Hell and the high ground

Patriots. By David Frum. CreateSpace; 484 pages; $16.99. Buy from Amazon.com

IT IS early in 2013, and America's first black president, a liberal, has just been consigned to the ignominy reserved for one-termers. To the horror of the conservatives who uneasily banded around a candidate they did not wholly trust, the betrayals begin.

Their president turns out to be woefully lacking in xenophobia; disgracefully willing to compromise with the opposition on cutting the deficit; even prepared to countenance tax increases for the wealthy. The backlash duly begins, a cynical plot involving a rabble-rousing hyper-conservative television station called “Patriot News”, a conservative think-tank, the Wall Street Transcript, the Scandinavian-surnamed head of Americans for Entrepreneurship, assorted multimillionaires and some dodgy political operatives. Welcome to David Frum's enjoyable vision of what might just happen in America next year.

Mr Frum, who once wrote speeches for George W. Bush, and who went on to work for the American Enterprise Institute before being forced out after he questioned Republican orthodoxy, knows the bestiary of the American right as well as anyone. And he has turned his knowledge into a brisk, often shocking and occasionally hilarious page-turner.

You really need a handy lexicon to keep track of who is a caricature of whom, as the Constitutionalists (the Republicans) battle it out with the Nationalists (the Democrats) for the ear of President Pulaski, a wheelchair-bound ex-general who resembles John McCain more than Mitt Romney; but that might have exposed Mr Frum to a libel charge, so scandalous is some of what goes on.

A lot of it is far-fetched (America probably is not going to get bogged down soon in a war in Mexico), but most of the fantasy is recounted by an ingénue congressional staffer who is forced to grow up pretty fast, and it rings nastily true to life. Perhaps none of it more so than Mr Frum's charge, directed at some of those who appear on radio and television to enrage, terrify and incite, that everything they say is about ratings and money, and not about politics at all.

“Patriots” is not great literature, though it should qualify for one of Britain's Bad Sex awards with the line: “Two hours later, she had drained me as thoroughly as a careful cottager preparing his pipes against the winter freeze.” But it is excellent political satire—and, for those in the know, bears more than a passing resemblance to reality.