The Flight 93 Election (claremontreviewofbooks.com)
✈️ The Flight 93 Election – Summary
Original Essay: The Flight 93 Election by Publius Decius Mus (Michael Anton), 2016
Summary by: ChatGPT (OpenAI GPT-4), June 2025
🧠 Overview
Published in 2016 by Michael Anton (under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus), this essay framed the presidential election as a civilizational tipping point. Using the metaphor of Flight 93, Anton argues that electing Donald Trump was a necessary and urgent gamble to prevent irreversible national decline—comparing it to passengers charging a hijacked cockpit in a desperate, possibly fatal attempt to survive.
⚠️ Central Thesis
2016 is the “Flight 93 election”: charge the cockpit or you die.
- Trump = risky chance of survival
- Clinton = certain death
- America, Anton claims, is on the brink of collapse; voting for Trump is the only hope to avert catastrophe.
🏛️ Critique of Conservatism, Inc.
Anton argues that the mainstream conservative establishment:
- Is ineffectual, obsessed with outdated ideology.
- Produces endless policy proposals, think tanks, and op-eds but achieves no real victories.
- Refuses to acknowledge the depth of the crisis, clinging to ideas like “limited government” and “civic renewal” as utopian, hollow slogans.
- Serves as controlled opposition—“Washington Generals” who exist to lose gracefully.
📉 Symptoms of National Decline
Anton lists numerous signs of decay:
- Moral & cultural collapse
- Crime and civic disorder
- Dysfunctional education system
- Globalist economic policies hollowing out the working class
- Weak military results
- Loss of national cohesion
- Mass illegal immigration
- Leftist dominance of media, academia, and bureaucracy
If conservatives truly believe their own diagnoses, Anton asks, why are they not in crisis mode?
🔁 The “Permanent Leftward Drift”
Anton claims that:
- Every decade drags the U.S. further left, culturally and politically.
- Even conservative victories (e.g., crime control, welfare reform) are temporary.
- Conservatives lose not just electorally but ideologically, by playing within Left-defined rules.
💣 Immigration as the Core Threat
- Mass immigration, especially from the Global South, is presented as an existential threat to American identity, liberty, and Republican voting patterns.
- Anton argues the Left sees immigration as the key to permanent electoral dominance.
- Republicans, driven by economic interests or fear of being called racist, refuse to resist this.
🧠 The Case for Trump
Despite his many flaws, Trump is seen as:
- The only figure willing to confront the big three issues:
- Immigration
- Trade/globalism
- Endless war
- Instinctively aligned with working-class interests and national cohesion.
- A disruptive force who challenges the status quo of both parties.
“Trump, alone among recent candidates, wants to live. He wants the country to live.”
❌ The #NeverTrump Critique
Anton calls out NeverTrump conservatives as:
- Hypocrites who care more about decorum than survival.
- Willing to lose nobly instead of winning imperfectly.
- In denial about the stakes and collapse of democratic norms.
🔮 If Clinton Wins: A Grim Future
Anton forecasts a Clinton presidency would bring:
- Full-throttle Progressive agenda
- Institutionalized persecution of dissent
- Further demographic shifts making conservative governance impossible
- Deepening censorship via Big Tech and media
- De facto one-party rule
🚨 Final Warning
“The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation.”
- Anton questions whether the American people have the courage (virtù) to act in their own defense.
- If they cannot even bring themselves to vote for Trump, despite his flaws, they are doomed to suffer the consequences of their inaction.
📚 Publication Details
- Author: Michael Anton (as Publius Decius Mus)
- Published by: Claremont Review of Books / American Greatness
- Context: Widely circulated before the 2016 U.S. presidential election; considered a key intellectual justification for Trump’s candidacy.
OpenAI. (2025). Summary of “The Flight 93 Election” by Michael Anton