“The Flight 93 Election,” Ten Years Later

en years ago today, September 5, 2016, Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” took the internet, and the Right, by storm. Anton’s essay made the case for Trump in the face of furious, well-funded opposition from elite conservative intellectual and political circles.

The electoral choice was easy: Trump was a risk; Hillary was a certainty. On Trump, though, Anton went further. On trade, war, the economy, and especially immigration, Trump promised to disrupt the establishment status quo in the name of the long-aggrieved GOP voting base. He ran on a concrete policy platform, amassed a presidential electoral coalition around it, and then delivered. How novel!

Anton’s arresting polemic in defense of Trump has been vindicated. It also did not come from nowhere. Six years before “Flight 93,” in 2010, the late Angelo Codevilla (a longtime Claremont Senior Fellow) published an equally viral essay in The American Spectator, “America’s Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution.” He called out the intellectual, moral, and republican bankruptcy of America’s bipartisan ruling class. Rush Limbaugh read it on air, as he would again with Anton’s essay in 2016.

Anton and Codevilla were ahead of the curve, analyzing the trends and the future of American politics and institutions at a higher level than their peers in the commentariat. Many of their Claremont Institute colleagues had been doing similar work for decades—on the threat of the administrative state, the folly of George W. Bush’s Middle East democracy project, and foundational constitutional questions like birthright citizenship.