If Hillary wins, is it lights out for America?
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“The Flight 93 Election.” That’s the title of a pseudonymous essay in The Claremont Review of Books that’s gotten a lot of attention of late. Rush Limbaugh apparently loved it. A great many others thought it was unlovable (See: Here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
I’m with them. Except in one regard: I like the title. Oh, I hate the way the writer uses the idea. Indeed, while I kind of like the writing style, and I’ve found the man I believe to be the actual author decent enough, I find the whole pose of it fairly offensive. The author adopts the pen name Publius Decius Mus, after a Roman nobleman who sacrificed his life for the Republic by charging into the thick of battle. But the author isn’t even willing to risk harm to his own name to launch his often baseless attacks. Rather, from the bespoke comforts of the private sector, he accuses conservative opponents of Trump of selling out, without any evidence beyond a mist-producing frenzy of logic chopping.
Yes, there’s a nice parallelism between the pen name and the title. The passengers who rushed the cockpit were indeed modern day Publii. The writer, however, is not.
While Publius is obviously using Flight 93 metaphorically — America is not actually a giant plane — he uses the metaphor with an appalling amount of literalism. Hillary Clinton poses an existential threat. Here’s the opening:
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.
Again, he is not literally saying we will all die if Hillary Clinton wins. But he is saying that it will be the end of America. This is grotesquely irresponsible, particularly as the anniversary of 9/11 is upon us. This is the logic that inspires Latin-quoting mad men.
It’s also not true. Truth would exonerate him. But it isn’t true — and even if it were, he can’t possibly know that it is. I am the first to concede that if Hillary Clinton wins it will likely be terrible for the country. But America is larger than one election for one office in one branch in one of our many layers of government. Indeed, if it’s true that America is one election away from death, then America is already dead. Because the whole idea of this country is that most of life exists outside of the scope of government. Yes, this idea is battered and bloodied. But I fail to see how rejecting the idea — as Publius does — is the best way to save it.
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In my preferred metaphor, we are on a plane heading for a bad place, though not to our deaths. We are heading to a place from which it will require years of work just to get back to where we are now, never mind a preferred destination. I remember giving speeches during Obama’s first term, amidst the fights over the stimulus and Obamacare. The set title for my talks was “Cheer Up, for the Worst Is Yet to Come.” I was right of course. But I remember saying, often, that I may end up spending the rest of my professional life fighting just to undo the messes this president has created. That may well still be true. And if either of these two hot messes hit the fan in November — and one almost surely will — I’m going to be on my hands and knees with a bucket and sponge trying to get the stain out of the carpeting.
And that’s the thing. The plane is off course because the pilot is MIA, off guest-editing Wired magazine or some such, while the other two members of the flight crew are fighting over the throttle. One, Hillary Clinton, wants to take us to a bad place and she knows how to get there. The other, Donald Trump, wants to take us someplace that doesn’t even exist. The best argument for Donald Trump is that if the destination existed, it might be a great place to go. I hear the martinis in King’s Landing are fantastic. Meanwhile, the only argument for Clinton is that at least she knows how to fly.
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- Discussion
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“If Hillary wins, is it lights out for America?”
What do you think?
The fact that both of these are our candidates means that it is already a very very dark place inside America. The thought that either of these two miscreants would be the savior of our country is ridiculous.
Jonah has proven time and time again that he is a lightweight.
He wasn’t even able to hold his own against rank amateurs when he posted at FreeRepublic.
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