Abstract
“The Flight 93 Election” was an essay published in the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016, barely two months before the 2016 election. The essay’s pseudonymous author invoked the heroic effort by the passengers of United Flight 93 to retake their hijacked plane on September 11, 2001, in a symbolic maneuver to characterize the stakes of the election according to apocalypticism, that is, in a binary logic that posited the opponent as a malevolent enemy whose accession to power would mean the end of the American republic. Commentators on the left and the right strongly criticized the essay. But much of the criticism failed to seriously grapple with substantive bases of the argument and used the same symbolic binary language of apocalypticism to attack it. This chapter examines what “The Flight 93 essay” and its reception in the public sphere indicate about the state of cultural and political debate and conflict in the contemporary United States.
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Notes
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Greengrass attempted to legitimate this scene by alluding in a confused way to German experience of the infamous Lufthansa hijacking in 1977, but the clear insinuation was that Europeans simply cannot be counted on to react in the required way to enemies such as those faced on Flight 93.
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The essay can be found online here: http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/
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It is an unspoken assumption of the piece that some proportion of the American population are simply not well suited to make intelligent political decisions.
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For the benefit of younger readers who are not sports historians, this reference is to the team that for years was the opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters in their staged games that predetermined Globetrotter victories in advance. The role of the Generals was to serve as foils for the talent and entertainment tactics of the Trotters, who would pull down their shorts, confuse them with trickery that should have been transparent even to a child, and then dominate them on the court in effortless fashion.
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An incomplete list of such celebrity promises to relocate was compiled by CNN. Some of the alternative destinations were “Spain, or somewhere” (Amy Schumer), Australia or Canada (Barbara Streisand), “another country” (Chelsea Handler), and “Jupiter” (Cher): https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/08/entertainment/celebs-canada-donald-trump/index.html
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I am currently working on a longer essay comparing the Flight 93 Election cultural structure on the right to that of the Russian Takeover Election structure on the left.
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References
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Gerson, M. (2016, September 12). The Self-Refuting Idea That America Needs Donald Trump as a Savior. WashingtonPost.com. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-self-refuting-idea-that-america-needs-donald-trump-as-a-savior/2016/09/12/d89a26ae-790b-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html?utm_term=.7aadbb4683f8
Grace, F. (2002, May 20). White House Was Flight 93 Target. CBSnews.com. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-was-flight-93-target/
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Shuster, D. (2006, September 12). 9/11 Mystery: What Was Flight 93’s Target? NBCnews.com. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14778963/ns/msnbc-hardball_with_chris_matthews/t/mystery-what-was-flight-s-target/#.Wn_ArainHIU
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Riley, A. (2019). On “The Flight 93 Election”: Enemies and Apocalypticism in American Political Culture. In: Mast, J.L., Alexander, J.C. (eds) Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95945-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95945-0_9
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