Chapter 1: What recent events in Minneapolis are shaping American democracy?
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
Hello, and welcome to The David Fromm Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. If you have listened to or watched this program before, you will notice that this present opening looks and sounds a little different from usual. Let me hasten to assure you that most of the show will look as normal.
There will be a dialogue between me and David Brooks, columnist at The New York Times and contributor to The Atlantic. That will look and sound normal. And we will conclude with a discussion of the new four-part Netflix miniseries, Death by Lightning, a dramatization based on the assassination of President Garfield.
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Chapter 2: What does David Brooks define as neoconservatism?
That will look and sound like normal. But this opening will not and does not look and sound like normal. And I have to beg your pardon for that. Here's my excuse. I planned a family vacation in South America for the final two weeks in January.
I pre-recorded the dialogue and the book talk and also the opening monologue because I thought, what crazy things can possibly happen in the last two weeks of January? Well, you know as well as I what crazy things have happened in the last two weeks of January.
um nato allies like france and britain denmark and norway moving troops into into greenland an altercation at davos between the president of the united states the prime minister of canada that concluded or has yielded members of the trump cabinet now promoting the secession of the canadian province of alberta to retaliate and threatening canada with all kinds of massive tariffs to punish canada for its prime minister getting too much attention at davos
President Trump making it clear that everything he's been doing in foreign policy is motivated by his thwarted desire for a Nobel Peace Prize. And of course, and above all, the terrible events in the city of Minneapolis, where a second American citizen has been killed by agents reportedly enforcing the law, while that American citizen was, according to most, if not all video evidence,
completely presenting no danger to anybody, least of all officers of the law, and the terrible systematic lying that has surrounded each of these terrible incidents with their attacks on basic norms of American rights and process. It's not just the American citizens who have been killed that are a scandal that shocks the nation coming from Minneapolis.
Forces of the law have burst into private homes without a warrant, have seized people, the wrong people, hauled them out into the streets in their underwear in a Minnesota January. We are hearing reports of deaths in detention, people being reportedly killed in detention. This is all on top of the previous cases of people being sent by American immigration authorities to prison.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from the neoconservative perspective?
torture centers in third countries, the centers that have been closed down by American courts because they violate basic norms of due process in American civil rights and civil liberties. It's a shocking, shocking story. And even as I record in the final week of January, it is amazing how much of this story remains murky and mysterious. An American citizen has been killed.
We don't know the names of his killer. We don't know whether the killer has been removed from the streets of Minneapolis. We don't know what kind of... The representatives of the state of Minnesota have been debarred from investigating what happened, how this terrible event could have unfolded in the way that it did. A man has been shot in the back when he was disarmed while he was being...
beaten in a beating we all saw on camera for the apparent offense of recording the activities of law enforcement and personnel, which was his total right to do, while carrying a gun, which was his right to do.
I'm someone who's pretty skeptical of the way American gun rights have unfolded, but skepticism does not mean that if you carry a gun according to the law of your state, that gives the agents of the state power or right to seize you force you to the ground, remove the gun from you, beat you, and then shoot you in the back, reportedly 10 times.
Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong, and it's getting wronger. Now, the good news is that a substantial majority of American citizens object to this wrong and oppose it, and that majority seems to be growing. The bad news is that an important minority continue to defend these actions.
and are rallying to the support of the personnel who commit these acts and the larger structures of permission that authorize and enable and defend these acts.
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Chapter 4: How do the neocons address the moral and political challenges in America?
The country that is now split on the basic question, can an American citizen be gunned down on the streets of his own city while carrying in his hands nothing more dangerous than a cell phone? Opinion is split.
David Brooks and I, in our dialogue, will talk a little bit about how someday the MAGA forces, the people who supported MAGA, may be reintegrated into the American family, into American democracy. David Brooks advocates a very open-armed and forgiving approach.
I'm not so sure that he's right about that, but that is something that we'll discuss and you will form your own opinion after hearing our discussion. For now, we have the problem that the people who are carrying out these acts against the wishes of the great majority of Americans, with the support of a minority of Americans, they remain in power.
Now, I think we all know, we all know MAGA people and we all know that most people who supported for Donald Trump, many of the people who supported Donald Trump did not begin as bad people, but they are justifying bad things and things that are getting worse and worse and worse at an accelerating rate.
It is sobering to consider if this is what has happened in year one of the Trump administration. As Trump and his people come closer to whatever kind of reckoning is available in November of 2026, what will the year ahead look like? What does 2026 hold? It looks like it will hold more abuses, more offenses, more attacks, more contempt for basic American values and law.
And we all have to find our way to come up with some kind of effective collective response. We appear to be heading to a government shutdown as Democrats in the Senate say they will not vote to fund ICE if it continues the kind of operations it's been doing. This may be quite a long government shutdown because there's going to be a lot at stake for everybody involved.
We are facing a kind of crisis in American democracy that is worse than anything that even people who are really worried about it, as I was, predicted a year ago, never mind at the very beginning of the Trump experiment in 2016, 2017, 2015, when Trump declared for office.
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Chapter 5: What cultural and historical context is important for understanding today's politics?
We've been kind of walking a path to moral degradation, and we're trying to stay away from the finale of moral ruin. I don't know what's ahead. I'm terribly worried. I hope we find a way out together, that there can become some kind of collective American agreement on what it means to hold the rights that American citizens should hold, on what it means that American citizens are being gunned down
in the streets of their cities, on the sidewalk, in their cars, that American citizens, naturalized citizens, but American as anybody else, being hauled from their houses without a warrant, and that important people in American government insist that no warrant is due because the provisions of 1776, which listed abuses of the search power as one of the causes of separation of the United States from Great Britain, that those principles no longer apply, at least they don't apply to Americans of certain kinds of last names and certain kind of accents.
and uh certain kinds of backgrounds and personal stories and certain kind of skin colors that other americans have got them you know the truck that mega people carry guns at their events and of course don't expect to be executed for but other americans don't have those rights mega people expect to be served with warrants in their homes if someone needs to search their homes for something but other people don't have those rights they don't extend to others the rights they claim for themselves how we find a way from this impasse
Well, David and I will talk about it, and I hope you will stick around to watch a more normal-looking version of this program. And now, my dialogue with David Brooks. But first, a quick break.
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
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Sign in to access all 7 segments of this chapter and more.
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Chapter 6: How does the conversation shift towards the impact of historical narratives?
reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
David Brooks is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Oh, he's also one of the most popular writers and speakers in the entire English-speaking world with a career that spans many decades at every distinguished institution.
I was a colleague of his at the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, but you probably know him from his role at the New York Times as one of the most influential newspaper columnists in America for more than two decades, from his appearances on PBS and NPR, or you may have seen one of his innumerable appearances on public platforms where he delights audiences with
in every state of this country and every country of the world, it seems. He is an indefatigable writer. He is the author of more books than I can even tally. all of which have gone on to enormous success. Most recently is the 2023 book, How to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
And I'm just so grateful he has taken time away from his whirligig activities to join me today on the David Frum Show.
David, welcome. I think we were actually colleagues at the Wall Street Journal first before the Weekly Standard back in the 80s or 90s.
That's true. That's true.
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Chapter 7: What insights does David Frum share about the Netflix series 'Death by Lightning'?
And you went off to glory at the Wall Street Journal Europe, where you covered the 89 uprisings, terrifying your grandmother. But you had a wonderful line, I remember this, that she called you in Brussels and said, but David, what if the revolution spreads?
True, and sure enough, it did.
I want to talk to you about your recent article for The Atlantic that appeared online in December and then in the print edition in January called The Neocons Were Right. I think a lot of people are used to hearing this term used as a kind of shorthand in politics or politics. conspiracy theory, but maybe some of us don't know exactly what the term means.
So could you explain what a neoconservative is or was and why it mattered once upon a time and now?
Yeah. When people hear these days, neocon, they think of the Iraq war and they think of Republicans who supported the Iraq war. But neoconservatism, actually, it has its roots in a dining hall, a college dining hall. The City College of New York was a school or still is a school for mostly for immigrant kids in those days. I think no tuition now, very low tuition.
So if you have if you've just come to America and you want to make it, City College is a great place to go. And in the 1930s, there were a group of young, mostly Jewish kids who were communists.
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Chapter 8: How can we apply lessons from the past to current political dilemmas?
And they had names like Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset and Irving Kristol. And they were a certain kind of communist. They were Trotskyites. And the Trotskyites were the smart communists, basically. And there were another kind called the Stalinists. And they were sort of the dumb conformists, to be honest.
And in the dining hall, the Trotskyites, like Crystal and Nathan Glazer, ate in alcove one, a little part of the dining hall. And the Stalinists ate in alcove two. And the Trotskyites were so much better at beating the Stalinists in argument, the Stalinists, in true Stalinist fashion, forbade their members from debating with the Trotskyites. And so they were communists in the 30s.
And then along comes the war. A bunch of the neocons like Irving Kristol served in World War II. And they realized the communism was not going to work. And so they became disillusioned with that. And then they became pretty standard Franklin Roosevelt Democrats. And some like Nathan Glaser went to work for John F. Kennedy. And in the early 60s, there was great faith in social science.
Politics didn't have to be this big messy ideological thing. We could just sick a lot of economists at a problem and they would devise a rational technocratic solution. And Irving Kristol and another vaguely person called neoconservative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, formed a magazine called The Public Interest. And in the very first issue, Moynihan said, we've learned how to make a society work.
And they were just standard issue Democrats. And then along comes 1968, 69. A lot of the policies that they had so earnestly championed in the early 60s were not working. And so you saw rising crime. American cities went into decay, rising crime rates, rising divorce rates, more kids born out of wedlock. There was just a lot of social anarchy.
I was a kid in New York City in the 1970s, and everybody got mugged. The crime rates were incredible. There was a guy, there was a serial castrator on the Upper West Side who would take kids, lead them into Central Park, castrate them, and then murder them. And his nickname was Charlie Chopoff. And the crime was so bad in those days, Charlie Chopoff was not even a big story.
But so there was so much social decay. And so the neocons, the people we now call neocons said, whoa, all the social planning that we had such faith in 10 years ago, we were wrong. Like, well, the world's a lot more complicated than we thought. And as Irving Kristol famously put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
And the second thing that happened in the 1960s was these immigrant kids believed in the bourgeois values. Work hard, dress neatly, respect your parents. Along came these rich hippies saying, don't work hard, drop out, do drugs. And they were outraged. They were just morally offended. And so that's really the roots of neoconservatism. It's not some right-wing Republican thing.
It started as a strategy of dissent within the Democratic Party.
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