David Frum:
Well, I wonder whether there’s really more division in the country today than at other points in the past.
Remember the feeling about Vietnam and the draft. I bet families had a tumult sitting down over dinner in 1969, ’70, and ’71. Debates over civil rights and the integration of schools in the early 1950s and early 1960s, I bet there are families that had difficulty reconciling about that.
But back then, the political system saw its job as managing. Leaders knew, this is an incredibly diverse country, rural versus urban, race upon race, ethnicity upon ethnicity, religion upon religion, sometimes men against women, young against old, rich against poor, all of these potential fault lines.
And it’s the job of the people who meet in the buildings down the road here to manage that, to say, we keep — while everyone else is getting excited, we keep our cool. And we remember that what is really important are dams and roads and high schools and defense plants. And we’re going to make the deals based on that. And we’re all just going to lower the temperature at the center.
But the political circle at the top no longer sees these conflicts as dangers to manage. They see them as resources to exploit. And Donald Trump is better at this than just about anybody, that they take this dangerous stuff, and they say that is going to be not something I’m going to try to contain, but something I will use for fuel.
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