Michael Anton, in the preface to his just released, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote That Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose, explains why he felt compelled to write “The Flight 93 Election“:
In 2016, I judged the modes and orders of my time – and especially of conservatism – to be exhausted and imprisoned within an inflexible institutional and intellectual authority. I believed that its conclusions on the most pressing matters were false and pernicious and that its orthodoxy therefore required smashing. I believed that ordinary rhetoric would not suffice. I knew that in writing I would anger many more than I inspired.
And yet, though he acknowledges that in some ways he felt inadequate to the task, no one else was taking it up and it needed to be said. So he did it, and at great personal risk to himself. (Full disclosure: I have known and considered Michael Anton a friend for some quarter of century, and I knew of his struggles during the time of his anonymity. Those who dismissed his concerns as inconsequential did so out of animus or, in some cases, just didn’t know what they were talking about.)
This new work, Anton suggests, is offered in the hope that in having explained the nature of danger we faced in 2016, we do not imagine that it is now vanquished. Indeed, much of it yet remains, and we need to begin to answer “Where do we go from here?” There’s a lot more to landing a plane than just overtaking the hijackers and it is by no means obvious that we have even fully accomplished that.
There will be more to say at American Greatness about Anton’s important work in the coming weeks. In the meantime, all readers of AG should order their copy of After the Flight 93 Election and get involved in the conversation. Let’s Roll.