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- [00:07]
A
Welcome to Talking Feds One on One. Deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman.
- [00:23]
B
Welcome to another Talking Feds one on One. I'm thrilled to be joined today for by one of the country's leading public thinkers. David Brooks is a staff writer at the Atlantic, a senior fellow at Yale's Jackson School of Public affairs, and a regular contributor on PBS NewsHour. For over 20 years he wrote a column for the New York Times. He's a prolific author in his own right, most recently 2023, I believe how to Know a Person the Art of seeing Others Deeply and Being deeply seen. David welcome to Talking Fitz.
- [00:59]
C
It's great to be with you, Harry.
- [01:01]
B
It's my sense that your recent move to the Atlantic and the Jackson School has coincided with a broadening of focus in your writing away from sort of daily or weekly developments and more toward broad gauged social criticism about what ails us as a society. What is to be done to repair it. Is that a fair impression? And why have you chosen now to brought in your vistas?
- [01:28]
C
That is a fair impression. It's just occurred to me, especially over the last 10 years really, that a lot of our problems are pre political, that our politics rests on a culture. And the culture is really in trouble these days. And it shows up in all the statistics. By now we're familiar with the rising Depression, rising suicide rates. The number of people who say they have no friends is up by fourfold since 2000. The number of people who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000. The number of people who are willing to have kids is radically down. So fertility rates are plummeting, marriage rates are plummeting, patriotism is plummeting. So in the relationships of our lives and frankly in our internal lives, we're in some sort of meltdown. And it seems to me where you go to fix that kind of pre political problem is in the culture. And by culture I don't only mean like painting and art, though I do mean that, but also just the way we treat each other, the way we talk to each other. And I got a great education when I was a kid and we read George Eliot on marriage and we read Plato on knowledge and beauty. And it struck me that we have an inheritance stretching back 4,000 years from all over the world of people who've thought about the deepest questions of life. How do you find a purpose in life? How do you treat somebody considerately, how do you sit with someone who's grieving? And we're in danger of squandering that inheritance, of not passing it along to succeeding generations. So I thought, well, where do I go to do that and to be part of that? And I go to a university, I go to a magazine where you can do long form journalism a little more easily. And so you can talk directly to cultural matters. Unless the sort of stuff I covered as a daily newspaper columnist.
- [03:09]
B
Yeah, and let me stick with that, because you have given that prescription. It strikes me that a lot of the criticism begins with a sort of lament of the loss of community cohesion, institutions that formally formed the social glue of American life. And I think of you as still maintaining an allegiance to what you could fairly call Burkean conservatism. But you've just laid out the sickness. Where and when did we go wrong to stumble onto this morally precarious path?
- [03:48]
C
Yeah, the short answer is, I think we've had 60 years of hyper individualism. And you had economic individualism from the right, you had lifestyle individualism from the left, but it was individualism all the way down. And so we have more personal freedom, which is great, but we have less social bonds and less social cohesion. So I think the individualistic shift happened to start around the 1950s. The more subtle one is a sense of a shared moral order. That there was a historian named John Marsden, George Marsden, who wrote that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such force was his belief that right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe. That segregation and slavery and rape, they're not just wrong. And sometimes in some places, they're always wrong. And so we have a shared moral order where we can we. When we can trust each other, because we sort of agree on what we ought to do. We know what the right thing to do is. And if you don't have a shared moral order, then that goes away. We can't trust each other. And sometime around the late 1940s and 1950s, we said, come up with your own values, come up with your own truth. And so we sort of privatized morality. And way back in 1955, Walter Lippman, a great columnist, wrote, if what is right and wrong is based on what each individual feels, based on their feelings, then we are outside the bounds of civilization. And I think the collapse of social trust, which is really the essence of our problem, that we can't trust each other is out of that sense. We don't have a shared Moral order. And so two generations ago, if you asked people, do you trust your neighbors? They would 60% said, yeah, I trust my neighbors. And now it's 30%, not 60%, and 19% on millennial and Gen Z. If you ask Millennial and Gen Z, as Pew did recently, do you agree with this statement, most people are selfish enough to get you? 72% of millennial and Gen Z said, yeah, I agree with that statement. So personally, I would find it very hard to go through life thinking most people are selfish enough to get me. You want to close in. And so I think it's phenomenally hard to be a young person these days because we have created, created, left them this world where they can't trust people and they can't think the best of people. And again, and to go back to my Edmund Burke, who you mentioned, he has a saying, manners are more important than laws. And by manners, he meant culture. He says laws touch us here and there, but manners touch us everywhere. They either build up our character or they destroy it. And so that's the sort of the realm I'm trying to focus on.
- [06:23]
B
Yeah. And it's such an important point. I don't want to go yet to our current president, but to me, the demolition of norms has been in some ways even more damaging than some of the lawless acts. Let me state the diagnosis itself is really important, David. So I don't mean to trivialize it, and I just want to stick with it because, you know, the millennials and others you've written that this individualistic culture has fallen for the belief that individuals are capable of devising their own morality. And when you talk about 1955, and you are, I think, distinctive in focusing both on the developments of the 60s, in addition to, say, a lot of people look to the 30s, but there really is the people who trusted each other also went to the Little League games and saw each other at the farmer's markets and the like. So what is the. How does it happen that those institutions fall away? And you seem overall sanguine, if I, if I read you correctly, that they can just be restored. How do you actually get to a place of shared communitarian, to use a word, values?
- [07:47]
C
Yeah. Well, I don't think it's going to happen like that.
- [07:49]
B
Yeah.
- [07:49]
C
But I do think it's going to happen. And my optimism is based on the idea that America has been through this before. You know, you go through culture changes, the way science changes. You have a paradigm like Newtonian physics, and then Einstein comes along and Smashes the paradigm. And then quantum mechanics comes along and smashes that paradigm. And so you got a culture that works for you for a little while. And we had a culture. Let's just take recent history in the 1940s, 30s, 50s, which was a culture of moral realism, I would call it. It was a culture of self effacement. I'm no better than anybody else, but nobody's better than me. And so there was a sense that we're sinful creatures. We have to be restrained in some way, we have to defer to authority. We work in big organizations like corporations or unions or the army. And then in the 60s, people decide that has some virtues, but we need to chop that up because it's too racist, it's too sexist, it's too boring, it's too conformist. So they chop it up. And they were right to do so. But now, after the 60 years of hyper individualism, we've reached a point where our society's fallen apart. And so we need to chop up this culture. And that's what we're now in the middle of. But if you go back through American history, these periods of chopping up, which political scientist Samuel Huntington called moral convulsions, they happen with some regularity in American history. In the 1770s, revolutionary period, the 1830s, Andrew Jackson populism, the 1890s, what became the progressive movement, the 1960s, and now today. And so the good news is we've been through this before, and human beings are creative and they don't want to live in misery, and they will shift culture. And the way culture shifts is when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy. So in early 1960s, there was a little group of students from the University of Michigan who went to Port Huron, Michigan, and they composed something called the Port Huron Statement. And it was a protest against the 50s. And it basically laid out all the ideas that then became famous in the late 1960s and Woodstock and all that stuff. And so they shifted history, and you shift culture not through persuasion, but admiration. People find a small group of people find a better way to live. It seems cool to people, and then we copy. And so out there in the country today, there are lots of people in different ways who, in my view, have found better way to live. I have a nonprofit that I chair called Weave, the Social Fabric Project. And we travel around the country and we say, who's trusted in your neighborhood? And people give us names. And these people are living beautiful communal lives. They are devoted. They love their community. They're there for their neighbors. They do whatever needs to be done in the neighborhood. They clean up an empty lot. They give the homeless people showers. They get kids food who don't have enough to eat. They just are community builders. And to me, trust is rebuilt in part out of that kind of action. And I see that in communities everywhere around the country. I've been traveling now for eight years to these places. And everywhere, I mean, you can name in your own community, there are people who are really restitching the fabric and rebuilding trust. And so the idea is, how do we amplify that?
- [11:00]
B
And, I mean, it is interesting. I think you think you see versions of this on the left and versions of this on the right. You yourself have given a sort of toleration for some of the values on the right that led to the appeal of a Trump in just the kind of sense of loss of something great, as you put it. So let me ask the. You. You get. You get communities and you get a, you know, sorts of organizations that band together. What is the. What's the role here of religion, do you think, Dave, for the. For what you're looking toward happening in American society?
- [11:49]
C
Yeah, I mean, we're not going to become as religious a society as we were in the 50s or 19th century, and we're not going to do that anytime soon. But I do think the withdrawal of religion from public life had a pretty devastating effect. And I say that first because religions come with congregations. Set aside belief in God, the fact that you're in the congregation means you've built in community. And so, for example, in Judaism, if your spouse dies, then the congregation comes and sits Shiva with you. It's not obvious that if you lose a dear one that you should go to a party for a week every night. But it's a brilliant ritual where the community knows what to do. They're gonna bring over the casserole, they're gonna sit with you. If you feel like talking about the deceased, you do. If you don't feel like it, you don't have to. And so it's a ritual. And everybody in the congregation knows what to do in those crisis moments. And the loss of that has been pretty devastating. The second thing I think we've lost is, frankly, biblical literacy. Like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were not conventional Christians in any way, but they knew their Bible. They knew the parable of the Good Samaritan. They knew the importance of helping the injured guy on the side of the road. They knew about Welcoming the stranger. And so they knew the story of Moses. They knew what an Exodus was and how social change. You know, Martin Luther King talked about the Exodus story all the time. The founders of the United States, several of them, Madison, Franklin, a couple of the others, wanted to put Moses on the Great Seal of the United States because they said, we're an Exodus story. We are the kind of people who leave oppression, cross the wilderness, come to the promised land and create law, rule of law. And so we've lost a lot of that biblical literacy. I had a friend tell me this was years ago. Her son was in an art history class at a very prestigious college in New England. And they were studying paintings. Not to be named, not to be named, but they were studying paintings, painting from the Renaissance. And it was always a picture of a mother and a boy. And one of the female students in the class said, why is the mother always with a boy? How come it's never a mother with a girl in the painting? And they had to explain to her, this is a certain kind of painting with the baby Jesus and the mother, the mother of Mary. And so it's not just some random mother and child. This is like a specific case. And she just had nothing encounter that. And so that's been a loss. And then if you just look at the raw data, religious people give to charity more. They're happier, they're more fertile. There are a lot of pro social things that somehow seems to come out of religion. And obviously, you know, I personally am a person of faith, and I look around at my fellow people who are religious, and I think, you know, we should be better than we are because we talk about being good all the time. But in my experience, there's no moral difference between people who don't believe in God and people who do. They like very little. But there are some socially useful byproducts of faith. And the loss of religion, I think, has made it hard. And I don't think we're going to go back to 1950s church, but we need to invent something else that'll give us a sort of humanistic connection.
- [15:01]
B
I do have that same view that there's no going back. I'm not a person of faith. And yet, nevertheless, when you hear the prescription of all that ails the millennials, you can't help but see, like, well, not religious people are the exact opposite, including, most importantly, in personal happiness, which is a focus of yours. One might think that you're having a kind of nostalgic, gauzy view toward Recovering the past, I don't think that would be accurate. And in particular, you're a very big fan of AI, And I think a lot of people who share your hope for love of humanism might feel like there's a little bit of a contradiction there. What's your sense of how it kind of fits in what you actually foresee as a greater move toward a happier and more communal culture?
- [16:02]
C
Yeah. First, I love the tradition that we inherited, the traditions, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, rationalism, like there are all these intellectual traditions that come from the past. But that doesn't mean I want to go back to the past. I think tradition is something you carry forward and you develop it and you advance it. And so I'm a traditionalist in that way. So I never want to rebuild. I never use the word prefix re because that implies going back, which you can't do and we wouldn't want to do. There's no decade in American history I would want to go back to. They're all worse. But AI. There are a couple of things I like about it. First, I like using Claude. When I use Claude, I assign it a voice. If Thomas Jefferson were talking to Franklin Roosevelt about how to structure American government, what would they say to each other? And AI, I think, is pretty bad. If you ask it directly to solve a problem, I think it's pretty bad. But if you asked it to summarize two different thinkers, way they see the world, it's pretty good at that. And so I just find it just as a humanist, very helpful to understand. And I was doing a piece on resentment recently, and it introduced me to a thinker I'd never heard of, early 20th century thinker named Max Scheller, who was a brilliant writer on resentment. And so I've started writing about him because Claude informed me about him. So that part I like. And so it's just an increase in knowledge in the world. Second, it's, you know, I'm not averse to solving pancreatic cancer. Like, there's just going to be a lot of good stuff that comes out of this. Now, the downside, to me, the main downside is a, it crushes mental effort. And so to me, what I worry about most is that there are certain people who, the psychologists, they have what they call high need for cognition. They like to think hard. They intrinsically enjoy it. And these are the people you see solving complicated puzzles if you're on an airplane, and that's about 15, 20%, and they're going to use AI. To think hard, and they will become phenomenally productive and lots of advantages. Then there's another 20% who don't like to think hard, and they're going to use AI to not think. And if you don't put in mental effort, your mental muscles begin to atrophy. And so they're going to produce output, but they'll be hollowed out inside. And then there's like another 60% in the middle who, I'm afraid, are going to be seduced by AI. And so if you ask somebody, use AI to write three successive essays in the first essay, people tend to write their essay and use AI to polish it up. By the third essay, they're just cutting and pasting. It seduces you into saying, use me more, use me more, use me more. And so I worry that the people that we're going to have a society which not only has income inequality and political inequality and education inequality, but vast cognitive inequality, and that will be a truly rotten situation. And so to me, we have to take all of us and reorient our ideas, our relationship to mental effort. And to say, just as you can't just sit on the TV and be flabby physically, you can't sit in front of AI and be mentally flabby. That's a road to ruin. And so we have to remind people how important it is to work out their brain. And so I worry about that bifurcation.
- [19:24]
B
And just as a. As a parent, the question is really, is there any way to buck the tide? And I know when you say 20, 60, 20, it's really rough and ready figures, but you've extol so frequently the values of a humanity's education and a public life informed by great works of literature and knowledge of history. And I think there's, you know, there's a tension there.
- [20:00]
D
I'm Michael Waldman, host of the Briefing Podcast. I'm a former White House speechwriter, a lawyer, and a constitutional scholar. And I'm president of the Brennan center for Justice. We work to repair and strengthen American democracy, from gerrymandering to abuse of presidential power, from Supreme Court reform to congressional corruption and more. What fun. You're going to hear new ideas in this podcast, and you're going to hear about the strategies and the legal and political fights that will shape the next phase of American politics. If you care about our democracy, the Briefing is a podcast for you.
- [20:34]
B
I'd like to just end with going a little bit more toward the current day within your overall kind of vision of social decline. David and the kind of loss of communitarian values. Where does the rise of President Trump fit in? How has that emerged from what you see as an overall kind of decline of the sort of community values?
- [21:02]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's important to notice history. Sometimes you get a historic tide. In the early 20th century, 1917 era, you get a totalitarian tide. You have the Russian Revolution, you got the Hitler and the Fascism, you later on, you got China and communism. And so you had a sort of a totalitarian tide. And then in the 1930s, you get a welfare state tide, including, we have the New Deal. But all around the world, different countries are building up their welfare state to provide social support. Then the 1980s, you get a neoliberal tide. And so you get Margaret Thatcher, you get Ronald Reagan, you get Mikhail Gorbachev, you get Deng Xiaoping, and free markets, free people, free movement. And now, since about 2010, we're in a global populist tide. And so it's not just us. With Donald Trump, almost every country on earth has a version of him. We, in my view, have the most toxic version. But almost every, whether it's Viktor Orban back in Hungary, whether it's Nigel Farage in the UK Or Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, it's all hostile nationalist populism. And so why did this happen all around the world? A. I do think it is because the fraying of the social fabric. I was in Fargo, North Dakota, recently, and when I visit a town, which I do a lot, I always go to a dive bar. And I googled best dive bar in Fargo. And because in a dive bar, people are more likely to talk to you. I don't dress like this, by the way. I don't dress in a jet. And so I go to Fargo and I get the best dive bar. And sure enough, it was a real divey dive bar. The people weren't down and out. They were raging alcoholics. There was nobody to talk to because there was nobody in the shape to have a conversation in that bar. And that, to me, was almost symptomatic of when the bottom falls out of a society, it really falls out. And so people look around and say, what's going on? And then the second thing they realize is that 20% of people in any of these countries who have the most education go to the same elite universities, marry each other, move to the same few urban centers, pour money into their kids, their kids marry each other.
- [23:08]
B
And.
- [23:09]
C
And so you get an inherited meritocracy, a caste system, and a lot of people look from on the left and the right say that top 20%, those people have too much cultural power, too much financial power, too much political power. We're going to flip the table. And then, and I say this as a member of the elite media, if you have newspapers and magazines that do not have any Trump supporters or any working class people, when I started my career as a journalist in Chicago, it was half a working class profession. You didn't have to go to college. Now you have to go to an elite college to get a job at one of these places. And so they see, they look at the media, they look at culture, and they say people like me are not represented. In fact, we're disdained, we're held in contempt. And so if you want to drive people crazy, humiliate them. And we in the educated elite have done a lot of that. And so they flipped the table. And so my one liner is that Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question, that people are saying we need a little rebalance of recognition in our society, rebalance of power in our society. Those people are not wrong, but they happen to pick the person who not only has also these corrupting influences, but doesn't even give a crap about the people who elected him and doesn't actually help the working class.
- [24:26]
B
Yeah, you've made the point very clearly that it's really a mistake to think of in terms of conservative or liberal, really this sort of absence of morality and kind of self concern that I think defines. My sense is you think a mistake could be made going forward if the, and you see this playing out in our current politics between people who really want to again, upset the table and go completely different, and others who you think might be more incremental and kind of cohesive of different sorts of views. And your, my sense is your prejudice would embrace the latter. You know, if you were able to, to go back in time and write this all out as it could now come to pass. What, what sort of leader or social movement would you hope takes, takes real root in the United States in the next few years?
- [25:28]
C
Yeah, I have two heroes. One is Edmund Burke, who we've been talking about. And Burke, his core idea is epistemological modesty. The world is really complicated and you don't want to have a radical, revolutionary attitude about it because you're going to make a mess.
- [25:45]
B
Talk about the opposite of Trump. Right, right.
- [25:47]
C
Well, if you want an example, look at the Iran war. We didn't think that through. We didn't have a strategy. We didn't have a plan. We thought, oh, we're going to up in that regime and everything will work out. I'm like, no, you have to think it through. History is hard. Politics is hard. And so if you think you're going to burn it all down, it's going to work out, you're probably wrong. My other hero is Alexander Hamilton, because American conservatism is not like European conservatism. We believe in mobility. And so Alexander Hamilton believed in creating a country with limited but energetic government, to create a country where poor boys and girls like him could rise and succeed. And we have. And so that dream of social mobility, of improving your condition, Abraham Lincoln, he put that at the center of his life. He said, the purpose of life is to improve your condition. He meant that economically, but he also meant it spiritually and democratically, politically. And one of the things that I find dismaying about the Democratic Party is that they were the party of the American dream of social mobility and using government to give people a lift. But one of the weird things that's happened to the Democrats over the last six or seven years is education reform has almost dropped off the agenda. And so, like Barack Obama had a strong education reform policy. Bill Clinton had a strong education reform policy. What was Joe Biden's education reform policy? What was Kamala Harris's proposal? They were none. The There were none. And so we're now in a situation where Republicans are beginning to do better than Democrats on social mobility. So in the state of Mississippi, a red State, obviously, 55% of black kids read at grade level, 55%. In California, which spends a ton more on education than Mississippi, it's not 55%, it's 28%. So Californians should be saying, what the heck, we need to have our kids have an opportunity, California here to be able to read. And, you know, I spend a lot of time in California. But somehow that impulse that we need to help the next generation be better and have better lives than we have, that's sort of gone away. And so I'm looking for somebody who can lead from a position of humility, which current president does, but also constant reform, reforming our schools, reforming our universities, reforming Congress, reforming all the mainstream institutions that have let us down, including the ones I'm part of.
- [28:21]
B
David Brooks, great to be with you. Hope we can do it again. And thanks for talking about some of these really kind of ideas that are a lot to chew on here, and I've really appreciated being able to do it with you this last half hour.
- [28:37]
C
I'M happy to be able to do it. I'm glad to be with you.
- [28:42]
A
Thank you for tuning in to One on One, a weekly conversation series from Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube YouTube, where we are posting full episodes and daily updates on top legal stories. Check us out on harrylitman.substack.com where we're posting two or three bulletins a week breaking down the various threats to constitutional norms and the rule of law. And Talking Fez has joined forces with the Contrarian. I'm a founding contributor to this new media venture and committed to reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Rest assured, we're still the same scrappy independent podcast you've come to know and trust just now linked up with an ambitious and vital project designed for this pivotal moment in our nation's legal and political discourse. Find out more@contrarian.substack.com thanks for tuning in. And don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking. Talking Feds is produced by Lou Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian, sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie Dawn Griffin, David Lieberman, Hansuma Hadrenathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker are our contributing writers and production assistants by Akshaj Turbailu. Our music, as ever, is by the amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Doledo llc. I'm Harry Littman.
- [30:44]
B
Talk to you later.