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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