David Brooks on What Happened to American Conservatism

In the midst of the midterms, we’re revisiting a previous conversation with David Brooks. The political commentator, author of How to Know a Person, and staff writer for The Atlantic joins Scott to explain why he no longer recognizes the conservative movement he joined in his twenties, and how we got here. David also reflects on the over-politicization of American life, the crisis facing young men, and more. The episode originally aired on May 1st, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:27Speaker 00

  Welcome to the 420th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening with the midterms this week? We're revisiting our May 2025 conversation with David Brooks about what happened to American conservatism. I think David brings just such a unique perspective on the GOP and sort of a bright, well-lit corner of conservatism, if you will. And I went back and listened to this and think it's especially salient for the day we're in today. Anyways, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy this, and with that, here is David Brooks. David, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:02David Brooks?

  I am actually at home in Washington, DC.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  In DC. Well, it's, as I said off mic, I'm a big fan, and it took us a while to get you on the pod, but really appreciate you being here.

• 2:12David Brooks?

  Very happy to be here.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  So let's bust right into it. You've been a lifelong conservative. Is there a version of conservatism left that you still recognize or believe in? Like where it feels, Democrats at least have a common enemy. Where do, where do true conservatives go right now for leadership or some sort of touchstone?

• 2:35David Brooks?

  Yeah, I became a conservative in my twenties after being a police reporter in Chicago. And the two heroes for me were Edmund Burke, who was an Irish conservative statesman and philosopher, who believed that in epistemological modesty, the idea is the world is really complicated, and when we do change, we should do it constantly, but incrementally. And my other hero was Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip hop artist from Upper Manhattan. Now, and so Alexander Hamilton believed that progressives believe in government to enhance equality, and libertarians believe in limited government to enhance freedom. Hamiltonianism believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. And so those are the two North Stars for me.

• 3:19David Brooks?

  And of course, over the course of the Trump administration, I've come to believe that whatever conservatism is, it's not what Trump is producing. He's producing reactionary politics, something completely different. And so I went back to those books that I used to read from Edmund Burke and people like Isaiah Berlin and a guy named Michael Oakeshott, and I loved them all over again. I think the essential conservative truths are still very profound, but they are nothing like what is called conservatism today. There is nothing like Fox News. And I go back to one moment in my formation where now in retrospect, it looks like there's a crucial fork in the road. I came out of the year of Chicago and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books.

• 4:03David Brooks?

  And I worked at National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, and we believed in promulgating conservative ideas. At the same time I graduated from Chicago, there were a couple of people graduating from Dartmouth who had worked at the Dartmouth Review. And people may recognize Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, they were in this group. And I've come to see they were not pro-conservative. They were anti-left. They were in elite institutions, but they hated the progressive lean of those institutions. And so they were sort of the rebel bad boys. The defining feature of the Dartmouth Review was in 1986, some progressive students on Dartmouth's campus erected a shanty town to protest apartheid.

• 4:44David Brooks?

  And in the middle of the night, the editors of Dartmouth Review, about a dozen of them, descended on the shanty town and took sled shammers to them. And it was an attempt to dismantle the left, really. And to me, it was like Gestapo tactics. I was shocked and appalled because apartheid really is worth protesting. But I've come to see that difference between being pro-conservative, which I would say John McCain was, Mitt Romney was, George W. Bush was, and anti-left, which is what Laura Ingraham is, which is what Pete Hexteth is, what is what Vivek Ramaswamy is. That to me is a crucial difference.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  You had a recent essay in The Atlantic titled, "I Should Have Seen This Coming." And you write about how people were once drawn to conservatism by a set of values, but now it's about dominance and rage. It feels as if the right has conflated some perverted form or sense of masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. How did that come about from a group of people that has typically been more aligned with, I don't want to say Christian values, but spiritual religious values that are meant to be more charitable than, quite frankly, these heathen hippies from the left? Like, how did it get so mean?

• 5:56David Brooks?

  Yeah, resentment, a sense of siege mentality. And then there's something animistic, deep in human nature. And so when humans first evolved, we were in a war of, a struggle of all against all. Life was nasty, brutish and short. And then over the course of the centuries, we built civilization. And that civilization consisted of constitutions to restrain power. It consisted of international systems to try to promote peace, but it also consisted of humanistic values, literature and art and poetry to soften human nature. It consisted of moral philosophies, either theological or secular, to answer the question, what is life for? And when I look at the Trump administration, I see a massive attempt to return us to the

• 6:41David Brooks?

  life of dog eat dog, the life of nasty, brutish and short, the life where gangsters have maximum freedom to do what they want to do. And that is the evisceration of all the values of civilization that conservatism is supposed to transmit and preserve. And I think the raw lust for power that Donald Trump embodies has not only eviscerated conservatism, it's invisterated Christianity. Christianity is a system designed around the meek, service to the poor. Jesus never embraced worldly power. Donald Trump is completely about worldly power. It's about domination. And so it's been interesting to me to watch a political leader eviscerate the two philosophies

• 7:25David Brooks?

  that he claims to stand for, both conservatism and Christianity, and such as the acidic power of nihilism.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  You summarized, I remember after January 20th, I was, I think a lot of us on the left just felt sort of flummoxed and flat-footed. We did not even know how to describe or even process what we were feeling. And you summarized it perfectly. You said that you, you felt moral shame, that to watch the loss of your nation's honor is embarrassing and painful. What do you think we lost that day?

• 7:56David Brooks?

  Yeah, you know, I quoted in that Atlantic essay, the first sentence of one of Charles de Gaulle's memoirs, and he says, "I've always had a certain idea about France, and I've always had a certain idea about America, that we're a flawed nation that's fundamentally a force for good." We, you know, Lincoln tried to uphold the dignity of man. FDR tried to defeat fascism. Ronald Reagan tried to defeat communism. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, created PEPFAR to save 25 million lives in Africa, who might have otherwise died of HIV. And so we made our mistakes, like Vietnam and Iraq, but they were straight mistakes of stupidity, of arrogance, of naivete, but they were not out of evil intention. And when I look at Donald Trump, evil intention is part of the plan.

• 8:41David Brooks?

  And so when I saw him attack Zelensky and with J D Vance in that Oval Office, I had experienced a blow to my patriotism, an emotion that I hadn't really felt about America before. And then on Liberation Day, when the tariffs were announced, I felt it again, mixed with a horror of incompetence. These are new experiences, new and shocking experiences.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a lot of moderates trying to find their political home base. I think I would have been a Rockefeller Republican if I'd been a little bit older. There's a lot of things about conservatism I'm really drawn to. And I wonder, as someone who's, you know, I think a lot of progressives are like, we think, okay, we Democrats get it wrong a lot. We take things too far. Identity politics, I think, is out of control. But the way you describe Americans, I would describe Democrats right now, their hearts in the right place. But we just often take things too far. We let 250,000 people across the border in December of 23rd, inspiring an overreaction where we start basically rounding up people with the wrong tattoos.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  We let D E I apparatus on campus go so far that it probably becomes unconsciously accidentally racist itself, and we inspire an overreaction. Do you think there's any truth to the notion that we on the left, quite frankly, have a tendency to stick out our chin and just take things too far and quite frankly, create space for an overreaction? Is some of this our fault?

• 10:11David Brooks?

  Oh, absolutely. You know, I would say one flaw, and now where I position myself, I read one of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher. And he said, I'm happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. And that's where I find myself these days, on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. I associate more with moderate or to the Democrats, I guess, but I am the conservative version of that. And when I look at the progressive world, I think it was just a horrible mistake to buy into an ideology that defines all human relationships into oppressor oppressed groups. It was a horrible mistake to think that a person's ideas, values and worldviews are determined by their racial or gender identities.

• 10:52David Brooks?

  But the ultimate sin for me that progressives committed over the last 70 years is they created worlds in the universities and in the media and the cultural institutions and the nonprofits, where there was no room for voices that were working class voices and there was no room for conservative voices. So when I joined journalism as a police reporter, I worked around a lot of high school grads. Journalism had a strong working class component in those days. And when I went to college, there was mostly progressives, but there were a lot of conservatives around. Over the ensuing 40 years, that's been purged. And as far as I know, if you took at the editorial staff of the major mainstream media

• 11:33David Brooks?

  organizations, there's not a single Trump supporter in an editorial position, as far as I know. And so if you tell half the country that your voices are not worth hearing, they're going to flip the table. And worse, if you create a meritocratic system where the children of the rich have advantages in getting to Ivy League schools over the children of the poor, and that goes on generation after generation, they're going to flip the table. And one of the things that disturbs me most about American life is how we've developed a caste system. So college educated people live 15 years longer than high school educated people. High school educated people are five times more likely to die of opioid addiction, five times more likely to have kids out of wedlock, 2.4 times more likely to say they have no

• 12:18David Brooks?

  friends. And so we've created this class divide on the basis of education. And it was mostly progressives who were in charge of our educational institutions. So that fixing that problem is one of the things I think progressives have to work on.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think a lot about this. And the way I describe, what you just described is this magic drug that does all the wonderful things you're talking about if you take it. And yet we as progressives who run these institutions have decided to hoard this drug through artificial scarcity. That America's become a rejectionist, kind of LVMH exclusionary culture, that once I have a house, I get very concerned with traffic and show up and make sure no one else can build a house because the incentive is to see the value of my house go up. Once I have a college degree, I kind of enjoy hearing that the admissions rate has gone from 76% to 9%, which is my alma mater, UCLA. Do you think that there's this virus that infects Democrats and Republicans where we've decided, once you get there, pull up the bridge behind you?

• 13:17Speaker 00

  That we're more LVMH than what was originally a vision for America?

• 13:22David Brooks?

  Yeah, I mean, I would say the one little activity that personifies what you just said is my daughter did okay in her SAT scores and she started getting brochures from colleges. And she got big, expensive glossy brochures from schools like Harvard. There is literally no student in my zip code who can get into Harvard who doesn't know about Harvard. And so why did they send these fancy brochures? In order to induce students to apply so they can reject them. That way, they can say, we are rejecting 96% of the kids who are applying to our school. And so that's a bit of the cynicism of creating, not only creating scarcity, but bragging that you've become a rejection academy, rejecting 96% of the kids who apply. And so that to me is a bit of the segmentation.

• 14:05David Brooks?

  And then recruiters from banks and the consulting groups, they recruit at very few schools. Somebody did a study of looking at who works in media, entertainment, corporations, law, science, and 54% in these various diverse fields went to the same 32 elite colleges. And so we have created a segregation system based on SAT scores and grades that divides society at a very early age. And a lot of kids know by age eight or nine, because their test is so often, whether the system thinks they're dumb or smart. And the dumb ones are alienated and they think the system is rigged against it, which is accurate.

• 14:49David Brooks?

  I had an interesting call with a friend of mine who lives in Ohio, who's an electrician. And he said, you know, David, I saw you saying nice things about institutions, that you really were through some really wonderful institutions that made you a better person. And I would include my summer camp, my high school, my college. He said, I've never felt that way about institutions. That was such a novel thought for me because every institution I've been a part of is like a jackboot in my face. And that's just a very different attitude than those of us who are fortunate enough to do reasonably well in these elite institutions.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

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• 18:45Speaker 00

  You're a thoughtful guy. I want to move to solutions. Do you think it's, I mean, one idea. I just spoke with David Axelrod, the University of Chicago. You're a Chicago grad.

• 18:55David Brooks?

  Yeah, I'm a Chicago grad.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Okay, in the middle of the tour, I just did that college week, college tour with my son. And they keep talking in this very like warm tones of we look at the full applicant. And then along the way, a parent, and of course, it's only the parents asking questions. But I think they should pass a law that no parent is ever allowed to ask a question in these tours. Anyways, someone makes the mistake of asking the admissions rate. And the guy, this lovely high EQ guy goes, it's 4%. So there's 75 people on this tour, 25 kids, 50 parents. So one of them is getting in and we're all marching around the campus. And I say to my son, I said, let's leave the tour. I just don't want to get your hopes up here. You're not getting into the University of Chicago with a 4% admissions rate. You're just not.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  And I wonder if some of these schools should lose their tax reset status that if you have, if you have an adowment over a billion dollars, you're not growing your freshman class faster than population. You're no longer a public servant, you're a hedge fund with classes. What, you're a thoughtful guy, you've written on the topic. What do you think we do to try and break the caste system that has become higher education?

• 20:00David Brooks?

  You know, first, on those college tours, I've never felt more invisible in my life than when I'm a parent on one of those college tours, because you realize you don't matter at all. But I would say these schools, and I piss on them all the time, they're still fantastic places.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  If you can get in, it's amazing.

• 20:18David Brooks?

  If you can get in. They're amazing places of deep learning. And what I'm hoping is the universities will do a couple of things. First, expand, as you suggest, to allow more access. Second, do genuine intellectual diversity on campus. And so, since I'm more conservative than the campus norm, I now talk politics, something I would never have done in the classroom. I'd say, look, I'm a conservative, I just want to explain to you what it feels like, why I became a conservative, so you have some access, you know what a conservative looks like. And so, that's strange to a lot of students. The third and most important thing is we need to redefine our definition of ability. Our whole system is based on a definition of ability, which is the ability to suck up to teachers between ages of 15 and 18 and do well on standardized tests.

• 21:03David Brooks?

  That is not what genuine ability is. It doesn't allow for curiosity, it doesn't allow for determination, for drive, for social skills. And if we had a wider definition of ability that rich parents couldn't game as well, to include those more humanistic traits, then it's more widely dispersed across populations. And we would have a more democratic student body, because we'd measure the things that really matter, that don't require you to go to a private school to get all the training. And so, to me, the history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. And we used to, it used to be, if you were in a military society, it was military courage. Then in the 19th century, it was social breeding. Did you come over from Mayflower?

• 21:46David Brooks?

  But in the 1930s to 1950s, the whole system switched over to IQ. And that's just an incredibly narrow definition of ability. So the only way to really diversify and democratize the system is to redefine what ability is, what we're going to measure, what criteria we're going to use to accept or reject kids. And we'll understand that the distinctions these days we draw between Princeton and, I don't know, Penn State, these are ridiculous distinctions. Williams and Amherst, you know, these are ridiculous. But we've built this hierarchy of status, which perverts and distorts all of society.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Do you think, though, I wonder if the argument over the criteria for who gets in, whether it's going from more analytical to more qualitative, that it's the wrong argument? That it shouldn't be who gets in, that's a misdirect from the key argument, and that is how many? And that is, DEI is an issue, DEI has caused a lot of problems on campus. I actually am, I don't want to call it conservative here, but I think that DEI apparatus on campus should be disassembled. You know, 60% of Harvard's freshman class identifies as non-white. So what is the 140-person DEI apparatus actually doing? But at the same time, I think all of that is a misdirect from what we should be talking about, and that is how many get in. So junior colleges don't have a DEI problem, because you just show up, you pay the fee,

• 23:08Speaker 00

  you get in. And there's not all this manufactured stress over who gets in, and then an argument over, like, who deserves advantage. And, you know, my premise has always been, at the age of 18, I don't know about you, I was remarkably unremarkable. And I don't believe any organization test or individual can be the arbiter of who's going to be a success at 18. You know, I think a lot about men. Our prefrontal cortex just doesn't fully develop till 25. And I didn't get my act together until I was in graduate school. And fortunately, Berkeley let me into graduate school with a 2.27 undergraduate GPA. And so, these institutions are amazing, but why would they sequester this drug? Anyways, I'm sorry, a bit of a speech there. I'm curious what you think about the idea of mandatory national service.

• 23:53David Brooks?

  I couldn't be more enthusiastic about it. In part, because it would get kids from Berkeley to meet kids from Birmingham, Alabama. And so, and then it would give students a sense of what this country is like, what different kinds of people there are in it. But it would also give them a sense that life is really about offering. What are you offering? And, you know, one of my favorite sayings about vocations, a famous one from the novelist Frederick Buechner, "You find your calling where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." And how do you find the world's deep need? You're probably not going to find it at the office at McKinsey, or on the campus of some fancy university. You have to go out to where the problems are.

• 24:36David Brooks?

  I'm also a fan of Viktor Frankl, whose book, Man's Search for Meaning, everybody should read. And he was an Austrian psychiatrist who was put in a Nazi concentration camp. And he realized the wrong question to ask about your life is, what do I want from life? The right question to ask is, what is life asking of me? What problems are in front of me that I am uniquely qualified to take part in addressing? And so, to, national service would give kids a chance to go out where the problems are. And they'll be moved by the injustice of homelessness. So they'll be moved by struggles in rural America, they'll be moved by urban poverty. And it's tapping into that calling will arouse tremendous energy levels.

• 25:20David Brooks?

  I just think it's become tremendously hard to be in your 20s these days, in part because we don't give students enough avenues to find their purpose in life. And you can only do that by trying out a bunch of stuff in your 20s, and figure out which touches your soul. I'm sort of like you, I graduated maybe halfway in my public high school class. I went to Chicago, because in those days, Chicago was accepting 74%. And I, just to underline something you said, I fervently agree with you that you can't predict how a person's going to do, by anything they do at age 18. They have not been formed. And the key to success in life is not how smart you are at 18, but whether you're capable of keep growing and learning all the days of your life.

• 26:03David Brooks?

  And I taught off and on at Yale for 20 years, and it's a wonderful place, I think it's a fantastic place. But I noticed this phenomenon with some of my students, they were electric at 21. But by the time I would have coffee with them 10 years after graduation, some light had gone out. They'd fallen into some career rut, they were not asking the big questions anymore. And so, to me, I don't want to know whether you're shiny at 18, I want to know, are you capable of perpetual growth until you're 100? And that is a skill that you can't measure at 18.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Talk about, one, do you believe, do you bind to this thesis that the idolatry of money has kind of overwhelmed and crowded out character, service, patriotism? Where do you stand on the thesis that it's the idolatry of money that has really, really hurt America?

• 26:52David Brooks?

  Yeah, I would say it's, that's a rhythm in American life, where money becomes the dominant ethos. And you would say the 1880s, the 1890s, we were incredibly materialistic society. But what you need is a moral system that stands against capitalism. So you live in the contest and the tension between capitalism, say, and Catholicism, or capitalism and Judaism, or frankly, capitalism and progressivism. These are all systems, or capitalism and environmentalism. These are all systems that push against some of the worst flaws of capitalism, and give you a moral basis to make your decision, a sense of right and wrong, not just richer or poorer.

• 27:37David Brooks?

  And so, I think creative people live in the tension between those two things. And I think what we've seen is the collapse of all rival systems. One of my favorite sayings from psychology is from a guy named John Bowlby, who does attachment research. Says, "All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base." We need that secure base. And that secure base fundamentally is about your relationship with your parents, having secure attachments. But it's also about having a secure home, hometown, a safe neighborhood. But it's also about a moral order. The sense that you live within a coherent moral order, and you can make the decisions of your life based on this. There was a historian named George Marsden, who wrote once that, "What gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such power was his sense that there was a moral order woven into the

• 28:22David Brooks?

  fabric of the universe. That segregation was not just wrong sometimes, segregation was always wrong. Slavery is always wrong under all circumstances." And so, that gives you a sense of security, if you have a sense that, yes, that right and wrong are permanent. And we took that away, we privatized morality. We told people, it's up to you to come up with your own values. And if your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do this. Most of us can't come up with our own values, and we're left in sort of a formless world that gives no security. Way back in 1955, a great columnist, Dan Walter Lippman, wrote a book, in which he wrote that, "If what is right and wrong is just what each individual invents based on his or her feelings, we have left the bounds of civilization."

• 29:06David Brooks?

  And I think we have left those bounds. So it's a loss of social security, friends, family are weakening, community base is weakening, and moral base is weakening. And that, to me, explains what I think is the deep root cause of a lot of our political problems, which is a spiritual and relational crisis. The rise of disconnection, the rise of loneliness, the rise of suicide. 45% of teenagers say they're persistently hopeless and despondent. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends has gone up fourfold since 2000. And so, we've just seen a decay at the foundations of society, and that has perverted our politics.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Let's try and move to solutions. A spiritual and personal disconnection, how do you think we repair this? If you, I imagine, get called a lot by, probably not this White House, but you probably have a lot of influencing it, asked a lot, what are the two or three programs you believe warrant real investment and attention to try and heal this decay?

• 30:07David Brooks?

  Well, first on the political front, you know, I thought Joe Biden had one job. And his job was to redirect resources to the places that have been left behind. And I thought he basically succeeded at that. If you look at the people who received the money from the Build Back Better and the big infrastructure bills and all that stuff, they're mostly Republican rural places. And if you look at where the big Rahm Emanuel, who was then our ambassador to Japan, produced a map where he showed where the big massive investments are in chip plants and other kind of manufacturing facilities. And the good news for me was like, out of the top 100, only two were in California. But five or six or seven were in Illinois, and five or six or seven were in Iowa, upstate New York. And as I travel around the country, I find a lot of those places.

• 30:52David Brooks?

  You go to eastern Ohio, they're happy because they got an Intel plant coming in there. You go to around Syracuse, they're happy because they got a Micron plant coming in. There really is some bit of economic renaissance. It did not bloom enough to reward Joe Biden. And the second mistake Biden made was you can't fundamentally solve a problem of respect with economic resources. That it's not only that these places have been left behind materially, but they've been left behind in terms of status and respect. And the Democrats still have not managed to find a way to show solidarity and respect to a lot of working class voters. And crossing that cultural divide is a chief challenge, I think, for the party. But then, if you're talking about the social and relational crisis, you know, I do two

• 31:37David Brooks?

  things. I'll just tell you what I do. I started a nonprofit called Weave, the Social Fabric Project. And we celebrate and reward and support people who are working in the neighborhoods where they live. And they're rebuilding trust in those communities. And we give them money, we give them support, we give them platforms to tell their stories. And culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy. So you pick the community leaders in your neighborhood and you hold them up and say, let's be more like them. Let's build connection. And then the final thing I did, I had a book come out a year ago called How to Know a Person. And that's based on the idea that a lot of the disconnection is that people just don't have skills. How do you sit with someone who's suffering from depression? How do you sit with someone who's grieving?

• 32:22David Brooks?

  How do you ask for and offer forgiveness? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart? These are basic social skills. And for a couple of generations, we simply have not taught them. And so to me, one of the reasons we have such high levels of distrust and disconnection is we haven't taught people the practical skills of how to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life. And so these are, at least the things I've chosen to try to work on as my piece of the larger challenge.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Something that struck me in your work is that you advocate for putting moral formation at the center of society. What does that mean and how tactically does that become operationalized?

• 33:01David Brooks?

  Yeah, when our founders created this country, they took around, look around human nature and said, if we're going to build a democracy out of these people, we have to work hard on moral formation. And moral formation is a pompous word, but my favorite definition comes from the Gospel of Ted Lasso. And he says his job at coach of this football team he was coaching is to make these fellows better versions of themselves on and off the field. And schools, unions, civic organizations, they used to think that moral formation was part of their job. It was to perform the character of their kids. And there was a school called the Stowe School, and the headmaster said, our job is to turn out students for acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck.

• 33:46David Brooks?

  They wanted to turn out students who were reliable when the chips were down. And sometime after the war, the whole ethos changed. And we went from a understanding of human nature is that we're beautiful creatures, but are also deeply flawed. We went to a version of human nature is that we're beautiful. People are good inside. There's an angel inside. All you have to do is self-actualize yourself. And if you think you're perfect inside, you don't need to do moral formation. And so all sorts of institutions got out of the moral formation business and into the self-actualization business, including the Girl Scouts, including the schools. And then gradually, the schools became just more careerist. They're not about, they're not about moral formation. They're about getting you into Harvard, they're about getting you a job.

• 34:28David Brooks?

  And so to me, that whole side of human nature, the whole side of human activity, which to me is the most important side, how can we become slightly better versions of ourselves? We abandoned it and were left with the consequences. And we left, frankly, with a country like Donald Trump, because they look at him and they don't see anything wrong. And that's, that's the consequences.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  The thing I struggle with, I think that makes a lot of sense, right? I think of Boy Scouts, which doesn't exist anymore. They're Scouts for America, and the Girl Scouts get their own gender, but Boy Scouts no longer exist. I think of, I used to go to church, temple. My dad was married four times, so I was exposed to a lot of different institutions. And I recognize the importance there. Having said that, I worry that universities, like the one I teach at, offer a lot of courses in sustainability, leadership, ethics. And quite frankly, I find for the most part, they're just student debt and an opportunity to bring in what I call FIPS, formerly important people, to basically, over and over, say one thing, do the right thing even when it's hard.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  So it's like we can charge kids more and more money. I just, I wonder if, again, Democrats have decided that we have decided in higher education that we're no longer centers of excellence, we're social engineers and evangelists of a certain orthodoxy. That again, it's a right idea, but it's gotten out of control at universities. Any thoughts?

• 35:58David Brooks?

  Yeah, well, just to stick with universities, in the course of American history, universities have gone through different regimes. And the first regime was the piety regime. They were Christian institutions, and they were there to instill Christian virtues. Then in the 19th century, there was the humanistic ideal, which is, we're going to still create moral formation, but we're not going to use the Gospels. We're going to use the, basically, the Great Conversation, the European writers, from Aristotle to Shakespeare, France to Bacon and all the way. Then in the middle of the 20th century, the ideal shifted to the research ideal. We're a bunch of specialists here to advance knowledge. And then it shifted to the career ideal. Our job as universities is to get kids high-paying jobs.

• 36:40David Brooks?

  And then, because those last two ideals were so morally vacuous, the social justice ideal filled the moral vacuum and said, our job is to be activists and to help people who've been part of marginalized groups. And that, of course, is a noble activity, but it's not the right activity for the universities. In part, because it turned teaching into a form of indoctrination. It turned students into a form of diplomats from their identity groups. But most, and what we're seeing now, is that if you fix your university to a political party and say, we're activists, we're the activist wing of the Democratic Party, well, guess what? The Republicans are going to take it out on you. And that's what's happening.

• 37:24David Brooks?

  And I'm hoping the universities will realize they're a new ideal, which is to return to the humanistic ideal, which is character formation more than political activism. But then to return to a civic ideal. Our universities spend, and like a lot of institutions, spend a lot more time helping people prosper in their private lives without thinking carefully, what's our role in our civic life? And why do we have so many universities that are blue bubbles in red neighborhoods or in red states? Because they're, they're not interacting with the civic life as a whole. They withdraw onto the campus walls. And so to me, universities are great institutions. They are great, great institutions that are really one of the keys to America's greatness.

• 38:07David Brooks?

  But they've lost their mission, and I'm hoping, under challenge from Trump and the rest of them, that they'll rediscover their mission and find out, our job is really to form people and to create citizens and to be civic institutions that bind society across difference and across class difference. And that would be a noble mission and a real recovery for American universities.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  We'll be right back.

• 39:15Speaker 00

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• 40:00Speaker 00

  Enterprise software, high concentration of youthful residents, and affordability. I think that's why Raleigh would probably stand out, or I would suggest that it should be in the consideration set. Okay, now let's assume you are, totally unlike me, I'm the great endorsement and enjoy the outdoors and want to find a city to live in that is great if you're into the outdoors. So feels obvious, but it wasn't to me when I did the search, Salt Lake City. So this is interesting, balanced career launchpads. The one that really surprises me a little bit here, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh in the house. So I think this does what you want it to do. There's going to be a couple of points of discovery that will legitimately move into your selection set, and you may end up making, quite frankly, just a better decision because you'll have more data points and things you probably wouldn't have included again in

• 40:45Speaker 00

  your opportunity set. So all this with Yahoo's AI-powered answer engine, Yahoo Scout. You can start exploring at scout.com. Support for the show comes from Canva. I've seen many a pitch deck in my life. Word of advice, don't take the visuals for granted. It's a crucial part of first impressions, and frankly, it's pretty easy to discern if it's a hastily thrown-together deck or a polished, inspired presentation born from real creativity. Canva is just what you need to bring that creative vision alive. And that goes beyond pitch decks, it could be an ad for socials, a logo for your side hustle, wedding invitations, whatever it is, Canva makes sure you never start from a blank page. They've got thousands of templates to choose from to get going instantly.

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• 42:14Speaker 00

  you basically wrote what was sort of an adjacent review of his book. Back in 2022, you wrote a piece for the New York Times called "The Crisis of Men and Boys," and it introduced me to Richard Reeves. Richard's become a good friend. And just the data was so overwhelming to me, and in a weird way, I felt like later, late in life, I'd found, you know, a sort of a purpose, and that was to talk about this issue. And we think about it a lot here, most of our, 80% of our listenership is men. What are your thoughts on struggling young men, and specifically masculinity?

• 42:48David Brooks?

  Yeah, well, I just took Ike with Richard two days ago, so he's a very close friend of mine. I do think, one of the beautiful things Richard has accomplished is to make sure this is not a zero-sum game. And he emphasizes this over and over again, that what's good for males is not bad for females. And that should be obvious, but Richard struggled to get the book published years ago because a lot of people had this zero-sum thinking in their head. And I think the crisis of masculinity is in part a system, as Richard says, where the schools are not designed for boys. But I think it's primarily that loss of purpose, that loss of sense that, how do I express? There's a British philosopher named Shirley Robin Letwin, who wrote a book about the

• 43:33David Brooks?

  vigorous virtues, that we want to be, we want people who are loyal to friends, tough on foes, dynamic, risk-taking, courageous, brave. And these virtues, some of these virtues have been shoved aside in the effort to create a more compassionate society, and that's a beautiful effort. But people want to be courageous, they want to do things on behalf of some moral ideal that requires courage, force, strength, and frankly, self-mastery. And I look at all the podcasters who are now like gigantic buff ripped guys, and they look like they swallowed a weight machine. And, but, but that's discipline. It's something you can relate to, and I'm not a buff guy by any means, but you could,

• 44:18David Brooks?

  you see why young men want that, because it gives them something that's hard. And it gives, it fills the urge to self-improvement. And we went a few decades by saying the things a lot of guys want, not all guys, obviously, those things are toxic, or those things are bad, or those things are aggressive and destructive. But they're aggressive and destructive only when used to serve evil ends. But to serve noble ends, the idea of self-improvement, the idea of being aggressive, the idea of being strong, is something we should celebrate and give people avenues toward. And just, you know, I hope I'm not violating your privacy, but Richard has a tradition

• 45:00David Brooks?

  of taking a camping trip on New Year's Eve, and it can get cold in that 10, nine degrees. And that's what, that's the kind of love of adventure that not only boys want, but girls want that too. And we've, we've reduced the ways young people can experience adventure, in part because of all the helicopter parenting.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  You talk about things around community and comity of man, and care for your neighbors. I don't hear you talk about your own family a lot, and to the extent you're comfortable, I'd just be very interested to know, we have a lot of young men who listen, a lot of new dads, a lot of new husbands. Curious, you know, we're, look, we're on the back nine, right? And hopefully, we've learned some stuff that we can impart on other people, or share our mistakes so other people don't make the same ones. What advice would you have for new dads, and what have you learned about being a dad?

• 45:56David Brooks?

  Yeah, well, I was, like a lot of guys, I had trouble expressing my emotions. I think I felt emotions, but there was no highway between my heart and my mouth, so I didn't know how to talk about them. And I had a natural fear of them, I guess. And there's a moment that represents the way I used to be to myself. I love baseball, I go to a lot of baseball games. I've never caught a foul ball. And I'm in Baltimore with my youngest son, and the batter loses control of the bat, and it flies into the stands and lands in my lap. And a normal human being, like getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball. A normal human being is waving his trophy in the air, my bat, and I'm high-fiving everybody

• 46:40David Brooks?

  and getting on the jumbo train, I'm hugging people. I took the bat and just put it on the ground and just sat there. And I look back on that guy, and I see, show a little moral joy, show a little joy, like that's a great event, you should be celebrating in public. But I was so inhibited that I didn't know how to be emotionally open in public. And I went through a hard time after that. I went through divorce, my kids left for school, and I was living in a little apartment, and I was lonely, and fiercely lonely. And there's a saying that when you're in those hard times in your life, you can be either be broken or broken open. And if you're broken, you turn hard, you turn into a lobster shell, and nothing can touch you.

• 47:24David Brooks?

  But if you're broken open, you get even more vulnerable, and you, you stay in the pain to learn what it has to teach you. And what my pain had to teach me was that I was misleading my life by not living from the depths of myself, but living from the shallows. It was very easy for me to use glibness and reason to do fine in life without confronting the spiritual, and in some way relational shortages and vacuums I'd created. And so I, I did it the way I do it. I read books about spirituality, and I came to faith in this time. But mostly, I just became a lot more able to express my emotions, express vulnerability, and that can be an easy drug to express vulnerability, too easy.

• 48:08David Brooks?

  But I think I'm different, and my friends tell me that I'm different. And when my wife, we've been married eight years, she looks at earlier versions of me on video, she says, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. And so I guess my, the lesson is to, to become familiar with your emotional and spiritual life, and it will bring you greater pains and greater joys. But you have to do that either through spiritual practices, for me, it's in the case of spiritual reading, that's how I process. But it's also through the process of deeper conversations. I'll tell you one quick story. When I was in between marriages, I was dating, and I was talking to my daughter on the phone,

• 48:51David Brooks?

  and I asked her what she was doing that weekend, and she said, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my boyfriend's parents for the first time. And I said to her, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my girlfriend's parents for the first time. And in that moment, our relationship went from being adult to child, to adult to adult. And we could talk about things that we, that as a parent, sometimes you don't want to talk, open up too much to your kids, but when it's adult to adult, you can open up a little more, not totally, but open up a little more. And that was a beautiful shift in our relationship, that to be able to just be adults and adults together, working through crap. And I found that was, that's a beautiful moment. And the overall lesson, I would say, is no matter what your age, it's never too late to change.

• 49:33David Brooks?

  People change, not just in adolescence, they change through adulthood, and the emotional, the, the transformation I needed in my life was an emotional one.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Thoughts on being a good partner, good husband?

• 49:46David Brooks?

  You know, there's a guy named Tim Keller who wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. And he said, you get married, you married this wonderful person.

• 49:56David Brooks?

  And about six months in, you realize that she's actually kind of selfish in some ways. And as you're making this discovery about her, she's making it about you.

• 50:08David Brooks?

  And marriage work when you realize, well, my kind of selfishness is the only selfishness I can work on. And he says, if you have two partners in a marriage who are working on their selfishness, then you're probably going to have good marriage and not blaming the other. The other thing I'd say is who you marry is just tremendously important. And Nietzsche, who you don't think of as particularly romantic guy, said, marriage is a 50 year conversation. Pick the person you can talk with for the rest of your life. And so if you find somebody who you can talk on the phone with for four hours, that's a pretty good indicator. The second thing I'd add is that love comes and goes, but admiration stays. So stay with someone you admire, pick someone you admire, and they will not let you down.

• 50:51David Brooks?

  And then the final bit of advice I give to college students in picking a marriage partner, which is to me, the most, one of the most important decisions in life is there are three kinds of love, according to the Greeks, there's eros, which is passion, there's friendship. And then there's agape love, which is selfish love. And if you're going to marry someone, you should have all three kinds of love. If you just have eros, you have a hookup, but you don't have a relationship. If you just have philly, a friendship, you have a friendship, but you don't have a romantic love. You should have all three. And so the bar should be pretty high. And, and so that's some of the advice I give on making a marriage decision. I'm not sure anybody listens, but that's my advice.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  So you've been very generous with your time. I'm going to do just a quick lightning round because you know, you're a busy dude. So real quick, best piece of advice you've ever received?

• 51:41David Brooks?

  I guess know something about something. When you get out of school, find some field of expertise that you can really study. And then you bring that to the table. A second bit of advice I would give to young people is build identity capital. There's a Meg Jay who wrote a book called The Defining Decade about being in your twenties. And she had a patient who wanted to work at Starbucks, but had a job offer at Outward Bound. And she said, go to Outward Bound because at every job interview, at every dinner party, people want to know what it was like to work on Outward Bound. That will give you identity capital. And so I find that's pretty good advice.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Last piece of media that really moved you?

• 52:24David Brooks?

  Well, I'm now listening on audiobook to Andre Agassi's memoir, which is one of the best modern memoirs I have ever read. He's a guy who hated tennis. His dad was an absolute monster who, who forced him to do tennis. And Agassi hated tennis all the way through. And so to me, it's very, I found it tremendously moving. A guy who's really good at an activity that he absolutely hates. And the way he struggles with this hatred and this really imprisonment. I find his, his courage and audacity really moving. And he's just a beautiful writer for a guy who dropped out of high school in ninth grade. He didn't have the benefits of an education, but he's obviously a brilliant guy.

• 53:03David Brooks?

  And it's just tremendously moving look at mastery and finding the things that you really want to do. And I, I just can't recommend that book enough.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  If you could go back in time and visit someone who's gone, who would it be? And what would you say to them?

• 53:20David Brooks?

  Well, I have a lot of questions for Jesus.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  That's a pretty big ask.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  We'll stop. And then you, you talked about finding your purpose. Last question, what is David Brooks' purpose?

• 53:34David Brooks?

  Well, my purpose now is to, you know, there's a concept I figured who came up with it called the lake. We all pour into the lake. The lake is the, our conversations and we all are little tributaries pouring into the lake. And we learn, we listen, we listen to your podcast and we, we learn and we improve our lives just because we're, we're all learning from each other. And so part of my job is just to pour into the lake, like everybody's job. But I think my, my two core missions, if I have to ask, first is to try to defend a political ideology, a belief system, this conservatism of Alexander Hamilton. I try to embody that. Second, I try to embody just a civil way of being in the world. And third, I think American society is, as you can tell from my conversation in the last 45 minutes, is over politicized and under moralized.

• 54:19David Brooks?

  I think we think too much about politics and too little about our moral and relational growth. And so I've tried to write books that are sort of about that, giving people tips and pointers of how to be better friends, how to be better listeners, how to be better conversationalists. And I think it's in those minute interactions of life that really the health of society is determined.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  David Brooks is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators. He is an op ed columnist for the New York Times and a writer for the Atlantic. He is the bestselling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive. He joins us from Washington DC. David, I've admired you for so long from afar. I feel as if I know you and I realize we've never met in person. And you bring this peanut butter and chocolate combination of your commentary is puncturing, unafraid, analytical, very strong, but you always feel like at the end of the day, you're a gentle soul. I think you're a wonderful role model for young men and really appreciate your contribution,

• 55:23Speaker 00

  not only to your domain, but just to larger society. It was a real pleasure to meet you and I appreciate your time.

• 55:28David Brooks?

  Thank you. I'm, I've always, I've been a fan of yours and a huge honor to be on this, on this podcast. So I really appreciate the invitation.

• 55:42Speaker 03

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