Held live at the 92nd St. Y, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls “the rightward edge of the leftward tendency,” Brooks argues that America’s core problems aren’t economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our “secure base” of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security.
Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most productive generation, smartphones and sex, the persuasiveness of AI vs novels, the loss of audacity, what made William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman great mentors, why academics should embrace the epistemology of the interview, the evolving status of neoconservatism, what Trump gets right, whether only war or mass movements can revive the American psyche, what will end the fertility crisis, the subject of his book, listener questions, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you mentioned the Tanenhaus book. It’s striking because you appear as a character in the book. I know you haven’t gotten to that part yet, but surely you remember the reality that William F. Buckley was considering making you editor of National Review. What would your life have been like if you had received that offer? Would you have even taken it? What does that alternate universe look like?
BROOKS: The American conservative movement is going from strength to strength. Donald Trump is a failed real estate developer somewhere.
COWEN: [laughs]
BROOKS: I was never an orthodox National Review person, that kind of conservative. I was a neoconservative, which was different. Basically, you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to.
I’ve learned, especially from this Tanenhaus biography, that a lot of the old right National Review people wanted to go back to the 19th century. They were pre-New Deal. I never had a problem with the New Deal. I had some problems with some of the policies of the 1960s, and I was an urban kid. I was a New Yorker, and I was a Jew, and the magazine was Catholic. I’ve been told that one of the reasons I didn’t get the job was that reason.
COWEN: Tanenhaus says this.
BROOKS: Oh, does he?
COWEN: Yes.
BROOKS: Buckley was my mentor. We can tell that story, how that happened. I worked at National Review, and then I worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I went from being an old right to being a free market, Wall Street Journal sort of person. I never had the opportunity to think for myself until I left those places and went to a place called the Weekly Standard. Suddenly, I could think for myself. It was funny how long — because I was in my 30s — before I really thought, “What do I believe?” Not how do I argue for the Wall Street Journal position on this, or the National Review position.
When I did that, I found I had two heroes. One was Edmund Burke, whose main idea is epistemological modesty. Change is really complicated, and we should be really cautious about what we think we can know about reality. The second was Alexander Hamilton, who’s a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from Washington Heights. Hamilton’s belief was using government in limited but energetic ways to create a dynamic country where poor boys and girls like him could rise and succeed.
That involves a lot more state intervention than National Review would be comfortable with. So, I became sort of a John McCain Republican. Now, another one of my other heroes is this guy named Isaiah Berlin, and toward the end of his life, Berlin said, “I’m very happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.” That’s where I found myself today, as a conservative Democrat. I would not have fit in at National Review because I didn’t really hew to the gospel.
And:
COWEN: If you think about Buckley, where you disagree with him, and I don’t mean on particular issues — I feel I know that — but his method of thought, what is there in his method of thought where you would say, “I, David Brooks, diverge from Buckley in a fundamental way”?
BROOKS: His gift and his curse was that he couldn’t slow down his thinking. I would see him write a column in 20 minutes, and if he wrote it for an hour, it would get no better. He just moved at that speed. It takes me two days to write a column. It takes me 14, 20 hours. That’s one thing.
Second, he grew out of such a different background. His dad, as we know from this book, was an old right America Firster. My parents were Lower East Side New York intellectual progressives. I always felt at home in a diverse America, in a regular working-class America that was light years away from the world he inhabited.
COWEN: Your difference with Milton Friedman, again, not on specific issues such as the New Deal, but conceptually, how is it that you think differently from how Milton did?
BROOKS: Friedman — his great gift — and I think this is a libertarian gift — is that once you get inside their logical system, within their assumptive models, there’s no arguing with them. It all fits together. I don’t believe in assumptive models. I’m much less rational. I think human beings are much less rational than needed. I think they obviously respond to incentives in some ways, but often respond to incentives in no rational way. I’m, again, being more neoconservative than conservative, or more whatever you want to call it, a Humean.
I really do believe that David Hume’s famous sentence that reason is and ought to follow the passions — I believe that’s true, that our passions are wiser than our reasonable mind, and that our emotions, when well trained, are much more supple and much more responsible for the way we think. Again, I may be caricaturing, but the rational school of economics thought, well, you see the world, that simple process of looking, and then weigh costs and benefits about the world, and then you make a decision about the world, I don’t believe that’s the way thinking works.
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