By David Brooks
Monday, April 07, 2025
Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this
sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my
life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a
deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the
world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and
beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we
promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people
across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was
because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.
Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my
very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that
we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily
lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have
watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward
our friends in Europe, toward
the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval
Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock?
Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description
for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor
is embarrassing and painful.
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing.
He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any
vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an
apparatchik says in 1984.
“We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.”
How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character
continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be
sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain
and humiliation.”
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s budget director, sounds
like he walked straight out of 1984. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to
not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the
villains,” he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. “We want
to put them in trauma.”
Since coming back to the White House, Trump has caused
suffering among Ukrainians, suffering among immigrants who have lived here for
decades, suffering among some of the best people I know. Many of my friends in
Washington are evangelical Christians who found their vocation in public
service—fighting sex trafficking, serving the world’s poor, protecting America
from foreign threats, doing biomedical research to cure disease. They are
trying to live lives consistent with the gospel of mercy and love. Trump has
devastated their work. He isn’t just declaring war on “wokeness”; he’s
declaring war on Christian service—on any kind of service, really.
If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is
this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer
what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a
consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to
create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any
institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of
law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Inspectors
general, judge
advocate general officers, oversight
mechanisms, and watchdog agencies are a potential restraint on power, so
they must be fired or neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it
must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state.
Trump’s first term was a precondition for his second. His
first term gradually eroded norms and acclimatized America to a new sort of
regime. This laid the groundwork for his second term, in which he’s making the
globe a playground for gangsters.
We used to live in a world where ideologies clashed, but
ideologies don’t seem to matter anymore. The strongman understanding of power
is on the march. Power is like money: the more the better. Trump, Russian
President Vladimir Putin, and the rest of the world’s authoritarians are
forming an axis of ruthlessness before our eyes. Trumpism has become a form of
nihilism that is devouring everything in its path.
***
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even
though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the
conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review,
The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and
the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James
Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to
shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for
intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We
were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for
anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they
were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
I should have understood this much sooner, because the
reactionaries had revealed their true character as far back as January 1986. A
group of progressive students at Dartmouth had erected a shantytown on campus
to protest apartheid. One night, a
group of 12 students, most of them associated with the right-wing Dartmouth
Review, descended on the shanties with sledgehammers and smashed them down.
Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth
opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean.
But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large
part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia,
whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their
intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put
this politely, but they just seemed creepy—nakedly ambitious in a way that I
thought would destroy them in the end.
Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent
publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative
books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the
left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That
led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the
American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a
lucrative strategy.
Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left
really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power
centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that
privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left
really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything
from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy
that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t
matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
But although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA
populist, leveraging this working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as
a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the
University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth
went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard.
Stephen Miller went to Duke. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Many of
Musk’s DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come
from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey,
Wharton. These are the Vineyard Vines nihilists, the spiritual descendants of
the elite bad boys at the Dartmouth Review. This political moment isn’t
populists versus elitists; it is, as I’ve written before, like a civil war in a
prep school where the sleazy rich kids are taking on the pretentious rich kids.
The MAGA elite rode to power on working-class votes,
but—trust me, I know some of them—they don’t care about the working class.
Trump and his crew could have taken office with actual plans to make life
better for working-class Americans. An administration that cared about the
working class would seek to address its problems, such as the fact that the poorest Americans
die an average of 10 to 15 years younger than their higher-income counterparts,
or that by sixth grade, many of the children in the poorest school districts
have fallen
four grade levels behind those in the richest. An administration that cared
about these people would have offered a bipartisan industrial policy to create
working-class jobs.
These faux populists have no interest in that. Instead of
helping workers, they focus on civil war with their left-wing fellow elites.
During Trump’s first months in office, one of their highest priorities has been
to destroy the places where they think liberal elites work—the scientific
community, the foreign-aid
community, the Kennedy
Center, the Department
of Education, universities.
***
It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism,
you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.
This Trumpian cocktail has eaten
away at Christianity, a faith oriented around the marginalized. Blessed are
the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The poor are closer to God than the
rich. Again and again, Jesus explicitly renounced worldly power.
But if Trumpism has a central tenet, it is untrammeled
lust for worldly power. In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously
identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses
on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a
high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.
To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about
justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to
emasculate the strong. In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners.
It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion. The
Nietzschean Übermenschen—which Trump and Musk clearly believe themselves to
be—offer the promise of domination over those sick sentimentalists who practice
compassion.
Two decades ago, Michael Gerson, a graduate of Wheaton
College, a prominent evangelical institution, helped
George W. Bush start the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,
which has saved 25
million lives in Africa and elsewhere. I traveled with Gerson to Namibia,
Mozambique, and South Africa, where dying people had recovered and returned to
their families, and were leading active lives. It was a proud moment to be an
American. Vought—Trump’s budget director, who also graduated from Wheaton—championed
the evisceration of PEPFAR, which has now been set in motion by executive
order, effectively
sentencing thousands to death. Project 2025, of which Vought was
a principal architect, helped lay the groundwork for the
dismantling of USAID; its gutting appears to have ended a program to supply
malaria protection to 53 million people and cut
emergency food packages for starving children. Twenty years is a short time
in which to have traveled the long moral distance from Gerson to Vought.
Trumpian nihilism has eviscerated conservatism. The
people in this administration are not conservatives. They are the opposite of
conservatives. Conservatives once believed in steady but incremental reform; Elon
Musk believes in rash and instantaneous disruption. Conservatives once
believed that moral norms restrain and civilize us, habituating us to virtue;
Trumpism trashes moral norms in every direction, riding forward on a tide of
adultery, abuse, cruelty,
immaturity, grift, and corruption. Conservatives once believed in
constitutional government and the Madisonian separation of powers; Trump bulldozes
checks and balances, declaiming on social media, “He who saves his Country
does not violate any Law.” Reagan promoted democracy abroad because he thought
it the political system most consistent with human dignity; the Trump
administration couldn’t care less about promoting democracy—or about human
dignity.
***
How does this end? Will anyone on the right finally stand
up to the Trumpian onslaught? Will our institutions withstand the nihilist
assault? Is America on the verge of ruin?
In February, about a month into Trump’s second term, I spoke at a gathering of
conservatives in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
Some of the speakers were pure populist (Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Johnson, and
Nigel Farage). But others were center-right or not neatly ideological (Niall
Ferguson, Bishop Robert Barron, and my Atlantic colleague Arthur C.
Brooks).
In some ways, it was like the conservative conferences
I’ve been attending for decades. I listened to a woman from Senegal talking
about trying to make her country’s culture more entrepreneurial. I met the head
of a charter school in the Bronx that focuses on character formation. But in
other ways, this conference was startlingly different.
In my own talk, I sympathized with the populist critique
of what has gone wrong in Western societies. But I shared with the audience my
dark view of President Trump. Unsurprisingly, a large segment of the audience
booed vigorously. One man screamed that I was a traitor and stormed out. But
many other people cheered. Even in conservative precincts infected by
reactionary MAGA-ism, some people are evidently tired of Trumpian brutality.
As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of
metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual
recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric
that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the
seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His
incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”
But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the
midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the
left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal
battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is
leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush
or be crushed.
The warriors tend to think people like me are soft and
naive. I tend to think they are catastrophizing narcissists. When I look at
Trump acolytes, I see a swarm of Neville Chamberlains who think they’re Winston
Churchill.
I understand the seductive power of a demagogue who tells
you that the people who look down on you are evil. I understand the seductive
power of being told that your civilization is on the verge of total collapse,
and that everything around you is degeneracy and ruin. This message gives you a
kind of terrifying thrill: The stakes are apocalyptic. Your life has meaning
and urgency. Everything is broken; let’s burn it all down.
I understand why people who feel alienated would want to
follow the leader who speaks about domination and combat, not the one who
speaks about healing and cooperation. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve
read Edmund Burke or the Gospel of Matthew—it’s still tempting to throw away
all of your beliefs to support the leader who promises to be “your
retribution.”
America may well enter a period of democratic decay and
international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances, and to
build the structures and customs of democracy—and only weeks to decimate them,
as we’ve now seen. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive
this crisis. Many nations, including our own, have gone through worse and
bloodier crises and recovered. In Upheaval: Turning Points
for Nations in Crisis, the historian and scientist Jared Diamond
provides case studies—Japan in the late 19th century, Finland and Germany after
World War II, Indonesia after the 1960s, Chile and Australia during and after
the ’70s—of countries that came back stronger after crisis, collapse, or
defeat. To these examples, I’d add Britain in the 1830s and ’40s, and the
1980s, and South Korea in the 1980s. Some of these countries (such as Japan)
endured war; others (Chile) endured mass torture and “disappearances”; still
others (Britain and Australia) endured social decay and national decline. All
of them eventually healed and came back.
America itself has already been through numerous periods
of rupture and repair. Some people think we’re living through a period of
unprecedented tumult, but the Civil War and the Great Depression were much
worse. So were the late 1960s—assassinations, riots, a failed war, surging
crime rates, a society coming apart. From January 1969 until April 1970, there
were 4,330
bombings in the U.S., or about nine a day. But by the 1980s and ’90s—after
getting through Watergate, stagflation, and the Carter-era “malaise” of the
’70s—we had recovered. As brutal and disruptive as the tumult of the late 1960s
was, it helped the country shake off some of its persistent racism and sexism,
and made possible a freer and more individualistic ethos.
But the most salient historical parallel might be the
America of the 1830s. Andrew Jackson is the American president who most
resembles Trump—power-hungry, rash, narcissistic, driven by animosity. He was
known by his opponents as “King Andrew” for his expansions of executive power.
“The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the
Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet,” Senator
Asher Robbins of Rhode Island said. “When the way to his object lies
through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to
restrain him from breaking through it.” Jackson brazenly defied the Supreme
Court on a ruling about Cherokee Nation territory (a defiance, it should be
noted, that Vice
President Vance has explicitly endorsed). “Though we live under the form of
a republic,” Supreme
Court Justice Joseph Story wrote, “we are in fact under the absolute rule
of a single man.”
But Jackson made the classic mistake of the populist: He
overreached. Fueled by personal hostility toward elites, he destroyed the
Second Bank of the United States, an early precursor to the Federal Reserve
System, and helped spark an economic depression that ruined the administration
of his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren.
In response to Jackson, the Whig Party arose in the 1830s
to create a new political and social order. Devoutly anti-authoritarian, the
Whigs were a cultural, civic, and political force all at once. They emphasized
both traditional morality and progressive improvements. They agitated for
prison reform and for keeping the Sabbath, for more women’s participation in
politics and for a strong military, for government-funded public schools and
for pro-business government policies. They were opposed to Jackson’s monstrous
Indian Removal Act, and to the Democratic Party’s reactionary,
white-supremacist social vision. Whereas Jacksonian Democrats emphasized
negative liberty—get your hands off me—the Whigs, who would turn into
the early Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, emphasized positive liberty,
empowering Americans to live bigger, better lives with things such as expanded
economic credit, free public education, and stronger legal protections
including due process and property rights.
Though we’ve come to call the early-to-mid-19th century
the Age of Jackson, the
historian Daniel Walker Howe notes that it was not Jackson but the Whigs
who created the America we know today. “As economic modernizers, as supporters
of strong national government, and as humanitarians more receptive than their
rivals to talent regardless of race and gender,” Howe writes, the Whigs
“facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of
parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by
commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by
political ties.” Looking back, Howe concludes, we can see that even though they
were not the dominant party of their time, the Whigs “were the party of
America’s future.” To begin its recovery from Trumpism, America needs its next
Whig moment.
***
Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A
demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down. But what’s likely
to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes, because
incompetence is built into the nihilistic project. Nihilists can only destroy,
not build. Authoritarian nihilism is inherently stupid. I don’t mean that
Trumpists have low IQs. I mean they do things that run directly against their
own interests. They are pathologically self-destructive. When you create an
administration in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to
flatter his voracious ego, stupidity results. Authoritarians are also morally
stupid. Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they
are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with
greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.
The DOGE children are doubtless brilliant in certain
ways, but they know as much about government as I know about rocketry. They
announced an $8 billion cut to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement
contract—though if
they had read their own documents correctly, they would have realized that
the cut was less than $8 million. They eliminated workers from the
National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently without
realizing that this agency controls nuclear security, and had to undo some
of those cuts shortly thereafter. Trump seems to be trying to give a bunch of
Sam Bankman-Frieds access to America’s nuclear arsenal and IRS records. What
could go wrong?
When Trump creates an unnecessary crisis, it’s unlikely
to be a small one. The proverbial “adults in the room” who contained crises in
Trump’s first term are gone. Whatever the second-term crisis—runaway inflation?
a global trade war? a cratered economy and plummeting stock market? an
out-of-control conflict in China? botched pandemic management? a true hijacking
of the Constitution precipitated by defiance of the courts?—it is likely to
crater his support and shift historical momentum.
But although Trumpism’s collapse is a necessary condition
for national recovery, it is not a sufficient one. Its demise must be followed
by the hard work necessary to achieve true civic and political renewal.
Progress is not always a smooth or merry ride. For a few
decades, nations live according to one paradigm. Then it stops working and gets
destroyed. When the time comes to build a new paradigm, progressives talk about
economic redistribution; conservatives talk about cultural and civic repair.
History shows that you need both: Recovery from national crisis demands
comprehensive reinvention at all levels of society. If you look back across the
centuries, you find that this process requires several interconnected efforts.
First, a national shift in values. In the late 19th
century, for example, as the country went through the wrenching process of
industrialization, America was traumatized by severe recessions and mass urban
poverty. In response, social Darwinism gave way to the social-gospel movement.
Social Darwinism, associated with thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, valorized
survival of the fittest and claimed that the poor are poor because of inferior
abilities. The social-gospel movement, associated with theologians such as
Walter Rauschenbusch, emphasized the systemic causes of poverty, including the
Gilded Age’s concentration of corporate power. By the early 20th century, most
mainline Protestant denominations had signed
on to the Social Creed of the Churches, which called for, among other
things, the abolition of child labor and the creation of disability insurance.
Second, nations that hang together through crisis have a
strong national identity—they return to their roots. They have a leader who
replaces the amoralism of the nihilists, or, say, the immorality of slavery,
with a strong redefinition of the nation’s moral mission, the way Lincoln
redefined America at Gettysburg.
Third, a civic renaissance. After the social gospel took
root, Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s launched and participated in a
series of social movements and civic organizations: United Way, the NAACP, the
Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the American Legion.
Fourth, a national reassessment. As Jared Diamond notes,
nations that turn around don’t catastrophize. Rather, they develop a clear-eyed
view of what’s working and not working, and they pursue careful, selective
change. According to Diamond’s research, the leaders of successful reform
movements also take responsibility for their part in the crisis. For instance,
Germany’s leaders accepted responsibility for the country’s Nazi past;
Finland’s leaders took responsibility for an unrealistic foreign policy before
World War II, when they had to deal with a looming Soviet Union on their
border; and Australia’s leaders took responsibility in the 1970s for a
political culture and foreign policy that had become overly dependent on
Britain.
Fifth, a surge of political reform. In 1830s and ’40s
Britain—racked by social chaos, bank failures, a severe depression, riots, and
crushing wealth inequality—Prime Minister Robert Peel, a leader of great moral
rectitude, built the modern police force, reduced tariffs, pushed railway
legislation that literally laid the tracks for British industrialization, and
helped pass the Factory Act of 1844, which regulated workplaces. In
early-20th-century America, Progressives produced a comparable flurry of effective
reforms that pulled the country out of its industrialization crisis.
Part of political reform is an expansion of the circle of
power. What that would require in America today is, among other things, a broad
effort to include working-class and conservative voices in what have
traditionally been cultural bastions of elite progressivism—universities, the
nonprofit sector, the civil service, the mainstream media.
Finally, economic expansion. Economic growth can salve
many wounds. Pursuing a
so-called abundance agenda—a set of policies aimed at reducing government
regulation and increasing investment in innovation, and expanding the supply of
housing, energy, and health care—is the most
promising way to achieve that expansion.
***
In the long term, Trumpism is doomed. Power without
prudence and humility invariably fails. Nations, like people, change not when
times are good but in response to pain. At a moment when Trumpism seems to be
devouring everything, the temptation is to believe that this time is different.
But history doesn’t stop moving. Even now, as I travel
around the country, I see the forces of repair gathering in neighborhoods and
communities. If you’re part of an organization that builds trust across class,
you’re fighting Trumpism. If you’re a Democrat jettisoning insular
faculty-lounge progressivism in favor of a Whig-like working-class abundance
agenda, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you are standing up for a moral code of
tolerance and pluralism that can hold America together, you’re fighting Trumpism.
Over time, changes in values lead to changes in
relationships, which lead to changes in civic life, which eventually lead to
changes in policy and then in the general trajectory of the nation. It starts
slow, but as the Book of Job says, the sparks will fly upward.
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