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| Gulag prisoners, via.They didn't suffer in vain! They suffered so that David Frum could feel good about himself! |
John Holbo (2003) on David Frum (1994):
... if it is good for the poor and middle-class to suffer and toil, surely it would do the well-to-do some good as well. We could stiffen upper-classes spines quick by raising the top tax bracket to, say, 95%, while firing all the cops, letting all the criminals out of jail, giving them guns, and busing them to the richest neighborhoods before letting them go. Not a good idea, obviously, but a lot of rich people would learn a lot of important, genuinely meaningful life lessons..
It's from a rant (via Brad DeLong's substack) on Frum's book, Dead Right, in the phase of his life when he was an ordinary Canadian opinionator/thinktank twit, before his bizarre irruption into "public service" as a Bush speechwriter, on the subject of how Frum can't possibly believe the things he believes he believes, as a representative conservative, like the way the Dostoevskian idea of how we can be ennobled by suffering, like the cannibal heroes of the Donner Party or the zeks of the Stalin-era gulag, gets transmuted into the idea that the function of the state is to ennoble people by making welfare payments too small for people to live on.
Frum can't possibly believe that that Stalinism is good, right? Because it's responsible for the ennoblement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his fellow political prisoners? But when Frum wishes liberal government would be more austere because that would be morally good for the beneficiaries
