What the Neocons Got Right

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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