David Brooks

and you should really have good reasons and you should make it bureaucratic.

But I think the core insight for the neocons, they not only grew up as policy people, they were influenced by literature, by culture, by theology, by Talmudic study.

And so they made no distinction between what you would call theological, philosophical, cultural growth, moral formation, and policy.

And so they brought a much more humanistic lens to see policy.

It's not just about economics and growth.

The elemental question is, A, can we build a civilization we can be proud of?

And B, can we create policies that will nurture values, the right kind of values?

In 1985, one of the great neoconservative political scientists named James Q. Wilson, who spent much of his career at Harvard, said, all we're trying to do is trying to inculcate certain virtues.

whether we're talking about education, when we're talking about trying to reduce recidivism, when we're trying to talk about reducing or conducting our fiscal policy.

And we can either have good values, and for the neoconservatives, the good values were the bourgeois values, being decent to people, being neighborly, showing up on time, working hard, not lofty Kantian values.

Or we can have bad values.

And if we run deficits, we're basically behaving selfishly to future generations.

If we subsidize non-work, then we will discourage people from becoming industrious and that kind of person.

And so I think one of the things they do, and especially in a moment right now, when we're in a myriad of really moral crisis in our politics, where basically 78 million Americans take a look at Donald Trump and they see nothing morally wrong.

Well, A, because he reminds us, and especially his wife, Gertrude Himmelfahr, the historian, he reminds us the power of the spirit of an age, that we live within a moral ecology.

And that moral ecology is not only constructed by each of us in our own behaviors, but it's constructed by the arts, by literature, and by the example set by great political leaders.

And in 18, this is Gertrude Himmelfahr, a great historian of Victorian England.

In 1810,

It was completely normal for a guy to get drunk after work, go home and beat his wife.

There was no harsh judgment about that.