The Deep Breath Before the Plunge

Thoughts from the precipice of profound political conflict.

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I’m writing this newsletter in the middle of what we call the “dog days” of summer. It’s the moment in the calendar where—everywhere but Twitter—things seem to slow down. Families are on vacation. Americans are focused on a uniquely perilous and stressful school year. Web traffic tends to dip. Podcasts audiences slack off a bit. But then, soon enough, will come the rush. We are on the verge of one of the most intense political seasons in living memory, one that will strain our nation’s “bonds of affection.”

I’m reminded of a memorable scene in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien’s Return of the King. Pippin stands at the ramparts of Minas Tirith and stares at the coming storm. “It’s so quiet,” he says. Gandalf replies, “It’s the deep breath before the plunge.” You can watch that moment below:

Readers know that I often write against alarmism, against the “Flight 93” fear-mongering that teaches us that each election represents nothing more than a battle for the very existence of the nation itself. I’m not alone. There are many Americans who are alarmed by alarmism. Yet Flight 93-ism endures. It thrives. Last week, for example, the president of the United States told radio host Hugh Hewitt that if he loses, “China will own the United States.” 

“You’re gonna have to learn to speak Chinese,” he added.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Realwoodies

    Wow - you linked to Slate to show how the Trump admin failed. Actually, all it talked about was how he lied about everything. That's not "failure" even if it is true. It might be failure of leadership, but from a policy perspective, we are doing about as well as any free nation has done so far. Not the best, but not the worst. This is why people say you have TDS.

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      David French vertical-nib Author

      It was a meticulously-researched piece of journalism, and if your takeaway is that "all it talked about was how he lied about everything," then you didn't read it closely. And we are most assuredly not doing about as well as any free nation. Not even close. Only five advanced democracies have a higher death rate than us, and we're on a pace to pass up to four of them (leaving Belgium alone at the top, aside from micro-countries like Andorra or San Marino.) We're doing worse than the majority of European nations and worse than every single advanced democracy in Southeast Asia, including nations with much higher population densities. We're performing more like South American nations that possess inferior public health infrastructures and inferior public resources. It's an absolute, tragic disgrace.

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  2. KSchaefer

    Yes, very true, what we hearing from the right is the rhetoric of war. People who know better are whipping up flames of fear and resentment and it's going downhill pretty quickly. The Christian writer Ron Dreher has been exploring with others what a civil war might look like, which is itself a scandal. I'm running across more folks saying online that they are glad they have their AR-15s and that the militias have been training for this for some time. Guns are out of stock and ammo prices are high. People are talking online about holding back food from cities, about shooting power transformers to cut off urban power supplies. This is not alarmism. These are facts. Read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia about how newspapers in Spain spread propaganda and inflammatory lies and it will resonate with you. There is no truth in war, only propaganda...we have already chosen sides, so argument is moot. We are on the downward trajectory to armed conflict and the question is, who on the right will step up and try to stop it. Because it has to be stopped from the right. And soon. I would guess that, three months ahead of the first violence of the Civil War, it did not seem inevitable. But we know that it probably was.

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    1. Avatar photo
      John Bowling

      Your comment gives the impression that the problem is all on the right—or its most extreme manifestation is on the right.

      Was it the right wingers that took over a portion of a city with guns and barricades just recently or was it the left?

      Was it a group of out of control right wingers that caused Chicago to raise its bridges recently?

      Surely our cultural decay has its roots in more mundane but widespread features of the human psyche. Maybe we aren’t well suited to rapid, global communication.

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  3. Avatar photo
    John Bowling

    It would be nice if we specified exactly what a Flight 93 mindset is supposed to be. Is it the claim that if we lose this election then we will forever lose certain goods? Or does a weaker claim like the following also count as a Flight 93 mindset: if we lose this election then significant harm will be done to the nation that will be difficult to undo? Or maybe the term is meant to cover both sorts of claims.

    For instance, Joe Biden seems to think that 2016 was a (quasi-)Flight 93 election in the weaker sense and that 2020 is a Flight 93 election in the stronger sense. Here is Joe Biden in the 2019 July 31st primary debate: "This is the most consequential election any one of you, no matter how old or young you are, has ever, ever participated in. Four more years of Donald Trump will go down as an aberration, hard overcome, the damage is done, but we can overcome it. Eight more years of Donald Trump will change America in a fundamental way, the America we know will no longer exist."

    Of course what Biden meant to say was "The last four years of Donald Trump will go down as an aberration... But eight years of Donald Trump...". Also, it's possible that Biden doesn't think "the America we know" no longer existing is irreversible, though his language most naturally suggests irreparable damage.

    Either way, using the Flight 93 descriptor for both the strong and weak claims ignores the fact that actually rebutting the weaker claim, instead of dismissing it with a pejorative label, isn't as easy as rebutting the stronger claim. From a progressive standpoint, it seems plausible that Trump has done significant harm to the nation that will be difficult to undo.

    My primary concern here is with how labeling something as "Flight 93" has over the last four years become a lazy way to do punditry. It's starting to become the NeverTrumper's equivalent of the Trumper's "Fake news" label. We think we have this collection of claims that aren't worth taking seriously, but also provide an easy target for rehearsing our bullet point arguments. We place this collection of claims in a bin labeled "Flight 93" or "Fake news" and then we can quickly toss any new claims into that bin if they look somewhat similar to us.

    And we can pull out the bin and rehearse the talking points when we want to explain why voters are so wrong about 'x'. But even if the people who are for some reason getting our attention attention are making claims that legitimately belong in the Flight 93 bin or the fake news bin, it's just not true that these are the only or best arguments that either side can offer for their concerns.

    And as for going first-order Flight 93 over second-order Flight 93: "it is absolutely true that hate, fear, dishonesty, and corruption can represent an existential threat to our continued existence as a united republic. Flight 93-ism itself presents a danger." -- Maybe what lies behind some of the second-order Flight 93 mindset is actually the perceived hate, fear, dishonesty, and corruption people see in their opponents?

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  4. Linda Howelton

    David, the long standing history of white Protestant's position on racial justice has been more than suspect. The split of the Baptist Convention over slavery, the support of Jim Crow after reconstruction, the lack of enthusiastic support for Civil Rights, the retreat to Christian schools during the fight against segregation does not support any indication that "Christians" will step up during this election. As an African American Evangelical, I have more hope in secular liberals to seek justice than staunch church going white Evangelicals seeking a winning strategy rather than truth and justice.

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  5. texigander

    Mr. French; perhaps you're too close to the dross that our media culture has become... Please keep the faith that voters can winnow through the hyperbolic ravings from both sides of the spectrum and arrive at a sensible view and then vote accordingly.

    I'm not dismissing your concerns, but its up to cooler heads, including yours, to do and say the right things. I.e., providing honest opinions based on facts with a minimum of personal emotion.

    Sorry to preach, but we're forgetting how to listen well and think critically amidst all the noise & I hope you and your colleagues at The Dispatch can leaven the extremes in our politics with reasoned rather than panicked discourse.

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  6. Gene

    Guess that’s encouraging?

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  7. Avatar photo
    Dina

    A few weeks ago, religious Jews observed the fast of Tisha B'Av, the Jewish date commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. The lesson of this dark tale is chillingly relevant today. Thanks to their ingenuity and daring, the Jews had fended off the Romans for several years. The Romans could not take the city and suffered heavy casualties. But a few factions vying for complete control over Jerusalem became so consumed by their infighting that they failed to notice that the Romans were quietly breaching their defenses. When they realized the Romans were upon them, they laid aside their differences and united--too late. The Romans overran the city, slaughtering thousands, burning down the Temple, and taking thousands more into captivity.

    Josephus, a historian who was an eyewitness to these events, recorded Vespasian as saying that he would wait until the Jews destroyed themselves and then he would easily mop them up (he turned the campaign over to his nephew Titus, as he was made emperor in the middle of the campaign).

    As the pandemic rampages through our country, killing tens of thousands and devastating our economy, we cannot unite. We keep fighting each other. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are quietly waiting in the wings, quietly breaching our defenses, as we point fingers of blame instead of uniting to eliminate all of our threats. It's a sobering thought.

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      Dina

      The Jewish sages of the Talmud taught that gratuitous hatred brought down the Holy Temple, and only gratuitous love can restore it. This is a great lesson for our time.

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  8. VcL

    This article from the Bulwark is long, and speaks to the temptation to dehumanize the "other." I found it thought provoking and relevant to this discussion of David's article:

    https://thebulwark.com/love-and-loyalty-in-the-liberalocracy/

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    1. VcL

      ...and this is a great article on the unity of the majority:

      https://thebulwark.com/unplug-from-the-matrix/

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  9. P Satter

    "We scorch our opponents with language that precludes compromise."

    It does not seem to be completely our "opponents" (or fellow citizens) who are at fault for this. It the ability of the internet itself to amplify and act as a rapid catalyst for the unfiltered negative attitudes towards fellow citizens which possibly endanger the American Experiment. No longer does a newspaper investigate claims before publishing--claims are out in real time online and facts have to run behind them to catch up. (Thanks Dispatch fact checkers!)
    Like the Eye of Sauron (going with the metaphor) the internet turns on its next victim or outrage or launches a conspiracy theory over the wall and the hordes follow to do online battle. Compromise is no longer seen as peaceable, reciprocal, mature, and necessary--but unfortunately is seen as defeat. The emotions are already engaged before either the intellect or conscience has time to arrive and ponder.

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    1. P Satter

      "It is the"

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  10. Avatar photo
    Russell Board

    The future of our nation will be determined by whether we choose to focus on the things that unite us or the things that divide us.

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