To justify support for an emotionally stunted, aspiring authoritarian, Prager et al. argue that the country “cannot survive” four years of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Limbaugh warns that this is a “Flight 93” election — meaning we either storm the cockpit and risk death, or surely die.
Bad analogy. The passengers on Flight 93 were pretty sure they were going to die. The only question was whether to go down fighting and possibly disrupt the terrorists’ plans, or to die passively. Those passengers ought to remind us that much remains right with America, because the voices crying doom are particularly piercing just now.
There is much decay in America. Government, best represented by an IRS that targets Americans for their political activism and an FBI that declines to hold high officials to the same standards as ordinary ones, is corrupt. Government is also sclerotic and headed for insolvency — with the approval of both major-party candidates. The courts are making social policy without even a pretense of constitutionality. Race relations are getting worse. The press is dominated by mindless infotainment. Men are dropping out of the labor force. The Internet has unleashed the most feral appetites of the human soul — from child porn to anti-Semitism. Manners are fraying.
So, yes, it may be that we cannot pull out of this dive. Many of these ills are not susceptible to repair by a president. In any case, how can people who until the day before yesterday emphasized the crucial importance of ethics, morality, tradition, and honor now argue that Trump is not the antithesis of those virtues?
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