David Frum: We Have to Get Back on the Right Track After Trump

LEMIRE: “Let’s turn now to your recent piece in The Atlantic in which you write this: ‘Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the 13th Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. The nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly — but the wrong choices are part of the story, too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.’ So, David, my question to you is, my inevitable question to you is, those examples we just cited are moments when the United States, in your view, made the wrong choice and then corrected itself, found itself back to where it needed to be, made the right decision. Do you have confidence that the country will do so again?”
FRUM: “I hope. Isn’t that enough? To make — to say you are confident means that you think of the future as something that exists and that you can make statements about. I think there has — those people in the United States who were born after the Great Depression and Second World War grew up as the country became more democratic, the years of civil rights, the inclusion of women, the extraordinary prosperity after the war, have lived an amazingly fortunate story, maybe the most fortunate story of any human beings in the history of the human race. So there is a kind of tendency to think that’s the way it always has to be, and to not understand there are forks in the road where important decisions were made or not made. We have to get back onto the right track. Nothing is promised and nothing is guaranteed. But maybe — I know a lot of people who watch networks like this one are kind of demoralized right now. Maybe the way to think about this is to say, along with whatever you feel about the path the country is on, you have personally been also given an opportunity to be an important part of American history and to be part of the story of pulling the country back onto the path it needs to be on and the way people before you have. I just — when I talk to the youth groups, I say, ‘Be grateful to be alive in a time your country needs you, because it needs you now.’”