DAVID BROOKS

The easiest way to describe the shift is to say that educated Democrats have moved steadily to the left. In 1994, only about a sixth of Democrats who had gone to graduate school said they were consistently liberal. In 2015, more than 50% did. In 1994, only 12% of Democrats with college degrees said they were consistently liberal. Eleven years later, 47% did, according to the Pew Research Center.

One of the results is that, as my colleague Thomas B. Edsall put it this week, there are now three Democratic Parties. The most moderate faction is the most nonwhite and focuses on pocketbook issues like jobs and taxes. The most left-wing segment is the most populated by whites. It focuses on issues like abortion, global warming, immigration and race and gender equity.

To say that white educated Democrats have moved left is true, but it’s not the essential truth. The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.

For example, immigration is now seen through the lens of race in a way that simply wasn’t true two decades ago. As Zach Goldberg noted in an essay in Tablet Magazine, between 1965 and 2000, the percentage of white liberals who wanted higher immigration levels never deviated far from 10%. During the Obama administration, the number rose to the range of 20 to 30%. Now, more than 50% of white progressives want to see higher immigration levels.

Many progressives see barriers to immigration as akin to unjust racial barriers. Many want to dismantle the border enforcement agencies and eliminate criminal sanctions against undocumented crossings precisely because they are seen as structures of oppression that white people impose on brown people.

The racial lens also affects views on foreign policy topics. For most of the 20th century, for example, white liberals consistently sympathized with Israel more than with the Palestinians. But that has reversed. White progressives are much more critical of Israel than ever before. What had once been seen as an intractable regional conflict between a democracy and a series of authoritarian regimes trying to destroy it is now seen as a conflict between a white colonialist power and the brown people it oppresses.

In this new dispensation, the concept of white privilege is on everybody’s lips. As Goldberg points out, in 1996 and 2010 about a quarter of white liberals thought racial discrimination was a very serious problem. By 2016, 58% did. White liberals have warmer attitudes toward other races than they do toward their own.

In this dispensation, more white progressives view society as basically unjust. In last year’s Hidden Tribes survey, for example, 86% of progressive activists said that people’s life outcomes are outside their individual control.

This shift in outlook has yielded several paradoxes. As many researchers have pointed out, white progressives are now farther left on immigration and race and diversity issues than the typical Hispanic or African American voter.

Second, two of the great marks of privilege in our society are skin color and education levels, and yet in the Democratic Party it’s the highly educated whites who express the greatest alienation with the system that benefits them so directly.

Third, the progressive framework is egalitarian, but the shift has opened up wider opinion and cultural gaps between this highly educated elite and less educated groups.

Why have white progressives moved so far so fast? There are several theories.

The most direct theory is that America is a land of systemic racism. Highly educated white progressives have woken up to this fact and are out in front of other groups. This is, after all, the nation that elected Donald Trump and that puts children in cages at the border.

The more cynical take starts with the observation that the creed of wokeness is mostly centered on the super-prestigious universities and the affluent progressive enclaves along the coasts. In this take, if you’re a rich white child of privilege you have to go to extraordinary lengths to prove you’re one of the good children of privilege and not one of the bad ones. In this take, white progressives don noble clothing to make themselves feel good without really dismantling the structures that keep them in lifestyle bubbles and on top.

For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons. The crucial question then becomes: When is the racial lens (with its implied charge of racism against those who disagree) the right lens to use and when is it not? When does it illuminate an issue and when does it conceal?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/white-liberal-democrats.html" id="ff98a980-acb8-3e71-abb4-37743eac5143">The New York Times</a>.

People are always changing their minds, day to day. But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white Democrats. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics.

How White Democrats Moved Leftward

I can’t stop thinking about the results. The first thing you notice is that of the 25 works they chose, very few are paintings or sculptures.

Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words. In 1982, for example, Jenny Holzer put the words “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise” on a digital billboard in Times Square. In 1985, Barbara Kruger took an image of a ventriloquist’s dummy and printed “When I Hear the Word Culture, I Take Out My Checkbook” across its face.

Of the 27 artists recognized, 20 were born in the U.S.

The next thing you notice is that most of these artists haven’t captured or maybe even appealed to a mass audience. If asked to name the era-defining artists from the 49 years prior to 1970, most of us would come up with world-famous artists: Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, etc. The artists listed here, from the 49 years after 1970, are generally not well known outside the art world: for instance, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lutz Bacher and Michael Asher.

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded. In 1989, for example, Cady Noland made a silk-screen of the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. There are eight large bullet holes across his body and there’s an American flag stuffed in his mouth.

The most provocative pieces are in the realm of sexual politics, where the art world has had its biggest influence. Jeff Koons is recognized here for “Ilona on Top,” a painting showing him having sex with the porn star who would become his wife.

Several works redefine female power. In 1974, the artist Lynda Benglis posed naked with a dildo between her legs. In 1972, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and others created “Womanhouse,” a living feminist manifesto. In 1993, Catherine Opie created “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” in which someone has carved two stick figures and a house into her back with a knife or razor. The figures depict an idyllic domestic dream that was hard for lesbians to realize at the time.

The general attitude is: Let’s smash injustice with a sledgehammer. What you see when all these works are brought together is how the aesthetic has given way to the political, how the inner life has given way to the protest gesture.

Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.

Among these 25 pieces, 20 are impersonal and only five allow you to see what life is like for another human being, including works by Nan Goldin and Judy Chicago. Only a few explore relationships and emotional connection. There almost seems to be a taboo now against capturing states like joy, temptation, gratitude, exaltation, betrayal, forgiveness and longing.

The absence of that emotional range reminds you that one of the things art has traditionally done is educate the emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett and other neuroscientists argue that emotions aren’t baked into our nature as things all humans share. They are constructed by culture — art and music, and relationships. When we see the depth of psychological expression in a Rembrandt portrait, or experience the intimacy of a mother and daughter in a Mary Cassatt, we’re not gaining a new fact, but we’re experiencing a new emotion. We’re widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others.

Barrett uses the phrase “emotional granularity” to capture the reality that some people — and some eras — experience a wider range and specificity of emotions than others. People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic.

This list fascinated me because it comes at a moment when everything is political — and our politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life.

One of the pieces that stands out is Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video montage “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” It’s an intense compilation of the African American experience — love, celebration, police shootings, religious frenzy, racism, dance, struggle. There are so many powerful emotions in a short burst, an overflowing of relationship. It’s a political work that transcends politics and reminds us: This is how life looks with human particularity left in.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/opinion/art-politics.html" id="13466351-4351-325f-a530-298c96dc2111">The New York Times</a>.

My colleagues at T Magazine had a very good idea. They gathered some artists and museum curators and asked them to name the artworks that define the contemporary age — pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970.

Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?

In Trump’s version, American is defined by three propositions. First, to be American is to be xenophobic. The basic narrative he tells is that the good people of the heartland are under assault from aliens, elitists and outsiders. Second, to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past. Third, a true American is white. White Protestants created this country; everybody else is here on their sufferance.

When you look at Trump’s American idea you realize that it contradicts the traditional American idea in every particular. In fact, Trump’s national story is much closer to the Russian national story than it is toward our own. It’s an alien ideology he’s trying to plant on our soil.

Trump’s vision is radically anti-American.

The real American idea is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on Earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one — e pluribus unum.

The Puritans settled this continent with visions of creating a future city on a hill. They had an eschatological dreams of completing God’s plan for this Earth. By the time of the revolution it was well understood that America was the land of futurity, the vanguard nation that would lead all of humanity to a dignified and democratic future.

“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” John Adams declared, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

American life is so raucous and dynamic because people are inflamed by visions of creating a heaven on Earth. As George Santayana put it, Americans often don’t make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. In building material wealth, they see themselves creating a country that will redeem humanity, that will become the last best hope of Earth.

This sense of mission has often made Americans arrogant, and somewhat dangerous to be around. But it has also made us anxious. The country was built amid a wail of jeremiads: Providence assigned us a mission to serve the whole planet, but we, in our greed and sin, are blowing it! “Ah my country!” Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, “In thee is the reasonable hope of mankind not fulfilled.”

But the American mission survived its failures. Herman Melville summarized the ethos in his novel “White Jacket”: “God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. ... We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path.”

Again and again, Americans have felt called upon to launch off into new frontiers — to design a democracy, to create a new kind of democratic person, to settle the West, to industrialize, to pioneer new technologies, to explore space, to combat prejudice, to fight totalitarianism and spread democracy. The mission was always the same: to leap into the future, to give life meaning and shape by extending opportunity and dignity to all races and nations.

This American idea is not a resentful prejudice; it’s a faith and a dream. The historian Sacvan Bercovitch put it best: “Only ‘America,’ of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth.

“But only the ‘American Way,’ of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only ‘American’ has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”

Trump’s campaign is an attack on that dream. The right response is to double down on that ideal. The task before us is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet — a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear.

Americans have always been divided in where they came from, but united in their vision of their common future. They’ve been bonded by the vision of creating a pluralistic home in which everybody can belong and be seen. Or as Langston Hughes wrote: “America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath / America will be!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-america-election.html" id="3a201b9b-9462-3e1b-a07d-1d39324ef569">The New York Times</a>.

So apparently Donald Trump wants to make this an election about what it means to be American. He’s got his vision of what it means to be American, and he’s challenging the rest of us to come up with a better one.

Donald Trump Hates America

The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance. Centuries ago our founders created a system of laws and not men. In our system of government there are procedures in place, based on certain values — impartiality, respect for institutions, the idea that a public office is a public trust, not a private bauble.

When Trump appears in the Mueller report, he is often running roughshod over these systems and violating these values. He asks his lawyer to hamper an investigation. He asks his FBI director to take the heat off his allies. He tries to get the relevant investigators fired. I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.

The second force is Russia. If Trump is a threat to the institutional infrastructure, the Russians are a threat to our informational infrastructure. We knew this already, but it was still startling to see the fact declared so bluntly — that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election “in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

It may not be bombing buildings or shooting at people, but if a foreign government is attacking the factual record on which democracy runs, it is still a sort of warfare. The Russians are trying to undermine the information we use to converse, and the trust that makes conversation possible.

The third force is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They are a threat to our deliberative infrastructure. Any organization needs to be able to hold private conversations in order to deliberate. Whether it is State Department cables or Democratic National Committee emails, WikiLeaks has violated privacy and made it harder for institutions to function. We’re now in a situation in which some of the worst people on earth get to determine what gets published.

The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia. But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built, through networkers like Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone. More important, it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.

I would say that’s the report’s central importance. We are being threatened in a very distinct way. The infrastructure of the society is under threat — the procedures that shape government, the credibility of information, the privacy rules that make deliberation possible. And though the Chinese government does not play a big role here, it represents a similar sort of threat — to our intellectual infrastructure, the intellectual property rights that organize innovation.

It is as if somebody is inserting acids into a body that eats away at the ligaments and the tendons.

These forces are motivated by self-interest, but their common feature is an operational nihilism. They are trying to sow disorder at the foundation of society. The goal is not really to convert anybody to a cause; it is to create cynicism and disruption that will open up the space to grab what you want to grab. They rig the system and then tell everybody, “The system is rigged!” And therefore, all values are suspended. Everything is permitted.

As I was reading the report I thought of a podcast called “Against the Rules” by Michael Lewis. A recent episode jumps off from the way athletes are getting more vicious toward referees. But that’s not just true in sport; it’s true in society. In all societies there are rules defining good conduct, and there are supposed to be impartial, honest referees that enforce those rules and make sure the game is fair.

And today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.) Things begin to topple.

The system more or less held this time. But that’s just because people around Trump often refused to do what he told them to do. And we happened to have Robert Mueller, who seems to be a fair referee.

The Justice Department has not been defended from political assault. William Barr’s news conference before the report’s release eroded any claim to impartiality and trustworthiness.

Trump doesn’t seem to have any notion of loyalty to an office. All power in his eye is personal power, and the government is there to serve his Sun God self. He’ll continue to trample the proper systems of government.

It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/opinion/mueller-report-corruption.html" id="9bc4ed4e-dcfc-3db2-a6ed-0d4f624a43d4">The New York Times</a>.

The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real.

It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption

But you’d still do something. You’d rally your neighbors and the local authorities and put some system in place — some way to provide immediate care, figure out who these people were and how, within your means, you could lift them up.

And this is precisely what the U.S. has failed to do in handling the refugees who are flooding across the southern border. There is nothing remotely like an adequate system in place to handle the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing violence in Central America or seeking economic opportunity. And there is no prospect of a plan being put in place from either Republicans or Democrats.

And in that way the border crisis is paradigmatic of our politics right now. Both parties are content to adopt abstract ideological postures. Neither is interested in creating a functioning system that balances trade-offs and actually works. In the age of Trump, national politics is showbiz — self-righteous performance art to make the base feel good about itself.

The Trump show is all about toughness and cruelty. The administration adopted a zero-tolerance policy that was supposed to deter potential immigrants. It failed miserably. Roughly 103,000 unauthorized immigrants reached the U.S.-Mexico border in March, twice as many as in March 2018.

Aside from baring his fangs, Trump is uninterested in processing the extra refugees. The facilities are overwhelmed. Over 800,000 people have their cases pending. New asylum-seekers are held for a couple of weeks, dumped out on the streets, and most will wait until 2021 to get their formal hearings. My colleagues Michael Shear, Miriam Jordan and Manny Fernandez cite the words officials are using to describe the situation: “operational emergency,” “systemwide meltdown,” “the system is on fire.”

The field is wide open for the Democrats to come forth with a decent plan. But on many issues the 2020 Democrats aren’t really having a primary campaign; they’re having a purity test. The candidates are not sure if they can deviate from wherever the social media warriors have defined the leftward edge. So the Democratic show consists of indignant generalities intended to sound radical while changing nothing.

Many Democrats in Congress are denying there even is a crisis on the border. The only Democratic candidate with an immigration plan so far is Julián Castro, who wants to repeal a 1929 provision that made illegal entry a federal crime. Others gesture toward the open border crowd with policies like eliminating ICE. This is Trumpian extremism reversed.

Immigration is one of those issues on which the extreme positions are wrong, because the correct answer means balancing competing goods.

On the one hand, these people are our neighbors. Many of them come to us with harrowing stories of husbands murdered, daughters raped, mass extortion. It’s our obligation and joy to reach out to them with a hand of solidarity. It’s barbarism to send them back to lawlessness.

On the other hand, many who are coming across seeking asylum do not qualify for it. When they get their hearings, only 20 percent win the right to stay in the United States because they’d face persecution in their home countries. Many come for traditional economic reasons. The murder rate in El Salvador has fallen by half since 2015, while the number of asylum-seekers has skyrocketed.

The U.S. cannot take in everybody who wants to come. So the first task is to set priorities. The victims of violence and persecution get top priority, then those being systemically denied their basic rights because their country has become a failed state, then those seeking economic betterment.

Then you create a system to implement those priorities. Over the short term do the things any practical mayor would do: build new detention centers at the border; expand the capacities at the ports of entry; expand the number of judge teams, to speed through the backlog; create an orderly release procedure coordinated with humanitarian agencies; increase the number of counselors so refugees can navigate the system; vet children in their home countries for refugee status so they don’t have to make a fruitless trip.

Over the long term, you help build better police and justice systems in the home countries. You cooperate with Mexico to jointly tackle this challenge we face together. You might shift to a more skills-based immigration system while increasing the number of refugees we take in each year.

Designing a practical response that wins widespread support is, in theory, not hard. But it requires starting with a certain question: What can we do to help them? Much of today’s politics starts from a different question: What posture can I adopt that will reflect well on me? What can I say to prove I’m manly or woke?

This is what happens when the politics of practical action get replaced by the politics of performative narcissism.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/border-crisis-immigration.html" id="57a331a0-3fb1-3b43-aa23-5948d0d1c26f">The New York Times</a>.

Suppose one night there is a knock on your door. You open it to find 100 bedraggled families shivering in your yard — exhausted, filthy, terrified. The first cry of your heart would be to take them in, but you’d know there were too many.

Our Disgrace at the Border

According to recently released data, between 2015 and 2017, Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20 percent. Roughly 825,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty in those years, giving the country today its lowest poverty rate in history.

The overall economy has been decent but not robust enough to explain these striking outcomes. Instead, one major factor is that Canadians have organized their communities differently. They adopted a specific methodology to fight poverty.

Before I describe this methodology, let’s pause to think about what it’s often like in American poor areas. Everything is fragmented. There are usually a bevy of public and private programs doing their own thing. In a town there may be four food pantries, which don’t really know one another well. The people working in these programs have their heads down, because it’s exhausting enough just to do their own work.

A common model is one-donor-funding-one-program. Different programs compete for funds. They justify their existence using randomized controlled experiments, in which researchers try to pinpoint one input that led to one positive output. The foundation heads, city officials and social entrepreneurs go to a bunch of conferences, but these conferences don’t have much to do with one another.

In other words, the Americans who talk about community don’t have a community of their own. Every day, they give away the power they could have if they did mutually reinforcing work together to change whole systems.

In Canada it’s not like that. About 15 years ago, a disparate group of Canadians realized that a problem as complex as poverty could be addressed only through a multisector comprehensive approach. They realized that poverty was not going to be reduced by some innovation — some cool, new program nobody thought of before. It was going to be addressed through better systems that were mutually supporting and able to enact change on a population level.

So they began building citywide and communitywide structures. They started 15 years ago with just six cities, but now they have 72 regional networks covering 344 towns.

They begin by gathering, say, 100 people from a single community. A quarter have lived with poverty; the rest are from business, nonprofits and government.

They spend a year learning about poverty in their area, talking with the community. They launch a different kind of conversation. First, they don’t want better poor; they want fewer poor. That is to say, their focus is not on how do we give poor people food so they don’t starve. It is how do we move people out of poverty. Second, they up their ambitions. How do we eradicate poverty altogether? Third, they broaden their vision. What does a vibrant community look like in which everybody’s basic needs are met.

After a year they come up with a town plan. Each town’s poverty is different. Each town’s assets are different. So each town’s plan is different.

The town plans feature a lot of collaborative activity. A food pantry might turn itself into a job training center by allowing the people who are fed do the actual work. The pantry might connect with local businesses that change their hiring practices so that high school diplomas are not required. Businesses might pledge to raise their minimum wage.

The plans involve a lot of policy changes on the town and provincial levels — improved day care, redesigned transit systems, better workforce development systems.

By the time Canada’s national government swung into action, the whole country had a base of knowledge and experience. The people in the field had a wealth of connections and a sense of what needed to be done. The two biggest changes were efforts in city after city to raise the minimum wage and the expansion of a national child benefit, which can net a family up to nearly $6,500 a year per child. Canada essentially has guaranteed income for the young and the old.

The process of learning and planning and adapting never ends. The Tamarack Institute, which pioneered a lot of this work, serves as a learning community hub for all the different regional networks.

Paul Born, head of the institute, emphasizes that the crucial thing these communitywide collective impact structures do is change attitudes. In the beginning it’s as if everybody is swimming in polluted water. People are sluggish, fearful, isolated, looking out only for themselves. But when people start working together across sectors around a common agenda, it’s like cleaning the water. Communities realize they can do more for the poor. The poor realize they can do more for themselves. New power has been created, a new sense of agency.

Born doesn’t think you can really do social change without a methodology, without creating communitywide collective impact structures. But in many American communities we’re mostly scattershot. That’s the problem with our distrust and polarization. We often don’t build structures across difference. Transformational change rarely gets done.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/canada-poverty-record.html" id="39210f9b-c80f-38f3-a8e8-b796a728ed0e">The New York Times</a>.

Jesus said the poor will always be among us, but there are a lot of people in Canada testing that proposition.

Winning the War on Poverty

Many years before, back in Russia, the two young men had been the groomsmen at a friends’ wedding. The party went on well after midnight and eventually a caravan of seven sledges carried the families through the snow, back to where they were staying. As they rode, faint streaks of shadow — hundreds of them — could be seen dashing through the trees along the trail. Suddenly, the howling of wolves erupted from all directions.

The horses took off and the wolves attacked. The rear sledge hit a clump and overturned. The shrieks were horrific as the wolves pounced on their human prey. Another sledge tipped and then another, and the swarms of wolves descended on the families.

Pavel and Peter were in the lead sledge, carrying the bride and groom. They were careening at top speed, but one of their horses was now near death with exhaustion. Pavel turned to the groom. They would have to lighten their load. He pointed to the bride. The groom refused to let her be tossed over. Pavel fought with him and tried to rip her away. In the scuffle he threw them both out and to the wolves.

Peter and Pavel survived — but lived in infamy. They were the monsters who had thrown a bride to the wolves. They were forced to flee to the New World.

The story reminds us how thin the crust of civilization really is. It reminds us of what otherwise good people are capable at moments of severe stress and crisis, when fear is up and when conflict — red in tooth and claw — takes control.

It’s an especially good story to tell as we enter 2019, because this looks to be the year of the wolves — the year when savage and previously unimaginable things might happen.

It will be a year of divided government and unprecedented partisan conflict. It will be a year in which Donald Trump is isolated and unrestrained as never before. And it will be in this atmosphere that indictments will fall, provoking not just a political crisis but a constitutional one.

There are now over a dozen investigations into Trump’s various scandals. If we lived in a healthy society, the ensuing indictments would be handled in a serious way — somber congressional hearings, dispassionate court proceedings. Everybody would step back and be sobered by the fact that our very system of law is at stake.

But we don’t live in a healthy society and we don’t have a healthy president.

Trump doesn’t recognize, understand or respect institutional authority. He only understands personal power. He sees every conflict as a personal conflict in which he destroys or gets destroyed.

When the indictments come down, Trump won’t play by the rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize those rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize our legal institutions. He’ll personalize every indictment, slander every prosecutor. He’ll seek to destroy the edifice of law in order to save himself.

We know the language he’ll use. It will be the anti-establishment, anti-institutional language that has been coursing through the left and right for the past few decades: The establishment is corrupt, the game is rigged, the elites are out to get you.

At that point congressional leaders will face the defining choice of their careers: Where does their ultimate loyalty lie, to the Constitution or to their party?

If their loyalty is to the Constitution, they will step back and figure out, in a bipartisan way, how to hold the sort of hearings that Congress held during the Watergate scandal — hearings that inspired trust in the system. They will step back and find men and women of integrity — the modern versions of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson and Judge John Sirica — who would work to restore decency amid the moral rot.

On the other hand, if they put party above nation, they will see this crisis as just another episode in our long-running political circus. They’ll fall back in partisan lines. They’ll hurl abuse. Their primary concern will be: How can this help me in 2020?

If that happens, then the roughly 40 percent of Americans who support Trump will see serious evidence that he committed felonies, but they won’t care! They’ll conclude that this is not about law or integrity. It’s just a political show trial. They’ll see there is no higher authority that all Americans are accountable to. It’s just power and popularity straight through.

If that happens, we’ll have to face the fact that our Constitution and system of law were not strong enough to withstand the partisan furies that now define our politics. We’ll have to face the fact that America has become another fragile state — a kakistocracy, where laws are passed and broken without consequence, where good people lay low and where wolves are left free to prey on the weak.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/trump-indictment-2019.html" id="e787c52a-eb06-3b7a-a291-4a7f36d51e64">The New York Times</a>.

In Willa Cather’s novel “My Antonia,” there are two kind Russian farmers named Peter and Pavel who have settled on the Nebraska prairie. On his deathbed, Pavel tells the story of how they came to emigrate there.

2019: The Year of the Wolves

Having lived much of their social life online, many young people expressed concern that they hadn’t developed the skills they needed to read possible partners in live, face-to-face situations. How do you tell if someone thinks you are special or just wants to be friends? In addition, nearly a fifth of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment.

The essay is part of the second batch of this year’s Sidney Awards, which I give for outstanding long-form journalism.

From The New Yorker, I recommend Dexter Filkins’ “A Saudi Prince’s Quest to Remake the Middle East.” In one essay, Filkins weaves together the Middle East’s geostrategic situation, its economic situation and how each of the major players, from Jared Kushner to Iran, is grasping for something.

It’s all built around a profile of Mohammed bin Salman, the young Saudi leader. Years ago, MBS asked a Saudi bureaucrat to help him appropriate a property. When the official said no, he received an envelope with a single bullet inside. Last year, MBS replaced Mohammed bin Nayef as crown prince. Bin Nayef had been summoned to the palace and surrounded by guards. His cellphone was taken away and he was forced to stand for hours — in excruciating pain because of an old injury. Just before dawn, bin Nayef agreed to surrender his position.

In “The Constitution of Knowledge,” in National Affairs, Jonathan Rauch argues that the marketplace of ideas is like a funnel. Millions of people float millions of hypotheses every day. Society collectively tests these ideas, bats them around or ignores them, and only a tiny few make it out the narrow end of the funnel, where they are declared useful or true.

But, Rauch says, the funnel is no more. Internet trolls simply overwhelm the system with swarms of falsehood. There used to be an implicit honor code — truth exists, credentials matter, what hasn’t been tested isn’t knowledge — but the honor code has been swept away. Most fringe information used to get ignored. But today, it can’t be ignored because a lot of it is spewed by the president of the United States. Rauch shows that the national conversation had an architecture, which has now been reduced to sand.

It’s hard to write about what religious faith feels like. Tish Harrison Warren does it compellingly in “True Story” in The Point. As a kid she just loved going to church. Then as an adult she learned about the church’s sins — the narcissism, abuse, sexism. But she still became an Anglican priest. The nice side of church, she writes, is the day-to-day goodness, the teenage boy still sweet enough to rest his head on his mother’s shoulder during the sermon, the young man who gives an elderly friend a ride, the way the members see themselves as a community of forgiven sinners.

“Each Sunday during communion, when the members of my church come to the table, I watch their faces. Many tired. Some sad. Some lit up with joy. One kid who has special needs approaches me like he’s won the lottery. His voice rises, ‘Oh boy! Oh boy!'”

Chinese art prices are through the roof. In 2010, a vase with a starting price of $800,000 sold in a suburban London auction for $69.5 million. Coincidentally, Chinese art is now routinely looted from Western art museums. In “The Great Chinese Art Heist,” in GQ, Alex Palmer walks us through these “Mission Impossible"-style robberies. He also captures the nationalist fervor driving the frenzy.

Most of these pieces were looted from China centuries ago by foreign soldiers. The price of each piece is determined partly by quality, but also by how closely it is associated with one of China’s most inglorious defeats. Stealing the items back is nationalist revenge.

I mentioned in my last column that there were several excellent essays this year on tigers. My favorite is “Man-eaters” in The Ringer, in which Brian Phillips explains: “The arrival of a tiger, it’s true, is often preceded by moments of rising tension, because a tiger’s presence changes the jungle around it, and those changes are easier to detect. Birdcalls darken. Small deer call softly to each other. Herds do not run but drift into shapes that suggest some emerging group consciousness of an escape route.”

Sidney nominees are gathered by a completely haphazard, random process. But I couldn’t do it at all without the annual help of Robert Cottrell of The Browser; Robert Atwan, who directs the Best American Essays series; and Conor Friedersdorf, who produces a Best of Journalism newsletter each week.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/opinion/best-journalism-sidney-awards-part-2.html" id="340ca7fe-e79b-371b-a72b-8fa1fe581630">The New York Times</a>.

In her essay “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” Kate Julian takes a question that seems to have a simple answer (porn) and shows that it has a complex answer. In one striking part of the essay, which appeared in The Atlantic, Julian shows that fewer young people are having the kind of relationships that lead to sex. In 1995, 74 percent of 17-year-old women had had a special romantic relationship in the preceding 18 months. By 2014, only 46 percent of 17-year-olds had ever had a roma...

The Sidney Awards, Part II

This year there were a lot of great essays on the shame culture and the out-of-control viciousness of online life. There were a lot of great essays about our brutal, angry transitional historic moment. And there were a lot of great essays about tigers. Don’t ask me to explain that last one.

The first of the Sidneys, named for philosopher Sidney Hook, is Helen Andrews’ essay “Shame Storm” in First Things. It is an amazing description of online viciousness. In 2010, Andrews was on a panel about conservatism with her ex-boyfriend, Todd Seavey. Instead of talking about the subject of the panel, Seavey went on a long rant about what an allegedly cruel person Andrews was, all of it televised by C-Span2.

When it was posted on YouTube, the clip got half a million hits in the first 48 hours. The wave of vitriol against Andrews built over time and got more vicious. Andrews couldn’t find a job for 18 months. She eventually escaped to Australia, but when she released a think-tank report there, she was still attacked by an Australian member of Parliament because of the clip. It never goes away.

“The more online shame cycles you observe,” Andrews writes, “the more obvious the pattern becomes: Everyone comes up with a principled-sounding pretext that serves as a barrier against admitting to themselves that, in fact, all they have really done is joined a mob. Once that barrier is erected, all rules of decency go out the window.”

Most of us have certain stereotypes about the European far right — that it’s just a bunch of blood-and-soil racists. But in an essay in The New York Review of Books, “Two Roads for the New French Right,” Mark Lilla shows that there’s a lot more going on. He found a group of Catholic conservative intellectuals who argue that social conservatism is the only viable alternative to neoliberal cosmopolitanism and who are all fans of Bernie Sanders.

They believe that both the European superstate and global capitalism undermine the cultural-religious foundations of European civilization. They are strongly environmentalist, feel that economic growth should be subordinated to social needs, believe in strong social support for the poor and limited immigration. As Lilla notes, they have a very coherent, communitarian worldview. I found the essay uplifting because it shows that in times of political transition, ideas get shuffled and reassembled in new and impressive ways.

In a post called “How This All Happened” for the Collaborative Fund blog, Morgan Housel walks us through 73 years of American economic history. He shows us how many economic phases there have been. And how each phase led to something unexpected.

“If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong.”

In “How Did Larry Nassar Deceive So Many for So Long?” in The Cut, Kerry Howley blows up the conventional telling of the American gymnastics sex abuse scandal. The story is generally told as a large group of victims finding their voice and “breaking their silence.” But Howley shows that they were telling their stories all along, to every relevant authority. It’s because the abuser, Nassar, had built up an edifice of trust that people couldn’t see the monstrosity that was taking place literally in front of their eyes. Nassar abused many of these young girls while their parents were in the room. He just told them he was doing a medical procedure he called a “sacrotuberous-ligament release.” He might still be doing it today if a police officer hadn’t discovered his hard drives, with 37,000 child porn images on them. It was the hard drives that finally persuaded the world, not the women and their repeated warnings.

Andrew Sullivan has forced me to do something I really don’t want to do — award two separate Sidney awards to the same writer in the same year. But his work for New York magazine this year has really defined the era. His two masterpieces are “The Poison We Pick,” on the opioid crisis, and “America’s New Religions,” on political fundamentalism. If you want to understand America in 2018, those essays are a good place to start.

Another batch of Sidney winners will land in a couple of days.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/best-journalism-sidney-awards.html" id="7fb2b369-2502-3c08-a8da-abfd89c85eb9">The New York Times</a>.

At the end of every year I give out the Sidney Awards to celebrate and recommend great examples of long-form journalism. I do it so that we can step out of the daily rush of events and read things that are broader and more reflective.

The Sidney Awards, Part I

The same process is happening today. Americans have lost faith in the big institutions of society. Many fly off to extremes, to the Donald Trump right or the Bernie Sanders left. Most of the rest of us feel adrift, gloomy and politically homeless.

But people figure it out. New ideas emerge. Old ideas are put together in new ways. Today, I offer you just one example — the Niskanen Center, which has become one of the most creative think tanks in America today.

The Niskanen Center began operations in 2015, started by a group of libertarians who broke off from the Cato Institute. Over the next few years many of the leaders of Niskanen began to lose faith in the libertarian ideology. The founder, Jerry Taylor, wrote a brilliant essay in October explaining the process.

The first cracks were over the issue of global warming. Libertarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes limited government, free markets and individual rights. There is nothing in that creed that should bias a person one way or another over whether global warming is a serious problem or not. That’s a scientific question, not a philosophical one.

Yet Taylor found that many libertarians, fired by ideological zeal, had slid into the position of minimizing climate change because they didn’t like some of the big government remedies that were being proposed to address it. Once he saw this tendency on climate change, he saw it everywhere and on all sides: People with single all-explaining ideologies have a tendency to let their philosophic blinders distort how they view empirical reality.

Taylor didn’t abandon his faith in markets and individual rights, but he decided to abandon the belief that a single ideology can be applied to all problems. There are a lot of different goods in society: liberty, social justice, equity, community, virtue, prosperity. It’s crazy, Taylor argued, to prioritize one of those goods in nearly every single policy context. And yet that’s what ideologues do.

Taylor and his colleagues embraced a posture of epistemological modesty, threw off the ideological style of thinking and began to notice something: that the central debate in our politics is completely bogus.

Since at least 1964, American politics has pitted conservatives who believe in a small government and a free market against liberals who believe in a bigger government.

But Niskanen thinkers like Ed Dolan, Samuel Hammond and Will Wilkinson made a simple and empirically verifiable observation. The nations that have the freest markets also generally have the most generous welfare states. The two are not in opposition. In the real world they go together.

The key distinction you have to make, Will Wilkinson writes, is between the redistributive state and the regulatory state. Nations like Denmark, Sweden and Canada built elaborate redistributive states to give their citizens a foundation of economic security. Then they realized they were going to have to liberalize their economies if they were going to be able to afford their welfare states.

Today, those nations have many fewer regulations governing zoning and economic activity. They score very high on the rankings of economic freedom that are put together by conservative outfits like the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute.

Last week, Niskanen released a comprehensive report called, “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,” written by Brink Lindsey, Steven Teles, Wilkinson and Hammond. The report is a manifesto for a new centrism based on what the authors call a “free-market welfare state” model.

They want government to protect citizens against the disruptions of global capitalism: “Without strong income supports that put a floor beneath displaced workers and systems that smooth the transition to new employment, political actors and the public tend to turn against the process of creative destruction itself.”

At the same time, they want an open, dynamic society. They want to reduce restrictive zoning and land use regulations that favor the rich and entrenched. They see immigration as crucial to America’s long-term prosperity. They want charter schools and wider choice, but within strong government structures to ensure quality. (It turns out that bad charter schools continue to attract students; the education market doesn’t work totally unregulated.)

The Niskanen authors are making a compelling case for moderation; for understanding that politics is striking a rough but workable balance between competing goods; for understanding that the world is complex and our knowledge is limited, and so it’s best to proceed constantly, but skeptically.

As I was reading the Niskanen report I experienced two strange sensations: I felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them. I began to feel at home.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/opinion/centrism-moderate-capitalism-welfare.html" id="34755f40-307c-329d-a7e0-7823e782ae0e">The New York Times</a>.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future? I’m optimistic. I say that because there have been many moments in our history when old ideas and old arrangements stopped working and people chopped them up. Those transition moments were bumpy, and it was easy to lose hope, but then people figured it out. Never underestimate the power of human ingenuity.

A New Center Being Born

I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and lack of interest in ideas that go with the type.

Last week, Anschutz and McKibbin murdered The Weekly Standard, the conservative opinion magazine that Anschutz owned. They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money. They seemed to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance.

John Podhoretz, one of the magazine’s founders, reports that they actively prevented potential buyers from coming in to take it over and keep it alive. They apparently wanted to hurt the employees and harvest the subscription list so they could make money off it. And Anschutz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.

The closing of The Weekly Standard is being told as a Trump story, as all stories must be these days. The magazine has been critical of President Donald Trump, and so this is another example of the gradual hegemony of Trumpism over the conservative world. That is indeed the backdrop to what happened here.

But that’s not the whole story. In reality, this is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mindset decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning.

In that sense, the closing of The Standard resembles Chris Hughes’ destruction of the old New Republic. This is what happens when the commercial forces trying to dumb down the American media run into a pocket of people trying to resist those forces.

I was on staff when The Standard was founded, by Bill Kristol, Podhoretz and Fred Barnes. They gathered the most concentrated collection of talent I have ever been around. The first masthead featured Charles Krauthammer, P.J. O’Rourke, Robert Kagan, David Frum, Chris Caldwell, Matt Labash, Tucker Carlson and the greatest political writer of my generation, Andrew Ferguson.

Early issues featured the writings of Tom Wolfe, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Q. Wilson and Harvey Mansfield. The person at the bottom of the editorial masthead, a young Neomi Rao, has just been nominated to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

It was and remains a warm, fun and convivial group. The magazine’s tone was part high intellectualism, part street-level political reporting and part Hunter Thompson-style gonzo journalism.

The Standard was conservative, but it frequently dissented from the Republican establishment and delighted in modern pop culture. The staff was never unanimous about anything. The many flavors of conservatism were hashed out in its pages. If it stood for anything, I would say it stood for this: that the good life consists of being an active citizen and caring passionately about politics; that it also consists of knowing something about Latin American fiction, ancient Greek culture and social impact of modern genetics; that it also consists of delighting in the latest good movies and TV shows, the best new cocktails and the casual pleasures of life.

During the past year, under the editorship of Steve Hayes, the magazine was as good as it ever was. Adam Keiper did brilliant work with the back of the book. Amazingly talented young writers were recruited, like Adam Rubenstein, Alice Lloyd and Haley Byrd. If you look at the issue now online — the last that apparently will ever go online — there’s an article calling on Republicans to respect due process, a look at what can be done to bring down the suicide rate, an essay by literary critic Paul Cantor on “Frankenstein” at 200 and a piece on the sixth-century Roman poet Maximianus.

Over the past few years, if all the stories are correct, McKibbin tried to change the tone of the magazine. He tried to get The Standard to hire highly partisan shock-jock screamers. He tried to tilt it more in the direction of a Republican direct mail fundraising letter. When these efforts were blocked, resentment flared and the ax fell.

The Standard is now gone, but the people and ideas The Standard nurtured will continue to flourish. The talented young people who were fired last week will go on to have brilliant careers; the courage and integrity Hayes has shown during the Trump era will continue to inspire, while the drab corporate bureaucrats fade into the sand.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/weekly-standard-closing-conservatism.html" id="5e643e50-c81c-3f6f-a87c-f09f676c9f3d">The New York Times</a>.

I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions were that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him, and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth.

Who Killed The Weekly Standard?

“I no longer find much of anything meaning, fulfilling or satisfying. Whatever used to keep me going has gone. I am currently struggling to find any motivation to keep going.”

“It would be nice to live according to my being rather than my blackness. I will never know how a totally worthwhile life will feel because of this.”

“Drugs and alcohol are the shining rays of light in my otherwise unbearable existence.”

“I don’t feel very satisfied with my life. I’m a stay-at-home mom and my life is endless monotony and chaos.”

The Pew survey reveals a large group of Americans down the income and economic ladders who are suffering from economic scarcity, social scarcity and spiritual scarcity all at once. Less educated people were less likely to say that friendship was a source of meaning in their lives. They were less likely to say hobbies were a source of meaning, nor was learning, nor good health nor stability.

When people overall described the sources of meaning in their lives, they stuck close to home. Nearly 70% identified family as a source of meaning, followed by career, making money and practicing a spirituality or faith. Only 11% said learning added meaning to their lives. Only 7% said helping others was a meaningful part of their life.

If you ask philosophers how people fill their lives with meaning, they usually point to some version of serving a cause larger than self. William James said that meaning was found in tireless struggle on behalf of some sacred ideal. Susan Wolf says that meaning is found in active engagement in important projects.

But the meaning of meaning seems to have changed. When people in this survey describe meaning, they didn’t describe moral causes or serving their community, country or God. They described moments when they felt loved, satisfied or good about themselves. They described positive personal emotions. As one respondent put it, “It’s easy to forget what’s wrong in the world when you are pretending to be a puppy with your daughter.”

It’s as if people no longer see life as something that should be organized around a specific vocation, a calling that is their own way of doing good in the world.

There is some sort of hard-to-define spiritual crisis across the land, which shows up in rising depression rates, rising mental health problems. A survey that the Pew Research Center released late last year captures the mood. Pew asked people to describe the things that bring meaning to their lives. A shocking number of respondents described lives of quiet despair:

DAVID BROOKS

Articles written by the author

How White Democrats Moved Leftward

Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?

Donald Trump Hates America

It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption

Our Disgrace at the Border

Winning the War on Poverty

2019: The Year of the Wolves

The Sidney Awards, Part II

The Sidney Awards, Part I

A New Center Being Born

Who Killed The Weekly Standard?

Will Gen-Z save the world?

Moderates have the better story

Dems, please don't drive me away

How artificial intelligence can save your life

Harvard's false path to wisdom

Voters, your foreign policy views stink!

The welfare state is broken, here's how to fix it

The Tawdry Trump-Nadler media war

The difference between happiness and joy