The Flight 93 Court

"The Flight 93 election" was a term used by conservatives in 2016 to justify voting for Donald Trump. The basic idea was that, even though Donald Trump was essentially everything we, well, knew he was -- a racist, an idiot, a wrecker -- the absolute, desperate need to stop Hillary Clinton from being elected required action that may well be suicidal. "Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. [But] if you don’t try, death is certain."Of course, to state the thesis is to underscore the absurdity-cum-perniciousness: the tier one emergency requiring conservatives to abandon all prudence and storm the cabin, was .... the possibility that a bog-standard Democratic politician might win the presidency. It is the prospect of ordinary democratic governance that was the emergency, and that shouldn't be forgotten. As Jamelle Bouie has noted, a running theme of contemporary conservative ideology is the belief that democratic outcomes are fundamentally illegitimate if they result in…