Crashing a plane can have bad results
Claremont rooted on "The Flight 93 Election." Now? Skittishness.
Back in the Fall of 2016, the Claremont Review of Books ran an essay anonymously written by Michael Anton, called “The Flight 93 Election.” The idea was that smart conservatives should take an admittedly potentially disastrous chance on Donald Trump because, obviously, Hillary Clinton would mean the end of America.
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.
That’s really the lede. Still astonishing to read after all these years.
Well, conservatives have given Donald Trump two chances now at charging the cockpit. How’s that going?
If the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books is any indication … let’s just say there’s some squeamishness on the part of writer Christopher Caldwell after watching Trump start trade wars with the entire world.
The title of his essay: “Let’s Not Do That Again.”
After a May meeting, the United States and China have stepped back from the astronomical tariffs that each imposed in the course of the spring. Western capitals and Western capital have calmed, and much of Trump’s trade plan is going into effect. But American voters have now experienced a sense of insecurity and arbitrariness that they will not soon forget. For a while, previously unthinkable things became thinkable: recession, depression, lost savings, a premature end to the second Trump Administration—in short, a host of confidence-sapping memories that may yet imperil the president’s ability to govern.
Doesn’t sound good does it?
But I don’t want to overstate things. Caldwell does actually a reasonable job in painting a picture of why it might be smart to get untangled with China. The problem, of course, is that Trump never ever does this things in a smart way.
Caldwell kind of concedes the point at the conclusion of his essay, which basically says “Thank God China’s leader is smart, calm and collected because ours isn’t.”
It is worrisome that Donald Trump has grown so dependent on crowing about his victories. For a man whose deepest conviction is that every human being is open to a deal, he pays strikingly little attention to other countries’ sense of honor—which is generally the value that statesmen are least willing to barter away. It is not Trump’s fault that Americans find themselves in a position where their future economic comfort is at least partly in the hands of Xi Jinping. But Americans are fortunate that Xi had the ability, the inclination, and the social standing in his own political culture to accompany the United States back from the brink. Had we been dealing with a more democratic adversary—one provided by the media with the same incentives American leaders have to whip up the passions and resentments of the public—the outcome could have been calamitously different.
This is wrong in a few ways:
Trump hasn’t “grown” dependent on crowing. It’s his lifelong habit, his whole mode of being. Everybody knows it, which is why expecting better from him is a fool’s errand. He is who he is.
Likewise, it is not true that Trump pays “little attention to other countries’ sense of honor.” His goal — as in his personal relationships — is to obliterate that sense, to dominate and humiliate. It turns out that doesn’t always work.
“Had we been dealing with a more democratic adversary” is a chilling sentiment — it suggests that democracy is the thing that will destroy us. Lucky there was a dictator on the other side! He might be right, but if so, Claremont was rooting on the destructive tendencies of our democracy all along.
The long and short of it is that Claremont a decade ago was ready to burn everything down. Now? The folks there seem a bit nervous that it’s getting warm in the room.
Turns out when you try to crash a plane, the plane sometimes crashes.
Or as they say, if you sign up for the Face-Eating Leopard Party, don’t be surprised when the leopard tries to eat your face.
I still think of Anton's article after all these years, for the same reasons you do, Joel. The attitude it embodied seemed so far from what I'd often read was the core of conservatism, or at least the brand as espoused by Burke and company. I could not believe that anyone who presumably would claim to be in Burke's tradition would think that Donald Trump was a requisite choice over Clinton. I was both genuinely curious about and frightened at the mental world masses of Americans had to inhabit to convince themselves that America needed Donald Trump to save itself from certain destruction at Hillary's hands. I also remember reading articles way back by Caldwell that in my memory, at least, seemed sane. Over the years since it seems like something bad happened to him. Your excerpt suggests maybe there's faint hope for a bit of a course correction on his part. I have to laugh at his assertion of what Trump's deepest conviction is. I'm pretty sure that would be a lot closer to something like "I am the world" than everyone is open to a "deal", a noun I have my doubts that Trump understands like most of us.