 2025, though, here we are again! Why is this essay no less relevant than it was in 2016? Why is the old conservative guard again surprised to learn they've lost the trust of the people? How many more losses does the establishment Right need to take before they rehaul their entire shop or go down completely? At this point, the latter seems preferable to me.
It is appalling how few conservative institutions took this essay's message to heart back when Rush Limbaugh read it on air, when they still had some shot at redemption. It wouldn't have been (that) hard to salvage their wounded reputation in those first couple of chaotic Trump years. In January of 2025, though, here we are again! Why is this essay no less relevant than it was in 2016? Why is the old conservative guard again surprised to learn they've lost the trust of the people? How many more losses does the establishment Right need to take before they rehaul their entire shop or go down completely? At this point, the latter seems preferable to me.
January 1, 2022
Whew I started this year off with a doozy.
This trilogy of essays is, at best, egregiously idealistic in regards to its views on America and, at worst, literally xenophobic. Anton indulges in many of the very same tactics and rhetoric he rails against the Left for, and even manages to adopt a “they hurt my feelings, pity me” attitude while also coming off as self-righteous and “holier-than-thou”. It boggles the mind how one can be this willfully ignorant to the reality of the very country you claim to love and “protect”. Just wow.
This trilogy of essays is, at best, egregiously idealistic in regards to its views on America and, at worst, literally xenophobic. Anton indulges in many of the very same tactics and rhetoric he rails against the Left for, and even manages to adopt a “they hurt my feelings, pity me” attitude while also coming off as self-righteous and “holier-than-thou”. It boggles the mind how one can be this willfully ignorant to the reality of the very country you claim to love and “protect”. Just wow.
August 10, 2021
Hard to argue with, but also depressing! But a very helpful book.
September 7, 2023
Waaaaaaay too Trump loving for my taste. Nice way to turn an American tragedy into a kiss ass piece.
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