Is Radicalism the Answer?

As we enter the midterm elections, Americans seem increasingly ready to move on from the Trump era, but there remains great disagreement about what should come next and how we might achieve it. Intellectual historian and law professor Samuel Moyn is among those who believe that liberals have become too timid about driving social, political, and economic change. If the Trump era was in part a response to the failures of centrist moderation, as Moyn suggests, then we may need something more radical to get us out of it. David Brooks is one of those centrist moderates, chastened by the many examples when radical change has led to tragic outcomes—including the example of Trump himself. In this week’s episode, David and Moyn discuss emancipation, fallibility, and the disagreement beneath the disagreement. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Raffman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00David Brooks?

  People are fed up. They're sick of the establishment and the people who've been running things. They want change, and they want change now. When people like me are in the middle of this kind of emotional climate, all our alarm bells start going off. We're all the product of our times, and I grew up in the age of the Cold War. It was an age when all sorts of exhilarating beginnings led to blood-drenched culminations. The lesson I drew from all this is that moving fast and breaking things is not the way to go. I became suspicious of people who wanted to burn everything to the ground and start over. I became, in other words, a moderate, the kind of guy who favors constant but incremental reform. But let's face it, the moderates of the center-right and the center-left have

• 1:43David Brooks?

  not exactly produced heaven on earth. Instead, problems ranging from climate change, inequality, the federal debt have just festered. So maybe something more radical is needed. That's why I'm here to talk to Sam Moin. Sam teaches at the law school here at Yale, but in his heart, he's an intellectual historian. He writes and thinks about the ideas behind our politics. Now, Sam and I are both liberals. We're both members of the intellectual tradition that values democracy, individual freedom, and the free exchange of ideas. We oppose the authoritarianism that seems to be creeping in from both right and left. But Sam and I are different flavors of liberals. I'm the more moderate kind, chastened by the scars of history, cautious about instant radical change, and more inclined to steady reform.

• 2:28David Brooks?

  So I'm curious to know which of us is right about the current moment. Is it me, the incrementalist, or is it Sam, who's a little more transformational? That's why I'm pleased to welcome Sam Moin to the permanent questions.

• 2:42David Brooks?

  Welcome to the permanent questions.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:44David Brooks?

  Oh, it's a pleasure. So I've been reminding people that you and I are both liberals. We both share the same broad philosophy, but I think we have different flavors of liberalism, and I want to get into that. So I thought I'd spend like a few minutes just describing where my world comes from, and then I'm going to ask you where your world comes from. So I was a democratic socialist in college. I was a revolutionary. I would have been with Bernie and Zoran and all those people. And I was assigned a book called The Reflections in the Revolution in France by this guy Edmund Burke. And he was like, "The world's really complicated. You should be careful about what you think you can change, and therefore move incrementally, gradually, slowly, constantly, but incrementally." And

• 3:27David Brooks?

  I hated that book. And I wrote a whole bunch of papers. What an idiot this guy Edmund Burke was. So then I go out in the world, and I work on the south and west side of Chicago as a journalist. And two of the places I cover are housing projects called Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. And they were designed by planners and, you know, Chicago sociologists. They tore down the old neighborhoods. They put up these high-rises. And they didn't bother to talk to the people in the neighborhoods. And then, when they tore down all those, what they thought were rickety old buildings, they tore out the systems of social support the neighbors had built for themselves. And so by the time I got there, they were hellscapes.

• 4:09David Brooks?

  Crime, gangs had taken over. They'd made life worse for the people in those neighborhoods. And I'm like, "Holy crap, that guy Edmund Burke. He might have been right." And conservatism in the Burkean sense, or as I would call it for the sake of our conversation, moderation, is basically based on two ideas, in my view. One, social change is really hard, and you could be wrong. Therefore, you should move incrementally so you can adjust. So I go off into my journalism career, and one of the best things I ever covered in my life was the end of the Soviet Union. And I'm there one day in Moscow, and Boris Yeltsin, who was the democratically-elected president of Russia, the old Soviet regime, as a last-gasp

• 4:53David Brooks?

  effort to stay alive, staged a coup. All these tanks rolled into Moscow, and I interviewed a woman in that crowd, a 93-year-old lady named Valentina Kosceva. And I asked her about her life, and she'd nearly been executed by the Reds in the civil war after the revolution in 1917. Every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her. Now, the final story I'll tell is I was covering the Middle East about the same time, in the 90s, mid 90s. And I'm at the home of Shimon Peres, who was prime minister there. And it was a big celebratory dinner with about like 50 or 60 people. And I'd say 40% of them were Palestinian negotiators on the Oslo peace process. 40% of them were Israeli

• 5:34David Brooks?

  negotiators, and the other 20% were people like me, like pundits and scholars. And the atmosphere in that room was so warm, because these men, mostly men, had been through years of negotiation, and they thought they had crossed the line, and we were going to have a two-state solution. We're going to have peace. It was a time, people forget, if you lived in Gaza, you could fly on a Palestinian airline to a Palestinian airport, holding a Palestinian passport. And we were on our way to nationhood. And the Yasser Araf had vetoed the deal. And in the ensuing years, the moderates who were doing the Oslo peace process got displaced by extremists of both the Israeli side, the thugs who are settlers,

• 6:16David Brooks?

  and then the Hamas thugs. And basically, theocratic fascism took over on both sides. And so, these experiences confirmed in me the idea that I'm a moderate. I believe in slow and incremental change, because you could be wrong. So that's my story. That's how I came to believe what I believe.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Well, I've just had a much less interesting life than you, it sounds like. I love that we're starting with thinking about ourselves as different kinds of liberal, because I think a lot of folks who know about both of us would say neither of us is a liberal. You're a conservative, and I'm a leftist. But from my youth, I was impressed by liberalism as something that could emancipate people. Starting with myself, I mean, I'm from Missouri. My father was an aircraft mechanic, and my mother was a kindergarten teacher. And I went to public schools. And then I went to university locally, and I read books that

• 7:20Speaker 03

  basically said, "Modern times is about a new chance for human beings. Who's been in charge?" Maybe they were moderates, but mainly patriarchs, priests, presidents. And they told everyone what to do and what not to do. And then something changed. And more people than ever got a chance to come from nothing and go wherever their dreams might take them. Now, I was a child of the 90s. I'm slightly younger than you, and I went to university in 1990. And of course, that was the end of history. And there were a

• 8:01Speaker 03

  lot of ideas about how simple it would be to realize universal freedom and equality, not just in this country, but on a global scale. And part of that was the idea that there'd be some simple process to get old, warring Israelis and Palestinians in the same room and to agree to stuff. And all of that proved really short-sighted. And we could go back and think about, what did people get wrong in the 90s? Because I agree, there was a lot. I'm with you that we need a certain amount of caution. I mean, I'd call it fallibilism, and everyone ought to be a fallibilist, like, I might be wrong about stuff. But that can't

• 8:44Speaker 03

  mean, if we're liberals, that we give up on emancipation. You know, we keep our eyes on the prize, and then we have a pettier debate about, well, what's the right way to get it? I mean, I think a lot of people, and you kind of narrated this, were impressed even before the 90s by a kind of neoconservative view that the state can mess up, and maybe we ought not to be as interventionist as we once, you know, thought. The trouble is, and this was something liberals have thought all the way back, is that you can also suffer from not enough intervention, because it's not as if getting rid of the state leaves

• 9:25Speaker 03

  everyone free and equal. That's the kind of libertarian view, not the liberal view. And so, I think we're in a moment when many of us are appreciating something I've long believed in, since I was a democratic socialist, more or less from the beginning, and never changed my mind, which is that sometimes we need to correct the state and keep it at bay, but sometimes we need more of it, because there are other sources of oppression than the state.

• 9:50David Brooks?

  You use that word emancipation. I want to ask you, like, what do you mean by that?

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think the great thing about liberalism is that it promised emancipation, and it's why I'm a liberal. And some people would say it was only the first philosophy of emancipation in modern times, because there was a second that came along, socialism. And you already talked about the dark side of socialism. But actually, liberals helped invent socialism. So maybe there was only just one framework for emancipation. It was this liberal one that said, "We had too much authority and oppression in the past, and we should lift that oppression so that more people and more ways can live the lives they

• 10:34Speaker 03

  choose." And so, emancipation just means you don't have to do what those authorities say. You get to decide.

• 10:42David Brooks?

  As you're trying to advance the cause of emancipation, how do you think about the epistemological problem? Epistemology is a fancy word for how we know things, basically. James C. Scott wrote a book called Seeing Like a State, which had a huge influence on me. And it's about why a lot of international development projects fail. And he tells a story in there that symbolized, I think, his whole worldview, which is, there were these German guys who wanted to improve the efficiency of their timber industry. So what they did is they looked at the forest, and they said, "Well, there are these nice trees we can use. And there's all this other crap called underbrush. What's this crap doing here? Let's clear it out, and let's plant our trees in straight rows so it'll be efficient."

• 11:27David Brooks?

  And it worked for a few years and then the trees started dying and because they were German, they invented some new word for forest death. And so the problem was the underbrush was not just crap. It was stuff necessary for the survival of the forest. And so Scott's point of view is that planners, in order to plan for the future, have to simplify reality to make it legible to them. And when they simplify reality, they end up cutting out stuff that's essential that if you don't see it, it's going to ruin your plans. So as you're doing action, like, how do you think about that, Rob?

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's a balance of risks. I mean, I totally accept that view, that there can be mistakes that people make. And they might not be aware of just how much wisdom there is accumulated over time. And that no planner could kind of reproduce that on the fly, especially if it's just one person or a small elite. And so these are views that do come from Burke and they were revived very famously by neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek. But I guess the trouble is that tradition's a mixed bag.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  And what we've accumulated could be a lot of mistakes. I mean, I know we both love an even older thinker, Aristotle. And he said things like, well, tradition is often old people repeating the same mistakes. And so we need some winnowing process. I think you'd have to agree with this, especially if we're fallibleists. We have to say, well, tradition can be wrong. And once in a while, the planners could sweep away something that needed to be swept away. And so I hope that there could be, you know, just a kind of care in our relation to the authority, we assume in the present, to make changes, maybe even big changes.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  A lot of oppression needed to be swept away. I mean, surely the fact that old men ruled for all those millennia, men ruled over women, fathers over children, didn't deserve the deference that you're, you know, suggesting we give it because it was oppressive. And so we have to sweep away some stuff. And then we're in a like, you know, little debate about, well, how do we know when? When do we take the risk that we might clear out something valuable along the way? And I just say, maybe we probably differ in not on that, really more that I think we should have more self-confidence to sweep more stuff away sooner.

• 14:11David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  And, you know, you want to maybe defer more often to the status quo. And, you know, we could each be right some of the time, it would depend. But if we're going to be liberals, at the end of the day, what we care about is not the continuity of our traditions, but whether people are free.

• 14:31David Brooks?

  Even I would admit moderation doesn't work when the situation is fundamentally oppressive.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:38David Brooks?

  So on race in America, I'm not a moderate. But I would say, I understand that radicals shift the Overton window and make it possible for moderates to come in and do things. And that would be a division of labor I could live with because I'm really suspicious of concentrated power, like our founders. And to do change, you have to have concentrated power to some degree.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:01David Brooks?

  And our founders, like, you do that? And John Adams was like, no, people turn into, first of all, they get corrupted by power. And in the second case, power attracts psychopaths. And this is literally what I saw in the Soviet Union. All the democratic revolutionaries, they were the first one to get the guillotine. And I literally ran into gangsters who were running every place I went, Smolensk, wherever you went. And so the problem of execution is still a problem of execution, even in a case where you think, oh, wow, you know, the civil rights movement had to happen, the civil rights movement had to happen. You've still got the problem of power. So how do you think about that concentrated power?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Well, I agree. I think maybe I worry that we shouldn't obsess just about state power. We agree that, you know, apartheid was bad, whatever country it was in. And so if there were formal arrangements, like laws, Jim Crow in our country that said there's enforced hierarchy, we both agree we need to get radical and sweep it away. The question is what comes next? And after reconstruction in our country, you know, Jim Crow was put in place, but even more, what was put in place was the authority of whites over blacks in private arrangements,

• 16:21Speaker 03

  including in the economy. And there are so many examples of this. If we don't like the Soviet Union, and I don't either, just to be absolutely clear, what if we end up with oppressors in the market? Elon Musk, is he someone who wields a lot of power over not just the two of us, but millions? Absolutely. Was he ever elected? No. Would it be a terrible thing? And he would agree with this, if we had a Soviet tyranny that, you know, Zoran Mamdani or anyone else instituted in this country? Absolutely.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  But just getting rid of state oppression leaves us with all the other oppression. And I think liberals, over modern times, learn mainly to insist that state oppression isn't the only kind. And one of the best things that happened in the history of liberalism was that they learned that markets could breed new hierarchies and oppression. And if that's not clear right now, when we're in a second gilded age with extraordinary inequalities, the likes of which didn't exist in our lifetimes until the present moment, then I guess I don't know what you mean by anti-authoritarianism.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Because if we're consistently anti-authoritarian and hate the oppressors of the world, then we should hate them when they run states and they're crackpots and madmen, and when they run businesses and tell us what to do in the workplace, and lord, their ill-gotten gains over us, because that's hierarchy too.

• 18:07David Brooks?

  When you mention Elon Musk, I instinctively feel, yeah, those guys have too much power. But on the other hand, when I think of Elon Musk, well, I can buy a Tesla or I can not buy a Tesla.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:17David Brooks?

  I can be involved somehow by SpaceX or not be involved, and Neuralink, or even X, which is the most addictive of them.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:24David Brooks?

  So what does emancipation from Elon Musk look like?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Well, I think it could involve constraints on market power. Yeah, I mean, of course, you're absolutely right, then in some very abstract sense, a market is a place you voluntarily participate. But that's really not true, because for the mass of human beings, they're forced into the market and they don't have a lot of market power. And they can't negotiate for a wage, they can't argue over the price of eggs, they just have to accept it. And when it comes to tech bros, I mean, you can say, well, I don't have to have an iPhone in my back pocket, but you and I both do, and everyone does, even some of the poorest among us.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  So we're all hostage to these hierarchies in real life. And then the question is, what do we do about it? And I see two, you know, very broad solutions. One is to constrain the powerful and one is to empower the weak. And I think we should do a little of both. But that would have to take place by messing with our economy, using the state, with all the risks it entails and all the caution, I think you're right to say we should exercise. But the alternative would be doing nothing and leaving the powerful in charge of our lives.

• 19:44David Brooks?

  Let me ask you a question about human nature. So one of my favorite sayings from Immanuel Kant is, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing is made." I'm in the crooked timber school. Are you less in the crooked timber school than me, or how do you view human nature?

• 19:59Speaker 03

  I think it's malleable, or that's the hope. You know, around the time of Kant, there was the French Revolution, which we can get into. And, you know, one of, one famous episode in that period is when someone asks, like, what human nature is, and the response comes, whatever we choose to make it. And I can see how that would be absolutely bone chilling to you, because that would presume that there's some, you know, single person or, you know, tiny elite that could just decree, you know, some experiment on all of us. On the other hand, we know that almost everything about us is produced by our environment.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  I think there are some, you know, enduring features that we're ultimately animals. Aristotle understood that, modern biologists insist on it. But as far as I can see, the way societies organize changes the, what people think and how they act, more or less completely. And so I would have to be, you know, in contrast to you in the school of thought that says, well, we have to run an experiment, we're running one now, about who we're going to be individually and collectively. And then the question is, what's a better experiment than the one we're running now?

• 21:30Speaker 00

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pescek and Anna Rappman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:32David Brooks?

  This is why ideas really matter, why I really love intellectual history, because you just said something that did chill my bones, which was that human nature is what we can make it. And I associate that belief, fairly or not, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Is that a fair belief?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, fair, very fair.

• 22:47David Brooks?

  And so Rousseau was sort of an inspiration for the French Revolution, and my guy Burke was a fierce critic of the French Revolution. So we're getting at it. And so I'm a Burkean, well, because I think the Burkean view of human nature, which I take to be the biblical view as well, is that we are not blank sites. We have certain innate weaknesses for libido dominande, the urge to dominate, resentment, fear, anger. We're built, those things are built in here. On the other hand, every human I've ever met has certain desires for goods. We want to belong. We want love and friendship. We want respect. We want to be admired by the people whose admiration is worth having. We want meaning. Every person I've ever met

• 23:29David Brooks?

  wants to lead a life of significance and meaning. We want competence. You look at a kid out on the playground just learning the skateboard, they want to get better at the skateboard. And so these, to me, are inborn elements of human nature. And you've just got to respect it. And so you've got to understand the sins that people have and also the blessings they offer. That really constrains how you think society could be ordered. I'm a believer the American Revolution was a way more successful revolution because the people who did it had an acute awareness of sin. And they were like, we're not going to start over. And they were rich landowners, a lot of them. And so they said, we're just going to change the political order, but the social order, that's too deep. And we're

• 24:11David Brooks?

  going to live out of the traditions of British rule. They thought they were extending those traditions, not breaking from them. And the French Revolution, on the other hand, they wiped everything out from the beginning. And as a result, they soon got a reign of terror. Edmund Burke said, you know what's going to happen? They're going to fall into anarchy, and they're going to go for a strong man. And a couple decades later comes Napoleon. And so that's my telling of that period in the late 18th century. What's your telling?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Well, first, I want to say that, you know, I get why one would have a bias for a fixed view of human nature. The reason I don't share it is that when we look back at all those centuries and millennia of oppression, the same idea of a fixed human nature was the rationale for the oppression. Why could women, whom you said you thought it was great that they got the vote not that long ago, why did they have to suffer under patriarchy all of that time? Well, because of the way men are and the way women are and so forth. And that was definitely a rationale for chattel slavery, because

• 25:23Speaker 03

  there were claims about the way white people are and the way black people are. And so I come with a kind of default skepticism about such claims, because they need to be stress tested. And what's significant about modern history, and this would include American history, not just the French Revolution, is that some people stood up and said, what if we checked how much oppression we absolutely require because of an enduring human nature? And the answer, on both sides of the Atlantic, was a lot less than people from millennia had thought.

• 25:59David Brooks?

  Before we get to the revolution, I want to get to that, but I want to, just on this human nature question, if you measure the capacities of men and women, of whites and blacks, you see that the idea that one is mentally or otherwise inferior is just wrong. And so that was a stress test. But if you stress test the idea that human beings all have a urge to dominate, I don't quote Michel Foucault very often, but he said that we all have a little inner fascist inside. And that's the one thing with Foucault I agree with. And so that's actually proved by rigorous intellectual work. And so to use error to disprove truth is not a good extension of what we learn from error.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Fair enough, but you know, we're in an ongoing experiment. And in my way of thinking, you know, like, for most of the history we know about, oppression was the rule and freedom rare. And then we tweaked a few things. And it seems like your view is basically, that was a long time ago and we're done. And my view would be, well, wait, we just got started just a few days ago. I mean, when did women even enter the workforce? Do we have a racial, you know, income and wealth gap right now, even though we've abolished formal apartheid? So even on race and gender, it seems like early days. And then there are a lot of other things like class that we could get into. On the French Revolution,

• 27:28Speaker 03

  I mean, obviously, it didn't go perfectly. But just if we compare, the American Revolution appears to be some very principled ideas in the name of a tax revolt that retained slavery, does nothing to challenge a lot of other kinds of inequalities. I think America lucked out, because it didn't have the same kind of old regime to overthrow. The revolution took place very far away from pretty much all the other powerful states. Compare the French Revolution, which was much more radical, but part of that was a good thing. I mean,

• 28:12Speaker 03

  it birthed the first ideas that women should be equal. Olemp de Gouges very famously propounded a Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizen. Jews were emancipated, you know, from one day to the next. And they had an old regime to face down, which had formally assigned people to second-class citizenship. And they thought that had to be swept away. Mistakes were made, but in fairness, the whole rest of Europe declared war on the French revolutionaries. And that's because it was an existential threat to the monarchy that prevailed everywhere. So America had this backwater good fortune to start something.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  It set up a time bomb that later went off in the 1860s. Many of the ideas in the French Revolution lit the world on fire. Would we have a decolonized world without the French Revolution? Because that was really the model for humanity under empire the world over. So I don't know. I wouldn't idolize either the American or French Revolution, but I also think it's a mistake to say, well, the American Revolution was the good one, because what about the slaves? What about the women, et cetera?

• 29:33David Brooks?

  Well, I have a shallow question. The shallow question is, there's a magazine in America now called The Jacobin. And I don't know if you've ever written for The Jacobin.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  I have. It's just Jacobin.

• 29:43David Brooks?

  Jacobin, oh, not The Jacobin. So, so like, the Jacobins were the people who ran the reign of terror and did all the guillotining. I think they killed like 12,000 people. Like, why would you name your magazine The Jacobin? Like, it's like a finger in your eye. It's like conservatives saying, oh, we're going to call our magazine the Gestapo. It's like some sort of gaslighting or something. So that's my shallow question. And just what it says about the modern left.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  It gets us into this really, in a sense, disturbing and exciting feature of our time, which is that a lot of people have concluded that the centrist moderates, and you've kind of self-IDed in that direction, that they've failed. And you're seeing, you know, new radicalisms on both ends of the political spectrum. Now, Jacobin, okay. First of all, the Jacobins did a lot of different things. They'd killed some people, but the American revolutionaries expelled tens of thousands of loyalists. And some people died in the American Revolution, not just combatants. But sure, there were some mistakes made.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  I think, you know, if you were to survey the writers and readers of Jacobin, it's just some socialists, mostly democratic socialists. There might be some communists in the mix there, but there are always going to be fringe ideas. But it is super interesting that what in the Cold War would have been a kind of, you know, death knell for a publication to name it after terrorism, became possible in our time. But that's just a testament to the failure of centrism. You know, maybe after the 90s, my defining political experience was in 2016, when I brought my young daughters, young at that time, up to New Hampshire from Cambridge, Mass, where I was living. And I got them to canvas for Bernie with me.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  And almost everyone we met said, I'm voting for Bernie or Trump. I just can't decide which. And that's why I wasn't shocked that badly later on in that year when Trump won. I mean, I was as blindsided as everyone else, but it was an amazing thing because it showed just the appetite out there for new ideas. And if they weren't going to come from the left, they were going to come from the right. Now, the populists in American history have been very hard to locate on the political spectrum. Thomas Jefferson, 1800, Andrew Jackson, above all FDR, who was the most popular politician

• 32:18Speaker 03

  in the 20th century, won the most crushing elections, the candidate of the white working man, just like Donald Trump later. Well, many people would insist that Roosevelt was on the left and would have, would not be sure what to say about Jackson and Jefferson. And certainly, they've been seen as kind of champions of, of the kind of working, working people. We could have had a contest of Bernie versus Trump in 2016, in which it would have been populist against populist. We may need a counter populism of the left in order to finally get what centrists like you say they want, which is finally to contain Donald Trump after decades of betrayal, when

• 33:03Speaker 03

  these, you know, working people became so incensed about kind of, you know, business as usual.

• 33:09David Brooks?

  We have different diagnoses of how the establishment screwed up.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:13David Brooks?

  And who the establishment is, maybe. So a lot of people would look at me, New York Times, The Atlantic, Yale.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  You are the establishment.

• 33:20David Brooks?

  I am the establishment. I don't deny that.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:24David Brooks?

  But I'm disgusted with the establishment. I'm an establishmentarian who's disgusted by the establishment.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:30David Brooks?

  And I, I ask myself this question. Back in, say, the post-war era.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:36David Brooks?

  The establishment was just a bunch of white guys. And you or I would not have had much chance of entering it, let alone women, blacks, like a zillion other people. And yet, that establishment created the post-war international order, created the World Bank, created NATO, the Marshall Plan. And then, in the 60s and 50s, really, starting, we made life more fair. And people like you and I had a better shot, and lots of other people had a better shot. And we've got, we've harvested, if I can use the word crudely, so much more talent in our society. And we have more talent in this country than ever before. And so, our establishment gets in, we're the best and the brightest, we're so smart,

• 34:21David Brooks?

  we get into Yale and University of Chicago. And what do we get? Vietnam, Watergate, the financial crisis, Iraq. I'm not sure any of our institutions are actually working better than they were when the talent pool was like this. And so, why is that? And the story I would tell is, those old white guys had a lot of problems, and I would find them repugnant to be around in many ways. But they tried not to be insular. And they had a sense of, I'm going to serve in the military and get to know my fellow Americans, and I'm going to have a sense of noblesse a liege, what I owe to the country. And George H. W. Bush would be the model of that.

• 35:01David Brooks?

  And I would say the current establishment, and I'm a part, and I think you are too, we are insular, cocooned. We've rigged the college admissions game, so our kids have huge advantages to get in. We've rigged the media.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:18David Brooks?

  So if they're of the, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, CBS, all the mainstream organizations, somebody did a study, 55% of the employees, editorial employees, went to the same 32 elite schools. There are no Trump people in the mainstream media. There are no Trump people in the cultural powers. There are none in the main, big nonprofits. And so, a lot of people look at what this establishment done and said, these people have rigged the game, they look down on me, in fact, they don't even know I'm there, and they're incompetent to boot. And so, that's my story. And it's not a story that the problem is necessarily the corporate elite, it's the whole professional elite has sort of divorced themselves from our society.

• 36:01David Brooks?

  And that's not a left-right problem, frankly. It's an educated class, non-educated class problem. Do you share that basic diagnosis, or is your diagnosis a little different?

• 36:10Speaker 03

  I, I share a lot of it. You know, one of, again, my formative experiences, same year, in 2016, was going to a Harvard cocktail party of faculty after Trump won. And I, I remember vividly the contempt. One person in particular, I won't name her, expressed towards basically everyone I grew up with. And actually, you know, proposed that it would be better if the enlightened elites who had more power on the coast just seceded from the country and then abandoned, you know, the red states to their fate.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  And I remember feeling viscerally, you know, furious because, like, what about everyone I know? And what about me? I mean, I, I feel like I had so many opportunities that people I knew in Missouri didn't get or take advantage of. But if I'd been in a different country, I've had, have to live a completely different life. So I do agree that our elites have failed, especially in the kind of culture of meritocracy we've created. When the, the receipts show that, like, these very best and brightest have done a pretty poor job.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  And that's been true for a while.

• 37:37David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  But it's also true that it's, it's not either or. There is an elite that's a class elite, and a lot of people are upset in their jobs, and they're facing the affordability crisis that, you know, now liberals and conservatives insist that we talk about. I would have said that the biggest mistakes elites have made, if we're going to kind of do the hit list, would be too many wars that failed. You supported some of those.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  And too much economic liberalism without, you know, sticking to political liberalism and, and the kind of emancipatory perspective, I'm, I'm championing in this conversation. And the effect of that was that what had made America great, which was a kind of managed capitalism that spread the wealth fairly, got destroyed in favor of what we call the neoliberal era. And that just has meant stagnation, not just in an affordability crisis lately, but since the 1970s, for a lot of people.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  And I think Donald Trump's just the revenge of ordinary people against those two biggest mistakes. Now, I agree totally that they then went on to see that the real winners were not just traditional elites, but those meritocratic elites who did happen to get into Yale and just departed from the American experiment in the name of living in their own bubble. And so, I agree with that part, but it can't be separated from these other mistakes. And I think the mainstream is completely implicated in those mistakes, too.

• 39:31David Brooks?

  I always say Donald Trump is the, the wrong answer to the right question.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:35David Brooks?

  You mentioned the Iraq war indirectly. This was clearly the most serious mistake I made in, in my intellectual life. And I want to tell you why I made it. And as I've indicated, I was a foreign correspondent in the 90s. And so, I watched the end of the Soviet Union. It really was an evil empire. I watched the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe. Then they sent me to South Africa, and I watched the end of apartheid. Then they sent me to the Middle East, and I thought I was watching Middle East peace. And so, there was all this progress. And you remember that moment? And I thought, why should it just be in Europe and South Africa? Let's, let's do it in the Middle East. And so, I, I would say I betrayed my core belief, which is, change is really hard.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:21David Brooks?

  And it turned out, in my view, the Iraq war showed the Burkean position is the right one, that we had no clue what was going on in there. And we, it was, it was arrogance. It was intellectual arrogance.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 40:34David Brooks?

  And so, would you tell a different story about why the Iraq war went wrong?

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Well, I wouldn't. I think that's very honorable to say that as a Burkean, you kind of, you know, abandon that perspective at that moment, because it was the most, you know, messianic, transformative planned politics that you can imagine, really, in our lifetime, that you would use the state, precisely the state, to transform the world. And yet, the, the liberal has to say that there was a kernel of truth in this neoconservative view that you represented at that time, which is that liberals believe that everyone everywhere is entitled to their shot at freedom.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  I think maybe, you know, what we got confused about, and, you know, I lived through it too, is that the Soviet Union unraveled. It, you can argue that, you know, Ronald Reagan's policies and the arms race and so forth, you know, primed that result, but it was really as a result of people in the streets and, you know, the dissolution of the regime, you know, and for economic reasons and so forth and so on. It's not like we ever invaded communist countries. One time, we tried. Vietnam, it didn't go well. So, the, the Iraq war was, was, I agree, a big mistake. And I made a version of that in my own, you know, benighted youth when I, you know, worked

• 42:07Speaker 03

  on human rights and humanitarian intervention, thinking that, you know, human rights could be spread at the point of a gun. A similar kind of mistake, I think, less grievous. But it led, among other things, when the Democrats were in charge of our foreign policy, to the, to regime change in Libya, which has not gone well. I think maybe the question then is, well, what's the alternative? And it can't be the abandonment of, you know, the hope that we can find ways of spreading freedom worldwide. It's just that the means chosen proved, like, counterproductive in the extreme.

• 42:54Speaker 00

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• 43:24Speaker 01

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• 43:56David Brooks?

  So some of the questions, how do you judge?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:58David Brooks?

  And for this, I will go back to my hero, Isaiah Berlin, who wrote a book called A Sense of Reality. And basically, for him, judgment was what he called a sense of reality, an awareness. And in my view, when the left goes wrong, it goes wrong for two reasons. It's overly rationalistic. It thinks it can use social science data to figure out society. And it's overly materialistic. It emphasizes the economic stuff, but ignores a lot of the spiritual and cultural stuff that also make up those neighborhoods in Chicago. And so for Berlin, and for me, there are a lot of different ways of knowing. And some of it is rationalistic.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:32David Brooks?

  But some of it is emotional. We use our moral sentiments. We use our imagination. We use our intuition. And that judgment is using all the faculties.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  You know, I honestly agree with all of that. And it goes back to Aristotle again, who insists that you need prudence or practical wisdom in order to be an ethical actor, let alone a political one. And I just think when we look out at who's made a big difference politically, they've always had this ability, which you're kind of describing, to judge the situation and exploit opportunities to avoid the biggest risks. And that's not going to be asking the Harvard faculty what to do. I mean, that may have been a mistake in Vietnam. And that doesn't mean we should just ask, you know, the first thousand names

• 45:23Speaker 03

  in the phone book of Cambridge, Mass. either. But I agree with you that certain gifted individuals can make breakthroughs or keep us safe at a scary moment because they have judgment. In Berlin's case, you know, my beef with him really is that he redefined liberalism in terms of freedom from intrusion, above all by the state. When he knew well, and I praise him on this point, that folks like John Stuart Mill, who preceded him, thought the point of liberalism was to make our lives creative and interesting. And, you know, we might need the state to achieve that. And it's not about equality. It's about the

• 46:08Speaker 03

  right kind of freedom. So Berlin's interesting because, you know, part of having this understanding of judgment is also appreciating the self contradictions that you might, you know, be part of yourself.

• 46:21David Brooks?

  So I got out of college, and I worked for a time at National Review with Bill Buckley, and then Washington Times. I hit all the right wing spots. And then I was named at age 25, the book review editor of the Wall Street Journal, which was crazy at that age. But I knew who my heroes were. And they were people around a magazine called Partisan Review, a small magazine, but very influential and very powerful. And they were called Cold War Liberals, these people. And it wasn't only them, like George Orwell wrote for it, W. H. Auden wrote for it. Like, they had big names. And by the time I got to them, they were like in their 80s. So there's a guy named William Phillips, who was editor of the Review. There was a woman named Diana Trilling, who was the widow of Lionel Trilling.

• 47:05David Brooks?

  There was a playwright named Lionel Abel. There was a philosopher named Sidney Hook. And there was a historian who I knew the best, I knew Sidney Hook a little, called Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was known as B. Crystal because she was married to Irving Crystal. And so they were the Cold War Liberals, and they were my heroes. You wrote a book criticizing my heroes. Tell us about that argument.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Well, first off, back when you were a book review editor, neither you nor they were liberals anymore. So they had evolved from Cold War liberalism to neoconservatism, and Himmelfarb not least, with her husband. And I strongly believe that she co-founded the movement, really the movement with him. That's why I did a whole chapter on her, really emphasizing how close she was to someone like Reinhold Niebuhr in her youth as a young Jewish woman championing the civilizational virtues of a kind of very orthodox Christianity. You know, I think what happened to liberalism is that it was emancipatory. And in the middle

• 48:11Speaker 03

  of the 20th century, the folks that you worshipped kind of abandoned.

• 48:16David Brooks?

  Admired. Worship is a little...

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, okay. They abandoned liberalism as it had been, you know, forged up to that point. And that's because they very understandably, in the 1940s, after the Weimar Republic had collapsed and the wartime alliance uniting our country with the Soviet Union had come undone, and, you know, the Cold War had begun. And they said, the real problem is the left, and in particular, a left that takes over the state and tramples freedom. And that was a very reasonable conclusion at that time. The trouble is, I think, that in the

• 48:59Speaker 03

  shuffle, the reason to be a liberal in the first place got lost. So Berlin redefines freedom. So it's no longer an emancipatory thing in which the state might have to get involved, but something that is really anti-statist. And that's going to serve, in the long run, economic liberals, we call them neoliberals pretty well. So Berlin and Hayek, although Berlin hated Hayek, nonetheless, the Cold War liberals like Berlin kind of propound a theory of what freedom is that's very close to the anti-statist views of someone like

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Hayek, not to mention James Scott, who also was influenced by Hayek later on. And then, you know, there's this idea that liberals from the beginning have that it's not just that the point of life is to be emancipated to make it your own, but that we might have to kind of, you know, think about history as something that provides us more and more freedom over time. And because the Soviets made so many claims that they were the vanguard of history, the Cold War liberals said, no, we should think in the way David Brooks would end up thinking, that we're basically sinful, and there are just strict limits on human

• 50:22Speaker 03

  possibilities. But that means that you're not a liberal anymore, because you're saying there are just limits to what we can ask for, how much emancipation we can hope for. And I think in the end, these folks end up ditching liberalism. And I think the results speak for themselves, because those Cold War liberals did become neoconservatives, many of them. I mean, we don't know what Lionel Trilling would have done. And his wife Diana famously says he wouldn't have joined Irving Crystal and be Himmelfarb and the rest. But we know that what those who lived did, and I believe there's also a parallel story to tell about how the Cold War liberals, you know, accidentally paved

• 51:06Speaker 03

  the way for neoliberalism.

• 51:08David Brooks?

  Yeah. I would tell a different story. So we're going to trace this way from FDR to neoliberalism.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Great.

• 51:14David Brooks?

  And so I would say the neocons, the people I knew.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:19David Brooks?

  They grew up, a lot of them went to City College, where my grandfather went. And they were all Marxists. They were all communists. So they're on the left. And then they grow up, and they look at what's happened to the ideas they believed in.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:33David Brooks?

  It led to mass murder on a massive scale.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:36David Brooks?

  And if I would fault your book, it would be you show them reacting, but you don't show as much what they were reacting to, which was the Gulag.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Fair enough.

• 51:44David Brooks?

  And so they have that experience. They were all Democrats back in the 50s, and those, they were all still Democrats. So they're champions of...

• 51:53David Brooks?

  The Great Society and they started a magazine, Urban Crystal does, called The Public Interest. And the first issue of that magazine, they say, we now understand how to make a government work. We have all the scientific tools, we've got the data, it's all gonna work. And so that's in the 60s and it doesn't work. You look at the 1970s, like inflation's at 15, unemployment's at nine, violent crime triples, divorce rates triple, like social chaos, and I think, we got this wrong too. And then the third thing that happens, they were poor kids from Brooklyn. And they knew they had made it because their parents were bourgeois and valued hard work education and depth discipline. Along come the hippies, who don't value those things and say bourgeois, those people are

• 52:38David Brooks?

  boring, empty, soulless. And so this generation takes a look at those three things and says, what the heck? We gotta rethink. And it's not only them, it's all of society.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:52David Brooks?

  And all of society takes a look at what I've just described, and in 1980, they say, Ronald Reagan. And that begins what you call neoliberalism. And I don't believe that's a thing. I think when you use the word neoliberal, you're conflating into one neat story Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, who were not the same thing.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Not at all.

• 53:16David Brooks?

  And you're conflating Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And the people who get maddest at the phrase neoliberal are the moderate Democrats.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 53:25David Brooks?

  Who say, we were not part of that party, we were different. And they called themselves new Democrats and they were more centrists, but they were more centrists precisely because the whole country had shifted to the right. And so I don't like the phrase neoliberal for two reasons. It assumes that everybody was Milton Friedman, which was not the case. And it tells a neat story where everything went wrong in that neoliberal era, which we're now trying to replace. But what do you think of the story I just told?

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's oversimplified and misleading. And here's why. The word neoliberal, which used to be marginal, is now very mainstream and even centrists adopt it to describe what's happened to our country. It isn't the view that everyone believed the same thing. You know, the standard view is that, you know, there are these orders. There was a New Deal order and it was so powerful that even though the Democrats founded it, the Republicans were forced to play along. And so Dwight Eisenhower became a supporter of the welfare state, such as it was.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  And the same argument is then made about the replacement of the New Deal order by the neoliberal order. That what the Reagan revolution wrought, and absolutely Jimmy Carter started it, then leads Bill Clinton to redefine the goals of the Democratic Party. And so it's a fact that some of the old Republicans, like Richard Nixon, were like way to the left of Democrats until very recently, until the coming of Bernie Sanders, very precisely. And that's because these anti-status views that basically said, the state is so prone

• 55:12Speaker 03

  to mistake that we should abandon it and let private ordering take its place, proved hegemonic across the aisle. And now we're seeing that, well, you can have too much anti-statism if it paves the way to Donald Trump. And I expect that on both sides of the partisan spectrum, we're seeing a kind of backlash against the backlash. That's why you see not just on the left, people reclaiming the state, you see common good conservatism and all kinds of, you know, arguments about the role the government should play in, you know, trade and industrial policy and Orin Cass's ideas about, you know, what

• 55:57Speaker 03

  a conservative economics should look like. And so neoliberalism is being broadly abandoned on both sides of the aisle because it was hegemonic on both.

• 56:06David Brooks?

  The story you tell that the conservatives were sort of the sun party and the Democrats were the moon party, there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, Teddy Kennedy, he sponsored deregulation regulations in the 1970s. So my question is, what was so bad about that era? So from 1980s to, let's say, 2010, or I'm gonna conveniently say 2008. So we had the greatest reduction in poverty in world history. We had the greatest rise of longevity in world history. The greatest reduction of global inequality in world history. We had growth rates, we had longevity increases. I'm not saying there were not problems in the 80s and 90s, most especially with the working class. But it didn't strike me as the worst period on earth.

• 56:50David Brooks?

  Times change and problems change and people move on. And I'm for moving on, I'm not going back to where Milton Friedman was. But what was wrong with that period?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, there's a lot to what you say. And I'm not claiming that there was like just an evil time and nothing good happened. I mean, a lot of the facts you reported, you know, followed from a very particular policy to integrate China into the global economic system, because that's where you see the anti-poverty succeeding and so forth. But basically, I don't think it's gonna be credible to say, well, there was an era and it felt good and some good things happened and then everything changed in a new era where we have to rethink. Because when we rethink, what we learn is that the first era made possible the second era. So then we have to revisit, what did we get wrong?

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Precisely in the 90s, when I think we both thought like a lot of problems had been solved. And I think everyone is in the position, having lived through the end of history, of realizing it wasn't over. And that's because of mistakes made when we thought it was.

• 58:01David Brooks?

  I was a really enthusiastic Reagan Thatcher kind of person, because I thought our core problem back then was dynamism. We were stagnating.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:07David Brooks?

  And we needed somebody to increase economic dynamics and they offered, I thought, a plausible thing. And I thought, I think they succeeded, starting in 2003. And I look around and think, our core problem is not dynamism anymore, it's just a fact. Our core problem is inequality. And so I called up all my old conservative economist friends and said, well, what are our conservative ideas on inequality? They're like, I really haven't done much work on that. So I would just say the problems have changed. And now, and this is where I'm gonna ask you a question, inequality is still obviously a problem. Since I've talked in terms of balances. In what way are we out of whack? If you were asked, like, when historians look back on 2026, what's the core problem that society needed to address? How would you define that?

• 58:49Speaker 03

  I'm just trying to broaden your diagnosis. And the diagnosis has something to do with elite misrule. In your view, and I share it, there's a meritocratic elite that doesn't have the goods and mainly uses its elite status to lord over ordinary people and is contemptuous of them and then is appalled and shocked when they vote for, you know, some like Neanderthal. And I just wanna say, well, it turns out that elite misrule has many facets and kind of cultural predominance is just one. There's also economic predominance.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  And I think more and more people are voting because of their perception of their economic situation. Now, in global history, and especially compared to stagnant European economies, actually, America is often seen to be, you know, doing rather well, even right now. But I think people's everyday experience is that they are, you know, living paycheck to paycheck. They are in so-called bullshit jobs that they don't want and are underpaid for the work as prices rise. And that's why this affordability meme has been so successful.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  And it's not that there's some obvious fix to that in a global economy, but we can see the way in which the policy choices made way back when by conservatives and liberals led to not just a cultural elite, but an economic elite. And that's the story that was once again very marginal and is now mainstream of the 1% and the increasing economic inequality. And then last, you look at foreign policy and, you know, both parties have been warlike and don't have a lot to show for it. And, you know, Donald Trump sadly was able to claim to be a kind of peace candidate,

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  hashtag endless wars, and that was credible to 70 to 80 million Americans in two big elections. Now, of course, he's thrown it all away by being just as warlike as those he attacked. But those are three examples of elite failure and I don't see how we can just stick with one and not take the other two very seriously.

• 1:01:16David Brooks?

  Okay. I can't help asking you, when I lived in Europe in the early 90s, America was richer than the European countries, but not by a lot. Now, America's significantly richer. It's like 30% higher and, you know, a lot of countries like France, Germany, UK, they've got GDP per capita like lower than Mississippi. So as a person of the right, or center-right, I have a story to tell that they over-regulated. And what story do you tell to explain that?

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Might be true. I mean, you know, they have they have made an existential choice to have a superior welfare state. And insofar as that involves a much higher taxation, they may have paid a price. Now, on the regulatory front, we'd have to, I think, look, you know, I mean, it's it's like a big claim you're making, and it just seems like we'd have to check it out. And I'm not saying it's wrong, but I just I'm not as confident as you that it's right. And the question is, can we have regulatory regimes of the kind that, you know, Richard Nixon was for, great environmentalist and so forth, that are not impeding growth, but

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  actually create new forms of growth, like green energy? And if that's what the Europeans are for, maybe there's a way of doing it that would have a different outcome.

• 1:02:38David Brooks?

  Yeah, I'm going to promote a grand compromise that I hope can bring us together. I'm about to solve all our polarized problems.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 1:02:46David Brooks?

  And I call it the Sweden compromise. The Scandinavians figured out a way to have successful societies. And that way is to have a pretty generous welfare state. But it's also the only way you can afford a generous welfare state if you have free market policies. So people think they're sort of socialist. They are not. The Heritage Foundation has this index of economic freedom. Heritage Foundation, very right wing. They measure tax rates, regulation, all that. And Denmark, Sweden, all Scandinavian countries, way above the US, way more free market. They have low corporate taxes, they have no wealth tax, they have no minimum wage. Sweden has school vouchers. In Denmark, for example, if you lose your job, you get support for two years. But there are almost no regulations governing when somebody can get fired from a job.

• 1:03:31David Brooks?

  And so they've basically made the decision, lots of free market on the supply side, and lots of welfare state on the demand side. I could live with that compromise that the Scandinavian countries have arrived at, maybe with a smaller government than they have, but on the whole, I'd be willing to support a more generous welfare state if you would give me the engines of growth. And I say that because I think in the age of AI, we need a lot of job growth. We there's going to be a lot of turnover. Some jobs are going to be destroyed. So we have to create tasks for people to do. And so you need a lot of economic dynamism. And so that's my compromise. How does that sound to you?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Well, I'd potentially take it, but, you know, I think we would have to consider whether everything they've done is portable to other places. I mean, they don't have the history of race. They do share our newfound immigration restrictionism, which is a way of, in their view, I think, in the Nordic countries, of keeping the social basis for solidarity. And that just doesn't seem available to us. And it's probably a good thing, because I'm sure both of us think that the diversity of the United States, including from immigrant waves, has been, at times, to its benefit, and maybe, you know, could be again.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  But that's just a big difference that might make it very difficult to achieve the compromise, even if we agreed with it. But I I'm personally for growth, because I think we need to balance dynamism and care. I do think we should have like a broader definition of creativity that doesn't just associate it with economic enterprise and with with kind of growth in our our wealth. But it's not as if we can disregard those questions. Where we might, you know, differ slightly is I think there's a genuine question with the rise of AI, whether we should keep working, or how big a part of our lives work. It needs to be or is going to be.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  John Maynard Keynes, the great economist back in the day, said, we're about to solve the economic problem, which will leave us with the big problem, which is, how do we spend our lives when we don't have to provide the means of our subsistence?

• 1:05:49David Brooks?

  Right.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  And AI might be setting up a world in which we finally do face that question. It might make it scarier, because, you know, not having a lot to do can lead people to make big mistakes. But it it's not as if just planning to replace jobs is the obvious answer to, you know, current events.

• 1:06:11David Brooks?

  On that note of agreement, Sam Moyn, it's been a real pleasure having a conversation with you. Thank you for coming on The Permanent Questions.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:18David Brooks?

  All political visions are based on a conception of human nature. What are people like? And for Sam, they're pretty malleable. For me, they're not so malleable. I think that human beings are beautifully made and deeply broken. And so we differed on all sorts of things, but it all went down to that original disagreement about the idea of what is a human. And there's a great Talmudic scholar idea, find the disagreement under the disagreement. And I think that in this conversation, we found the disagreement under the disagreement, and that's an illuminating thing to do. Thanks so much for joining us for this week's conversation with Sam Moyn. This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University.

• 1:07:02David Brooks?

  New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic's YouTube page, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modarese-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.