Amerika

The election of 2016 tested America to see if there were enough functional people willing to vote to keep America instead of allowing it to be torn apart by the mob of special interests and lost people who wanted a moment of power when they could revel in the power of destruction.

Called The Flight 93 Election by some, the era exemplified a choice between continuing down the path of French Revolution suicide or making a Hail Mary pass for survival:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. 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.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

As it turned out, Trump was not only a good president but a moderate one: none of the extremity of the Christian Right nor the absurdity of the so-called “far-Right” (National Socialism et al.) was unleashed. By contrast, Biden has come across as the Carter-FDR-LBJ hybrid that no one ever wanted, a businessman’s Communist.

Business in the end chooses Communism because it promises to reduce risk of instability. If you give the people what they want, surely they will not object, and business will continue under what is simply a more rigorous regulatory regime.

Already we can see how the American economy transformed from capitalist to “mixed economy” which means capitalism taxed to provide socialism. This creates an economy driven by government which is as slow as self-interested bureaucracies usually are:

Here, for instance, is President Biden in July 2022, “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.” Okay, if the matter is that urgent, then one might expect . . . urgency. And yet just four months after Biden’s speech, his administration unveiled a relatively minor rehab project with that glaring 18-year timeline. (And it isn’t just this administration that’s lackadaisical; one could point to many other examples of such dawdling, at all levels of government, from coast to coast.) 

For all their presumed enthusiasm about infrastructure, especially green infrastructure, the liberal establishment and associated officialdom seem to be in thrall to NIMBYs and Naderites. And one of the activists’ weapons of choice is the environmental impact statement (EIS), first mandated by Congress in 1970 and now a paper bonanza for lawyers and activists. The Heritage Foundation’s Diane Katz describes EIS as “an anachronism that unduly politicizes environmental protection and encourages judicial activism.” Katz notes that the Trump Administration took immediate steps to reform EIS. On his fourth day in office, President Trump issued Executive Order 13766, “Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals for High Priority Infrastructure Projects.” That order returned power to the states that never should have been taken away. Specifically, governors were empowered to identify “high priority” projects, which the federal government’s Council on Environmental Quality would have to evaluate within 30 days, with an eye toward speeding the overall federal review. To be sure, the whole process of getting things built involves many more players than just the governors and the executive branch, and yet the Trump Administration at least began to set a new tone of get-it-done. However, those efforts have been cut short; indeed, the Biden Administration has actually been moving the clock backward.

Of course, this deference to the status quo has come at a cost: things grind to a halt. In 2009, then-president Barack Obama persuaded Congress to pass his stimulus package, promising “shovel-ready” projects that would get Americans working while improving the Nation’s infrastructure. Yet the following year, surveying the failure of his near-trillion-dollar package to stimulate much more than paper-shuffling, Obama said with a sigh, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” 

When you add heavy taxes, the effect on an economy is similar to regular old corruption, the mordida or bakshish payments informally mandatory in the third world, meaning that you load costs of about a third onto any transaction, effectively paralyzing the economy.

History will show that under the kings, corruption was lowest, and under democracy, it quickly rose to Tammany Hall levels, although it did so in a legal form by creating bureaucracies to address the trends and panics of voters, at which point those served themselves.

Any time someone says “we need a law” it is time to think: any law passed means a bureaucracy is created, thousands of people are hired, lawyers are needed, and fees, red tape delays, and consultant charges eat up most of the wealth. Everything gets more expensive, therefore corners are cut.

If you want to talk about “freedom” and “compassion,” the first step to a sane person would be to lower costs and raise quality by eliminating this one-third legal corruption cost imposed on everything done in our society. The poor would be less poor; our “elites” would be less rich.

After all, switching to a government-driven economy made many people wealthier if they were good at manipulating the meritocracy, which is equal parts ideological endurance tests in school and willingness to support the bloat of the State:

With their output surging as a result of the big-city tilt of the decade’s “winner-take-most” economy, Democratic districts have seen their median household income soar in a decade—from $54,000 in 2008 to $61,000 in 2018. By contrast, the income level in Republican districts began slightly higher in 2008, but then declined from $55,000 to $53,000.

Underlying these changes have been eye-popping shifts in economic performance. Democratic-voting districts have seen their GDP per seat grow by a third since 2008, from $35.7 billion to $48.5 billion a seat, whereas Republican districts saw their output slightly decline from $33.2 billion to $32.6 billion.

The increases in government, especially ESG and Green spending, kicked up salaries for bureaucrats and those who depend on government, most of whom not surprisingly live in the cities. Add in the massive affirmative action boost and you can see wealth redistribution in action as the national debt rises!

The Flight 93 Election meme took off because people realized that if Trump did not win, Hillary was going to come in and amnesty a few dozen million more immigrants so that she could have a permanent voting base. Poor people think in terms of cash in hand and therefore always want free stuff paid for by others.

In other words, we were madly rushing the flight deck in order to prevent certain doom, even if our chances of success were minimal. It is better to crash a hijacked plane in a field in Pennsylvania and die than allow it to be used as a weapon to fly into a building and add even more casualties.

Translating that subconscious imagery, it is better that we get someone in government who can dismantle it than that we allow it to grow until it reaches Soviet levels. That was true then and in 2020, but for various reasons, the system had to be allowed to reveal itself, leaving us with the next election.

This one might be called “The Garden of Eden Election.” That is, we choose to either believe the serpent that Leftism is our future, or we recognize that the free stuff offered by smug voices is suicide, and opt to turn the country against Leftism including its roots in the 14a and entitlements.

At this point, we are struggling against all those people receiving money from the government — the “Deep State” and its benefactors — in order to get an outsider in office to remove the dysfunctional government, so that then we can start repealing millions of pages of burdensome and unnecessary laws:

It’s thus worth asking: Who wins in Trump vs. Biden 2024? Not which candidate wins; two years and a vast array of variables render all such predictions purely speculative. No, the real question is whose interests would such a choice serve? The interests of the American people? The American establishment? The American future?

I propose that the answer is an emphatic “none of the above.”

In 2016, Trump provided the country with a wake-up call. Sanders might have done the same. These candidates generated passion because they were very different from the bland, corrupt, elitists that voters had been taught to swallow. Using the power of their distinctive personalities and the divergence of their ideological orientations, they provided starkly similar warnings: “America! Look at what’s been done to you! If you want to preserve the future you’ve come to expect, it’s almost too late to act!”

The West is heading toward an interweaving and amplification of crises that are nearing their peak. Our debt keeps growing; social order keeps declining; pollution intensifies as does The Ecocide; totalitarianism is rising; and on top of it all, political instability increases daily.

We approach the Garden of Eden election. We either reject the snake, or we go further down the path the snake has been taking us which increasingly looks to wider groups of people like it ends in the same horrors of the Jacobins and the Soviets.

Tags: flight 93 election, garden of eden election