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Decius Has Responded
Decius Responds to Critiques of Flight 93
Published in GeneralWell that was unexpected.
Everything I said in “The Flight 93 Election” was derivative of things I had already said, with (I thought) more vim and vigor, in a now-defunct blog. I assumed the new piece would interest a handful of that blog’s remaining fans and no one else. My predictive powers proved imperfect.
Which should cheer everyone who hated what I said: if I was wrong about the one thing, maybe I’m wrong about the others. But let me take the various objections in ascending order of importance.
I’ve divided 1. into three parts:
A. Talk about how important the upcoming midterm election is, emphasize all the stuff you can accomplish with Congress alone, even if you don’t have the White House.
B. Win the midterms.
C. Tell everyone who voted for you that you can’t really do anything without a veto-proof majority in both houses, or at the very least sixty seats in the Senate.
Even if the plan was to crash the plane, if they got control of the cockpit and had fat people sitting on all the terrorists, I’m sure they would have reevaluated their plan and tried to figure out how to fly it.
No, everyone can (and should be conservative).
But the simple fact of that matter is that our innumerable “outreach” efforts for ethnic minorities have failed miserably, and I don’t see any particularly creative minds in charge who seem capable of changing that.
We’re blown away if more than 5% of blacks vote for us. We long for the Bush years in which only 60% of Hispanics voted against us.
I agree that we could theoretically do it, but in practice we’re downright awful at it. Instead, all we’re capable of is maintaining our defensive “I’m not racist, really I mean it” stance that makes minorities permanently suspicious of us while simultaneously alienating working-class whites.
But yeah, we could do it, but that would require listening to obnoxious blowhards like me who’ve actually converted blacks to Republicanism. (Hint: I actually understand inner-city economics and go on the offensive.) Which means it’s out of the question.
We have basically one trophy: gun rights. And that had nothing to do with the GOP politicians. We got that one because Anthony Kennedy woke up on the right side of the bed that morning. And all it will take is a future SCOTUS to wipe that off the map as if it never happened. Some say we should count the lowering of tax rates in the 80’s, and while we’ve held off the old 70 to 90 percent rates, our rates are still high enough (including corporate rates) that taxes should be a partial victory at best.
five possible scenarios .
1: Do nothing, get crashed into a building, die.
2: Try to fight back, hijackers crash plane away from building, die.
3: Try to fight back, succeed, passengers intentionally crash plane, die.
4: Try to fight back, succeed, passengers try to land the plane, crash, die.
5: Try to fight back, succeed, passengers try to land plane, succeed, live.
Option 3 seems exceedingly sub-optimal for all parties involved.
Not even close. He says very clearly near the beginning of both pieces that he’s fully aware that the plane may very well crash no matter who wins.
I think there’s a distinction to be made between ReluctantTrump, Better-Than-Clinton arguments — which would absolutely work for me given almost any other candidate — and Decius’ positive defense of Trump and Trumpism. Ben Shapiro nailed it:
Questions:
How do we get from here to there?
What’s the actual plan to fix all that for 2020?
Because we’ve been hearing that “decentralization and federalism combined with a renewed societal focus on virtue implemented at a familial and communal level” is the answer for 20 years, and I have yet to hear an explanation of how we’ll implement those things. Mostly I hear “Donate to stop Harry Reid!” “Donate to stop Nancy Pelosi!” “Donate to stop Obama!” and “Donate to stop Hillary!”
I get a lot of “Donate to stop Hillary!” email from Trump, by the way, and I’ve never signed up for his mailing list. The only conservative mailing lists I’ve signed up for are: The Weekly Standard, National Review and Ricochet so one of those three sold or gave the Trump campaign my email information.
Trump doesn’t have any answers but he barely pretends to care, which is almost an improvement over the various non-plans we get told about.
The plan depends on whether or not it’s right before or right after a midterm election. Before the election, there’s all sorts of stuff we can do if we win the election. After we win the election, the plan is to wait until we have sixty senators.
That seems depressingly true.
The old joke about step 2: ???, step 3: profit is a lot less funny when step 1 also happens to be ???.
Tom Meyers, Ed.
Ben Shapiro wrote:
Ben has no answers besides more of the same. Been there, done that. How’s it working in Newark? Compton? East LA? East St. Louis? Birmingham? Philadelphia? Milwaukee? Oh, it hasn’t been tried? No, it hasn’t been accepted.
Decius suggests the answer, and I’ll spell it out: A radical reduction, if not a complete moratorium, on all immigration.
That is a fundamental change that would reverse 50 years of government policy and elite consensus. It gets to the heart of our problems, which is that the traditional American nation is being deliberately displaced in favor of a New People through a continuous wave of immigrants, a wave that does not permit – in fact it has destroyed – the work of assimilation.
We must reverse an immigration policy designed by Democrats 1) to augment Democratic voting strength and 2) to marginalize and demoralize troublesome traditional Americans who somehow maintain a hankering for freedom.
Otherwise it’s “Alien Nation” (1995), “Adios, America” (2015) and “The Flight 93 Election” (2016).
Well, that sounds like a post – if you’ve already written it then please link it for me.
And just Decius is not the only person that French went after.
Amen. Sing it Brother!@
It’s one of several on the works. I’ll try to give a quick breakdown though in the comments here later when I’m on a computer and not my phone.
Other than an offhand comment in the podcast can you point me to intellectual defenses of Trump from the likes of Dr. Sowell or Peter Robinson or any other intellectual you choose that Mr. French is impugning in your opinion.
You’re right about Kennedy and SCOTUS of course, and that only emphasizes the critical nature of NOT VOTING for the candidate who, if she wins*, will put more Kagans, Breyers and Ginsburgs on the Court.
But gun rights have been protected legislatively as well. The NRA’s secret has been to support candidates of either party, even Democrats such as Harry Reid, as long as they are good on gun rights. Unfortunately, according to the logic you can often see on Ricochet, funding Democrats to get what you want makes the NRA “left-leaning” and “progressive.” Sure.
*There is no realistic scenario by now in mid-September that has Clinton losing AND Trump losing. If Trump doesn’t win, Clinton does. Period. Full Stop. (h/t for that sign-off to BHO)
I went back and read the original piece.
He says “All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary Clinton.” so he clearly believes that Trump is our only salvation.
He does say “One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise.” which I missed the first time I read it, but he does not associate himself with that position and he only uses to condemn those who think there is not a crisis.
I agree with him that there is a crisis, where I completely disagree is that Trump is part of the solution to the crisis. I agree, that Trump is only possible in corrupt times, but that fact, in and of itself, seems to imply that Trump is, in fact, not part of the solution.
As Rob Long has said on several podcasts, he used to believe we are a center-right country, but that has changed and we are now a center-left country. Trump wants to pull the Republican party to the left. That may be a winning electoral strategy, but it will only accelerate the movement of the country to the left, not halt it.
Did you say “read” or “re-read”?
Answered in the original post
Apparently, according to @jamielocket that is not an intell
The right has done nothing to halt it for 70 years. They have trophies on the field and we don’t.
There have been lots of them here. One was right below this one on guns. Again, he painted with a brush that covered everything.
Okay but defenses of Trump on pragmatic grounds are not what French was talking about (i.e. he’ll still be awful but is better than Hillary because of X). French was talking about intellectual defenses of Trump as a “savior of the country”. It’s an important distinction.
Correction: “only hope of salvation.”
Flight 93 crashed even thought the passengers did the right thing and stormed the cockpit. He compares the storming of the cockpit to electing Trump. He therefore recognizes that although electing Trump is our best option at the moment, it may not be sufficient. Otherwise he wouldn’t have named his piece after Flight 93.
Decius claims that Trump’s transformational role is to put We the People back in control of their government, rather than a managerial/meritocratic elite running the state through the agency of an administrative bureaucracy. The words are as plain as day in his response to his critics.
The people of the US wanted effective border control. The people in California wanted Prop 187 and Prop 8. North Carolina wants HB2. Conservatives have not been able to deliver on the first 3 and will soon fail on the fourth. It will take an outsider to put the people first – and make America great again.
Donald Trump is the last chance.
A couple of guidelines I use:
There’s a lot more details and nuance, but that’s a very rough outline of the principles I follow.
And please don’t bore me with comments that Trump probably opposed Proposition 8 or spoke against HB2. That is not the issue. Either as private citizen or as President, Trump can have any opinion he wants; but what we don’t want – and don’t expect – is for him to put the full weight of the government on the side of the elite once the people have voted.
And who exactly do you think has been voting liberals into office all these years? Robots?
Through an intermediary, I have been passed this response to Ben Shapiro’s analysis which I am sharing here as a Ricochet comment: