How America Recovers From All This David Brooks

TITLE: How America recovers from all this | Yale Conversations with David Brooks | Yale University CHANNEL: Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs DATE: 2026-04-13

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Thank you all. Good to be back here for my third. It’s clear none of you went to my first two cuz they were disasters. Today I’m going to talk to you about how America recovers and you will understand why I am known as the irrational optimist at all my workplaces.

The story I’m going to tell is based on my predilection. Some people are technological determinists. They think technology shapes history. Some people are economic determinists. They think economics does. Some people are political. I think minds shape history. That culture shapes history. It’s how we think, how we react. And that culture is the main driver of politics, of history, and of just the way we see the world.

There’s a guy at the University of Michigan named Richard Nisbett who did these experiments where he asked people from America and people from Asia to describe a fish tank he put in front of them. And the Asian people tended to describe the vegetation of the fish tank, the nature of the water, the whole context. The Americans just described the biggest fish. He did a similar experiment looking at the Mona Lisa. People from Asian cultures, their eye saccades moved all over the painting. People from the US, their eyes just looked at the mouth and the nose.

And so his explanation is that 2500 years ago, Greek philosophers like Aristotle described a way of looking at the world that emphasized individual agency. At the same time, Asian scholars like Confucius developed a way of the world that emphasizes harmony, context, and interrelationship. And so these cultural differences show up even in the way our eyes move in front of a painting.

I know about this in politics. If you look at the electoral map of 1896 and the electoral map of 2024, it’s pretty much the same map. The populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896 won the South, Texas, Appalachia, the West. The American populist of 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump, won mostly the exact same states. They switched political parties, but the populist cultures of those places stayed exactly the same over 100 years.

And there was a great book called Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, a historian who said that New England was settled by people from southern England who valued education, emotional restraint, and being active in civic life. West Virginia 300 years ago was settled by the Scots-Irish who came from the northern border of England and Scotland. And they valued military service, honor, and shame. And to this day, people in Appalachia commit more crimes, are more likely to be in the military, have lower educational levels than people in New England. And so that’s 400 years of cultural stability.

Now, cultures can be very stable. They can also change really rapidly. And they change the way science changes. There’s a dominant paradigm and then that paradigm shifts when it stops working for people. And so over the next few minutes, I’m going to try to sprint through the dominant cultural paradigms of the last 70 years.

I was driving years ago in Washington DC and on Sunday nights our local NPR station broadcast old radio shows and I happened to hear a rebroadcast of a radio show named Command Performance which was a variety show that went out in the 1940s. I happened to hear the episode that aired on VJ Day 1945. It was taped live just hours after Americans learned they’d won World War II and the host Bing Crosby gets out there and says, “I guess all anybody can think about is to thank God it’s over and today our deep down feeling is one of humility.”

And I was really struck by this tone of quietness after just winning World War II. Later in the show, Burgess Meredith reads a passage from Ernie Pyle: “We won the war because our men are brave and because of many other things like great allies and great material blessings. We did not win it because destiny created us better than any other people. I hope that in victory, we are more grateful than proud.”

I was really struck by that tone of humility. So I turn on a football game. I watch a quarterback throw a pass. The wide receiver gets tackled after a two-yard gain. And the defensive player does a victory dance in honor of himself. And it occurred to me I watched a bigger victory dance after a two-yard gain in football than after winning World War II.

And that suggests a different culture back then. It was a culture of moral realism, an awareness that we’re all sinful and we should be aware of human frailty. And so the first thing we should do is trust institutions that’ll make us slightly less selfish than we are. Back then — 1940s and 50s — military, government, corporations, union, and the church. People had faith in authority and trust in institutions and trust in their local community.

If you grew up in Chicago, you didn’t say I’m from Chicago. You said, “I’m from 59th and Pulaski.” You picked your local neighborhood where you had tight community. Back then, there was no TV and no air conditioning. So in the summertime, the doors were all open. The kids from the neighborhood were running into any house, eating at whatever fridge they happened to be closest to. It was very hard to be a loner in those communities. There was dense community, a lot of social capital, and a culture of self-effacement. I’m no better than anybody else and nobody’s better than me.

Joe DiMaggio, when he hit a home run, he did not do a bat flip. George H.W. Bush, who grew up in this culture, when he was running for president, his speechwriters would write paragraphs saying why you should vote for me, why I’m so great. And he refused to read those speeches. One day he finally agreed to read the paragraph about himself and he got a call from his mom and she said, “George, you’re talking about yourself again.”

So that was the culture of the 40s and 50s. In every cultural moment, the seeds of the future are already present. In the 1950s, there were people who looked at the culture and said it’s got some virtues, but it’s got something wrong. Carl Rogers and Dr. Benjamin Spock decided humans are not sinful — humans are basically good. We should liberate them so they can exercise their goodness. And there were critics who worried about the conformity of the 1950s, the lack of opportunity for women, for Blacks, for all minority groups.

And so in the 1960s they more or less tore it down. The dominant paradigm is the age of liberation. Let’s throw off restraint so we could have a more fair society, a more creative society. Don’t conform to others. Be true to yourself.

There were two quarterbacks in the 1969 Super Bowl. One was a 1950s kind of guy, Johnny Unitas — high socks, crew cut, extremely boring. The other was Joe Namath — long hair, swinger, playboy. Namath wrote a memoir called “I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow Because I Get Better Looking Every Day.”

And little me, I was involved in that shift. In 1966, the hippies in Central Park had a “be-in.” They set a garbage can on fire and threw their wallets into it to demonstrate how little they cared about money. I was five and I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can. So I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away. And I say that was my first step over to the right.

Some decades reverse the earlier decade like the 60s reversed the 50s. Some decades consolidate. The 1970s consolidated the cultural shift from restraint to liberation and we harvested a lot of creativity — Stairway to Heaven, Freebird, Born to Run, Bohemian Rhapsody. The Godfather, Chinatown, Star Wars, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now.

The disadvantage is the liberatory movement of the 1960s led to social chaos. Between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rates more than doubled. The share of children born out of wedlock more than tripled. Violent crime tripled. Drug use exploded. I was living in New York City in the 1970s and everybody got mugged. There was a serial castrator on the Upper West Side whose nickname was “Charlie Chop Off.” Such was the chaos of New York in those days.

And so the 70s also produced a loss of institutional authority. Social trust in institutions collapses — the My Lai massacre, defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, the decimation of American manufacturing, bankruptcy in New York, hostage taking in Tehran. People lose faith that institutions are basically functioning.

Out of that chaos comes the 1980s. If the 1960s was bohemian liberation, the 1980s was a bourgeois backlash. People who looked at Woodstock and didn’t like what they saw decided to reimpose bourgeois values — being self-disciplined, showing up on time, dressing neatly, being entrepreneurial, and believing in institutions. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the vigorous virtues.

James Q. Wilson, a famous Harvard sociologist, said, “The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I’ve witnessed over the last 20 years has been the deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry.”

I was sort of there for that too. I graduated from University of Chicago in 1983. William F. Buckley came to campus and I wrote a parody of him. At the end of the interview he says, “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I want to give you a job.” And that was the big break of my life. Sadly I was not in the audience — I had been hired by PBS to debate Milton Friedman on TV. I was then a socialist and Friedman was a Nobel Prize winner. You can imagine how well that debate went.

The 1990s were an age of cultural synthesis. The primary move was convergence. The Berlin Wall fell, communism fell, European unification came together, the Oslo peace process. I was a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in those days and I saw this convergence coming together.

I was in Moscow the day the Soviet Union tried to stage a coup and oust Boris Yeltsin. I met a woman named Valentina who was 93. She told me her life story — grew up in the household of the Tsar, lined up to be executed during the revolution, husband sent to the Gulag, two sons killed at Stalingrad, second husband taken in the night. Every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her.

Domestically, the great cultural move in the 1990s was an attempt to reconcile the bohemian values of the 1960s with the bourgeois values of the 1980s. Education was rewarded with money. The New York Times wedding page was called the mergers and acquisitions page — Princeton marries Yale, Goldman Sachs marries Skadden Arps, Fulbright marries Rhodes.

It was the emergence of a new educated class — people with bohemian values who were upper middle class. They wanted to show they didn’t care about money even though they made seven figures. They created Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s. They had these Viking stoves that looked like nickel-plated nuclear reactors and Sub-Zero refrigerators. It seemed like the culture wars were reconciled.

The 2000s produced a shocking loss of faith. 9/11 — we lost faith in our own safety. The Iraq war — we lost faith in our ability to do good abroad. The financial crisis — we lost faith in unregulated capitalism. The internet — we lost faith that communication would bring us together. Democracy stopped spreading and began a 26-year retreat. A loss of social connection. And finally, a loss of moral knowledge.

For the last 30 or 40 years, we have told successive generations of young people, find your own truth, come up with your own morality. And if your name is not Aristotle, you can’t do that. And so we left successive generations morally naked and alone.

In the 2000s interpersonal trust plummets. If you asked people “do you trust your neighbor?” 60% said yes. Today it’s 30% and 19% of millennials. And when you get that loss of trust you get surges of populism. Populism is a belief system for people who feel betrayed. Fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. Pew Research Center asked Gen Z and millennials, “Do you think most people are selfish enough to get you?” 72% agreed.

And they lost faith in the educated class. They saw the social chasm — by age three, affluent parents are twice as likely to send kids to preschool. By sixth grade, they’re four grade levels ahead. By 18, a kid in the top 20% has a one in five chance of scoring over 1400 on the SAT. A kid at the bottom has one in 50. People with high school degrees die 10 years sooner than people with college degrees. Five times more likely to have children out of wedlock, six times more likely to die of opioid addictions.

45% of high school students say they’re persistently hopeless. Only 13% of young people say America’s headed in the right direction. 69% of Americans said they didn’t believe in the American dream.

Humiliation is felt when people feel they are not granted equal standing they think they deserve. The Germans felt humiliated after World War I. The Arab nations after the Six-Day War. Bin Laden by American bases on his homeland. Russia after the Cold War. The China scholar William Callahan writes, “The master narrative of modern Chinese history is the discourse of the century of national humiliation.”

Domestically, a lot of people have felt humiliated — less educated people, rural people, religiously orthodox people, oppressed minority groups, struggling young people. Inner pain turns to outer hostility. Resentment begins with a feeling of impotence. I can’t control my own life. Someone has something I want. I feel unseen.

Max Scheler, a German philosopher of the early 20th century, said democratic capitalism is the perfect breeding ground for resentment. In cast societies, people don’t feel resentment because they don’t think they deserve to be at the top. In democratic societies, we all feel we deserve equal dignity. When you produce a society that advocates for equality but produces inequality, you get resentment.

Resentful people devalue the things they feel they lack. They develop a sour grapes response. Resentment creates a spiritual contraction — people cut off the loftier registers of human life. They said those things are not important.

Some values are higher than others — sensual pleasures, career success, friendship, wisdom, justice, holiness. The best life is an ardent life reaching upward. The problem with resentment is they do not even see the higher things. Scheler says, “Such people are self-poisoned.”

Donald Trump in France at the war cemeteries off the Normandy beaches couldn’t understand why anybody would sacrifice their life for a country. He said, “Those people are suckers.” A man who cannot even see the higher virtues. Donald Trump could never understand John McCain.

What you see on the right, but also on the left, is nihilism that believes whatever is lower is more real — selfishness, egoism, lust for power. Altruism, generosity, honor, integrity — those are mirages. People who are disillusioned give themselves permission to embrace brutality.

Steven Miller says international contracts are niceties, but life is about force, about power. Pete Buttigieg says no, life is about cooperation and friendship. In the Melian dialogue from Thucydides, the Athenians say the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That is essentially the position of resentful people who have cut off human values at a middle level.

Politicians find it easy to motivate people by appealing to dark passions — anger, hatred, fear, the search for scapegoats, and what St. Augustine called the libido dominandi, the urge to dominate.

Where are we headed? Could get worse. One of the things Democrats think is if we show that Trump is doing a bad job, voters will swing over. But voters are not swinging to Democrats. When Trump does a bad job, people don’t swing from right to left — they swing from crazy to crazier.

I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think people are going to realize this old paradigm ain’t working. They’re going to realize we’ve abandoned our humanistic core. Religious devotion, theology, literature, history, philosophy — all the things that nurture empathy and orient the soul toward justice and virtue are diminishing.

Humanism is the perfect antidote to nihilism. Anything that upholds the dignity of each person. When students read about Antigone trying to bury her brother, Lincoln rebinding the nation, Martin Luther King writing from the Birmingham jail — that’s humanism.

The most effective antidote to resentment is earnest admiration. Finding people whose lives are so impressive and so inspiring that it cracks through the feelings of resentment and distrust. You can’t argue people out of them. You have to show them there really are things worth dying for.

Does America have the vitality for one more cultural revolution? We seem a little demoralized right now. But when I ask people what made them who they are, nobody ever says vacation in Hawaii. They always point to a hard time — a moment of rupture and repair.

I read three books during my own rupture. Paul Tillich said moments of suffering reveal cavities below the basement of your soul. Henry Nouwen said you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you. Frederick Buechner said in moments of pain you can either be broken or broken open. When you’re broken open, you make yourself even more vulnerable, and only then are you capable of change.

In history, we have case after case — Britain in the 1820s and 1830s, Australia in the 1970s, Germany and Japan after World War II, South Korea in the 1980s, Rwanda after 1994, Chile after the 1990s. Look at how much American culture has changed in the last 70 years.

I was at a bar scrolling through Twitter a month after October 7th, through brutal images. And then I scrolled across an interview from the early 60s with James Baldwin. And Baldwin says, “There’s not as much humanity in the world as one would like, but there’s more than you would think. There’s enough.” And then he says, “Every person you see, that person could be you. You could be that person.”

James Baldwin had every right to be calloused over. But even in those circumstances, he was making a statement that’s the ultimate source of humanism. And the phrase that leapt in my mind was defiant humanism. That even in the cruelest and most resentful times, it’s possible to say, “No, I’m standing for the higher virtues.”

Q&A highlights:

On catalysts for cultural shift — Mr. Rogers and Ted Lasso. When the Mr. Rogers movie came out, people were crying. They liked that image of goodness. Ted Lasso took off because there was a guy who was good. His goal was not to win a championship but to help young fellas become better versions of themselves. People are hungering for that.

On the election of Monta Donnie — “I absolutely do. Watch that guy get interviewed. He smiles when he talks. He’s uplifting. He’s happy. He believes in the city. He believes in the people.” Brooks says he disagrees with him on policy but loves watching him talk.

On the No Kings demonstrations — impressed because joyful, self-disciplined protests put the regime in an impossible position. The civil rights movement was an example of this. But worries about it becoming too left-wing and losing broad appeal.

On Victor Frankl — Frankl learned in the concentration camps that the primary motivation of human beings is not status or money, it’s purpose and meaning. Abraham Maslow was wrong — poor people are just as interested in spiritual growth as rich people. Frankl says don’t ask what you want from life; ask what is life asking of you.

On Dorothy Day — assigned her book “The Long Loneliness” and 19 of 24 students picked it for their final paper. The best essays were written by atheists and orthodox Jews. An exemplar of defiant humanism and radical altruistic service.

On electing a woman president — doesn’t think sexism is the main barrier. Both Clinton and Harris had campaign flaws. A country that elected Barack Obama and admires Michelle Obama isn’t unready. The Democratic party pays too much attention to demographics and not enough to positions.

On the Democratic party — “Trump is very, very, very, very, very unpopular. Except next to the Democrats.” Politicians won’t lead cultural shifts — it happens among artists, writers, intellectuals. Culture has to shift before politics can follow. Trump could not have gotten elected in 1996 because the country wasn’t in a resentful mood.