There is nothing so bracing as viewing David Frum’s carefully posed snapshot of America’s political history, with the help of fellow traveler Rich Lowry. If Mr. Frum meant his quotations from Mr. Lowry to be edifying or even enlightening the notion of ‘executive intelligence’ falls short. Mr. Lowry’s pastiche of critical evaluation is another exercise of maladroit apologetics, for a Party that has since surrendered to nihilism in its many iterations.
On the pressing question of race and the Republican Party, Mr. Frum elides the fact of the Dixiecrat migration to the Republicans in ’64 and ’65, in protest of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passing, at which time Mr. Frum was four and five years old: but being a student of American history this is an ideologically, not to speak of, strategically fueled myopia. The Dixiecrats have ruled the Republican stance on race in America since. The evidence: The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Nashoba County Fair speech that was the first speech of his campaign: I believe in states rights! Bush I and Lee Atwater’s Willy Horton ads, the appointments of the Neo-Confederate/Originalists to the Supreme Court: Rehnquist,Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and even sometime ally Anthony Kennedy.
On Trump the ‘politician’: he is a Caudillo like Peron, with the baroque stage manner and bluster of Mussolini.With the spotty veneer of Mr. Lowry’s ‘executive intelligence’ perfected on his television show, based on the ‘principals of Vulture Capital’: which is enough to make Messrs. Frum and Lowry politically tumescent.
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