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We all have more at stake in the rules of the game than we do in the outcomes of the game. When that changes, that's when you begin to lose democracy.

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
Lose
Game
Loses
Stake
Democracy
Stakes
Games
Outcomes
Rules
Changes
Begin

More quotes by David Frum

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As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
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Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?
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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).
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An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.
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Whenever you discuss politics, it is always better to use individual names rather then the term neocon.
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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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[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.
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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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Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.
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We live in an age of de-democratization. The number of democracies in the world has been going backwards since 2005, and even many existing democracies including in Europe have been becoming less democratic.
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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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One of the questions I often get asked is, Were you surprised that Trump won? I always answer the same way: I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised.
David Frum
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The Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.
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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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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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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Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.
David Frum
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One of the things that really has gone wrong in modern politics, one of the things that made Trump possible was that many people have a view of politics as something dramatic and exciting and thrilling and emotional.
David Frum
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The system has evolved to protect parties from people like Donald Trump. It really is true that people without well-established public records, without proven capability in public service, without tested beliefs and at least apparently under the influence of a foreign power, such people are screened out by major parties.
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