In a few short hours, we will know the results of The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes. It’s a cliche at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Will the American people submit — cowed, broken and bent — content to be managed, believe what they’re told, and take what they’re given with no desire, or even conception, of better? Or will they, after nearly a decade of rising action, finally stand up to say Enough?

As a younger millennial, I grew up at a time when faith in the Hero was still real, as was the ideal of the America we all cherish. But already, the poison of postmodernism was setting in. Disney classics of the 90s taught my generation the traditional hero’s arc, but to those who looked carefully, cracks were beginning to show in what was once the uncontested virtue of heroism; is what we call the Hero really a Villain? Meanwhile, the America of our birthright — one of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness —  had already slipped away in practice, if not yet in spirit. Has America and its ideals truly been the heroic force of world history, or are we the villain we believed we were fighting?

These are the inverted moral questions that reached critical mass throughout my lifetime. My generation never truly lived in a world where faith in the Hero stood unshaken. We never lived in the America of our forebearers, where liberty remained a given – it was lost in the era of globalization, endless war and identity politics. Yet through this moral fog, these idyllic visions never truly left us; grasping it once again required only the political will. This election will determine whether or not we possess that will. Will my generation be the last to know even the very idea of the heroic America that was promised to us?

But this election is not about me. It is about one man: the last real Hero undertaking the last real chance to save that great American spirit. In a matter of hours, Donald J. Trump will reach the climax of his Hero’s Journey.

You know it intrinsically, but there is a universal formula for the Hero’s Journey — or what professor of literature Joseph Campbell called the “monomyth” —  across the foundation of mythology that defines the Western canon. Campbell’s 17 steps of the monomyth can be broken into three main stages:

I. The departure from the ordinary world to answer the “call to adventure,” where he receives “supernatural aid” to “cross the first threshold.”

II. The initiation into the unknown “special world” of heroism, where he faces obstacles and inner crisis on a “descent” to the “abyss.” Yet he comes back “transformed,” fighting until a “decisive victory is won.”

III. The return, where “the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

It’s not hard to see how this tracks Trump’s political trajectory, riding down the floating steps of a golden escalator to answer the call for American renewal. He crossed over from the ordinary world of real estate to the unknown world of politics, beating Hillary Clinton in an almost supernatural upset that shocked the villainous Beltway class. At first, this appeared to be a decisive victory, but it was merely the first threshold that sent him on a descent of struggle, sabotage and #Resistance until he reached the abyss of defeat in 2020. These past four years, Trump has transformed: he’s more disciplined, more focused, and stronger than ever before. Everything his enemies once tarred him with now refuses to stick. His ultimate victory will be decided in the coming hours, and if he emerges victorious, he will bestow the boon of his victory on the American people.

Of course, not everyone who votes for Trump will see him consciously as a Hero. They may even plug their nose and vote for what they see as ample villainous qualities. Nevertheless, it will mean they have been swept away in the Hero’s momentous story, in his larger-than-life ability to inspire others towards his own conception of what is good and right — which for any hero worth his salt, is indeed timeless — and to adopt his vision as their own. The lasting power of heroic myth, as it has been for thousands of years, is to shape the real world in its image.

In turn, this informs our political will. I’m sorry to say that Trump will not deliver tangibly on everything he’s promised. No one can, at least not right away. But our boon will come with the simple assurance that our will to one day get there is still intact: that the vision of the country that is ours by right still lives on in the hearts and minds of its people; that we have faced nearly a decade of lies and crushing coercion and still will not yield. The alternative is almost too dark to consider.

I never knew the freedoms that my father and his father knew at my age. I was born in the era of stifling political correctness, the bureaucratization of all public life, the chains of globalization choking back our national interest; it’s all I’ve ever known. But still, the light of better days always hovered on the horizon.

COVID was a fluke, which the powers-that-be used to beat their unsuspecting subjects into submission. In the four years since, they have revealed their malevolent hand for all to see. For the American people to have seen this clearly and still vote for her will mean they no longer care — that after millennia, the Hero’s Journey can now produce nothing but apathy. It will mean that our great American spirit has finally gone dark beneath the horizon, following the tangible promises it held that have long since set. The American people, by and large, will be revealed as content to accept whatever hand they’re dealt, devoid of the Hero’s courage to strive for more.

How and when that courage will return will have escaped the bounds of rational prognostication.

Notice I did not say if; a temporary defeat is still no excuse to despair. All it means is that the rising action of our national story is in fact still rising. Have faith in what is good, and true, and right — that America’s ideals are too imbued with timeless virtue to ever truly be lost. Afterall, the history of the Western world is one millennia-long Hero’s Journey in itself. We can wait a little longer.

WHAT I’M WATCHING: 

The Wayans brothers took to X this week to announce a reboot of their raunchy Scary Movie franchise. While the films petered off in the 2010s after crappy fourth and fifth installments, the first three were the peak of what post-racial American comedy had to offer. I rewatched the first three in the lead up to Halloween, where blacks and whites flippantly mocked each other’s racial stereotypes without an inkling of ill will. The new installment, if it follows the old formula, has the potential to erase Barack Obama’s entire legacy of re-racializing America’s body politic. It’s time for America to laugh at our differences again without getting so damn offended. It’s time to Make America Scary Again.

WHAT I’M READING:

The Daily Caller’s own Reagan Reese lays out “What happens if Trump wins?” Charles Haywood on “the Left as Scorpion,” for Man’s World Magazine. A confident prediction of Trump’s victory, Haywood shows how and why the leftist establishment will subsequently explode. Peter Van Buren’s “final case for Trump” for The American Conservative.

A plan to restore the “warrior ethos” of the American military for American Greatness.

AUTHOR

Gage Klipper

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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