David Frum’s last anti-Trump book, Trumpocracy, was brave and fascinating because its author hoped President Trump’s inevitable self-destruction would soon render the book easily forgotten. Having failed at that singular aspiration, Frum now takes even bigger risks with Trumpocalypse: the risk not only of looking ahead to a post-Trump America, but of doing everything he can to make politics boring again.
Swaths of Trumpocalypse read as predictable never-Trump conservatism. America needs “partners” abroad and “national renewal” at home. There are all-caps calls to “DETER GERRYMANDERING” and “DEPOLITICIZE LAW ENFORCEMENT,” and long passages crammed with statistics to justify, among other things, a carbon tax. There are quotes from President Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and “the veteran political observer Norman Ornstein.” He urges the rising generation to reject extremism on both sides.
Yet Frum humbly disavows any claims to Trumpocracy’s grandeur from his opening pages. “My proposed reforms,” he writes in the introduction:
…
The spectacular debacles that enrage and terrify voters trace back to technicalities that bore those voters. But Americans will not prevent the debacles until they fix the technicalities.
Don’t believe Frum’s modesty for a second. Trumpocalypse is more radical and more conservative than he cares to admit. Frum sees the United States under Trump joining a worldwide march away from self-government. He understands, right down to his marrow, that the practice of civic argument (those endless quibbles over “technicalities”) is the way civilization trains itself to resist barbarism. Trumpocalypse is not just a defense of civil society, it’s an expression of it.
It’s also an expression of radical empathy. Frum sent Trumpocalypse to press before the coronavirus bonfire made a liberal victory this November that much more likely. But he was already worried about what he was hearing from the presumptive victors. He hopes the increasingly radicalized Left will forgo its vengeance. “Trump’s enablers in politics and media are contemptible and deserve the scorn of honest patriots,” he says. “But Trump’s voters are our compatriots. Their fate will determine ours.”
Frum’s empathy even tempers his scorn for the man at the center of Trumpocalypse. The president, he writes,
It’s in those empathetic passages where Frum’s radicalism reveals itself. You can hear it in the slightly paternalistic tones he adopts when talking about Trump voters. He blames their votes (mostly) on bad leadership, not their consciences. To Frum, Trump’s supporters are those souls modern America has abandoned, and something must be done for them. He argues, for instance, to expand the welfare state while shrinking immigration quotas. It’s a provocative case, and one we’re likely to hear again in the years ahead.
In any other context, you’d call Frum a one-nation Tory. The brainchild of that old genius Benjamin Disraeli, one-nation Toryism sees government’s role as preserving the organic order by reforming just enough to ensure the lower classes don’t despair. Abroad, it’s an old idea, but here, it’s an alien one.
With Trumpocalypse, then, Frum takes on a formidable and honorable project and one that belies his own stated mission: It’ll never be boring.
Bill Myers lives and works in Washington. Email him at [email protected]. He tweets from @billcaphill.
