photo credit: cnn.com
A few
days ago I posted a link to a think piece entitled The Flight 93 Election, along with a few extracts. The essay,
originally published on The Claremont Review of Books website here,
generated a significant amount of interest in the blogosphere. It also
generated a boatload of responses, much of it critical, to which the author, writing
under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, responded on
Sept-13 here.
Like
everyone else, I am trying to navigate my way through the run-up to the
November election, and I highly recommend both the original think-piece and the
follow-up that responds to specific criticisms. Here are a few extracts from
the Restatement on Flight 93:
Some
also complained about the aptness of the analogy: the plane crashed! Well, yes,
and this one might too. Then again, it might not. It depends in part on what
action the electorate chooses to take. The passengers of Flight 93 roused
themselves. They succeeded insofar as that plane did not hit its intended
target.
The temptation not to rouse oneself in a time of great peril is always
strong. In another respect, the analogy is even more apt. All of the passengers
on Flight 93—and all of the victims at the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon—died owing in part to a disastrously broken immigration system that
didn’t then and still doesn’t serve the interests of the American people. Which
also happens to be the core issue at stake in this election.
.
. .
[another
reason that some conservatives oppose Trump is that] Trump might win. He is not
playing his assigned role of gentlemanly loser the way McCain and Romney did,
and may well have tapped into some previously untapped sentiment that he can
ride to victory. This is a problem for both the Right and the Left.
The
professional Right (correctly) fears that a Trump victory will finally make
their irrelevance undeniable. The Left knows that so long as Republicans kept
playing by the same rules and appealing to the same dwindling base of voters,
there was no danger. Even if one of the old breed had won, nothing much would
have changed, since their positions on the most decisive issues were
effectively the same as the Democrats and because they posed no serious
challenge to the administrative state.
.
. .
[T]he
current governing arrangement of the United States is rule by a transnational
managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state. To the extent
that the parties are adversarial at the national level, it is merely to
determine who gets to run the administrative state for four years. Challenging the
administrative state is out of the question [my emphasis]. The Democrats are united on this
point. The Republicans are at least nominally divided. But those nominally
opposed (to the extent that they even understand the problem, which is: not
much) are unwilling or unable to actually do anything about it. Are
challenges to the administrative state allowed only if they are guaranteed to
be ineffectual? If so, the current conservative movement is tailor-made for the
task. Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the
administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.
Trump
is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement.
.
. .
If
Hillary wins, there will still be a country, in the sense of a geographic
territory with a people, a government, and various institutions. Things will
mostly look the same, just as—outwardly—Rome changed little on the ascension of
Augustus. It will not be tyranny or Caesarism—not yet. But it will represent,
in my view, an irreversible triumph for the administrative state. Consider that
no president has been denied reelection since 1992. If we can’t beat the
Democrats now, what makes anyone think we could in 2020, when they will have
all the advantages of incumbency plus four more years of demographic change in
their favor? And if we can’t win in 2016 or 2020, what reason is there to hope
for 2024? Will the electorate be more Republican? More conservative? Will
constitutional norms be stronger?
The
country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a
blue state on a national scale.
The
entire article is here. Should be a Must Read.
# # #
Gov. Mike Huckabee
