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The Opinions
Tom Friedman Says We’re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.
00:32:18
Two columnists debate this strange moment.
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A
This podcast is supported by GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead, but what about real impact on people's lives? For 18 years, GiveWell has independently researched the highest impact opportunities around the world. Over 150,000 donors have confidently used GiveWell's research, collectively saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Find out more and make a tax deductible donation today@givewell.org select podcast and the Opinions at checkout. This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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B
My name is David Brooks. I am a columnist at the New York Times. I am joined by my friend and colleague Thomas L. Friedman, who I will start calling Tom from here on out. We've been working together for a long time. Between us, we have three Pulitzer Prizes. Some would point out that Tom has all three, and I have never been nominated. But when it comes to Pulitzers, I'm a socialist. I believe in sharing them equally, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. So it's good to be with you in the Pulitzer category. Tom always there. One of the things I love about Tom's writing is that he's not just reacting to whatever happened in the last 12 hours. He does big sweeping columns which help us explain the Times. And so we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about a piece called welcome to Our New Era. What do we and you repeat the term the Polycene. And we're going to talk about your theory of where we are as a world before we get there. There's a great saying in Talmudic scholarship, and I think our ancestors were probably debating the Book of Job somewhere back in the shtetl in the 19th century called find the disagreement under the disagreement. And sometimes when two people disagree, it's because they have just very different ways of looking at the world. And you and I have discussed this many times that we often come out to the same spot. We have the pretty similar views, but we come by very different avenues. And one of the pleasures of reading you is I get the pleasure of agreeing with you and also the pleasure of disagreeing with you at the same time.
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A
Ditto.
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B
And so, correct me if I'm wrong, I would say the simplistic way to summarize the difference in the way we see the world is you would be more technology first and I would probably be more culture first.
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A
Yes.
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B
And so I'm going to make my little two minute critique, please, of the technological viewpoint.
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Go for it.
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B
And so my view of the problem with the technological viewpoint is technology is obviously very important in driving world events, but it sometimes falls into the danger of what you might call Norman Angelism. And Norman angel is famously a guy who wrote a book called the great illusion in 1910, saying the world is so interconnected we can never have World War. Years later, we live World War I. And so I think technology explains a lot. It often doesn't explain the biggest world events. Like to me, World War II. It maybe had some technological impulse. I'd say it came about mostly because of German humiliation after Versailles and a belief in dictatorships in that era, which was pretty universal. And so am I getting this wrong or right? Why do you think technology is so forward, if I'm summarizing your view correctly? And how'd you get here?
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A
So I would say a couple of things, David. One is that it's a little bit of a misinterpretation of me. And I get this a lot when I wrote the World is Flat. But let me just back up. I was in China last year and I was at Beijing Airport. I was coming to a conference. So they sent a college student to greet me and we're sitting waiting for my luggage. And she said, Mr. Friedman, I just have to ask you one thing. Is the world still flat? And I said, actually, it's flatter than ever in the way I meant it. What did I mean? I meant that we had created a technological platform on which more people could do more things in more ways with more other people for less money, for more places than ever before. That's what the book was about. What the book wasn't about is, is what people would do on that platform, driven by culture or politics or something else. And I kind of got conflated into the Norman angel thing by people saying, well, because the world is flat, therefore everyone will love each other. And it'll be Mark Zuckerberg's world of just building wonderful communities. I never, never believed that. So the better real frame for my thinking, David, is actually the book I wrote before the World is Flat, which was a book that basically took on the challenge of what is the system that would replace the Cold War system. And at the time, there were several big ideas out there. Frank Fukuyama said, it'll be the end of history. Didn't work out okay. The second was Sam Huntington, it'll be a clash of civilizations. Well, that didn't work out because there are more clashes within civilization, Sunnis and Shiites, just to name one, than between them. Third was Robert Kaplan. He said it would be the coming anarchy. Well, we've had a lot of anarchy, but a lot of stability, too. I weighed in with the Lexus and the olive tree. My argument was that what's going to actually replace it is a tension between culture, the olive tree, the things that anchor us, root us, and drive us into the world, and this new globalization system. And then to take up the Norman angel point, sometimes that globalization system will actually restrain behavior. Putin will invade Crimea, but he might not go to, you know, Kiev. China will threaten Taiwan, but they won't actually invade. And sometimes you'll burst through that system. But my real framework is that it's a tension between the two. That's my real world view.
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B
Yeah. Now, one more point on this, and then we'll get to your comments. What about the argument that the reaction to. And I would say the counter reaction is often more important than the. The actual technology. And so one of the things I've learned just over the course of my career is that don't only look at the people who everyone is focused on. Look at the people who are silently watching. And so by 1968, you would have seen the hippies and you would have seen the new Left and the peace movement, and you thought, man, this is going to be a liberal era.
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Right?
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But quietly, in the hallways of Yale University, there were two guys named Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and they were saying, this is disgusting.
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Ye.
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B
These people, they're taking us off the rails. And they turned out to be more powerful. And when you get a technological advance, you always get a nostalgic counter reaction. In some ways, the counterreaction is more important than the actual technology itself.
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A
Well, I actually agree with that, which is why so much of my writing is also about community and things like that. The head of Anthropics is in the other room, and I was just listening to him, and he was talking about the power of computing. And this piece on the policy scene actually follows one that I did on AI ethics. And what I said is that the faster, more powerful, more integrated, complex the world gets, the more everything you learned at Sunday school matters more than ever. And asking the head of Anthropic, I said, if you ask me, what's the most dangerous statistic in the world today in your world of AI? And it wasn't anything with chips, it was the Gallup poll that fewer people than ever are going to church because if we're going into a world where we're all much more empowered and all much more interconnected, then what you learned in Sunday school matters more than ever. Starting with do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. But it's even more complicated. If we don't endow those values into this new species we have spawned artificially intelligent being, all hell is gonna break loose. So you're right. I've got a lot more David Brooks in me than you realize. But it comes out. I start in a different place, but as you know, I end in the same place you are. And so that would be my.
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B
Okay, we're going to do a David Brooks exorcist.
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That's right.
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We're going to get rid of any versions of me that are polluting me.
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I'm proud to have a lot of David Brooks.
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B
Okay, let's get to the column. Yeah, so you've got this term, the Palestine. Just give us a summary of what the argument is.
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A
You know, one of the things I wanted to do in this column day was something I've never done, which is that I have some real thought partners around the world. I'm really privileged over the years, and I consider myself an acorn collector. That's what I'm really good at. I see stuff out there, but I'm not smart enough to crack them. And I've developed this set of partners over 40 years who are just so much smarter than me. And we crack acorns together. So two summers ago, I actually was in Aspen and my friend Craig Mundy from Microsoft, former chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, who's been my AI tutor since the world was flat, came and tutored me on AI. He gave me my introductory tutor to AI. What a great thing. Craig's a supercomputer designer and explained to me that the goal of AI was polymathic Artificial General intelligence. That's an artificial brain that's mastered chemistry, biology, physics, baseball, Mozart and the New York Yankees, and can then reason across all of them. I'd never heard that term before. A week later, I get a call from my climate tutor, Johan Rockstrom, talking about polycrisis. I said, well, that's interesting. I've just been with my AI tutor. He's talking about polymathic now you're talking about polycrisis. The idea that the world isn't a binary thing of hot and cold. It's that climate change triggers deforestation, triggers crop loss, triggers internal migration, triggers state collapse, a poly crisis. Anyways, at the same time, I started giving a speech on foreign policy that Secretary of State Blinken started citing. And the speech was. Think about two secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blinken, two Middle East October wars. October 73, October 2023. Henry Kissinger, here was his world. Kissinger to do his job. To put together the first disengagement agreement between Syria, Egypt, Israel needed three dimes. I'm dating myself here. A dime to call Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Islam. A dime to call Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt. A dime to call Hafez Assad, the President of Syria. Three dimes. Kissinger, airplane. Three months. Kissinger magic. And he produced the first disengagement agreements. The diplomatic equivalent, David of tic tac toe. Three across. Fast forward 50 years later. Tony Blinken. Tony Blinken saw double everywhere he went. He had to deal with inside Hamas and outside Hamas, political Hamas and military Hamas, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In Lebanon, he had the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. Syria had the Syrian government, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. In Yemen, he had 18 troops. Tribes. In Iraq, he had 18 militias. And in Israel, he had 18 parties. Tony Blinken wasn't playing tic tac toe. He had a Rubik's Cube. And he was trying to get one color aligned on all sides of the Rubik's Cube. And if you've ever tried that, it's really hard. His world had become incredibly polymorphic and polyamorous. Last example. I'm thinking about the community and the time I grew up, Minneapolis in the 50s, St. Louis Park. Everything was binary then. You're either a man or a woman. You're either white or black. You're either Christian or Jewish. You're either at work or at home. My world was entirely binary. Fast forward to today, my little town, St. Louis Park. The mayor is a Somali woman. The mayor of Saint. New mayor of Saint Paul is a Hmong woman from Laos who defeated an African American guy. And the elementary school around the block from me now has 30 different languages in it, which is 29 more than when I was there. My universe there has exploded into polymorphism. So the net effect of all that is. I came back to Craig and I said, craig, we are not in the Cold War anymore. We are not in the post Cold War. We're not in the post, post Cold War. What do we call this era? And he suggested we called it the poly scene.
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B
Okay, now the New York Times audience wants us to have a long conversation on polyamory, but we're not going to give them that satisfaction. We are both married to women named Anne, and I don't think either of them would like that.
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Exactly. We love our wives.
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But let me challenge you on two things. And it's the same challenge, but it's on different spheres.
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Yes.
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First, on the domestic. And the core of my challenge is that the world. Either it wasn't that simple in the past, as simpler than it is now.
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No question.
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Or that we were in a weird moment that you and I both grow up in.
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Yes.
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And that was just a weird moment.
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Right. Which I've come to believe a lot more, but go ahead, please.
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B
So the domestic, you talked about your childhood in Minneapolis or St. Paul.
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St. Louis Park.
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St. Louis Park. And so I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City. And when I was in fourth grade, we heard a loud boom. And it turned out there was a radical group called the Weathermen who were building bombs in a townhouse right by my school, and they blew themselves up. And New York was so violent in the 1970s, there was a serial castrator who was nicknamed Charlie Chop off, who was castrating kids. And it wasn't even a big story because there was so much chaos. So the simple world. I'm not sure it was that simple.
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A
And I grew up in a different place.
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So it's easy to think the past was simple, but it wasn't that simple. And then on a grander global scale, we both grew up in the Cold War, and it was a world of, you know, great. The binary superpowers. But that was a weird historical moment. And our mutual friend Robert Kagan sometimes suggests we're just going back to the world of great power rivalries. If you're dealing in Thucydides world, in rivalries between Greek city states, it was pretty damn complicated. If you're Machiavelli dealing with the rivalries in Italian city states, pretty damn complicated. If you're Queen Elizabeth trying to balance power in her era, Queen Elizabeth first, pretty damn complicated. And then you go back to the 19th century, Metternich and all those people. Aren't we just gone back to normalcy?
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A
So it's a good question, and I will respond at two different levels. One is that I do believe we grew up, born in 1953, in my case, in this period of incredible income compression and incredible political compression. Okay. That is Minnesota politics. I grew up was very binary and very, very moderate. Okay. So I think we did grow up in a unique time. But here's where I would push back on you, Dave. It's true what you said about Queen Elizabeth and all of those things, but wasn't true that individuals in Queen Elizabeth's time had a phone that could reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before, and could call in an airstrike in their backyard or develop a weapon, a drone, that could actually threaten Queen Elizabeth's army. The new, new thing to me today, which is the basis of the Polycene, is the degree to which the world had become sharded. And it's become sharded because each individual now has a tool to express their voice and express their power like never before. And we're all connected. And it's that combination of sharding, empowerment and connectivity that I really think is new, even from the age Bob Kagan is talking about.
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B
Right, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, let me try my theory of where we are today, because I think it'll. I want to understand how it fits within yours. I think it does, but I haven't connected the dots. So my theory is that you go through historical tides and there's something will sweep over at least Western history and maybe global history, where a lot of countries are affected by the same ideas all at once. And so in the 1770s, the 1780s, you have the democratic tide. You have the American Revolution, the French Revolution, John Locke, and the ideas that bubble up to the democratic revolutions of 1848. Then around early 20th century, you have a totalitarian tide. You get the Russian Revolution, you get the Nazis, you get the Chinese Revolution. And people believed in that. Democracy was inefficient. We can. We have scientific means to manage society, and we're gonna do it from the top. And they try that. Good luck to you. Then in the 1980s, you had the liberal tide, you had Margaret Thatcher, you had Ronald Reagan in China, you had Deng Xiaoping, you had Mikhail Gorbachev. And liberalism seemed to be the wave. Since 2013 or so, we've lived in the global populist tide. And you get Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, I don't need to tell you, the AfD and Nigel Farage, Latin America, I mean, it's just everywhere. Japan, South Korea, they have versions of it. And so how does the policy. And I think the global populist tide has been caused by a rejection of elites, a loss of faith in societies, and a sense that a lot of people feel they're not respected in Nazi. And so my explanation is, as you'd expect, cultural has an economic element. I think it's a class revolt, among other things. But so how do we fit these two stories together?
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So, as you said, we're going to end up in the same place. I think we're here for our third Civil War, David.
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It's cheerful.
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Yeah, exactly. So let me start with what is a bedrock thing in my identity. I think it's in yours, too. For me, human beings are driven by the two most powerful emotions. Driving human beings are one, humiliation and dignity. The quest for dignity and the revulsion of humiliation. That's why I changed my business card back in 2015 from New York Times foreign affairs columnist to New York Times humiliation and Dignity columnist, because I felt that's really what I was covering, whether it's about China or Russia or Palestinians or anything else. But the second thing, the second most powerful human emotion, I believe, is home. It's a quest for home to be anchored in the world, as my friend Andy Karzner describes it, to be anchored in a community where people are connected, protected, and respected. Best definition of home I've ever heard. Okay, so I believe we have had three civil wars, basically, over home. The first was, I can't feel at home if I'm a Southerner and I can't enslave a black person. And I can't feel at home if I'm a Northerner, and you are enslaving a black person. So it was a struggle over who gets to belong and be home in this world. Second, one 1960s civil rights movement was about the failed reconstruction and the fact that we didn't deliver on the promise of liberty for all. I think we're in our third Civil War now. Only it's not just about race. It's about what I call race, pace, and price. Okay, first of all, it's again, about race, only in a very different way. Now it's, I don't feel at home in a minority majority country where I, as a white person. This is what some argue, don't feel at home. Where the mayor of St. Paul is among refugees, okay, that applies to a certain number of people. The second is about the sheer pace of change. The fact that about 20 years ago, well, back in the late 70s, my aunt and uncle grew up in a small town in Minnesota, Wilmer, Minnesota. And I visited Wilmer for 50 years. One day around 1975, my aunt comes to a family event in Minneapolis. She pulls me aside and says, tom, I have to tell you, I was in the grocery store on Saturday and I heard someone speaking Spanish. I heard someone speaking Spanish. It was her first encounter with the other, and she Never forgot it, and I never forgot it. And today, Wilmer, Minnesota, is roughly a third people of color. That's how fast the pace of change of who belongs here in terms of ethnic identity. Then they went to work and their boss rolled up a robot over their shoulder, and it seemed to be studying their job. So people's sense of home, people's sense of cultural norms, which are what anchored you at home, and people's sense of work, which also anchors you at home, all got disrupted. That was pace. The last is price. There's a whole generation that can't afford a home anymore to get anchored in the world, to be connected, protected, and respected. So our civil war right now, our third civil war, I believe, is about identity, belonging, and a place called home. And I think it's going on all over the world. You know, Ben gvir, the leader of the Nationalist Front in Israel, Nationalist group in Israel. His ads in the last campaign where he just bought a side of eged buses, the main buses in Israel, and all it said was, who is the landlord here who gets to be at home? Along comes a guy, a political genius in his own way named Donald Trump and says, I have a metaphor that can cut across all three of these lines, and it's called a wall. I'm gonna build a wall against those people who don't make you feel at home in your own home. I'm gonna build a wall against the pace of change of those things at home in your own fold, and I'm going to bring down the walls to home ownership. The last he's failed to do, but et cetera. So that's kind of how I think we meet somewhere in a very core way, because again, these quests for humiliation and dignity and a place called home, I think matter more than ever. Which is why I say Dorothy got it exactly right. There's no place like home. Yeah.
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B
The great Brooks Friedman. Confluence has indeed happened. I agree with you completely.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But it's easy for people like me. I'll just speak for myself. Who believe in progress.
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Yes.
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And who basically believe a lot of these inventions, including AI, are wonderful and more positive than negative, to be condescending toward those who we would call reactionary. And so how do we not make it seem like they're the backward, primitive, intransigent ones and we're the modern, enlightened, pluralistic ones?
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A
David, remember I was a little Jewish kid from Minnesota who wanted to cover the Arab Muslim world in the 70s. Not a natural thing. Okay. And my secret for survival was to Learn to be a good listener. Because I discovered two things happen when you listen. What is what you learn when you listen? Because all the stories I got wrong were because I was yapping when I should have been listening. But much more important is what you say when you listen. Because listening is a sign of respect. And what I learned was if I just listened to people, and I mean deep listening now, not just waiting for them to stop talking, it was amazing what they would let me say to and about them. So I could go into a room with 30 young Arab students and they got my columns printed out, some things on Israel, they're ready to carve me up. You spend an hour listening to them, and at the end of the hour, everyone's got their cell phone out and they want a picture with you. Because so many people are just starved to be respected and heard. And so that became my survival mechanism. As you know, I'm not out there saying, you're all great, you're all wonderful, it's all the other guy's fault. I'm in everybody's face. But I will listen. And I do it both because not to get things wrong, but much more importantly because that's what unlocks a conversation, and it all goes back to respect.
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B
Yeah. There's a great book I recommend to our listeners called Crucial Conversations by a whole bunch of authors. The lead one, or at least one of them, is a guy named Joseph Grenny. And in that book, they have a sentence. In any conversation, respect is like air. When it's present, nobody notices. When it's absen all anybody can think about.
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A
Oh, I love that.
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B
And I just think that is profoundly true. Now, there are two topics I want to cover that are implicit in your column. And one is A.I. yeah, I guess in the next room we have the CEO of Anthropic.
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A
So it's.
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I'm going to go. Yeah, well, you know, the simple question is. And I don't. I've had trouble understanding this. I use it every day.
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Yes, me too.
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I find it moderately useful. Yeah, I think my physicist friends find it extremely useful. But the stuff we write about is subjective. Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So my question is really, I'm just going to be basic. How big is it and what's it going to do to our governance?
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So I'm in the category of it's the biggest thing ever. And the way I would explain it is a concept that Craig Mundy and I developed. We divide the history of the world into just three basic phases. So the first is the Age of tools. Literally, from the dawn of man to the printing press and humans, we analogize to H2O molecules. So we call it the age of ice age, okay? Cause humans were very separated as H2R molecules are in ice, and they move very slowly. Technology is heat. So we get the printing press, it melts the ice into water. Water begins the age of information. Ideas now flow, people, flow, capital flow. The age of water lasts from the printing press through the computer age. Okay? We are now entering. We got more technology, AI we're entering the age of vapor, okay? And vapor is gonna go into everything, David. It. That's why it's different and why you have to understand it. It's going to go into your glasses, your watch, your toaster, your refrigerator, your car, your microphone, this chair, which will say, God. That question made Tom Friedman really uncomfortable. You know, very soon, AI is going to go into everything. And that's why I just spend a lot of time trying to understand it. But you get overwhelmed by it. So as I, as a journalist think about AI, I just want to focus on one thing. And for me, it's the ethical question. Because if we are going to have a tool that actually is gonna be able to solve probably every problem we have, from energy to biology, okay. But what a tragedy it would be. And this is gonna get right back to where you live if we couldn't get the best out of that tool and cushion the worst. Because we didn't trust each other and we didn't trust the artificial species. We couldn't build trust into that, and we couldn't trust China, our biggest competitor in this. And so it always come back to these core princip. You focus on trust community again, it comes back to Sunday school.
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B
Yeah.
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A
No matter how fast the technology gets.
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B
Now, as you're mentioning all the vapor, I, of course, have a famous sentence running in my head, which comes from world literature. All that is holy is profane. All that is solid melts into air.
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A
And that's one of the most brilliant lines from the Kon Manifesto from Friedrich.
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B
He and Karl Marx. And so a humanist would say vapor is the worst.
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Yeah.
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B
I need spiritual depth. I need intellectual depth. I need to know who my heroes are. I need to be able to read. Read serious books in a slow way. And I need to base my political system on some unchanging principles. And so should we be worried in the world of poly, should be we worried that all the solid is melting into the air and this will turn into a psychologically unsustainable condition for a lot of people.
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A
So my answer is going to be the best question I ever got on book tour. It's 1999. I'm on book tour with Lexus and the Olive Tree. I'm at the Portland Theater in Portland, Oregon. Last question is always the last question that gets you. Young man waving from the balcony says to me, Mr. Friedman, I just have one question. Remember, it's 1999 and this thing called cyberspace has just been invented. And he says, Mr. Friedman, I have a question. Is God in cyberspace? And I said, ah, I have no idea. So it really bothered me. So I called my spiritual teacher. He's a guy named Rabbi TZVI Marks. I got to know him when I was a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute. And I said, zvi, I got this question. What should I have said? And he said, well, Tom, in our faith community, we actually have two concepts of the Almighty. One concept is the Almighty is Almighty. He smites evil and rewards good. And if that's your view of God, he sure ain't in cyberspace, which is full of gambling, cheating, people smearing one another, pornography. But he said, fortunately, we have an alternative concept of the Almighty that God manifests himself by how we behave. So if we want God to be in cyberspace, if we want God to be present, we have to bring him there by how we behave there. You're right back at Sunday school.
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B
Yeah. Okay. Our final topic it's how do we govern the age of the policy? I'll set this up by making an observation that our teams are not doing particularly well. And so I'm probably a little more center right than you.
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A
Just barely, though. But you are. Yeah.
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B
And my team is gone. You're more center left. But I look around the the world at Keir Starmer's government. I look at Macron's government in France. I look at center left governments around the world not doing well. And so how do people like us envision government in the age of the policy?
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A
So, really good question. I think first of all, we have to start with, for me, a bedrock principle from my teacher and friend, Dov Seidman, which is that because of everything that's happened technologically, interdependence is now our condition, not our choice. Technology has climate. They've all communications have made us interdependent. We are either gonna build healthy interdependencies and rise together, or we're gonna build unhealthy interdependencies and fall together. But baby, whatever we're doing going forward, we're doing it together. So I start with that point, which is that every problem now that needs solving is at a planetary scale, governing AI, nuclear weapons, climate, and therefore every solution will have to be at a planetary scale. So I believe that the politics that will work in such a world is really just what I call common sense and common purpose. You know, I'll tell you, if I were running for office now as a Democrat or a moderate Republican, I'd be running on common sense solutions, but also national unity, because nothing can happen without it. I had a funny experience, David. My lecture agent, like a year ago called me and said, you have a lecture offer from Pittsburgh State University. And I said, oh, that sounds interesting. Please sign them up. They go down there, lovely people, lovely students. But at the end, they ask a professor to interview me. I don't remember what question he asked me to. I just remember my answer. My answer was, donald Trump says his favorite word is tariffs. My favorite word is public. Public schools, public libraries, public parks, public service, public health, public places. And I got the loudest ovation of the night. I am telling you, the hidden secret in America today is how much people do not like what Donald Trump is doing in tearing us apart. Yes. There are people on the far left who love it. They feed on it. People on the far right who are tweeting it out. And in the middle is a huge number of people who want us back on our journey of making out of many, one.
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B
Yeah, but then you have a nice riff in the column about and better what is it and or.
- [28:35]
A
I'm not an either or person. I'm a both and person both and. And that's cause the way I grew up, I grew up in a time where politics works. So that's been in Minnesota. And that's to say I'm immigration. I've said this all along. I'm for a really high wall. A country has got to control its borders with a very big gate. Okay. Cause I still want immigration. I'm for better police and more police. I'm for growing the pie and redividing the pie. I'm for all kinds of energy as long as they're tending toward clean. And David, it's not because I can't make up my mind. It's cause I have made up my mind. It's a synthesis between them, which is real, where the real solutions and energy is. So I'm a both and person. And I think you are center right, I'm center left. I think the country is two thirds both and. And the politicians who figure that out, I think are gonna do really well going forward.
- [29:22]
B
Yeah. The counterview would be a more tragic view of history. And this would be. One of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin.
- [29:27]
A
Yes.
- [29:28]
B
By the way, he once said he considers himself on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency, but one of his core ideas is pluralism. But the idea that ideas don't fit together.
- [29:37]
A
Yes.
- [29:37]
B
That there are inevitably tensions and trade offs between liberty and equality, between freedom and order, between coherence, cultural coherence and diversity. And you just have to make trade offs. They do not fit together. There's no both. And yes, you've just got it. You're dial. You've got to dial it a little more on diversity, a little more on order. And we probably, as societies have gotten a little over on the pluralism side. And a lot of people are saying dial that back a little.
- [30:03]
A
Yes.
- [30:04]
B
And if we did our politics, I.
- [30:05]
A
Think that is both and I think it's not either or. We're not going to stay out in the far right or far left.
- [30:10]
B
So we'll close with this. Are we getting out of this? I guess this is the number one question I get asked.
- [30:16]
A
So I am a struggle with myself, David. Every morning now I get up and I say, today's the day I write the column, folks, we're not going to make it. If we stay on this trajectory where this administration has taken us, and it's not just the problem of this administration, but it is a big part of the problem. Three more years of this, we're not gonna make it. Cause I do live by the bedrock view which a very, very senior Republican former president who will go unnamed, I heard say fairly recently. We can survive anything, David, as long as our institutions survive basically intact. But if we lose our institutions, the courts, the FBI, the police, what I call the beautiful state, not the deep state, the ability to rebuild out of this is going to be extremely difficult. So the optimist in me wants to believe the institutions will hold, but that's what I'm watching most closely.
- [31:11]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. And given that there's only one former Republican president living, I think I can guess who your source is.
- [31:19]
A
No comment.
- [31:20]
B
But it's been a pleasure talking. We should do this more often. I would love Tom Friedman. The column was on the policy and you can go back and look it up in the New York Times. Thanks so much for listening.
- [31:31]
A
Thanks, David. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski, and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.