It’s become almost de rigueur during an presidential election year to issue ominous warnings that this is the most consequential election of our lives. I first became fully conscious of the tactic after the 2016 election when I read Michael Anton’s essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” This is how he started:
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.
The purpose of that essay, says Anton, “was to impress upon those who consider themselves principled conservatives the urgency of the moment and the stakes of the 2016 election, not just for conservatism but for the country.” He goes on to say that many readers told him that the piece “‘woke them up’ to the dangers that militant leftism poses to our country and to our civilization.”
I was a Never Trump conservative from the 2016 primaries through the national election. Hillary Clinton was a disastrous choice and I thought Trump was even worse. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either of them.
Four years on and I’ve done a one-eighty on president Trump. I fully support a second term for the man who has arguably governed more conservatively and shown his love for this country more than any president since Ronald Reagan. That’s why the 2020 election is, once again, one of the most important in our nation’s history.
I recently read two essays underscoring the reality. The first, by Eric Lendrum, is “The Civil War Election.” He writes,
[A]ny objective look at the parameters of the national discussion leading into this election makes it clear that 2020 is not only an important election, but indeed, a domestic existential crisis unlike any this country has seen since 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. For the first time in modern history, the presidential election will be a choice between a party that loves America, and a party that openly hates it.
I’ve been banging that drum—”a party that openly hates” America—for years. The Democrat Party is anti-American to the core, embracing ever-more extreme ideological positions.
Democrat Ilhan Omar from Minnesota is a case in point. Just yesterday she said that, “We can’t stop at criminal justice reform or policing reform. We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, [and] in the air we breathe.”
She wants to burn it all down: “We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.” Thankfully, her subversive ideals are not reflected in the party majority—yet. But she and her progressive Marxist ideology is the future of the Democrats. Look no further than Joe Biden:
He’s echoing, of course, the “O’Biden-Bama” years, when president Obama spoke of “fundamentally tranforming the United States of America.”
“Fundamental transformation” means tear it down and start again. I don’t hear any conservatives asking for fundamental transformation because you can’t improve on the U.S. Constitution. Extremists like Omar apparently think they can.
The second essay is by Conrad Black, who you should regularly read if you don’t. Called “Point of No Return,” Black contrasts our choices this fall, writing,
It is also inconceivable that the country could fail to choose the president’s championship of patriotic continuity with strong emphasis on racial equality and the highest standards of civilized law enforcement over the nihilism and Americo-phobic mob rule of the post-George Floyd rioters whom the Democrats in their decadent insipidity have appeased.
It’s “inconceivable,” yes, but so was Trump’s defeat of Hillary in 2016.
In other words, it’s again a stark choice we face in November. This time, however, we don’t have to imagine what either candidate might do once in office. We can capitulate to the anti-American, shame-hustling junior commies rampaging through our cities, or we can elect to another term a president who understands the foundation of American culture, loves this country, and who can keep us on a path toward restoring our patriotic sensibilities.
In 2016, conservatives charged the cockpit and took control of “Flight 93,” averting an extension of the Obama regime. For the last three-and-a-half years, though, the mob has been pounding on the cockpit door. We’ll learn in November whether it’s strong enough to hold.