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Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.

David Frum

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David Frum
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: June 30
Blogger
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Speechwriter
City of Toronto
David Jeffrey Frum
System
Democracies
Politics
Complacency
American
Advanced
Thought
Vulnerable
Generally
Discover
Americans
Democracy

More quotes by David Frum

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I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.
David Frum
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Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
David Frum
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Journalists have to do their job. And journalists have to resist emotionalism. You have to keep your cool and to continue to do your job until you're prevented.
David Frum
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Yet when the hour of decision arrives, it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues. Sarah Palin is exciting and appealing. But what kind of executive is she? None of us have even the remotest idea.
David Frum
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The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.
David Frum
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Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king.
David Frum
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In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
David Frum
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Reagan survived the Iran-Contra scandal because the elements of it that were illegal (aiding anti-communist Nicaraguans) were popular and the things that were unpopular (arming the Iranians) were quite legal.
David Frum
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One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.
David Frum
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So long as Donald Trump is powerful and popular, Fox News is going to achieve an advertising bonanza unheard of in the era of modern cable, because people will pay them to talk to the president.
David Frum
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My mom was truly an iconic figure, a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill.
David Frum
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Canada has a real civil service, which the United States doesn't have, an independent civil service. Canada also has a stronger federal system.
David Frum
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So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.
David Frum
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As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
David Frum
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[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up.
David Frum
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Democracy requires you to learn how to lose as well as how to exercise power when you win. And that requires restraint all around. One of the reasons it works is because when you win you don't do things that are so upsetting to the losers that they feel like they have less, they have more to gain by turning over the system.
David Frum
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I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.
David Frum
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The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel).
David Frum
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We're not free because other people are nice, maybe other people aren't nice that day. We're free because we expect the institutions of government to work impersonally. That we expect people in government to understand they don't work for the president or the prime minister, they work for the government. And the government is always there.
David Frum
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People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.
David Frum