What Just Happened in America, with David Brooks

Our increasingly reactionary political environment doesn’t lend itself to nuanced, patient understanding of events like the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump. What historical and philosophical resources can help us gain insight and wisdom? How can we successfully know and encounter each other in such a divided society?


In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (columnist, New York Times) for reflections about the 2024 General Election, the state of American politics, and how we got here.


Together they discuss the multi-generational class divide; sources of alienation and distrust; how loss of faith and meaning influences political life; intellectual virtues of courage, firmness, humility, and flexibility; what it means to be a Republican in exile; the capacity for self-awareness and self-critique; and much more.


About David Brooks


David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. His latest book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023). He is also the author of The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, and founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.


Show Notes


• A spiritual or emotional crisis we’re working out in American politics

• Should we blame inflation and economic factors? (Biden’s Covid-19 overstimulation)

• Class divide is a generational thing

• High-school-educated voters are increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party

• Alienation and distrust is a multi-decade process

• Loss of Faith, Loss of Meaning, and the “Death of God”

• An exiled Republican


• “I’m a Whig.” (”Abraham Lincoln was a Whig.”)

• Edmund Burke and epistemological modesty—”don’t revolutionize something you don’t understand.”

• You should operate on society in the way you operate on your father, with care.

• Alexander Hamilton

• Whig tradition is unrepresented in contemporary American politics

• How David Brooks waffles between Democrat and Republican

• Isaiah Berlin: “At the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.”

• “The capacity for self-critique

• Matt Yglesias

• Humble, introspective, and “how did we get so out of touch?”

• Racism and sexism are not what’s driving Trump voters

• “In my opinion, Donald Trump is wrong answer to the right question.”

• Mark Noll and America’s use of the Bible: un-self-aware and un-self-critical

• Why is there more capacity for self-critique on the Democratic

• Jonathan Rauch and “Epistemic Regime”: includes media, universities, scientific research, review process, etc.

• “There’s still a core of people who believe ‘if the evidence says x, you should say y.’”

• “The greatest victory in the history of the world.”

• Intellectual Virtues: Courage, Firmness, Flexibility

• “Reality is constantly going to surprise you.”

• 1980s Republicanism was more intellectually sophisticated

• Conservative book publishing



• “The Stacking Stereotype”

• “A redistribution of respect” (away from large swaths of America and to elites)

• “The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials.”

• “… almost no Trump supporters.”

• “If you tell 51% of the country ‘Your voices don’t matter,’ people are going to get upset.”

• America changing beneath us

• High level of spiritual and moral authority and low level of intellectual confidence

• The moral teaching of the New Testament

• “People are unitary wholes.”

• “I became a Christian around 2013.”

• “Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don.”

• C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity

• “What it’s like to be in the claustrophobic mind of a narcissist.”

• Aggression: a joyless way to see the faith

• What is needed?

• “I was a 50-year-old atheist.”

• Chris ...

[SteelyTheVan]

I enjoyed listening to David for his clarity of thought. He’s not always right or has all the answers but his earnestness is real.

[nancytankelson]

I love David Brooks' intellect, but moreso his humanity.😊

[JaniceThorsell]

Thank you David for your insight. I’ve listened to you on PBS news hour and have such respect for you. This conversation has opened my mind to seeing this election in a very different light. It was wonderful to hear your comment about change taking place as we live the example of Jesus.

[wholeNwon]

When describing Hamilton's political philosophy, remember that he said that he did not favor universal enfranchisement because the average person was "too easily swayed by superficiality." Human nature hasn't changed.

[Kekuahiwi]

Over decades I've listened to David Brooks as the Republican movement of the late 20th century alienated him and left him behind. As a progressive and secularist, I disagreed with his conservatism and religiosity on views and issues. I was annoyed by him. I felt a fair bit of schadenfreude as I watched him floating on the iceberg as he drifted further and further, alone and nonplussed by the shift in politics and society. I've come to listen to him with a much more accepting ear as I've grown as well as he has. He has become in my mind and respect, one of our exemplary intellectual thinkers on society, morality, and contemporary culture and politics.

[billfletcher]

Love Brooks. Great line: "Trump is the wrong answer to the right questions"

[joychristena-gordon]

God bless you David Brooks. I always look forward to seeing & listening to you (& Jonathan Capehart) on PBS Newshour. I love your values, opinions, common sense & moral integrity. I wish you were the president of our country - I would know we are in good and capable hands! I'm a senior and concerned about this country.

Joy Gordon
(From Brooklyn, now NJ)

[jonathandufern]

David Brooks is such a beacon of hope for clarity amongst a world of static noise. I have read his books and been listening to him for over a decade on the PBS News Hour on Fridays. We need people like him in politics instead of many we have today.

[alexandracolmant]

Very good interview with David Brooks, who doesn't disappoint. Thank you!

[BlueBaron]

Yes, David *loves* to reference the past to deliver context. Mine was more from the journalist and author John Gunther whose beat during the early rise of fascism was Austria. He sounds a bit like David too. *"The breakdown of the family, the church, the institutions of government had prepared fertile soil for the rise of the dictators: Hitler, Mussolini, Dolphus. They were all neurotics of course but they had also become father substitutes. People like to be afraid. They tell themselves that they are defiant, that they are independent. They roar in a crowd. The ectoplasm of the dictator envelops them. They believe they are now part of the leadership. Obedience and defiance finally merge, and the leader becomes the new savior.”*

[normanbonk]

I am impressed with his position on change- to proceed gently as one would with one's own father is consistent with Scripture that tells us to correct our elders gently as if we we engaging with our own father. Further, I agree heartily that life and human interactions are so complex that revolutions with a small "r" ought to be done with great humility as all the variables and outcomes can never be fully known. Prayers.

[islandtook]

This is the ONLY election postmortem I have run across that touches the heart of America with wisdom. I can only hope more people find it and listen to it.

[lydiahill-expertineradicat]

Thank God for people like David Brooks who knows a thing or two about nuanced thinking.

[dannysullivan]

While I understand that Brooks is personally a caring person, I find his conservative writing a mere soft pedaling of what the GOP has become. At no time during this election cycle did I see him stand up firmly to the macabre fiasco of current GOP politics. Instead he cherry picked Dem weakness’s here and there. As a conservative columnist I suppose that is his job, but I do not find him, in his political writings to be some kind of ‘sane’ voice in the middle. He’s the great equivocator.

[anitacayol]

Bravo! I love David Brooks and admire him a lot for ibis intelligence. He speaks very well and write very well too.I am a very sad democrat now and also a catholic who disagree with things invented by men not by God!

[ricklarson]

David Brooks' observations are probably spot on accurate. I wish I could be as magnanimous as he is, but I cannot. All I see is cruelty, hatred, fear, attachment to conspiracy theories, and stupidity. Maybe someday I will be a bigger person but not today.

[reviewwriter]

This still makes no sense to me. People want community, so they choose a racist, traitor, and felon???

[shantanatarajan]

i like David Brooks views as I watch PBS Firday, I am very sad that character and ethics lost. We will pay for it.

[ThomasLongJr]

David Brooks: A Legend in His Own Mind

[americanexpat]

I Inflation was – and still is – the problem because, while gas prices went down, nothing else did. I live in Ireland now and our grocery prices never rose like those in the US. Whenever I return, I am utterly amazed at how expensive things are in the States. I honestly feel sorry for people, especially in the bottom half, since their wages have hardly budged in the last 30 years.

So, INFLATION, was the problem in last few years and INCOME INEQUALITY has been the problem all this century. All these other high-level analyses overcomplicate and overthink it. Like James Carville says, “It’s the economy, stupid”.