2016 US Presidential Election
Donald Trump defeats Hillary Clinton; the founding event of the MAGA New Right as a governing movement; the election that The Flight 93 Election was written to influence; the pivot point in the New Right’s long intellectual prehistory
What Happened
On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College (306–232) while losing the popular vote by approximately 3 million votes. Trump won by flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — “Rust Belt” states that had voted Democratic in presidential elections since the 1980s or longer — by narrow margins.
The result shocked virtually everyone: pollsters, media, the Democratic Party, the Republican establishment, and most of the New Right intellectuals who had been building toward this moment. Michael Anton’s The Flight 93 Election — published in September 2016 — had argued that Trump was the only possible candidate who could prevent civilizational catastrophe, but few expected it to work.
Intellectual Significance
The 2016 election is the moment when the New Right’s long intellectual project collided with electoral democracy:
For the Claremonters: the election vindicated The Flight 93 Election’s framing — the charge worked, the cockpit was taken. The Claremont Institute went from a respected but marginal conservative think tank to a central node of the MAGA intellectual infrastructure almost overnight.
For the Postliberals: Trump’s victory confirmed that liberalism was in crisis and that the time for Postliberalism had arrived. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) was already written; the election gave it its context.
For the Hard Right: Trump’s explicit anti-immigration rhetoric, his praise of authoritarian leaders, and his demolition of the Republican establishment vindicated the Hard Right’s prediction that populist nationalism could win. Steve Bannon moved from Breitbart to the White House.
For the New Right broadly: the election killed Fusionism as the Republican Party’s dominant ideology. The Bush-era Republican orthodoxy — free trade, immigration, interventionism — was repudiated by the party’s own voters.
The Limbaugh Transmission
The 2016 election is also the documented case of the Claremont Institute → Limbaugh → mass-conservative-audience pipeline operating in real time. Two transcripts in the wiki:
- The Shaming of the Never Trumpers (September 7, 2016) — Limbaugh devotes most of an episode to reading and amplifying The Flight 93 Election the day after publication, crashing Claremont’s website. Limbaugh’s gloss: “Conservatism no longer applies. We’re way past that.” Names Angelo Codevilla’s 2010 American Spectator “America’s Ruling Class” as the structural antecedent.
- We Have Not Lost Our Country (November 9, 2016) — morning-after-Trump’s-victory framing as (a) ideological repudiation of “Big Government,” (b) Brexit-twin transatlantic event, (c) repudiation of Democratic identity-group politics. The wiki’s clearest single artifact of the New Right’s real-time self-understanding of 2016 as ideological-civilizational rather than the contemporaneously-popular media frame of “economic anxiety.”
The Intellectual Precursors
The 2016 election did not come from nowhere. The intellectual infrastructure that made it possible had been building for decades:
- Harry V. Jaffa’s West Coast Straussianism provided the political philosophy
- Pat Buchanan’s Paleoconservatism (1990s) provided the template for trade/immigration/anti-interventionism
- The internet Right and Hard Right figures like Curtis Yarvin provided the cultural energy and the “red pill” pipeline
- The Flight 93 Election provided the intellectual permission slip for elite conservatives to vote Trump
Cross-References
- MAGA New Right — the movement the election brought to power
- The Flight 93 Election — the essay written to enable Trump’s victory
- The Claremonters — the intellectual beneficiaries
- Fusionism — the ideology the election killed
- Steve Bannon — the campaign strategist
- Paleoconservatism — the earlier populist-nationalist template
- 2020 Election — the sequel; see January 6 2021
- Rush Limbaugh — the transmission node
- The Shaming of the Never Trumpers — September 7 broadcast
- We Have Not Lost Our Country — November 9 broadcast
- Angelo Codevilla — structural antecedent