David Frum and Andrew Sullivan join me to discuss their experience moderating a conversation with me at my event in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 22. I m not proud of what happened, but I m proud of the conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did moderating it. David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and he is the author of the new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. Andrew Sullivan is a writer-at-large for The New York Magazine, and was the creator of The Daily Dish, which was one of the first political blogs in print. He was the founding editor of The New Republic from 1991 to 96. He holds a B.A. in History from Yale and a PhD in Modern History and Modern languages from Harvard. He s been in conservative media for quite some time, and has been a lifelong Republican. And he was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute from 2001 to 2002. And the man who was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. And he certainly knows a lot about politics. He s also been on the podcast, and we ve debated various things in print over the years, and over the past few years, we've debated a lot in print, too. Today you ll hear the audio from my event with Andrew Sullivan. I love the event, I m sure glad you re here! in this episode of The Weekly Standard, where I talk about the conversation I had a lot of fun, and talk about how to have a good time. and what it s like to be on stage with two people who have a lot to say. in general and how to talk about politics, and why I think it s a good idea and why it s important to have two guests on stage in a conversation so you should do it in a way that s not just one thing, not two things that s better than one, but three things that are better than two, not three, not just two, so you can have it all at once a day not two, and not two days in a day, not one, and two days, and one day, and three days, not four, and a week, and so on that s all the same thing, and That s right, that s good, right? In this episode, we talk about that.
00:06:15.540Well, I have two guests tonight who, they have great bios, I have their bios here, but I realize they actually need no introduction in this town.
00:06:27.120So, please welcome Andrew Sullivan and David Frum.
00:06:45.540So, I just heard from my wife that my daughter, my youngest daughter, who just turned four, was asked yesterday who her favorite monsters were.
00:06:57.020And, she thought for a while, and she said, Grover and Donald Trump.
00:07:03.600Now, this is after, at two and a half, saying she was going to vote for Donald Trump.
00:07:09.660Now, I promise we are not going to focus exclusively on politics, and if I don't keep that promise, there will be a long Q&A, and you can move on to other things, if that interests you.
00:07:20.720But, clearly, with the two of you, we need to talk about Trump and his consequences.
00:07:27.020I want to start by attempting to nullify any kind of charge of partisanship that would be leveled at us, however incongruously.
00:07:55.460So, David, just deflate this notion that any expression of concern of the sort that we will articulate here about politics, and Trump in particular, must be an expression of ideology or partisanship here.
00:08:13.020Well, first, I don't know why I should be so worried about that, because when you express a moral attitude or a political attitude, I don't think you have to – it's either true or false.
00:08:28.560So, the why question, and that's just psychoanalysis, and we all have our motives.
00:08:34.700I come to this as someone who's a very conservative person who's been lifelong involved in the conservative movement, not just in this country, but in my native Canada.
00:08:43.700I've been very involved in Britain as well.
00:08:45.080And I've been a pretty consistent supporter, in fact, a perfectly consistent supporter of those parties.
00:08:53.120And I think a lot of my reaction to Donald Trump is not – it's the deepest level, not a political one.
00:09:04.140He's cruel to people who depend on him.
00:09:06.360He's cruel to the men and women who come into his orbit.
00:09:08.740And I think that's the beginning of my reaction to him.
00:09:15.080I think it's maybe the opposite that needs to be explained, that it is not the revulsion against him, which is now shared by more than 60 percent of American society.
00:09:27.620That's not the phenomenon that needs to be explained and where you raise the question of, is this partisan, is this ideological?
00:09:36.880Some support him because, unfortunately, human beings are more excited by cruelty than maybe it's comfortable to admit.
00:09:45.360That's how the gladiatorial games in Rome sold out.
00:09:48.520You could fill the whole Coliseum with people watching cruelty.
00:09:52.380There's something that's exciting about it.
00:09:54.140But a lot of people, because of partisanship or ideology, are able to close their eyes to what they see.
00:09:59.400Maybe this is an entirely vain hope, but what would it take to have a conversation on this issue of the sort we're about to have that could change minds?
00:10:09.580I mean, we're talking about 35 percent of the population and an environment of hyper-partisanship, unlike any we've seen before.
00:10:17.940What do you think about, Andrew, the prospect of actually changing minds on this issue?
00:10:25.700I've been staggered and dismayed by the number of people who are prepared to side with a figure so repellent in so many ways, except for one thing, which is tribalism.
00:10:43.280This is not partisanship is sort of a bit like supporting your football team.
00:10:59.040In fact, warring in a zero-sum game, in which one party seeks to undo everything of the last administration, in which the notion that you might actually accept that there is a place for two parties in this system, and that they should take turns, that in fact that's a strength of a bipartisan system, this has been completely wiped away by these deeper, more primordial loyalties.
00:11:29.180And the bulk of the blame of this does go absolutely to the Republican Party's transformation, really, in the 90s particularly, I think, and onwards, into believing that the other party has no right to govern at all, that it's illegitimate.
00:11:44.520Whereas I was a happy supporter of Republican presidents and conservative prime ministers until I thought, you know, it's good for Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to have a shot.
00:12:13.120Well, listen, let's talk about the system, because it is just a fact that democracies fail.
00:12:19.340And this is something you cover in your book.
00:12:21.040And it's a fact that we are not very sensitive to.
00:12:25.460I feel like, just speaking personally, I feel like the first moment in my life where I realized I was living in the stream of history, like real history, where bad things happen in surprising ways, was 9-11.
00:12:40.100That was the first moment where I realized, OK, the big bombs could start falling anywhere.
00:12:45.880And you can't take anything really for granted.
00:12:48.780But yet, I feel like I, up until the moment of Trump, have been asleep on this particular point, that I've taken our institutions and their strength for granted.
00:12:59.820And so connect some of the dots about what's at stake here.
00:13:04.020Well, I think one of the reasons it's easy to be blind to the danger around you is that we imagine the danger, the only kind of danger to worry about is the danger at its most extreme.
00:16:46.560If that happens, there may be individual intellectuals and donors who turn on Donald Trump and say it's your fault,
00:17:01.500but the logic of the situation will force his party to cling to him more desperately,
00:17:05.520because remember, it took three branches of government, the House, the Senate, and the President to pass the tax cut.
00:17:13.340It takes only one of them to defend it.
00:17:16.560So, I want to talk a little more about what it looks like for democracy to begin to erode.
00:17:23.940And there are many signs here that we're not in normal territory,
00:17:27.900but one is just with respect to the norms of political discourse.
00:17:30.780And the most infuriating retort to everything I say when I worry out loud about Trump that I've encountered is,
00:17:43.880he's just trolling, like as though that excuses any possible indiscretion, whether it's threatening nuclear war or singling out some private person on Twitter for abuse.
00:17:56.400You know, we have the President of the United States going after someone.
00:17:59.060This notion of just trolling, which there's a kind of nihilistic delight in him eradicating the norms of civil political discourse.
00:18:11.560And, I mean, you must spend as much time on social media as I do.
00:18:31.440These are smart people who delight in a kind of wrecking ball-like chaos.
00:18:37.220Yes, because something really happened, it seems to me, in this moment.
00:18:41.580Now, if you're an old-school conservative and you've studied political thought, you're terrified of what happens in democracies as they continue.
00:18:49.620You know, Aristotle and Plato and the ancients understood that democracy is inherently unstable and will almost always devolve at some point into a tyranny.
00:19:00.220But those two things are deeply connected.
00:19:02.160What happens is that people have simply decided they're not interested in rational deliberation.
00:19:10.560Emotions are much more important than arguments.
00:19:14.540They're much more interested in people rather than principles.
00:19:19.000And at some point, they made a decision that they would rather abandon self-government and give it up to the one man.
00:19:28.560Now, this is something that they all predicted in the ancient world, but essentially when democracy is fully extended, when everyone is equal to everyone else, there are no intermediary things.
00:19:40.480There's just the masses and the celebrities.
00:19:43.860Then there will be some point at which the masses will elect a celebrity to govern for them and feel great calm in that.
00:19:50.560And when they've made that decision, it's a personal commitment to that person, which is at a level that cannot be argued out of.
00:20:01.300And he represents a rebuke to the elites that didn't think he could happen, that have failed dramatically on a whole variety of fronts over the last 20 or 30 years.
00:20:17.620And it's a sign that they really don't care if the system of government survives.
00:20:24.740That's an incredibly dangerous moment in democracy.
00:20:27.280That one of our major parties and a whole slew of intellectuals who should know better have decided to go along with this.
00:20:34.860It just shows they don't understand what they're dealing with and how powerful and dangerous this is.
00:20:39.120You know, to echo Andrew's point, the people belong to the generation of my parents who came of age after World War II.
00:20:48.480For 30 years, they saw life just get better and better and better for the ordinary person.
00:21:01.340People whose parents had not finished high school, were able to complete college, and they had tremendous confidence in the system that made all of this possible.
00:21:12.160I sort of sum it up by if you watch an old movie, whenever a character steps forward who's wearing a white lab coat, you know he's got the answer, especially if he has a German accent.
00:21:22.400He will tell you how the time machine works, how you've got the tiny little submarine inside the bloodstream.
00:21:31.620And starting sometime in the middle 1970s, whenever you see a man in the white lab coat, he's like a hubristic maniac.
00:21:39.540We will see him, his last scene will be vanishing down the gullet of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that he thought it was a good idea to bring back to life.
00:21:46.680And so we have a loss of confidence in a lot of institutions.
00:21:50.540But here's something to say, and I think maybe this is the very first thing I should have said here.
00:21:55.520I think one of the things that is sort of exciting and inspiring about the, when I say the moment, I don't mean the big moment, I mean literally the hour that we're living in, is the counteract to all of this is a revival of civic spirit.
00:22:07.580I mean, I never thought I would be sitting on a stage on a theater on a Friday night and have people listen to these musings when they could be doing it.
00:22:20.540And I don't, I think, I don't know if narcissistic personality disorder is infectious, I hope not, but I don't have enough, I don't have, I haven't caught enough of it yet to think that people are here for any of us.
00:22:32.980I mean, they're here because one of the reactions to this president, I quoted in the book, it's an email I got from somebody who just said that he had reacted to the election of Donald Trump by resolving to be a better citizen.
00:22:44.540And you see that, and you see that, and you see that, and you're doing it, and thank you, and that's what's going to make the difference.
00:23:13.540I've been amazed at how many people are perfectly happy with a president that has contempt for the courts, that talks about shutting down the free press, that wants to use the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents.
00:23:26.920Actions that are inimical to liberal democracy.
00:23:32.480I'm amazed by the number of people that much prefer to emote about their identity, or the people hating them, or the people they hate, as opposed to thinking about what are the best solutions to this particular problem.
00:23:45.180Um, I think identity politics has definitely made all of this worse, and that when the right decided to adopt identity politics, in a particular moment in time, uh, they compounded all of its problems.
00:24:00.460So that, essentially, you're not voting for a set of policies against another.
00:24:08.540He's, he's pursuing a classic Randian policy, when he ran as a populist person standing up for the forgotten men and women, but no one cares.
00:24:17.820Um, now one of the reasons is, he's just a white man who represents the last stand, really, of a white majority country, which is going to become a non-white majority country, whatever you mean by white.
00:24:28.460Uh, and that is the first time in human history that's ever happened.
00:24:34.680When it's happening at a time, also, of mass immigration, and declining, and, or stagnant living standards for most people, it is, it is, it is a very dangerous moment.
00:24:45.080And everybody should be attempting, at such a moment, to mitigate those, those issues, to lean against those issues, where the political temptation, of course, is to fan them for extraordinary power.
00:24:58.980And that's happening now on both sides.
00:25:00.380So you're not voting on a set of issues, you're voting because you're gay, you're voting because you're black, you're voting because you're white, you're voting because you're a woman.
00:25:06.500So, these are not arguments, this is not a democracy.
00:25:10.120Well, I want us to touch identity politics because I think that is especially problematic on the left now, and it will be the reason why the left will fail to contain this problem.
00:25:19.880But I want to stay on this point of explaining the Trump phenomenon, and it seems to me it's not, it can be fully explained, perhaps, almost without reference to who Trump is himself.
00:25:33.820It's like he's, I mean, I've said this before, but I've been thinking of him for a very long time as a kind of evil Chauncey Gardner.
00:25:40.820He's just like, he's a person who has stumbled into a situation that is misinterpreting his chaos as these genius manipulative gifts, but he's in some deep sense exactly as he appears, and yet he's paying absolutely no consequence for being uninformed and imbecilic and callous.
00:26:02.940And David, you say something in your book about that it's not so much him, it's the enemies he's picked that explains his rise.
00:26:11.660I mean, it's his counter-elitist stand across the board, which has drawn so much support.
00:26:20.580Like everybody, I was riveted by the Michael Wolff book, of course.
00:26:24.120And as someone who's releasing a book the week after, you feel a little bit like whoever had to go on the Golden Globe stage after Oprah.
00:26:35.220But I think the image of Donald Trump as a drooling, imbecilic, senile-tending maniac, I mean, that, I think that's not, that can't be true.
00:26:48.020He has gifts, and one of his gifts, one of his most important gifts.
00:26:54.120Whatever you're about to say, I'll give you for free, but there's not one more gift.
00:26:59.800He's got the bully's instinctive ability to see the psychic weak spot in his target.
00:27:08.760To Jeb Bush, and to Marco Rubio, and to Ted Cruz, he found that thing that, you know, for Donald Trump to call Ted Cruz a liar, I mean, it seems audacious, right?
00:27:21.700But what he saw in Ted Cruz was that Ted Cruz is not the person.
00:27:26.980He had constructed an identity that Ted Cruz was a very sophisticated graduate of America's, you know, most expensive educational institutions.
00:27:37.300You know, someone who has a deep knowledge of the law.
00:27:39.640You know, someone who's got a very modern marriage.
00:27:41.320You know, his wife was the head of Goldman Sachs office in Texas.
00:27:46.920This guy was not the person that he presented himself to, his evangelical voters.
00:27:52.840There was a central lie at the heart of the Ted Cruz message.
00:27:55.780And Donald Trump saw that, and he hammered that point.
00:27:58.420And he saw that there was a kind of psychic weakness in Jeb Bush, that he could, that low energy was a way of saying, you know, I'm going to attack you, and I'm going to attack you, and I'm going to attack you.
00:28:07.120And what you're going to do is take half a step backward and stand on your tippy toes to look taller, but you're never going to meet me.
00:28:14.200And what he did to those opponents, he's done to the American political system.
00:28:19.420He's found its points of vulnerability, and he has twisted them.
00:28:22.480You know, he wants you to believe that he's popular.
00:28:26.120But what he is very skilled at is being able to put together something close enough, enough popular support to overwhelm the institutions and to keep that support revved up by constantly making them united in what they hate and make everybody else be divided in what they are trying to defend.
00:28:45.260There's another simple gift he has, or rather ability, which politicians in the past in the West have not done.
00:28:58.020Now, they've done it in code, and they've done it with different issues appealing to certain instincts, but no one's gone out there and openly said, vote for me because you hate or are afraid of black people.
00:29:12.000Vote for me because you're afraid of foreigners coming in with different color skin.
00:29:54.360And then what he's done, and he has got more quick gifts than that.
00:29:58.080He's able, actually, he did a self-hostage taking.
00:30:01.020I mean, how is it that you get a Lindsey Graham who was one of Donald Trump's severest critics and a person who was committed to a set of political views about as far within the Republican Party as you could be away from Donald Trump,
00:30:16.440and make him not only his defender but the person who would be one of two signers of a criminal referral of one of Donald Trump's opponents,
00:30:24.500and break all the rules of the Senate that Lindsey Graham loves, or not the rules but the habits of the Senate that Lindsey Graham so loves,
00:30:30.720he's a real institutional senator, that you would send this thing out without even informing, never mind consulting your Democratic counterparts.
00:30:36.320How did he get Lindsey Graham to do that?
00:30:38.300And the answer is, well, Donald Trump has sort of shackled the whole Republican Party to himself.
00:30:44.520And, indeed, they sort of know that he's going to be the last man to sink because he's got a four-year term and they're all facing nemesis.
00:30:51.200But, again, isn't that a situational truth?
00:30:54.420That's just what happens when you have 35 percent of the country and whatever percentage of the Republican Party that is that simply will not disavow you no matter what you do.
00:31:04.920It just seems like anyone could successfully exploit 35 percent that is unmovable and scandal-proof.
00:31:10.800In a two-party system with an electoral college, exploiting 35 percent is actually quite tricky.
00:31:15.500You exploit 35—I mean, Herbert Hoover got more than 35 percent of the vote in 1932.
00:31:22.460What Trump understood and what previous Republicans have not faced up to is that the Republican message has become,
00:31:32.460over the past generation, but especially since the Great Recession, more and more out of sync, not only with the country, but with the Republican Party's own voters.
00:31:41.820That was the thing that Donald Trump understood that the others did not, that your own voters don't—my joke about this, I kept saying through the cycle,
00:31:50.380was that the Republican base was signaling they wanted more health care security, less immigration, and no more Bushes.
00:31:56.080And what the party offered was less health care, more immigration, and one more Bush.
00:32:00.220And they couldn't have missed it more.
00:32:04.100But what Paul Ryan and the others believe is if only we had better communications or explained it more,
00:32:09.700or if only put a little bit more of this special sauce on it, we could somehow build out—
00:32:16.520instead, we're not going to change our core message, but we can—in fact, that was the thing that so many people said after 2012.
00:32:21.400We're not going to, in any way, change our core message, but we will season it.
00:32:25.160What Donald Trump intuited was if you've got 35 percent, that's only a problem so long as you've got a political system that requires you to have a majority.
00:32:49.520I think Americans pay too much—when they think of democratic breakdown, they pay too much attention to the spectacular example of what happened between the wars in Europe.
00:32:58.060I sometimes try to direct people to what's happening now in Central Europe.
00:33:01.120But one of the ways—we have—there's an example right here at home, which is what happened in the half-century after Reconstruction.
00:33:06.660I mean, here's a statistic that when you hear about this gerrymandering in North Carolina, to keep in mind.
00:33:11.600So in 1872, after the Civil War, the state of South Carolina had about 700,000 people, of whom 100,000 cast a vote in the presidential election of 1872.
00:33:24.1801924, half a century later, the state's population has grown from 700,000 to 1.7 million.
00:33:29.460The number of votes cast drops from 100,000 to 50,000.
00:33:34.320And South Carolina was still an American state.
00:34:02.880One of the things that Donald Trump has forced—and he's forced on, I think, a lot of us on the right-hand side of the spectrum—
00:34:07.380is a deeper encounter with the American past, things that we thought were past and buried, that were maybe just dormant and that are coming to the fore again.
00:34:17.960But the problem is, it seems to me, and I'm not—obviously, there's no defense of Trump.
00:34:23.840There's not a single redeeming characteristic.
00:35:11.980They've also experienced an unprecedented—well, not quite unprecedented, but only once before this volume—of immigration from one country, primarily,
00:35:27.900that has completely altered the demographics of this country in ways that people are, especially older generations, are simply bewildered by.
00:35:35.200The last time that happened, we had the 1924 Immigration Act, which basically shut all immigration down.
00:35:41.980If you are not—if you are a Democratic Party and your only response to this question, which, by the way, also must affect the wages in terms of competition,
00:35:51.320and your only response to the situation is all of you people are racists, and we're not going to even discuss you, discuss the issue,
00:35:59.640then I think that's why people land back with him.
00:36:04.500And I think the Democrats' inability to listen to those white working-class voters in the middle of the country
00:36:13.220has been an incredible—as big an enabler to his capacity as president as Hillary Clinton was an enabler to his candidacy.
00:36:22.260Yeah, well, just to take that single issue, the idea that immigration is all upside with no casualties,
00:36:27.980that's clearly a lie, and the fact that millions of people were suffering the actual truth of that equation,
00:36:35.680and that's unaddressed on the left, and to—
00:36:38.320Not just unaddressed, but bringing it up as itself an active racist.
00:36:40.540Yeah, you're a racist if you worry about it, yes.
00:36:42.260This is how the far left has now occupied the entire territory on questions of identity
00:36:47.380and is actively alienating the very people we need to talk to.
00:36:53.500And they don't think—they somehow think they can't—the people out there don't see what's going on.
00:37:00.120They think they don't hear what they're being called.
00:37:04.320They can't hear—they can't hear the lazy bigotry of elites about white working class.
00:37:09.360They don't hear someone on television use the word white male as a bald insult in itself.
00:44:39.040There—the—and this is also true now increasingly, unfortunately, on the left.
00:44:43.180If you don't sign up to the entire brigade of identity politics, you are banished.
00:44:50.820And so the ability for us to actually—the very processes of thinking, of changing your mind, of weighing different things,
00:45:04.440of seeing something the other side might have thought of, and openly doing that has been stigmatized.
00:45:10.700And you are praised constantly, and all the rewards in both our intellectual and media—I'm talking about the intellectual life and media—
00:45:19.040you are praised and rewarded, whether you're in a university or in a right-wing think tank, for your loyalty to the party line.
00:45:25.260David actually was sacked from AEI because he actually thought that Obamacare was a perfectly decent, if flawed, possibility,
00:45:35.400and it was not the hill for Republicans to die on.
00:46:56.880I just—there is some—it's psychotic that this is regarded as—
00:47:03.400and every—there's no other civilized country in the world where a political party actually denies the existence of climate change.
00:47:11.560No political party in the world, no right-wing political party in the world, except for this pathological, ideological, alienated, and angry fringe.
00:47:25.440We're going to agree that there's a lot of things about the politics that are obsolete, but that linking up—that's the party system.
00:47:33.660That's what parties do, that you have to organize different people who have different points of view to cooperate on politics.
00:47:40.620And you can—this happens on—in any political system, that people have a set of concerns.
00:47:47.740And so people from Los Angeles are able to collaborate with people from Boston on different kinds of issues because that's what party mechanisms do.
00:47:56.820I don't think—and I think there are always going to be people who are more liberal and who are more conservative.
00:48:00.560That's linked to the structure of the human brain.
00:48:03.000There are people—and people are going to have different interests.
00:48:04.560There are going to be people who work for the government sector.
00:48:06.260There are people who work for the private sector.
00:48:07.660They're going to have different interests.
00:48:08.840The special problem we have right now is we're all supposed to be committed, first and foremost, to the rules of the game.
00:48:17.120Rules that protect your view when my guys are in power and that protect my rights when someone else's people are in power.
00:48:26.680And that's what's in danger right now.
00:48:28.440I mean, I think when the day will come, I hope, when, you know, we can go back to, you know, taking out the wet mackerels and hitting each other with them over what the corporate income tax rate would be.
00:48:40.400And I will probably agree with Paul Ryan about where the corporate income tax rate should be.
00:48:44.780But I don't agree with him so much that I'm willing to corrode the American constitutional system in order to get my way.
00:48:58.960You want to conserve and keep this valuable and rare experiment in liberal democracy in the history of the world alive and healthy.
00:49:07.660And that means adhering not just to its formalities but to its norms.
00:49:12.740And one of those key norms is understanding that the other party or the other point of view does have a chance and should have a role in government.