Looking Back on the 2016 Essay That Changed American History

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in which more than 3,000 Americans were killed by Islamic hijackers who turned commercial planes into missiles. It also marks the tenth anniversary of Michael Anton’s pseudonymous essay, “The Flight 93 Election.”

That essay, arguing for the existential necessity of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, was widely criticized on both left and right. Yet the arguments it made and the images it galvanized were also widely credited with helping propel Donald Trump into the White House. Ten years later, those arguments are still worth looking at.

The central argument of Anton’s essay was evident from the title. Like those passengers on Flight 93 who realized what was going on with their plane on September 11, 2001, and decided to storm the cockpit to stop their plane from being used as a weapon against the nation, Americans had a duty to stop Clinton from winning the 2016 presidential election.

“2016 is the Flight 93 election,” Anton wrote. “Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway.” Despite Anton’s clear meaning that charging the cockpit in this scenario involved voting for Donald Trump and not some kind of armed coup, critics had a field day intentionally misunderstanding him.

That he did indeed mean winning the election was clear from the lines immediately following: “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.”

The cockpit was clearly the White House. Changing the metaphor but keeping the meaning, Anton observed that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto,” whereas, “With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

Anton knew that this would sound “histrionic” to “ordinary conservative ears.” Thus, he spent much of his essay defending the case that things are really as bad as he says they are. And the evidence he marshalled was that conservatives had been saying things were this bad themselves for years. If all the ills attributed to the republic were as conservatives said, then “we are headed off a cliff” [his italics].

Anton’s conclusion was that it was “quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.” He noted that even those who said then-candidate Trump was on the right track policy-wise felt no need to support him. He described the mainstream conservative view as “Pollyanna-ish declinism,” summarized as “Things-Are-Really-Bad—But Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different!”

To put it in one way, Anton accused the world of ordinary conservative politicians and think tankers of the kind of conservatism that simply conserves the status quo. He didn’t quote Chesterton’s gibe that “The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected,” but his claims are similar.

Most conservative politicians and intellectuals had accepted, if unconsciously, their “status on the roster of the Washington Generals.” Like the Harlem Globetrotters’ regular opponent, “Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid.” When they are on the winning side, “it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.”

And while they don’t come up with “inanities” such as “32 ‘genders,’ elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, ‘Islamophobia,’ and Black Lives Matter,” too many conservatives “merely help ratify them.”

In a Hillary presidency, Anton warned, there would be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments,” the mainstream conservative tendency to give way, rationalize, or merely take the fights to the courts to be settled in a decade or so, America as we know it would die. Add to this agenda Anton’s sense that this agenda would be enforced by “a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ‘advanced’ Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England.”

Anton understood, too, that Democrats were hellbent on more and more massive immigration of people “with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty” in order to adjust the electorate more left and less American in every cycle. This was why Democrats “treat open borders as ‘the absolute value,’ the one ‘principle’ that—when their ‘principles’ collide—they prioritize above all the others.” Most Republicans were too fearful of particular business interests and too afraid of being called “racist” to fight back.

So, what about Trump? Anton judged Trump worth the bet despite the fact that he was more nominally liberal than any recent Republican on some issues and his “vulgarity” gave too many an excuse to avoid talking about his substance. Anton admitted in a follow-up essay that his preferences for statesmen ran to “Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, Reagan, and the like.”

However, though Anton didn’t like everything, he argued that Trump had a substantive core worth supporting. Anton broadly defined and applauded Trumpism as “secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy.” Of course, even those who broadly agree with Anton may have qualms about some of the economic policies that Trump has pushed, but that is the nature of things.

The general thrust of Anton’s piece, which he clarified and expanded upon in a follow-up piece, is that in allowing “Davoisie managerialism” to continue and to grow, the American system, already off its constitutional moorings because of the administrative state, would be pushed even farther away.

Trump, he wrote, was “the first candidate since Reagan” to challenge the “arrangement” whereby Republicans only nominally challenge the rule of unelected members of the administrative state. Far from Trump being a “threat to the Constitution,” Trump was the only one who might challenge what we have come to call the “Deep State”—one of the main reasons the newly Republican businessman from New York was so hated by Democrats.

Anton’s essay captured the imagination of many who were on the fence. Even for those who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, the essay crystallized many of the problems we had with how the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement were operating.

Subsequent history has shown Anton strikingly prescient. Even though Trump was elected in 2016, the Russia Collusion Hoax showed how much Democrats and the administrative state would do to avoid allowing an elected president to act as one. When the full history of the January 6 incident is revealed, it’s likely we’ll see the same strategy at work. The use of censorship to punish ordinary Americans and political officials, especially during the Biden administration, was a revelation to those paying attention. And the dangerous flooding of America with illegal aliens from 2021-2024 showed that “the sacredness of mass immigration” was and is “the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.”

In hindsight, Anton’s essay was hardly histrionic. That today’s Democrats, as far-left as they are, continue to defend even violent criminal illegal aliens and are becoming even more radical at the behest of their actual socialist wing, is proof of the stakes we faced and still face.

While the 2026 midterm elections aren’t quite the “Flight 93 election” that was 2016 or even 2020, we need to be as clear-eyed as Anton was about what this year’s contest is about. Democrats want “rule by a transnational managerial class in conjunction with the administrative state.” We want an America that is secure, free, and recognizably American.

Anton’s essay captured a moment and changed that moment. In many ways, it still does today.