The David Frum Show: Frum on Gatsby, Trump the Fascoid and What It Means to Be an American

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. One of my favorite recent shows, with Fareed Zakaria. He came on the show a few months ago to talk about the paperback version of his book, Age of Revolutions. We, of course, talked America and Trump. And I was particularly intrigued that Zakaria appeared on another prominent internet show, podcast show, The David Frum Show, which is put on by The Atlantic. And Zakaria was talking to Frum about what it means to be an American. They're old friends. They met at Harvard many years ago. So I thought we would get David Frum on the show and reverse the question. So David, welcome to Keen On America. For you, what does it mean to be American? You came here as a young man, as a student at Yale University. You grew up in Canada. So will you be celebrating July 4th, David?

**David Frum** (1:27)
So I'll give you a back story to my conversation with Fareed. As you say, I've known him since the middle 1980s.
We're both naturalized American citizens. He's born in India and became American. I'm born in Canada. And my question to him for this discussion was whether there were any second thoughts about that decision because we both were pulled into Americanism by a certain idea of America that's been called into question over the past decade. Your question to me about the 4th of July just points to the special complexities. The Canadian-American relationship is in one way very simple. Speak the same language, have many of the same customs, many of the same habits, many of the same institutions, share much of the same history. Even the accent is very slightly different. An English accent sounds quite different to an American ear as it takes some pretty close listening to tell the difference between someone from Ontario and someone from, say, Ohio. But Canada is the product of an American Civil War, which is how Canadians remember the Revolution of 1776 I spend much of the year in a small town in Ontario, directly across the lake, which was settled by refugees from the American Revolution.
And in fact, I live on a road called Loyalist Parkway in honor of those refugees who exited up the Hudson and then across the Mohawk, across the Lake Ontario to stay loyal to King and the old country. And I will be, that's where I usually am on the 4th of July, where the 4th of July is an important holiday, but it's also a complicated holiday because it's the birth of Canada as well in protest against the Revolution and in loyalty to the old association across the Atlantic with the common ancestor of both the United States and Canada, Great Britain.

**Andrew Keen** (3:13)
So is that your way of saying that what it means to be an American is to be a rebel, to go back to Canada and celebrate losing a civil war?

**David Frum** (3:24)
There's a revolution, there is indispensibly and inevitably a revolutionary aspect to the American heritage. President Roosevelt famously said when he's talking to the daughters of the American Revolution at a time, a lot of reactionary feelings in certain parts of American society, he said to them, never forget that all of us, and you and I especially, are the descendants of immigrants and revolutionists.
So there isn't a revolutionary aspect. It's also true that the United States exists because it crushed a counterrevolution, which is what the Civil War was. And so there's an aspect of continuity. I think the reason that I thought this conversation was so timely with Fareed, and I timed it for the first anniversary of the show, that's how important I thought the discussion was, was many of the ideas of what it means to be in America are now in question in the age of Trump, in a way that I, they're always in question, in a very painful way they're in question, and there's some question whether the United States represents in the world what it used to mean. That there is something, both Fareed and I grew up with the idea that America was something more than just another great power, that its great power was exercised in conjunction and in service to certain ideals, and those ideals are very out of fashion in the age of Trump.
As you and I speak, the United States is in the throes of a war with Iran, and President Trump has made clear that America's goals in that war as in his previous wars in Venezuela are purely predatory. He wants to invade Iran, take its oil, enrich the United States by impoverishing the Iranians by depriving them of their oil, not to bring freedom, not to bring a better way of life, but just to go around plundering like some kind of bandit band. That's not the America that I believed in and that I chose to merge my fate with.