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Alison Smith: But you're still hammering away, a little bit.
David Frum: Well, because... Well a couple of things. One is... I still believe... I...
There's a great line in Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard Keynes that I often
quote, people ask me about my mother's influence on my politics which is very large, but it's
also true, as Robert Skidelsky tells us, that the biographer needs to remember that people
are products of their times even more than they're products of their background. And
for those of us who came of age between 1977 and 1983, a time of tremendous crisis that
is not like the crisis of today, but was in its ways are severe, we then as young people
were casting around for answers to the problems of our time, and in... Why was there inflation?
How do you stop it? How do you stand up to the Soviet Union? Why are the cities in chaos?
How do you restore order? How does America, how does the western world regain its primacy
when it seems to be losing it?
DF: And the great thinkers of the conservative world had answers that we adopted and believed
and were then implemented and then led to positive results. And what happens is in modern
life that... One of the great danger in the life of a person. This is the great line of
Machiavelli, "For this is a tragedy of man, circumstances change but he does not," that
you carry the things that worked in your youth with you into middle age and old age. But
what... But I still believe that for those problems those were the right answers and
that vision of a society that was more spontaneous, that was more ordered by market transactions
where they had room for creativity and individual scope, where it was not just with... Where
it was not just eat your peas and everything was the same. That that offered something
positive. And it's an ideal that that still moves me.
DF: And I also feel that through my... Probably my one and only time in government probably,
I was involved with people who did try to implement those ideas, and the results this
time weren't good. And I feel a burden of responsibility about that, that you might
say at that point, "Well, I'll do the Paul Bremer thing and retire to Vermont and paint."
But it does seem if you've been part of the making of a mess, you have some obligations
to stick around for the cleaning up.
AS: Thank you. We have some time for questions from you, if I haven't asked them all and
I'm sure I haven't. So there's a microphone in the middle of the room and we have about
15 minutes or so for questions. If you wanna... Go ahead.
S?: Hi. It's Christopher. I've been watching the... Well, actually let me just start with
a different story. There was an article last week, it was talking about how US conservatives
really love British public intellectuals. It particularly named Hitchens and Niall Ferguson.
And I thought, well, yeah I love them too, but then I thought to myself, there're still
very few US public intellectuals on the conservative side that I like. There's yourself and you're
Canadian, there's David Brooks and he's Canadian. [laughter] So are there any US public intellectuals
who enjoy and beyond that, have you seen their birth certificates?
[laughter]
DF: Chris, I love Christopher Hitchens dearly and Niall Ferguson I know a little. I don't
know him as well, I'm much closer to his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's a dear friend of ours,
and I admire him. But here's why you don't tend to see them so much in the United State.
That the point to Christopher, and the point to a lesser degree of Niall, they were generalists.
You put a drink into Christopher and you ask him about who should be the government of
Indonesia and he would have an opinion. You ask him about who's funnier, PG Wodehouse
or Bob Newhart and he has an opinion. He was a generalist, and he came from a tradition
where mental agility, rhetorical creativity, that was the value.
DF: American intellectual life is much more technical and much more specialized. And so
that kind of style is not really welcome, it's not produced by the system. So American
public intellectual, I mean the economists are, you know, John Taylor, John Meacham,
who's an economist at AEI that I admire very much. He's an American public intellectual
but he's not gonna give you an answer about PG Wodehouse. He's going to stick to M1, M2,
U3, U6, and the same thing... And people do budgets and so on. It's just a much more technical
specialized intellectual life. And that job category of public intellectual doesn't exist
because the institutions that support it don't really exist. That's why the Americans import
them, they're bred elsewhere.
AS: Do you think there's an anti-intellectual bend in America politics that it's okay to
drink a beer, but not admit you eat arugula?
[laughter]
DF: I often joke that the way you can understand American elite politics is it's a class struggle
between people with more money than education and people with more education than money.
And so... And I think that the people with... And both of them believe the other is the
true American elite. You saw this with Sarah Palin. I mean, even before Sarah Palin became
the vice presidential candidate, the Palins were the richest people in their town. Todd
had a very valuable asset, a salmon fishing license, has a considerable piece of property,
he had a plane. Yes, he worked in the oil business with his hands, but that's a... They
were rich people, an important people in their town, that's why she was Mayor. But they didn't
have formal education very much of it. I mean she definitely had a BA, he did not.
DF: And they didn't felt very resentful of people who they thought were looking down
on them, and now they have millions of dollars and they still have that resentment, and other
people who are system professors of English somewhere will feel, "Well, I have these PhDs,
but I don't have the money the Palins do, and they look down on me." Then there's a
famous book about the anti-intellectual traditional American politics. But I think for the purpose
of this question, that the key thing to understand is American intellectual life is a highly
technical intellectual life, it is not a generalist intellectual life.
S?: Hi, my name is John, and I have a business colleague in from Colorado this week who describe
himself as a liberal, but he was very pro-Romney and anti-Obama. And one of the reasons he
was anti-Obama was that he said that the president was not pro-business enough. Is that a view
that you would hold and can you cite some examples of how the president might not be
pro-business?
DF: Yes, you know, stock market's up, people who have money are making money. Tax rates
did not go up and so a lot of the Obama people are puzzled. How can you say... And the president
takes advice from a lot of people, important people in the business world, but it's also
very evidently true and people who know him well confirm this. That's not his world. He
never grew up in it. Nobody in his family did it and none of his friends do it, and
those of his friends who are in business who have made money, have made money because they're
political... They've used their political connections to business advantage. But he's
not surrounded by entrepreneurs or heads of companies. He's plainly uncomfortable with
those people. He doesn't understand what they do, and he gives off a vibe of not respecting
what they do.
DF: And this is especially damaging right now to the standards of the business world
because Wall Street in the 2000s really disgraced itself and there were a lot anger at Wall
Street. But there are a lot of people in shipping business, in the information technology business,
in the entertainment business, the art industries didn't disgrace themselves. We went on making
excellent products and goods and services that met people's needs. And yet we feel this
general mood of blame that is about the performance of this one industry and one section of this
industry, and yet we all are now held to suspicion and there's a president who seems not to get
us, and not to respect us at a time when we feel sensitive and under pressure.
DF: So, I think that is what your friend is expressing and I think he's capturing something
real, and it's one of the reason... I feel it's one of the reasons why I end up with
all my reservations about Romney as probably a Romney voter because he... That's, I mean
the business of America is business and he understands and respects the people who lead
that business.
S?: Thank you.
S?: So, a question about health care being a dual citizen. Should Canada move away from
our system or should US move toward our system or... What's your feeling about the role of
government in ensuring health care to society on both sides of the border?
DF: I think it would be very easy to take more of your time on this question than you
have any patience for. [laughter] And even if you've patience for it, then I'll... But
let me just say this one sentence... Two sentences about it. It's a very unfortunate thing that
Canada and the United States, both English-speaking countries are right next door to each other
on this health care question, because of the two dozen plus countries in the OECD, almost
all have some form of public health care provision. If you were to arrange them on a scale of
least government to most government, Canada and Britain would be on one extreme of the
scale and the United States would be on the other.
DF: And because the two countries are next door and because they speak the same language
that they assume it's a binary alternative, and you either have the American system with
all of its instills, people don't get covered, there's a lot of waste and fraud or you have
the Canadian system with a lot of instills. Andrew Coyne is here tonight. Andrew Coyne
is the author of the... I think the greatest statement of the difference between the two
countries which is in the United States. In the United States not everybody has insurance,
but everybody gets care. In Canada, everybody has insurance, but not everybody gets care.
And on that scale, there are other countries that don't speak English and aren't next door
have come up with some better answers than either of these two neighbours and when you're
looking for models, I would look there.
S?: Okay, thanks.
S?: Hi. I grew up in Detroit, lived here for the last 30 years. Every time I go back to
Detroit I get gut sick at the devastation that the downtown people are growing corn.
I've read a fair bit of recently departed Gore Vidal. What's your thought on the future,
the broad future of the American republic?
DF: Wow! [laughter] It's better than Detroit. [laughter] You have to be an optimist about
the future of the American republic. And when I say you have to be, I mean you must be because,
otherwise what are you going to do. But Gore Vidal was a terrible crank, I must say. I
met him in person only once. He was a great friend of Christopher Hitchens and we would
have many discussions about him. But I met him once. We were on the Bill Maher show together,
and he was patronizing toward me, which I think I didn't take personally because he
was patronizing to a lot of people.
DF: And one of the things he said, at one point to Bill Maher was, "If we had proper,
fair elections today, the way they did in the early 19th century." He had to really
not know a lot about American history to imagine that elections today, for all their problems,
are less fair than they were in the 19th century. And that's the kind of thing he would always
toss off. I think Gore Vidal's general take on American society was that the main... America
was a corrupt and damaged society because he, Gore Vidal, was not treated as an important
enough person. And there was nothing wrong with American society that couldn't be fixed
by treating he, Gore Vidal, as a more important person.
[laughter]
DF: I think that the beginning of... When I wrote my book about George Bush, left the
White House, and was prevailed on through a complicated story that I won't repeat to
write this book which I now intend to do. So I left in March, I started work on the
book in April, and I finished the first draft in June. And I showed it to my wife, who reads
and criticizes everything long-form I do, who is not a gentle critic. And her first
response to the first draft was, "Can we afford to give the advance back?"
[laughter]
DF: So I went back and I had talk to some people but how do I... So I had to finish
the book between July and September. And one of the things I realized as I wrote this book,
it was very just general insight to me about how you write things, was the defining experience
that you have working in a White House, is the experience of humiliation. You are constantly
being reminded... And this is true for everybody from the Vice President on down. I think it's
true for the President often, and one of the lines in the book is that one of the people
who works through President Polanski says they always say, "The President of the United
States is the most powerful man on earth." But from my point of view, that title really
belongs either to the head of Patriot News, the Governor of the Central Bank of China
or whichever *** senator is choosing to make a nuisance of himself that day.
[laughter]
DF: Understanding that you're not... You have to deeply internalize your non-importance
in the scheme of things, if you're going to write truthfully about anything. And I think
that was one of the problems that Gore Vidal had as a writer, especially in his later years.
He could not internalize his non-importance in the scheme of things.
S?: Particularly interested in your comments about the conservative movement and the Republican
party. Where do you see the strategic opening for those moderate republicans, the moderate
republicans that maybe left or that haven't left the party? Where do you see the strategic
opening for them, particularly as President Obama exerts influence and is recognized for
strengthening aspects of the democratic party that were previously their weaknesses? Foreign
policy would be a prime example. And also, on some aspects of domestic policy, the individual
mandate, not 20 years ago was a republican proposal. Where is the opening for those moderates
given... Isn't that real estate being squeezed between the right wing and the president?
DF: I could answer that question, but I'm going to answer a slightly different question.
Because I think it may be as more useful for our purposes tonight. You can think about
strategic openings and where they're going to be. But then you are subject to the fallibility
of your predictions of the future. I think it's much more useful in political work to
not worry about where the strategic openings are. And to focus instead on what you're trying
to accomplish, and not look at the position of the other runners on the track.
DF: Bill Buckley in one of the things... He gave an interview to Playboy magazine in 1970
that is collected, and my favourite of his collections. And he said, this is a very dark
moment for his brand of conservatism. And the interviewer said, "What do you think you're
doing? I mean you are just losing all the time." And he said, "What I'm doing is I'm
maintaining a landing strip in the jungle in the hope that the planes will begin coming
in. And when they do, coffee and coke are on the house."
[laughter]
16:53 DF: And that's what I try to do. And you just... Where's the strategic opening?
Again, I can answer, but I just... You just have to do it. And you have to do it with
knowledge that it may not work out. Another of my... Someone who's not here tonight, another
school classmate of mine who wrote a very funny book, David Eddie. He has a... This
is a line I often quote from his very funny novel, "Chump Change". He said... One of his
characters says, "You know they laughed at the Wright Brothers?" Another of his characters
says, "Yeah, that's true. They did laugh at the Write Brothers. They also laughed at all
the people who jumped over the cliff, clutching their beanie propeller hats to their heads."
[laughter]
DF: So you might be one of those? You never know.
S?: And just on that, do you think there will be enough of the remnants? I feel like I'm
one of those people who used to be a moderate republican and now I'm not that engaged in
it. But do you think there will be enough remnants of that base of Rockefeller Republicans
left to come back?
DF: I think it's actually growing. Because here's what's going to happen. Okay, this
was a strategic question. A lot of the social issues are... You know, when you look at where
are they held? They're held in by most intensely by relatively small groups of older people
in regions of the country that are not growing so rapidly. Meanwhile, the problems of how
do you maintain middle-class incomes in a globalised world? Where they are huge, where...
Where everywhere, in every country more and more resources flow to the people who have
truly global skills and assets.
DF: And one of the things I often point out is, that the most famous American architect
of the 1950s, Gordon Bunshaft, who built the Lever House building, built one building outside
the United States. And he made a very good living but he did not make hundreds of millions
of dollars in the way that the celebrity architects of today who have global markets do. So if
you are the best architect of the United States, that means you're the best architect in the
world, and that means you are just a much richer person than your counterpart was in
1955.
S?: And meanwhile reward just squeeze at the middle, and manufacturing things like that
flow outside. That problem is going to be one of the great, if not the very greatest,
problem of developed societies. And we know President Obama told us what his answer was.
He gave a big speech in Kansas in November 2011. And his answer is basically more people
work for the government because the government... Or as government contractors because government
can guarantee middle-class standards of wage and condition. And that's an answer, and if
you reject that answer and more Americans will reject that answer than accept it, they
are going to go somewhere else, and the negative things about Republican Party, I devoutly
believe will fall away. They may not fall away on a time table that is convenient to
me personally, but they will fall away.
S?: Thanks so much.
AS: The final question.
S?: Oh! Hi, David. I was wondering if I could just ask two questions. Do you see the Republican
Party as the British Conservative Party that had to lose so many elections to come to that
point, where they start delivering for the American middle class? And the second question,
just very quickly, is on a foreign policy side, what do you see the odds of a military
strike against Iran? Do you think it's... [laughter] Because your blog picked it up,
that's why...
DF: Okay.
S?: I'm bringing it up. Do you think... Thank you.
DF: Thank you.
[laughter]
DF: I'm trying to wear my novelist hat tonight, not my global pundit hat, so I will just say,
to the second question, I will give you a very short answer. I would say the odds are
low, both United States and Israel. And for details, come visit the blog.
[laughter]
DF: The Republican is the British Conservatives. The British Conservatives would have to...
If they were more successful right now, I would think that that would be a real possibility.
And one of the things that has been very... Weighing on the Republican Party is that the
Cameron Government has made decisions that have led to... I mean Britain's recovery from
the worst of the trough of 2009 has been on a worst path than that of the United States.
It's been worst, even the Continental Europe. So, they don't... The British Conservatives
don't look very wise. And they're not going to have a lot of supporters. And lot of the
things that David Cameron did to modernize the party begin to look like Declaration,
but on the core strategic decision did you deliver success? That he's not delivering
success and that is going to impede his influence.
AS: David, thank you very much.
DF: Thank you.
[applause]