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One of the paradoxes of our moment is that the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency seem to demand our obsessive attention, while Trump himself obviously thrives on that attention—and all of the social division that comes with it. What if the clearest way out of our political crisis is taking politics less seriously? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with his old friend (and new boss), Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, about the pleasures and pitfalls of a life spent covering politicians, the limits of partisanship, and the need to see life from the redwood’s perspective.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Brooks: Our topic today is politics. What role should politics play in your life? How much of your spiritual, emotional, and mental energy should you devote to politics?
Now, I am something of a political junkie. I grew up as a political correspondent covering people, and I can say there’s nothing more fun in journalism than going to a rally in Iowa or New Hampshire or anywhere people are campaigning, talking with the folks, watching them scream, watching the passion. It’s just Americana in all its glory, both good and bad.
So I really care about politics. I really care about politicians. I admire them in general. They’re good people in rotten circumstances. And yet I also feel that we’ve over-politicized our society. Everything is red or blue. Where you live is red or blue. What car you drive is determined by red or blue. The TV shows you watch are determined by red or blue. Who you marry and befriend, how you think about the WNBA.
When you make politics your religion, you think you have a sense of belonging, but you really don’t. You’re not sitting with your community members; you’re just hating the same people. You have the illusion of righteous action. You’re doing something good for the country. But you’re not feeding the poor or sitting with the widow; you’re just hating people on social media. It gives you the illusion of all the things that you get in a real community or a real faith or a real philosophy, but you just end up in a cultural war.
I’m trying to figure out: How do I care about politics without over-caring?
My guest today is Jeffrey Goldberg. You probably know him as the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine. As you watch or listen to this conversation, you will notice that Jeff and I know each other. We’ve known each other for 25 years. You’ll see that we have, as all old friends do, a certain way of talking to each other. We have a certain banter, which involves a lot of interruption. That’s our conversational style.
What you are about to witness is us at our most slow paced, our most earnest, our most serious. Jeff and I will be talking about what role politics should play in our lives. But in order to get there, I thought we’d compare notes about our careers, the politicians we’ve covered, what we’ve thought about them, what’s been important, what’s been unimportant.
Jeffrey Goldberg, welcome to The Permanent Questions.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.
Brooks: This must be—
Goldberg: I’m very wary.
Brooks: —a thrill for you. You do edit a magazine, you’ve won some prizes, but this really is pretty much the pinnacle of your career.
Goldberg: You know, I applied to Yale, and I got rejected. I didn’t even get wait-listed. They were just like, “What, are you joking?” So I consider this getting into Yale. Aren’t you a professor at Yale?
Brooks: I’m a faculty member at Yale.
Goldberg: What does that mean? What’s the difference between a professor and a faculty member?
Brooks: Professors know what they’re talking about.
Goldberg: Good one.
Brooks: We’re going to talk politics, if we can get on track here, which is highly unlikely.
Goldberg: It’s really deeply unlikely.
Brooks: We’ve spent our lives covering this stuff.
Goldberg: Isn’t that sad?
Brooks: I know. So I’m gonna ask you, I want to get your political origin story.
Goldberg: My political origin story?
Brooks: When did you first have a brush with politics?
Goldberg: My first brush with politics was when, as a 2-year-old, I urinated on Al Shanker’s lap.
Do you remember Al Shanker?
Brooks: Of course. He was head of the American Federation of Teachers.
Goldberg: He led the 1968 teachers’ strike. My father was one of the leaders of the teachers’ strike. And the story is told that they were having a meeting in their Brooklyn apartment, and I was seated on Al Shanker’s lap, and I pissed all over him.
Brooks: Really?
Goldberg: I grew up in that kind of household with posters on the wall with quotes: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” That was by the bathroom, I remember.
Brooks: I had a similar upbringing, weirdly.
Goldberg: It’s not that weird, actually.
Brooks: My parents volunteered for Ed Koch back when he was a liberal member of Congress.
Goldberg: He was a liberal reformer. He was fighting Carmine DeSapio and the remnants of the Tammany machine.
Brooks: I think also Watergate—I don’t know, I’m slightly older than you, but when I saw the Watergate hearings, I thought, That is so cool., I wanted to be—I was on the side of G. Gordon Liddy and the Watergate co-conspirators.
Goldberg: I have recollections of it being on constantly in the house. And just a general and deep loathing of Nixon in the cohort of my parents and their friends, which later on I realized was overdone. I don’t take the Lynyrd Skynyrd position on Watergate. But—
Brooks: Wait, what is the Lynyrd Skynyrd position?
Goldberg: “Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?” But I just think Nixon is much more interesting. In the full light of what we know now about the possibilities in American politics, I think Nixon is a very interesting character. But at the time, he was Satan incarnate, which is kind of funny in retrospect.
Brooks: Now, did you have heroes? I remember when I got a little older, and I became more politically aware, when I was in high school—this is the kind of kid I was—I had a Hubert Humphrey poster on my wall. It was not Joe Namath or Tom Seaver.
Goldberg: You’re such a loser.
Brooks: It was Hubert Humphrey. But it had the saying: “Some people talk change. Others cause it.” And I knew even then I wanted to be the kind of person who only talks.
Goldberg: Some people just don’t even open their mouths. They just think about it.
Brooks: I was like a mainstream Democrat. Scoop Jackson was big in our household, and Birch Bayh.
Goldberg: Scoop Jackson became a hero of mine later, in college, but not then.
I think I was just very, very influenced by what was hanging on the walls of the house. There was a famous, very moody photo of JFK and RFK consulting with each other.
Brooks: One difference between us: I’ve always had a political ideology. I’ve always had a label that I’ve labeled myself. When I was a kid—or in college, even, I was a socialist. I had read John Reed.
Goldberg: Who wasn’t, though? You read John Reed?
Brooks: Yeah, he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World.
Goldberg: I just waited for the movie. I watched the Warren Beatty movie.
Brooks: Yeah, there’s a movie called Reds—Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton—which was one of my favorite movies. I was like, “Yeah, revolution.” And I loved The Communist Manifesto.
Goldberg: Wait, how could a Hubert Humphrey poster and The Communist Manifesto coexist?
Brooks: Because I swung left in college. I just hung out in the library. I didn’t go to classes. I just hung out. And I read a magazine called the New Masses, which was a communist magazine from the 1920s and ’30s. I became in love with magazines.
There was a historian named Richard Pells, who basically argued that all of human history is controlled by The New Republic, and he covered American history as if it was The New Republic. So it gave me the conviction, which I have to this day, that ideas matter more than anything else in politics, and that small magazines in particular drive the intellectual debate.
Goldberg: It’s funny, I read the Old Masses, which was a pro-Cossack magazine, at the same time.
Brooks: Lessons on how to chase down Jews. (Laughs.)
Goldberg: I’m a reporter. I’m not like you. I didn’t read the New Masses.
Although I did go to the library and read a lot of magazines. I read The New Republic, definitely. I wasn’t really a New Yorker guy or an Atlantic guy. More Atlantic in high school than New Yorker. But I was definitely—when I started reading The New Republic, and I guess this was the Kinsley era, so after college, I really had this kind of feeling. I was like, “Who are these people? How do they know so much? Why do these words shine off the page?”
Brooks: Was it my writing that caused this a lot?
Goldberg: I didn’t remember your pieces personally. I’m sure someone read them, but it wasn’t me. You wrote for The New Republic in that period?
Brooks: Occasional freelance. I was more a National Review guy.
Goldberg: I read the National Review just because I just went for—this is sort of the way I am, I guess, why I fell into magazines—I would privilege in my mind good writing over almost anything.
That’s why George Will’s my favorite columnist. I don’t agree with him on everything, but the man can write. I mean, next to you, he’s my favorite. But you’re not a columnist anymore; you’re more of a video personality.
Brooks: I’m a talk show host. I’m a game show host. Bob Barker.
Goldberg: You’re like Phil Donahue. You’re not going to ask me about my feelings in this session?
Brooks: No, don’t worry. I’m going to your intellectual life. That void is big enough.
Goldberg: Yes, it is. (Laughs.)
I’ve written about this; it’s no secret. I was a self-identified socialist Zionist at 15. Actually, this is true: With a group of friends, we once marched in St. Mark’s Place, in the village. We once were at a rally carrying the banner “Socialist Zionists for Animal Rights.” Huge constituency.
Brooks: Now did you ever have a book or an event that shifted your political view?
Goldberg: Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I’m serious.
Brooks: Is that true, really?
Goldberg: Yeah, I became a vegetarian out of that, until I realized that I really like hamburgers too much.
I read deeply in socialist theory and Zionist theory, and there was a kind of almost Bolshevik inevitability to my early path. I ended up living on a kibbutz that was still organized like a kibbutz in the kind of collectivized sense. And then I realized that socialism is ridiculous.
Brooks: For what reason?
Irving Kristol went to the army and decided if we became socialists, the people he was serving with would turn it into a racket. So he said, “Oh, I can’t be for socialism.”
Goldberg: It just seemed to go against—I mean, I’m making a very broad statement here—human nature. People like things. They like to acquire things, like to acquire status. You can tell them, “That’s wrong. Don't be like that.” But I’m also like that. I like to have acquisitions. I like to collect things. I like the material world also. And I like to see people being rewarded for working harder than other people. I believe in equality, but I don’t believe in equity in the sense that I don’t think that people are born with the same level of skill.
Maybe I’m straying too far away from the point of this. What is the point of this session?
Brooks: The role politics plays in your life. But we’re starting out with the ideas of politics.
Goldberg: There just seems something unnatural about socialism, this overwhelming desire. It seemed resentment based a little bit too much for me. “There should be no such thing as a billionaire”—I’m not in that camp. I’m in the camp that there should be a lot of millionaires. I don’t want to cap anybody’s success. I would bring the floor up.
I don’t think that makes me a socialist or a Democratic socialist. I think this makes me a common-sense, non-cruel believer in some kind of meritocratic possibility.
Brooks: It’s somewhat similar. I read Edmund Burke in college, and that was a shock. He just said: The world’s really complicated. If you think you socialists can plan reality, good luck with that.
Goldberg: Socialism doesn’t survive first contact with humans and all of their ridiculous complexity.
Brooks: And a lot of my heroes became the neoconservatives, like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They were lefties who grew up in Brooklyn, but they also grew up immigrant kids, and they looked at their parents and how they had made it in America, and it was hard work. It was bourgeois values. It was education. And they looked at the hippies and think, What are you guys doing?
Goldberg: They’re destroying, because they could either make or destroy, and so they were in the destruction phase.
Brooks: We both, early in our careers—you way more than me—reported from abroad. I was abroad basically the first six years of the ’90s.
Goldberg: And you count Belgium as abroad, don’t you?
Brooks: I was covering the Soviet Union—that’s abroad. I was covering South Africa—that's abroad. I was covering the Middle East.
Goldberg: Yeah, that’s true.
Brooks: These are abroad places.
Goldberg: Those are abroad.
Brooks: As far as I know. I wasn’t in Greenland, like most parts of America.
Goldberg: I mean, I’m just saying that, you know, Brussels is not—
Brooks: Okay, Mr. Obscure Foreign Correspondent.
Goldberg: I’m just saying, it’s a direct flight. Anything with a direct flight …
Brooks: That’s fine.
Goldberg: And a wide selection of cheese ...
Brooks: To me it was the daring adventures with waffles. That’s what I had in Brussels.
Did you have your worldview shaped by events—as you call them—abroad, where there’s no direct flights?
Goldberg: The first thing I think of is coming home from Pakistan. I spent part of the late ’90s, early 2000, up to 9/11, going in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I don’t think I’ve ever really articulated this before, but part of my belief system is that America is better than any other place.
I’m American. I love America. I recognize all the flaws, especially right now, but I’m American. Another observation I would make—these all kind of marry up—is that there’s too many journalists in America, or commentators or whatever you wanna call them, who see America as the locus of evil in the world, and that everything that happens in the world that’s bad is somehow caused, directly or indirectly, by the United States. And I just don’t buy that.
Does that send me down a more conservative pathway? In one superficial sense. But I think that the broadening experience of seeing how tens of millions of people live and realizing that we built something pretty good for ourselves gave me some perspective and some appreciation that sometimes, let’s say, people who come out of the Ivy League don’t really have.
They think that America is the locus of all bad in the world, and I have no patience for that anymore.
Brooks: You had a much more—
Goldberg: I’m not saying things are going so great, by the way.
Brooks: I just want to establish that, just to show that we’ve spent our lives on the importance of politics, both foreign and domestic. And I really care about politics.
I think that my favorite person I ever covered was John McCain.
Goldberg: Yeah, probably me too. Just to be around him.
Brooks: He was just so much fun. People forget that. He took me to casinos to teach me how to play craps.
Goldberg: He once introduced me to a group of Hungarian right-wingers as, “This is Jeff Goldberg. He’s a communist reporter.” You know? Whatever happens, happens. And I was like, “Jesus, man. Will you just stop?”
Brooks: But I ask you all this because we’ve spent a lot of our life in politics. And obviously politics matters a lot, both foreign and domestic.
Goldberg: Or does it?
Brooks: I’m now of a mood that we’re over-politicized as a country. I have this line: “We’re over-politicized and under-moralized.” We spend too much time paying attention to whatever cable TV is covering that particular hour and less about the things that really matter.
Goldberg: When you say “we,” what do you mean?
Brooks: We as a national society.
Goldberg: I don’t know about that. If you add up all the people who watch cable news, it adds up to a very, very small percentage of the American population.
I think most people aren’t, and most people are probably healthier than the people who do pay inordinate attention to politics or are involved in politics. Is the reality the general perception of reality, or is the reality something deeper? I do think that most people in America don’t pay day-to-day attention to it. We’re just around people who do.
If you’re asking in my own life, I’ve come to realize—here’s where everybody quotes the late Breitbart: We all understand now that “politics is downstream from culture.” But I would say that, especially now, culture is downstream from psychiatry and theology and tribalism and anxiety and resentment and a whole basket of sometimes inchoate human impulses and emotions that are buried deep in our lizard brains. You know what I mean?
To go upstream, you’ve got to be a salmon now in politics, if you’re writing about politics, and go as far upstream as you can go. That’s where you’re going to find out some possibly meaningful truths.
Brooks: I agree with Breitbart, though I should say Gramsci got there first, and a lot of people wrote about culture first.
Goldberg: Your old socialist roots coming out.
Brooks: My theory is that people are emotionally and spiritually quite disturbed right now, and they don’t go to church, and so politics has become the religion for a lot of people.
Goldberg: That’s why I stopped a long time ago falling in love with politicians. Because falling in love with anything human—any movement or anything that’s human created—is going to lead to disappointment.
I don’t mean falling in love with a human. You know my wife. She’s perfect.
Brooks: She’s now throwing her shoes at you, metaphorically.
Goldberg: I don’t know if she listens to your podcast.
Brooks: I’ll send her this part.
Goldberg: She knows you. She can just call you if she has to find out what you’re thinking at any given moment.
There are humans I love. But humans involved in public life who you fall in love with—that’s bad.
Brooks: I don’t know if I agree with that. I was deep into McCain and Obama.
Goldberg: Is there any politician who hasn’t disappointed you in some way in your 80 years in politics?
Brooks: All people except my kids and my wife have disappointed me, except my boss has never disappointed me.
Goldberg: Your new boss, not the old boss. The old bosses were terrible.
Brooks: But I’ve still gotten enthusiastic about various campaigns. It really mattered to me that Obama, McCain—the 2008 election was really tough on me, because I admire these two guys the most.
Goldberg: I wish they could’ve run the country together. If you melded some of McCain’s instincts and impulses with Obama’s thoughtfulness and analytical heft, you would’ve had a really interesting president.
Brooks: They would’ve killed each other.
Goldberg: No, I mean, in the one person, if you could just combine that.
David Brooks: I still want to believe in politics, and I still do believe in it. And I think most politicians are in it for the right reasons. The problem comes to me when people say they wouldn’t marry somebody from the other party, and that’s a very high percentage right now.
Goldberg: This is why religion is important. One of the many reasons religion is important. It says that humans are limited. Humans are broken, and humans are deeply imperfect. Any system of thought that demands some level of humility …
This is what I can’t stand about politics—the certainty of everybody. Because everybody needs religion. Human beings need religion. Some people just make politics their religion.
Brooks: My argument is that it gives you the simulation of religion without the actual religion. It gives you a simulation that you belong to a group, but you’re not really in a community. You’re just hating the same people.
Goldberg: You’re not in a community, and you’re accepting only half of what religion has to offer. You engage in judgment, but you don't really engage in mercy. That’s what our politics is like. It’s judgment without mercy.
It matters to me so little now what a person’s positions are on a set of issues compared to their character and to their core beliefs about themselves, their family, their community, their country, the world system that we have.
I don’t care that much if someone believes X about Y bill.
Brooks: This is why I think being over-politicized is not just a small group of people. I think what you just expressed—another way to say it is when you're looking at a candidate, the first lens is: Are they a good person? Are they a trustworthy human being?
Goldberg: Are they mentally stable?
Brooks: That would be nice.
Goldberg: I like to look at someone who’s committed to his or her family.
Brooks: And also, do they have good judgment? A lot of politics is just looking at the world, seeing what matters here. The third lens should be: Do they agree with me? Are they on my team?
But if you look at, say, the Texas primary race, where Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn, I don’t think people are applying the character frame or the judgment frame. They’re applying the partisanship lens.
Then for the Democrats, Graham Platner up in Maine. Even after a lot of his scandals got out, a lot of Democrats were willing to stay because he’s on the team.
Goldberg: This is a cliche already, but partisanship does make you stupid. Partisanship, excessive partisanship especially, turns you into a robot. Or, put it this way: It turns you tribal. What’s amusing, leftists who believe in universal principles and universalism get pretty tribal as well. Tribalism makes you kind of dumb.
Brooks: Have you lost friends over Trump?
Goldberg: Have I lost friends over Trump?
You’re assuming that I have friends and not a series of shifting alliances.
Brooks: Well, we’re momentarily friends.
Goldberg: Again, shifting alliances.
Have I lost friends over Trump? No.
I have more Republican friends than the average Washington-based “mainstream” journalist, but my Republican friends are disproportionately anti-Trumpers who’ve become so committed to it. It’s like, all right already with Trump. You know what I mean?
It’s funny. This is a possible insight into The Atlantic. The Atlantic is meant to be the magazine of the American idea. The American idea posits that you have a strong liberal group and a strong conservative group battling it out in public for primacy of their ideas, and you have to convince the public that your ideas are right.
I think it’s very important to have conservatives and liberals writing and arguing in the pages of The Atlantic. So I try to get as many conservatives as we can. Unfortunately, all they want to do is write about Trump. Every so often I have to remind a conservative writer, “Can you just come out against abortion randomly or something to remind our readers that you have positions?”
I understand how personal it is for them. I understand what it must be like to see the party that they believed in become a cult of personality around an individual, rather than a place for the ventilation of conservative ideas.
Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent, but that’s a long way of saying: I can’t say I lost friends over that.
Brooks: I don’t believe in losing friends over politics. I just think that’s a misalignment.
Goldberg: Well, it doesn’t really matter what you believe. It matters what your friends believe.
Brooks: I grew up in the conservative movement, so I have a lot of conservative friends. I have conservative family members—MAGA conservative types. And they’ll occasionally say, “How much do I have to pay you to stop writing?” They don’t like what I write, but we have fun with it, and we argue all the time about it.
Goldberg: Here’s the thing. This is what makes me most nervous about America. The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability, the willingness, of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves. Restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their differences with their fellow Americans.
You have to start from a position: No American is my enemy. I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my—I mean, the way Trump talks about enemies of the people is obviously horrible—enemy. And I will impose restraints on myself. I have the First Amendment right to say whatever I want, but I don’t need to exercise that right to the detriment of the American project.
That’s how we get out of this. We don’t get out of it through legislation, we don’t get out of it through constitutional amendment, we don’t get out of it through demography. We get out of it because people decide that more unites us than divides us.
Brooks: I used to think we needed a war against Canada, but now we may actually get a war against Canada.
Goldberg: I think that the liberals, for good reason, would be like, “Why are we having a war against”—I mean if Canada, like, sucker punched us. Martians maybe.
Brooks: I just mean some common foe. Martians would be a good one.
Goldberg: But I think it’s almost deeper than that. In the Middle East, there’s very obvious existential wars. We don’t have—there’s very little chance that China just attacks the United States in a Pearl Harbor–style way.
China might very well attack Taiwan, and that causes a huge discussion in the American public about: Do we defend or do we not defend? But I don’t see an outside party coming in and unifying the American people in the way that the shock of Pearl Harbor unified the American people.
Brooks: I would go back to what we talked about earlier. My experience in the ’90s abroad made me so pro-American. I just love all Americans. You can’t love America and hate half the country. I love going to Trump areas, I love going to—Brooklyn I have problems with, but—
Goldberg: Depends on what part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn is wildly diverse.
Brooks: But my fear is not only that there are no limits to how we exercise our partisanship, but that we’ve lost faith in the art of persuasion.
I have this weird pet peeve when politicians say we’re going to fight. When they use that word fight, which is now omnipresent, I want to say, “Fighting is for fascists. Democracy is about persuasion.”
But I know a lot of journalists, opinion journalists, who don’t believe in persuasion.
Goldberg: You’re going to make a lot of money as a political consultant, by the way.
Brooks: It is about persuasion.
Goldberg: Of course. Persuasion is the coin of the realm in democracies, and coercion is the coin of the realm in autocracies.
I don’t like coercion. I would love to be persuaded. I think it’s actually healthy for your brain to allow it to be persuaded by evidence. It means that the pistons are functioning.
Brooks: But there’s a lot of people in our business—and there are economic incentives to be—in the mobilization business, not in the persuasion business.
Goldberg: Huge. And yet it’s not as if 350 million Americans have to wake up tomorrow morning and say, “Persuasion, not coercion. No American is my enemy. I will impose restraint on the way I talk in order to make sure that my fellow Americans understand that I do not consider them enemies.” I understand that’s a hard one. There are structural ways, there are algorithmic ways, of lowering the temperature.
If we had non-sociopaths running social media companies, they might program for unity or fact as opposed to programming for anger. But here we are.
Brooks: Tell me if I’m being an old fogey.
Goldberg: You’re an old fogey.
Brooks: Thank you. I appreciate that. That was a bit of emotional bath that I needed.
I used to admire politicians more as people, and I don't know if the politicians are getting lesser or if the system is getting lesser, or some of the people I admired—I was just down in Georgia and I met Sam Nunn’s daughter. Sam Nunn was a senator, and he knew so much about defense policy. He was a deeply knowledgeable guy, as much as any policy wonk.
We talked about McCain and Obama. They struck me as bigger. Ted Kennedy was just a great, great legislator. I think the two best legislators of my lifetime have been Ted Kennedy, who really knew what everybody in the room needed, and Nancy Pelosi.
Goldberg: Seemingly every Republican in the Senate in Ted Kennedy’s long tenure there had a bill with Ted Kennedy.
Kennedy would always find something to agree with someone on and then legislate to their mutual advantage. It was an amazing thing to watch.
It’s funny, when you talk to old senators who are like, “I co-sponsored that with Ted Kennedy.” And then they’re like, “And I know you’re surprised by this.” No, it’s not surprising.
He was also so secure as a liberal icon. If Ted Kennedy said, “I’m doing something with Orrin Hatch,” the liberals of Massachusetts would say, “Oh, wow, you’re a great legislator,” not, “What are you doing with Orrin Hatch?”
Brooks: But there was a skill to being a legislator, which they really worked on. Now, it’s a skill that’s getting on TV, but the skill of politics—
Goldberg: It’s just performance now. I think it’s the social media temptation. The ability to express your feelings 24 hours a day instantaneously is not a good thing. You could spend all day long trying to maintain your filters, and you can’t. Even people of dignity succumb.
I would really like the next president to be just a dignified person who doesn’t rise to the bait all the time and just explains to the American people over and over again, “This is what a president does; this is what a president doesn’t do. I’m not gonna do the things that presidents don’t do.”
Brooks: Okay, let’s talk about the future. I’m going to tell you why I’m optimistic about America, and you can tell me why my theory is ridiculous.
Goldberg: What’s second prize? (Laughs.)
Brooks: We decline the fall of the Roman Empire. In 2020, I’m reading a book, I’m sitting at home, during COVID, and I’m reading a book by Samuel Huntington, The Promise of Disharmony.
The Promise of Disharmony is the subtitle. The title was American Politics. And he says every couple of generations, America goes through a moral convulsion. People get disgusted with established power, high distrust, they want to burn everything down. There’s a new passionate generation comes on the scene, new form of communications technology.
He says this happened in the 1770s, the revolutionary period; 1830s, Andrew Jackson populist era; 1890s, the Industrial Revolution, which leads to the progressive era; and the 1960s. And these periods, he says, are brutal to live through.
So he’s writing this in 1982, and he says, “If the pattern holds sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, America will go through another moral convulsion.” And I’m like, “Well done, Professor Huntington.”
But the good news is you come out of them. We’ve been through this six or seven times before.
Goldberg: The question is: How do we come out?
Brooks: I think we come out of them the way we’re coming out of them right now, which is you have a cultural shift, a value shift, and then that leads to a politics shift. And we’ve gone through a period of brutal nihilism.
And I think—I look at the Fred Rogers movies, where people are weeping in the theater because they want to see a good person. Or you go to Ted Lasso. People loved it because they wanted to see a good person, upbeat. I just saw Devil Wears Prada 2. The Anne Hathaway character’s a good person.
I think most of Zohran Mamdani’s policies are horrific, but he smiles when he talks. He’s a happy guy, and I think he’s a brilliant politician.
To me, this is all part of a buildup of a cultural-value shift, a vibe shift as big as we’ve seen in any of these other moral convulsions. It makes total sense to me that that’s what’s about to happen, and we’re seeing the early days of it.
Goldberg: It’s funny, because my perfect president would combine the best qualities of Anne Hathaway and Zohran Mamdani. How did you know that?
How do you read my mind like that? How do you do that? I’m perfectly open to the idea that this is a midlife crisis, or whatever you want to call it, and that we’re coming out. I’d prefer not to think that it’s a terminal illness.
I think that there’s one huge—Put aside AI, which I don’t know how that ball bounces, right? But social media generally, I don’t know what you can do contemplatively in an age of social media.
All that being said, if people on the right accept the basic undergirding principles of creedal nationalism, which is: We all swear allegiance to a constitution, and we love the flag, and everybody lives here together, and we’re a big multicultural democracy, and the American idea is that no one is better than me, and I’m not better than anyone. And people on the left have to not talk about identity and division all the time and try to divide based on resentment categories, right?
On the right, downplay the nativist impulses that are universal. And on the left, downplay the things that divide and up play the things that unite.
Because—you and I both know this, because we’ve traveled around the world—when you meet an American outside America, it’s the greatest thing in the world. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, you're just so ineluctably American, and you’re so excited. Doesn’t matter that you’re from Brooklyn, and this one is from Montana—you’re American.
That’s what I love about America. It’s a shame that sometimes you have to go outside of America to get that feeling among Americans. I don’t have a prescription for how to make people understand these things, and I hope that we can find our way to these things the easy way and not the hard way.
But at the end of an easy way or a hard way is this renewed understanding, I think.
Brooks: I think nations decline not when they go through turmoil but when they run out of energy. And we have not. We have all this mishigas around us, but we haven’t run out of energy, that’s for sure.
Goldberg: No, we haven’t run out of energy for the mishigas. But at a certain point, these things, you forget. I was in Cyprus once, and you cross the DMZ, and you talk to people on both sides, and they’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Like, “What’s the last crazy thing that happened here?” “I don’t know.” And you’re like, “If it went back to Greece, would you care?” “No.”
Things burn out. You know? But we’re not at that burn stage yet.
Brooks: I want to bring us home here with this question—
Goldberg: Did we accomplish anything in this podcast?
Brooks: We did.
Goldberg: Is this a podcast?
Brooks: This is a pointillist painting by Seurat. And we have had so many points that all add up to one beautiful picture. And that picture is to me—
Goldberg: The Atlantic magazine.
Brooks: The Atlantic magazine, embodied truth.
There was a guy, Abraham Kuyper, and he had a theory of the spheres, that there are a lot of different spheres in society. There’s a political sphere, there’s a religious sphere, there’s a capitalist sphere, there’s a family sphere. And it’s really important to keep them apart, and to know that the logic of one sphere does not pertain to the logic of other spheres.
His argument was that we’ve collapsed all the spheres, and we’ve taken the logic of politics and applied it to the logic of education. Our higher ed, at least, is super politicized. Our logic of popular culture, that’s super politicized.
Every scandal that breaks up, it breaks down immediately on partisan lines. Everything is seen through that lens, and so we’ve broken down the spheres, and that’s a problem for all of us.
Goldberg: I think we have to segregate the impulses of politics away from the other parts of life that are more complicated and more—you know, politics can make you inhuman.
Brooks: And you know, to get down to your daily life—
Goldberg: I’m getting older, so I attribute this to chronology, but I’m more in the nature, spiritual religion. I think part of it is—and this has been a theme of this conversation, I will try to organize a coherence to this conversation—I think that the older you get in journalism, and maybe politics too, I think now I’ve seen most things.
Many of the things that I’ve seen in politics and journalism I’ve seen three or four or five times. Nothing’s new under the sun, to borrow from Ecclesiastes. Nothing is new, and that makes it a little bit more boring, so you’re trying to find the thing that’s actually transcendent out of this.
On one hand, it leads to what our friend Ruth Marcus calls “calm mastery.” It’s like, Okay, I’ve been through that crisis already. I did that. I know what happens. But on the other hand, you’re looking for something more.
I read more Emerson than I used to. I read more Bible than I used to. I read Psalms more than I used to. I try very deliberately to go into nature more than I used to. I was just last week out in the redwoods, and there’s nothing like it: Go right up to a redwood and look up.
You’re really going to think that some fight on MS Now or Fox is important? Standing next to a 1,400-year-old redwood? It’s just putting things into perspective and understanding that not much matters. The things that matter, matter hugely, but not much actually matters.
I’m sorry, I’m getting on a—
Brooks: No, this is why The Permanent Questions is here for you.
Goldberg: Oh, that’s good.
Brooks: That’s what we’re doing. This is what—
Goldberg: So if I listen every week, I will understand?
Brooks: We are the verbal equivalent of a redwood. And I just wanted to express—so the point of this podcast—
Goldberg: You’re one of the shorter redwoods I’ve ever met, by the way.
Brooks: Spiritually tall.
Goldberg: But spiritually your canopy shades us all.
Brooks: Ultimately, your decision to hire me was a wise one. I think that’s why we’re here.
Goldberg: As wise as a redwood.
Brooks: Jeffrey Goldberg, thank you for being on The Permanent Questions.
Goldberg: Thank you.
Brooks: There were times when I was covering political campaigns and I would be deep in political everything, and I would take time off to read an essay written by the essayist C.S. Lewis. He talked about how medieval people looked at the night sky. We see the night sky, and we see balls of gas. They looked at the night sky, and they just saw enchantment. His description of the way they saw the world as enchanted always used to lift my spirit. In the midst of a political season, I needed something to lift my spirit.
So I resonated when Jeff talked about the redwoods—that maybe as you get older, or maybe we just are exhausted by the politics of the last 10 years, when Jeff talked about going out to the redwoods, sitting under a redwood and looking up, suddenly the world is enchanted again. Or he talked about reading the Bible, reading spiritual books, reading deeper literature. Suddenly, in the midst of the random flux of political debate, it’s important to care about the permanent things.
That’s one of the reasons that motivated me to do this podcast, frankly. I was tired of the daily bounce of politics. I wanted to step back at what really mattered. And I think with Jeff’s conversation, we saw how important that is.
Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg.
The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe at The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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