As we come to the 250th celebration of America's founding, what is happening in our country? Pundits, writers, historians, political scientists, and average citizens are all trying to take stock of where we are as a nation. In this episode, we seek perspective by returning to the conversation between Mark Labberton and David Brooks immediately following the 2024 election, before the beginning of Trump's second term and all the events that have unfolded since.

Whether you come to the 250th celebrating our national life, or questioning our national life; whether you're in support of what's happening currently in America, or whether you're overwhelmed by so much that you wish was different, may we give thanks.

Thanks be to God for the place that we get to live, even as it's a place that is struggling to reach its ideals, and may we continue to pray and seek its welfare, its justice, its purpose, its fairness, and its equity.

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (The Atlantic, formerly of The 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.

Episode Highlights

"In my opinion, Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question." "The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials." "If you tell 51% of the country 'Your voices don't matter,' people are going to get upset." "Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don." "The world just loves a human being that's trying to act like Jesus."

Helpful Links and Resources

"Confessions of a Republican Exile" (The Atlantic): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/trumpism-republican-party-exile-david-brooks/680243/

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, by David Brooks: https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman: https://www.amazon.com/My-Bright-Abyss-Meditation-Believer/dp/0374534373

David Brooks's current writing at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks/

Brooks and Capehart, PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/brooks-and-capehart

About David Brooks

David Brooks is staff writer for The Atlantic and is Presidential Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Prior to that he wrote for The New York Times for 22 years*.* He is author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen; 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 is 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
• "Confessions of a Republican Exile" (via The Atlantic): "A longtime conservative, alienated by Trumpism, tries to come to terms with life on the moderate edge of the Democratic Party."
• "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 the 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 side?
• 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
• *Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change* by Jonah Goldberg
• How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
• "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."
• Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer): materialistic categories couldn't explain the world
• "If they made me pope of the evangelicals, which is a job that makes me shudder…"
• "Be not afraid."
• "The world just loves a human being that's trying to act like Jesus."
• David Brooks's teaching at Yale
• The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist by Dorothy Day

#Conversing #DavidBrooks #MarkLabberton #FaithAndPolitics #AmericanPolitics #HowToKnowAPerson #ChristianHumanism #Election2024

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.