David Brooks

holding the world then the wolves take over and wolves like putin and she and others have taken over and people on this country on the populist right and sometimes on the left think oh that old neoliberal order that was all a scam it was a scam for america to exercise imperial hegemony hegemony but it was all just words but that liberal world order that people built after world war ii and that people like ronald reagan and john f kennedy and harry truman enforced

That really did restrain people.

And so the world has just become a more dangerous place.

And America has taken one of our great assets, which is our ideals.

Yeah, I've covered so many people around the world and they all, they want democracy, they want dignity.

And we have squandered that strength, an actual resource of strength.

And then the final thing, we replaced it now with Donald Trump.

We're no longer hanging back.

Suddenly we're launching forever wars all over the place, but we're not doing it on behalf of ideals.

We're doing it on behalf of nihilism, on behalf of oil.

I feel sorry for all my left-wing friends who used to, and when they talked about George W. Bush, they would say, he claims to be for democracy, but really this war is all about oil.

And they had the subtle ways to see what the real meaning of what Bush was saying was.

But that skill is no longer necessary because Donald Trump says, yeah, it's all about oil.

What are you going to do about it?

And so I would ask people, if you thought American foreign policy idealism was discredited by Iraq, which it largely was, how do you like the anti-idealistic foreign policy, policy of pure material greed?

A lot of my more progressive friends are always nostalgic for the last conservatives.

And so I started saying, well, wait till you get we have a government, a Republican government that makes you nostalgic for Donald Trump.

So that seems to be the trend.

I would say there are certain things that are not liberal or conservative.

They used to be consensus American positions.