The MAGA New Right

The Flight 93 Election

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The Flight 93 Election

Author: Publius Decius Mus (pseudonym of Michael Anton)
Published: September 2016, Claremont Review of Books
Genre: Political essay / manifesto

What It Is

The single most important intellectual document of the early MAGA New Right. Published weeks before the 2016 election under the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” (a Roman consul who sacrificed himself to save Rome), the essay argued that the 2016 election was an existential crisis requiring Trump as a desperate last gamble. It went viral after Rush Limbaugh read it on air on September 7, 2016.

Anton’s identity was later revealed in The Weekly Standard after Trump won. Anton joined the National Security Council in January 2017.

Core Argument

The essay’s central metaphor: the 2016 election is like Flight 93 on 9/11. You may die storming the cockpit, but you will certainly die if you do nothing. A Hillary Clinton presidency is certain death; Trump is a gamble. “Charge the cockpit or you die.”

Against the conservative establishment (“Conservatism, Inc.”):

  • Conservative intellectuals admit America is in crisis but refuse to act with urgency
  • They have been “losing ground for at least a century” while occupying themselves with think-tanks, magazines, and conferences
  • They are “keepers of the status quo” — “Washington Generals” who show up to lose
  • If conservatives truly believe their own arguments about the importance of virtue, morality, and family — and yet also believe things can continue as they are — they are logically contradicted

The three core Trumpist issues:

  • Immigration (“stop importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures”)
  • Trade (“economic nationalism”)
  • War (“America-first foreign policy”)

Anton argues Trump was the only candidate who articulated all three correctly and was willing to fight for them. Other conservatives saw the same problems (Douthat, Salam, Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war) but refused to connect them or vote for the man who would.

The immigration argument (which Field notes echoes the “Great Replacement” conspiracy):

  • “Ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty” is turning the electorate permanently Democratic
  • This is the “mystic chord” uniting America’s ruling class across party lines
  • Trump alone is willing to say “I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live.”

The future without Trump: Caesarism, secession, collapse, or permanent “managerial Davoisie liberalism.” No scenario ends well.

Significance

  • Defined Trumpism intellectually before Trump could define it himself
  • Served as the intellectual bridge between the Claremont Institute’s West Coast Straussianism and raw populist politics
  • Rush Limbaugh’s same-day endorsement gave it a mass audience of ~15 million listeners — see The Shaming of the Never Trumpers for the broadcast transcript and the wiki’s structural reading of the Claremont→Limbaugh→mass-audience pipeline
  • Field calls it “apocalyptic and conspiratorial” while acknowledging it made a “positive analytical case for Trump” that other conservatives had avoided

The Limbaugh Amplification (September 7, 2016)

The wiki’s structural reading: Flight 93’s influence was a function of Limbaugh’s same-day broadcast as much as of the essay’s content. Limbaugh devoted most of an episode to reading and amplifying the piece, crashing Claremont’s website in the process. Limbaugh credited himself with coining “Washington Generals” before Anton (a borrowing the transcript appears to confirm) and named Angelo Codevilla’s 2010 American Spectator essay “America’s Ruling Class” as the structural antecedent. The full transmission lineage:

Codevilla (2010, American Spectator) — ruling-class/country-class
→ Limbaugh (2010-onward, talk radio) — popularization
→ Anton (2016, CRB) — catastrophist culmination
→ Trump (2016-onward) — political incarnation

The transcript (The Shaming of the Never Trumpers) is the wiki’s primary documentary evidence for this pipeline operating in real time.

On the “Flight 93” logic: The essay established a template that would recur throughout the New Right — catastrophism, the claim that existing institutions are irredeemably corrupt, and the conclusion that extreme action (supporting an imperfect, even dangerous figure) is therefore justified. This logic reappeared in the Claremont Institute’s “The Fight is Now” in November 2020.

Contradictions and Tensions

  • Anton simultaneously invokes conservative first principles and argues that those principles cannot save America — essentially arguing for the abandonment of conservative proceduralism in favor of emergency politics
  • The essay is written under a pseudonym, using the Straussian “esoteric” tradition of concealment — Anton is performing the very thing he’s writing about
  • Its immigration arguments rely on demographic replacement theory that Field explicitly links to the Great Replacement conspiracy

Cross-References

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