The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
What Happened to American Conservatism? — with David Brooks
Thu, 01 May 2025
David Brooks, New York Times columnist and writer for The Atlantic, joins Scott to discuss the decline of true conservatism, the failures of elite institutions, the moral decay fueling American politics, and the crisis facing men and boys. Follow David Brooks, @nytdavidbrooks. Algebra of Happiness: reflections on religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the decline of true conservatism?
Yeah, you know, I quoted in that Atlantic essay the first sentence of one of Charles de Gaulle's memoirs. And he says, I've always had a certain idea about France. And I've always had a certain idea about America, that we're a flawed nation that's fundamentally a force for good. We, you know, Lincoln tried to uphold the dignity of man. FDR tried to defeat fascism.
Ronald Reagan tried to defeat communism. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, created PEPFAR to save 25 million lives in Africa who might have otherwise died of HIV. And so we made our mistakes like Vietnam and Iraq, but they were mistakes of stupidity, of arrogance, of naivete. But they were not out of evil intention. And when I look at Donald Trump, evil intention is part of the plan.
And so when I saw him attack Zelensky with J.D. Vance in that old office, I experienced a blow to my patriotism, an emotion that I hadn't really felt about America before. And then on Liberation Day, when the tariffs were announced, I felt it again mixed with a horror of incompetence. These are new experiences, new and shocking experiences.
Yeah, I think a lot of moderates try and find their political home base. I think I would have been a Rockefeller Republican if I'd been a little bit older. There's a lot of things about conservatism I'm really drawn to. And I wonder as someone who's, you know, I think a lot of progressives are like, we think, okay, we Democrats get it wrong a lot. We take things too far.
Identity politics, I think, is out of control. But the way you describe Americans, I would describe Democrats right now. Their heart's in the right place. But we just often take things too far. We led 250,000 people across the border in December of 23rd, inspiring an overreaction where we start basically rounding up people with the wrong tattoos.
We let DEI apparatus on campus go so far that it probably becomes unconsciously, accidentally racist itself, and we inspire an overreaction. Do you think there's any truth to the notion that we on the left, quite frankly, have a tendency to stick out our chin and just take things too far and, quite frankly, create space for an overreaction? Is some of this our fault?
Oh, absolutely. You know, I would say one flaw, and now where I position myself, I read one of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher. And he said, I'm happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. And that's where I find myself these days, on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.
I associate more with moderate or to the Democrats, I guess, but I am the conservative version of that. When I look at the progressive world, I think it was just a horrible mistake to buy into an ideology that defines all human relationships into oppressor-oppressed groups.
It was a horrible mistake to think that a person's ideas, values, and worldviews are determined by their racial or gender identities.
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Chapter 2: How have elite institutions failed in America?
Okay, in the middle of the tour, I just did that college week, college tour with my son. And they keep talking in this very like warm tones. If we look at the full applicant and then along the way, a parent. And of course, it's only the parents asking questions. But I think they should pass a law that no parent is ever allowed to ask a question in these tours.
Anyways, someone makes the mistake of asking the admissions rate. And the guy, this lovely high EQ guy goes, it's 4%. So there's 75 people on this tour, 25 kids, 50 parents. So one of them is getting in, and we're all marching around the campus. And I say to my son, I said, let's leave the tour. I just don't want to get your hopes up here.
You're not getting into the University of Chicago with a 4% admissions rate. You're just not. And I wonder if some of these schools should lose their tax-free status, that if you have an endowment over a billion dollars, you're not growing your freshman class faster than population. You're no longer a public servant. You're a hedge fund with classes. You're a thoughtful guy.
You've written on the topic. What do you think we do to try and break the caste system that has become higher education?
First, on those college tours, I've never felt more invisible in my life than when I'm a parent on one of those college tours because you realize you don't matter at all. But I would say these schools, and I piss on them all the time, they're still fantastic places. If you can get in, it's amazing. If you can get in, they're amazing places of deep learning.
What I'm hoping is the universities will do a couple of things. First, expand as you suggest to allow more access. Second, do genuine intellectual diversity on campus. And so since I'm more conservative than the campus norm, I now talk politics, something I would never have done in the classroom. I'd say, look, I'm a conservative.
I just want to explain to you what it feels like, why I became a conservative. So you have some access. You know what a conservative looks like. And so that's strange to a lot of students. The third and most important thing is we need to redefine our definition of ability, right?
Our whole system is based on a definition of ability, which is the ability to suck up to teachers between the ages of 15 and 18 and do well on standardized tests. That is not what genuine ability is. It doesn't allow for curiosity. It doesn't allow for determination, for drive, for social skills.
And if we had a wider definition of ability that rich parents couldn't gain as well to include those more humanistic traits, then it's more widely dispersed across populations. We would have a more democratic student body because we'd measure the things that really matter that don't require you to go to a private school to get all the training.
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Chapter 3: What is the moral decay in American politics?
And as I travel around the country, I find a lot of those places, you go to eastern Ohio, they're happy because they got an Intel plant coming in there. You go around Syracuse, they're happy because they got a Micron plant coming in. There really is some bit of economic renaissance. It did not bloom enough to reward Joe Biden.
And the second mistake Biden made was you can't fundamentally solve a problem of respect with economic resources. That it's not only that these places have been left behind materially, but they've been left behind in terms of status and respect. And the Democrats still have not managed to find a way to show solidarity and respect to a lot of working class voters.
And crossing that cultural divide is a chief challenge, I think, for the party. But then if you're talking about the social and relational crisis, I do two things. I'll just tell you what I do.
I started a non-profit called Weave, the Social Fabric Project, and we celebrate and reward and support people who are working in the neighborhoods where they live, and they're rebuilding trust in those communities. We give them money, we give them support, we give them back platforms to tell their stories.
And culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy. So you pick the community leaders in your neighborhood and you hold them up and say, let's be more like them. Let's build connection. And then the final thing I did, I had a book come out a year ago called How to Know a Person.
And that's based on the idea that a lot of the disconnection is that people just don't have skills. How do you sit with someone who's suffering from depression? How do you sit with someone who's grieving? How do you ask for an offer of forgiveness? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart?
These are basic social skills, and for a couple of generations, we simply have not taught them. And so to me, one of the reasons we have such high levels of distrust and disconnection is we haven't taught people the practical skills of how to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life.
And so these are at least the things I've chosen to try to work on as my piece of the larger challenge.
Something that struck me in your work is that you advocate for putting moral formation at the center of society. What does that mean and how tactically does that become operationalized?
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Chapter 4: What crisis are men and boys facing today?
Chapter 5: How can we redefine ability in education?
And I'm in Baltimore with my youngest son and the batter loses control of the bat and it flies into the stands and lands in my lap. And a normal human being, like getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball. A normal human being is waving his trophy in the air, my bat, and I'm high-fiving everybody and getting on the jumbotron, I'm hugging people.
I took the bat and just put it on the ground and just sat there. And I look back on that guy and I see show a little moral joy, show a little joy. Like that's a great event. You should be celebrating in public. But I was so inhibited that I didn't know how to be emotionally open in public. And I went through a hard time after that. I went through divorce.
My kids left for school and I was living in a little apartment. I was lonely and fiercely lonely. And there's a saying that when you're in those hard times in your life, you can either be broken or broken open. And if you're broken, you turn hard, you turn into a lobster shell and nothing can touch you.
But if you're broken open, you get even more vulnerable and you stay in the pain to learn what it has to teach you. And what my pain had to teach me was that I was misleading my life by not living from the depths of myself, but living from the shallows.
It was very easy for me to use glibness and reason to do fine in life without confronting the spiritual and in some way relational shortages and vacuums I'd created. And so I did it the way I do it. I read books about spirituality and I came to faith in this time. But mostly I just became a lot more able to express my emotions, express vulnerability.
And that can be an easy drug to express vulnerability, too easy. but I think I'm different. And my friends tell me that I'm different. And when my wife, we've been married eight years, she looks at earlier versions of me on video. She says, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. And so I guess the lesson is to become familiar with your emotional and spiritual life.
And it will bring you greater pains and greater joys. But you have to do that either through spiritual practices. For me, it's in the case of spiritual reading. That's how I process. but it's also through the process of deeper conversations. I'll tell you one quick story.
When I was in between marriages, I was dating and I was talking to my daughter on the phone and I asked her what she was doing that weekend. And she said, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my boyfriend's parents for the first time. And I said to her, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my girlfriend's parents for the first time.
And in that moment, our relationship went from being adult to child to adult to adult. And we could talk about things that as a parent, sometimes you don't want to open up too much to your kids. But when it's adult to adult, you can open up a little more, not totally, but open up a little more.
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Chapter 6: What role does national service play in society?
You've been very generous with your time. I'm going to do just a quick lightning round because you're a busy dude. Real quick, best piece of advice you've ever received.
I guess, know something about something. When you get out of school, find some field of expertise that you can really study, and then you bring that to the table. A second bit of advice I would give to young people is build identity capital. Meg Jay wrote a book called The Defining Decade about being in your 20s.
And she had a patient who wanted to work at Starbucks but had a job offer at Outward Bound. And she said, go to Outward Bound because at every job interview, at every dinner party, people want to know what it was like to work on Outward Bound. That will give you identity capital. And so I find that's pretty good advice.
Last piece of media that really moved you.
Well, I'm now listening on audiobook to Andre Agassi's memoir, which is one of the best modern memoirs I've ever read. He's a guy who hated tennis. His dad was an absolute monster who forced him to do tennis. And Agassi hated tennis all the way through. And so to me, I found it tremendously moving, a guy who's really good at an activity that he absolutely hates.
And the way he struggles with this hatred and this really imprisonment, I find his courage and audacity really moving. And he's just a beautiful writer for a guy who dropped out of high school in ninth grade. He didn't have the benefits of an education, but he's obviously a brilliant guy. And it's just tremendously moving look at mastery and finding the things that you really want to do.
And I just can't recommend that book enough.
If you could go back in time and visit someone who's gone, who would it be and what would you say to them?
Well, I have a lot of questions for Jesus.
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Chapter 7: Is the idolatry of money hurting America?
I think you're a wonderful role model for young men and really appreciate your contribution, not only to your domain, but just to larger society. It was a real pleasure to meet you and appreciate your time.
Thank you. I've always, I've been a fan of yours and a huge honor to be on this, on this podcast. So I really appreciate the invitation.
Algebra of happiness. When I was younger, I took pride. I've been exposed to a lot of religion. My father was married and divorced four times. I went to temple, church, Presbyterian, then Methodist.
And at a very young age, I decided that I was a quote-unquote pseudo-intellect slash scientist and basically mocked religion and religious people and felt that it was just sort of, I was very judgmental and got a lot of sort of I don't know, intellectual reward from thinking that, okay, religion is stupid and I don't have an invisible friend.
It was very judgmental and disparaging, and not only religion, but people who were religious. And as I've gotten older, I've discovered that while the extremist part of any religion I find dangerous to society and a very negative force, that that represents an extreme niche and minority of religion and religious people.
And that religion, for the most part, gives a great number of people a great deal of comfort. And while I am a raging atheist, I find myself thinking that part of the solution to what ails us in terms of loneliness
And a lack of comity of man and empathy is religious institutions to go to church or go to temple or to mosque and to be in the company and presence of other people in the agency of something bigger than yourselves. And that the majority of these institutions promote empathy and kindness and community. I have someone in my life who's worked with me for, I guess, the better part of 10 or 15 years.
And she showed up with a new kid. And I thought, I didn't even know she was pregnant. And someone told me, no, she adopted her sister's kid. Her sister struggles with drug addiction. And then she showed up with a second kid and same thing happened. Her sister had another kid.
And our firm went through an acquisition, and I suggested that she move to the corporate headquarters where they hosted the people who did or the professionals who were in her department. And she said, I don't want to move. And I said, you'd be crazy not to move. You have two kids. You're a single mother. You need economic security. And she said— yeah, but I don't want to give up my church.
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