“LOL, NOTHING MATTERS” – A common gloat of Trumpists on Twitter ~2019
“A republic, if you give a fuck” – What Benjamin Franklin should have said back in 1787
IN SEPTEMBER 2016, A FOUR THOUSAND-WORD ESSAY written pseudonymously by the conservative writer Michael Anton appeared in the Claremont Review of Books. The Flight 93 Election achieved no small measure of fame and notoriety for its bleak assessment of America’s prospects and its presentation of the then-imminent presidential election as an apocalyptic last chance to save the American Republic. Anton argued that America was in a comparable position to the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, which on the morning of September 11th was being flown by hijackers towards an unknown target. The choice facing the passengers, once they turned on their phones and discovered the truth of the attacks earlier that day on the World Trade Centre, was dreadful in its simplicity:
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. (Michael Anton)
That this hack would profane the heroism of the passengers of that doomed flight scarcely merits comment. And whatever one thinks of the propriety or accuracy of such a metaphor, one cannot dispute its power. It starkly illustrates the perspective of the substantial portion of American society who feared then and fear now that mass immigration will irreversibly tilt America’s political balance to the left, and that this is in fact a deliberate strategy. And (the theory goes) once conservatives are locked out of power, the floodgates will be thrown open, permanently, until traditional and conservative America goes the way of Pocahontas. It seems clear in hindsight that this fear (of runaway demographic change, deliberately engineered from the top) was the obvious and inevitable reaction to the sense of liberal triumphalism following the 2012 election, and the accompanying raft of commentary making almost the identical claim, albeit without the conspiratorial angle; namely, that America was now inevitably on a path towards becoming a “majority-minority” country and that Republicans and conservatives would have to get with the programme or die out. And if the American people did not find the courage to storm the cockpit, they would die too and their experiment in liberty would be lost forever.
The essay is, in its paranoia and apocalypticism, part of a recognisable tendency in American conservative thought, stretching back to the Civil War era at least. Notably, one of the many terrors stalking the antebellum south was the prospect of encirclement by anti-slavery states, whose numbers would eventually swell to such as to permit slavery to be voted out of existence. The urgency motivating secession, even at risk of war against the much larger and wealthier north, was this very sense that the last way out was being shut, and that if they did not break away now they would never again have a better chance (1860 being the “Flight 93” moment for American slaveholders). It is worth emphasising the centrality of mass immigration as a deliberate and irreversible liberal power grab to the argument. The author makes a few gestures towards other conservative priorities (isolationism, protectionism, tax and so on), and even attempts to argue that there is a profound intellectual trinity of sorts between immigration control, isolationism and protectionism, which Trump is the first candidate in decades to understand and articulate, but such arguments are left largely undeveloped. Anton is emphatic, however, that policy follows demography. Only if we pull up the drawbridge do we conservatives have any chance of survival, let alone of making headway on any of their other priorities.
The essay captured the mood of the moment, at least on the right, and (if one accepts his priors) there really was a certain logic to it. While one might raise an eyebrow at Anton’s choice of analogy, the idea that the structural basis of American political life was being shifted inexorably leftwards by gradual demographic change was not, in 2016, obviously wrong. And I remember well the feeling back then, and not just on the right, that 2016 was the last stand of the Republican party as we then knew it (i.e. white, rural and Christian) before it eventually woke up to the reality of the new electorate and changed its ways, just as social democratic parties had already had to do across Europe in response to deindustrialisation and the rapid decline of working class political identity as a basis for voting (Blair’s reinvention of the UK Labour party being only the most well-known example).
Of course, Mr Trump did win in 2016, and again in 2024. So how does The Flight 93 Election stand up ten years on? I will try to answer this question at least in part by asking a different question: ten years on, the Republic itself, as a system of government constrained by laws and by the consent of the governed, is in grave peril. We have returned to office a man who has repeatedly attempted to shake off, with no little success, the chains and fetters made by the founders to contain an overweening executive. So why does no-one, beyond the usual pockets of liberal fretting, seem to care?
Those of my fellow-citizens who do not see in this present American government what I see fall into three main camps. First are those who are wilfully blind: those who pretend not to understand and pretend not to see. These are the people who insist, coolly, that Donald Trump is an essentially ordinary democratic politician. Perhaps he is a libertarian; perhaps a nationalist; maybe just a good old-fashioned conservative – more capable, perhaps, and more flamboyant; certainly a little more coarse; but not, they stress, different in a dangerous or undemocratic way to those that have come before. “January 6th?” they exclaim, eyes wide with fake innocence, “Just a campaign rally that got a bit out of hand.” (Michael Anton sits firmly in this camp). Second are those who do not deny that they perceive much of what I perceive, but where I see cause for horror, disgust or alarm, they are gratified, even delighted. They hate the noise and chatter and glacial pace of democratic government; all the back-and-forth between congress and the senate and the courts; the seeming inability for anything ever to change; for things to get better; for any business to be done. They want a strongman, a ruler – an idol to bow down to. They are getting what they want. Third are those who notice almost nothing; do not register the significance of what little they do notice; or forget everything almost as soon as it happens. These are the voters who didn’t notice the Capitol Riot of January 6th, 2021; or didn’t see why it was such a big deal; or forgot about it within days or weeks of it happening, regardless of what impression it initially made on them; or remembered it and perhaps even disapproved, but considered it just one issue among many, to be weighed up alongside high gas prices and transgender kids playing girls’ sports. It is on this third group I wish to focus. These are the people who just don’t care.
Of all the ways one might imagine a great national experiment in liberty coming to an end, few are as dispiriting, as utterly bleak, as the idea that democracy might die because her citizens don’t much care either way. This is not the tragic end of a gallant republic, defiant to the last in her failed bid for freedom from the crushing grasp of some dismal tyranny, as would be the case if Ukraine were defeated in her ongoing war for independence. The fall of the Second Spanish Republic to Franco’s unspeakable regime was likewise a catastrophe, but it did not, at least, come about because nobody cared. And yet, how else can one explain the perhaps imminent extinction of our own experiment in liberty except in terms of indifference? There is no serious question of the integrity of 2024’s elections (nor 2020’s, for that matter, but the double-standard here is so maddening that I cannot bear to revisit it). No – Donald Trump is the legitimately elected president of our great nation. It bears repeating, again and yet again. He won the popular vote. He won every swing state. He outperformed every prediction; every poll; all his own records in the two elections prior. He achieved unprecedented levels of support for a Republican among young and minority voters. (So much for irreversible demographic destiny).
This did not happen because the majority of American voters are baying fascists. Certainly, a dreadful minority of us are: loud, militant, conspiratorial and (for all the endless and empty genuflection to “liberty”) determined to enslave themselves and everyone else to the will of a petulant tyrant – but these are not, thank God, enough to make a winning coalition. The tens of millions of voters who put Mr Trump over the top in 2024 are men and women who are neither partisan fanatics nor ideological crackpots. They are simply people who weighed up, on the one hand, a criminal and bloody attempt to block the outcome of a free and fair election, thwarted only by Vice President Pence’s miraculous, decisive and wholly unexpected attack of courage and integrity; and, on the other, persistent high inflation, excessive immigration and irritating woke rhetoric. This is not a failing of intelligence. It is far, far worse than that. How can one describe the voter who understands, at some level, that January 6th was a treasonous assault on the American constitution and people (an attempt, in essence, to end elections as we understand them), but simultaneously thinks that issues like high egg prices or gender-neutral bathrooms or there being too many taco chefs called César are more important – so much more important, in fact, that they justify voting for the author of that unprecedented act of treason, thereby endorsing the crime and all such future crimes? Where did they think this would end?
My first attempt to write this essay was back in November 2025, before the president’s Venezuelan triumph and Iranian catastrophe both. Back then, I intended to list here all of Mr Trump’s most serious crimes against law, tradition, constitution and ordinary decency, and to hold this up in ridiculous contrast to the supposed virtues of the man that a non-partisan, ordinary voter might reach for to justify voting for him (“he’s a businessman”, “prices are just too high”, “there are too many immigrants”, and so on). This proved impossible. Even a potted summary of Donald Trump’s malfeasances would run into the tens of thousands of words and would, if given justice, fill entire books. And so long and so egregious is this list of violations already that it is hardly worth pointing out, as one should, that these are merely the crimes that we currently know about. There is a certain kind of futility, however (a futility which might as well define the Trump era) in piling up Trump’s scandals – each of which would have been era-defining and presidency-destroying for any previous administration – because so many of them are so grave, so instantly disqualifying, that if someone wasn’t persuaded not to vote for him by any one of them, why should they be persuaded by two, five or ten of them? Is there really some voter out there who can stomach January 6th; Access Hollywood; the various crypto scams; the sale of American foreign policy to the highest bidder; his open use of the presidency to tout for his family businesses; his repeated attacks on the credibility of American elections (when he loses); his use of intimidation to keep his own party in line and use of the pardon power to thwart investigations into his conduct; his attempts to compel officials like Mr Raffensperger into fabricating vote counts; his repeated pardoning of wealthy donors to his campaign and so on, but who would be finally disillusioned by something else? (Amazingly, the apparent impact of the Epstein files suggests that such voters might actually exist. Why this scandal cut through when thousands of others did not, I have absolutely no idea). The only point I need make is that, in the most important sense (namely, the electoral sense) none of this mattered. The decisive cohort of voters in this country either do not see the threat that such a man as Mr Trump poses to the Republic, or simply do not care whether the Republic lives or dies.
From this, what follows? Simply this: that since the so-called Republican Party has now been repeatedly rewarded and not punished by the voters for its persistent criminal attempts to corrupt American democracy and subvert the rule of law, we can only expect such efforts to proliferate and intensify in the future. In these circumstances, the approach favoured by the Democratic Party until now – of refusing to break the rules themselves, even as the Republicans do, and appealing to voters on this basis – is patently suicidal. Mrs Obama’s mantra that “when they go low, we go high” is only a viable precept if the voters (a) notice, (b) care and (c) consistently vote to reward the party which plays by the rules and punish the party which bends or breaks them, even if only belatedly, when buyer’s remorse sets in. The more belated the electoral reckoning, and the greater the damage done to the organs of the Republic, the more consistent and punishing and unambiguous that reckoning must eventually be. And yes, the authoritarian party did suffer defeats or setbacks in national elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022, but these were neither unambiguous nor forceful enough to break the fever. So who honestly supposes the now-imminent mid-terms will have any chastening effect at all? The response to defeat or disappointment has not been to chart a course back to normality and moderation, but to double down on authoritarianism, radicalism and criminality. Was it too much to hope that 2024, had it gone the other way, might have been the final straw? Perhaps it was only ever a distant chance. But it was a chance, and it was our last chance. As things stand now, we know that Trump’s successors from his own party will continue to use the authoritarian strategies he has pioneered, since they have delivered such astonishing and unexpected success. The longer this goes on, the more crimes are accumulated by the governing party, and the less they can risk giving up power. And even if the Democratic Party ever is permitted to return to office, we can expect only escalating partisan warfare to continue, as more and more of our civil and democratic institutions are dismantled or corrupted. The idea that they would be permitted to honestly pursue a programme of government voted for by the American people is laughable.
Ten years on, the mendacious absurdity of Anton’s argument has been thoroughly exposed by events. Indeed, if there ever was a “Flight 93 Election”, a decisive test of the “virtù” at the core of the American nation, then 2024 was it. It was our last chance to tell the Republican party, and all her aspiring despots, that authoritarianism was a losing game. It was our last chance to prove to our erstwhile allies that an American alliance was not worthless. It was our last chance to put the lid back on the seething pot of paranoid conspiracism; to defend the rule of law; to defend press plurality; to restrain elite corruption; to resist the sordid alliance of aggressive despotisms coalescing around Moscow and Tehran and Beijing. And the blatant, obvious, reeking truth is this: that 2024 was as easy a question as any electorate in democratic history has ever been asked, and that we flunked it spectacularly.
Ten years ago, the ridiculous Michael Anton worried that a future generation of Mexican and Guatemalan-Americans would put the United States on an unstoppable path to socialism and disaster. Today, we know that the real threat was ourselves: our own decadence and idleness and indifference. We lived in a wealthy and successful country, and we had become so accustomed to wealth and comfort that we lost interest in the civic virtue (or “virtù”, as Anton insists on calling it) on which that success was built. We neglected our responsibilities as citizens, and instead treated our national elections with the seriousness of a reality TV show. And suitably enough, when the moment came, it was the very Hispanic voters that Anton was certain would betray America to socialism who put Trump back in office.
The point is not to lay the blame at Mr Anton’s feet, as much as he would love that. No – our ruin has been long in the making. The truth, that seems obvious only now, is that the belly of this great republic has long been swollen with fascism. For decades we watched it grow, though all save a few have refused to see what is right before our eyes. Even when the monster quickened, we shut our eyes to the looming terror. Yes, the top is at fault – the cowards in the Senate who refused to convict Mr Trump after the Capitol Riot in 2021 (another no-brainer of a question, if ever there was one); Trump’s treasonous fake judges; the so-called conservative journalists and thinkers who have lied for and justified this regime whenever required; the business, tech and media elites who have swarmed around this President like unctuous flies – but so too are the people. We are guilty of not noticing, not caring, not thinking. We, the people, will lose our republic because we do not cherish it. And what shall we do when it is gone? Once we have crossed that line, that point at which opposition and suicide become one, we shall find that whatever monstrosity replaces the government of laws is not so easily undone.
Nathan
Monday October 26th, 2026
York
