So many of the major ongoing fights among those opposed to Donald Trump concern how best to adjust to norms being breached and rules being broken. Do you shift your own code of conduct in response, or do you uphold the old standards, even if it allows the enemy to take advantage of you? The latest flare-up has concerned the resignation of Al Franken, even as Republicans prepare to welcome Roy Moore, but the dispute never goes away. Whether people go with side one or two depends heavily on their perception of the threat level. If you think we’re in a crisis—an emergency—then you’re likelier to throw off old restraints. You fight dirtier. This, in turn, prompts the other side to outdo you. It’s where crisis thinking leads.

The rise of Trump gave rise to a lot of essays, but few are likelier to make it into history books than the one entitled “The Flight 93 Election,” published by the Claremont Review of Books under the pen name Publius Decius Mus, later revealed to be conservative writer—and now Trump administration employee—Michael Anton. Using the arresting imagery of United Airlines Flight 93, on which passengers banded together to charge the cockpit of a plane they knew would be used as a missile, Decius argued that the United States was on a fatal course and that the only hope for conservatives was to take a crazy risk, in the form of Donald Trump, in order to right it. Otherwise, the hegemony of liberalism would extinguish any hope of preserving the United States as we’d known it. Again, this was decision-making through the prism of crisis.

After Trump was elected, Flight-93-style thinking arguably gained momentum, becoming just as pronounced among Trump’s enemies as among his supporters. Comedian Sarah Silverman, a prominent speaker at the Democratic National Convention, seemed to yearn for a coup, tweeting that “ONCE THE MILITARY IS W US FASCISTS GET OVERTHROWN.” Among calmer voices, talk of impeachment and the “palace-coup” 25th Amendment (which New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called to be unleashed) still bubbled up regularly. Recently, Brookings fellow and legal journalist Benjamin Wittes fired off a widely circulated tweet storm that called for Democrats and Republicans to preserve the status quo in every possible area of policy while countering the “national emergency” of Donald Trump.

The assumption of crisis leads to emergency measures and a wartime mentality, particularly obviously on the extremes, but sweeping up more and more people in the middle. Break the rules if you must, and burn things to save them. Elections and appointments, fraught enough already, become life-or-death affairs. Better to risk crashing with our guy, said Trump supporters, rather than accept certain death with the other candidate. Better to support a teen-stalking kook, goes the argument of Roy Moore’s supporters, rather than accept the destruction of your way of life in the hands of Doug Jones. It’s doubtful that Democrats, faced with a similar dilemma, would perform much better these days. (Liberals could afford to renounce Al Franken, because he’ll be succeeded by another Democrat. But imagine if his replacement were someone with the politics of Ted Cruz.)

What made Decius’s essay effective was that it wasn’t crazy, provided that you accepted the premise. For immigration restrictionists, the temptation of Trump was especially high, not unlike the urgency felt by climate-change activists over tipping points, with a choice between getting control of the border and losing it for good. Similarly, what made Wittes’s tweets gain the notice they did was a similar rationality, provided that you accepted the premise. “National emergency” seems apt to Trump’s foes, who see the president smashing delicate governmental and societal institutions right and left, like a golden retriever playing fetch in a room full of stemware.