In the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, top Democrats are being increasingly honest about their rationale for sticking with the President: he may be a flawed vessel, but Biden is the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump. And given that Trump poses an existential threat to the country, that’s all that matters. This is the logic, at least, and it’s pulled straight from the “authoritarian” playbook that conservatives embraced against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

That September, the Claremont Review of Books published a viral essay titled “The Flight 93 Election” which argued that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” The piece, later revealed to be written by Michael Anton, was thereafter denounced by the chattering classes for years, held up as an example of intellectual rot in a conservative movement corrupted by Trump.

Compare those words with what Democratic senator Chris Coons said about Biden on ABC News on Sunday: “The stakes of this race couldn’t be higher. And the only Democrat who’s ever beaten Donald Trump is Joe Biden.” To be clear, that is a direct quote from a Biden campaign national co-chair. Just last week, Coons referred to himself as a “close friend” of the President’s.

Scrambling to assuage donors, the campaign itself made a “Flight 93” case in a fundraising email blast after the debate. The message actually included a graphic of polling that showed other leading Democrats “far[ing] similarly” to Biden against Trump if they replaced the President in the election, adding: “At the end of the day, we’d switch to candidates who would, according to polls, be less likely to win than Joe Biden — the only person ever to defeat Donald Trump.”

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.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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