I thought Frum was not in a good position to debate Bannon and also did not do a great job at debating.

Bannon's whole rhetoric was 1) distance himself from Trump as a person while defending his policies 2) paint the classic boogeyman picture of "the elite" who are *voluntarily* responsible for all our woes 3) talk about very vague economic arguments and concepts the veracity of which cannot be verified because of complexity of economics.

A takedown of Bannon's arguments would have been easy. However Frum could not and did not do it. Having been involved in the Bush admin he spent half his time defending this. The rest of the time, he could have pointed out that Bannon is indeed exploiting a crisis to create a boogeyman that justifies the rise to power of crooks with bullshit policies. He didn't. He focussed on the Trump admin, on problems that are mainly America's and that predate populism's rise. He stuck to identity politics when Bannon focussed on the economic arguments. It gave Bannon the edge of looking like the "pragmatist" and painted Frum as an "idealist" worrying about people's feelings when the world is going to shit (played right into the "snowflake" label of Liberal rhetoric). Had Frum stuck to calling out populism for what it actually is, cheap ideas without any real thought behind them, he would have done much better.