A Man of 1989 (w/ David Frum) #569

Summary

The Fifth Column #569 — "A Man of 1989 (w/ David Frum)"
Release Date: August 7, 2026
Guests: David Frum (The Atlantic)

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Episode Overview

This episode features journalist and commentator David Frum, a longtime observer of American politics, ex-speechwriter, and staff writer at The Atlantic, in conversation with hosts Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch. The discussion explores generational political perspectives, the fragility of liberal democracy, the legacy of 1989, ideological shifts on the right and left, the current shape of American party politics, polling/trends in Michigan, and personal political reckonings. Frum's reflections are personal and historical, often turning to his family’s story and the lessons of 20th-century upheaval.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

I. On Loving One's Country & Memory

• How Should We Love our Country?

  • Frum opens with a meditation on love of country:

    "To love your country is to love it as it is. When you say, I can't stand it now, but if we could get rid of all of the people I don't like, if we could get rid of all the social changes of the past 50 years, then I'd love it. Well, then you don't. You love some fantasy." (00:00)

• Historical Memory & Fragility

  • Frum discusses the vulnerability and contingency of liberal societies, drawing from his Jewish family's experience in Europe. His political views spring from a sense that safety and prosperity, especially for minorities, are never guaranteed:

    "Everything we have is more vulnerable than anybody around me wants to admit... it's all protected not by the RCMP, but by these giant institutions of power that ultimately rest on the United States." (11:08–12:15)

• The Lens of 1989

  • Frum:

    "I will always be a man of 1989. That's the miracle year. That's everything I believed in... 1989 was not just the year the Berlin Wall came down... it spread all over the planet... Everything one could ever have imagined happening, happening within approximately half a decade." (15:20–16:20)

  • The "vindication" of 1989 gave way to disappointment as American global leadership retreated, particularly under Trump (17:46)

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II. Generational Shifts & Historical Amnesia

• Disconnection from History

  • Younger generations lack the visceral memory of 20th-century horrors; leads to shallow engagement with totalitarian history.

    "The dimming of historical memory... is part of the story. But I think there's something else that goes on... confronting the horrors of the human past... could it have happened to you?" (19:59–20:40)

  • Anne Applebaum’s line:

    "I write this story of the Soviet Gulag, not so that it will never happen again, but because it will happen again. It happens all the time." (21:00)

• Luck, Vulnerability, and Self-Regard

  • On privilege and fortune:

    "God blesses you by making you lucky and then curses you by making you think you are so smart." (21:57)

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III. Conservatism, Trump, & Political Courage (or Lack Thereof)

• Never Trump, Bravery, and Rationalization

  • Frum is not keen to overuse "brave" for Never Trumpers:

    "No, we're not [brave]... Yes, some people have passed by the chance to make ill gotten disgusting dirty money... but that's not bravery." (23:06)

  • Discusses how minimal courage is really required—and laments the many rationalizations former colleagues have made.

• Betrayal by Intellectuals

  • The most disappointing to Frum: intellectuals (e.g. Claremont Institute) who used their gifts to rationalize a betrayal of constitutional principles—often "for sport" or sheer contrarianism. (26:19–28:42)

• Pull of the Crowd

  • Frum warns that today, social media and the instant feedback loop have "pushes and pulls" that can warp even thoughtful commentators for the allure of populist affirmation—or YouTube views:

    "...the roar of the grease paint, the smell of the crowd—they couldn't resist." (28:42)

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IV. Realpolitik, Party Shifts & Current Political Dilemmas

• The Price of Anti-Trump Coalitions

  • To defeat Trump, centrists made concessions to the left. Post-Biden, more extreme left elements have new clout, demanding policies that challenge former Republican/centrist allies. (29:56–31:18)

• Michigan's Senate Race Dilemma

  • Frum details his quandary in the face of two "bad" choices: a mainstream Republican (Mike Rogers, who’d bolster Trump) versus a Democratic DSA candidate (El Sayed), who, Frum argues, embodies new, dangerous ideological trends—especially regarding stance toward American Jews. (36:05–39:09)

    "And all I ask in return for this guarantee of your physical safety is that you disavow who you are. I've heard that offer before... and the answer is no." (37:37)

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V. The Parties: Structure and Instability

• Republican vs Democratic Party Structure
  • Frum likens the GOP to Philadelphia (centralized, base-and-suburbs model) and Democrats to Los Angeles (multi-centered, unstable, fractured).

    "The Democratic Party is a much more contentious institution... it's potentially more stable just because there's much more variety..." (43:36)

  • Democratic instability makes it possible for far-left insurgents to ascend, despite unpopularity in the general electorate.

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VI. Voting as Consumption & Elite Radicalism

• Voting as 'Self-Actualization'

  • As society gets richer, political activism becomes a lifestyle pursuit.

    "We're now a much more prosperous society. We have lots of people who don't think they need that much from the government and they're in politics to self actualize. It's a consumption good." (62:31)

• Disconnect from Material Stakes

  • Working class/black voters remain more pragmatic, close to necessity; elites can "afford to vote emotionally." (63:09)

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VII. Poll Failure & Michigan Case Study

• Polling Industry in Crisis
  • Frum describes why poll data is less trustworthy: phone calls go unanswered, samples are skewed, reputable polling is expensive, and unreputable actors manipulate markets.

    "Polling has gone into... crisis because of modern technology... the number of phone calls to make the sample rise... reputable people are being driven out... for us to do guerrilla marketing..." (54:40–56:46)

  • The Michigan Senate primary shows the peril: expectations (and Polymarket odds) vastly overstated El Sayed’s win margin—reality revealed a much closer contest. (53:29–54:32)

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VIII. Immigration, Populism & Political Stability

• Immigration as Populist Flashpoint Globally

  • Immigration is consistently the issue around which populist parties rally, from U.S. to Europe. (70:39–72:36)
  • Frum: restriction is necessary both morally and prudentially, to prevent the kind of societal backlash and destabilization seen across the West.

• Populism, Nationalism, & the Limits of the Religious Right

  • Frum (as early as his first book) saw that the real threat to his vision of conservatism would come from nationalism and ethnic exclusivism, not religious right revival. (98:49–99:26)

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IX. Political Reckonings & Changing Views

• Openness to Change

  • Frum is asked to cite regrets and major changes: he points to his past opposition to gay marriage, now reversed. He’s also more accepting of a broader social insurance state for the sake of stability. (96:49–99:15)

• On "Unpatriotic Conservatives" (2003) and the Trajectory of the Right

  • Frum stands by his harsh critique of the anti-war, paleoconservative right, saying his core warning was correct, but admits to overestimating the enduring strength of his own (liberal internationalist) conservative camp. (88:50–96:15)

    "To love your country is to love it as it is... You project, but it's a fantasy. You don't love the country." (91:04) "There are probably phrases I would amend... That piece, which was written at a very emotional moment, it could have stood to be dialed back a notch. But the core of what it said, why did it stay in use? Why does anyone still care?... the hook go in the fish and never come out again?" (94:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Luck and Not Being "Smart":

  "God blesses you by making you lucky and then curses you by making you think you are so smart."
  — David Frum (21:57)

• On Political Courage:

  “So little is asked, and some of it is socially awkward and some of it involves maybe more assertions of personal independence than you’re comfortable with because we are pack animals. But it’s easy. So why don’t you do it?”
  — David Frum (23:06)

• On the Viability of Revolution:

  “My hypothesis is in societies where property is broadly distributed and in societies that have not gone through some unspeakable convulsion and trauma like military disposition, defeat – fascism is always going to beckon much more attractively than communism.”
  — David Frum (84:51)

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Key Timestamps by Topic

• Opening, Frum's Love of Country/1989: 00:00–16:20
• Family & Intergenerational Memory: 10:36–14:25
• American/Global Democratic Fragility, Trump Era: 15:20–18:00
• Never Trump, Betrayal, and Bravery: 23:06–28:42
• Leftward Drift, Post-Biden Democrats, Michigan Dilemma: 29:56–39:13
• Party Structure, El Sayed, DSA Insurgency: 43:36–48:45
• Polling Failures, Michigan Elections: 54:00–56:46
• Immigration and Populism: 70:39–73:42
• Political Regrets, Gay Marriage, Social Insurance: 96:49–99:15
• The "Unpatriotic Conservatives" Legacy: 88:50–96:15

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Tone & Atmosphere

• The conversation is searching, sometimes somber, but often lively and funny—the hosts tease one another, share drinks, and trade quips.
• Frum is both earnest and self-aware, willing to admit error and defend past positions, maintaining a slightly wry tone.
• Moynihan and Welch prod for accountability but also relate as fellow veterans of political journalism’s wars.

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For listeners seeking an exploration of current American politics through the prism of historical memory, the divided right and left, and the perspective of a "man of 1989," this episode is dense with insight and debate—a brisk survey of how we got here and what's keeping us from the brink.

Transcript

[David Frum]

To love your country is to love it as it is. When you say, I can't stand it now, but if we could get rid of all of the people I don't like, if we could get rid of all the social changes of the past 50 years, then I'd love it. Well, then you don't. You love some fantasy. We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Horse the Fifth Column Greetings

[Camille Foster]

and welcome to another exciting installment of the Fifth Column podcast. This is your weekly rhetorical assault in the news cycle. The people that make it, occasionally ourselves. I'm Camille Foster. Delighted to be here. Michael Moynihan is here. Matt Welch is here.

[Matt Welch]

We have day trading.

[David Frum]

What are you doing down there? Okay, let him make his money.

[Michael Moynihan]

No, I just. I got a call. I was seeing who it was.

[Camille Foster]

Okay.

[Michael Moynihan]

It was my doctor.

[Camille Foster]

He's buying on the SpaceX. SpaceX on the dip.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

And we are also joined by a guest in the studio today. The esteemed Mr. Frum is here. David Frum, the advisor.

[David Frum]

That sounds like a pre obituary.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Welch]

We're not giving you a lifetime achievement award.

[Camille Foster]

I'm not suggesting anything.

[Michael Moynihan]

We're going to wait till we release this.

[Camille Foster]

No, no. I'm delighted to have you here in the land of the. Hanging out with us for a little bit. Talking to us about various things political. We've got some recent election results. Yeah, but he's been opining on American politics for a very long time.

[Michael Moynihan]

Writing speeches for prominent Republicans. Aware that he's an interloper filled in the discount. He is an immigrant. Yes. And David, by the way, I start with the nice stuff. Start with nice stuff before I attack him and turn him apart. David, when I first met you, I told you the first time we met that you did write one book that was one of my favorite books of the year that I read it. The book about the 70s, which is a phenomenal book. Get it back in print because it

[David Frum]

was even documentary when you're not exactly. Brilliant memory.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah. So how we got here. The book about the 70s. If you listen to David and say, meh, buy your stick of books, still buy the 70s book. Even if you're MAGA. Go buy the 70s book. It's a great book.

[David Frum]

I don't think they will.

[Michael Moynihan]

No, no. We were illiterate. But one other thing I wanna say before we start.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

We did a members only episode a couple of days ago.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah. The Tuesday before the election.

[Michael Moynihan]

Just returned from my sojourn to Europe. A bit sick, but you Sick. Yeah. Weary but Go subscribe, by the way. Cause it's a great episode. But I just wanna apologize that I think that I might have had a few too many drinks during the episode. So. Dear listeners, me to you looking directly into the camera. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Not. So if you just get the free sample. I'm fine. It gets worse. Yeah, that's an apology to the tell

[Matt Welch]

is not slurring, although I think you might have. But that's. Which. Which is a very steep. For Moyn to ever get an S wrong.

[Michael Moynihan]

Takes a while. It's.

[Matt Welch]

It's. It's the volume.

[Michael Moynihan]

The volume got up the volume. Yeah. I think they level that though.

[David Frum]

Low or high?

[Michael Moynihan]

It goes low.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

I get very energetic. David.

[David Frum]

Yes.

[Michael Moynihan]

So I apologize for that. But. David from the Atlantic, staff writer. Is that what you're doing now? Now you have a podcast, correct. Why are you competing with us? Mind your business.

[David Frum]

The Atlantic recently unionized and I think in the union contract of media people, it's. Everyone in America is obliged to have a contract. I think if you get like you arrange the draft numbers right, you can be deferred. But if you don't get the deferment. If you don't get the deferment, you have to do the podcast.

[Michael Moynihan]

Are you in the un?

[David Frum]

I am in the union.

[Michael Moynihan]

You are the Harry Bridges of I

[David Frum]

am in the union.

[Matt Welch]

Used to be a conservative, sir.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yes.

[David Frum]

Well, one of the things you discover at unions is they're not voluntary. So.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah. Which is the old conservative argument. He's doing the right to work stuff at the Atlantic. Well, I'll have to talk to Jeff Goldberg.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah.

[David Frum]

So the podcast is very solo. It's me plus a guest. I do a monologue before, I do a book review after. And it's kind of an anti podcast because one of the. Every podcast ends with the discussion of a book in printed form to remind you that you should consume content not just through your ears, but through your eyes. And we do a lot of pretty rigorous stuff. The last show, we are not into clickbait. The last show was looking back on the political and economic legacy of Herbert Hoover.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, that was a real belt looser.

[David Frum]

I'll go to the mat on that one.

[Michael Moynihan]

But you did also a recent one, end it with a discussion of your favorite antisemitic author, John Licari. So, you know. And you did recommend the Spy who Came in from the Cold, which is a good book. And then it was all downhill from there. I do recommend people read Clive James, go back into The Cold, his review of all of Licari's books. It was in the New York Review Books, one of the funniest reviews I

[David Frum]

have to read that.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's extremely funny.

[David Frum]

But I didn't review the book. I talked about the genre. Why did the spy novel emerge in the 20th century? And I offered two theses. The first, that spy novels are attempts to write about bureaucracy, which is a new experience in the 20th century. It's about people who have to wrestle with problems of fundamental good and evil within the context of giant bureaucratic apparatuses. And sometimes there's more fantasy. Like Ian. You never see James Bond fill out an expense report, whereas John le Carre's character.

[Michael Moynihan]

There's a lot of expense reports.

[David Frum]

A lot of expense reports. And then the second thing is, and this is, I think, why it has been so associated with English writers and in the United States, where the spies tend to become more like Spider man or superheroes with extraordinary powers. The people who write, at least my favorite spy novels, tend to be Jewish, Daniel Silva and Alan Furst. And because spy novels are about the experience of people who are secretly powerful, the spy is the most marginal of marginal characters. And the American writing about the bureaucracy and good and evil tends to be Tom Clancy giant machines where the power is very visible.

[Camille Foster]

And they're hyper competent.

[David Frum]

Hyper competent. But the British, with their experience of having their power Displaced in the 20th century, the Jews who live on the margins of society, the spy novel speaks to that experience in a way that the techno fantasy really does not.

[Matt Welch]

There's a great movie. It's actually the precursor to or the original of True Lies. What became True Lies in America? The Schwarzenegger movie. The Schwarzenegger movie, which is fantastic.

[Camille Foster]

It's a very sexy movie.

[Matt Welch]

Jamie Lee Curtis movie called the Functionary. Il Functionaire French movie that came out before. And the conceit of it's totally different than True Lies. And it's terrific. It's that he is, in the French parlance, a functionary. You're a bureaucrat. You will, like, have the most boring job. You just work for the government. You got your state job. You can retire safely at age 57 or whatever and have a lifetime. But you're boring. You're fundamentally boring. And that guy turns out to have a secret life as a James Bond that everyone's like, can you even believe it? But it plays right into that bureaucratic

[Michael Moynihan]

thing to get to your background through this. In the John Licari thing, you pointed out that the books that he wrote, particularly Spy who came from the cult is that it's kind of a reaction to Fleming. It's kind of a reaction to the swashbuckling, good looking superhero kind of guy. And then you have somebody like William F. Buckley, who does a series of spy books, none of which I've ever read, called Blackford Oaks, which was a reaction to Le Carre.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

You started your career in the US working for Buckley. Right. You started National Review. Am I wrong in thinking that was the first thing in the us?

[David Frum]

No, it's approximately true. So I got to know Buckley when I was an undergraduate. I was offered a job at National Review when I graduated, which I turned down.

[Michael Moynihan]

Because you went to Yale.

[David Frum]

I went to Yale. So that was a. Which was the first bona fide a job qualification at National Review. And I. I came out and I'm writing a memoir. So this is all very fresh in my mind and I've been going through old files and refreshing my memories of things. And I admired him so much. I was close to his son Christopher, whom I just remains of friends to this day. And they were kind. Buckley, Bill Buckley was kind enough to invite me to lunch at that amazing house in Stamford. And it was such an exciting thing. And I thought in on the train ride there, is it possible they're going to offer me a job? That would be so amazing. No, no. That would be so amazing. That would be too amazing to be believed. Probably not, but maybe what would I do? And then they did and then I turned it down. And that's. I am still to this day, I'm not 100% sure why I did it really, but it was. I did it because I'm not a joiner. I did not. And I sometimes think, what. Because I've had this irregular relationship with the conservative world all my life and I think being offered the golden Willy Wonka ticket and saying I'll do it my own way instead, which was a spur of the moment decision.

[Michael Moynihan]

But you wrote for them quite a bit.

[David Frum]

I wrote for them quite a bit.

[Michael Moynihan]

At that point. You're 22 years old. Something like that. Just how do you. You're a Canadian. Your mother is Barbara Fromm, the journalist, and she was the host of as It Happens.

[David Frum]

Is that cbc. My mother was probably after the Queen, the most visible, instantly recognizable female face and voice in Canada. From about 1971 till her untimely death at age 54 in 1992, she hosted a radio show called as It Happens, which is the. Which was copied, All Things Considered, basically, All Things Considered. Copied the format. And then in the spirit of free trade, my mother and the second 10 years of her career was on a show that copied Nightline. So the Americans ripped off the radio idea, but the Canadians then borrowed Nightline. And she was then the main interviewer on the nightly evening interview show after the hard news at 10.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, but you lay all this stuff out, all this biographical detail out and then no one has any idea who the names are. And you say, well, and then the sun becomes a prominent conservative is not something you would imagine. CBC Canada. Your background. What was it when you were 22 years old, 21 years old, you said, maybe I'm not a Republican because I'm not American, but I'm a conservative. I'm sort of tilting towards this side

[David Frum]

of the political aisle Again, you happen to touch a fertile numbers. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. So here's the necessary background fact. So I'm an Ashkenazi Jew on both sides. My father's family came to Canada from Poland in 1930. He was born in Toronto in 1931. Most of their family remained behind in Poland and to a person, with one or two exceptions, murdered and had my father's parents made a slightly different decision in 1930. And they didn't have big ideas. They were not victims of persecution. The economy was terrible. They had relatives in Toronto, so they moved. Had they made a different decision, my father would have been murdered about the time of his 10th or 11th birthday. On my mother's side, her parents were, by the standards of the small town in which they live, prosperous people. And they bought their handsome house in Niagara falls, Ontario in 1942, which happens to be the single most murderous year in the history of the Jewish people. And so I was now none of this was talked about very. This was all too much to talk about when the relevant people were alive. We only began to talk about it after the relevant people were gone. Find words for these contrasting experiences.

[Matt Welch]

You knew it, but you knew not to talk about it, or you sort of knew it.

[David Frum]

I sort of knew it. I knew more of the details as I grew up. Some of them had been obscure. A lot of the people who had the knife whistle past their ear just never wanted to think about it again. It was too. My father's father's side, I mean parents, grandparents, cousins, children. Everybody killed and killed by bullets. Killed not with. This is before the killing machinery, the industrialized machinery of the death camps is created. Killed by bullets, killed by starvation, killed by being locked 27 people into a room and an infectious disease goes through killed in ways you don't. It takes you 20 years even to get any under notion of exactly how did your mother die? So, but to the question of my political development. So one of the things and my parents did well, my mother was this prominent journalist. My father began as a dentist, was a successful businessman. And we lived in conditions of security and prosperity that simply unimaginable in the history of anybody with my DNA going back 2,000 years. And so my earliest political thought was. And because the grownups around me didn't want to talk about any of this, is that a little conceivably. But I was a big reader as a kid. At age 14 or 15, I became convinced. I understand that this, everything we have is more vulnerable than anybody around me wants to admit. And, and because it's canon, I understand that it is all protected not by the rcmp, but by these giant institutions of power that ultimately rest on the United States. That's why we are not going to meet the fate of my grandparents. And that's why my maternal grandparents had the degree of prosperity and security that they had. And so I wasn't Alex B. Keaton. I wasn't a rebel against my parents. I thought I was very close to both my parents and admired them and to this day carry their ideas and even their turns of phrase upon me. But my formative political thought was this has to be protected. And it has to be protected in a more explicit and affirmative way than my parents politics allowed them to acknowledge.

[Matt Welch]

I wonder, has that sense of how does that sense of fragility, that sensation inside of you changed over that time? Like you're 15, so you're headstrong and you're a little bit solipsistic, mouthy. But whatever you're.

[David Frum]

You're also unbearable, I think is the

[Michael Moynihan]

word we're looking for in this job. You're all unbearable.

[Matt Welch]

You're thrusting yourself in the world and you're starting a career. You have this maybe sort of a crusading sense of, of this must be protected. Let's identify the sources of the strength that is keeping this and also the potential danger protected from who, protected from who. And all this kind of stuff. And the world changes a lot after the end of the Cold War, and then it certainly changed a lot over the last 12 years. Did your sense of fragility go into remission for a while in that long period? And then it is now kind of awakened and still undergirds your work in

[David Frum]

the early Cold War period? For sure it did. Our friend Christopher Hitchens always described himself as funny, fundamentally a man of 1968. And I realized, however long I live, I will always be a man of 1989.

[Matt Welch]

Me too.

[David Frum]

That's the miracle year. That's everything I believed in. And there may be younger people listening who don't understand this. 1989 was not just the year that the Berlin Wall came down and that Europe or Germany reunited. And Europe was reunited. It spread all over the planet. All over the planet. So between 1989 and 1994, you get the coming of democracy to the Pacific fringe, to Taiwan and South Korea. You get the overturning of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. I'd visited Chile during the dictatorship and I'd smelt how terrifying it was. You have the end of apartheid in South Africa. You had India and Mexico. Mexico becoming a multi party democracy for the first time in its history. India opening its markets, China opening its markets.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's this Vietnam opening its market.

[David Frum]

Vietnam. Everything one could ever have imagined happening, happening within approximately half a decade. And so for me, that was a vindication of all the things I believed. But what I did believe was, okay. The question, as I'm always very historically minded, the question was, would the people of 1989 to 1994 prove themselves the equals of those from 1946 to 1950 who'd built institutions to make all of this last and then to finish the story? And so one of the reasons that the Trump experience has been so radicalizing for me, not radicalizing because I don't know that I've changed so many of my views, but so galvanizing has been. I see all of this because it all rests on American institutions, American power, American involvement in the world. That is the guarantor of this whole system. And when America implements, implodes upon itself, betrays its best nature, becomes a predatory instead of a benign power, the whole world systems begins to spiral. And so I see that. I don't know when we can talk about how permanent this is all likely to be. But over the past decade, and this is a kind of undoing, a withdrawal of America from its best self, a withdrawal of America from the world and the spiral of the world back to the nightmares that that existed before I was born.

[Michael Moynihan]

A lot of your writing, as you just said, is based on kind of a grand sweep of modern history that you take that into consideration. I think of you, I think of people like George Will and George Will's columns. I mean, he will randomly write a column about The Einsatzgruppen, just to remind everybody of the evil that exists in the world. It had existed in the world. And it reminds me of my friend Noam Dwarman, who's been on the show, owns a comedy seller here, talking to me about his father, who is Manny Menachem, who was born in Israel in what he thought about America, which was just this, had the most sort of expansive view of the greatness of America because what it provided him and his family, and I see a lot of that, it's not as if you would have grown up speaking Polish, you wouldn't have been able to grow up at all because your father would have been killed. And, and then you look at now, you wrote a column recently, not too long ago, about the globalized, the intifada idea in that sort of movement. And you see a lot of Jews in this city. And I remember Norman Podhoritz wrote a long time ago, why are Jews liberal? Write this book. And people who have no connection, despite their families, have these connection to these old ideas of what can go horribly wrong when people are, you know, blaming the Jews for everything and finding Jewish conspiracies. And this is unfortunately on the right and left and almost in equal measure now, from the Tucker Carlson's on one side, somebody who you knew in the past to the, you know, I wouldn't say aoc, these people who are running. Who was the one here?

[Matt Welch]

El Sayed.

[Michael Moynihan]

El Sayed, yeah, yesterday. But do you feel there's a kind of a disconnection, a generational thing, that a certain amount of time it stops and no one is looking backwards because you had those connections to your family and it informs so much of what you say and what you write and what you believe. Are we at a point now where people don't remember the Cold War? And, you know, you have Hassan Piker praising Mao and saying the Soviet Union, the collapse of that was a great tragedy. I mean, where are we now in that kind of view of what to us is recent history that informs what we believed and believe?

[David Frum]

Well, the dimming of historical memory or the distance from historical memory for sure is part of the story. But I think there's something else that goes on which is one of the questions that confronting the horrors of the human past involves you to think about is could it have happened to you, you wonderful, lovely, important, you brave, you noble, you moral, you? Could you have been vulnerable? And the thought of that, that's a very painful thought. And so people want to believe in a version of the World around them. History. No history. Because these things that happened in the past. Ann Applebaum, in her book on the Gulag, has this wonderful sentence that needs to be chiseled. Somewhere. I write this story of the Soviet Gulag, not so that it will never happen again, but because it will happen again. It happens all the time. And these bestialities and brutalities are unleashed. And if you live in the comfort and security of the United States, the prosperity of the United States, you don't want to think that. And to really. So to really grapple with these things is to face your own mortality, your own vulnerability. You just got lucky. My late father, again I mentioned he was a successful businessman. He is a man of many, many wonderful sayings. And one of his saying is God blesses you by making you lucky and then curses you by making you think you are so smart. And one of the things he always wanted to stress was a lot of what happens to you. And I don't know whether this is my least conservative belief or my most conservative belief is the extraordinary fact of luck, including being born where you were, being born without the disabilities that might have attended you, being born without the psychic or other problems you might have had, that all the things you think are you are products of chance and luck and your environment. So that's a hard thing to face. And people would like to believe, you know, what if we just said the right formulas or did the right things, then the need to keep danger and horror at bay, that would vanish and we could live our noble, perfect lives.

[Michael Moynihan]

That's your most conservative belief, that you don't believe that if we just have the formula. Right. But the Anne Applebaum quote reminds me of the scene in the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters, when Max von Sydow is saying, you know, there's a woman in his apartment, he's watching a documentary on the Holocaust, and she says, I can't believe this happened. And Max von Sydow, in his very Swedish way, walks by and he says, I can't believe it doesn't happen more often. Right. I mean, it's very similar. But of the people that you knew.

[David Frum]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

And presumably aren't friends with. We all have these from your time either in the conservative movement or adjacent to it, who have not been brave, who have disappointed you. Tucker Carlson presumably being top of almost everybody's list. Who are those people? Are there people that really have massively disappointed you by betraying what you believe were their principles to basic conservative principles? In a way.

[David Frum]

Can I just put a Pin briefly in that word, brave. So one of the things that will sometimes be said about never Trump conservatives, the people broke with Trump on this is that people say, you're so brave. No, we weren't. No, we're not in a concentration camp. Yes, some people have passed by the chance to make ill gotten disgusting dirty money. So they forfeited some economic opportunities, whether reasonable that they could have stayed, they lost a job that they could have, under different political circumstances, could have kept, or they could have cashed in on this giant bonanza of unprecedented corruption from coin. Yeah, exactly. And corruption that can't be compared. When people say this is the most X or Y in American history, it can't be compared to anything in American history. It's the Philippines, it's so Soviet Republic, it's post colonial Africa. It's like nothing that has ever been seen in any democratic country ever. And some people are getting pieces of it. I mean, for everyone who's making billions, there are a hundred people who are making millions and a thousand people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so you miss your chance. That's not bravery. So the question I keep saying is so little is asked, and some of it is socially awkward and some of it involves maybe more assertions of personal independence than you're comfortable with because we are pack animals. But it's easy. So why don't you do it now? I try to be very particular in my judgments about different people who have done different things. Some people make decisions that are mildly blameworthy, Some people make decisions that are more severe. Some people are faced with really awkward choices, which is there are always people who say, well, it would be worse if I didn't take part. And sometimes that's even true. Yeah, sometimes that's true.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's better to have me in the administration than me outside.

[David Frum]

Sometimes that's true. And sometimes even if it's not true, so it's still an understandable problem.

[Michael Moynihan]

Personal justification.

[David Frum]

Yeah. Well, it can be a rationalization, but sometimes it really is true, especially for people in some of the national security and law enforcement and intelligence jobs.

[Camille Foster]

Sure.

[David Frum]

And sometimes it's just that they say I need to time my resignation so it will arrive when it counts. And I don't want to resign over the first thing because there will someday be an more important thing and I need to save my resignation. So I want to be specific in judgment. And we all also have to be charitable with people do have mortgages, they do have children. And even though you're not brave, you're not facing anything. There's still economic uncertainty that people have to get through. And even in this prosperous country abounding in opportunities, people say, well, will my next opportunity be as good as the one I'm saying goodbye to? And that's not a light thing to summon people to do. But, yes, there have been people who have disappointed me.

[Michael Moynihan]

Who shocked you? Anyone shocked you? Anyone shocked you in the. Like, you know, I know certain people who have been. Who have been very close with Tucker Carlson who were really shocked by how far he went. But is there anyone beyond the obvious one of Tucker that really shocked you?

[David Frum]

That Tucker doesn't shock me because he was always capable of so many. When I knew him well in the 1990s and early 2000s, even then, he was always capable of many things, some of them good. But people are capable of many things, are capable also of things that are bad. So if you'd said to me in 1998, you know, this person is going to become what he has become. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't have guessed it, but I'm not surprised when you tell me. I think the ones who shock me more, the ones who shock me are the people who have real intellectual gifts, people at the Claremont Institute and places like that, who have a real commitment to the American Constitution, who understand the institution.

[Matt Welch]

You're using the present tense. You want to still hold on to that present tense. Talking about the Claremont Institute, okay?

[David Frum]

Or they had it. And then apply these prodigious powers of thinking to rationalize and to turn on their heads what they used to believe. That's the part what shocks me. And they do it for no reason. They do it for sport, or they do it because. And this is. We've all been exposed to this temptation of letting your indignation and irritation with things that are genuinely irritating and offensive drive you to places where you would never have voluntarily gone. And one of the things, and this is about our line of work, including especially this format in the podcast world, we are exposed both to pushes and to pulls. So the push is there's somebody powerful or wealthy or influential behind you, someone whose support you need, who says, do this or do that. And that's basically an order. And that's the push. And we've all encountered people who are susceptible to the push, but there's also the push. There are the people out there who want certain things and don't want other things. And thanks to modern information technology, we all know instantly what they want and what they don't want and how Much they want it and how much they don't want it. And they pull us. And I've seen that happen too, of people being and you say you didn't have to do it, but it's kind of the roar of the grease paint, the smell of the crowd, they couldn't resist. And we all know people like this. You say you're doing this just for a higher YouTube count.

[Matt Welch]

Has there been a pull on you in the last dozen years for Come to the Resistance? DAVID Frum?

[David Frum]

Yeah, that's about to start. That's about to start. Oh, to me it's a start. Yeah. Not on me personally, but. In 2018-2020, the Democratic Party made it very easy for people like me, which is to say, look, we all want to stop Trump, right? And we all want the broadest possible coalition to stop Trump. So we're going to assemble a group of pretty level headed people. They may be a little bit more liberal than you. They might do. We know you don't like the student loan cancellation. We know you don't like that. But you're just going to have to live with that. And is that the worst thing in the world? I can live with the student loan cancellation. They made it easy and they made it easy through 22 and 24. And now they're making it not so easy. Now they're saying we are going in a direction where we're gonna do some things that really shock and offend you.

[Camille Foster]

A moment ago you said 2020, then you just went further and said 22, 24. What happened in 2020 that started to make this more of a difficult arrangement.

[David Frum]

So what happens is that the very broad Democratic coalition that won the House in 2018, that elected Biden in 2020, there are elements in that coalition who said, now we have a mandate to do real progressive change. And they didn't have a mandate for it. They had an opportunity and I can't entirely blame them. Trump gave them an opportunity. And one of the things I said through the first term is the price of Trump is going to be an America that ends up being more left wing than it otherwise would be. Because in order to sustain the anti Trump coalition, the center is going to have to make concessions to the left that it wouldn' not otherwise have had to make under a more normal kind of Republican. But they really took that opportunity and they took it a lot while Biden was president, either because he agreed or because he was not in a condition to stop it. And now post Biden, they've interpreted the defeat of 2024 as the American people demanding ever more wild and radical things, wanting an ever bigger challenge to the American system. And so in the 2026 cycle, we see a Democratic Party that is not in its entirety, but that we're a really extreme faction of. It has gained a lot of power. And it's going to. That's going to change the whole coalition. And again, they're going to make it difficult. And those who come from the Republican and conservative tradition, who are part of the Never Trump coalition, we're going to have to make some very difficult choices.

[Michael Moynihan]

But some of those choices kind of shock me in the sense that you can sit on your hands, you can oppose this stuff, you don't have to come out and support it directly. And I see people that were conservatives, worked at the Weekly Standard talking about court packing, talking about Graham Platner in an extremely positive way, a man with a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest, right in people who identified 10 years ago as rock rib conservatives. And that was the reason they were opposing Donald Trump now supporting these things.

[David Frum]

So the classic story here is a fable by James Thurber called the Bear who Could Take it or Leave It Alone. And it's the story of a bear who becomes an alcoholic and comes reeling home drunk and falls flat on his face. And his wife is very afraid and his children are very upset. His children are very afraid and his wife's very upset. But at length, good news. A temperance preacher comes through town. The bear sees the error of his ways, takes the pledge, forswears liquor, and not only that, to prove how healthful teetotaling is, he takes up calisthenics, and he will do handsprings in the bedroom and knock over the furniture and fall flat on his back. And his wife is very upset and his children are very afraid. And the moral of the story is it's just as bad to fall flat on your back as it is to fall flat on your face. And that's something that everybody in politics needs to keep in mind. And it's hard. But, yeah, my object here and whatever little few pebbles of weight that I bring to the course of history is on behalf of some things. And those things can face many dangers. And at any given moment, some of them are more urgent than others. And you always have to make compromises, and it's hard to know what are the compromises that are right at that juncture of events. But don't lose sight of what it is that you come to do. Don't Lose sight of what it is you believe in and what it is you oppose.

[Michael Moynihan]

Did you make any compromises that you regret?

[David Frum]

Regret? I've done many things I. In my life, I've done many things I regret, but in the Trump era, compromises. So far, not. I mean, so far, I think that generally making my peace with policy outcomes that are more liberal ish than I would have liked has to date not been a higher price than I expected to have to pay. But I think in the next political cycle, this work of thinking is going to become much more difficult. And there are a lot of questions that I'm in the middle of thinking about. And I will tell you, I don't yet have an answer to this choice or that choice. I expect to because, again, I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years. I always feel. Not because anyone cares, but because it's your responsibility as a thinking person. If you change your mind, you have to put on the record. Explain why. Yes, not because, again, anybody cares, but just so it's not arbitrary, just so people can see it's not driven by popularity. You thought it through. So this is why I used to think X. This is the process by which I came to believe Y instead or plus X, or that X was partly true, but not true enough. This is why I've changed. This is where I am now. And that's just my account. That's my guarantee of quality service to you.

[Matt Welch]

Whoever is interested, go ahead.

[Camille Foster]

No, I was just going to ask if we could help you navigate some of those unresolved quandaries that you're dealing with now.

[David Frum]

Well, the unresolved quandary. Well, the hardest quandary we're speaking the day after the Michigan primary is if what you want to do is restore the rule of law, protect free trade, protect the Department of Justice, protect the courts from bad judges who shouldn't be there. Because. Because by and large, to this point, with a few exceptions, I think the courts have been a bulwark and they have done good service. I don't like the Trump immunity decision at all. But if you really enter into it, you see they had a real problem, and I don't like their answer, but it's not like I can glibly dismiss the problem they faced. So if you want to protect all that, it's very important that Trump's party not keep control of the Senate. On the other hand, the Democrats seem to want to put in the Senate people who are as hostile to American institutions in ways in their way, even if it's a less popular and immediately dangerous way. And then you have to make your decision case by case. And in some of the cases, the unacceptable Democrat faces an equally or nearly equally unacceptable Republican. That's the case of the Wisconsin governorship where it's wacko versus wacko. But in the Michigan Senate race, you face someone who on a different timeline would be a perfectly normal, sensible Republican.

[Michael Moynihan]

Against Mike Rogers. Yeah. Who was in the house for what, eight years?

[Matt Welch]

I mean he's kind of to 2014. He's a national security pre Trump guy.

[David Frum]

Yeah, perfectly, perfectly responsible choice. I mean he will do some bad things because party discipline will make him do them, but he's in the American mainstream and he faces an opponent who's not.

[Matt Welch]

And so you don't know who you'd vote for if you were in Michigan? Is that what you're telling us? Because I know who I wouldn't vote for.

[Michael Moynihan]

That's pretty easy.

[David Frum]

I think I know who I would vote for, but I'm second guess. I would have some time. I would not say my thinking process is quite over yet.

[Michael Moynihan]

Although what are the unanswered questions there?

[Camille Foster]

You guys have to name names too. I would vote for.

[David Frum]

Okay, so it's a question of the consequences of voting for Mike Rogers are bad consequences because it empowers Trump. But the Elsie choice is a bad choice. And it's especially. When the message of a candidate to me said, look, I'm a little worried about your stance about the Jewish people in America and the Jewish people in the world. And the candidate's answer is, look, so long as you disavow half your people, I'm prepared to guarantee your physical safety. I believe there should be no violent attacks on American Jews. And I will do my as if you were my own children. I will prevent violent attacks on you. You. And all I ask in return for this guarantee of your physical safety is that you disavow who you are. I've heard that before. I've heard that before. And the answer is no. The answer is no.

[Michael Moynihan]

I mean the idea of globalizing Intifada. There's an attack on a Jewish daycare in Michigan and his response is ultimately after being pushed. Yeah, it's bad. But so is what's happening in Gaza, which is the idea of globalizing the intifada. What does Gaza have to do with attacking Jewish children in Michigan? It's all part of one big morality play for him, which is a very, very dangerous way of thinking.

[David Frum]

I think the answer that that kind of candidate, that DSA candidate is moving toward and Mayor Mamdani is getting there first, is okay. We regret seeming to be indifferent to the attack on the daycare center, which was ultimately unsuccessful. It should be said, thanks to the heroism of the people there. And we are prepared, you know, thinking it over, we do think that those Jews who live in the United States, North America, should have their physical safety guaranteed. We do think that. But there's a price. And if you don't meet the price, then whatever happens to you is your own fault. And the price is that you disavow who you are and what you believe. If you'll do that, your physical safety will be guaranteed. And I just think I listened to that offer. As I say, Jews have heard that offer through history.

[Matt Welch]

Can't vote for someone who says that.

[David Frum]

And you can't vote for someone who says that.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[David Frum]

Even though the consequences of voting for the other guy may in the near term be worse.

[Michael Moynihan]

But isn't it, I would say, making no, I mean, as we've said on the show, Matt especially that Rogers is a rat bag of epic proportions. But one of the things that I would say he has going for him, and this is where we are in American politics, is that I don't know if he believes in anything. I'm more afraid of the person who believes in something in this race because it appears that said has some very core beliefs that he's trying to kind of walk away because now he has to win a statewide election in Michigan, which Trump won twice, but you know, is trending.

[David Frum]

I don't think he's going to win. It was one of the services the never Trump Republicans can provide. Their current and maybe someday former coalition partners say, you understand that the Republican Party of the United States is a very effective and ruthless power seeking machine. You've been playing high school ball against Democrats who are just covered with inhibition. So you have candidates who get very close to candidates who literally stand beside somebody who said America deserved 9, 11. And they're in a Democratic primary. And in the Democratic primary, it's bad form to do too much with that. Bad form. They don't do too. They do a little. They don't do too much. Now you're about to congratulations, you won your high school league and now you're going to the NFL. And when you say you can't hit me that hard, they will just say to your crushed, flattened self back there, I just did. Now I'm turning around and ready for another crushing.

[Michael Moynihan]

I mean it's a national election with Barack Obama. But recall that he had to run away from Reverend Wright who said God damn America. Right. And you have people out there in a Senate campaign traveling around with somebody who says America deserved nine, eleven and a thousand things just as bad. And they're not running away.

[Matt Welch]

But that's also we're in the post running away from here, of course.

[Michael Moynihan]

And it's Trump has a lot of is the person who established a lot

[Camille Foster]

of it is the post running away from moment. But it's also there is a I was just talking to my friend Isaac Saul over at Tangle about this yesterday and there's this like calculation that we're all doing. Like who is actually more perilous for you to get behind or at least align with temporarily what a great place to be.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's very, very bad.

[Camille Foster]

And I'm thinking about like Fuentes on one side and Piker on the other. And Nick Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump. So Kanye brought him to the dinner

[Matt Welch]

and a really great looking dinner.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, yeah. The other anti Semite brought him to dinner.

[Camille Foster]

He's healing now. But beyond that, in general, I don't know that there are any currently elected or aspiring, prominent aspiring Republicans who are out and out like Fuentes goipers. I don't think that's the case. I don't even know that there's anyone who would have him over for a campaign event. Piker, on the other hand, is going out to Michigan and is rather prominently and publicly palling around with lots and lots of people who are not seeking

[Michael Moynihan]

office, to use an Obama phrase, palling around.

[Camille Foster]

They're not just actively seeking office. These are prominent races. These are people who could be really formative figures in the Democratic Party at this point. And it feels materially different. Even though as you pointed out, I think appropriately, Moynihan, there are kind of really ugly vibes, nasty things happening in both parties right now. But there seems to be a kind of quiet permissiveness on the left at the moment that makes me very uncomfortable. And I suppose you are running that all of that math alongside this calculation that says there are people on the right who are making compromises, but they seem to be making compromises in places where you imagine they don't actually believe the things they're saying.

[Michael Moynihan]

One thing that I said, which I believe is that Donald Trump provided that permission structure. But it is incumbent upon you as the other party who has been sneering appropriately at some of this stuff from Donald Trump, to not inhabit that same world and say, well, we can get some electoral advantage from this, too. So just to be clear about that.

[David Frum]

Sure. Part of the asymmetry here is the Republican and Democratic parties are very different kinds of institutions organized in very different ways. And I compare them. The Republican Party is like Philadelphia as a city. It has a downtown and the downtown is the densest part. And then it fades out into the suburbs. But there's a base. It is a meaningful thing to talk about the Republican base and to wonder what it's going to do and to notice its impact on the people who live in the non base in the outer areas. The Democratic parties, like Los Angeles, it's got five centers. So who's the when people talk about the Democratic base, is it the highly educated urban leftist who made Mayor Mandani what he is and elected El Sayed? Is it the people who vote for Jim Clyburn? Is it the remains of private sector unions and the powerful forces of the public sector unions? And these are different groups with very different views. They often don't like each other very much. And so the Democratic Party is a much more unstable institution. Well, it's a much more contentious institution. It's potentially more stable just because there's much more variety and there are things going on away from the hot zone at any given moment in a way that the Republican Party can be captured. So I think that's one of the differences between the Republicans move toward and make no mistake that the train is never late. The direction in which Trump is leading the Republican Party will have consequences for all minorities. Jews don't rank as low on the Republican list of animosities as other minority groups. Oh, they're going up or as low as high.

[Michael Moynihan]

The Republican number six with a bullet.

[David Frum]

Yeah, Number six.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah. Quite literally. In a language. Yeah. Who knows?

[David Frum]

So there are other groups they dislike more. But one of the things that we are hungering for are at least I am, leaders who summon the spirit of generosity which American leaders have at their best. And that's something that's very much in danger. And the Hardys are in a spiral. Competition.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, it's a competition. I want to play a clip for you guys that I know that our crew has seen this morning. We were all laughing about this. And this is Mr. Al Said, who wins on Wednesday. I think this was today's Thursday. Recording this on Thursday, on Wednesday gave a speech and I noticed a few curious, odd things. I'm wondering if you guys will notice something similar. And this is Abdul El Sayed on Wednesday as Bitter and as divisive and as cynical as the campaign against us might have been, I want us to realize that there is so much more that unites us now because the campaign that Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and their GOP MAGA allies are launching is already more bitter.

[David Frum]

All you got to do is look

[Michael Moynihan]

at the ads you're already watching on TV started today. You know, they think that you want to use my whole name against me. Mike, listen, man, if you can't say the name, it's Abdurrahman. Keep the name out your damn mouth. I'll be happy to give you lessons. All right, that's good. Couple things about that. I don't know if anyone noticed. I pointed this out to producer Jason and he said, I wanted you to be wrong about this. And then he realized maybe I was right. He's kind of starting to sound like Obama.

[Matt Welch]

Yep. Clipping.

[Michael Moynihan]

He's doing the clip.

[Matt Welch]

Little clip.

[Michael Moynihan]

They're using my name. They're trying to make me form. And then the funniest thing about that, he's like, you can't pronounce my name, I believe. Come on. That was. That was like, you know, the most, like, over the top pronunciation. I was like, what's it.

[David Frum]

That's not what I was struck most struck by in the, in the clip.

[Michael Moynihan]

What was that?

[David Frum]

I was as bitter and divisive as the campaign against us was. That is. There's no generosity for anyone else. There's no thought, you know, other people. There are other people in Michigan politics who have taken some blows. Other people have felt, been made to feel by your supporters physically unsafe who can't go to conventions because of your supporters. You're very aware of what has been done.

[Michael Moynihan]

Democratic Attorney General. Yeah.

[David Frum]

Very aware of what has been done to you. And that is when you say, what is the Obama difference? The Obama difference would have been. He wouldn't have said the against us. He would have had a word of generosity for his opponent at least, and certainly his same party opponent.

[Michael Moynihan]

It.

[David Frum]

And to say, I want to reach out my. You've won. It's not their job to come to you. It's your job to go to them. And it's your job to say something congratulatory and to say, you know, there have been anti Semitic threats. There have been other kinds of threats. I say here and now, remember Bob Dole in 1996 in San Diego? This is the party of Lincoln, and if anyone here thinks otherwise, the exits are clearly marked. That's the way to talk.

[Matt Welch]

Although he's the leading edge, at least this week, of an insurgency. And whenever there's an intraport party insurgency, when the insurgents win, they're not necessarily magnanimous in that moment. When there's the Tea party candidates of 2010 that came through, they went against Mitch McConnell's desires or handpicked successors in a bunch of different states. And I don't remember what the tape was, but maybe it wasn't quite a sharp elbow, but it was a bit like that, too, because they were insurgents.

[David Frum]

But dress for the job you want.

[Matt Welch]

That's true.

[David Frum]

And what is the job you want? Do you want to lead the country? The thing about Donald, among the shocking things about Donald Trump is there has never been an hour where he wanted to be president of the United States. He never thought that he had any duty at all to the people, to the states that voted against him. If your state didn't vote against him and there's a tornado nerts to you, you get nothing.

[Matt Welch]

There's a great, just an interjection in the Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan regime change book. They have have several different meetings where it's basically Stephen Miller with a bunch of executives and saying, okay, can you get us your deal has to be producing jobs within Trump's term or forget about it or you have to be from a Trump state or not a Trump state. They're just explicit about it.

[Michael Moynihan]

We do on this show, as you people know, are Test of Polymarket. But we have David Frum here and we're going to talk about Michigan. He knows a lot about it. He's been talking about it now. So let's get to some numbers from Tuesday's elections in Michigan. All right. By the way, can we get rid of Graham Platner in the beginning of that?

[Camille Foster]

No, no.

[Michael Moynihan]

Replace him with Goebbels or something. Is that, is that a heavy lift for people?

[Camille Foster]

Keep him.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, he's down but not out. All right. I want to start with something that very few people notice. This is the 8th district in Michigan and a bunch of names you haven't heard of. Right. And Amir Hassan, this is the Republican who was endorsed by Donald Trump. Donald Trump went on the stump with Amir Hassan and said, here's the guy. He's the guy I got to vote for.

[Matt Welch]

How did he pronounce his name?

[Michael Moynihan]

He's Amerhassen. Great guy. We love Amerhassen. Thomas Smith. Smith, who was the Democrat who dropped out of the race. He dropped out of the race and said everybody throw their support behind Alfred Lemo Right. So if you look at this Amir Hasan in the Poly Market. If you were looking to Poly Market to give you some tips, I'll defend polymarket in this way. You could have made some money. You could have made a lot of money, Cuz. Amir Hassan. These are the numbers. These are the numbers. 95, 97%, 98%, 98%. All the way. All the way. And the election happens. Thomas J. Smith dropped out of the race. As our friend Dave Weigel pointed out. The New York Times reported this. They didn't even have a headshot of him.

[Camille Foster]

Nope.

[Michael Moynihan]

They had no headshot of the guy that won Donald Trump an uninterrupted string of successes. The man he endorses loses to somebody who wasn't even running. All right, let's look at.

[Matt Welch]

Do we think it's just because Thomas Smith sounds like a normal name?

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was like, I don't know about that guy. But what we have been talking about is the Senate primary. Abdullah. Al Said, now, if you look at this stuff, let's actually look at the past week. Past week is, is. Is pretty impressive because Haley Stevens was. And I talked to our pal Jonathan about this. I said, I think she's gonna be more competitive than you're giving her credit for. Because what we try to do when we're looking at this polymarket stuff and looking at polling too, is trying to disaggregate the kind of Twitter world is Twitter, real life and all these kind of, you know, this is pretty impressive as candidate. Cause Al Said is getting enormous barrels of ink in newspapers, msnbc, cnn, Fox in its negative way. But he's the only guy in this race, if you're paying attention, outside of Michigan. And if you look at this on Polymarket, Abdul el Sayed is 94, 95%. This is the last week. 97%. Vote returns start coming in and we get a little uptick from Haley Stevens, who gets up to about 16, 17%. Now El Sayed wins. How many people cast votes in this? Anybody out there? Matt, how many people cast votes in this election? I don't know, man. You know, you're supposed to be an expert. David, any idea?

[David Frum]

No idea.

[Michael Moynihan]

1.5 million people cast votes in this election. Do you know what the vote difference was? Was it, as Polymarket had it, 97%, 2%, et cetera? The difference in vote totals was 14,000 votes. GE best, if you looked at this and you were trying to get a sense of who was gonna win, just this, this, you know, this arc over the past week, you would have thought this was going to be something of a blowout. New York Times had a story. What happened to the polling here?

[Camille Foster]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

Now, let's be generous to our friends at polymarket. The polling wasn't much better. It was a little narrower, but it wasn't much better. And this is an interesting thing to look at because these are polls typically that are funded by campaigns or funded by grassroots groups who want, you know, to put their thumb on the scale they're oversampling, young people, et cetera. We don't know the methodology, but the methodology was clearly not good. That was a vote total of 14,000 votes in 1.5 million cast. There was the third candidate, Mallory McMorrow.

[Matt Welch]

Spoiler, spoiler.

[Michael Moynihan]

60,000 votes. I think she got something around that. So, David, what say you about the polling?

[David Frum]

So I wrote a story for the Atlantic when Gallup decided to stop doing its presidential approval polling, a disaster, by

[Matt Welch]

the way, in my view.

[David Frum]

Why did they stop doing this? I wrote a story about this. So polling has gone into. The polling industry is in crisis because of modern technology. So just the way you do a poll is you hire a bunch of people at a certain rate per hour to make phone calls to create a sample. And you know, for example, that your sample, if you want a sample of 1,000 people, which is the ideal size, you have to have 520 women, 480 men, you have to have so many over 65, so many between 20, 20, 18 and 24, you know what the ethnic balance should be. And then you build your sample the number of phone calls it takes to build your sample. The numbers are in the article I don't have. I forget them now, but have dramatically gone up because people don't answer. And as the number of phone calls to make the sample rise, your costs in doing the sample rise. And so one quick thing you do is you cut the sample from 1,000 to 500, which sort of works. It's good enough. And you make other adjustments as well. And that's all assuming the best will in the world. Gallup got out because they would do their presidential approval polling as a lost leader. They used to have a partnership with cnn, which paid the bills that ended a while ago. And they would say, okay, we'll continue to do it as a prestige item. But then you're exposed to presidential pressure. And so the Gallup decision is, we're only making enemies here. We're not making, certainly not enough to make up for the business. We're not making money at this, let's just exit the business.

[Matt Welch]

And the disaster of that is that they had, I don't know, 70 years worth of pretty good presidential approval data that you can go back and look at. And now those strings are starting to.

[David Frum]

And this is all assuming the best will in the world. Now what happens when people say, you know what, the reputable people are being driven out of the business by the rise in costs. Here's an opportunity for us to do guerrilla marketing. And how much does it cost to make Poly Market move up and down? Probably not that much.

[Michael Moynihan]

These are pretty low dollar figures on primaries and on small races.

[David Frum]

So if you're, if you're a superpower,

[Michael Moynihan]

much better on the bigger races. I mean, it's a global thing. People are, people are, you know, wagering on from, you know, malta. I mean, here is a very specific thing. So if you've taken stress test, can

[David Frum]

you put a couple hundred thousand dollars to make polymarket do what you want it to do? I wonder. I don't know.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, it depends on the. Depends on pole. Yeah.

[David Frum]

And at the same time as other people are. Are creating false polls to drive narratives. And in the end, as we saw, sooner or later, all of this meets the test of reality. But because people who. Journalists who rely on polls so much are reluctant to say, I think I was deliberately. I'm having a feeling that it's possible that the people I look to as sources deliberately lied to me over a long period of time. I'm just gonna say the polling was bad because that's a much more comfortable. Much more comfortable. Everyone could say the polling was bad. It obviously was.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah. I think in something like this, you don't really have to, you know, marshal the troops and say, put some, put some wagers on El sayed in this. Because, you know, if you're a sports fan, you don't have a ton of confidence in your team winning in the playoffs. You're still likely to wager on them, Right. You're still going to be like, well, it's my team open. And a lot of this seems to me enthusiastically motivated in that way from DSA types. Jason, I sent another link to. Can you pull up the Senate race, not the primary one, but the actual Senate race, which is kind of interesting because now we have a real race, right? Statewide race, with somebody who is an actual candidate who has, as David pointed out, would in another world be a normal Republican. Up until, I think, 1914, 2014, he sort of was. But now we have something that we'll be Paying attention to here and now, this is the Michigan Senate election winner. And if you see El Sayed early on March 5, April 5, you see these numbers, 80, 20. And now reality is coming more into focus here. And Elsai's numbers are going down, down. They're going down to now 60, 40, which is pretty interesting when you see up here, which is an enthusiasm issue. And now there's the reality issue of two people running against each other in a statewide race. And also reflecting the fact that the primary was so damn close that had it not been for the spoiler, the, the Ralph Nader in this election who got 60,000 votes, who knows what I mean, I don't think those people would have voted for Al Sayed. But now I'm pat Buchanan in 2000. So interesting one to watch as we get closer to November.

[Matt Welch]

And again, these poly market ones, they're just building to the win. Did you get the win correctly? So it kind of doesn't matter if it's 93 to 7. If you get the win correctly. They still like.

[Michael Moynihan]

No, no, I know that. I mean, that's the thing is the 99% the whole time, that's just very good money.

[Matt Welch]

But, yeah, there's some moments in the day when there were some pretty interesting wagers to be had. But I. The whole thing is this is what happens when political parties tell on themselves or movements within political parties tell themselves. Are you willing to lose the general? Democrats in Michigan? They might not say this to themselves. They might say it out loud. They're willing to lose the general. Michigan went to Trump twice. It's going to be D +5. It's a horrible year for Republicans and deservedly so. It's a winnable race. Like, it's not going to be. It's gonna be close in Michigan, and that's important. Right. If you're. All your energy is built on like, no, we really have to take the Senate. Right. Which is why a lot of people were holding their nose. Michelle Goldberg was at this table holding her nose, talking about Graham Platner. Yeah, Graham Platner. It's just that important. Even though Susan Collins is not the most reliable Trumpy voter out there. But it's just that important. If that's what you wanted to do, if that sense of pragmatism was governing you, you wouldn't have. I'll say it. He's beatable in a state that the Democrats should win. And that could, that could flip things in a way that's pretty interesting.

[Michael Moynihan]

David, what do you make of this, I mean, you mentioned Wisconsin and that's Francesca Hong was running for governor there. We had a bunch of these races, were really repulsive people with repulsive ideas in New York who, when you win the primary, you win the general, you're going to Congress, and every minute you see open up the New York Times, here's another DSA insurgent that you haven't paid attention to who's performing incredibly well. Is this a moment like when the Labor Party in England in the 80s had its socialist kind of split off, where you're gonna have a little thing, a UKIP kind of thing, where it is a momentary thing, maybe as a little lasting power, maybe become something like reform, but doesn't seem like a permanent thing. Are we forever dealing with a Democratic Party now that is indulging these, I have to say I think very much extremist ideas.

[David Frum]

I wonder if there's something going on in every democracy that's more or less as follows. If you wanted a vote in 1885, you offered people a little bit of money or a shot of whiskey because it's a poor world and a little bit of money and a shot of whiskey make a difference. If you want someone's vote in 1955, you're not going to get a vote for a little bit of money and a shot of whiskey. You have to give them a high school, you have to give them a dam, you have to bring a road, you have to do something substantial for

[Camille Foster]

them government run convenience store, grocery store,

[David Frum]

you have to bring the goods, but you're not going to get their vote for the turkey or the turkey or the shot of whiskey. We're now a much more prosperous society. We have lots of people who don't think they need that much from the government and they're in politics to self actualize. It's a consumption good, it's a consumption good. And, and so at that point the kind of, well, if I lose the general life becomes more interesting for me. If my party wins, it's just a series of tedious technical administrative problems, all of them with very unsatisfactory and disappointing outcomes.

[Michael Moynihan]

Now I have a podcast. I can start a podcast, right?

[David Frum]

The left did not enjoy Obamacare. It's just a series of highly technical administrative problems. And you approach the appeal of Medicare for all.

[Matt Welch]

That's a bumper sticker.

[David Frum]

But it above all says what if there were no medical scarcity? That's what that's because actually anyone who's ever had to deal with the actual Medicare, Medicare deals with Scarcity, they turn down claims they don't cover. There are co pays. There's no escape from the tragedy of scarcity. But what if there were were?

[Michael Moynihan]

It's the same thing in the healthcare system in Sweden they say nope, they put you on a waiting list, you have to pay for things, etc.

[David Frum]

There's no escape. So the problems of actually running the government, but when you lose, you don't have to run the government. You can fulminate and if you are removed enough. And so I think it's one of the things that people watch a place like Michigan say that the reason why the working class African American districts tend to vote more pragmatically is because they are closer to the edge of necessity. They are not voting emotionally, they can't afford to. But the people with the postgraduate degrees, they can afford to vote emotionally. And they do. Because if they lose, how bad will it be?

[Matt Welch]

The how bad will it be is of interest to me. Even bringing it back to what we started this whole conversation about is your sense of the fragility, the from fragility meter, where and like the kind of panic that's engendered by that. Where do you rank this era, flavor and momentum of DSA candidates on the from fragility meter?

[David Frum]

In the end, they're going to be limited by their inherent unpopularity. In the end, there is not going to be a communist government of the United States. There's not going to be a DSA government of the United States. And they're just. There isn't. If there were a serious campaign to do Medicare for All, it would involve dealing with. Well, of course there will be higher.

[Matt Welch]

They literally tried it in Vermont and couldn't do it.

[David Frum]

Yeah. And even if you could do it, Medicare for all is not the craziest, worst idea ever hatched. You just have to explain to people it means cues. You understand that. It means co pays, it means scarcity. It is not a magic wishing pill. So I think they are limited by that. When I say what is the on the David Fromm meter? What am I most worried about is around the world, the United States is trusted or has been. And around the world, the whole world has seen that Trump is plundering oil from Venezuela, he is taking bribes, he's made the treaties with the United States worthless. Why would anyone sign a treaty, our trading room with the United States, when it's been demonstrated repeatedly that the United States does not feel. I mean, Donald may say, well, that's just Trump, but he's the president and twice. And Biden in between, while better, was not as different as you might have thought. I mean, Biden entered no trade agreements. Biden was the second most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover after Donald Trump. And Biden also is not all that comfortable with the idea that this is American leadership of a collective enterprise, that it's collective security led by America, but in which other people contribute. And the American job is both to round up the club dues from the other members, but in the end, to understand America will always pay a disproportionate price. And for that, it gets a disproportionate voice, but not a sole voice.

[Michael Moynihan]

It doesn't entirely map on. But if you go, I went back to your book from 2008 or 9, it was a comeback.

[David Frum]

My goodness, you're one of, like, 11 people who's read that book.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. I read it twice, so it's actually technically 10 people, but gone all the way through it. Going back to that book, it's pretty interesting to me that there's a lot of stuff that maps on to parts of the Trump agenda, parts of a populism. You very much defend free trade in the book, which I appreciate, and very un. Trumpy. But immigration.

[David Frum]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

There's a line in that book that stuck out to me when I was reading it this weekend. It was something to the effect of, people don't want any more Bushes.

[David Frum]

Yeah, right. Yeah, this is.

[Michael Moynihan]

And that has a kind of Trumpy resonance in the kind of populism like these are these dynasties that they don't. I mean, they're all rich guys. There's something about that. If you go back to that era when you were doing your own autopsy post George W. Bush, who you worked for briefly, does the Trump thing kind of make sense to you ideologically? If not, I mean, obviously not how it's executed. The man is unhinged. Right?

[David Frum]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

But those instincts, the things that connected with people, a little more populism. Because at the same time, I mean, you were the opposite of the Buchananites in 2002, 2003, et cetera. So what is that? I mean, am I wrong in thinking there's some sort of resonance?

[David Frum]

No, no, you're not. That's very perceptive. So first, I always say, if you want to do immigration restriction, which I thought was right, both for on merits and to head off the populist insurrection that I saw coming, free trade is your answer. So when an American farmer says, I need to bring all of these workers on temporary peonage into the United States or otherwise I won't be able to harvest my strawberries. So can we grow the strawberries in Mexico? Can we grow the strawberries somewhere else? You don't have to bring the people if you can bring the product.

[Matt Welch]

Why do you hate the American farm, David FROST?

[David Frum]

And because maybe the American farmer will then say, well, what if I make the capital investments in robots so that people don't have. And one of the things that immigration has meant in the United States States the way especially the high tolerance of illegality, is a tolerance of this brutal attitude toward the treatment of human beings. I mean, it's in, you know, the most dangerous jobs in construction, roofing, drywalling, those could be made safer. It costs money. It would cost capital. Or you could hire people who don't have rights and then you don't have to make the job safer. And then roofing and drywalling can continue to and my, my vision of how and again, I'm a market guy, but if you have consistently high rates of accident in these lines of work, people who have the job of worker safety should be thinking, what rules should we put in place even if they demand more capital input from the employers to make these jobs more safe. And that will mean probably fewer workers earning a higher wage and then it will be more attractive to hire people with rights. The core idea idea, one of the many revolutionaries ideas of America, and it's been battled and that's what the civil war was fought over, was that every worker should be a voter. There should be no workers who are not voters because otherwise they will be trampled and abused and exploited and treated like instruments of people who have more. And so that was my moral core. But also I saw this was going to lead to problems. But I did once have a talk with a prominent Trumper who like you had read the book and said, you saw us coming, so why aren't you with us? I said I saw you coming so I could stop you, not so I could help you.

[Michael Moynihan]

But you have always been more on the restriction aside when it comes to aggression. And I think that regardless of what you think about immigration in the American context, there are very few problems in the world and in modern sort of, let's say, let's just take Western Europe or Europe in general, I mean Western Europe in the United States, that immigration is not a part of the rise of all the populist parties in Europe that change the policies. I mean they're all trade restrictions us with the one maybe One exception in Norway, the Norwegian, the Progress Party there. But that bleeds into every aspect of politics. And the nut of it is always immigration. Always immigration. I mean, look, a long time ago in the show, and I heard this the other day, I didn't mention this in the show. An Irish person talking to an American person who had been in. Did I mention this? Been in South Africa, Africa, and was working on a documentary there and said, oh, you know, these guys were going into these neighborhoods and they were, you know, with whips and, you know, trying to get rid of the immigrants. And he's like, and they were all black. And I was like, yeah, no, that's. The. Immigration's not about race necessarily. I mean, when Venezuelans leave because of Maduro, they're attacked in Brazil, they're attacked in the world, they're attacked in Chile. When they come into India and Pakistan, Rohingya, they're attacking, attack. Immigration is always the thing. You know, I was just in Spain and I was just in Italy. I was in a town in Italy, Lucca, one of my favorite towns in Europe, and was reading an article in the newspaper that the mayor of Lucca is a kind of, like, ideological backbone of the re Migration movement. Luca, this small Tuscan town. And this guy was fulminating against immigration. And you see it. You see, like, very real consequences from this in Italy.

[David Frum]

The reason you have to restrict it is because the number you want is not zero, because you want and must have some. You must create a structure of law around what you do have. And you must consider the risk of destabilizing the existing society, often for irrational or bad reasons. Look, one of the triumphs of politics in whatever defines modernity is the ability to create broader and broader feelings of solidarity and sympathy among human beings and human beings, at least in much of the world, human beings are better at this than they were 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago. I think that's true, and that's the project. We hope that 100 years from now they'll be better still and that all kinds of barriers and prejudices and hatreds will fade. But you can't just get there from here. You can't get there from here to there in one leap, and you can't get there from from here to there without understanding the material, the human material with which you're working, which contains so many aspirations to the good, but so many pulls toward the bad.

[Michael Moynihan]

No, I mean, this is the Ceta thing in Spain, and this is where I really disagreed with your friend Ann Applebaum, who I've been a fan of. I reviewed one of her books for Commentary in a very positive way. And she wrote a piece about this. And that's what I wondered, is Anne gone too far to just saying, well, the far right is exploiting this and I have to be on the other side of it? And she said, you know, look, they all went back. They all went back to Morocco. 60,000 people. I mean, well, I mean, 80 people died, something like that, and there's some people hiding out there. But it was the perception, the perception in Spain, the perception that Giorgio Meloni was like, we are shutting down Schengen. Well, yes, but it's in Africa. It's like, no, the perception in European countries when you see video of 60,000 people coming up, it's that sense of not no migration and not no immigration, but the sense of chaos is what is so common in the discourse amongst average people in Europe that it became in 2015. And then you see something like this, it reignites those memories of just utter chaos. How do we not even assimilate these people? How do we care for these people in any way at all? The migration center in Ceuta was already full and it's become a big problem for the Spanish. But even Pedro Sanchez, who is not a good leader in my opinion, was like, okay, too much. But yeah, I disagreed with her on that one.

[Matt Welch]

Michael had mentioned Pat Buchanan and you were talking about talking to your Trump, your modal Trump voter, about, like, identifying things. I wonder. I totally agree with you about like the 89 to 94 period of being the time when you should have. We should have built new structures for the new time to extend the thing, change the thing, change the terms of the thing, but also keep the underlying peace going. And I think for me, that was the greatest opportunity lost. Other people might say that or like the side of the people who are on the side of that then blundered into Iraq. And I know that you've criticized yourself or at least said that you were part of a problem of justifying the war in Iraq. And I have a great, great amount of respect for you for saying that because many were in the post apology society. But what do you look at as the errors done by the kind of Atlanticists that helped give us Trump?

[David Frum]

There are tragic errors where there are things that people did that turned out wrong, that they had every reason to think would not turn out wrong, or where they couldn't know. And so one of the greatest injustices in politics is first you don't get credit for the bad things that don't happen. And you're given an assumption that you had better knowledge than you do. So one thing I want to say about that era is if an angel of God had stopped President George H.W. bush on his way to take the oath in 1989, said, you're going to have one success. You're guaranteed one success. You're going to have whatever it is, you tell me what it is, I'm taking the message upstairs. One success. What is the one success you would want of your presidency? He said, I would to like. Like to feel, I'm sure what he would say. As the Soviet Union is coming to an end, I want to know that those 50,000 nuclear warheads that are at loose in the Soviet Union and unsupervised and subject to what we're discovering, shocking, shockingly careless treatment, not one of them goes astray. Done. You got it. Well, if everything else goes wrong, then I have been a successful president. But who remembers now that the greatest fear in 1989 was that the 50,000 soap and not only did not even one of the Soviet nuclear scientists went astro. Because your tax dollars paid to provide Soviet nuclear scientists with interesting, meaningful work at American taxpayer expense. So they didn't defect.

[Matt Welch]

Also, George Soros contributed to that as well.

[David Frum]

He did indeed. And the weapons were controlled. I don't know the number now, but many of them were decommissioned for a long time. The nuclear facilities in the United States were being run on Soviet nuclear fuel that was purchased and putting money into that. So they had tremendous successes. I think what the big. It looks like in retrospect, the big thing that was not got right was not preparing for planning for the shock of China's return to world markets. And I think, by the way, how many hundreds of millions of people have been pulled out of China probably because of that.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[David Frum]

And that is a human success. The reduction in poverty. What has happened in China.

[Michael Moynihan]

Globalist.

[David Frum]

I'm thinking of getting wearing. I wore a suit and tie on the show, but if I didn't, I'd wear a hat that said make neoliberalism great again. Yeah. But pulling a couple hundred million Chinese out of poverty, tremendous human achievement and ending Maoism and putting China on a path where it has an opportunity. And I never give up hoping that this will be the future to be a good global. I mean, if we can integrate China into some kind of world, what a better world this will be. I mean, avoiding a war, avoiding conflict with China, that's gotta be one of the top two or three priorities for any American president. And one of the things worries me so much about Washington is we talk so much about the inevitability of this conflict. And of course you have to prepare for the worst. But every time you say it, you should also say it. But we also are preparing. The hand of friendship is always out. The hand of agreement is always out. And we want to welcome China into. And as much as we've been disappointed since the past decade and a half, we shouldn't. The present leader won't be there forever and there may be better leaders.

[Michael Moynihan]

I would say one thing about Russia. There's a number of things like this. Providing money for nuclear scientists and particularly I have to go back and read Bill Safire's Chicken Kiev column because I have to refresh my memory rib when and why he wrote that that was an attack on George H.W.

[David Frum]

bush.

[Michael Moynihan]

But there are a number of these things that the United States did. And that is a. There's a bunch of recent books about this, about the fall of the Soviet Union. So many people associated with the Hoover Institution too, that it has after the Ukraine, the forever Ukraine war, not Crimea, but in. I guess that was 22. Right? It's a 22. And that happened. Got it. So long ago that there was the Buchananite tendency on the American right. People like Tucker Carlson and Zilk saying, you know, we made the Soviets feel bad about themselves. Right. That was that. That's the argument. Not only NATO expansion, which they misunderstand in almost every way, but it's that the humiliation of the Soviet Union, it's like, well, United States was. Did a lot of things to mitigate.

[David Frum]

Your ear should prick up. When they talk about the rape of Russia, which is what they talk about in the far right. There's something that they think that the people who are the villains of the story have in common.

[Michael Moynihan]

Jews.

[David Frum]

They're Jews. That's the big part of the story. What happened was when the Soviet economy imploded and the effort was made to put together the pieces that the first round of oligarchs were disproportionately Jewish in Armenian and. And that is a big part of what they say. What went wrong in Russia was we turned Russia over to the Jews. Buchanan is not explicit about this, but you get the idea there are people from whom he's drawing his message who are much more explicit about it. The Soviet economy was not wrecked by. In the 1990s, it was wrecked by the Soviets. The reason it collapsed. And then there had been this effort. High oil prices disguised the wreck, military spending disguised the wreck. When the oil prices collapsed and the military spending stopped, then you're confronted. There's a New York Times reporter who wrote a fantastic book about the Soviet economy in the 80s, made the point that in the 1980s, the largest producer of shoes in the world was not Italy, not China, not the United States, it was Russia. And yet there are chronic shortages of shoes because what the Russians were doing or the Soviets were doing was taking perfectly good shoe leather and turning it into products that nobody wanted on the scale of hundreds of millions. And when this stopped, stopped, factories closed. But it wasn't that. The point of a shoe factory is not to employ the shoe workers, it's to make shoes. And they didn't have shoes. And when all of this wreck came to its inevitable ending, then, yes, they left behind a lot of suffering. But the challenge that American policymakers had in the 1990s, and again, not saying they did everything right, but the last time they'd had to save a major economy like this was Germany and Japan after the war and the associated countries where they had absolute political control. How much foreign aid can you pump into a society where you don't have political control? And you have to be much more careful. You can't just tell the Russians in 1995 that you'll do this and that, not this and that, and then we will fund you to the extent that we funded. Germany and Japan could be funded the way. Because no one had to look to see the account books. If you wanted to see the account books. Sorry, no one had to worry about, will we see the account books? You will see the account books.

[Camille Foster]

There's something I'd love for you to square for me, and I'm thinking about this because my own libertarian orientation, I think it arrives in much the same way that you described about your kind of conservative inclinations, the notion that we have this thing that we have to protect and things can go badly very quickly. But you also said we're not going to have. We're not on the verge of a communist revolution. It won't happen here, essentially.

[Michael Moynihan]

And, oh, if it does, that clip's gonna be so great. We'll make so much money, we're selling that clip. If you'll never see that clip, it'll never happen. Red flag goes up.

[Camille Foster]

I'm inclined to agree that we're not on the. It doesn't seem like we're on the verge of it, but when things do Start to snowball. It tends to happen quickly. It's on the back of some sort of weird national disaster or controversy. And as you were saying a moment ago, and the way you put it, I thought was really crisp and articulated. Like, our politics are fundamentally unserious in so many cases. It's superficial at the moment. It is openly conspiratorial and vulgar. And the economic illiteracy is unbelievable. And I've heard you, like, unpack pretty basic economic ideas that most people would find pretty daunting. It seems this is the reason tariffs don't make sense. Just a moment ago, when you talked about Medicaid for all or Medicare for all, these. These are ideas that I think for people who have a basic free market orientation, it's pretty straightforward stuff. Like, we get this. But I don't think that's most Americans. And I do think that the appeal for those kinds of policies and the necessity of building a government large enough to even theoretically deliver that stuff to you is a profound danger that we discount if we're not willing to acknowledge that. Yeah, the possibility for the rot to begin on the left and kind of metastasize is real and profound in much the same way it is on the right.

[David Frum]

Well, one thing about the viral clip, just to protect myself, my hypothesis is in societies where property is broadly distributed and in societies that have not gone through some unspeakable convulsion and trauma like military disposition, defeat fascism is always going to beckon much more attractively than communism. And where you have spontaneous communism, where you're not imposed by the Red army by occupation, but where you actually get a revolution where they win is in society where property is extremely narrowly concentrated, and that have been Russia, China, Vietnam, extremely narrowly concentrated, Most people are propertyless. They have literally nothing to lose. And the situation is so disordered that you don't need to gain control of the bureaucracy. You can see the state is broken and it's easy to seize. And I don't think that describes the United States in any scenario that I can imagine. The way since the middle of the 19th century, the way stable, successful societies have dealt with the demand of the far left is with concessions to the near left. People say, we have mass unemployment. People are going hungry. They can't feed their children. We're thinking about overthrowing the state. Would you take unemployment insurance? Yeah, yeah, take unemployment insurance. Okay. My mother, she's old. She can't work anymore. She has nothing. We want to overthrow the state. Would she take a pen? Yeah, she'd Take a pension.

[Matt Welch]

Sounds a bit like a hostage negotiation.

[David Frum]

It's a bit like understanding that radicalism, when radicalism gets big, it's because it's speaking to something real. And the job of creative statesmanship is to say, what is the grievance here? Is there something we could do that would take 80% of the followers away from the extremist movement? And, and so the project that was done across the developed world, especially after World War II, but even before, of building social insurance, taking away the fear of unemployment, taking away the fear of hunger, that's the Civil Rights project in the United States. You've got a disenfranchised, oppressed group of people. They might be open to revolutionary ideas. Who could blame them? Well, what if you made them full citizens? Would they take that? Yeah, maybe they take full citizens.

[Michael Moynihan]

I was thinking the same thing the other day yesterday when I was watching a clip on MSNBC of I can't remember the host interviewing somebody on a campus in Michigan. It was an Ann Arbor campus, and he was some student leader. And it was the same thing that I'd heard a million times. He's like, people of my generation are dissatisfied with the status quo that was started that way. And it went on for a handful of minutes with no specific, Nothing specific. I mean, you know, there are enormous numbers of problems in this country, as there are in almost every country on the planet, but abundance isn't one of them. Guys probably, you know, gets off the interview and immediately checks it on his phone. It cost a thousand dollars and is, you know, well clothed and the rest of it. And it's in this kind of vague way that, you know, we are. They're talking in a revolutionary way without any specificity of what the problems that the revolution is going to address they can get. I mean, also notice it must be really frustrating for people who have been devoted to the kind of never Trump cause that almost none of it is about Donald Trump. There's very little talk about Donald Trump. There is some overlap, of course. I mean, we were talking the other day on the show. Bloomberg had a piece of how many companies now does the United States have a stake in? I mean, what this is, conservatism, I mean, trade problems, et cetera, which they love, all that stuff. But. But before we go, David, I wanted to. We talked about Pat Buchanan a couple times and it came up. And Matt and I were talking about this the other day, the piece that people hate you for the most. You know what I'm talking about?

[David Frum]

Yeah, I do.

[Michael Moynihan]

Do you want to tell me the name of it?

[David Frum]

Unpatriotic Conservatives.

[Michael Moynihan]

That's correct. That was 2003 National Review. That more than anything else, particularly amongst the kind of paleo conservatives, certain types of libertarians, anti libertarians. Talk us through that. Now, 20 plus years later. Do you regret the piece? Do you think is the headline?

[Matt Welch]

Do you prescient?

[David Frum]

Was it Prescient is if you drop a brick on somebody's foot and 25 years later the foot is still broken. That was some brick. That was some brick. Why do they hate the piece so much? Because it was so true. And why was it so true? Because. Because if you go back and re engineer the piece, you'll discover astonishingly little of it is written in my words. It's quotations. It's all one quotation after another. And what it showed, what people who talk about that piece, which was published in National Review in 2003, want to say. It was a piece about the Iraq War. In the very first paragraph it says Iraq War. It's important to debate it. There are people on all sides looking at National Review. Yeah. I want to say, not that this is not internal to the piece and probably should have, but the same day that I published the piece, at that time I was writing a blog for National Review and I had a long and favorable account on the blog of somebody who'd written an impassioned article against entering the Iraq war. He said, the problem here is what you've got is a group of people who are so alienated from the tendencies in American society, they're becoming alienated from the American government. Government and the American Constitution. And they so hate the world in which the modern world, they are turning to these extremist ideas of actually endorsing, hoping that they're for the overthrow of their society. And the piece, it is the blueprint to what was to come. And not just the Trump movement specifically, but the broader anti modernist post liberal right. It saw all of this come and it did it out of their own mouths.

[Camille Foster]

That's why they came up.

[Matt Welch]

Except for the last three paragraphs where you. That's what everyone quotes, right? It's they have come to hate their country, they're rooting for America to lose.

[David Frum]

Well, when I said they have come to hate their country and they're rooting to America to lose, there are about a dozen quotations in which people in their own words say, I have come to hate my country and I'm rooting for America to lose. But they had come to. And because I Wrote a book a decade later about the end of the Romney campaign. And I said, to love your country is to love it as it is. When you say, I can't stand it now, but if we could get rid of all of the people I don't like, if we could get rid of all the social changes of the past 50 years, then I'd love it. Well, then you love some fantasy that you project because you're right wing. You project the fantasy back into the past. Leftists would project into the future. You project, but it's a fantasy. You don't love the country. The actual demotic, pulsing, multi ethnic, multiracial, multicultural, multi ideology America, this big mess of a thing. You don't love that, you hate that.

[Matt Welch]

But you could also say that, using his own quotations, that Donald Trump doesn't love this country, that Stephen Miller doesn't love this country. I mean, even when they're in office, we don't have a country anymore because of this. Of birthright citizenship or whatever. Like the American carnage speech. There was a whole lot of that. Is it fair to level that accusation against Donald Trump as well?

[David Frum]

Well, Donald Trump has done his utmost to damage American institutions, American world leadership.

[Matt Welch]

I might not disagree with any of that. But, like, it's just. I'm talking about the level of the accusation about Donald Trump's hating their countries.

[David Frum]

What does Donald Trump love except self gold? It's actually to say he doesn't love his country would be too specific an indictment. He doesn't love his wife, doesn't love his kids. He doesn't. That's rough.

[Matt Welch]

You're accusing a man of not loving his wife and kids.

[David Frum]

He doesn't love dogs. He doesn't love. He has. This is a person who is.

[Michael Moynihan]

I don't think he likes his wife or kids. Just a guess. I have no evidence. But when I saw the video of Baron when he was five, still speaking with a Slovenian accent, meant that his father wasn't talking to him very much. Right.

[David Frum]

Love comes in a lot of different ways. This is, in a way, to talk about him personally takes you down into directions that are so specific and so dark that they don't actually help with the problem the country has. But the reason that the people who I talked to in that piece, they, they felt its truth. That's why they. Look, if somebody slurs you in some way, your World cup goaltending record is all fake, you'd smile that up, say, well, I actually don't. I never claimed to have a World cup goaltending. Record that bounces right off. That bounces right off the field.

[Matt Welch]

I mean, as a matter of fact, one or two of the people that you were singling out for criticism in that piece spend a lot of acres of words pointing at me and accusing me of all kinds of nefarious things. And I don't like. I remember it only by reading the name at the bottom of the unpatriotic Conservative didn't touch because I'm not, as it turns out, a neocon or a CIA agent.

[Michael Moynihan]

At least you're accused of both. I think one covers the other.

[David Frum]

So I think a quarter century later, there are probably phrases I would amend. And just generally, I think it's always a good idea to dial it back a notch. That would be my advice to any writer. Dial it back a notch always. And that piece, which was written at a very emotional moment, it could have stood to be dialed back a notch. But the core of what it said, why did it stay in use? Why does anyone still care? Think of how many things one writes that never land. Why did that one? Why did the hook go in the fish and never come out again?

[Matt Welch]

You were trying to read people out of the conservative movement and out of the Republican coalition. And people tend to remember such exercises pretty poignantly well.

[David Frum]

And the reason that that was so explosive was there was a contest for the future of the conservative movement. And at the time, the thing the piece got wrong was at the time I thought that the people believed in what I believe in would prevail. And at the time, we were the temporary majority. And I said, okay, this is going to be the future. And indeed, we did not prevail. And the future of the political. So one of the reasons the piece should be a source of pleasure to those who I criticize is I said, we are not going to be. The conservatism of tomorrow will not be ethnically exclusive. It will not be chauvinist, it will not be localist, it will not be protectionist, it will not be reactionary. It will be Democratic. It will be open and. No. That David, from you got wrong.

[Michael Moynihan]

Well, so the prediction that you got wrong, you acknowledge that I thought my vision of conservatism would be triumphant. Is there a piece that you can think of that you wrote where it's not a prediction, it's just you go back and look at it and it's like, Jesus, I can't believe I thought that I was totally wrong.

[David Frum]

Things I thought that was totally.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah. Like, not in the sense. I mean, you said earlier. I mean, you change your mind over time. You grow up, you soften on a bunch of things. Is there anything that you look back on in not, you know, predictions can be wrong and you can still have the same beliefs. Is there any belief that you had that you put into like one that you're really like? I wish that one would disappear from the record.

[David Frum]

Okay, I don't wish. I wouldn't want them to disappear from the record because I take. Because you can't be who you are without the people you were. And so everything you believe is the product of the experiences you've had and the mistakes you've made along the way. So you can never wish to be undifferent. But I was a big opponent of gay marriage in the 1990s and I changed my mind on that. And I think that view in the 19. And I came to it for conscientious. We were at the beginning of this crisis of family stability and the interrelations of the sexes. And I thought, well, the answer to that is to make. Is to. Is to make sure that there's a much stricter binary between marriage and non marriage. The multiplication of all of these statuses of what do they call them? Relationships and situationships and cohabitations is creating a blur that is pushing people away from the binding forms that are best for themselves and best for the next generation of children. And I saw gay marriage as another one of those blurrings of the line. But what I came to believe in the early 2000s was I was a side issue. This was a solution that was not. The problem was real, but this is a solution that is punitive on some and not responsive. And even if you win the argument and then you become one aware that for a lot of people this is driven by mal. They don't intend to live better lives themselves, they just want to punish somebody else. So I've changed my mind on that one. I think compared to the 1990s, I'm generally accepting of a broader social insurance state than I was in 1993 and 1994. I appreciate now more its contribution to political stability. Giving people just. I'm never going to. And if you live in a developed country, you're never going to go hungry, you're not going to be poor in your old age. There are certain things you can take for granted no matter how much you. And even if it's your own fault, Even if it's 100% your own fault, there's still something that is behind you that we're not going to let these extremes of human misery be in our society. And I can think of some other things. But I'll tell you one thing that I got right on this non prediction. It's my first book. One of the major themes of the first book was I didn't think the religious right had a big future. And I wrote in the theories for that. The future, the antagonism to what I want to see is going to come from nationalism and xenophobia and race, not from exclusive religious, Christian, overbearing faith or other forms of reaction. The religious right is at the peak of its power and it's on its way out. And so I think in 2000, a little bit under the influence of the spirit of national unity, after 9 11, I allowed myself to think, I allowed myself to revisit that view of 1994. I said, you know what? The conservative movement can actually free itself from this. And I think one of the things that needs to be said is that that article was I did not bring that project to National Review. National Review asked me to do it. That was I was expressing. So when I said, we do this, we do that, I was expressing a consensus view of a lot of people who then were nowhere to be seen as soon as things got warm.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah. Well, David, it's good to end there and realize that you've made this arc towards the gay welfare state. David Frum's homosexual welfare state. That's where it ends. With these connections, Canadians, they're gonna make us all gay. Big welfare state.

[David Frum]

A strap on in every part.

[Michael Moynihan]

That's just gonna happen. Thank you, David. It was good to see. It's been a very long time. And I'll be listening to the podcast.

[David Frum]

Thank you.

[Michael Moynihan]

And even if it's about, you know, Herbert Hoover's farm policy or whatever the hell the last episode it was.

[Matt Welch]

You know what?

[David Frum]

I hate to tell you, this probably was right.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, yeah. But at least you had Margaret Hoover on.

[David Frum]

Yes, that was up.

[Michael Moynihan]

That's the excuse. That's the excuse. Otherwise it was you monologuing. Next episode. You know, okay, Taft people are going to unsubscribe. I'm just giving you a tip. It's my business mind here. So thank you, David, really appreciate it.

[David Frum]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Michael Moynihan]

Bye.

[David Frum]

We know of new method of attack. The Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column. The Fifth Fifth. The Fifth Column. Fifth Column. Fifth Column. Fifth Column. Spies, saboteurs and traitors. These dividing forces are undy lovick poison. They must not be allowed to spread in the new world as they had in the old. Our moral and our mental defenses must be raised up as never before against those who would cast a smoke screen across our vision.