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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE’s warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested. David asks whether the country can find a way back from a dangerous moral and political impasse, as a majority of Americans recoil from these actions while a determined minority continue to defend them.
Then, David is joined by the New York Times columnist and Atlantic contributor David Brooks. Frum and Brooks discuss the origins of the term neocon, what the neocons got right, and why they should be listened to today. Brooks describes how America’s problems long predate Trump, and why elections alone cannot fix what has been lost. Together, Frum and Brooks explore whether the country is capable of moral renewal, what rebuilding would actually require, and why recovery, if it comes at all, will be slow, difficult, and deeply personal.
Finally, David ends the episode with his thoughts on Death by Lightning, a television series on Netflix based on the assassination of President James Garfield, and how, when watching historical dramas, we need to look back on the past with a contextual lens, one that we should bring to our present too.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum 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 [James] Garfield; 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 prerecorded 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: NATO allies like France and Britain, Denmark and Norway moving troops into Greenland. An altercation at Davos between the president of the United States and 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 [Donald] 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 purportedly enforcing the law while that American citizen was, according to most, if not all, video evidence 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 torture centers in third countries, centers that have been closed down by American courts because they violate basic norms of due process, and 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. 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 personal 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 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, 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 enabled and defend these acts.
This a 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 cellphone?” 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 MAGA people and we all know that, most people who supported Donald Trump, or 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.
But we are facing a kind of crisis in American democracy that is worse than anything that even people who were 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. 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, are being hauled from their houses without a warrant, and that important people in American government insist that there 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 certain kinds of backgrounds and personal stories, and certain kind of skin colors—that other Americans have got them. that MAGA people carry guns at their events and, of course, don’t expect to be executed for it, but other Americans don’t have those rights; MAGA 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 will 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 by dialogue with David Brooks.
[Music]
Frum: 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 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 of activities to join me today on The David Frum Show.
David, welcome.
David Brooks: I think we were actually colleagues at The Wall Street Journal first, before The Weekly Standard, back in the ’80s—
Frum: You know—
Brooks: —or ’90s.
Frum: —that’s true. That’s true. And you went off to glory at The Wall Street Journal Europe, where you covered the ’89 uprisings, terrifying your grandmother. You had a wonderful line—I remember this—that she called you in Brussels and said, But, David, what if the revolution spreads?
Brooks: (Laughs.) True, and sure enough, it did.
Frum: (Laughs.) I wanna 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 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?
Brooks: 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 mostly for immigrant kids—in those days, I think no tuition; now very low tuition. So if you’ve just come to America and you wanna 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. 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. (Laughs.) 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 Kristol and Nathan Glazer, ate in Alcove 1, a little part of the dining hall, and the Stalinists ate in Alcove 2. 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 communism was not gonna work. And so they became disillusioned with that. And then they became pretty standard Franklin Roosevelt Democrats. And some, like Nathan Glazer, 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 sic 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. 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 serial castrator on the Upper West Side who would take kids, lead ’m into Central Park, castrate them, and then murder them. And his nickname was Charlie Chop-Off. (Laughs.) And the crime was so bad in those days, Charlie Chop-Off was not even a big story. (Laughs.) 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 a group of—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.
Frum: Okay, but the distance in time from the 1960s to us is the same as the distance in time from when these people were young, in the 1930s, to Reconstruction.
Brooks: (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) Did I just do that math right? Yeah, it’s, like, 60 years. So why would you write a magazine article in 2026 saying these people who were active from 1930-something to 1960-something were right about anything to do with us? How does this bear on our lives today in any way?
Brooks: Because I’m a human anachronism. That’s why.
Frum: (Laughs.) No, no, you have your finger on the pulse. We count on your observations to tell us what’s going on in America, so what’s going on in America that any of this helps us with?
Brooks: I think what the neoconservatives can do is they teach us, first of all, some of the things they learned in the ’60s: Life is really complicated. You should do social policy. You should try to improve government, but you should realize that most policies fail, and you should really have good reasons, and you should make it bureaucratic. But I think the core insight for the neocons—they not only grew up as policy people; they were influenced by literature, by culture, by theology, by Talmudic study. And so they made no distinction between what you would call theological, philosophical, cultural growth—moral formation—and policy. And so they brought a much more humanistic lens to see policy; it’s not just about economics and growth. [The] elemental question is (a) can we build a civilization we can be proud of, and (b) can we create policies that will nurture values, the right kind of values?
In 1985, one of the great neoconservative political scientists, a guy named James Q. Wilson, who spent much of his career at Harvard, said, All we’re trying to do is trying to inculcate certain virtues, whether we’re talking about education, when we’re talking about trying to reduce recidivism, when we’re trying to talk about conducting our fiscal policy. And we can either have good values, and for the neoconservatives, the good values were the bourgeois values—being decent to people, being neighborly, showing up on time, working hard—not lofty Kantian values, or we can have bad values. And if we run deficits, we’re basically behaving selfishly to future generations. If we subsidize nonwork, then we will discourage people from becoming industrious and that kind of person. And so I think one of the things they do—and especially in a moment right now, when we’re in a myriad of really moral [crises] in our politics, where basically 78 million Americans take a look at Donald Trump and they see nothing morally wrong.
Frum: Okay, so we are at a moment—I was wondering where you were going to go—we’re at a moment when agencies of government, Cabinet-level departments, are, for their own amusement, tweeting out variations that are obviously intended to be variations on Nazi Party slogans: “One people, one empire, one leader”; when we have masked armed men roaming American cities, detaining people without any right to detain them, beating up people, in some cases killing them. We have the most corrupt administration—not in American history, but I keep saying, if this were a Nigerian administration, it would be one of the most corrupt administrations in Nigerian history—to your point about bourgeois values, where the president of the United States was a close friend to, and seems to be operating a cover-up on behalf of, one of the most notorious child-molestation rings (Laughs.) in American history. And how is Irving Kristol going to help us with any of this?
Brooks: (Laughs.) Well, (a) ’cause he reminds us—and especially his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian—he reminds us the power of the spirit of an age, that we live within a moral ecology tnd that moral ecology is not only constructed by each of us in our own behaviors, but it’s constructed by the arts, by literature, and by the example set by great political leaders.
This is Gertrude Himmelfarb, the great historian of Victorian England—in 1810, it was completely normal for a guy to get drunk after work, go home, and beat his wife. There was no harsh judgment about that; that’s just the way things are. And along came a group called the Clapham Sect, who were basically evangelicals, and they said, No, that is not gonna be acceptable behavior anymore. So they reset the norms of what acceptable behavior was going to be. They’re sort of the beginnings of Victorian morality. And as part of that, they said, We have such respect for human dignity, we’re gonna campaign against the slave trade. And so what Himmelfarb describes is a period of moral improvement for a whole society. We all live on the cultural capital of centuries gone by, and if we tear away at that capital, then we’re lost in the world Stephen Miller talked about last week, which is a war of all against all, where force is the only thing that matters; a shared morality does not matter.
And so I think they give us the tools to think about, How do we reconstruct a social order so we can trust one another once again and so we can treat each other decently once again?
Frum: Many of the people that you and I knew when we were young have gone on to power and prominence, and they started off sharing many of the ideas, or at least participating in many of the ideas that you’re describing. And today, we have a world in which the bright lights of the younger intellectual right are inspired at best, at best, by the idea of abolishing the difference between church and state and letting the church run everything, and at worst by outright fascism, and at very worst by flirtations with literal Nazism. So, 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, or left, side of the spectrum, saying, 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? (Laughs.) How is Irving Kristol going to help us with our dilemma? If I have to choose, I’m choosing wokeism over fascism, but I’m not crazy about either.
Brooks: Yeah, you’re really cheering me up. So glad I came on the podcast. No, I’m kidding. (Laughs.) You and I—
Frum: (Laughs.) No concessions—speaking of, like, the neoconservative spirit—no concessions to the need for uplift here. We’re going for the full gloom-and-doom situation.
Brooks: (Laughs.) So you and I got out of school at about the same time and entered our business at the same time. And at that time, I was working at National Review in the mid-’80s, and another group of people came out of school at the same time. And I came out of the University of Chicago; you came out of a fancier school back east. But there were a group of students from Dartmouth—
Frum: I think you meant easier school, but you’re being polite.
Brooks: (Laughs.) Maybe easier, yeah.
Frum: (Laughs.)
Brooks: So there were a group from Dartmouth who worked at a magazine called The Dartmouth Review, and people will know some of them still: Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza. There was a guy named Ben Hart. There was a guy named Greg Fossedal. And I did not appreciate the distinction; I thought we were all on the same team. But there was a distinction—I think earnest people like me and you, we were pro-conservative. We had read Edmund Burke and Isaiah Berlin and Adam Smith, and we had these earnest ideas that was pro-a conservative vision of society. But Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, they were not pro-conservative; they were anti-left.
And there was an episode that illustrates for me how they were different from us: that during the ’80s, to protest apartheid, students on a lot of campuses put up shantytowns, and it was to represent the suffering of Black citizens of South Africa under apartheid. And one night, a bunch of the editors of The Dartmouth Review descended on the shantytown protests and, with sledgehammers, slammed them down. And I remember being appalled, (a) because apartheid really was evil and was worth opposing, but (b) going through a protest with sledgehammers and destroying it, that’s not America; that’s [Joseph] Goebbels. That is really thuggish fascism. And I thought they were low-rent; I thought those people were intellectually mediocre. But it turns out there were a lot more people who were anti-left than there were pro-conservative, especially as the time went [by].
And so what you have in the Trump administration is people with the same profile as the Dartmouth Review crowd: They went to elite schools, but they hated what they found there. That’s Steven Miller, who went to Duke. That’s Pete Hegseth, who went to Princeton. That’s J. D. Vance, who went to Yale Law. Now, you can go down the list. It’s Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to Penn. And so these are not pro-conservative. These are oppositional nihilists who hate the liberal establishment. And I found it easy, when I was saying college, to be more conservative than my professors but still have reverence for their learning. But these people do not have reverence for learning; they just want to offend the bourgeoisie. And so that’s what it’s become. And then they’ve produced spawn of young people who just think, That’s cool. That’s edgy. And of course, you have to up the dosage when you’re giving people edgy nihilism—it just has to get worse and worse and worse. And as Richard Weaver, a philosopher from the 1950s, said, The problem with the younger generation is they haven’t read the minutes to the last meeting. And so you get a group of people who, when they see fascistic behavior, don’t understand where that eventually leads.
Frum: 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?
Brooks: Well, I think it got attached—and I’ll tell my story—I think what happened was, neoconservatives, as I said, really believe in the nature of a regime. They want America to stand for certain values, and they’re appalled by regimes that stand for evil values. And the Soviet Union was like that, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was like that. And so they said, If you have a regime that is internally and domestically poisonous and oppressive, it will be dangerous to the world. And I would say, in my life in the ’90s, I was covering the end of apartheid, the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the Oslo peace process in the Middle East. I was watching democracy be created, and it seemed to me we were on a tidal wave of creating societies with better democratic values. And so I think a lot of neocons like me or others and our elders supported the Iraq War for that reason: because they thought fighting for a democratic wave was the right thing to do.
What they did not sufficiently appreciate, what we, and especially me, did not sufficiently—the other thing I had said earlier about neocons: epistemological modesty. Be careful about trying to change complex circumstances, ’cause you’re gonna screw it up. And we ignored one of the core tenets of our own belief system; we were so swept up in the moment. And if we’d only gone back to the single most famous neoconservative foreign-policy essay of all time, was written by Jeane Kirkpatrick, and her argument was that if you’re gonna try to a democracy in an authoritarian context, you need generations of civic planning, of civic organization, of moral foundations of a democracy. You can’t just imagine you can do it overnight. And we forgot that lesson.
Frum: Mm. 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 to 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, [President Barack] 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, 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. My hands are tied. I’m powerless to intervene. And so you got this extraordinary wave of refugees from Syria—I forget the number of how many millions of people. 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. And the world is on its own now, without American guidance, at the mercy of whoever looks like the second-strongest candidate to guide the world.
Brooks: Yeah, when we withdrew, our friend Robert Kagan wrote a book called The Jungle Grows Back, which is to say, when there’s no social order holding the world, then the wolves take over. And wolves like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] and others have taken over. And people [in] this country on the populist right and sometimes on the left think, Oh, that old neoliberal order, that was all a scam. It was a scam for America to exercise imperial hegemony, but it was all just words. But that liberal world order that people built after World War II, and that people like Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman enforced, that really did restrain people. And so the world has just become a more dangerous place. And America has taken one of our great assets, which is our ideals—I’ve covered so many people around the world, and they want democracy; they want dignity—and we have squandered that strength. It’s an actual source of strength. And then the final thing, we replaced it now with Donald Trump. We’re no longer hanging back. Suddenly, we’re launching forever wars all the hell all over the place, but we’re not doing it on behalf of ideals; we’re doing it on behalf of nihilism, on behalf of oil. I feel sorry for all my left-wing friends, who used to—and when they talked about George W. Bush, they would say, He claims to be for democracy, but really, this war is all about oil. And they had the subtle ways to see what the real meaning of what Bush was saying was. But that skill’s no longer necessary because Donald Trump says, Yeah, it’s all about oil. What are you gonna do about it?
And so I would ask people, “If you thought American foreign-policy idealism was discredited by Iraq, which it largely was, how do you like the anti-idealistic foreign policy, a policy of pure material greed?”
Frum: Let’s go back to these old books and essays, and think about, What are the lessons that, in the age of Trumpism, we need, whether we are broadly sympathetic to conservative projects or if we’re broadly unsympathetic. Let’s start with the other side. If you’re someone who’s not a conservative and you think of yourself as a liberal or even a progressive, is there any value in any of these old ideas in the face of an administration, as I said, where at best we’re looking at people who wanna overthrow the separation of church and state, with the church in charge, and at worst functional fascists and on the edge outright Nazi sympathizers and apologists? Why isn’t the lesson for a person of liberal views or progressive views to say, You know what? Conservatism was always a terrible idea. I never liked any of these folks. They’re now even worse than before. I have nothing to learn from any of them?
Brooks: Well, a lot of my more progressive friends are always nostalgic for the last conservatives. And so I started saying, Well, wait ’til we have a Republican government that makes you nostalgic for Donald Trump. (Laughs.) So that seems to be the trend.
I would say there are certain things that are not liberal or conservative. They used to be consensus American positions. One is that we have a social order, that there are certain rules and certain beliefs and values that we share, that form the basis of how we live. George Marsden is a great historian, and he wrote this about Martin Luther King [Jr.]’s rhetoric: He says, What gave King’s rhetoric such force is the idea that right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe. That slavery is not just wrong in some times and some places; it’s always wrong. Segregation is not just wrong in some times and some places; it is always wrong. Right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe. And when you have that social order, people feel held. You can have a society ’cause we have a shared understanding of what’s right and wrong. We have a shared sense of norms about what’s right and wrong, so we’re gonna behave [with] each other; we can trust each other. Two generations ago, 60 percent of Americans said, Yeah, my neighbors are trustworthy. That’s not a liberal or a conservative thing; that was a great human achievement. And what happened? We shredded the shared moral order. And that was not just a conservative project; it was a liberal project too.
And so one of the things we did is we privatized morality. We said to people, Come up with your own values. And the problem with that is that there’s no shared morality if everyone has to come up with their own values. And the other problem with that is, unless your name is Aristotle, you can’t come up with values. Walter Lippmann, a great columnist in the 1950s, wrote a book in which he said, If what is right and wrong is based on what each individual feels according to their emotions, then we are outside the bounds of civilization. And so this moral collapse, I think, is what undergirds the rise of Trump. It undergirds the alienation. It undergirds the idea that we want a politics that’s based not on ideals and values, that it’s about power and it’s about who has more force. And so if we’re gonna get over Trumpism or the [Alternative for Democracy] AfFD or [French politician Marine] Le Pen, we need a set of ideals that can hold society together and create some social trust, and we need ideals that have some roots—and this is what the New York conservatives were good about—in universal values. It’s not just my kind. All through much of human history, my kind of people are the kind of people I care about, and I don’t care about the other kind. But it was a great achievement of civilization to say, No, I care about all people, maybe not all equally, but there are certain ideas that apply to everybody, ideas of dignity, democracy, and kindness. And that was an achievement.
And so I think the neoconservatives were inheritors, maybe more conservative than not, some not, but they were the inheritors of that idea, and they caused us to see politics and see our national culture through the lens of either a shared moral order or a lack of one.
Frum: I am, like you, formed in many ways by this tradition. I’ve got some critical distance from it. I never really felt like I was a part—I read the books; I never felt like I was part of the social circle that was such an important aspect of the neoconservative world when it was a real thing. So I knew these things through print rather than through personality. And in a way, that was kind of disqualifying because neoconservatism was as much a milieu as it was a set of ideas, and I was not a member of that milieu. Maybe I’m just anti-social. But the question I think about a lot as we are trying to move beyond Trumpism is it does seem like there’s about to be a big swing of political power in the United States in ’26 and ’28. I worried through the year 2025 that Trump would somehow be able to distort the election enough to hold on to power, the coming congressional election. I think the tide against him is now too big for those methods to work. Unless he tries an outright coup d’état, I don’t know how he stops it.
So there’s likely to be a shift in power. And the question I find myself thinking about a lot—and I have no answer to this, and I’d be very interested to be guided by the wisdom you draw from these texts and your own wisdom. When President [Joe] Biden entered office in 2021, clearly, his thought, or clearly to me, his thought was, We need to get past the recent unpleasantness. We need a policy of accommodation. We need a policy of looking forward, not backward. And while, when people have actually sacked the Capitol, they have to be held to account, we’re not gonna object too much if their higher-ups—a justice system goes real, real slow on bringing justice to the people who gave the orders for the sacking on January 6, 2021. We’ll punish the actual foot soldiers, but we’ll leave the colonels and generals alone mostly, to the extent we can. The question I am struggling with is: If and when power does shift, was the Biden attitude the right one, to be reapplied in ’27 and ’29, or do we need some kind of lustration, something like what the Czechs and Hungarians and Poles did after 1989? They said, Look, we have an elite that was authoritarian, corrupt, and criminal, in some cases homicidal. And we can’t do justice in every case, but we need to find some system to hold the previous administration to a moral and legal account, and exclude them from power. I can’t make up my mind what’s the right answer. What guidance would you draw from these old texts?
Brooks: Yeah, I guess I would not be for mass defenestrations.
Frum: I’m not throwing them out the window.
Brooks: (Laughs.)
Frum: No, I’m serious. What should happen—Jeanine Pirro, a U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who’s leading the charge to bring these utterly ridiculous criminal charges against the head of the Federal Reserve to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve and subordinate monetary policy to Trump’s election needs. What should happen to her?
Brooks: Yeah. So first, I think the problem with the Biden administration, one of them, was that he said, correctly, “This is a battle for the soul of America”; he had no idea how to think about that. And then he should have read more neoconservative books ’cause they would have said, Here’s the soul of America. Here’s how it’s being destroyed. [Here’s] how you can restore it.
The second thing, and one of the reasons I’m not against going after these people as aggressively—when they broke the law, if they break the law, they should break the law. George Santayana, the philosopher, said that Americans don’t solve problems; they just leave them behind. And I think what’s gonna happen after Trump is that people are gonna take a look at corruption in Washington on an unprecedented scale, and they’re gonna wanna do what Americans did after Watergate: They’re gonna wanna turn the page. And in 1976, Jimmy Carter looked like integrity. And so it’s not like—and I actually think Gerald Ford did the right thing in pardoning Richard Nixon because we didn’t need to wage the same war over and over again. I thought the indictments of Trump during the Biden administration ended up helping Trump get reelected. And so I worry that that will happen again or that will just motivate the same battle lines over and over again.
Voters who voted for him, they have real issues, real concerns, which Trump is not addressing. The job is to win them over, not to lock them in the same battle lines as before. I think societies move forward the same way human beings move forward: through a process of rupture and repair. Trump has ruptured our society from top to bottom, and I think you just move on, you turn the page, and you offer something different. After Nixon, you got something different in Carter. After Carter, you got something different in Reagan. After Reagan–[George H.W.] Bush, you got something different in [President Bill] Clinton. And people want to try something different.
Frum: You make a very compelling case, and as so often, you’re almost certainly right. But let me just keep thinking.
One of the teachings of the neoconservative world was that these moral beliefs matter, that culture matters. And they were very impatient with social scientists who said, No, what matters are deep structures of wealth and power. They didn’t like that way of thinking. But deep structures of wealth and power do often matter. And so after Trump leaves office, it will still be true that the people who became corrupt billionaires under Trump will remain corrupt billionaires, with all the political power that that entails—including, by the way, Trump’s children, who have made a corrupt fortune in the single year of his first year of his presidency through these cryptocurrency operations they’re running, which have left every purchaser losing 95 percent of their money but have left the sellers very rich. That is not just wealth; that’s power.
The changes in the media landscape that have concentrated informational power in the hands of people who are beholden to the Trump administration, whether it’s the social-media companies or the new conglomerates in what we used to call television—I don’t know what we’ll call it [as we] go on—those will still remain. The changes that have happened inside the Republican Party, those will remain. People talk about doing something about these ICE recruits, but they’re still going to remain, probably, government employees with this rogue police force that doesn’t seem to answer to any kind of—that’s all going to be there.
And how do you say, Well, we’re going to re-moralize the society, when the structures of wealth and power bequeathed by what used to be there, where those structures are all still there, just waiting for the next economic downturn to take power? That’s what happened to Biden: He just assumed, Well, we can re-moralize 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.
Brooks: Yeah, there’s clearly a lot of weight behind your argument. I think we all acknowledge that it was a big mistake not to punish any of the 2008 financial-crisis architects. That just struck people as a moral job undone. So sometimes you do have to have truth and reconciliation, with the emphasis on truth.
On the other hand, I think the big test for people in the years ahead is to separate Trump voters, working-class voters, from the Trump cronies. And I think that will happen (a) as people are realizing that the Trump cronies ride to power on the votes of the working class. And the working class die much sooner. They earn much less. They’re much more likely to get divorced. They’re much more likely to say they have no friends. So the needs of the working class are really something that needs to be addressed, and Trump is not doing it. And the job is to separate those working-class voters from the cronies.
The Republican Party in our lifetime, in my view, is always gonna be a working-class party. That’s true of every right-wing party in the Western world. What used to be the bankers’ party is now a working-class party. And it is a great achievement to become a multiracial working-class party, if the Republicans can pull it off. And so we’re not going to go back to the Republican Party that you and I knew in 1990. It’s gonna be a working-class party.
Frum: What does that mean? What do you mean when you say it’s going to be a working-class party? My sense of the Trump vote in 2024 was that the Trump voter was more affluent, on average, than the [Kamala] Harris voter. And while Harris did better among college-educated people than Trump did, that Trump was competitive and that noncollege 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.
Brooks: Yeah, there are obviously a lot of Trump billionaires floating around out there. But if you look at the upper-middle, educated sectors of our society—whether it’s Palo Alto; Bethesda, Maryland; Westchester County, New York; Boston—those are all Democratic areas. And to me, the best predictor of voting patterns is no longer income; it basically is not a predictor of voting patterns anymore. It’s education levels. And Democrats are winning over the highly educated former Republican suburbs, and Republicans are winning over the less-educated working class in rural areas. And I guess I use working class a little loosely; I really mean education levels.
And it’s simply, that’s the divide not only in this country, but across Western Europe. And why is it the divide? Because the Information Age economy rewards education with money. And a lot of people look around their societies, whether it’s here or in Hungary or in England and in France, and they see the 20 percent most-educated people living in extremely affluent lifestyles, sending their kids to the same schools, replicating a caste system based upon education and inherited privilege, and, by the way, ruling working-class and conservative voices out of the media and out of college campuses. And if you tell people that one top 20 percent is gonna rig the game generation after generation, they’re gonna flip the table. And that’s why populism is not only an American thing. This phenomenon is happening everywhere in the Western world as we screw up the need to respond to the nature of the Information Age economy.
And so, to me, the central challenge is to separate those people from MAGA. And I think [the way] that is most doable is if we try to put Trump in the rearview mirror.
Frum: Yeah, well, MAGA 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—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, paying taxes becomes ever more optional. For the people who spend their income on goods, taxes become ever more baffling and mysterious, and are included in the prices of the 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 multiracial party. So 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?
Brooks: (Laughs.) He would talk about the circulation of elites, that you can circulate elites pretty quickly. And all the people who were the elites in the Republican Party under George W. Bush, they thought they were gonna be in every Republican administration going forward, but that didn’t happen because Trump and Heritage Foundation and all those people brought in a new elite. CPAC, when I was a young conservative, was considered the fringe of the fringe, and it became the mainstream.
This is not unusual in American history. The people who were the elite under John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman were no longer the elite under Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. They had an entire shift in elites. And so you can have a shift in elites. And I’m hopeful that there is a group on the Democratic Party that is now acting like an elite, and I mean that in a good way. They’re running universities, and they’re trying to be less crazy-left than they were. They’re running institutions that they’re trying to reform. Isaiah Berlin, who I mentioned, he had a phrase, I find myself on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency, and that’s where I find myself.
Frum: The analogy I should have chosen was not lustration after 1989; it’s Reconstruction. That’s the American analogy, where the traditional governing elite of one of the great parties of much of the country committed itself to something not just in the defense of slavery, but to slavery-plus, fortified and amplified by treason. And until that generation has spent its 40 years in the wilderness, and a new generation has grown up, and the policies of the country have changed, and their victims have been brought into the political system—not just their disaffected followers, but also their victims—then you’re not going to have true stability again.
So I think, What are going to be the equivalents of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that go into place to make sure not just that we put Trumpism behind, but so it really can’t happen again. And so the people who got rich and powerful, and who will remain rich and powerful, don’t use that wealth and power to attack American institutions in the way that the Trump people did in the first year of the second term, and looks like we got three more years to go.
Brooks: Yeah, let me try a historical example on you. So in the 1920s and ’30s, we had vicious anti-immigration movements. We had the America Firsters, and we had Father [Charles] Coughlin, who was sort of a radio priest who had semi-fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies. And suddenly, along came Franklin Roosevelt, along came the Depression, along came World War II, and they were just discredited. And they were discredited from 1941 to probably 2006, at least. And they were discredited not by elites; they were discredited by the whole country. You did not wanna say the phrase “America First,” ’cause that would discredit you. And along comes Donald Trump, and when he first started saying the word “America First,” I was like, What is he doing? Everyone knows what “America First” is. (A) I’m not convinced he knew what the original “America First” was, (B) people had either no historical memory or they didn’t care, and so ideas that were discredited came back. And that is the nature of politics: It’s never over. No argument is ever settled. They come back. But, to me, it’s not what a certain set of prosecutors do. It’s whether the mass of America decides: That was despicable. That’s discredited. We don’t want any piece of that. And you can learn that lesson.
Frum: That history is not going to repeat itself, because it took the Great Depression to discredit high tariffs, it took the Holocaust to discredit anti-Semitism, and it took Pearl Harbor and then the subsequent American triumph in two oceans and the complete collapse of fascist ideas in the fascist countries and the repudiations by the fascist countries themselves of their previous fascism. (Laughs.) And that string of things is so dramatic, it’s very unlikely to repeat. So it’s much more likely to happen that the Trump people are going to have a bad election or two. There will be some of the more selfish, materialistic plutocrats who will say, You know [what]? We overdid some things. We overdid some things. We shouldn’t have shot that woman in Minneapolis. We shouldn’t have done the tariffs so much. And if you wanna get rich out of politics, you should just have the deferred gratification to wait until you’ve left office, and then we’ll make you rich. Don’t do it while you’re in office; that’s just impulsive. And maybe less denigration of women and other minorities. And also, by the way, leave the anti-Semitism for the podcasters; don’t bring it into public. So those may be the lessons. But otherwise, good job, everybody, because what we’ve learned is that the system is much more vulnerable than anybody thought it was to authoritarian means for plutocratic ends, and let’s just get smarter for the next try. That’s what I worry is going to be the outcome, not the kind of grand repudiation that you got because of the series of catastrophes of the 1930s and ’40s.
Brooks: Yeah, one of the things I think about and worry about is, I don’t think we’re ever going back to a pre-Trump presidency, which we had presidencies that were self-restrained, and they were strained by norms; they were strained by laws. But the presidents, I would interview them all, and I asked one president on his final day in office, What’d you learn being president that you didn’t know before? And he said, I learned there’s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in government. The president says something, and nothing happens. And those were the restraints that were built into the system. Donald Trump has shown you can crash through all those restraints, both the legal and normative ones. And I have trouble believing any future president is gonna want to give back all that power, and so, whoever wins, we could be walking into an age where presidential power is ramped up and congressional power continues to deteriorate, which is a primary distortion of our system of government.
Frum: David, thank you so much for making time. Thank you for sharing all this wisdom and history. I learned a lot, and I’m sure every viewer and listener did too. We’re grateful to you. Thank you.
Brooks: It’s great to be extending our lifelong friendship.
Frum: (Laughs.) Okay, bye-bye.
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Frum: Thanks so much to David Brooks for joining me today. Now, as I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is not a book at all; it’s a TV series, a four-part series on Netflix called Death by Lightning, about the presidency of James Garfield and his assassination at the hands of a killer named Charles Guiteau. It’s a delightful four-part series. I strongly recommend it. I enjoyed it enormously. Michael Shannon plays President Garfield. Matthew Macfadyen plays the assassin, Charles Guiteau. There’s both humor and heartbreak, and it’s really lovely. And I’m not here to be a total buzzkill about the series, just a little bit of one. There are some historical inaccuracies; I’m going to let them go. I’ll mention a couple of them.
When we first meet James Garfield, he’s working on his farm. He seems a man of the soil. You see someone far away from the dirty word of Washington politics, utterly surprised that he’s invited to speak at the Republican convention of 1880. You wouldn’t know from the opening of the series that he was, at that time, a ninth-term congressman who had just been elevated to the United States Senate (Laughs.) and whose main residence was a three-story townhouse at the corner of 13th and I in Washington, D.C. Okay, let that go.
Nor am I going to complain about the hilarious depiction of his vice president, Chester Arthur, as a thuggish boozer, although, actually, Chester Arthur was quite a gentle man and had been, in his day, a pretty serious scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I think he was one of the stars of his class at Union College in upstate New York, and he was made Phi Beta Kappa.
So now, I’m not gonna quibble about those things. But what I am concerned about is this show introduces viewers who probably don’t know that much about it to an important period in American history, but at the price of deleting what made the period important, what the politics were about. It shows a lot of very personal quarrels, and many of these quarrels were indeed very personal, like the famous quarrel between Senators James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling, which was driven very much by ego and mutual dislike. So, yes, that’s all true, but it obscures, because it’s just too difficult to explain, what drove the politics of the period. And I wanna talk about that today because it confronts us with the tragic choices that people in the past have faced and helps us to maybe understand or have some patience for the tragic choices that we will face in our own time.
James Garfield was elected in 1880. He entered Congress during the Civil War. And in the post–Civil War period—and he retained a seat; he represented the northeastern part of Cleveland, near Lake Erie. The Civil War left behind two great issues to face for the traumatized country.
The first was what to do for and about the population of freed slaves, who had been subordinated, dehumanized, abused, who now were to be granted their freedom, but what did that freedom mean, and how was it to be made real? The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. The 14th Amendment granted civil rights. The 15th Amendment granted voting rights. But those rights were often attacked by violence, by the neighbors of the freed slaves, and it was going to take a big military presence to continue to protect the slaves and their rights. What was to be done about that? How are they to be made full Americans? Should they be made full Americans? Should the rest of America undertake the costs and sacrifices necessary to make them full Americans? Problem one.
Problem two: Before the Civil War, the federal government of the United States was a very tiny and slapdash affair, but it didn’t matter because the federal government didn’t do much before the Civil War. During the Civil War, the United States had become the most powerful military force on planet Earth, and even after the demobilization, everyone saw the tremendous latent power of the United States, both military and economic. But the government, much bigger than before the Civil War, was still a scandal. Jobs were given by patronage. The government was financed by tariffs that were kind of random and crazy and punitive. And all of politics was about distributing government jobs to people who would help the government, whoever won the election—usually the Republican—to win. There was no rational administration. Levels of corruption were extremely high. This all had to be brought into the modern era. That was problem two.
The great tragic choice was the political coalition that supported justice for problem one—that is, bringing the freed slaves fully into national life—was a very different coalition from the coalition that might exist to pull the United States government into the modern era. And politicians of the time were forced to choose. The so-called Stalwarts, who were the group around Roscoe Conkling, who was one of the characters in the drama, said, Our job is to try to bring the freed slaves into national life. Now, that’s gonna mean some very dirty politics—because this is not a popular cause in the Northern part of the country, certainly not after about 1873; it loses all its popularity. The only way we’re going to keep winning elections is if we use the tariffs to raise a lot of money from protected industries; if we use patronage and pork barrel to get a lot of votes and persuade people to vote for us even though they don’t like very much the things we’re doing for the freed slaves, but they like what we’re doing for them; and, above all, avoid anything that smacks of reform. It’s the old flag, it’s the old cause, it’s a Republican Party based in the Protestant small towns of the North, and we remain very suspicious of the Democratic big cities and certainly suspicious of the South. That’s coalition one.
Coalition two said, No, we need to modernize. We need to bring some rationality to the tariff system. We need to suppress the post-war inflation with a new kind of monetary system and a new kind of banking system. We need to have a much more professional government. And that coalition means making inroads into the Democratic big cities of the North, and that means, of necessity, jettisoning concern for the freed slaves. And the people who took this approach to politics, unlike the Stalwarts, who took the first, they were known as the Half-Breeds. And a lot of the battle of the 1870s and 1880s are these battles between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds. Should you have a Reconstruction politics, or should you have a modernization politics?
I’ve simplified this enormously, and people who are versed in the period will detect many errors of nuance and emphasis in what I just said, but that’s basically the problem. And without telling people who are long dead (Laughs.) what they should have done, understanding that problem helps us to understand the period and it helps us to understand ourselves because their choices were ugly, and our choices are often ugly too, and political success goes to those who best manage the choice.
Garfield became president in 1880, and inaugurated in 1881, not because he was a hero—he had been a very great war hero; he’d behaved very gallantly at the Battle of Chickamauga especially. But he was not a political hero. He was a person who balanced and served political expediency. There’s a scene in the series that, when you put it into context, shows what Garfield was and what he wasn’t.
So there’s a scene in the series where Garfield is visited by men, African American men, in what appear to be Union uniforms, and they appear to be Union veterans. And he says to them, “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.” Well, that’s very inspiring. That’s very inspiring. Did it happen? So I pulled off my shelf the 1978 biography by Allan Peskin and looked up the incident. And sure enough, it did happen. And those words were spoken.
But something else (Laughs.) then happened. So the people to whom he spoke those words were not Union veterans. They were a group of singers from Fisk University, an all-Black college, who had come to serenade him, and he thanked them for the serenade, and he gave them a little speech afterwards. And he ended the speech by saying those words that the series quoted: “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.” But when the account was written up for the press by Garfield’s political team, that sentence was suppressed (Laughs.) according to his biographer. They left that out because that would cost votes. They did not wanna say to everybody—they wanted to say to the people who were there, We’ll be with you. But to everybody else, mm, maybe not. Garfield was a balancer, as political leaders so often are.
As I say, I’m not here to be Captain Buzzkill about this. I enjoyed the show; I hope you will too. But I do think we need to look back on the past with a tragic lens because we need to look at our present with a tragic lens. And understanding the past better helps us understand—and its problems, and the unsolvability and difficulty of its problems—gives us more sympathy and pity for the people who lived in the past and gives us more preparedness for our problems in the present.
Thanks so much for watching and listening to me this week. Thanks to David Brooks for joining. As ever, the best way to support the work of this podcast and all my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. I hope you’ll consider also following me on social media: Instagram, @DavidFrum; Twitter (X), @DavidFrum. Thanks so much. See you next week on The David Frum Show.
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