The Flight 93 Election

The Flight 93 Election
"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.
To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic.
The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon.
Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible.
...But how great is the crisis?
Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
...The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.
...But for those of you who are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.
The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation.
If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed.
They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless."