YouSaid · the spoken record

David Frum

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68
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2024-08-04
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2024-08-04
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  1. “I believe that Mitt Romney obviously would have been a much better president. I think he would have been one of the best presidents we ever had. I think he's demonstrated both his extraordinary technical competence and his moral integrity. I was very proud to have cast as my last Republican vote was my vote for Mitt Romney, and I'm very proud of that vote. But I think the question of is Donald Trump a conservative or not is to me actually a very tertiary question. What he is is unacceptable.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The loss we've suffered means that in a way the future my daughters, my eldest daughter is not going to see becomes more precious to me. And it can't be subject to the dictatorship of the aging. So yes, there are new problems. Climate change was not understood well in the 1980s. The mass migration on the scale of tens of millions of people was not anticipated when travel was more expensive in the 1970s and 1980s. These are just two of the many kinds of new problems that are different. And to quote the greatest of American precedents, Abraham Lincoln, as our situation is new, so we must think anew. And intelligent conservatism is based not on pretending the world isn't changing because of course the world is.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I have no nostalgia for anything. I'm a pretty intense student of history, and one of the lessons of history is do not wish to be born even five minutes before you are born. Just think of the dental care. Among other things, the world is a better and safer place in almost every way, certainly for citizens of the developed countries and for most of the rest of the world as well in 2024 than it was in 1984 and 1964. We're free from the terror of a U.S. Soviet nuclear exchange, which would not just be a mass death event, but probably the extinction of human civilization. So that's gone. And that's a tremendous mercy. So I've no nostalgia for it. What is challenging as we get older is to remain open to new possibilities. And you were kind enough to refer to the article I wrote about my daughter. I had three children. I have two. I'm very close to them. And I try to see a lot of the world through their eyes and the pain of...”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Think one of my observations, and it's a little uncomfortable, is that look, the conservatism I grew up in was an accumulation of solutions to problems of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. And some of those solutions worked brilliantly. Of those solutions failed dismally, and some of them might have worked but were politically. But the problems changed. And so you shouldn't be surprised when you see, as I and Alistair observed together after Brexit, that you get new kinds of coalitions. So questions about what should the world look like after the Cold War, after 9-11, is going to group people in different ways. And the question of what should the world look like before 9-11 and before the end of the Cold War?”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “At its best, and I know people in Britain are so sick of talking about Brexit, and I sense the little sound volumes being shifted to mute. But I understood the appeal of sovereign island independence. I really did. And so long as people made clear that this was going to be very expensive, but was worth it. I couldn't argue with anyone who said that this is a self-governing island. It's always been self-governing. You're good at it. You don't want to take orders from foreign courts and bureaucracies. And we're prepared to pay the enormous price of putting up all these barriers to trades in services and goods and the movement of people. But the problem was that no one said that. A few men and women of iron conscience said it. But most people pretended that there was going to be that Brexit meant more, not less. And so I had a lot of arguments over that. But I do think...”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I said, well, I can only look at this like a North American. I understand there are deep issues of British patriotism here, English patriotism, but I wrote this short play that went something like The American to the British, I need you to watch your brother again, again. You're always asking me to do this. Yes, I am always asking you to do this. It's not fair. Life isn't fair. You like him better than you like me. You notice I never ask him to watch you. We live in a world in which things change. And so I have this, I've believed in collective security, free trade, the alliance of the democracies under the protective cover of the world's leading liberal power, First Britain, then America. And I believe that all my life. And in 1980, that made you a Reaganite. And in 2020, it makes you an anti-Trumpite.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, and what we talked about then, if I can tell telescopes, is how because human beings live longer than they used to do, we often have the experience of growing old in a world that's very different from the world in which we were young. And so when you're young, you have an illusion that the arrangement of political forces is not only natural, but unchangeable because it hasn't changed for you. But over time, these things begin to drift and shake. So during the Brex time, I would say, well, I wrote a little short play. I was doing a blog, I wrote a blog somewhere. I wrote a short play about the American, I was asked by my British friends, many of whom were pro-Brexit why I was so horrified by it.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yes. I know I think that's very perceptive, and of course, your angle of observation was very, very intimate. I actually did not work that much when I was there on foreign policy issues. I work mostly on domestic issues. My big foreign policy brief was Mexico, not anything transatlantic. And one of the things I remember most intently was preparing for the state visit of Mexican President Vicente Fox, the first Mexican president ever elected in a competitive multi-party election who arrived at the White House on, I believe, September 10th, 2001. And that was, I mean, for me, that was one of the most moving moments of my life. It's now obscured by other incidents in history. But I want to say something about Alistair's tribalism. If I can tell a tale out of school, I visited Alistair at his home in North London just on the eve of the, was it just before just after the Brexit referendum?”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “One of the things as a writer for Bush, keeping the Bush sense of humor under control was like owning a $200-pound dog and trying to keep under control with a thin leather leash because he was so dangerously funny so much of the time. And most of the humor could not be said, could not be shared by president or even maybe by an ex-president. But when it came out, you saw who the man was.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And he said he whispers that too. I think Hillary Clinton. So everyone, all the people in the West Side of Los Angeles are charmed by some weird shit. And when it's time to introduce George W. Bush that the introducer says to this room full of big donors, I know many of the people in this room were skeptical of you and voted against you in two elections, but we were all amused when you are delighted when you were caught on video saying that was some weird shit about Donald Trump's inaugural. And everyone claps. George Bush comes to the microphone and they're still clapping as he comes to the microphone. He leans into the microphone and he says, so you like me now, you motherfuckers. The room convulses.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, the year is 2017. But things look up because at the inaugural for Donald Trump in January 2017, George Wush is caught on camera mouthing. These words are not heard, but everyone can read them. After Trump's inaugural speech, that was some weird shit.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “charming and likable and very humane human be What are your memories of working for George W. Let me tell you a story about him that will warm, I think, every skeptic, although it takes place after he left office. Can I use a little off-color language on this podcast? Will that offend anybody?”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Events, but I was very committed to the Republican and Conservative project of the 1980s and 1990s, which I saw as first and foremost a defense of human freedom against foreign authoritarian violence and then unthinking interference with private markets at home. So when I look back on it from this vantage point, I say, you know, people like me who supported Bush and then moved away from the Republican parties were often accused of mending our views to ingratiate ourselves with some imaginary Georgetown cocktail party set that hasn't really existed for probably 40 years. But I look back and say, what I have believed from the beginning to the end is collective security, democratic government at home, markets, free trade, and the necessity of all of this world system being guaranteed by some power.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I didn't journey toward the right. I was sort of gravitated to the right as a teenager because of, I think as I look back on this contrast between safety in my little island and the world I saw and how those terrors were kept at bay. I had a very realistic understanding of what it took to keep the terrors at bay. I went to a university in the United States. My mother was dual Canadian U.S. national and then was kind of floundered around through my 20s. I often advise young people who are interested in journalism, you can't start in journalism. You have to fail at other things first before you're qualified for the occupation. So I floundered around through my 20s. I went to law school and finished that. Then fell in love and got married and still am married. I got a job at the Wall Street Journal on the editorial page and I just sort of bumped along and drifted from journalism.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I wouldn't want to be them, but I was intensely. Look, my father's parents came to Canada from Poland in 1930. They had suffered ordinary, the ordinary insults of anti-Semitism, but they migrated for economic reasons and they came to Canada because they had family there. My father was born in Toronto in 1931. Most of their family stayed behind in Poland, and they were almost all murdered. Had my father's parents stayed behind, my father would have been murdered sometime around his 10th or 11th birthday. And that was something I knew as often happens in life. It was something that has become much more vivid to me in my later years, but it was something I knew from my early years. But did I wish that it had been me being on a forced march from Australenka to the Warsaw ghetto? No, I was very happy to miss that.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Who died young in 54 in 1992 was one of the most prominent journalists in the country. My father had begun as a dentist and became a successful real estate developer. So I had this contrast between my home life, which could not have been more comfortable and the terrors of the world around me. And one of the ways in which I became political and began drifting away because Canada is so comfortable and so safe, the best and worst aspect of the Canadian character is a certain tendency toward complacency of believing that all of this is something that happened because Canadians achieved it and Canadians deserved it and the misfortunes of others are sort of their fault. Whereas I had an early intuition that all of this was an island that owed its existence to the protective embrace of first British and then American power. And so where I became moved rightward when most of the people I knew were liberalish.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I was born in Toronto in 1960, Ashkenazi Jew from moderately observant background. And I grew up in Toronto where almost every adult I knew was someone who had fled oppression of one kind or another. Refugees from and survivors of the Holocaust, people who had fled the communist bloc, a lot of Hungarians from 56 came to Canada checks from 68. One of my homeroom teachers in middle school lived with a man who had been tortured under the Pinochet regime. We knew people who had fled Uganda. In fact, my father's chief bookkeeper was Ismaili Muslim who had been expelled from Uganda. So I grew up in a world in which dictatorship and oppression were very intimate realities. At the same time as I lived in this extraordinary cocoon of security and comfort, my parents were quite affluent. My mother was a”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, that's a great invitation because for the past four years, I've been wrestling with a failed memoir. And so I have all the information at my fingertips, even though I haven't organized it to my liking yet. Three of my four grandparents were born subjects of the Russians are. One was born in New York City.”

    2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source