🎙️ Podcast Preview: Judgment on David Brooks – Misarchism and the Simulation of Order

This episode reviews David Brooks’s New York Times column, which argues that the defining political struggle of the 21st century is not over government size but over the collapse—and possible restoration—of social order. Brooks traces the rise of populism, the erosion of cultural trust, and the emergence of what he calls “misarchism”: the selective use of state power to impose order while weakening liberal institutions.

The Tribunal finds Brooks’s essay structurally coherent in its identification of the moral and relational crisis shaping American politics. Yet it also uncovers a deeper tension: that the populist appeal to “order” functions less as genuine repair and more as simulation. It offers the image of restoration without the substance, bypassing the triune demands of truth, love, and justice.

The judgment concludes that Brooks rightly diagnoses collapse, but that the proposed cure risks becoming another mask of false coherence rather than a path toward enduring alignment.

☩ Tribunal of Conscience ☩
Truth. Love. Justice.

All episodes are part of the ongoing work of the Tribunal of Conscience — testing forms under the triune strain to reveal what holds and what collapses.

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Let those who see the structure, name it without fear.