David Frum

That's what's happened to the conservative world in which we've moved.

And the result is that people of conservative instinct, which I still consider myself to be, and I think you may as well, find ourselves mute and voiceless when we hear things from people on the more liberal left side of the spectrum.

Well, they have some things we don't like, but what do we have to set against this when the choices really do seem to be wokeism or fascism?

How is everything here, Crystal, going to help us with our dilemma?

I mean, if I have to choose, I'm choosing wokeism over fascism, but I'm not crazy about either.

No concessions.

Speaking of the neoconservative spirit, no concessions to the need for uplift here.

We're going for the full gloom and doom situation.

So when you set out the stage for us, you described events or thinkers or currents that were active between the 1930s and the 1960s.

How does any of this get attached to the Iraq War all those years later?

Well, we are in many ways living in the 2020s in the Iraq hangover, that many people, people of good faith, people of bad faith, took the lesson from the Iraq experience, just stay out of everything.

And so we've had a decade and a half

where America has largely been absent from many of the great decisions of the time.

And in the Obama administration, Obama backed away from the Syrian civil war, a war that looks more and more important the farther we get from it.

He laid down some red lines and he said he would enforce them.

and he had he'd certainly i think abundant authority on his own to do it but the moment congress raised any objection he backed away and then said okay well it's because of congress uh my hands are tied i'm powerless to intervene and so you've got this extraordinary wave of refugees from syria i don't i forget the number of how many millions of people i mean half the population of syria was internally displaced millions left millions of other people from other places moved at the same time and destabilized the politics of europe and the whole world the united states was

quite passive when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014.

And the Trump years are their own story.

And now we see people in the streets of Iranian cities chanting, looking for American help.

And we are in a country where people no longer feel that there is a right, a calling, or any likelihood of success in America intervening in these important conflicts.