Are We Too Political?

One of the paradoxes of our moment is that the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency seem to demand our obsessive attention, while Trump himself obviously thrives on that obsession—and all the social division that comes with it. What if the clearest way out of our political crisis is taking politics less seriously? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with his old friend (and new boss), Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, about the pleasures and pitfalls of a life spent covering politicians, the limits of partisanship, and the need to see life from the redwood’s perspective. - - - 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.

• 0:00David Brooks?

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35David Brooks?

  Our topic today is politics. What role should politics play in your life? How much of your spiritual, emotional, and mental energy should you devote to politics? Now, I am something of a political junkie. I grew up as a political correspondent, covering people, and I can say there's nothing more fun in journalism than going to a rally in Iowa or New Hampshire, anywhere people are campaigning, talking with the folks, watching them scream, watching the passion. It's just Americana in all its glory, both good and bad. And so I really care about politics. I really care about politicians. I admire them in general. They're good people in a rotten circumstance. And yet, I also feel that we've over-politicized our society. Everything is red or blue.

• 1:18David Brooks?

  Where you live is red or blue. What car you drive is determined by red or blue. What TV shows you watch is determined by red or blue. Who you marry and befriend, how you think about the WNBA. When you make politics your religion, you think you have a sense of belonging, but you really don't have belonging. You're not sitting with your community members. You're just hating the same people. And you have the illusion of righteous action. You're doing something good for the country, but you're not feeding the poor, sitting with the widow. You're just hating people on social media. And so it gives you the illusion of all the things that you get in a real community, or a real faith, or a real philosophy, but you just end up in a cultural war. And so I'm trying to figure out, how do I care about politics without overcaring? My guest today is Jeffrey Goldberg.

• 2:02David Brooks?

  You probably know him as the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. As you watch or listen to this conversation, you will notice that Jeff and I know each other. We've known each other for 25 years, and you'll see that we have, as all old friends do, we've developed a certain way of talking to each other. We have a certain banter, which involves a lot of interruption. And so what you are about to witness is us at our most slow-paced, our most earnest, our most serious. So Jeff and I will be talking about what role should politics play in our life. But in order to get there, I thought we'd compare notes about our careers, the politicians we've covered, what we've thought about them, what's been important, what's been unimportant.

• 2:43David Brooks?

  I'm David Brooks, and this is The Permanent Questions. Jeffrey Goldberg, welcome to The Permanent Questions.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:54David Brooks?

  This must be-

• 2:55Speaker 02

  I'm very wary.

• 2:56David Brooks?

  This must be a thrill for you. Like, you do edit a magazine, you've won some prizes, but this really is pretty much the pinnacle of your career.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  This is, well, you know, I applied to Yale, and I got rejected. I didn't even get waitlisted. They were just like, what, are you joking? So like, I consider this getting into Yale.

• 3:14David Brooks?

  Basically, yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Aren't you a professor at Yale?

• 3:16David Brooks?

  I'm a faculty member at Yale.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  What does that mean? What's the difference between professor and faculty member?

• 3:20David Brooks?

  Professors know what they're talking about.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Ah, good one.

• 3:22David Brooks?

  Okay, so we're going to talk politics if we can get on track here, which is highly unlikely.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  It's really deeply unlikely.

• 3:29David Brooks?

  We've spent our lives covering this stuff.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Isn't that sad?

• 3:32David Brooks?

  No, so I'm going to ask you, I want to get your political origin story.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  My political origin story?

• 3:38David Brooks?

  Like, when did you first have a brush with politics?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  My first brush with politics was when, as a two-year-old, I urinated on Al Shankar's lap. Do you remember Al Shankar?

• 3:49David Brooks?

  Of course, he was head of the American Federation for Teachers.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and led the 1968 teacher's strike. My father was one of the leaders of the teacher's strike, and the story is told that, you know, they were having a meeting in their Brooklyn apartment, and I was seated on Al Shankar's lap, and I pissed all over him.

• 4:07David Brooks?

  Really?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I grew up in that kind of household with posters on the wall, you know, with quotes. "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men." That was by the bathroom. I remember.

• 4:18David Brooks?

  I had a similar upbringing, weirdly. My parents-

• 4:22Speaker 02

  It's not that weird, actually.

• 4:23David Brooks?

  -volunteered for Ed Koch, back when he was a liberal member of Congress.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  He was a liberal reformer. He was fighting Carmine DiSappio and the Tammany, the remnants of the Tammany machine.

• 4:32David Brooks?

  But then, I think also Watergate. I don't know, I'm slightly older than you, but when I saw the Watergate hearings, I thought, that is so cool, and I want to be, I was on the side of the G. Gordon Liddy and the Watergate co-conspirators.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  I have recollections of it being on constantly in the house, and just a general, a general and deep loathing of Nixon in the cohort of my parents and their friends, which later on, I realized was overdone. I'm not, you know, I'm not like Lynyrd Skynyrd. I don't take the Lynyrd Skynyrd position on Watergate, but-

• 5:11David Brooks?

  Wait, what is the Lynyrd Skynyrd?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you? But I, you know, I just, I think Nixon is much more interested in the full light of what we know now about the possibilities in American politics. I think Nixon is a very interesting character. But at the time, it was, you know, he was Satan incarnate, which is kind of funny in retrospect.

• 5:31David Brooks?

  Yeah. Now, did you have heroes? Like, I remember when I got a little older and I became more politically aware, like, when I was in high school, this is the kind of kid I was, I had a Hubert Humphrey poster on my wall. It was not Joe Namath or Tom Seaver.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  You're such a loser.

• 5:46David Brooks?

  But it had the saying, "Some people talk change, and others closet." And I knew even then I wanted to be the kind of person who only talked change.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And some people just don't even open their mouths, they just think about it. Hubert Humphrey.

• 6:00David Brooks?

  Yes, I was like a mainstream Democrat, like Scoop Jackson was big on our household, and Birch Bay-

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Scoop Jackson became a hero of mine later in sort of college, but not, not then. We had, I think I was just very, very influenced by what was hanging on the walls of the house. You know, there was a famous, very moody photo of JFK and RFK consulting with each other.

• 6:23David Brooks?

  So one difference between us, I've always had a political ideology, like, I've always had a label that I've labeled myself. Like, when I was a kid, or in college even, I was a socialist. I had read John Reed.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Who wasn't, though? You read John Reed?

• 6:38David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  I just watched the movie. I just waited for the movie.

• 6:41David Brooks?

  I waited for the movie. Yeah, there's a movie called Reds, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, which was one of my favorite movies. I was like, yeah, yeah, me too. And I loved The Communist Manifesto. And then, which is weird-

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Wait, how could you have a Hubert Humphrey poster and have The Communist Manifesto coexist?

• 6:54David Brooks?

  Because I swung left in college because I read a book, I did, I just hung out in the library, I didn't go to classes, I just hung out. And I read a magazine called The New Masses, which is a communist magazine from the 1920s and 30s. And A, I became in love with magazines. And there was a historian named Richard Pels who basically argued that all of human history is controlled by the New Republic. And he covered American history as if it was the New Republic. So it gave me the conviction, which I have to this day, that ideas matter more than anything else in politics, and that small magazines in particular drive the intellectual debate.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  It's funny, I read, I read The Old Masses, which was a pro-Cossack magazine at the same time, yeah.

• 7:34David Brooks?

  Lessons on how to chase down Jews.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I'm a reporter, I'm not like you. I didn't read The New Masses, although I did go to the library and read a lot of magazines. I read, it's funny, I, New Republic definitely, I wasn't really a New Yorker guy or an Atlantic guy, and I'm more Atlantic in high school than New Yorker, but I was definitely, when I started reading The New Republic, and I guess this was like the Kinsley era, so college after college or whatever, I was like, I really had this kind of feeling, like, who are these people? Like, how do they know so much? Why does the, why do these words shine off the page? It was really-

• 8:12David Brooks?

  Was it my writing that caused this reaction?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  I didn't remember your pieces personally, but I'm sure someone read them. That wasn't me. The, well, you wrote for The New Republic in that period?

• 8:23David Brooks?

  Occasionally, occasionally. I was a more a National Review guy.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I read The National Review just because I, I just went for like the, this is sort of the way I am, I guess, why I fell into magazines. I would, I would privilege in my mind, good writing over almost anything. You know, it's why George Will's my favorite columnist. I don't agree with him on everything, but like, the man can, I mean, next to you, my favorite, but you're not a, you're not a columnist anyway, you're more of a video personality.

• 8:55David Brooks?

  Yeah, I'm a, I'm a talk show host. I'm a game show, Bob Barker.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Phil Donahue.

• 9:01David Brooks?

  Phil Donahue, yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  You're not going to ask me about my feelings in this-

• 9:04David Brooks?

  No, don't worry.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Session.

• 9:06David Brooks?

  No, no.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Because I'm not-

• 9:08David Brooks?

  We won't touch you either way. I'm going to your intellectual life, that void is big enough.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yes, it is. So I was, I've written about this, it's no secret, I was a self-identified socialist Zionist at 15. Actually, this is true, with a group of friends, we, we once marched in a, like, Saint Marks Place, in the Village. We once were at a rally, carrying the banner Socialist Zionists for Animal Rights. Huge constituency.

• 9:38David Brooks?

  Now, did you ever have a book that, like, something or an event that shifted your political view?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. No, I'm serious.

• 9:47David Brooks?

  Is that true, really?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, became a vegetarian out of that until I realized that I really liked hamburgers, too much, whatever. But, no, I mean, I read, I read deeply in socialist theory and Zionist theory, and that's why, you know, and, and I did, I mean, I wound up, there was a kind of almost Bolshevik inevitability to, you know, my, my early path, I ended up living on a kibbutz that was still organized like a kibbutz, in the kind of collectivized sense. And then, you know, then I realized that socialism is ridiculous.

• 10:27David Brooks?

  For what reason? Irving Kristol went to the army and decided if we became socialist, the people he was serving with would turn into a racket. So he said, oh, I can't be for socialism.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Why did I, it just seemed to go again, I mean, I'm making a very broad statement here, but it just seemed to go against human nature. People like things, they like to acquire things, like to acquire status, and like, you could tell them, that's wrong, don't be like that. But I'm also like that. I like to have acquisitions, I like, I like to collect things, I like the material world also, and, and I like to see people being rewarded for working harder than other people. And-

• 11:13Speaker 02

  I believe in equality, but I don't believe in equity in the sense that I don't think that people are born the same

• 11:22David Brooks?

  Right.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  level of skill. And I don't wanna, and, and, and, again, maybe I'm straying too far away from the point of this. What is the point of this session?

• 11:33David Brooks?

  The role politics plays in your life, but we're starting out with your, with the ideas of politics.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I just, I just, I just, there seems something unnatural about socialism, like this overwhelming desire. It seemed resentment-based a little bit too much for me, you know, and I, I'm not a, there should be no such thing as a billionaire. I'm not in that camp. I'm in the camp that there, there should be a lot of millionaires, you know, and I don't wanna cap anybody's success. I wanna, I would bring the floor up. I don't think that makes me a socialist or a democratic socialist. I think this makes me, you know, common sense, you know, non-cruel believer in some kind of meritocratic possibility.

• 12:17David Brooks?

  Yeah. I, it's somewhat similar. I first, I read Edmund Burke in college and that was a shock. And he just said, the world's really complicated. If you think you socialists can play in reality, good luck with that.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Socialism doesn't survive first contact with humans and all of their ridiculous complexity.

• 12:34David Brooks?

  Right. And then I also, similar, and a lot of my heroes became the neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, and they, they were, they were lefties who grew up in Brooklyn, but they also grew up immigrant kids. And they looked at, at their parents and how they had made it in America. And it was hard work. It was bourgeois values. It was hard work, education, and they looked at the hippies.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Like a kind of a hyper-parenting.

• 12:55David Brooks?

  What are you guys doing? And so-

• 12:57Speaker 02

  They're destroying because they could either make or destroy, and so they were in the destruction phase.

• 13:02David Brooks?

  Yeah. Now, we both, early in our careers, you way more than me, served, reported from abroad. Like, I was abroad in the 90s, basically, the first six years of the 90s.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  And you count Belgium as abroad, don't you?

• 13:15David Brooks?

  Well, I was covering Soviet Union, that's abroad. I was covering South Africa, that's abroad. I was, and I was covering the Middle East.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 13:24David Brooks?

  These are abroad places.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Those are abroad.

• 13:26David Brooks?

  As far as I know. And I wasn't in Greenland, like, not parts of America.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  I'm just saying that, you know, Brussels is not, I mean-

• 13:34David Brooks?

  Okay, Mr. Obscure Foreign Correspondent.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  No, I'm just saying, like, all right, you know, it's a direct flight. Anything with a direct flight, you know, is like, all right, that's fine.

• 13:42David Brooks?

  And, and, and a wide selection of cheese. The daring adventures with waffles. That's what I had in Brussels. Did you have your worldview shaped by events, as you call them, abroad, where there's no direct flights?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  So, I mean, the, the first thing I think of is coming home from Pakistan. I spent, like, like, part of the late 90s, early 2000, up to 9/11, going in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. And I just, I, I don't think I've ever really articulated this before, but part of my, part of my belief system is that America is better than any other place. I'm American. I love America. I recognize all the flaws, especially right now, but

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I, I'm American. And, and another observation I would make, these all kind of marry up. Another observation I would make, that there's too many journalists in America who, or commentators, or whatever you wanna call them, who see America as the locus of evil in the world, and that everything that happens in the world that's bad is somehow caused directly or indirectly by the United States. And I just, I, I don't buy that. Does that send me down a more conservative pathway? In one superficial sense, but I, I think that the broadening experience of seeing how tens of millions of people live, and realizing that we built something pretty good for ourselves, gave me some perspective and some appreciation

• 15:21Speaker 02

  that sometimes, let's say, people who come out of the Ivy League don't really have. They think that America is the locus of all bad in the world. And I have no patience for that anymore.

• 15:31David Brooks?

  Yeah. Now, you, you had a much more-

• 15:32Speaker 02

  I'm not saying things are going so great.

• 15:34David Brooks?

  Right.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  By the way.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Hey, I heard you had a meeting about a Yale online ad. I've got a couple of thoughts on that. Isn't it corny for us to run an ad? We don't even want people to buy anything. We just want them to go and enjoy the, like, wealth of knowledge, right? And given that, how about we run an anti-ad? 30 seconds of just, like, online.yale.edu, online.yale.edu. Or how long is this voicemail? Just run this voicemail. Okay, I can see why I'm not in these meetings. All right, bye.

• 16:14Speaker 04

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• 16:49David Brooks?

  I just wanna establish that, just like, to show that we've spent our lives on the importance of politics, both foreign and domestic. And I certainly, you know, I really care about politics. I, I think that my favorite person to ever cover was John McCain.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably me too, just to be around him.

• 17:05David Brooks?

  He was just so much fun. People forget that. He was like, he took me to casinos to teach me how to play craps.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  He once introduced me to a group of Hungarian right-wingers as, this is Jeff Goldberg. He's a, he's a communist reporter.

• 17:19David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  You know, whatever happens, happens. And I was like, Jesus, man, will you stop?

• 17:23David Brooks?

  I ask all this, because like, we, we spent a lot of our life in politics.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:27David Brooks?

  And obviously, politics matters a lot, both foreign and domestic.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Or does it?

• 17:31David Brooks?

  Well, now, I have to say, I'm now of a mood, like, we're over-politicized as a country. We're-

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 17:37David Brooks?

  I have this line, we're over-politicized and under-moralized. We've took too much time paying attention to everything that's on, whatever cable TV is covering that particular hour, and less about the things that really matter.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, when you say "we," what do you mean "we"?

• 17:49David Brooks?

  We as a national society.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  I don't know about that. I mean, if you add up all the people who watch cable news, it, it adds up to a very, very small percentage of the American. I, I think most people aren't, and most people are probably healthier than, than the people who do pay inordinate attention to politics or are involved in politics. But yes, I mean, what's, is the reality the, the, the general perception of reality, or is the reality something deeper? I do think that most people in America don't pay day-to-day attention to it. We just around people who, who do. I mean, in, in, in my own, if you're asking, like, sort of in my own life, you know, I've come to realize, I mean, it's, here's where everybody

• 18:33Speaker 02

  quotes the late Breitbart, you know, we, we all understand how that politics is downstream from culture, but I would say that, especially now, culture is downstream from psychiatry and theology and tribalism and anxiety and resentment and a whole basket of, you know, sometimes inchoate, human impulses and emotions that are buried deep in our lizard brains, you know what I mean? And, and so things flow from, and so, like, to go upstream, you know, the, you gotta be a salmon now in politics, if you're writing about politics, and go as far upstream as you can go, and that's where you're gonna find out some possibly

• 19:18Speaker 02

  meaningful truths.

• 19:19David Brooks?

  Yeah, though I, I would say that, you know, if you start, and I agree with Breitbart, though, I should say, Gram, she got there first, and a lot of people wrote about culture first.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Your old socialist roots coming out.

• 19:28David Brooks?

  But my theory is that, you know, people are emotionally and spiritually quite disturbed right now.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:33David Brooks?

  And they don't go to church, or whatever. And so they, politics has become the religion for a lot of people.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Oh, and it's, and, and that's why I stopped a long time ago, falling in love with politicians. Falling in love with anything human, you know, any, any movement or anything that's human-created is gonna lead to disappointment. I don't mean falling in love with a human. And you know my wife, and she's perfect.

• 19:58David Brooks?

  She's now throwing her shoes at you metaphorically.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if she listens to your podcast. I mean, she knows you.

• 20:05David Brooks?

  I'll send her this part.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  She can, she can just call you if she has to find out what you're thinking at any given moment. But, I mean, you know, I, there are, there are humans I love, but humans, humans involved in, in public life who you fall in love with, that's bad. That's a bad-

• 20:23David Brooks?

  I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, I, I was deep into McCain and Obama.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Is there any politician who hasn't disappointed you in some way in your 80 years in politics?

• 20:32David Brooks?

  Well, all people, except my kids and my wife have disappointed me, except my, my boss has never disappointed me.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  No, no, of course. But-

• 20:38David Brooks?

  Your new boss, not the old boss. The old bosses were terrible. But, but I would still say, I've still got enthusiastic about various campaigns. It really mattered to me at Obama. McCain, the 2000 election was really tough on me because I admire these two guys the most.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  I wish they could have run the country together. If you, if you, if you melded McCain's, some of his instincts and impulses and Obama's thoughtfulness and analytical heft, you would have had a really interesting president.

• 21:04David Brooks?

  That's a good, yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  You know?

• 21:05David Brooks?

  They would have killed each other, but.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  No, I mean, in, in the, in the one person, if you could just sort of combine that.

• 21:10David Brooks?

  So I, I still wanna believe in politics, and I still do believe in it. And, and I think most politicians are in it for the right reasons. The problem comes to me when people say they wouldn't marry somebody from the other party. And that's, that's very high percentage right now.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Well, this is what, this is why religion is important. One of the many reasons religion is important is it says- Humans are limited and humans are broken and humans are deeply imperfect. And any, any system of thought that demands some level of humility. This is what I can't stand about politics is the certainty of everybody. Because, you know, I, everybody needs religion. Human beings need religion. Some people just make politics their religion. Some people make, I make all kinds of things their belief system, but.

• 22:03David Brooks?

  My argument that it, it gives you the simulation religion without the actual religion. So it gives you a simulation that you belong to a group, but you're not really in a community. You're just hating the same.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Well, you're not in a community and you're, you're, you're accepting only half of what religion has to offer you. It, you, you, you engage in judgment, but you don't really engage in mercy. Right. I mean, that's what, that's what our politics is like. It's judgment without mercy. And I just, it matters to me so little now what a person's positions are on a set of issues compared to their character and to their core beliefs about themselves, their family, their community, their country, the world system that we have.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  I, I don't, I don't care that much if someone believes X about Y bill.

• 23:01David Brooks?

  Right. And this is why I think it, being over politicized is not just a small group of people. And so, for example, I think what you just expressed, you, another way to say it is, when you're looking at a candidate, the first is, are they a good person? Are they trustworthy human being? And the second lens is.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Are they mentally stable?

• 23:18David Brooks?

  Yeah, that would, that would be nice.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Are they, are, are, and I like to look at someone who's committed to his or her family. I do.

• 23:25David Brooks?

  And also do they have good judgment? A lot of politics, just like looking at the world, seeing what matters here. But the third lens should be, do they agree with me? Are they on my team? But if you look at, say, the Texas primary race where Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn, I don't think people are applying the character frame or the judgment.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  No, I don't think they do apply the character.

• 23:43David Brooks?

  And then for the Democrats, Graham Plath, they're up in Maine. Even after a lot of his scandals got out, a lot of Democrats were willing to say, cause he's on the team.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  We know, I mean, this is a cliche already, but partisanship does make you stupid. Partisanship, excessive partisanship especially, turns you into a robot. Or, or put it this way, it, it turns you tribal. And what's, what's amusing, especially on the left, is like a leftists who believes in universal principles and universalism. Get pretty, pretty tribal as well. Tribalism makes you kind of dumb.

• 24:20David Brooks?

  Yeah. Now, have you lost friends over Trump?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Have I lost friends over Trump? You're assuming that I have friends and not, not a series of shifting alliances.

• 24:30David Brooks?

  Yeah, well, we're momentarily friends.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, again, shifting alliances, like I said.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Have I lost friends over Trump?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I don't, I don't.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  I have more Republican friends than the average Washington-based quote unquote mainstream journalist. But my Republican friends are disproportionately anti-Trumpers who become so committed to, it's like, all right, already with Trump. You know what I mean? I mean, it's, it's a funny, a little insight into the, the possible insight into the Atlantic. The Atlantic is meant to be the magazine of the American idea. The American idea posits that you have a strong liberal group and a strong conservative group battling it out in public for primacy of their ideas. And you have to convince the public that your, your, your ideas are right.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  So I think it's very important to have conservatives and liberals writing and arguing in the pages of the Atlantic. So I try to get as many conservatives as, as we can. And unfortunately, all they want to do is write about Trump sometimes. And it's like, every so often I have to remind a conservative writer, can you just come out against abortion randomly or something to remind our readers that you have positions? I understand. I, I understand how personal it is for them and I, I understand what it must be like to see the party that they believed in become a cult of personality around an individual rather than a, a, a place for the ventilation of conservative ideas. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent, but, um, so that's a long way of saying, a long way

• 26:14Speaker 02

  of saying, I can't, I, I can't say I lost friends over that.

• 26:19David Brooks?

  Yeah. I don't believe in losing friends over politics. I, I just think it's, it's a misalignment.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't really matter what you believe. It matters what your friends believe.

• 26:27David Brooks?

  But like I have, I grew up in the conservative movement, so I have a lot of conservative friends. I have conservative family members. I mean, I mean MAGA conservative types.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:34David Brooks?

  And they'll occasionally say, um, how much do I have to pay you to stop writing? They don't like what I write, but we have fun with it and we argue all the time about it.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Well, this is the thing about, here, here's the thing, and, and, and, and this is what makes me most nervous about America. It's like, the thing that will keep America, keep the United States united is nothing more, nothing less than the ability, willingness of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves and restraints on how far they will go rhetorically and otherwise to express their differences with their fellow Americans. You have to start from a position, no American is my enemy. I don't have to like him. I don't have to agree with him, but no American is my, I mean, the way Trump talks about enemies of the people is obviously horrible. No American is my enemy and I will impose restraints on myself.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I have the First Amendment right to say whatever I want, but I don't need to exercise that right to the detriment of the American project. That's how we get out of this. We don't get out of it through legislation. We don't get out of it through constitutional amendment. We don't get out of it through demography. We don't, we, we get out of it because, because people decide that more unites us than divides us. And obviously there are people on both sides of the fence.

• 27:51David Brooks?

  I used to think we needed a war against Canada, but now we may actually get a war against Canada.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think that, I think that the, the liberals, for good reason, would be like, why are we having a war? I mean, if Canada like sucker punched us or something.

• 28:04David Brooks?

  I just meant some common foe, Martians would be a good one. But I think it's almost deeper than that.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I think, um, here's the thing, we don't have, um, the Middle East, we have, there's very obvious existential wars. We don't have, there's very little chance that China just attacks the United States in a Pearl Harbor style. China might very well attack Taiwan and that causes a, a huge discussion in the American public about do we defend or do we not defend? But I don't, I don't, I don't see an outside party.

• 28:34David Brooks?

  Right.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Coming in and, and unifying the American people in the way that the shock of Pearl Harbor.

• 28:39David Brooks?

  But I would go back to what we talked about earlier. My experience in the nineties abroad made me so pro-American. I just love all Americans. Like, you can't love America and hate half the country. But my worry is that, and so I, I love going to Trump areas. I love going to, Brooklyn, I have problems with, but.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Depends on what part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn is wildly diverse.

• 28:59David Brooks?

  So, but my fear is that it's not only we, there are no limits to how we exercise our partisanship, but we've lost faith in the art of persuasion. And so I have this weird pet peeve. When politicians say we're going to fight, when they use that word fight, which is now omnipresent, I want to say fighting is for fascists. Democracy is about persuasion. But I, I know a lot of journalists, opinion journalists who don't believe in persuasion.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  You're going to make a lot of money as a political consultant, by the way.

• 29:26David Brooks?

  It is about persuasion.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Of course. I mean, persuasion is the coin of the realm in democracies and coercion is the coin of the realm in autocracies. I don't like coercion. I would love to be persuaded of, I mean, it's actually, I mean, I think it actually is like healthy for your brain to allow it to be persuaded by evidence. It's like, it, it means that, you know, your, your pistons are functioning.

• 29:51David Brooks?

  But there's a lot of people in our business and their economic incentives to be in the mobilization business, not in the persuasion business.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Huge. And I don't know how to, I mean, and yet it's not as if 350 million Americans have to wake up tomorrow morning and say, persuasion, not coercion, no American is my enemy. I will oppose restraint on the way I talk in order to make sure that, that my fellow Americans understand that I do not consider them enemies. I understand that's, that's a hard one. There are structural ways of, there are algorithmic ways, obviously, of lowering the temperature. If we had non-sociopaths running social media companies, they might, they might program for unity or, or fact as opposed, as opposed to programming for anger. But here we are.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? When was the last time you drove in total serenity, the outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading edge luxury to make every drive and occasion limitless, effortless, pureless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction.

• 31:46David Brooks?

  Now, let me, tell me if I'm being an old fogey.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  You're an old fogey.

• 31:51David Brooks?

  Thank you. I appreciate that. It was a bit of emotional bath that I needed. So I used to, maybe I, I used to admire politicians more as people. And I don't know if the politicians are getting lesser or if the system is getting lesser. Or is it the, some of the people I admired, I was just down in Georgia and I met Sam Nun's daughter. Sam Nun was, and like Sam Nun was a senator, knew so much about defense policy. Like he was a deeply knowledgeable guy, as much as any policy wonk. We talked about McCain and Obama. It's, they struck me as bigger one. Ted Kennedy was like a great legislator, just a great, great legislator. I think the, the two best legislators of my lifetime have been Ted Kennedy, who really knew how to, who knew what everybody in the room needed.

• 32:36David Brooks?

  And the other would be Nancy Pelosi.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Every, well, yeah. Every Republican in the Senate, seemingly every Republican in the Senate in Ted Kennedy's long tenure there, had a, had a bill with Ted Kennedy. Kennedy would always find something to agree with someone and then, and then legislate to their mutual advantage. It's amazing thing to watch. I mean, it's funny when you talk to old senators, they're like, yeah, I co-sponsored that with Ted Kennedy. And then I was like, and I know you're surprised, but it's like, no, it's not, not surprising.

• 33:10David Brooks?

  There were like.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  He was also so secure as a liberal icon that, you know, if Ted Kennedy said, I'm doing something with Orrin Hatch, the liberals of Massachusetts would say, oh, wow, you're a great legislator, not what are you doing with Orrin Hatch?

• 33:24David Brooks?

  But he also, there was a skill to being a legislator, which they really worked on. Now, it's a skill that's getting on TV, but like the skill of politics.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  I think it's the temptation, the social media temptation, the ability to express your feelings is not a, the ability to express your feelings 24 hours a day, instantaneously is not a good thing. You, you, you know, it's, you know, you could spend all day long trying to maintain your filters and you can't. So that's, that's sometimes why. I mean, you know, I get even people of dignity succumb. And, you know, I, I just, I would really like it, just the next president to be just a dignified person who doesn't rise to the bait all the time and just explain to the American people over and over again, this is what a president does. This is what a president doesn't do. I'm not going to do the things that presidents don't do.

• 34:15David Brooks?

  Okay, let's talk about the future. And I'm going to tell you why I'm optimistic about America. And you can tell me why my, why my theory is ridiculous. So in 2020.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  What second prize?

• 34:26David Brooks?

  We would define the fall of the Roman Empire. So in 2020, I'm reading a book. I'm sitting at home in COVID and I'm reading a book by Samuel Huntington, The Politics of Disharmony. Oh, is it the, The Promise of Disharmony is the subtitle. The title was American Politics. And he says, every couple of generations, America goes through a moral convulsion. People get disgusted with established power, high distrust, they want to burn everything down. There's new passionate generation comes on the scene, new form of communications technology. He says this happened in the 1770s, the revolutionary period. 1830s, Andrew Jackson populist era. 1890s, the industrial revolution, which leads to the progressive era in the 1960s. And these periods, he says, are brutal to live through. So he's writing this in 1982 and he says,

• 35:11David Brooks?

  if the pattern holds sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, America will go through another moral convulsion. And I'm like, well done, Professor Huntington. And, but the good news is you come out of them.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:22David Brooks?

  And so we've been through this so many, six or seven times before.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  How do we come out?

• 35:26David Brooks?

  And I think the question, I think we come out of them the way we're coming out of them right now, which is you have a cultural shift, a value shift, and then that leads to a politics shift. And we've gone through a period of brutal nihilism. And I think, I look at like, you go back to the Fred Rogers movies where people were weeping in the theater because they wanted to see a good person. Or you go to the Ted Lasso. People loved it because they wanted to see a good person upbeat. I just saw Devil Wears Prada 2. The Anne Hathaway character is a good person. I think most of Zohar Mambani's policies are horrific, but he smiles when he talks. He's a happy guy. And I think he's a brilliant politician. And so to me, this is all part of a buildup of a cultural value shift, a vibe shift

• 36:10David Brooks?

  as big as we've seen in any of these other moral convulsions. It makes total sense to me that that's what's about to happen and we're seeing the early days of it.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  It's funny because my perfect president would combine the best qualities of Anne Hathaway and Zohar Mambani. How did you know that? How do you read my mind like that? How do you do that? I'm perfectly open to the idea that we're, that this is a midlife crisis or whatever you want to call it and that we're coming out. I don't, I prefer not to think that it's a terminal illness. I think that there's one huge, put aside AI, which I don't know how it's going to like, how that ball bounces, right? But social media generally, I don't know what you can do contemplatively in that age of social media. All that being said, if the, if people on the right accept the basic,

• 37:00Speaker 02

  undergirding principles of creedal nationalism, which is like, we're elsewhere allegiance to a, to a constitution and, and we love the flag and everybody lives here together and we're a big multicultural democracy. And the American idea is that no one is better than me and I'm, I'm not better than anyone and we're all going to create opportunities. Great. And that people on the left have to not talk about identity and division all the time and try to divide based on resentment categories, right? And, and sort of downplay, like, like the, on the right, downplay the nativist impulses that are, you know, universal. And on the left, downplay the things that divide

• 37:45Speaker 02

  and upplay the things that unite. Because you and I both know this because we travel around the world. When you meet an American outside America, it's the greatest thing in the world. It doesn't matter where you're from. You're just like so ineluctably American. You're just doing, you know, and, and you're so excited. It doesn't matter that you're from, you know, Brooklyn and this one is from Montana. You're American. And, you know, it's like, that's what I, that's what I love about America. And it's a shame that sometimes you have to go outside of America to get that feeling among Americans. But I don't know what the, I don't have a prescription for how to make people understand these things. And I hope that we can find our way to these things the easy way and not the hard way. But at the end of an easy way or a hard way, is this renewed understanding, I think, I hope.

• 38:29David Brooks?

  Yeah, and I think nations decline, not when they go through turmoil, but when they run out of energy. And we are not, we have all this mishgas around us, but we haven't run out of energy.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  No, we haven't run out of energy for the mishigas. But at a certain point, these things, you, you forget. I was on Cyprus once and, you know, you cross the, you cross the DMZ and you talk to people on both sides and they're like, I don't know. I don't remember. Like what, when's the last thing, when's the last crazy thing that happened? I, I don't know. You know, and, and you're like, if it went back to Greece, would you care? No, things burn out, you know? But we're not at the burn, we're not at that burn stage yet.

• 39:11David Brooks?

  I want to bring us home here, try to.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Did we, did we accomplish anything in this podcast?

• 39:16David Brooks?

  We did a.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Is this a podcast?

• 39:17David Brooks?

  This is a pointillist painting by Surratt. And we have had so many points that all add up to one beautiful picture. And that picture is, to me.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  The Atlantic magazine.

• 39:30David Brooks?

  Is the Atlantic magazine embodied truth. I, but I, to me, I'm reminded, there was a guy, Abraham Kuiper, and he had a theory of the spheres, that there are a lot of different spheres in society. And there's the political sphere. There's a religious sphere. There's a capitalist sphere. There's a family sphere. And it's really important to keep them apart. And to know that the logic of one sphere does not pertain to the logic of other spheres. And his argument was we've collapsed all the spheres and we've taken the role, the logic of politics and applied it to the logic of education, or higher, at least higher ed is super politicized, a logic of popular culture that's super politicized. Every scandal that breaks up, it, it breaks down immediately on partisan lines.

• 40:14David Brooks?

  Everything is seen through that lens. And so we've broken down the spheres and that's a problem for all of us.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  I think we have to segregate the impulses of politics away from the other parts of life that are more complicated and more, you know, politics can make you inhuman.

• 40:30David Brooks?

  And, and you know, get down to your daily life.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm getting older. So like, I'm, I'm more in the.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  I attribute this to chronology, but I don't know. I'm more in the nature, spiritual religions. Like, you know, I think part of it is, and this has been a theme of this conversation. I will try to organize coherence to this conversation. I think that the older you get in journalism and maybe politics, too. I think now I've seen most things. Many of the things that I've seen in politics and journalism, I've seen three or four or five times. Nothing's new under the sun, to borrow from Ecclesiastes. Nothing is new, and that makes it a little bit more boring. So you're trying to find the thing that's actually transcendent out of this.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  You know, on one hand, it leads to, our friend Ruth Marcus calls it calm mastery. It's like, okay, I've been through that crisis already. I did that. I know what, I know what happens. But on the other hand, you're looking for something more. And so I read more Emerson than I used to. I, I read more Bible than I used to. I read Psalms more than I used to. I try to very deliberately go into nature more than I used to. And by the way, I mean, it was just last week out in the redwoods. And there's nothing like, go right up to a redwood and look up.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  And, and like, you're really gonna think that some fight on, on MSNBC or Fox is important?

• 42:10David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Standing next to a 1,400-year-old redwood?

• 42:13David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Like, you know, it's just like putting things into perspective and, and understanding that it's, it's, that not much matters. The things that matter, matter hugely, but not much actually matters. I'm sorry, I'm getting all like-

• 42:28David Brooks?

  No, well, this is why The Permanent Questions is here for you.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Oh, that's good.

• 42:32David Brooks?

  That's what we're doing.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  So if I listen every week, I will understand?

• 42:35David Brooks?

  You will, we are the verbal equivalent of a redwood. And, and, and I just wanted to express the point of this podcast-

• 42:41Speaker 02

  You're one of the shorter redwoods I've ever met, by the way.

• 42:44David Brooks?

  Spiritually tall.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  But spiritually, you're, your canopy, your canopy shades us all.

• 42:49David Brooks?

  Ultimately, your decision to hire me was, was a wise one. I think that's why we're here.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  As wise as a redwood.

• 42:55David Brooks?

  Jeffrey Goldberg, thank you for being on The Permanent Questions.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 43:02David Brooks?

  There were times when I was covering political campaigns and I would be deep in political everything. And I would take time off to read an essay written by the essayist C.S. Lewis. And he talked about how medieval people looked at the night sky. We see the night sky and we see balls of gas. They looked at the night sky and they just saw enchantment. And his description of the way they saw the world as enchanted always used to lift my spirit. And in the midst of a political season, I needed something to lift my spirit. And so I resonated when Jeff talked about the redwoods. About that, maybe as you get older, or maybe we just are exhausted by the politics of the last 10 years, when Jeff talked about going out to the redwoods, sitting under a redwood and looking up.

• 43:47David Brooks?

  Suddenly, the world is enchanted again. Or he talked about reading the Bible, reading spiritual books, reading deeper literature. Suddenly, in the midst of the random flux of political debate, it's important to care about the permanent things. And that's one of the reasons that motivated me to do this podcast, frankly. I was tired of the daily bounce of politics. I wanted to step back at what really mattered. And I think with Jeff's conversation, we saw how important that is. Thanks so much for joining us for this week's conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays.

• 44:28David Brooks?

  You can subscribe at The Atlantic's YouTube channel, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work, or the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.