>EXCERPT
The 45th president of the United States is damaging the very tenets of democracy “perhaps irrevocably.” An exclusive excerpt from David Frum’s new book.
“Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy’s undoing.” So begins Canadian-American political analyst David Frum’s new book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. Democracy’s decline hasn’t been something most Americans were concerned about. And then Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Now, argues Frum, the 45th president of the United States is damaging the very tenets of democracy “perhaps irrevocably.” Here, an exclusive sneak preview from the first chapter of Frum’s book (out Tuesday from Harper).
How removed from interactions with ordinary Americans did political elites have to be to plan the 2016 election as a return engagement between the two most famous political dynasties of late twentiethcentury America: Bush versus Clinton? Yet the country’s wealthiest citizens committed hundreds of millions of dollars to secure just that outcome. Could they not foresee trouble? Apparently not.
Rich people faced rising taxes in the Obama years, and understandably they did not like it. They had to deal with a president who seemed unusually unimpressed by their accomplishments, a sore point for a class of people accustomed to accolades and compliments. The venture capitalist Tom Perkins signed a letter to the Wall Street Journal in 2014 calling attention to “the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one per cent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one per cent, namely the ‘rich.’ Perkins warned of the possibility of a “progressive Kristallnacht.” Psychic alarms aside, the Obama years were actually a good time for the American affluent. Over President Obama’s eight years in office, the S&P 500 gained 235 per cent, more than 16 per cent annually — one of the very best returns in U.S. history.
Yet through those years, one heard the pounding drumbeat of discontent: the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Trump campaign. These movements had many points of disagreement with each other, but even more important similarities, including a rising tolerance for violence. It could still shock the nation in 2009 when one man carried a loaded rifle to an Obama political rally in Arizona. Dozens of weapons were carried at the Black Lives Matter march in Dallas 2016 that ended in the killing of five police officers and the wounding of seven more, as well as the injury of two civilians. Even more and heavier weaponry would be displayed at the rallies against the removal of the Confederate statues in Houston and Charlottesville in 2017.
The affluent and the secure persisted with old ways and old names in the face of the disillusionment and even the radicalization of the poorer two-thirds of American society. They invited a crisis. The only surprise was . . . how surprised they were when the invited crisis happened.
Donald Trump did not create the vulnerabilities he exploited. They awaited him. The irresponsibility of American elites, the arrogance of party leaders, the insularity of the wealthy: those and more were the resources Trump used on his way to power.
“It’s even worse than it looks,” quipped a 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. Such pessimism invited the reply, “That’s what you said last time.” Things have looked bad before without the world coming to an end. Why panic now? But it can equally be true that things were bad before, that things have gotten worse since, and that things may get even worse in the future. Like a man falling downstairs, each thump and tumble may be a prelude to the next, with the final crash still waiting for him even farther down.
Since the election of Donald Trump, the hard and painful floor seems to be rising toward us faster and faster and faster. David Frum