David Brooks

This phenomenon is happening everywhere in the Western world as we screw up the need to respond to the nature of the information age economy.

And so to me, that's the central challenge is to separate those people from MAGA.

And I think that is most doable is if we try to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

He would talk about the circulation of elites, that you can circulate elites pretty quickly.

And all the people who were the elites in the Republican party under George W. Bush, they thought they were going to be in every Republican administration going forward.

But that didn't happen because Trump and Heritage Foundation and all those people brought in a new elite.

CPAC, when I was a young conservative, was considered the fringe of the fringe.

And it became the mainstream.

And this is not unusual in American history.

The people who were the elite under John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman were no longer the elite under Gary Hart and Bill Clinton.

They had an entire shift in elites.

And so you can have a shift in elites.

And I'm hopeful that there is a group on the Democratic Party that is now acting like an elite.

And I mean that in a good way.

They're running universities and they're trying to be less crazy left than they were.

They're running institutions.

They're trying to reform.

Isaiah Berlin, who I mentioned, he had a phrase, I find myself on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.

And that's where I find myself.

Let me try a historical example on you.