By Christopher Flannery, The American Mind – October 19, 2024
The season has come again (actually, we’re a few weeks behind schedule) for the restorative quadrennial reading of Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election,” first published at the website of the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016. Its vivifying spirit leaps out immediately in the famous opening lines:
“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.”
Michael’s practical and theoretical argument weathers well and rewards re-reading. But for the moment, I cut to the practical gist:
“A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments…. [T]he Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.”
Anton’s assessment was profoundly confirmed by the reaction of “the bipartisan junta” to Donald Trump’s election in 2016—they spied on his campaign, never acknowledged his legitimacy, prevented him from governing in every way they could, stole the 2020 election (I know, I know; but just consider Russiagate and the Fabulous 51, the intel leaders who called Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian “disinformation”—they were enough by themselves), and installed “moderate” Joe Biden, who did indeed put the leftist pedal-to-the-metal in ways that still boggle the mind.
Some of Anton’s theoretical and practical analysis builds on Angelo Codevilla’s almost equally famous 2010 essay on the ruling class, later turned into a book. More generally still, they both build on a tradition of Claremont Institute scholarship—see the work of R.J. Pestritto, Glenn Ellmers, and John Marini—that has analyzed how the progressive movement transformed American politics over the past century. The Progressives gave us the administrative state under which we are now ruled, meaning “the death of self-government.”
Now, Elon Musk seems to have joined a growing chorus in recognizing the stakes of the 2024 election.
Musk—the wealthiest man in the world and certainly one of the most interesting Americans of our time—says, “If Trump doesn’t win this election, it’s the last election we’re going to have.” Why does he say this? In his words,
“The Dem machine has been importing so many people…so many illegals…transporting a large number of illegals to swing states…. If you look at the numbers…there are triple digit increases in illegals to all the swing states, and in some cases it’s over 700% over the last three years…. Now the swing state margins are something like 10 to 20,000 votes. So what happens if you put…hundreds of thousands of people into each swing state?”
Then (me paraphrasing now) you fast track them and give them a green card so that they can receive full citizenship in five years and legally vote, which they will do overwhelmingly for Democrats because the Democratic Party has made them clients. But their “values” might not be “woke”? No matter. The Democratic Party knows well how to make them “beholden to the Democratic Party”—for handouts, for getting other family members into the country, and so on.
Musk’s “prediction is, if there’s another four years of a Dem administration, they will legalize so many illegals…that the next election there won’t be any swing states. And it will be a single-party country, just like California is a single-party state.” And if we are trying to imagine what a Californicated America would look like, Musk mentions that “California just passed a law making it illegal to require a voter ID in any election at all in California.” Why would anyone pass such a law? Musk: “The purpose of no voter ID is obviously to conduct fraud in elections.” (And, I would add, to destroy the distinction between sovereign American citizens and 7.9 billion foreigners.)
This is a sensible analysis of what is at stake in the coming election, based on very specific conditions that have been created by the Biden-Harris Administration, beginning on the first day of their administration and continuing with determination today. This analysis is in keeping with a now well-established tradition of thinking in Claremont circles that will be much needed—both in meeting our crisis and overcoming it.
Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
