Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

A more modest revision of the notorious inefficiency of the corporate income tax might well have gained bipartisan support: John Kerry had endorsed corporate-tax reform in 2004.

The National Security Act of 1947 expressly forbids active or recently retired generals from serving as the secretary of defense. The ban was waived only once before, in September 1950, to permit George C. Marshall to reorganize the US armed forces, which were demoralized after their humiliating retreat down the Korean Peninsula.

Ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, the US Supreme Court rejected forever the “I was just following orders” defense.

A lot of people in America felt bullied and humiliated. Not all of them were old white men either. Some were young white men.

These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”

the percentage of people under age twenty-five with zero sexual contacts since turning eighteen had spiked to levels not seen since before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

What was “alt” about the alt-right was precisely this stripping away of religiosity, to reveal a politics of resentment and domination ungrounded in any traditional moral claim.

In the late 1990s, the risk that a non-college-educated white person would die in his or her early fifties was 30 percent lower than for a comparable black person. By 2015, the non-college white person’s risk was 30 percent higher than his or her non-college black counterpart.

Where technologies were invented and where styles were set, where diseases cured and innovations launched, where songs were composed and patents registered—there the GOP was weakest.

In 2004, an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama delivered an eloquent appeal to national unity at the Democratic convention in Boston:

In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution. I wrote those words after the 2012 election, and they apply even more forcefully after 2016.31

One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

For eighteen months on the campaign trail, Trump modeled behaviors that would seem in any other context about as repugnant as could be—and yet despite it all he was ushered to the most honored place in American society.

A harder, tougher, and less illusioned American Left: a strange gift from Donald Trump, but real.

Trump demonstrated that the independents are not moderates, and that the center is not always so sensible.

If you seek revolution, go seek it in business, in technology, in the arts. The steadiness and predictability of well-functioning liberal democracy enables innovation in every other area of life.