David Brooks

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.

That's just the way things are.

And along came a group called the Clapham sect, who were basically evangelicals.

And they said, no, that is not going to be acceptable behavior anymore.

So they reset the norms of what acceptable behavior was going to be.

They're sort of the beginnings of Victorian morality.

And as part of that, they said, we have such respect for human dignity.

We're going to campaign against the slave trade.