Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

The candidate who won the most support from young voters in 2016, Bernie Sanders, noisily promised to upend that status quo: With your support and the support of millions of people throughout this country, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially, and environmentally.21 Sanders promised a politics of ever-accelerating change, of boundless goals, a politics that offered answers to the existential questions. In a constitutional democracy, these questions should fall to each of us to resolve individually, outside of politics, not collectively and by means of politics. People who have never suffered the tyranny and terror of utopian politics may hearken to radical and revolutionary slogans. We see them in black masks, professing to be “antifascist” even as they emulate the street violence of Blackshirts and Brownshirts against the targets of their own totalitarian ideology. The Trump presidency may administer a much-needed booster shot to enhance the anti-authoritarian immunities of a younger generation apparently lacking in them.