David Frum

And how do you say, well, we're going to remoralize the society when the structures of wealth and power bequeathed by what used to be there, when those structures are all still there, just waiting for the next economic downturn.

to take power.

That's what happened to Biden.

He thought, he just assumed, well, we can remoralize society.

He thought and forgot, well, if there's a little bit of inflation in 22 and 23, all of this changes and everything that was sinister before reemerges from the surface of the waters to claim new victims.

What does that mean?

What do you mean when you say it's going to be a working class party?

I mean, my sense of the Trump vote in 2024 was that the Trump voter was more affluent on average than the Harris voter.

And while Harris did better among college educated people than Trump did.

non-college, that Trump was competitive and that non-college voters are not always the same thing as working class voters.

They may simply be older voters who finished their schooling at a time when education was less prevalent than it's been since the 1970s.

Well, MECA is doing a pretty good job of separating themselves.

And the tariff policy, which is essentially a tax on purchases of goods, and the less you make, the more of your income is taken.

I mean, it's a nakedly, upwardly redistributive thing.

You combine that with the other things they're doing, not just the tax cuts, but the destruction of tax enforcement in ways that favor those who own businesses.

So for the affluent self-employed,

um paying taxes becomes ever more optional for the people who spend their income on goods they become ever taxes become ever more baffling and mysterious and are included in the prices of of things you buy so that's doing a separation and i think that the way that the trump people have chosen to do immigration enforcement is destroying the prospects of the republican party as a multi-racial party so that that work is being done but

We are going to be left with, yes, many of the disaffections you described, but also with a governing elite on the conservative side of the spectrum that really has tasted the benefits of jettisoning democratic norms, jettisoning democratic institutions, and using violence as a tool of power.

Do they unlearn those ideas from mere political defeat, or does something more need to happen?

What does Irving Kristol tell us about that?