David Frum meant it as criticism. He was right about everything except that.
David Frum is a conservative writer. Worked for Bush. Wrote speeches for the administration. Not a liberal. So when he wrote a piece in The Atlantic about Vice President Vance and what he calls “redistributing respect,” I paid attention. And I have to say: he gets it. He just doesn’t like what he sees.
Frum argues that MAGA is “above all a movement about redistributing respect away from those who command too much (overeducated coastal elites) to those who don’t have enough (white Americans without advanced degrees who feel left behind).” He means this as criticism. But read that sentence again. Where exactly is he wrong?
For years, people like me were told our opinions didn’t matter. That we needed to defer to experts. That our concerns about immigration were racist, our questions about policy were ignorant, our values were backwards. I know. I used to be a Democrat. I used to nod along when they said these things. Then one day a barista corrected my language, and something clicked.
He Sees It Clearly
Frum describes ICE as “less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.” He notes that DHS posted an image with lyrics from a song popular on the nationalist right: “By God we’ll have our home again.” He says Vance rushed to defend the Minneapolis shooter because he had to “pay moral cash where others might be trusted on moral credit.”
As someone who came to this movement later than others, I understand that. When you’re a convert, you have to prove yourself. You can’t coast on history. Vance gets that. I get that.
Frum also mentions that Trump pardoned over 1,500 January 6 defendants, including many convicted of violence against police. He thinks this proves MAGA doesn’t actually care about law enforcement. But that misses the point entirely. Those people were political prisoners. The system had turned against them. Defending them was about something bigger than blue lives or thin blue lines.
The Part He Almost Gets
Here’s where Frum gets close to understanding but flinches away. He writes that the ICE agent may have fired because he “felt disrespected by a person who—in his opinion—owed him deference.” Frum thinks this is damning. But think about what he’s actually describing: an agent of the state, doing his job, being disrespected by someone who thought she was above compliance.
For decades, certain people have been allowed to show contempt for authority. For working-class values. For anyone who didn’t have the right credentials or live in the right zip code. And nothing happened to them. They got promoted. They got book deals. They got to sneer at the rest of us from their platforms.
Frum ends his piece with a warning: “Failure to heed the MAGA campaign to redistribute respect is insolence punishable by death.” He means it as horror. But strip away his tone and ask yourself: is he describing something new? Or is he describing what happens when a movement finally has the power to demand what it deserves?
I’m not celebrating what happened in Minneapolis. But I’m also not going to pretend that respect has been fairly distributed in this country. Frum sees exactly what’s happening. He just can’t accept that maybe, after all these years, it’s our turn.
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