The immense stakes in the 2020 election

On September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93’s passengers defied armed hijackers and fought to take over the cockpit regardless of danger or odds because they realized that certain death was the alternative. Michael Anton’s 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” written for the Claremont Review of Books and later expanded into a book, argued that although Americans did not know what kind of president Donald Trump would be, they should risk all to elect him because they could be very sure that the alternative would be our republic’s death.

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Anton, now a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, again urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge....

... should the Democrats win, the ruling Left—which includes just about everyone who controls American government and society’s commanding heights—is ready, willing, and eager to implement plans that would make it virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win national elections again. These plans include the importation and counting of non-citizen voters. Elections-by-mail would shift power from voters to those who count the votes, just like in Venezuela....

The bulk of this well-written book juxtaposes accounts of life under what had been the American constitutional regime with the ruling-class politics that have gone a long way to destroy it. It opens with a bittersweet description of California, then and now....

Today’s California is for government-favored oligarchs and those who service them. You want a career? If you don’t conform every word and action to the ruling orthodoxies, your work and talents will be wasted. You want your children to grow up intelligent and decent? The schools will teach them little reasoning and much depravity. ...

For almost 200 years the Constitution, the American people’s basic “deal” with one another, channeled our strivings and disagreement into deliberations and compromises that allowed us to live the mostly decent lives our culture prescribed....

In today’s America, Anton writes,

In short, the ruling class has unleashed a bunch of tigers on America, which for now it is riding. Whether and for how long it can stay on their backs and not end up in their bellies is an open question...

This is an election like no other. To treat it otherwise would be a grievous and perhaps irreparable misstep. In case any of our readers are still uncertain, we thought we’d let Anton explain, in his own words, just what The Stakes are. If the ruling class and their Marxian revolutionaries currently roving the nation are allowed to regain the White House:

• “Biden has already promised to amnesty every illegal immigrant currently in the country. According to a 2018 Yale study, that’s at least 22 million people…. If each newly minted American brings over just one relative, that’s another 20 million new immigrants in Biden’s first term alone.”
   
• “Such an amnesty, once the Democratic machine got everyone registered to vote, would tip many purple states permanently blue. That’s the whole point. After that, the electoral map would become impossible for Republicans ever to win the presidency again. Which is also the point.”

...

But in the Obama era, they began to belligerently “weaponize” the federal government, using the IRS and intelligence agencies to thwart their political opponents. If granted control of the White House again, the lesson they will draw from defeating Trump is not only that they will not be held accountable for such tactics, but that such tactics work. They will use government agencies to kneecap their enemies in every conceivable fashion. Those are the stakes.

• “If you think we have mass surveillance already, just wait. The government and the tech companies already work hand-in-glove, the latter helping the former in exchange for favorable tax, regulatory, and immigration treatment. More of that is coming, and on a bigger scale.”...
   
• ... The Left finally has found a way around the First Amendment: consolidate all ‘speech’ and public expression onto a handful of private-sector platforms run by oligarchs and staffed by wokerati…. Free speech as we have known it—as our founders insisted was the natural bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule.”...
   
• “The fundamental right of self-defense—the bedrock foundation of all our other rights—increasingly is not honored if you’re a member of a disfavored group and your attacker is not.”...
   
• “If present trends continue, the Constitution has no future. Neither its letter nor its spirit will be honored—either in ordinary circumstances or in the breach. Not only will none of the Constitution’s guarantees be upheld nor any of its limits respected, but the document itself will be increasingly denounced as a hateful tool of racist oppression, a relic of a benighted, evil past best left on the ash heap of history. That judgment is already the norm in academia and elite intellectual circles.”

The end of America: those are the stakes....