David Brooks

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.

One is that we have a social order, that there are certain rules and certain beliefs and values that we share that form the basis of how we live.

George Marsden is a great historian, and he wrote this about Martin Luther King's rhetoric.

He says, what gave King's rhetoric such force is the idea that right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe.

That slavery is not just wrong and sometimes in some places.

It's always wrong.

Segregation is not just wrong and sometimes in some places.

It is always wrong.