The 2016 “Flight 93” essay: Michael Anton vindicated

 

Yesterday’s blog linked to William A Jacobson’s “pep talk” for conservatives.  Today, the executive editor of The Federalist, Joy Pullmann, looks back on what Michael Anton was predicting in 2016, and why we all need those pep talks.  Here’s an extract – towards the end of her column:

Biden’s Destruction Of America Vindicates
Mike Anton’s 2016 ‘Flight 93’ Essay

. . Anton was also right that Trump’s top issues — border security, international trade, and endless foreign wars — were broadly popular and could form the basis of a national renewal. The Biden administration’s gross and dangerous mismanagement of all these issues has vindicated this analysis as well. We’re just two years into Biden’s divisive, lawless, scorched-earth reign, and one already wonders if there will be anything left of our country after two more.

On the flip side, Trump’s platform and four years in office transformed and united the Republican Party. The only people who haven’t figured that out are the people who misread the nation and their own constituents and refused to man up and admit it, forfeiting their credibility to lead. Their cowardice and softness have revealed themselves as more dangerous than Trump’s rudeness and intimidation, and voters are over it.

Riding the center of the maelstrom, Trump’s presidency did change the political winds, in ways Anton couldn’t predict. For one, Trump cracked the right’s tolerance for political correctness, a major victory. We are now free to say, yes, we do want our border secured, and to call that racist is simply unserious and callous to all the women and children trafficked and raped by the cartels. We can say that anti-white racism is also racism, and it’s the right that maintains the strictest zero-tolerance policy on racism.

Trump’s moderate appeal and bull-in-the-China-shop bashing of the racist stigma barrier set the GOP toward becoming a truly multiracial working-class and middle-class coalition party. The amplified media propaganda machine and woke incest between big business and government has prompted a deep and wide backlash, alienating normies from the Democrat Party. In this, Trump’s presidency helped people awaken to their true political foes and allies, clarifying what time we are in and who is a talk-only grifter and who’s a legit freedom fighter.

Anton also couldn’t account for Covid opening so many people’s eyes — except many among self-appointed conservative “leadership,” who acquiesced instead of fighting for actual constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly, free speech, and not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”! They left resisting the communists to ordinary citizens, such as the few Democrat lawyers who still believe in civil rights, apolitical doctors who formed impressive new messaging and policy coalitions, and mom bloggers with kids banned from school.

We don’t need the right’s Monday morning armchair quarterbacks to do anything but get out of the way as Ben Sasse did. . . .

Read Ms. Pullman’s full column here.  It’s one to bookmark.

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