David Brooks

We said to people, come up with your own values.

And the problem with that is that there's no shared morality if everyone has to come up with their own values.

And the other problem with that is unless your name is Aristotle, you can't come up with values.

Walter Lippmann, a great columnist in the 1950s, wrote a book in which he said, if what is right and wrong is based on what each individual feels according to their emotions, then we are outside the bounds of civilization.

And so this moral collapse, I think, is what undergirds the rise of Trump.

It undergirds the alienation.

It's undergirds the idea that we want a politics that's based not on ideals and values.

It's about power.

And it's about who has more force.

And so if we're going to get over Trumpism or the AFD or Le Pen, we need a set of ideals that can hold society together and create some social trust.

And we need ideals that have some roots.

And this is the new conservatives we're good about in universal values.

It's not just my kind.

Like through all through much of human history, my kind of people are the kind of people I care about.

I don't care about the other kind.

But it was a great achievement of civilization to say, no, I care about all people, maybe not all equally.

But there are certain ideas that apply to everybody, ideas of dignity, democracy and kindness.

And that was an achievement.

And so I think the neoconservatives were inheritors, maybe more conservative than not, some not.

But they were the inheritors of that idea.