David Brooks: Trump Gutted Conservatism and Christianity

And when I look at the Trump administration, I see a massive attempt to return us to the 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 eviscerated Christianity. Christianity is a system designed around the meek, service to the poor. Jesus never embraced worldly power.

I am actually at home in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, I became a conservative in my 20s 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 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. 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. They are nothing like Fox News.

And I go back to one moment in my formation where now, in retrospect, it looks like there was a crucial fork in the road. I came out of Chicago and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books, 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 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 shantytown to protest apartheid, and in the middle of the night the editors of the Dartmouth Review — about a dozen of them — descended on the shantytown and took sledgehammers to them. And it was an attempt to dismantle the left, really, and to me it was like Gestapo tactics, and 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 Hegseth is, which is what Vivek Ramaswamy is. That to me is a crucial difference.

Yeah, resentment, the 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 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 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 eviscerated 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 that he claims to stand for, both conservatism and Christianity. And such is the acidic power of nihilism.

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 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. And so when I saw him attack Zelensky and with JD Vance in that Oval Office, I experienced a blow to my patriotism as 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. And so these are all new experiences, new and shocking experiences.

Oh, absolutely. You know, I would say one flaw — and now where I position myself, 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 the moderates or 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. 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 working-class voices, and there was no room for conservative voices. And 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 look at the editorial staff of the major mainstream media 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 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 fixing that problem is one of the things I think progressives have to work on.

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. And so that way they can say, we're rejecting 96% of the kids who are applying to our school. And so that's a bit of the cynicism of 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. And then recruiters from the banks and the consulting groups, they recruit at very few schools. Somebody did a study 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 divide society at a very early age. And a lot of kids know by age eight or nine, because they're tested 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 them, which is accurate. 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 have been 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 were fortunate enough to do reasonably well in these elite institutions.

I'm a Chicago grad, yeah.

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.

If you can get in, they're amazing places of deep learning. And what I'm hoping is the universities will do a couple 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 said, "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 the ages of 15 and 18 and do well on standardized tests. 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 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 the Mayflower? 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 distinction 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.

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, the 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 in McKinsey or on the campus of some fancy university. You have to go out to where the problems are. 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 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 tapping into that calling will arouse tremendous energy levels. 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 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 were at 18, but whether you're capable of keep growing and learning all the days of your life. 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.

Yeah, I would say that's a rhythm in American life where money becomes the dominant ethos. And you would say the 1880s, the 1890s, we were an 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. 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. He 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, a 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...

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 named Walter Lippmann 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. 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.