Shadi Hamid: We’re starting a new season of Zealots at the Gate, and we have a very special guest with us to open things up. David Brooks, who needs no introduction, but we’ll give him a brief one. Longtime New York Times columnist, now a staff writer at The Atlantic, the author of several bestselling books, including The Road to Character and How to Know a Person most recently. And we’ll include a link to both books in the show notes for those who want to read more.
So, David, thanks so much for joining us. It’s great to have you. I think a good place to start would be on your own faith journey. Obviously, we’re a podcast about religion and politics, and we’ll get to some of the politics later on. But just to get us situated, I want to bring you back to, honestly, one of the best essays on faith that I’ve read in a mainstream publication. The title was “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be.” That came out in the New York Times in December 2024. We’ll include a link to that as well in the show notes. Highly recommended. It’s really beautiful.
I want to share one little anecdote from the piece that I think really captures what’s so wonderful about reading it. You talk about being in the subway in New York City and having a kind of epiphany, or as you call it, an illumination. This is what you write:
I looked around the car and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, color, weight, or shape, but that gave them infinite value. The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning, some soaring, some suffering or sleeping, some were downtrodden and crying out.
That’s just one. I love that. But I think what’s really interesting about this piece is that you’re someone, I think, who has struggled. You’ve wanted to be more spiritual or wanted to be more religious, and it hasn’t necessarily come easy to you because you’re someone who’s very intellectual. There’s a lot going on in your mind. I can relate to that too as someone who’s often in my own head. So it’s been a challenge to kind of let go and let the beauty of faith or the beauty of that longing really take over you. So maybe just say a little bit about that and how you view your own faith journey.
David Brooks: I grew up in a Jewish home. My parents were New York Jewish intellectuals of the classic Partisan Review variety. And because they were Jews of a certain generation, they were Anglophiles. Jews tried to assimilate into America at a certain time in the twentieth century by adopting English manners and mores. So they gave their boys Jewish names or English names like Sidney, Milton, Irving. And within twenty years, everybody thought they were Jewish names, not English names. So that didn’t work.
But part of our Anglophilia, my parents sent me to an Episcopal school called Grace Church School, which is on Tenth Street and Broadway. For those who know New York, it’s about a block from the Strand bookstore. 30 percent Jewish. So to square with our religion, we wouldn’t sing the word Jesus. And the volume would drop in the church because we just wouldn’t sing that word. And so I grew up with having both stories in my head, the Jewish Exodus story and the Jesus story. But I didn’t believe in God because I just thought these were two good stories. And I saw it as a form of humanistic knowledge that you got from the Bible.
And as I matured into my fifties in particular, my experience of the world overflowed my categories for the world, which is to say my material categories for the world. And so I had numinous experiences like the one you just described. I had one up in Colorado Mountain Lake when I had a book of Puritan prayers called, I think it was called … high and holy, meek and lowly. And they were just common succession.
And so I began processing this. And then I would meet people. I once wrote a column on John Stott. It was a very prominent—if somebody described him as, if evangelicals had a pope, it would have been John Stott, who died a few years ago. And he took me out to lunch after I wrote that column. And he said, “What’s going on in your soul?” And he evangelized me hard. And I said, I am not doing this. I do not believe. I’m not going there because it will have all sorts of repercussions for my family life. But he pushed pretty hard.
And then gradually things just began happening. And then I started reading. And it turns out if you go on a public search or a seeking for faith, Christians send you books. So in the course of about three months, I acquired about 600 books, only 300 of which were different versions of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And so I was just reading and reading and talking and being surrounded more by Christians, and especially the evangelical variety of Christian. And I found some of them awful people and some of them inexplicably wonderful.
And I think it was through some of the seeing pure goodness. There’s a guy—when I left Judaism, I … the thing I missed most was Friday night meals, Shabbat dinners. And I once mentioned to an evangelical friend of mine, you know, I’m always sad on Friday nights. And I mentioned this to him probably fourteen years ago. Every Friday at 6 p.m. I get a text from him, which is a prayer, just a sign of encouragement. That’s just a thing of beauty.
Dorothy Day, a beautiful life. My favourite Dorothy Day story is, at the end of her life, Robert Coles asked her, have you thought about writing another memoir? And she said, “You know, I thought about it. I pulled out a legal pad and I wrote A Life Remembered by Dorothy Day on the top. And I sat there and I thought of the Lord and his visit to us those many centuries ago. And I was just grateful to have had him on my mind all this time.” And she didn’t need to write anything.
And that spirit of tranquility, and I think eventually it just seeped into me. And it began to harden and began to form. And I am still a Jew. My peoplehood is Jew. I’m down to my bones the way I think, the way I talk. I’m a Jew. And when I’m in Christian circles, I always have to tell myself, dial back the sarcasm a little for these people.
But I didn’t experience faith as a Jew. To me, I can’t unread Matthew. And the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where for me the spiritual grandeur is the strongest. And I don’t know about all the miracles that Jesus performed, but the Sermon on the Mount is itself a miracle.
And so I’ve gradually crossed a boundary in no dramatic form. There’s no moment where Jesus walked through the wall and said, “Come, come follow me.” That never happened. The way I—and just to close with this—I liken it to being on a train. You’re sitting there, you’re reading the newspaper, all the people around you are doing normal things. And suddenly you look out the window and you realize there’s a lot of ground behind you. You’ve travelled a long way from where you used to be. And so at some point you crossed over into a boundary that defines secularism versus faith. And you’ve entered the world of faith.
And then my spiritual life then has just been the process of deepening. And I joke that joining … circles in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929. It was not the best timing, but it’s become a part of my world ever since. And I’m glad I have faith in my life.
Shadi Hamid: Thank you for that. And can you say a little bit more about the struggles that you encounter in trying to be a more faithful person? This idea of, you know, for those of us who are more—we feel things more with our intellect than we do with our heart. And so it can be challenging to make that shift to kind of like let go and try to have things wash over us. And it sounds to me like that’s still something that you wrestle with. And you talk about in your essay how there are sometimes months where you don’t really feel God’s presence and you feel like not very faithful in that sense. There are other periods and seasons where it comes back to you and you kind of go back and forth a little bit.
David Brooks: Yeah, I’m now sitting at the desk of my wife, Anne Snyder, who was the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine, who you guys know well. And I watched her spiritual disciplines, and I just can’t do that. The sense of spiritual hunger, the prayer, the prayer journaling—she feels it in a way that I just don’t.
And so when you consent to a life of faith, you’re consenting to moving the centre of gravity of your life eighteen inches down from your head to your heart. And I think when I came to faith, and the reason I gave that piece the title, “The Shock of Faith,” is that I had always assumed that faith was a set of beliefs. But now I believe faith is a set of longings.
Then when Dorothy Day wrote the book called The Long Loneliness, by loneliness she did not mean solitude. She meant her longing for God. One of my heroes is Gregory of Nyssa, fourth-century theologian. And he was surrounded by Greek philosophies that taught him that happiness is rest. You struggle through things, you solve problems, and then you fix them and you rest. And that’s when happiness occurs. And Nyssa thought to himself, well, my greatest happiness would be to know and love God. But if I could have perfect knowledge and love of God, if I could rest, that would imply that God is finite, which he is not. And therefore happiness must not be rest. It must be endless longing.
And he wrote beautifully about the Song of Songs, the sexy part of the Bible. And in that part, the bridegroom—the bride sees her beloved and she chases him, and the groom withdraws, not out of cruelty, but so she can have the pleasure of chasing him again and encountering him again. And he withdraws and she pursues and he withdraws and she pursues. And each encounter is deeper, more loving. And Gregory said that’s what faith is. God is always infinite. He’s a little withdrawing. He’s not always there. But the chasing, the pursuit, that’s joy. We want to be conquered by higher and higher loves. And so faith to me is not an intellectual set of beliefs. It’s a set of longings that consume the whole body.
Matthew Kaemingk: So jumping off of that, David, that sense of longing into the political sphere—I wonder how you think about the role of longing in politics in beautiful and broken ways when you think about human beings not simply as intellectual, as minds, but as hearts that are engaged in politics. The place of passion, desire, and spiritual longing in our political life today. How do you see the passions at play in our politics here in America and in yourself personally?
David Brooks: I would say we are in the middle of a grand conflict between the forces of dehumanization and the forces of humanization. And to me, the forces of dehumanization are primarily rationalist, which is to say they think we’re all head.
Blaise Pascal. He was a scientist, a mathematician, a technologist. And he said, I have a rationalist side of my nature. I do my science. But I’m not only possessing the spirit of geometry, which is the power of reason. I also possess the power of what he called the spirit of finesse. And by finesse, he meant intuition. He meant entering longingly into a relationship. He meant unity of insight, the ability to see situations whole. And he said the problem with rationalism is not that it celebrates reason. Reason is wonderful. The problem with rationalism, it refuses to acknowledge any other kind of knowledge that is not technical. So rationalists are oblivious.
And our public culture, in my view, is dominated by this belief system that intelligence is our crowning quality, not our capacity to love. And then you get a whole series of other beliefs. The belief in quantification, that all of life should be quantified. The belief in optimization, that everything should be rendered efficient. And so it’s a whole series of practices that I think are denuding our public life and sort of technocratic planning.
And rationalists fail because the world is more complicated than they know. Humans feel dehumanized in rationalist systems. And they generate backlashes. And in the 1960s, we had a bohemian backlash, which was the Woodstock and all that. Today, we’re living through a reactionary backlash. Reactionaries, like Donald Trump, believe that there was a golden age when humans were whole, and we’ve abandoned that golden age, and our job is to go back to that prelapsarian past. And so Donald Trump is the perfect embodiment of a reactionary revolt against rationalism. Every word he says, he’s basically saying, “Screw you, technocratic class, and screw the cognitive regime you come in on.” And so my view is we need a better backlash against rationalism. And that’s why I emphasize this word humanism.
Matthew Kaemingk: Could you provide us with just a very practical example of a sort of rationalistic or technocratic way on the left that has evoked this response from the right? What is like an example of this dehumanizing rationalism on the left that has this response from the right?
David Brooks: Well, everybody in my world quotes Hartmut Rosa, who wrote a book called The Uncontrollability of—something. I forget the name of the book.
And so there have been a whole succession of rationalist plans, mostly from the left, but also from the right. The French Revolution was essentially a group of people who decided we’re going to take the methods of science and we’re going to use those methods to reorganize society. And they reorganized all of French society along—you know, they wanted to create a temple of reason instead of churches, a festival of reason instead of Christmas. And that devolved into raw bloodshed and a reign of terror.
The next great rationalist project was Soviet communism. The Soviets thought that they could rationally plan an economy. The next other great rationalist projects were Le Corbusier and Robert Moses putting highways through neighbourhoods because they thought cities should be efficient machines for traffic.
And so our schools have become rationalist enterprises. Intelligence is the quality most highly valued, and students are weighed, ranked, and sorted according to how they do on standardized tests. And so many of the systems of our society are organized around what a guy calls technological solutionism. Everything should be quantified. Whatever can’t be quantified is something we don’t see, and then we reorganize around that.
And so, for example, if you go into corporations, there’s a management technique called OKR, which is about setting up metrics that employees have to meet. Companies like Google and Microsoft and Deloitte, they put these rationalistic methods into their company. So every single employee at Deloitte was ranked—60,000 people. You each got a ranking. And this management philosophy strikes me as completely dehumanizing. It’s all about control. It’s all about managers controlling. And if you do that, it turns out if you rank human beings according to some metric, they turn into ruthless jerks who compete to game the system.
And so these systems are pervasive in society, in our schools, in our companies, in our sports teams. I’m a big fan of the New York Mets, and the New York Mets hired the most prestigious data analysts to acquire their—to build their team two years ago or three years ago. And they gave him $730 million to pick players. And he ran all the numbers and did all the analytics and produced one of the worst teams in baseball.
And so this is pervasive. I mean, the final example I’ll give you, if you go back twenty years and listen to a pop song, the introduction—there’s the musical introduction that typically lasted twenty seconds, but the algorithms say, don’t do that. Audiences don’t like that. So now a pop song has an introduction of five seconds. And so it’s pervasive in life, these things, and people get upset about it. And I think populism is really a reaction against all the ways other people are trying to control us.
Matthew Kaemingk: If populism is a reaction to this rationalistic approach, then some might say that populism is good, because we need that correction, we need to move away from that technocratic planning, and that it’s good to have passion and longing and emotional content in our politics, and that’s what the populist right and the populist left both offer, is a kind of post-rationalism.
Shadi Hamid: I think I’d want to separate though a little bit the right from the left here, because I think the right now is the destructive force. I mean, we’ve seen under Donald Trump what it looks like. So at some level, I think we have to say, well, the response is understandable, but it’s also dangerous. Where do you come out on that? Because the backlash does seem to be justified for the reasons you mentioned. And the Trump—the Trumpian movement has tried to introduce passion into politics, which is good, maybe in some ways, but obviously dangerous in others.
David Brooks: Yeah, I would say my longstanding rule is that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question, that he’s never wrong about everything. And there were deep social fissures and social wounds that have been unveiled over the last ten years. And one of them is that the top 20 percent of the country, the most educated 20 percent of the country, have too much cultural power, too much political power. They control the universities. They control the media. 55 percent of the editorial employees at places like the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CBS—55 percent of those went to the same twenty-two elite schools. And so we’ve created a caste society. And populism is a revolt against that. And they’re not wrong about the fact that we’ve created a caste society.
The problem is, is that left-wing populisms and responses to rationalism tend to be romantic, the 1960s. And the problem with romanticism is that people who are romantics believe the desires are naturally good. They don’t have to be formed and educated. You just release their passions and you shuck off all of the institutions of society. And that never works.
The problem with right-wing rationalism, or responses to rationalism, is they tend to be nihilistic. They tend to not celebrate the dignity of the human being. They tend to not believe in formation, which is the essential humanistic enterprise—that we educate the emotions, we educate the spirit, we form people or else they’re too savage.
And so, you know, I think Donald Trump, he indicts things that need to be indicted. But he never has the solution. He never has a response. And if he does, it’s always an overcorrection. So Trump is the kind of guy—you go to the doctor and you say, “I’ve got acne. Can you give me some cream to address my acne?” And Donald Trump would say, “Oh, I have a cure for acne. It’s decapitation. We’ll just chop off your head and that’ll solve the problem.” And that’s the way Trump overreacts to everything.
And the final thing is that Trump is an embodiment of ressentiment, of resentment. And resentment is a flaw in the method of desiring, of what you should desire. Resentment starts, if you promise a country that is going to be equal, and then you deliver massive inequality, you get resentment. Resentment is about social standing. You don’t see me. You don’t respect me. And unfortunately, it ferments. It ferments into a feeling of impotence. You don’t even know I’m here. And then it ferments into a feeling of sour grapes—that that thing you have, like expertise, like education, like sophistication, like love, I don’t even want those things. Those things are not even worth having. And so it’s a malfunction in the form of desire.
Donald Trump never quite knew what to make of John McCain. He never quite knew what to do with somebody who would be willing to sacrifice his life for his country. Because when you’re resentful, you’ve cut off all the higher registers of human experience. Stephen Miller gave that famous quote a couple months ago, I think to Jake Tapper on CNN. And he said, you can have international niceties all you want, but we all know that politics is about power. It’s about dominance. It’s about libido dominandi, the urge to dominate. And that’s how we play this game. And so that is also an example of resentment—somebody cutting off the higher registers of human nature in order to dwell through raw power, through meanness, through things that insult human dignity.
Matthew Kaemingk: We discuss conservatism and liberalism quite a bit on this podcast and its connection to faith. But what we don’t discuss or analyze very much is moderation or the moderate. And you have sometimes been described as a moderate yourself. Perhaps you would describe yourself that way. But I wonder if you might talk us through, in your mind, what it means to be a moderate. And for those of our listeners who describe themselves as moderates, sometimes rather happy with themselves, what are some dangers that you’ve found within what it means to be a moderate in politics today? Could you talk to us just a little bit about what does it mean to be a moderate in America today?
David Brooks: Yeah. Moderation is built on the belief that most of politics is a competition between partial truths, that in most issues, both sides have a piece of the truth, because in reality, there are natural tensions between two rival goods. And so what we want to do is try to strike a balance that’s right for that moment of those rival goods.
So, for example, there’s going to be a tension between autonomy and belonging. And we want to strike a balance between individualism and the group. There’s going to be a tension between diversity and cohesion. And so we want to create a balance between a diverse society, but also one that kind of hangs together. There’s going to be a balance between freedom, or between achievement and equality. If we just value achievement, then we’ll get radical inequalities because some people are smarter than others or some people work harder than others. But we want to have a basically equal society. And so moderation is about finding the right balance. So Dwight Eisenhower was a great moderate. And if you look at his final farewell speech, he uses that word balance over and over and over again.
Moderation is also the belief that other people exist. You can’t love your country if you hate half its people. And one of the things I see as I’ve been covering politics all these years is partisans on the left and right, they long for a day where the other side doesn’t exist and they can get everything they want. But that day will never come. And so you have to understand that there’s politics, there’s compromises, there’s deals that have to be made, there are conversations, there’s the art of persuasion. Moderates believe in all that.
I think moderates believe politics is a limited activity. That politics will never supply us with joy, hunger, relationships, love, the things that really matter in life. Politics is there to solve some practical problems.
I think moderates believe that creativity is syncretistic, that you achieve your boldest moves, both in art and in politics, by combining two disparate worldviews into a third worldview. Picasso combined African masks and European art, and we got Picasso. In politics, for example, I would support the union movements on the left and the community cohesion movements on the right. And those come in different styles, but I think we need them both right now.
Moderates beware the danger of a single identity. We all have multiple identities and we’re trying to seek a balance between the one. Moderates distrust monism, the belief that everything is one. Moderates put the truth over justice. If you’re lying because you think it serves your political cause, you’re corrupting your political cause. And so these are all, I think, belief systems that go into moderation. It is not just putting yourself in the centre.
And then as for the dangers, I’m blanking on his name. George Packer wrote a book, a novel, a sort of 1984 novel. And it came out last year. And the hero is a moderate. And his world is collapsing around him. And he’s trying to encourage civility and he’s trying to encourage politeness and reaching across difference, all the things that moderates really like. But the problem with this guy is that he didn’t appreciate or understand or even see the rotting of his societies that slowly rotted. He was so invested in the status quo that he didn’t allow himself to perceive the pain that others are suffering and the changes that need to come.
Moderation is a nonsensical point of view when you’re living in a society that’s fundamentally screwed up. So in my view, moderation is nonsensical when it comes to race relations. When you have a society with a long history of segregation and redlining and all that, being moderate about that is wrong. You should be about changing that. And so the flaw of moderation is a complacency.
And so we want to be moderate about some things, and especially political life, so we can be passionate and zealous about our private loves, about our loves for family, our love for God, our love for country. A moderate love of country would be a repugnant thing to me. I like a fervent love of country. I just want it to be exercised in a moderate way, because we have to be moderate because we’re broken and we’re divided within ourselves. And so balance and moderation and self-checking and self-policing are the only way to be decent in life, in my view.
Shadi Hamid: But it’s not precisely the problem that society is so fundamentally screwed up? I mean, at least it feels that way to so many Americans, that there’s something fundamentally rotten about where we are right now in terms of our institutions, in terms of where the establishment of both parties has taken us and the failures of elites in big judgments, like things like the Iraq War, the financial recession. Or even more recently, I think it’s worth bringing up Gaza as a flashpoint where so many left-wing populists feel that the Democratic Party establishment has been too unquestioningly pro-Israel. And the only way to change that is by not being moderate, by being very vigorous in appealing to a different kind of politics that is more critical of Israel and—whatever you want to call it—more pro-Palestinian and so forth.
And I think at least on the left side of the spectrum, Gaza has become the progressive litmus test. So I’m curious, what would you say about something like that, where an ostensibly foreign policy issue—although I think many would say that it’s not exactly a foreign policy issue because it has domestic implications—that moderates have failed in these fundamental ways, and therefore we have to consider people like Zohran Mamdani or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or AOC, that we need that kind of vigorous politics because the Democratic establishment has just fallen. And even putting aside Gaza, the fact that they failed to win in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, or Kamala Harris more recently, or the fact that Joe Biden, even though he did win, ultimately became something of a failure in terms of his broader legacy.
David Brooks: Yeah, I would tell a different story about—well, start with Gaza and then come back home. You know, I was a foreign correspondent in the 1990s for the Wall Street Journal. And I probably took thirty trips to the Middle East, to Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan.
And the 1990s was a great era of moderation. Our presidents, for example, were George H.W. Bush, sort of a moderate Republican, and then Bill Clinton, who was explicitly not a progressive. He was explicitly a centrist Democrat. And during that era, I spent a lot of time covering the Oslo peace process. And this was a time … were in control. Ehud Barak on the Israeli side, Ehud Olmert. And then you had a whole range of moderate Palestinian negotiators, not necessarily Yasser Arafat, but pretty much everybody under him, who was also, you know, working the peace process.
I remember going to dinner one night, a big dinner, like forty or fifty people at Shimon Peres’s house when he was president. And it was half Palestinian and half Israeli. And these were the people—most of the people at dinner had been working the peace process for twenty-five years. And they were like, they were been in the same family business. We’re in the peace process of business. And the atmosphere in that room was wonderful. People genuinely—of course, they’d had conflict and struggle in the Middle East, as the Middle East is the Middle East, but the spirit was high because we thought we were on the verge of a two-state solution.
And Barak and Olmert on separate occasions proposed a deal that would have given Palestinians, I think, 98 percent of the land. I can’t remember. It would have given them some version of right to return, a small version. And it was rejected by the Palestinians. And it was rejected, I believe, because Yasser Arafat thought the extremists on his side would kill him, which he had good reason to think that, after what happened to Anwar Sadat.
And so everything that has happened in the Middle East since has been the extremification of both sides, where both sides refuse to recognize the other people exist and we’ve got to cut a deal. Both sides have postponed. They think, well, we’re not going to get everything we want now, but in 100 years we’ll get everything we want. That’s the classic illusion of an ideologue, of an extremist. So the story I would tell about the Middle East is not a story of the moderates letting us down. It’s a story of moderation being refused and rejected. And the region on both sides have—the settlers are now basically theocratic fascists. Hamas is basically theocratic fascism. So the story I would tell is that’s not a failure of moderation. That’s a failure of extremism.
Now, back in this country, I agree we have problems. Believe me, I’ve been covering the Trump era just like everybody else—climate change, inequality. But are our problems worse than 1960? Or 1968, when there were assassinations, riots, social breakdown? In the 1970s, violent crime tripled. Children born out of wedlock tripled. Drug overdoses massively increased. Riots in the cities. Complete social breakdown. Then you look at the 1930s, the Depression, World War II. Then you look at the 1890s. Massive poverty. Political corruption. Racial lynching. I mean, I look at America. And I think exactly what decade would you want to go back to? And there is none for me, maybe the 1990s, but I would not want to go back to any other decade.
And so I grant that we have problems, but humanity always has problems. And I think what we’re seeing is a catastrophizing of problems that will lead to terrible policies. And so there’s this thing that’s just—I see it in my students, and my students are very ambitious and they want to lead big lives, but they also have a malaise. They have a sense—there was a meme that went around, “nothing good is ever going to happen ever again.” And then the idea was that every person under forty believes that meme. And I think that pessimism, that malaise—I talk to students who say, I do no long-range planning because it doesn’t make sense. 70 percent of Americans say the American dream doesn’t make sense. And I think that’s half true and half catastrophizing.
And so if you can’t build upon the strengths you have as a country, if you just want to tear everything down, well, then you are slipping into the classic rationalist French Revolution problem, which is you’re overestimating your own intelligence.
And when I look at Mamdani, I find a very attractive figure. I really have personal warmth. I’ve never met him, but personal warmth because the guy smiles when he talks. He seems like he’s having a good time. And I like AOC. I’ve met her a few times. I think she’s a very impressive person in all sorts of ways. But as Richard Weaver once said, the problem with the younger generation is they haven’t read the minutes to the last meeting. And everything they’re proposing, believe me, it’s been tried. And it’s catastrophically failed. And so I guess we have to relearn these things every generation. But I do not see what’s going on in America as a failure of moderation, rather as a failure of extremism.
Matthew Kaemingk: I know we want to talk a little bit about this challenge of moderation within the Democratic Party, but on the Republican Party, for a moment, moderates have been almost completely excluded and marginalized. And I wonder if you might speak to—well, let me put it this way. We are a two-party system. And in order for America to flourish, we need a healthy Democratic Party and a healthy Republican Party. As you think about loss after loss after loss of moderate Republicans being primaried and pushed out, and various never-Trump movements falling apart, what sort of path do you see for the healing of the Republican Party? … future look like?
David Brooks: Yeah, I’m in my sixties. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime. So I tell—I have a good friends with a guy named Yuval Levin. I say, “Yuval, at your age, you’ve got time. But at my age, I’m going to get into another line of work.”
I spent twenty years trying to promote John McCain Republicanism, the early Rudy Giuliani, and we had books and articles—National Greatness Conservatism, we called it. And what I didn’t appreciate—I got out of school in the 1980s. I covered crime in Chicago, and I just saw social policies that failed. And so I became a conservative. And I came to D.C. to work for National Review and then the Washington Times and then the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
And as I got out of college, I was one of those earnest University of Chicago types. And so we wore neckties. And people wore Edmund Burke neckties. He would have been my guy. Some people wore Adam Smith neckties. Some people wore Tocqueville neckties. We all had our neckties.
And at the same time I got out of college, a group of people I thought were conservatives got out of college. And I’m specifically thinking of those who graduated from Dartmouth and worked at the Dartmouth Review. And some of your viewers will know Laura Ingraham. Maybe they’ll know Dinesh D’Souza. Maybe they’ll know there were a couple others, a guy named Ben Hart.
And I didn’t appreciate at the time, but we were pro-conservative. They were anti-left. And what I mean by that is they were at elite universities that were very progressive, and they just wanted to rock the elites, rock the left. And I remember sometime in the mid-1980s, there were protests on campuses against apartheid. And at Dartmouth, the progressive students built these shanties. And they lived in the shanties as a way to register their upsetness about apartheid. And the editors of the Dartmouth Review in the middle of the night took sledgehammers to the shanties while the students were sleeping inside them. And I was appalled. Sledgehammers did not seem very Edmund Burke-y to me. And secondly, does being a conservative mean I can’t protest apartheid? Like, is that really what we’re fighting about?
And so what has happened over the ensuing years is the anti-left version of … has come to dominate the pro-conservative version. And so if you look at the people who populate the Trump administration, whether it’s J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, they all went to elite schools—Princeton, Yale, Duke—and they hated the people they found there. And so it turns out their resentments match onto the resentments of a lot of other people. So they have taken over the Republican Party.
And I stuck around for a while thinking of myself as a Republican, but then I realized I haven’t voted for a Republican in a long time. And one of my heroes, who is a true moderate, by the way, a pluralist, is the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. And Isaiah Berlin at one point in his life said, “I’m happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.” And that’s me these days. I think my home is on the rightward edge of the Democratic Party. Whether the Democratic Party have a much bigger moderate edge than the Republican Party does.
And I will remind you, there’s a theory in political science called the median voter theory. If you want to win an election, get to where the median voter is. And that theory is not just a theory. It’s an overwhelmingly proven fact. In almost every election you can think of, the candidate who is perceived as the more moderate one wins. It’s worth remembering Donald Trump was perceived as more moderate than the Democrats. He was moving off some of the hard-right positions on abortion and other issues, and he’s willing to use the government to intervene in the economy, God knows. And so he was perceived as the moderate. In 2020, Joe Biden was perceived as the moderate. In 2024, Kamala Harris was not perceived as the moderate. And the problem with the Biden administration, it was like twelve old moderates on the top and 4,000 screaming Bernie-ites staffing the rest of the administration.
And so I agree that moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans have not done well. But that doesn’t mean moderation is in political crisis. If you look at the actual American voter, they prefer the moderate. The problem is the parties are captured by the wings.
Shadi Hamid: Hmm. Matt, did you want to jump in?
Matthew Kaemingk: Well, yeah. So I’d love to pivot to the Democrat side. Shadi and I have had a—we’ve discovered we have a bit of a disagreement about the future of the Democratic Party. And David, you’ve recently written a lovely article in The Atlantic on how Democrats historically have found themselves by fighting the left. And I imagine Shadi and I have a different interpretation of what you’ve written there. But Shadi has been one who has been arguing for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, that that’s the path the Democrats should be taking. I don’t want to put words in his mouth. Shadi, would you like to articulate your recent view on this?
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, sure. So I’m kind of in an odd situation. I think I’m a moderate by temperament. I can’t really relate to people who are extremely passionate about politics. I think that you should be extremely passionate about things that are not political. And that’s a better way to live. And you can find that in community and faith and friendship and family and so forth. And I’m by no means a socialist, and I’m skeptical of socialist policies, of that kind of economic approach.
Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah, so this—I mean this is confusing, Shadi, to me. You’ve said on multiple occasions you’re not a Marxist, you’re not socialist, you’re also not woke. So what is it about progressives today that you’re—why are you lining up behind them? What is it that they provide?
Shadi Hamid: I’m getting there.
Matthew Kaemingk: Okay.
Shadi Hamid: Let me get there. All right. Yeah, so I think I sort of alluded to this in what I was saying earlier. I see a failure of elites in the Democratic Party, particularly over Gaza and foreign policy more generally. And we can go back to the Iraq War for that. I mean, it was centrist Democrats who lined up to support Republicans in going to war. And, you know, we know how that turned out.
So I think that—I see a little bit of a different story over the past twenty years, but I think that what I appreciate about someone like Bernie Sanders, to just give an example, I mean, the most prominent example of this tendency, is I see someone with a moral core. I see someone with a kind of moral authenticity. When I hear Bernie Sanders talk about specific policies, I may not agree with the policies, but what I appreciate is that he seems to be someone who finds injustice to be morally unacceptable, and that’s what drives him.
I see something similar with Zohran Mamdani. He sees a situation of deep economic inequality, and he’s angry about that. And I think there’s something that I respect about that kind of anger and frustration, because to drive real change, you need people who are angry about the status quo.
And I’ll just also maybe be a little bit—I’ll be honest in a way that some people will say this doesn’t make me look good. But Gaza was a turning point for me, and I think it’s in some sense distorted my normal politics. I prioritize that a little bit more than I otherwise would. And when I look at candidates and I’m deciding who to support in a kind of Democratic primary, I see Gaza as a litmus test, as I kind of mentioned earlier. I think it—should it always be a litmus test? Should it be the number one issue? No. But should it be important? And is it reflective of an important dividing line between the establishment and the progressive wing? Yes.
And I think this is where, David, I think your analogy to race is relevant. On issues of racial equality, we shouldn’t be moderate. Similarly, if we consider there to have been a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, then in opposing that, we shouldn’t be moderate. We should be very vigorous. Anyway, there’s more I could say, but those are a couple—a couple of things I would mention to explain the seeming inconsistency of my position.
David Brooks: Shadi, do you believe in the two-state solution? Is that your goal for the end state?
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, I’m still a two-stater, which puts me in a maybe an un—it’s not popular, obviously, to support a two-state solution. The reason I do still is because I think it would be a moral injustice to undo the Israeli state. I think that if Israel was founded upon ethnic cleansing and was founded upon a great injustice, that to undo the state would be another injustice, because it would require compelling Israeli Jews to live under an arrangement which they would not want to live under. And I think that you can’t force people to dissolve their own state.
David Brooks: I agree with you on that. You know, I would say one of the challenges for moderate—what do you do with the extremists? What do you do? Like, I firmly believe that politics is not about fighting. Fighting is for fascists. Politics is about persuasion. And you’re trying to win people over to your side.
And one of my problems with Bernie Sanders is that he has believed the same things, the same policies for the last, I don’t know how many years, seventy or eighty years. And to me, a moderate does not believe the same policies regardless of circumstances. I was for tax cuts in the 1980s because I thought our society was too stagnant and needed some vigorous virtue, some dynamism. And I thought tax cuts would help rearrange incentives to provide that. I’m against tax cuts now because our main problem is not stagnation. It’s inequality. And so my policy views have shifted. But that doesn’t mean I’ve changed philosophically. It means that I’m willing to adjust to the times.
And I think Bernie Sanders’ view of society as a class war is overly simplistic, formulaic. And I just don’t think these policies work. … five grocery stores. And he’s been pretty moderate, frankly, by DSA standards. But, you know, five grocery stores that are going to sell food at cheaper prices. Well, how the heck is that going to work? People are going to buy the steaks and then they’re going to go across the street and they’re going to arbitrage them and sell them. And these things—the world is way too more complicated and the unintended consequences too rife.
And so my second problem with the current Democratic left of the Democratic Party is that it mostly appeals to people with PhDs in sociology. And I just think a lot of the values coming out of the progressive wing are way out of touch with Americans. I do not think prisons should be eliminated. I don’t think the Pentagon should be eliminated. I don’t think borders should be completely open. If we value immigration, we have to have controlled immigration. And so it’s always a question of balance.
And my problem with the progressive left is, A, they haven’t learned from the past. B, they’re overconfident in thinking how they can organize complex systems. And three, they’re going to lose. And, you know, you can win in a Democratic primary in August if you’re running in Morningside Heights. But if you look at where the median voter is in America, it’s way, way, way to the right of that.
And so when I look at moderates in the Democratic Party, I think I see some pretty good candidates, like good natural political athletes. I don’t know if Jon Ossoff is going to win from Georgia, Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, Rahm Emanuel from Illinois. I realize I’ve just reeled off three Jews. I don’t know if the Democrats are going to nominate a Jew in 2028.
Shadi Hamid: Jon Ossoff, I like a lot because I think he’s someone where progressives are able to project their own desires upon him, similar to Obama in that way. Ideally, you want a candidate who appeals to both factions of the Democratic Party. And I think Jon Ossoff also has the sweet spot of being Jewish but also critical of Israel’s policies in a way that distinguishes him, which I think might be a way of closing some of these gaps.
I did want to say just very briefly, you know, one thing about the class divide which you point to. One thing that I find appealing about the old left, the Bernie Sanders left, is that I’m a believer that at some level politics is about us versus them. I wish it were otherwise, but I think that’s what people need to get themselves motivated. They need to have a sense of adversary. Now, the question is, which adversary are you going to pick? I think the Trumpian right picks immigrants or Hispanics or whatever it might be. That’s their outsider. What I like about the Bernie Sanders left is that they acknowledge this reality, but then they pick corporations, billionaires. That’s better than picking a racial minority. It’s also better than being super woke.
And I think it’s worth noting that Bernie Sanders was never particularly woke when it came to issues like trans rights or the kind of abolishing prisons. Or even abolishing the border. I mean, Bernie Sanders—and he was criticized for this in 2016—was someone who very much believed in borders and was skeptical of open borders for economic reasons.
So I think from that standpoint, if I had to choose between like a woke left or a class left, I would pick the one that sees class divides as the primary cleavage, because that way we get away from the racial stuff, which I think is very destructive to the Democratic Party, this obsession with race or gender or sexual identity.
So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Maybe that’s me kind of idealizing that there could be a left that could be economically populist but culturally moderate, because I’m a cultural moderate. Maybe even some ways I’m culturally conservative. I think that religion can play a positive role in public life, and I would like to see more Christianity. That’s what our—that’s what our new book is partly about. Um, but maybe that’s just not something that’s possible in the real world, to have this kind of mix of positions. But I think that’s also the sweet spot that someone like J.D. Vance has been trying to carve out: economically populist, but culturally conservative.
David Brooks: Yeah, I don’t think politics is primarily about adversarial relationships. I think when you conceive of politics that way, you’re basically handing yourself over to the dark passions—hatred, resentment, the urge for domination. You’re removing the art of conversation from politics.
And this is not just wishful thinking. Like I covered a Senate back in the day where people were friends with each other. You know, if you go back in most political eras, and I think even today, I travel a lot. For my sins, I spend somewhere between 180 and 220 nights a year in a hotel. And the good parts of that—the bad parts are obvious. I spend a lot of time in airports. The good parts is I get out of my little Acela bubble and I get to have conversations with people who are pretty left and pretty right, even in my own family. And I’ve never lost a friend over any of this. I find if you ask people respectfully what they believe and how they came to believe it, you don’t have to have an adversary position.
And if you believe, as I do, in the moderate belief that competition is a competition between partial truths, I may not mostly agree with Bernie Sanders. But I think he has a possession of a part of the truth. And so why should he be my adversary? He should be my conversation partner, maybe my political rival. I’m not naive about the competitiveness about politics. But I think that idea that we have to have us-them categories is a poisonous introduction into politics.
And that doesn’t mean politics is going to be beanbag. One of my heroes is Alexander Hamilton, who was shot by the vice president of the United States. So that’s not beanbag. But it did mean the founders, for all the fraught emotions of those years, they did produce the Declaration and the Constitution. I really doubt today’s Congress could do that because they lack the learning and they lack the sense, we will figure this out. We will cut a deal. We will make all our differences happen. And it was ugly, obviously, because they didn’t address slavery. But at least the founders got something very impressive done, which is to create these two documents. And to me, that is an exemplification of what politics should be, even amidst all the passions of the day.
Matthew Kaemingk: David, you’ve written a good amount about character and virtue and the role of virtue in public life and the need, frankly, for character in politics in American public life, and thinking about where that comes from. Shadi and I, we’ve just finished up our book arguing that religion is an important aspect of building a thick and sustainable democratic culture. And so I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about where public and political character comes from and how we might begin to organize ourselves as citizens to repair this social fabric through this development of character. So where does your mind go when you think about those kinds of things?
David Brooks: Yeah, when I think about making a decision who to vote for, I think it should be a three-level decision-making process. The first question is, is this a person of good character? Can I trust them? If you can’t trust your leader and if they’re just going to lie to you, then you’ve really undermined democracy in some major way.
And the second should be, does this person have good judgment? Most judgments that political leaders have to make are not ideological. They’re like, what do we do about Iran? Is it wise to launch a war against Iran? Or is it dumb? And that’s a question not of ideology, but it’s a question of judgment. What’s the situation here? What are the opportunities? What are the dangers? How can I be humble about my own ability to do what I think I want to do?
And then third, after you ask about character and after you ask about judgment, then the next question is, do I agree with this person? And I’m afraid that the Republican Party obviously blew through the first levels of analysis. It’s just, is this guy on my team? And frankly, I think the Democrats did the same thing back in the day when they were nominating Graham Platner in Maine. I don’t think he was—he’s not a person of great character from what I could tell. And that’s just bad for your party.
And so like in any other realm of life, finding someone who will be honest, who will respect the truth, who will respect evidence, who will be truthful, who won’t be massively corrupt—that seems to me the only way you run a democracy and inspire faith in democracy. And we’re obviously not living that. And the failure is not a failure of moderation. It’s a failure of nihilism and team spirit and adversarial dark passions overtaking our life.
Matthew Kaemingk: So, I mean, last one, just to push you a little harder there, is how do we become the sort of people who are immune from the politics of resentment, who are not vulnerable to this kind of political persuasion, whether it be resentment on the right or fear and trauma, you know, sort of catastrophizing that happens on the left. How do we cultivate that kind of character? What do we need?
David Brooks: Well, I was at a conference recently and somebody said, “You know what we need? We need to teach the Bible in public school.” And this was a secular guy. And I was like, you know, I think that’s right. And I say that for this reason. When I came to faith, I was in midlife, my political views and even a lot of my practical views about what’s good and bad did not change very much. And that, I think, is because even though I was not a person of faith, I had the biblical story in my head. I had the parable of the Good Samaritan. I had the Exodus story. I was the inheritor of a system of values about what is right and wrong, what is admirable and not admirable. And coming to faith, those were already implanted in me. But I think having these kinds of moral ecologies in our heads through the reading of the Bible, through the reading of whoever you want—C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, you name it—I think those ideas begin to seep in and form your view of what is right and wrong.
The second thing that I think we need is to insist that our leaders are exemplars of the sort who create moral ecologies around them. So I began my pundit career working on PBS for the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. And Lehrer, when I was on the show, if I said something he thought was smart, I could see his eyes crinkle with pleasure. And if I said something he thought was stupid, I would see his mouth downturn with displeasure. So for ten years that I was working with Jim, I just tried to chase the eye crinkle and avoid the mouth down. And Jim never said anything to me about character or moral formation. He just said—he just implied through the smallest of his gestures, this is how we do things here. These are the NewsHour standards. And that is a great—it’s a great thing to have left behind a moral ecology. And Lehrer’s been dead, but he taught it to everybody, these standards. And that’s—this is just how we do things here.
And so we learn morals through admiration, not through persuasion. And I just admired Lehrer. And I admired John McCain. And I admired Barack Obama. And if we surround ourselves with people we admire, I think the soul is warmed toward goodness. And it would be a wonderful feeling to have a president we could admire, or at least I could admire.
Matthew Kaemingk: Amen to that. That’s a good note upon which to end. Let’s all certainly hope for that. Thank you so much, David Brooks, for joining us. It was a pleasure to have you.
David Brooks: Okay. I’ve been a longtime listener of Zealots at the Gate, and I’m glad to now be a zealot. I don’t know if the zealots are you guys or the people who are at the gate trying to get you guys.
Matthew Kaemingk: It’s open to interpretation. And friends, you’ll be happy to know that our book has a lovely endorsement on it here from our guest. And David, we’re very grateful for that.
David Brooks: It is the rarest of things, a sincere blurb.
Matthew Kaemingk: Thank you.
Shadi Hamid: Thanks for listening to Zealots at the Gate. If you like what you heard, check out other episodes at comment.org. Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment magazine, produced by Rachel Collins. Technical production is by Allie Crummy. Audience strategy by Matt Crummy. And editorial direction by Anne Snyder.
