The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.
They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: America, International, Politics & Public Policy
Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriors—the whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the world—the transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who can’t afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. It’s a cynical game … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. [James Davison] Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
James Davison Hunter… reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.
American culture, Hunter argues, was formed … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Political parties no longer serve the function they used to. In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
The author David Brooks … notes in his recent book, How to Know a Person … that a lot of people are “Diminishers,” self-involved to the point that others feel small and unseen. Such Diminishers do this by speaking primarily about themselves—something that, studies show, most people do often—and by failing to ask questions. Brooks contrasts Diminishers with “Illuminators,” who are persistently curious about others, … [ Read more ]
Authors: Arthur C. Brooks, David Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Character, Psychology | Behavior
As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything. Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary… Under cultural tyranny internal values become … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
By the early 2000s, I came to believe that the free market policies that were right to combat stagnation and sclerosis a few decades earlier were not right for an age of inequality and social breakdown. Then the congressional Republicans began to oppose almost every positive federal good, even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump brought the three horsemen of the apocalypse — immorality, dishonesty … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, International
In some ways the health of a society can be measured by how many avenues to self-importance it opens up.
Author: David Brooks | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
Maybe the lives of the meritocrats are so crammed because the stakes are so small. All this ambition and aspiration is looking for new tests to ace, new clubs to be president of, new services to perform, but finding that none of these challenges is the ultimate challenge, and none of the rewards is the ultimate reward.
Author: David Brooks | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society
Conservatism, as Roger Scruton reminds us, was founded during the 18th-century Enlightenment. In France, Britain and the American colonies, Enlightenment thinkers were throwing off monarchic power and seeking to build an order based on reason and consent of the governed. Society is best seen as a social contract, these Enlightenment thinkers said. Free individuals get together and contract with one another to create order.
Conservatives said … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times (June 25, 2018) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. […] Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times (December 7, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
The Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.
Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times (August 29, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Race Relations, Trump
It took a lot to get us here. […] I’d rely on the old sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. All across the world, we have masses of voters who live in a world of gemeinschaft: where relationships are personal, organic and fused by particular affections. These people define their loyalty to community, faith and nation in personal, in-the-gut sort of ways.
But we have a … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times (January 20, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump