This “Flight 93 Election” essay is getting linked around. Apparently Rush Limbaugh performed it on air. Some conservatives are dismayed, others delighted.
It’s the first political tract I have ever read that singles out Chicken Little, by name, as a conspicuous squish on the pressing ‘sky is falling’ issue of the day.
Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it.
If only Chicken Little had nominated Foghorn Leghorn, for President, that would have proved he was taking this ‘sky is falling’ issue seriously. Actions speak louder, I say, LOUDER than words! “Pay attention to me, boy! I’m not just talkin’ to hear my head roar!”
On the other hand, skeptics may be put in mind of a different Leghornism: this essay, like Paul Revere’s ride! “A little light, I say a little light! – in the belfry!”
On a more semi-serious note, I have two books on my Kindle I am going to try to get through this weekend. First, Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction. I am just a few pages in but, let me say, if it turns out he is quietly taking on a lot of water he was frantically trying to bail out of the bilge a few years ago …. ?
What I mean is: here is our Henry, being indignant on our Corey’s behalf. Henry questioned such statements by Lilla as the following, intended to correct Corey’s excesses as ‘uber-lumper’ of conservatives with reactionaries:
The turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.
That is, Lilla thought it was important not to lump in NR-style conservatism with reactionism. (The next sentence reads: “To understand why the distinction between them still matters, we need to remind ourselves what the terms “conservative” and “reactionary” originally meant.”)
But what’s this I read, in the first few pages of The Shipwrecked Mind?
The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind. Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. He is time’s exile. The revolutionary sees the radiant future invisible to others and it electrifies him. The reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and he too is electrified. He feels himself in a stronger position than his adversary because he believes he is the guardian of what actually happened, not the prophet of what might be. This explains the strangely exhilarating despair that courses through reactionary literature, the palpable sense of mission — as the reactionary American magazine National Review put it in its very first issue, the mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” The militancy of his nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.
Lilla is now assuming without argument that National Review was founded not as a journal of conservative thought but as a ‘reactionary magazine’? How far we have come! But I’m still only a few pages in. We shall see what we shall see.
Per the title of this post, I do feel Lilla has missed a yuuuuuge opportunity, not playing on the title of another classic, cautionary text.
I’m also planning to read George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism. I honestly don’t know what I’ll find.
{ 22 comments }
ZM 09.10.16 at 4:18 am
John Holbo,
“The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind. Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. He is time’s exile. The revolutionary sees the radiant future invisible to others and it electrifies him. The reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and he too is electrified.”
This weekend you might be interested in reading Rod Dreher’s recent article on post-modernity which quotes Zygmunt Bauman on time in Christian civilisation and time in post-modernity:
“[Bauman says] “Pilgrims had a stake in the solidity of the world they walked; in a kind of world in which one can tell life as a continuous story, a ‘sense-making’ story, such a story makes each event the effect of the event before and the cause of the event after, each age a station on the road pointing towards fulfilment.” …. Time ceases to be experienced like a river, says Bauman, but is rather nothing more than a series of ponds and pools — episodes that have no real connection to each other. The “horror†(Bauman’s word) of the new situation is that you can’t count on the work you do today counting for anything tomorrow. The only way to manage life successfully under these conditions is to avoid long-term commitments…”
I was reading it after faustusnotes brought up Dreher’s piece on someone deliberately breaking the law playing Pokemon Go in a church in Russia, which I have to go back and comment about actually, since it was kind of misrepresented.
Hindu Friend 09.10.16 at 10:20 am
Flight 93 election piece is spot-on in identifying increasing tribalism/declining lineralism. This is a global phenonemenon, not just a US one. Past tome for shrilly condemning it–needs a more serious analysis/response.
John Holbo 09.10.16 at 10:28 am
I’m willing to grant the 93 election piece status as a symptom, not as a diagnosis. But I do agree it’s a symptom in need of a serious diagnosis.
R.Porrofatto 09.10.16 at 3:01 pm
The Flight 93 Election. Wow, was this written by the same guy who came up with the “Twin Tower Sale” ad for the mattress store in Texas?
Also, from that essay to buttress (operative syllable: butt) the Decline of America, example #4,987,458 of how conservatives of any stripe are incapable of using statistics in good faith (i.e., they make it up):
Crime, for instance, is down from its mid-’70s and early ’90s peak—but way, way up from the historic American norm that ended when liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s.
Crime rates are only not way way up compared to the mid-60’s, but much lower, and approaching mid 50’s levels. E.g., the homicide rate of 2014 was the same as 1953 (4.5/100k), and actually lower than 1952. But then this is according to the same FBI who found no evidence of the treasonous criminality of Hillary Clinton, so easily dismissed.
Glen Tomkins 09.10.16 at 5:08 pm
This Decius Mus piece is gaining influence in the movement, with Gary Bauer quoting it at the Values Voters Summit (http://crooksandliars.com/2016/09/lets-roll-gary-bauer-tells-values-voters).
The movement has been, for a long time, on the edge of giving up on the political system. They’ve had their successes within the system, and that has kept them from making a final break. But, basically, they believe that the world in general and the US in particular is on the wrong track, has been hijacked, if you will, by people intent on ending all that is decent and good in Western Civilization. When their party wins, that pulls them back a little from the brink, because there is hope that the forces of civilization are back in control. But then their party either does nothing with its control of the cockpit to change course, or actively goes liberal and joins in aiming for barbarism.
Trump presents them with a new problem Their party has been hijacked by someone who is not actually a conservative on most issues, and not particularly likely to win. They can deal with not winning, though the less their party is in control, the less loyalty they have to the system. But if their party isn’t even trying to be for civilization enough to at least have a candidate who is against barbarism, then they are well and truly lost.
The saving grace in the whole Trump catastrophe, though, is that Trump is not only for one key component of their program, he is so far and so unapologetically for getting rid of the “threat” from anti-Western ethnicities taking over the US, that he might actually get something substantive about that threat done. None of the more respectable and conventional Rs who tried for the nomination this year were ever going to actually get anything done to even slow the demographic tide. But Trump is a cut the Gordian Knot kind of guy. Even if not particularly inclined to ethnic cleansing, he would have to do something dramatic if he won to avoid being a failure and not getting anything done while in office. And the legal limbo the 11 million have been left in actually would let a president send out a detention force without any further Congressional action. Trump could detain the 11 million, and that crashes the political system even as it gets rid of the 11 million.
It’s almost as if they had read Saul Alinsky, or at least the BS version of Saul Alinsky that exists only in their fevered imaginations, but this is what that Decius Mus person at the Claremont Institute, and now apparently Bauer, believes — we need to heighten the contradictions. Rush the cockpit by backing Trump’s play at the dictatorship that would result from actually ethnically cleansing 11 million of us. Of course that ends up with the political system crashing, but that’s the only way forward now. Crash the system, and then the people will turn to the movement as the only force capable of leading them out of the chaos and back to civilization. Bonus — the people are now a lot whiter than they were before Trump crashed the system getting rid of the 11 million.
P O'Neill 09.10.16 at 5:43 pm
Hillary at the Deplorables/Streisand fundraiser —
You know, I’ve been saying at events like this lately, I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse. Tonight, I’m all that stands between a much better outcome!
Russell Arben Fox 09.10.16 at 7:22 pm
Glen,
Rush the cockpit by backing Trump’s play at the dictatorship that would result from actually ethnically cleansing 11 million of us. Of course that ends up with the political system crashing, but that’s the only way forward now. Crash the system, and then the people will turn to the movement as the only force capable of leading them out of the chaos and back to civilization. Bonus — the people are now a lot whiter than they were before Trump crashed the system getting rid of the 11 million.
What’s scary is that this claim is, within a certain paranoid and cramped worldview, eminently plausible, and thus an inducement to action.
Francis 09.10.16 at 8:18 pm
I remain amazed at the assurance displayed by this genre of conservative catastrophist that they will end up better off after the Crash. I’m just some mediocre lawyer, not a historian, but even I know that the Russian (and Chinese and French and Eygptian etc.) revolutions / civil wars did not work out so well for big chunks of the population.
I like Scalzi’s line, originally aimed at anti-tax activists: “… just how long after their no-tax utopia comes true that their generally white, generally entitled, generally soft and pudgy asses are turned into thin strips of Objectivist Jerky by the sort of pitiless sociopath who is actually prepped and ready to live in the world that logically follows these people’s fondest desires.”
brett 09.10.16 at 9:15 pm
Anyone who uses the word “unwarrantedly” twice in the same short paragraph deserves to be dragged face down across a parking lot in the name of all lovers of prose. It might be the clunkiest English word I’ve ever seen.
At long last, sir, have you no thesaurus?
Anarcissie 09.11.16 at 12:24 am
Actually, Mus says, ‘[A] Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.’ This does not strike me as a conviction that one will be better off after the Crash.
Dave Maier 09.11.16 at 12:39 am
That Flight 93 thing was … interesting. I was struck by the journal’s disclaimer, below an article which argues in all seriousness that if I do not [N.B.: do NOT] vote for Donald Trump, then I am contributing to the seemingly inevitable slide into barbarism of this benighted country, that “[n]othing in this journal, whether in print or pixels, is an attempt to […] influence the election of any candidate.” Is that right.
Lee A. Arnold 09.11.16 at 11:01 am
I had no idea that the Claremont Review was so crazy. There’s another thing I won’t ever read.
divelly 09.11.16 at 4:14 pm
Flight 93 was shot down by USAF.
divelly 09.11.16 at 4:16 pm
No Gulf of Tonkin incident.
No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Only 2 times DC lied to us,right?
PatinIowa 09.11.16 at 7:21 pm
Dave Meier @ 11
The Claremont Institute is a 503(c)(3) non-profit. They and their donors might have to pay taxes if they admitted doing what they do. They probably couldn’t take as much money from corporations as I assume they do.
But hey, what’s a little lying and tax evasion in the service of “virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on,” as the article puts it?
Neville Morley 09.11.16 at 8:42 pm
Has anyone discussed *which* Publius Decius Mus the ‘Flight 93 Election’ author is identifying with?
mds 09.12.16 at 12:29 am
Really? He embraces enormous tax cuts for the rich, massively increasing military spending, and vicious institutionalized racism and sexism. He plays up white victimhood, and is willing to pay lip service to right-wing authoritarian Christian causes regardless of any personal religious beliefs. All of that would seem to jibe with the modern American conservative movement really well.
Presumably one of the two who supposedly embraced the ritual of devotio, offering their own lives to the gods in exchange for Roman victory. Or maybe the third one, who got lucky enough to lose to Pyrrhus? One could make the case that a Democrat winning a presidential election, but thereby spawning yet another reactionary armed rebellion, would count as a Pyrrhic victory. But that might be a little too subtle.
I will say, though, that the piece in question did have at least one worthwhile consequence. It led Ben Shapiro (Ben Shapiro!) to describe it thus:
… Well, I laughed.
casmilus 09.12.16 at 10:39 am
With this article, I feel that CT has now become like a fan forum for a cult scifi series, where it is now just too fatiguing to keep up with all the jabber and in-references. Just can’t make the effort to puzzle out the meaning of this stuff anymore. I mean, I do have a copy of a Mark Lilla book, and I sort of get the conflict with him and you guys, but… sorry, the feud stopped being fun to watch.
Similarly, I gave up on Rod Dreher a while back. He’s just a one-note bore and it’s not interesting or slightly amusing any more, especially as any detailed reading shows he’s only concerned with his own status within the conservative comment-ecology, and he fears genuine marginalisation, despite all the voice-in-the-wilderness posturing.
Chip Daniels 09.12.16 at 5:58 pm
“Crash the system, and then the people will turn to the movement as the only force capable of leading them out of the chaos and back to civilization.”
Gotta say, this sounds like every would-be revolutionary I have ever heard of. Its practically Helter-Skelter.
Not that it isn’t a dangerous idea; sometimes these guys get laughed off, other times they are taken seriously.
parse 09.12.16 at 7:14 pm
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.
This seems exactly backwards to me. What history tells us about Flight 93 is there are no guarantee except one: if you charge the cockpit, you die.
Because isn’t that what happened? They charged the cockpit and they died?
So according to their metaphor, there’s only one guarantee. If you mess with Hillary, you die.
It might well be the case that if passengers hadn’t charged the cockpit things would have been worse, but that’s only conjecture.
parse 09.12.16 at 7:15 pm
Sorry–italics should include the line Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.
Meredith 09.15.16 at 4:48 am
I dunno. I’m just sad that Flight 93 has been reduced to this. I mean, I don’t know much more about that flight than what I saw in the movie, which I watched again last Sunday (with feeling; my husband was critical — of the movie, not me). If Pennsylvania and Newark and DC and NYC are real places to you, and the people who live (lived) there real people, none of this is easy stuff to play with. We’re still to deep in it. This recommended from a Jersey girl (New Jersey, where people talk right even when they don’t talk my particular version of NJ — this was the world around me, as I grew up, that I still love): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg
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