Confessions of a Republican Exile

By David Brooks

Saturday, October 12, 2024

 

Politically, I’m a bit of a wanderer. I grew up in a progressive family and was a proud democratic socialist through college. Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q. Wilson, Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Irving Kristol, the right was just more intellectually alive. But over time I’ve become gradually more repulsed by the GOP—first by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, then by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and now, of course, by Donald Trump.

 

So these days I find myself rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time. I’ve taken up residence on what I like to call the rightward edge of the leftward tendency, and I think of myself as a moderate or conservative Democrat. But moving from Red World to Blue World is like moving to a different country. The norms, fashions, and values are all different. Whenever you move to a new place or community or faith, you love some things about it but find others off-putting. So the other 30 percent of the time a cranky inner voice says, “Screw the Democrats, I’m voting for the GOP.”

 

For context, let me explain a little more about my political peregrinations. I think of myself as a Whig, part of a tradition that begins with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party in the 18th century, continues through the Whig Party of Henry Clay and then the early Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln in the 19th, and then extends to the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt in the 20th. Whigs put social mobility at the center of our politics. If liberals prioritize equality and libertarians prioritize individual freedom, Whigs ask: Which party is doing the most to expand opportunity, to help young people rise and succeed in our society? Which party is doing the most to cultivate energy, ambition, creativity, and daring in the citizenry?

 

Today, Whigs don’t have a permanent home. During the Reagan-Thatcher years, Republicans were the party of dynamism, but now they have become backward looking and reactionary. At the Democratic National Convention, I watched Michelle Obama talk about the generations of mothers who sacrificed so their children could rise and realize their full potential. Those are the people that Whigs like me want the American government to support. So here I find myself, almost all the way to joining Team Blue.

 

But my new suit is ill-fitting. I’m still not fully comfortable as a Democrat. And given that there are many other former Republicans who have become politically homeless in the Age of MAGA, I thought it might be useful to explain, first, what it is about the left that can make a wannabe convert like me want to flee in disgust—and then to explain why, ultimately, I’ve migrated in that direction despite sometimes having to suppress my gag reflex.

 

***

 

Progressive aristocrats could accept these realities and act like a ruling class that has responsibilities to all of society. But the more they dominate the commanding heights of society, the more aggressively progressive aristocrats posture as marginalized victims of oppression. Much of what has come to be called “wokeness” consists of highly educated white people who went to fantastically expensive colleges trying to show the world, and themselves, that they are victims, or at least allied with the victims. Watching Ivy League students complain about how poorly society treats them is not good for my digestion.

 

Elites then use progressivism as a mechanism to exclude the less privileged. To be a good progressive, you have to speak the language: intersectionality, problematic, Latinx, cisgender. But the way you learn that language is by attending some expensive school. A survey of the Harvard class of 2023 found that 65 percent of students call themselves “progressive” or “very progressive.” Kids smart enough to get into Harvard are smart enough to know that to thrive at the super-elite universities, it helps to garb yourself in designer social-justice ideology. Last spring, when the Washington Monthly surveyed American colleges to see which had encampments of Gaza protesters, it found them “almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.” Schools serving primarily the middle and working classes, in contrast, had almost no encampments.

 

This privilege-progressivism loop is self-reinforcing. A central irony of the progressive aristocracy is that the most culturally progressive institutions in society are elite universities—but the institutions that do the most to reinforce social and economic inequality are … those same elite universities. Sure, they may assign Foucault and Fanon in their humanities classes, but their main function is to educate kids who grew up in the richest, most privileged households in America and launch them into rich and privileged adult lives.

 

After college, members of the progressive aristocracy tend to cluster in insular places like Brooklyn or Berkeley where almost everybody thinks like them. If you go to the right private school, the right elite college, and live in the right urban neighborhood, you might never encounter anyone who challenges your worldview. To assure that this insularity is complete, progressives have done a very good job of purging Republicans from the sectors they dominate, like the media and the academy.

 

The progressive aristocracy’s assumption that all sophisticated people think like them, its tendency to opine about the right without ever having seriously engaged with a single member of that group, the general attitude of moral and intellectual superiority—in my weaker moments, all of it makes me want to go home and watch a bunch of Ben Shapiro videos.

 

***

 

A second trait that’s making it hard for me to fully embrace the Democratic Party is its tendency toward categorical thinking. People in Blue World are much more conscious of categories than people in Red World are. Among the Democrats, the existence of groups like White Dudes for Harris, or Asians for Harris, is considered natural and normal.

 

This kind of identity-politics thinking rests on a few assumptions: that a person’s gender, racial, or ethnic identity is the most important thing about them; that we should emphasize not what unites all people but what divides them; that history consists principally of the struggle between oppressor and oppressed; that a member of one group can never really understand the lived experience of someone in another group; and that the supposedly neutral institutions and practices of society—things like free speech, academic standards, and the justice system—are really just tools the dominant groups use to maintain their hegemony.

 

These assumptions may or may not be correct (some of them are, at least to a degree), but they produce a boring way of thinking. When I’m around people with the identitarian mindset, I usually know what they are going to say next. Blue World panel discussions put less emphasis on having a true diversity of views represented than on having the correct range of the approved identity categories.

 

But the real problem is that categorical thinking makes it harder to see people as individuals. Better to see a person first as a unique individual, with their own distinctive way of observing and being in the world, and then to see them also as a member of historic groups, and then to understand the way they fit into existing status and social structures. To see a person well, you’ve got to see them in all three ways.

 

At its worst, identitarian thinking encourages the kind of destructive us-versus-them thinking—the demonization and division—human beings are so prone to. Identitarianism undermines pluralism, the key value that diverse societies need if they are to thrive. Pluralism is based on a different set of very different assumptions: Human beings can’t be reduced to their categories; people’s identities are complex and shifting; what we have in common matters more than what we don’t; politics is less often a battle between good and evil than it is a competition among partial truths; societies cannot always be neatly divided into oppressor and oppressed; and politics need not always be a Manichaean death struggle between groups but sometimes can consist of seeking the best balance among competing goods.

 

I find it more pleasant to live in a culture built on pluralistic assumptions than on identitarian ones—which is why I sometimes have to grit my teeth when I visit an elite-university campus or the offices of one of the giant foundations.

 

***

 

The final quality keeping me from fully casting my lot with Blue World is, to borrow from the title of the classic book by the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, its Culture of Narcissism. In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical.

 

According to this way of thinking, people are most likely to thrive and act wisely when they are formed by a moral and social order. In the absence of one, they are likely to act selfish and shortsighted. This is why conservatives spend a lot of time worrying about the cohesion of families, the health of the social order, and the coherence of the moral community; we need these primeval commitments and moral guardrails to help us lead good lives.

 

In 2021, the conservative Christian writer Alan Noble published a book called You Are Not Your Own—a title that nicely sums up these traditional conservative beliefs. You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

 

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

 

But unless your name is Aristotle, it’s hard to come up with an entire moral cosmology on your own. Too often, people in a “culture of authenticity” fall into emotivism—doing whatever feels right. If you live in the world of autonomy and authenticity, you have the freedom to do what you want, but you might struggle to enjoy a sense of metaphysical belonging, a sense that your life fits into a broader scheme of meaning and eternal values.

 

If you lack metaphysical belonging, you have to rely on social belonging for all your belonging needs, which requires you to see your glorious self reflected in the attentions and affirmations of others. This leads to the fragile narcissism that Lasch saw coming back in 1979: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”

 

This might be why mental-health problems are so much worse in Blue World than in Red World. In one recent study, 34 percent of conservative students say they report feeling in poor mental health at least half the time. That’s pretty bad. But among very liberal students, 57 percent report poor mental health. That’s terrible.

 

Spending time in Blue World makes me realize how socially conservative I am. I don’t mean socially conservative in the way that term gets used to describe certain stances on hot-button cultural matters like gay marriage or trans issues. (On those topics, I hold what would be considered progressive positions.) Rather, I am a social conservative in believing that the universe has a moral order to it, that absolute right and wrong exist, and that we are either degrading our souls or elevating our souls with every little thing we do. I also believe that the strength of our society is based on the strength of our shared moral and social foundation. And I believe that any nation’s moral culture comes before politics and economics, and when the moral culture frays everything else falls apart. This places me in a conservative tradition that goes back to Edmund Burke and David Hume.

 

***

 

At this point you might be wondering why I don’t just stay in Red World. After all, maybe once Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party ends, the GOP can once again be reconstituted as the most congenial home for a wandering Whig like me. But in the meantime, despite everything that sometimes drives me away from Blue World, there’s more that’s drawing me toward it.

 

For starters, it has a greater commitment to the truth. This may sound weird, but I became a conservative because of its relationship to knowledge and truth. In the 1980s, I looked around at all those progressive social-engineering projects, like urban renewal, that failed because they were designed by technocratic planners who didn’t realize that the world is more complicated than their tidy schemes could encompass. Back then, the right seemed more epistemologically humble, more able to appreciate the wisdom of tradition and the many varied ways of knowing.

 

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. As Jonathan Rauch has written, “We let alt-truth talk, but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.” The people who perform those roles and populate the epistemic regime are mostly Democrats these days, and they’re the ones more likely to nurture a better, fairer, more fact-based and less conspiracy-deranged society.

 

Second, I’ve come to appreciate the Democrats’ long-standing tradition of using a pragmatic imagination. I like being around people who know that it’s really hard to design policies that will help others but who have devoted their lives to doing it well. During the Great Depression, FDR recognized that bold experimentation was called for, which led to the New Deal. During the financial crisis of the late 2000s, I watched the Obama administration display pragmatic imagination to stave off a second depression and lift the economy again. Over the past four years, I’ve watched the Biden administration use pragmatic imagination to funnel money to parts of America that have long been left behind.

 

Recently, I watched a current Democratic mayor and a former one talk about how to design programs to help homeless people. The current mayor had learned that moving just one homeless person into a shelter doesn’t always work well. It’s better to move an entire encampment into a well-run shelter, so people can preserve the social-support systems they’d built there. Listening to the mayors’ conversation was like listening to craftspeople talk about their trades. The discussion was substantive, hopeful, and practical. You don’t hear much of this kind of creative problem-solving from Republicans—because they don’t believe in government action.

 

Another set of qualities now drawing me toward the Democrats: patriotism and regular Americanness. This one has surprised me. Until recently, these qualities have been more associated with flag-waving conservatives than cosmopolitan members of the progressive aristocracy. And I confess that I went to the Democratic convention in August with a lot of skepticism: If Democrats need to win the industrial Midwest, why are they nominating a progressive from San Francisco with a history of left-wing cultural and policy positions? But the surging displays of patriotism; the string of cops, veterans, and blue-collar workers up onstage; the speeches by disaffected former Republicans; Kamala Harris’s own soaring rhetoric about America’s role in the world—all of this stood in happy contrast to the isolationist American-carnage rhetoric that has characterized the GOP in the Trump era. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the “Happy Warrior” Democratic Party of Al Smith, Hubert Humphrey, and Barbara Jordan than the Democratic Party of the Squad, and at the convention that old lineage seemed to be shining through.

 

But ultimately what’s pulling me away from the Republican Party and toward the Democrats is one final quality of Blue World: its greater ability to self-correct. Democrats, I’ve concluded, are better at scrutinizing, and conquering, their own shortcomings than Republicans are.

 

Red World suffers today from an unfortunate combination of a spiritual-superiority complex and an intellectual-inferiority complex. It’s not intellectually self-confident enough to argue with itself; absent this self-scrutiny, it’s susceptible to demagogues who tell it what to think. Blue World is now home to a greater tradition of and respect for debate. Despite what I said earlier about the rigid orthodoxy of the progressive aristocracy, the party is bigger than that, and for every Blue World person who practices identity politics, there is another who criticizes it. For every Blue World person who succumbs to the culture of narcissism, another argues that it’s shallow and destructive. For every Blue World person who thinks we should have universal basic income, another adduces evidence suggesting that the UBI saps people’s incentives to work and steers them toward playing video games on the couch.

 

In Blue World, I find plenty of people who are fighting against all the things I don’t like about Blue World. In Red World, however, far fewer people are fighting against what’s gone wrong with the party. (There’s a doughty band of Never Trump Republicans, but they get no hearing inside today’s GOP.) A culture or organization is only as strong as its capacity to correct its mistakes.

 

All of this leaves me on the periphery of Team Blue, just on the edge of the inside, which is where I believe the healthiest and most productive part of American politics now lives.

 

I’m mostly happy here. My advice to other conservatives disaffected by MAGA is this: If you’re under 45, stay in the Republican Party and work to make it a healthy, multiracial working-class party. If you’re over 45, acknowledge that the GOP is not going to be saved in your lifetime and join me on the other side. I don’t deny that it takes some adjustment; I find it weird being in a political culture in which Sunday brunch holds higher status than church. But Blue World is where the better angels of our nature seem lately to have migrated, and where the best hope for the future of the country now lies.