Last chance for Gas? The Flight 93 Election

photo credit: flickr.com

The Flight 93 Election

Is this year’s election just another in the endless series of election cycles, or is it a do-or-die election, a sort of Last Chance For Gas? Do you have a sense of urgency, or are you looking askance at those who do?

One of the most thought-provoking essays that may be of interest to Tea Party people with any conservative values, whether economic or social, is a piece by the pseudonymous Publius Decius Mus at the Claremont website here. A couple of short extracts: 

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.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high . . .

. . .

To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

Read the entire thing here. Especially if you find it difficult to jump on the Trump Train, as it were.

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