David Brooks

Right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe.

And when you have that social order, people feel held.

You can have a society because we have a shared understanding of what's right and wrong.

We have a shared set of norms about what's right and wrong so we can behave each other.

We can trust each other.

Two generations ago, 60% of Americans said, yeah, my neighbors are trustworthy.

That's not a liberal or conservative thing.

That was a great human achievement.

And what happened?

We shredded the shared moral order.

And that was not just a conservative project.

It was a liberal project too.

And so one of the things we did is we privatized morality.

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.