The Real Flight 93 Election

Apologies for not publishing anything last week. I was wrapping up edits on my forthcoming book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It. The good news is, the book is done! You can preorder it now from Bookshop.org. Now that I’ve gotten it in the best shape I can, back to our regular publication schedule.

Remember “The Flight 93 Election?” Almost exactly 10 years ago, the right-wing intellectual and tailoring aficionado Michael Anton penned an essay for the Claremont Review of Books that soon became one of the defining texts of the Trump era. Writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Anton framed the 2016 presidential election as an existential battle; electing Hillary Clinton would mean certain destruction for the American republic, whereas electing Donald Trump would ensure that the United States retained at least a fighting chance.

Here’s the essay’s now-famous opening:

“To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic,” he confesses. And not just to ordinary conservatives! Revisiting the essay this past week, I found it overheated to the point of unreadability. Here are just a few examples of the social ills that Anton attributes to liberalism: “the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers”; “Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents [and] the gaslighting denial by the media”; “the wars on ‘cis-genderism’—formerly known as ‘nature’—and on the supposed ‘white privilege’ of broke hillbillies”; “the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism”; you get the idea. As with a lot of what passes for the Right’s more intellectually sophisticated output, this is basically Limbaugh-ism seasoned with a few scattered references to Livy.

And yet I’ve found myself thinking about “The Flight 93 Election” a lot recently. Not so much the essay itself, but its central conceit: the notion of an election that, depending on its outcome, augurs either the end of the American experiment or the thin possibility of its renewal. As the reference to Flight 93 suggests, the patriots who stared down that choice would be obliged to take extraordinary measures in order to prevent disaster.

Which brings us to last week’s election in Virginia, where voters narrowly signed off on a partisan gerrymander that advantages Democrats. This, like last year’s California gerrymander, was a tit-for-tat response to Republicans’ own efforts to rig the 2026 midterm map in their favor. My sense is that most Democrats have reconciled themselves to this sort of hardball politics, but a certain squeamishness remains, even among some of those who voted for the redistrictings. A common view holds that Democratic gerrymandering is an unpleasant necessity to check Republican gerrymandering.

I don’t disagree with this view, but I would add one more consideration. It’s not just that refusing to gerrymander Democrat-controlled states would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament; it’s that the stakes in 2026 and 2028 are so high that the Democratic Party must be permitted to play legal and constitutional hardball—in fact, that it has a moral obligation to play hardball.

Consider just a few of the outrages we’ve collectively witnessed since January 2025. Trump has turned ICE into his own secret police force and had them conduct what can only be described as a series of state-sanctioned pogroms. The administration has built concentration camps and sought to turn asylum seekers into stateless peoples. Pete Hegseth has been systematically re-segregating the armed forces. Trump launched an illegal and unprovoked war against Iran and then publicly threatened genocide against the Iranian people. Elon Musk’s DOGE illegally dismantled USAID, a move that may ultimately kill 14 million people.

In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton writes that the United States has been sliding into terminal decline for at least the past 20 years. “If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988,” before trying to remind us all of his erudition with a reference to the Carthaginian commander Hannibal. As with Anton’s notion of an existential election, we can easily apply this declinist narrative to the Left/liberalism’s current predicament. The United States has only been a full liberal democracy since, at earliest, the mid-1960s, and that democracy has been under attack from the Right since more or less the moment of its birth. In the 1980s, Reagan—the last president under whom the Right wasn’t “losing,” according to Anton—helped cement the conservative movement’s monopoly on the GOP and ushered in a post-New-Deal-coalition political order that saw the steady erosion of the New Deal social contract.

Trump is sui generis, but he is also a culmination and the climactic figure in this political order. He is also an avatar for the dark forces that the Reaganites once relegated to junior partner status, which is no doubt part of his appeal to Anton. Similarly, “The Flight 93 Election” presents Hillary Clinton—Hillary Clinton—as a radical whose administration would be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments.”

Trump doesn’t have a consolidated, authoritarian regime, and he probably lacks the temperament and competence to build one. But in the unlikely scenario that Republicans retain unified control of Congress after November, and/or that they elect a successor to Trump in 2028, regime consolidation will stay within the realm of possibility. And it’s no great mystery what MAGA would do with a firm lock on federal power. After the 2020 election, in a piece for another Claremont publication, Glenn Ellmers wrote that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” JD Vance has endorsed a book by a regime ally that goes even further, referring to progressives as “unhumans.” They are creating a permission structure for domestic terror on an unimaginable scale.

If that isn’t a “Flight 93” scenario, I don’t know what is. Things have reached a point where it is no longer sufficient for Democrats to win back the House this year and the presidency in two. If the current structure of American politics remains basically unaltered, and thermostatic politics sweeps Tucker Carlson or JD Vance into the Oval Office in 2032 or 2036, then the United States will have only delayed catastrophe, not averted it. What makes the next couple of elections into “Flight 93 elections” is not just the stakes of defeat, but the scale of the political challenge that would follow victory: restructuring the American political system to establish a revitalized social contract and lock fascists out of power.

Which means that we don’t just need victories but generational blowouts. With those stakes in mind, it scarcely makes sense to ask whether time-limited Democratic gerrymanders are going too far; they can both increase the likelihood of such a blowout and act as a demonstration of Democrats’ newfound willingness to do what is necessary to preserve (small-r) republic government. To quote Michael Anton: “I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Truer words, etc.