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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum argues that President Donald Trump is making a miscalculation in his second term. Instead of consolidating power before plundering the state, Trump has reversed the sequence, imposing massive tariffs that raise prices on ordinary Americans, flaunting foreign wealth, and enriching his inner circle at public expense. Frum speculates that by impoverishing the public before securing control, Trump is exposing himself to serious political risks and that Americans must resist the temptation to be passive, hopeless spectators.
Then Frum speaks with the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice about political violence, the assassinations and upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and what those episodes teach us about the threats facing America today. They revisit the murders that reshaped the era, consider how violence changed the course of politics, and draw out the parallels and differences between then and now: from polarization to technology to the shifting role of institutions.
Finally, Frum closes with a book talk on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, reflecting on its enduring power and dark insights into human nature.
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. My guest this week will be Geoffrey Kabaservice, a great historian of American life in the 1960s and 1970s, and we’ll talk about how the shocking recent events in American life—the tumults and the threats of violence—compare and contrast with America’s experience of polarization and violence in the 1960s and 1970s. In the space of the years from 1968 to 1972, we saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King [Jr.], Bobby Kennedy, and the attempted assassination against George Wallace. How does our time compare to theirs? What is different, and what, what is done and how people react?
Before my conversation with Geoffrey Kabaservice, I want to offer some few preliminary thoughts about a way to feel about the dangers that everyone who cares about free institutions must be feeling during this Trump era. Every week, it seems, brings some new outrage, some new attack on the essential institutions of a free society by the president and his supporters. It’s easy and maybe even natural to succumb to some kind of feeling of despair, hopelessness. What can be done? What, if anything, will matter? So I’m not here exactly with an action plan. That’s not my topic this week. I want to instead talk a little bit about the psychological mood we should bring to the crisis of our times.
Hopelessness is a resource for the tyrannical. Hopelessness is a resource for those who seek to abuse power, and hopelessness is a great danger. As long as we retain our capacity to feel shock at what is being done, there is some hope, and I want to talk about what that hope would look like.
Now, as I observe President Trump in this first year of a second term, I see him making one big mistake. And it’s a mistake that is going to have him, and is going to exact, I think, a very big price. Look—there’s a basic recipe for anybody who’s trying to convert a formerly free society into a less free society, and that is: Consolidate power first. And only after you have consolidated power, plunder the state and impoverish the subjects. If you get the order wrong, if you do it backwards, you’re in danger of losing power before it can be consolidated. Now that’s exactly the program that [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. He achieved a lot of economic benefits for the ordinary Hungarian early in his tenure, and that became the basis for his consolidation of power. And by the time things began to go wrong for the ordinary Hungarian, it was a little bit too late for anybody to raise their voice. You can tell a similar story about [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and other kinds of people who’ve converted more free into less free societies, as Donald Trump seems to be wanting to do in the United States.
In Trump’s first term, Trump mostly got it right. Trump made important economic mistakes. He got into trade wars with China that crashed the stock market in the second half of 2018. Between the fall of 2018 and the early winter, the Standard & Poor’s index lost almost 20 percent of value. During Trump’s first term, Brazil definitively overtook the United States as the world’s largest exporter of soybeans and other important agricultural products because of Trump’s trade wars with China that resulted in Chinese power and American retreat. But most people remember that at least the first three years of Trump’s term—first term—as good years, and that created a lot of permission for him to do a lot of bad things during that first term. And that created the possibility for him to—and that memory of the three good years before the catastrophe of COVID, which he made so much worse by his mismanagement, that memory became a powerful aid to Trump’s bid for return to power in 2024. And this time he returned to power with a really clear understanding of what to do and how to do it. This time he surrounded himself not with people who got in his way, as happened often in the first term, but with enablers, people who are determined to wreak his will and more than his will on anybody who stood in his way. And those enablers have done a lot of things for him. In the areas of mass media, in the areas of the courts, we have seen this striking again and again and again.
But Trump has been a much worse economic manager in the second term than in the first. He, early, introduced massive tariffs, which are massive tax increases on everybody and have driven prices higher and higher and higher. In the present quarter of 2025, we can see that the American economy is seriously weakening. We’re not in a recession yet. Although it may feel that way to many Americans, the economy has been buoyed by massive investment in artificial intelligence. And that investment may continue, and the benefits to the economy of that investment may continue, and we may be able to avoid a technical recession. But for the typical American, things don’t feel so good right now. The job market is softening, prices are rising, and people are noticing the effect of Trump’s tariffs in their grocery bins. They’re feeling that upon themselves—and they know that Trump did it and did it on purpose. It wasn’t a miscalculation. It wasn’t the unintended consequences of other acts. Trump is deliberately making things more expensive in order to transfer the tax burden from those best able to pay to those least able to pay.
A way to dramatize this point, a figure that I try to keep in mind is, this no-tax-on-tips gimmick that you’ve heard about, that expires in 2028. Over the life of the gimmick—from today until to the end of 2028—it purports it will deliver approximately $30 or so billion of relief to Americans who get the benefit of the tax break over the entire period from today to the end of 2028. In the month of August alone, Trump’s tariffs extracted that much money—the same amount of money as the whole tax-on-tips benefit in one month, August, of this year—and he extracted that overwhelmingly from middle-income and lower-income Americans, who are paying more for so many different things, and as we enter the Christmas season, who will pay more for many more things than that. Every kind of gift, every kind of decoration. Even their clothes, the Christmas trees, everything: They’ll be paying more for all of it. And Trump did that on purpose in order to make them pay the cost of the other benefits he’s getting. So he began the process of plundering the state and impoverishing the people before he had consolidated power.
Now, how you stop him from consolidating power, that’s a trickier matter. But Trump is casting a lot of hostages to fortune. This big, multibillion-dollar digital-coin thing he’s doing—people don’t maybe understand exactly what these coins do or how they work, but they are aware that the president is a vastly wealthier man than he was before he took office. And a lot of that money is coming from foreigners. And a lot of those foreigners seem to have received other kinds of benefits from Donald Trump. They notice, and they’ve heard of, that he got a gift of a plane from a foreign emirate, that foreign emirates are pouring money into his pocket, in the pockets of his children, of other people in his administration, his negotiators. And they know they’re paying more. Trump did it in the wrong sequence, and I think he’s in real danger of losing at least the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate. And it may be a wave too big to rig. Although certainly there are projects to gerrymander and to use the military in a way to suppress the vote.
He’s doing it in the wrong order, and he’s exposing himself to tremendous risks. And as he makes these mistakes, we all need to keep in mind: We’re not spectators to this drama. Every one of us has some potential to be an active participant in the drama. There was a saying in the first Trump term: LOL, nothing matters. But the truth is: Everything matters. There’s just a lot of everything, and it’s up to each and every one of us to do our little part, whatever that is. To say, You know what? We don’t accept what is being done. And simply keeping alive the feeling that it’s not acceptable is itself the beginning of something.
So I’m not here with the playbook. We’ll be talking about that in later episodes of the show—what specifically to do about what particular heinous action. But begin with courage, begin with self-belief, begin with the determination to act, begin with the determination never to stop being shocked by the shocking, and understand that Donald Trump is making mistakes that contain the potential of his own undoing. He is in a society with a lot of resources for freedom. He’s trying to do a very big and bad thing, and he has to get a lot of things right in order to get away with the big and bad thing, and he’s doing a lot of things wrong.
And now my conversation with Geoffrey Kabaservice.
[Music]
Frum: Geoffrey Kabaservice is [a] vice president of the Niskanen [Center] and host of its podcast The Vital Center. He is by training a historian, with degrees from Yale and Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. He’s the author of an acclaimed biography of Kingman Brewster, president of Yale during the Vietnam era, and Rule and Ruin, a history of the decline and fall of moderate Republicanism.
Geoffrey is an especially astute observer of the tumults of the 1960s and 1970s, and, therefore, the perfect guest to discuss our topic today: How is the tension and polarization and dissension of America in the 2020s like and unlike the terrible experiences of the 1960s and 1970s?
Geoff, welcome to The David Frum Show.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Thank you, David. It’s good to be with you, even in troubled times.
Frum: So let’s start by recalling some of the horrors of those days. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a terrible spasm of violence in the United States. Resistance to the civil-rights movement, bombings, murders, assassinations, but mostly localized to the southern United States. Americans in the North and West thought this had very little to do with them. Nineteen-sixty-four and ’65 come the first of the urban riots that spread beyond the South into the great cities of the West and the North, and then the new left expands into a nationwide movement of bombings and other kinds of political attacks.
Martin Luther King [Jr.] is assassinated in April of 1968 by a white supremacist; Bobby Kennedy in June of 1968 by a Palestinian gunman, although acting independently, not under the control of the international Palestinian-terrorist movement; and in May of 1972, George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, who was running for president, was shot and crippled by a gunman who seems to have been a kind of loser seeking fame rather than somebody with a political agenda.
So looking back at that period, looking back at now, you remember the emotional intensity of those years. You are living the emotional intensity of now. How are we alike? How are we unlike that different period?
Kabaservice: Oh, thank you, David. That’s a very good question, and it’s not an easy one to answer.
The 1960s has always fascinated me, because the difference between what American society looked like at the beginning of that decade and what it looked like at the end of that decade were so radically different. I can’t think of another period, except maybe the 1860s, of which that would be true. And it also—I think, one has to keep in mind—was an extraordinarily hopeful decade. Because it was a time when America was still relatively recently removed from having won World War II, as most Americans saw it, and having emerged undeniably as the really global superpower in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And for most Americans—even including its African American citizens—the decades since the 1940s had seemed to be decades of progress and promise.
And then starting really in about the late 1960s, it became apparent that America was a victim of structural trends beyond its ability to control, as well as having maybe an excessive amount of change for many Americans to deal with. And people began to think that something had gone terribly wrong. And also at that time, the people who had been maybe the most idealistic in their hopes for the changes for the decade, the idea that everything would change for the better, began to see the limitations of that. And they began to become disillusioned, and sometimes that delusion expressed itself in violence. There also began to become a kind of chaos in American society, a disorder that was really foreign to most Americans’ experiences. And the most vivid expression of that chaos and disorder was the assassinations of leading American political figures, including the ones you’d mentioned, but also I would say figures like Malcolm X and then people who actually were in politics in other capacities.
Frum: Well, let’s try to bring this home to ourselves. I can dimly remember—I was born in 1960, and, of course, I grew up in Canada where all of this seemed like noises outside the window—but I can remember in the feeling of the grown-ups around me that things just seemed to be spinning out of control. And as I try to think about how it’s different now, you put your finger on something that is very—it was the feeling of hope. That if, you were a northern liberal-ish American in the year 1965, you thought of violence as something, Yeah, the South is a violent place. Always has been. Maybe always will be. And of course, when the federal government tried to return to its equalizing mission that had abandoned a century before, and it came back to life in the 1950s and 1960s, yes: There was violent resistance, as there had been in the 1860s and 1870s. But outside of that special zone, this is a country that is moving ever faster toward ever-greater progress. And as tragic as the death of President Kennedy was in 1963, as shocking as that was, it didn’t seem to interrupt the trend toward progress. In fact, in some ways it was followed by the spasm of the greatest liberal progress ever: the Great Society programs of ’64, ’65, for which John F. Kennedy’s death became a kind of act of martyrdom and an act of permission. And then suddenly the King death and the Bobby Kennedy death.
The difference between then and now is maybe we didn’t start with that feeling of hope. This just feels like the country’s been on a cycle of radicalization that began maybe with the Great Recession, and now worse than ever.
Kabaservice: Yeah. You know, it’s an interesting thing. Americans like to feel that their society’s evolving toward something better. The reality of evolution, as I understand it from my scientist friends, is that evolution rarely happens in a gradual progression. It’s usually an extreme leap forward followed by a consolidation, or maybe even a regression. And I think that’s often been the case with American history, as well. It has not been a linear progression from low to high. There have been significant interruptions to that trajectory of progress, whether that be the Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction, the violent reaction against the capitalist system, but also against immigration that we saw in the 1920s, which then was followed by the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II.
These are all eras of change. Every era has been an era of change in American history. But often people get to a point where things feel normal and they want to stay there, and they see change as a threat, and I think that was very much the case in the 1960s. Up to a point, Americans began to reckon with the fact that African Americans had been left out of the promise of America and its promises of equal opportunity—and that this was the case not just in the South but really across the entire country, although it was most vivid in the South, where it was written into law. And therefore Americans were very supportive; I would say the majority of the population, of the earliest civil-rights movement. But then when it came to the question about how far this equality would extend, how—whether through the government or through gradual societal change—then we began to see a reaction. And at the same time, the radicals, as radicals often do, caught a glimpse of utopia and proceeded to push that further. And I think that was the case, both on the political right and the political left. One might even say that the Goldwater movement around Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican presidential candidacy was actually the first to take part of this millenarism.
And this is, I think, where we are right now. You know, we’ve come from what Americans thought was a good period, maybe in the 1990s, through the spasms of of 9/11, and then the financial crash of 2007-2008. The kind of recession of neoliberalism, if you want to call it that, and the rise of populism here and around the world, the reaction on part of many Americans against immigration. And it’s a great deal of change for people to sort out, and we’re not always sorting it out in wise ways. And again, not to bury the lede here, but you know, we have now seen the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old Republican activist, who founded Turning Point USA, one of the great organizers in the Republican Party. And his life has been cut short in such a tragic way, and yet reactions have been quite polarized, again, both on the Republican side and the left.
Frum: We’re having this strange debate—I find it strange—about, is political violence more common on the right or the left? And the vice president, with his self-appointed mission of Are things bad? What can I do? I myself, I’m just one man, but what can I personally do to make the situation worse? Is there anything I can do or say to make things even more terrible than they are now? Because I don’t want to look back on my life as vice president and say, I missed a chance to make things worse. And here’s my chance today; it’s just one day of a long—but today, this is going to be my chance. I will appear on Charlie Kirk’s show. I’ll bring one of America’s leading spreaders of extremist, deranged conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson, along with me, and we will say, What can we do to make it worse?
And one of the things he did to make it worse was issue—and emphasize again and again—that it’s a statistical fact that political violence is more common on the left than on the right.
And I listen to this and think, How would you even make such a statement? Because when people try to—and we’re seeing now all these charts—you’ve got three variables, all of them completely subjective. What is the extreme left? What is the extreme right? And what is political violence? Look—if somebody shoots up a campaign office because he hates Democrats or Republicans, that’s obviously political violence, probably, unless he’s a schizophrenic and mistakes the campaign office for a confederacy of demons out to get him. But if somebody shoots up a school because he hates women, is that political? Sort of? Yes? No? If somebody shoots up a church to make a statement about immigration, is that political?
So that’s one undefined variable. What is political violence? And what’s the right and what’s the left? The man who shot Bobby Kennedy in June of 1968 was a Palestinian nationalist gunman acting, as I say, for Palestinian reasons, but without direction. Is Palestinian nationalism a left-wing or a right-wing movement? You know, it often uses the language of the left, but it’s also a kind of blood-and-soil nationalism driven by reactionary social ideas, so maybe it’s right. I mean, just, see—once you begin to really press on this, when, you know, we have an impression that ’68 to ’71 was a moment of left-wing violence, and the anti-desegregation violence of the ’50s and ’60s was sort of right wing. But, you know, Arthur Bremer—the man who shot George Wallace—was he right wing? Was he left wing? Was he neither? Was he both? Maybe he’s outside these categories.
Kabaservice: Yeah, I completely agree with you that no political persuasion has a monopoly on political violence. No group, no set of individuals. Political assassins are, by their definition, unusual figures throughout the course of history. Sometimes they’re attached to a cause. One might point to, let’s say, François Ravaillac, who assassinated the French King Henry IV in 1610. He was a Catholic fanatic. He didn’t like the edict of Nantes and other attempts that Henry had made to bring about a religious settlement. But often—
Frum: John Wilkes Booth.
Kabaservice: John Wilkes Booth, another case in point—but often, political assassins are people who are mentally unwell, driven by their own demons.
In the case of Arthur Bremer, he had become alienated from his parents. He’d moved out; he’d dropped out of college after one semester. In his case, he seemed to have been driven by a desire for fame. He initially wanted to assassinate Richard Nixon when he was on a visit to Ottawa, Canada. Fortunately, the Canadians did the United States great service by having too-tight security to allow him to get close to Nixon, but eventually he found his chance and shot George Wallace and paralyzed him. In, I believe, it was Laurel, Maryland, in 1972.
But really all he wanted was to become famous, not to become a nobody. And I think that sense of powerlessness—particularly for young men, in a society with access to guns—is a large part of what drives political assassinations, more than any political persuasion we could think of.
Frum: Yeah. I sometimes think that one of the ways to understand what’s going on now is: We’re in a kind of race where the technologies for getting people agitated are spreading faster and faster and wider and wider. So much of the debate we’re having this week—or the week that you and I record—is, people open their social media and someone they had never previously heard of, far away from them, has said something unfeeling, insensitive, reprehensible, callous. That they would, before social media, never have known about and never have had an opinion about or a reaction to because they would never have heard it. And now there’s this technology to say, There’s someone 2,000 miles away, whom you didn’t know, who just said something you wouldn’t like. Here it is. How do you feel? Well, I’m mad. So we have a race between spreading the technologies of upset, easier and easier access to ever-more-lethal weapons, because assassins in the 1960s had to use pretty crappy handguns. That’s why Gerald Ford survived the two assassination attempts on him; the weapons just weren’t that good. At the same time the policing is getting better and better and better and more professional and more comprehensive. And so we have the sense of the world coming apart, the technologies of violence getting better, but the police intercepting many attempts because of their superior capabilities as well.
Kabaservice: Yeah; I think you have pointed correctly to technological change driving instability. After all, it was the printing press that made possible the wars of religion that wiped out something like a third of Germany in the Middle Ages. Of course, the coming of radio was instrumental to the rise of dictatorships in Europe. And now we are dealing with the as-yet-untapped potential, for good and ill, of social media and artificial intelligence. You know, one of the things about social media that I would add to what you said is: It’s not just people you’ve never heard of whose reprehensible opinions you now know about. Unfortunately, it’s some people close to you who have been given this platform that, for whatever reason, they’re making use of to spread just distasteful views of what are often tragic situations. It’s pushing us apart. And, you know, I suspect in ways we haven’t really delved into, that social media may actually be what’s driving immigration from the less-developed countries to the developed countries, because people can now see for themselves people much like themselves living much better lives away from the country of their origin. So we’re struggling to deal with this technology, and we’re also struggling to deal, I think, with the fact that social media brings out often the worst aspects of us humans. And it blinds us to the better aspects.
Frum: And there are bad actors, foreign and domestic, who sometimes are creating these things. I mean, many of the things you are seeing aren’t even real; that is, they’re not human. They exist, but they’re created by a program, an algorithm, and brought to you by an actor, a bad actor, foreign and domestic, who wants to work on you and people like you.
One of the ways we can see how things were different is to look back at the movies that come to us from the period, the late ’60s and ’70s, and see how dark they were, and their message is one of official indifference and corruption. The cities seemed to be decaying. Death Wish, the [1974] Charles Bronson movie in which Charles Bronson is radicalized by an attack on his family, and he becomes a vigilante assassin and guns people down. And people found real meaning in the—by the way, you’re supposed to think he’s—the director doesn’t want you to identify with. Well, maybe; it’s complicated. Directors have complicated motives. But theoretically, the theory of the movie is that Charles Bronson is bad, but the reaction of people to the movie was, Yeah, go get ’em. Go shoot down; go do one more vigilante act of violence. But that sense that society was spinning out of control: I wonder if people now have that same sense, or whether there’s something different when you can escape the feeling of “out of control.” If you could just put your phone away, you wouldn’t have those feelings that things are out of control.
Kabaservice: As always, David, you’re raising some fascinating questions. You know, the 1960s was a decade where radicalism didn’t penetrate to the mainstream, but as you yourself have written about in an excellent book, the 1970s was the decade when that dark, conspiratorial view really penetrated to the mainstream, and it did so particularly through what I consider to be some great works of American art from that period. In films like not just Death Wish, but, let’s say, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View: you know, these dark, sinister movies about wider conspiracies and powerless individuals caught up in them. And I think, again, that sense of powerlessness is something that I keep coming back to as what drives violence, and the desire to see these people taken down a peg. Maybe through the political process, but maybe not through the political process. Maybe through violence and assassination. And yet it’s also the fact, I think, that that was part of what brought Ronald Reagan to power in the 1980s: a sense that this isn’t who Americans wanted to be. We didn’t want to be in this unsettled state. We wanted more certainty. We wanted to return to what we thought of as tradition and stability.
And so there’s an ebb and flow in these forces as well. And we may be—it looks right now like we’re in a period when we’re really coming apart, but maybe it will be precisely that feeling that things have gone so far that brings us back together.
Frum: Well, I want to say, people will often say, this will often be set up for interviews that you see: We’ve never been so polarized. And you think, That’s not true. We’ve never been so aware of being polarized; maybe that’s true. But the big difference now, the thing I would say is the role of the government. So, Donald Trump, when he ran for president the first time, often compared himself to the Richard Nixon of 1968—that is, a figure of law and order. Ha ha. But that’s how he was positioning himself, and that’s very much how they’re doing it right now in 2025: This represents law and order against chaos.
But one of the things that was striking about Nixon is—whatever he said when he had some booze and pills and the privacy of the White House that we only find out about through diaries after the fact—what he would say in public was very unifying. In 1968, I’m going to paraphrase this, I won’t have the quote exactly, but in his nomination acceptance speech in 1968, he said, There could be no justice without order and no order without justice. And he nodded left. He nodded right. His message was: Bring us together. That was the slogan in 1968. That is, we want to leave behind. Whereas the Trump administration seems to regard ill feeling as a resource. Something they can use in every way they’re trying to inflame, that the people who are making things worse are—it is not just the adjunct professors of English at some community college that you only know about courtesy of Instagram or TikTok. It’s the president of the United States and the vice president and their most senior officials who want Americans to be angry at each other as a resource for power for themselves. That’s different from the ’60s and ’70s.
Kabaservice: Yeah. You know, a number of people have pointed out that, although America went through these convulsions in the 1960s, that in some sense we were a stronger and more cohesive society then, and that was part of what is allowed to get beyond the convulsions. And Richard Nixon is a fascinating figure for biographers, precisely because he is so evidently caught between the angel on his shoulder and the devil on his shoulder: these conflicting impulses of dark and light. And you had a feeling that Nixon was always haunted by the figure of his saintly Quaker mother, who wanted him to bring peace to the world. And yet he understood that power actually lay through populism and positive polarization, in the phrase of his vice president Spiro Agnew, and demonizing people whom he could mobilize a majority of people against. Again, the Pat Buchanan phrase is kind of famous: If we tear the country apart, we’ll end up with by far the larger half.
So these impulses have always been there, I would say, on both sides of the aisle. But it’s only recently—
Frum: I hadn’t heard that. I didn’t know that quote.
Kabaservice: Oh, it’s terrible. It’s terrible. But clearly that playbook has been followed, if not with direct inspiration from Buchanan, by the Trump administration, and it’s only getting worse now that the adults are no longer in the room.
Frum: Trump now wants to give a presidential medal—or many of the people around Trump—want to give a presidential medal of freedom to Buchanan. So maybe it’s kind of deserved, because he showed the way to Trumpism.
But it does need to be said that the actual toll of violence in the country was surely greater in the 1960s and ’70s, and whatever definition of political violence we have, the numbers of people hurt and killed would’ve been much greater, 1967 to ’72, than today. Bombs did go through the mail, and most of them were unsuccessful, but some of them reached their target; some of them did harm. In one spectacular case, the bombmakers themselves were the people killed. They blew up the townhouse in Greenwich Village where they were making the bombs they sent around the country.
You did have incidents like Kent State, where the National Guard opened fire on students. I think four people were killed, if I have that right. And urban rioting that was much more costly in life and property in the 1960s than any of the worst incidents of 2020.
Kabaservice: Yeah; that’s right. We tend to forget about the violence of that era. We look back mostly to our edited version of what we would like about the 1960s, whether that’s the better music or the more stable culture. But the fact is that the reaction, by the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, was really quite severe. and I believe that it was 1972 or ’73, where there were 1,900 bombings a year. And as you say, yes—some of the Weathermen blew themselves up at their Greenwich Village townhouse, but there also was a fatality at the University of Wisconsin, where a scientific researcher was killed in a bombing. And this kind of level of violence drove Americans to think that everything that was stable had come unstuck, and people actually were looking for a dictatorial figure in that period. And there’s, again, some similar impulses that you see nowadays.
Frum: One of the things that is an American habit is always to put things into legal categories. And we’ve had this flurry where the attorney general said Hate speech is not free speech. And many of the people around Trump have suggested that people who say things they don’t like should be put in prison. And obviously, that’s completely unconstitutional. They may still try, but it’s completely unconstitutional. It’s illegal. American law is quite clear about how wide the bounds of speech that is protected from government retribution is.
But, you know, we’re also human beings. And the fact that someone can’t be arrested or prosecuted for saying something hateful doesn’t mean that you have to say, Well, I disagree with your—I personally am going to go out of my way to not react to what you just said. Because we also have human reactions, and there’s this whole social realm, and that’s really where a lot of the fights took place. I mean the moments between 2014 and 2022—and, for lack of a better term, cancel culture seemed to be at zenith—were moments where in liberal institutions, people who were further left sort of used judo powers against people who were less far left. In hope of both punishing people they didn’t like but also asserting control over the institution, changing the way universities worked, changing the way art institutions worked, changing the way publishing houses worked. And for a time it seemed pretty successful. Now we’re watching the counterpart of that, where people on the right are trying to say, Look—maybe even if I can’t put you in prison for speaking unfeelingly of the death of Charlie Kirk, perhaps I can cost you your job, especially if you work in some kind of governmental institution.
Kabaservice: Yeah. You know, David, we’re living through a period when liberal democracy is under threat and under stress. Not just here, but all around the world. And I’m reminded of a G. K. Chesterton quote that you may know, about Christian idealism. He said it “hasn’t been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” And liberal democracy is a very demanding creed, and it’s one that’s very hard to live up to, because I think we’re fundamentally tribal creatures. We want what we want, and we want to bring pain and punishment to our enemies, even as we bring good things to our side. And this means that many people who profess a belief in liberal democracy just often don’t uphold the creed or live up to it. And that’s what cancel culture is about. It’s trying to change the norms of civilized society in a way to punish your enemies, whether through the loss of their jobs or loss of their associational status or expulsion from university or whatever.
And yeah; we’re coming to the end of a period, one hopes, where we’ve seen a lot of this cancellation taking part from the left. And unfortunately, this is a moment when the right is just trying to imitate the left in its illiberalism. And what we don’t have that I think we did have in the 1960s was a group of prominent leaders who could hold themselves to that more demanding creed and implore Americans to live up to what they know to be our best ideals.
Frum: Right. And the central text is the speech that Bobby Kennedy improvised in April ’68 in Indianapolis on the night that Martin Luther King was killed—maybe the greatest improvised speech in American history. And you can watch it. It’s actually, you missed the first couple of seconds, but somebody had the wit to turn the camera on. So it was caught in the strange Kodachrome color of those days, in which he said, We have to ask ourselves: What country do we want to be? Do we want to find peace? Do we want to find rage? Who talks in those terms today? Nobody, certainly nobody in the Trump administration, talks that way.
Kabaservice: Yeah. I can’t think of anyone in American life, frankly, who would quote Aeschylus to a largely working-class and African American crowd of people, and use the insight of the ancients and the pain that Kennedy himself had felt in the loss of his brother—his brothers—as a way of bringing peace and order.
David Frum: Yeah, well, the thing about that Aeschylus quote, I, again, I won’t have it exactly. But it was something like, Pain falls drop by drop upon our heart until through the grace of God—through the awful grace of God, I think is the phrase he used—we discover acceptance and submission to God’s will.
Now, I’m sure I bungled the quote, but it was not something that he just happened to have in his pocket. That had been a phrase that he had been thinking about the death of his brother for five years, or nearly five years at that point. And he had been writing about it, and that phrase had been the talisman that he had found and it was just in his mind all the time. I’m not even sure if it’s an accurate quote from Aeschylus, actually; I should have looked that up before we did this podcast. But at this point you might as well give it to Bobby Kennedy, because that’s how we know it, is through him. And it’s so powerful. That music—who can sing that music? I think there’s some people at the state level who try. Some people in positions of private responsibility who try, but it is kind of a sobering thing. Maybe this is why we feel that things are spinning out of control. Even though there’s less violence—it’s less chaotic, you can avoid a lot of it by putting away your telephone—it’s the leaders of the country who are the people who are most grimly trying to make things worse when they ought to be trying to make things better.
Kabaservice: You know, one of the people that I wrote about quite extensively at the beginning of my scholarly career was John Lindsay, who was the Republican mayor of New York, while he later became an independent and ran on the Liberal ticket. But, he was mayor of New York on the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, in 1968. And his response was to go to Harlem, with barely any kind of security, and talk to the people in the crowd, try to persuade them that he shared their horror and sorrow, that the powers that be were listening to them, and that it was in the interest of everyone that they not give in to the urge to violence and revenge. And Lindsay then went on to become really, I think, the guiding voice behind the Kerner Commission, which came out with its famous warning about America dividing into two societies: one Black, one white, separate and unequal. And there was a speech I came across from Lindsay in that period, more or less, where he pointed out that the Kerner Commission was one of several elite commissions in that era—most of the members of whom were white, male, Christian, straight, successful—and they came to some surprisingly radical conclusions. Not because I think they were infected by radical chic, but because, as Lindsay put it, change doesn’t come from calling for change; it comes from a society where both the leaders and the participants and the average citizens are engaged in the long, difficult struggle to try to bring a society in line with its professed ideals. And I think that’s what’s missing right now—that we’ve given into tribalism. We’ve given into the urge to revenge. We’re not looking to the wisest among us and cooler heads in this particular moment.
Frum: Yeah. And crime from that period that I think is reminiscent of what is happening now. There are people who admire Charlie Kirk more than I do, who want to compare him to Martin Luther King, which is not accurate, to put it mildly.
But he is—I think, the figure from that period he reminds me more of is Malcolm X. A person who also was capable of great eloquence, great power, meant a great deal to many people, who also said reprehensible things, is not an uncomplicated character. You don’t do him justice when you try to idealize him into something that he wasn’t. You have to take him as he was, where there were obviously great talents, as there were with Charlie Kirk, and there were great flaws. And murdered in a way that, again, in a very public setting, in a way that was witnessed by many people and was terribly shocking and dismaying. And became a kind of complicated martyr, in a way that I think Charlie Kirk will become a complicated martyr.
This is maybe the core of the wisdom that some of the Charlie Kirk, the collective—what happened with Malcolm X is we sort of have domesticated him. We’ve brought him into the American story. There’s a movie made about him that sort of suppresses some of the darker aspects, and highlights, while he was in the process of change, he was going to become a different person maybe. That emphasizes the quotes that were empowering and uplifting, and suppresses the parts that were bigoted and defamatory. And we make him, we pull him into the American story by tidying up a little bit. And maybe that’s what’s going to happen with Charlie Kirk.
Kabaservice: You know, the comparison of Charlie Kirk to Malcolm X has occurred to me as well. And obviously it’s not exact, in so many ways. But, you know, as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
There was considerable speculation that Malcolm X was killed precisely because he was moving in a direction toward liberalism and some kind of integrationism, and therefore that was a threat to people further to his extreme who therefore removed him. And Charlie Kirk, for all these flaws and the difficulties that we both have had with him, was actually somebody who was under pressure from his extremes. The Groypers, for example—basically neo-Nazis, who called him a sellout and a traitor because he was not willing to drop his support for Israel, and also because he basically was trying to counsel the young men in his orbit away from that kind of nihilism and conspiratorialism and violence that he found threatening to the republic. And instead he was encouraging them to drop their excessively online existence, to touch grass, to get married and have kids and join a church.
It’s fascinating to me that the response to Malcolm X on the part of good liberals was actually pretty similar to their response nowadays to Charlie Kirk. There’s the line from the Phil Ochs song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” These people who shed copious tears when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Medgar Evers was shot, and yet would say, Well, Malcolm X got what was coming. He got what he asked for this time. I think there’s a lot of that reaction to Charlie Kirk, and it really obscures our humanity.
Frum: There’s a line in Shakespeare, that If we got what we deserved, who would escape whipping. We’re very flawed creatures. All of us, every one of us. We all want to be treated a little better than maybe we deserve. We want to be treated as our humanity entitles us to be treated, not as our faults called for. We don’t want to be judged by, you know—that’s such a standard, where would you be? And I think one of the things that I think we all need to think about is: If you didn’t admire Charlie Kirk, think about someone you do admire. And if they met this terrible end in front of the world on film that their family would see, in this gruesome way, what would you want your neighbors to say? That’s what you should say.
Kabaservice: Yeah. We all should hope for that kind of charity. But we are likelier to get it if we extend that charity to others, particularly those with whom we disagree most intensely. And that is difficult. And that’s where institutional supports come in; that’s where norms of civilization and democracy come in; that’s often where religion comes in, as well. But it’s difficult. It runs counter to our nature.
Frum: The spasm of violence, of anti-war violence, was of ’68, ’71,’72 came to an end when the draft ended, the Vietnam War ended, when the economy got a little softer. And so people began to think a little harder about questions, about, How do I, as a soon-to-be college graduate, how do I personally make a living? Not assuming, as you did in ’67, that there would be no problem making a living. And it did seem to bubble down. And then Watergate was this kind of catharsis, after which you had leaders who were less polarizing than Richard Nixon was: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. And society seemed to put it out of its system for a time.
What would be the equivalent today? How can we imagine if we are looking back on 2025 from the perspective of 2030, and we tell a good story about how America sort of calmed down. What would that look like? Do we have to ban TikTok and break the algorithm? What would be the way by which we came to a kind of greater sense of social peace?
Kabaservice: People who spend most of their time looking backwards are very poor guides to what’s going to happen moving forward. And to be honest, we don’t even really know what brought the cycle of violence to a close in the 1970s. Student, campus unrest came to an abrupt end after the Kent State killings, and most of America actually was on the side of the people who did the shooting rather than the people who were killed. And I think that was sobering. Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972 was quite sobering to the left, some of whom reacted in violence, but others of whom retreated, I guess. And some of whom then tried to think about better ways to reinvent the Democratic Party and liberalism in a way that would make it more broadly appealing.
And there’s also the fact that the United States in the late 1960s was coming to the end of its monopoly position, so to speak, when much of the developed world lay prostrate from World War II. By the late ’60s and early ’70s, you had other countries being able to produce more efficiently and at lower cost, and, in some cases, better than the United States could. And this was what led to the Rust Belt and our industrial decline. And I think a lot of people looking from 15, 20 years in the future will think to themselves, Why didn’t Americans take the threat of China more seriously? I’m not saying whether we’re in a cold war or should be in a cold war with China, but we’ve allowed China to really pass us by far in its manufacturing capability, its defense capability. And they’ll think, Why didn’t Americans actually see that it was in their best interest to preserve the way of life that benefited them so much, to be on the forefront of technological and scientific breakthroughs? To come together as a country from both sides, both partisan parties, to really invest a lot of resources in keeping ahead of that all-important race? I think the answer to whether the future will be happy or unhappy depends on whether we can actually see these larger interests or not.
Frum: Yeah; I think there’s a kind of stripped-down, simplifying, streamlined version of American thinking. What history that goes like this: While the revolution looked pretty grim, the United States was fighting against the odds, but there was George Washington, and so everything turned out all right. And the Civil War could easily have been lost or gone, but there was Lincoln, so everything turned out all right. And the Great Depression and World War II. So I guess that’s it. You got lucky three times. I guess we’re always going to be lucky. And it may be that one way to look at it, like, say, you know: At exactly the moment that, as you say, the challenges were needed, the United States had leadership that divided the country against itself and alienated the United States from its friends. And that made a big difference.
One of the teachers who had the most influence on me was a historian whom you may know, Conrad Russell, who taught the 17th century. And Russell’s big theme was: Do not assume that because something has big consequences, that it must have big causes. That often things that could easily have gone different ways happen and that have large and enduring consequences. And if people had made slightly different choices at moment one, the whole world would’ve been different at moment one plus 15 years. And it may be something like that now. If the United States has been making—has been led by leaders who make—very bad choices. And maybe this time the costs really do endure, and maybe this time they do. I think one of the things that we are going to be left with after the Donald Trump years is: From Gerald Ford to Joe Biden, presidents lived with the FBI director they inherited. The FBI director had a set term, and unless the FBI director was shown to have done something very, very wrong—this happened at the beginning of the [Bill] Clinton administration with an FBI director who was accused of abusing his expense accounts—the president left the FBI director in place. Ronald Reagan I don’t think appointed an FBI director until he’d been in office for seven years. Trump fired an FBI director at the beginning of each term. In fact, at the second term, he fired the FBI director he had himself appointed during his first term, because he wanted someone who was even more compliant.
So if Kash Patel is still FBI director in 2029, and there’s a Democratic president, obviously you have to fire Kash Patel—and not for fiddling the expenses or for anything else or for abusing the plan. You just say, You know what, you’re an unworthy person. You are too political. And the tradition of apolitical FBI enforcement is over. I wonder if any Democrat is going to look back at the Merrick Garland experiment and say, We need to do that again with the next attorney general. Or whether the Democrats will say, We’re going to make sure the next attorney general hunts down all of these criminals and make sure that every corruption case, real or suspected, is investigated to the fullest power of the state. And whether Trump has just changed the rules—not just for his party, but for both parties.
Kabaservice: You know, as always, David, there’s a loft in what you say that takes time and thought to unpack. Let me come at your question somewhat obliquely. There’s a phrase attributed to the German leader Otto [von] Bismarck, which is that God looks after fools, drunks, and the United States. And the United States has had that kind of providential streak in much of its history. But maybe it’s also relied on its luck for too long, and maybe that luck is running out as we give into the darker angels of our nature. But the fact that there are darker angels means that there are also better angels of our nature. And Americans historically have been a fairly pragmatic people, and they don’t like wallowing too long in error. And they seek to recover from the mistakes that they’ve inflicted upon themselves.
I can’t believe that Donald Trump’s program of revenge and unfettered populism and turning against the rest of the world is going to lead to the kind of material successes that Americans have become used to. Think of as a necessary concomitant of progress. There’s that phrase by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “the narrow corridor,” that societies pass through for success, neither becoming too statist nor too anti-statist. I tend to think of moderation the same way. There really is only one way; it’s the relatively moderate way. We either thrive together or fall separately. And I have to feel that most Americans who have their country’s best interests at heart, who even have their own material interests at heart, are not going to be content with a political pathway that leads us into division and economic, cultural, social downfall.
You know, we joke about living through the waning days of a dying empire. But the reality is that people hate being in a society that feels like it’s in decline. And they come to feel, as Charles Krauthammer put it, that decline is a choice—which means getting out of decline is also a choice. And you know, I think a Democratic president, if there is one in 2028, will probably engage in what used to be called lustration, the process of removing the worst actors from political life and banning them from political participation. I don’t see how the Democrats won’t give into that level of revenge. But at the same time, the Democrats have to realize that Donald Trump is in office, in part, because they damaged their own brand with so much of the American public, and they need to find a way back toward the center. They need to find a way to recover both the working classes and the middle classes, not just the college-educated classes, if they’re going to have a chance of becoming the leaders that the country needs right now and that the world needs, frankly.
So I have hope, but I’m not optimistic, if that makes sense. But I think we have to proceed as if the things that we’re seeing right now in the Trump years—the damage that we’re seeing to society—ultimately will be reversible.
Frum: Let that be the last word. Geoffrey, thank you so much for joining me today.
Kabaservice: Thank you, David. It’s a real pleasure.
[Music]
Thanks to Geoffrey Kabaservice for joining me today. I promised I’m going to go with a finale about a book I’ve recently been reading or rereading. In this case the book is a venerable classic of English literature, Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 by Emily Brontë.
The book was called back to my attention because, as you may know, there’s a new movie coming out in 2026 that remakes Wuthering Heights. The novel has been made into a movie at intervals since 1939, the classic with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Of course, I have no idea what’s in this new movie. I can hazard some guesses. The novel is often assigned to high-school students because it is this intense tale of thwarted romance—doomed, thwarted romance—exactly the kind of thing that high-school students are supposed to appreciate. But of course, the book is much more than that. It’s a story about multigenerational child cruelty. It’s a story about religious hypocrisy. It’s a story of class prejudice and class resentment. It’s a story that also teaches us more about the art of reading, because the central narrator of the story is a childhood nurse and lifelong servant of one of the principal characters, and this narrator is a woman of extraordinary spitefulness and unreliability. And so, one of the things the novel teaches the young reader to do is to read with suspicion, to understand that you can’t just trust the person because they’re the narrator, because they tell you things have happened in a certain way. And as you may have heard if you listened to my discussion of Frankenstein, I think one of the great merits of the study of literature is to understand, not to trust; that it teaches us not to trust narrators. Or anyway, to ask ourselves: What is a narrator’s agenda? Why am I hearing the story that I’m hearing?
For this occasion, I want to go back and reread Wuthering Heights more naively, the way we invite high-school students, in fact, to read it. As a story of love and romance.
In case you don’t know the plot: A prosperous Yorkshire landowner brings home a foundling child—that’s the famous Heathcliff—and the landowner then raises this child as almost his own. The landowner’s decision to bring Heathcliff into his family polarizes the family and creates tremendous rippling effects. One of the landowner’s two children, a son, instantly hates the newcomer and becomes his lifelong enemy. The other, the daughter, Catherine, becomes an intimate friend and play-fellow of young Heathcliff, and gradually they become lovers of a kind of almost incestuous kind, as they’ve been raised together since quite early childhood.
When I say lovers, the relationship is never consummated. This is a great story of sexual frustration, but the passion they feel for each other begins in adolescence and lasts as long as they both live and beyond, as we’ll see. As Catherine reaches marriageable age, the class differences that are such a theme of the novel reassert themselves. Heathcliff is a person with no family, no origin story, no money at the time. And Catherine is pressured, or feels herself obliged, to break off with him and marry instead the son of a nearby landowner even more prosperous than her own family is.
Catherine’s decision to marry another man sets in motion a complex cycle of revenge, which brings catastrophe upon just about everyone. Ultimately, Heathcliff marries the sister of the man Catherine marries. So the former semi-incestuous Heathcliff and Catherine are now bound together in another complicated brother-sister relationship: each married to a brother and a sister of this other neighboring family.
Now, as I said, when I studied this book in high school, our excellent English teacher, who was a veteran of Canada’s Normandy campaign, urged us to look past the love story, to read for the other themes. And I imagine that may happen when the new movie is made. After all, Margot Robbie, who’s one of the two stars of the movie, came to global fame—she was famous before—global fame playing Barbie, a movie whose underlying theme was mistrust and even antipathy to male-female romantic pairings. In Barbie, the only way to become a fully actualized human woman was by stepping away from the feminine role epitomized by the doll that gave the movie its name. And if some of the themes of that Barbie movie—the director of the new Wuthering Heights is another character from the Barbie movie, another actress in the Barbie movie—if those themes are carried over, you would expect this new Wuthering Heights to do, as my English teacher in high school did, and say, Let’s go get beyond the love story and get to all these other dark themes of social criticism.
But I kind of think that today’s audience needs a story of intense sexual love. Our modern relationship scripts are based on a lot of skepticism about romantic love. We have a lot of pornography, obviously, and that is one kind of sexual relationship, but it is the opposite of romantic. And pornography, any person will do for any other person. But otherwise, most of our relationship stories are based and advise a kind of low-temperature amiability that we recommend as the best foundation for long-term companionship between any two persons of any two sexes. The idea that a man and a woman might choose one another once and forever, and suffer and die if they cannot have that exact person that they chose, that seems to our modern sensibility somewhere on a scale from impossible through unhealthy to outright dangerous.
Look—we can agree that too much of a cult of passion is dangerous. There’s a lot of criticism of the romantic idea, and Wuthering Heights itself is not exactly a romantic novel. It doesn’t recommend the passion of Heathcliff and Catherine as the path to a happy life or even a fulfilling relationship. They die tragically, and their only hope is to be reunited as ghosts flitting about the moors together. But the readers of Wuthering Heights have glimpsed in that relationship some possibility that they might apply to their own lives. And as we recommend to others this low-temperature amiability instead of sexual passion, I think we are not teaching the next generation something about what to look for and what to want.
Rereading this book reminded me of a passage from C. S. Lewis, from his Screwtape Letters. So I went and looked it up, and I’m going to quote it. Now this is from one of his demonic characters to another. The character in Screwtape Letters writes: “The use of fashions [in thought] is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each danger of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger, and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we’re trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood and all cry crowding to that side of the boat, which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus, we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they’re all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere ‘understanding.’ Cruel ages are put on their guard against sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants, we make liberalism the prime bogey.”
We’re in an age where sexual passion, the call of man to woman, of woman to man, they’re deeply mistrusted. It would be an antidote to read a book from a different era that shows us a different possibility. I think our movies may, however, provide us more of the sickness we’re struggling from and less of the antidote we need. So, unless I’m grievously mistaken about the direction in which the new Wuthering Heights movie goes, go back to the original: Read the book, and feel a pang of sympathy, understanding, and admiration for the doomed Heathcliff and the doomed Catherine.
Thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Thank you to Geoffrey Kabaservice for joining me. I hope you’ll share and listen and subscribe on whatever platform you use to view or listen to this program. Please remember that, as always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. Thank you so much for viewing and listening. See you next week.
Goodbye.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
