New York Times columnist Ezra Klein reflected at the weekend on the reaction to his controversial but prescient February plea for Biden to back out of the race. At the time, he said that “no one tried to convince me that Biden was a strong candidate. They argued instead that he couldn’t be persuaded to step aside, that even if he could, Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the election and that if a convention didn’t choose Harris, passing her over would fracture the party.” Months ago, these arguments remained private. What we’re hearing from some now is merely honest: Biden may be incapacitated, but even a Weekend at Bernie’s commander-in-chief is better than Trump in these dark times.

As the Biden campaign and its stakeholders use the existential rationale to justify his ongoing candidacy, for reasons that range from moral and sincere to self-interested and cynical, Democrats asking him to step down are using similar logic to Anton and Coons. “If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick. That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses,” wrote the New York Times editorial board. “But given that very danger, the stakes for the country and the uneven abilities of Mr. Biden, the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee.”

Echoing that assertion, a Monday essay in Vox contended: “Treating an existential threat as existential requires the one thing that the Democratic coalition has increasingly struggled to do: prioritization. It means putting aside personal feelings, individual ambition, and subjective preferences in favor of a single goal: success’.” Otherwise, the author wrote, “it’s just empty rhetoric.” That’s about as close to “Charge the cockpit or you die” as it gets.

Anton’s logic was deemed “histrionic, false, and absurd” in the pages of the Atlantic. In New York magazine, Johnathan Chait lamented that Anton sought to “make the Flight 93 ’emergency’ more or less a permanent condition” and called it “singularly hysterical”. The Washington Post described the argument as “of the permanent variety typically used to justify authoritarianism”.

The candidates in question are dramatically different, to be sure, so it’s entirely reasonable to defend one iteration of “Flight 93” while objecting to the other. But the underlying logic here is the same — and that underlying logic was itself dismissed as a false premise when Anton published it in 2016. What is now clear is that our entire political class sees itself as engaged in apocalyptic warfare — and it doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.