The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:00:00 · Scott Galloway
[00:00:00] S0: Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. Whatever you're searching for, Yahoo Scout can turn hours of research into clear, trustworthy answers in seconds, keeping up with culture and navigating the ups and downs of parenting, planning a vacation, and more. Make sense of life's everyday questions and personal decisions with Yahoo Scout. Yahoo's personal finance page has been my home page for about thirty years. And so far, I find the user interface from Yahoo Scout really elegant, and I find the results to be really helpful, quite frankly. Go to scout.com to start exploring today. Support for the show comes from Canva. Say you're on the path to launch a brand new product, but there's one problem. You've yet to nail down the marketing visuals. So if your team's looking for a place to brainstorm in real time, Canva is exactly that place. With thousands of templates to choose from, all of you can work together to build compelling visuals for your launch. Every project is better when everyone's on the same page, and that starts on Canva. What will you Canva today? Find out at canva.com.
00:01:07 · Ina Garten, Scott Galloway, David Brooks
[00:01:07] S1: I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garner. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. [00:01:45] S0: Welcome to the four hundred and twentieth episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening? With the midterms this week, we're revisiting our May 2025 conversation with David Brooks about what happened to American conservatism. I think David brings just such a unique perspective on the GOP and sort of a bright, well lit corner of conservatism, if you will. And I went back and listened to this and think it's especially salient for the day we're in today. Anyways, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy this. And with that, here is David Brooks. David, where does this podcast find you? [00:02:21] S2: I am actually at home in Washington, DC. [00:02:24] S0: In DC. Well, it's, as I said off mic, I'm a big fan, and it took us a while to get you on the pod, but really appreciate you being here. [00:02:31] S2: Very happy to be here.
00:02:31 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
[00:02:31] S2: Very happy to be here. [00:02:32] S0: So let's bust right into it. You've been a lifelong conservative. Is there a version of conservatism left that you still recognize or believe in? Like, where... It feels... Democrats at least have a common enemy. Where do where do true conservatives go right now for leadership or some sort of touchstone?
00:02:54 · David Brooks
[00:02:54] S2: Yeah. I became a conservative in my twenties after being a police reporter in Chicago, and the two heroes for me were Edmund Burke, who was an Irish conservative statesman and philosopher, who believed that in epistemological modesty. The idea is the world is really complicated. And when we do change, we should do it constantly, but incrementally. And my other hero was Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip hop artist from Upper Manhattan. Now... And so Alexander Hamilton believed that progressives believe in government to enhance equality. And libertarians believe in limited government to enhance freedom. Hamiltonianism believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. And so those are the two north stars for me. And, of course, over the course of the Trump administration, I've come to believe that whatever conservatism is, it's not what Trump is producing. He's producing reactionary politics, something completely different. And so I went back to those books that I used to read from Edmund Burke and people like Isaiah Berlin and a guy named Michael Oakeshott, and I loved them all over again. I think the essential conservative truths are still very profound, but they are nothing like what is called conservatism today. There is nothing like Fox News. And I go back to one moment in my formation where now in retrospect, it looks like there was a crucial fork in the road. I came out of the University of Chicago, and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books. And I worked in National Review, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Weekly Standard, and we believed in promulgating conservative ideas. At the same time I graduated from Chicago, there were a couple people graduating from Dartmouth who had worked at the Dartmouth Review. And people may recognize Laura Ingram, Dinesh D'Souza, they were in this group. And I've come to see they were not pro conservative. They were anti left. They were in elite institutions, but they hated the progressive lean of those institutions. And so they were sort of the rebel bad boys. The defining feature of the Dartmouth Review was in 1986, some progressive students on Dartmouth's campus erected a a shantytown to protest apartheid. In the middle of the night, the editors of Dartmouth, about a dozen of them, descended on the shantytown and took sledge shammers to them.
00:05:11 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
And it was attempt to dismantle the left, really. And to me, it was like gestapo tactics. I was shocked and appalled because apartheid really is worth protesting. But I've come to see that difference between being pro conservative, which I would say John McCain was, Mitt Romney was, George W Bush was, and anti left, which is what Lorian Grimm is, which is what Pete Hegseth is, what is what Vivek Ramaswamy is. That to me is a crucial difference. [00:05:37] S0: You had a recent essay in The Atlantic titled I Should Have Seen This Coming, and you write about how people were once drawn to conservatism by a set of values. But now it's about dominance and rage. It feels as if the right has conflated some perverted form or sense of masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. How did that come about from a group of people that has typically been more aligned with, I don't wanna say Christian values, but religious values that are meant to be more charitable than, quite frankly, these heathen hippies from the left? Like, how did it get so mean?
00:06:16 · David Brooks
[00:06:16] S2: Yeah. Resentment, a sense of siege mentality, and then there's something animistic deep in human nature. And so when humans first evolved, we were in a war of a struggle of all against all. Life was nasty, brutish, and short. And then over the course of the centuries, we built civilization. And that civilization consisted of constitutions to restrain power. It consisted of international systems to try to promote peace, but it also consisted of humanistic values, literature, and art and poetry to soften human nature. It consisted of moral philosophies, either theological or secular, to answer the question, what is life for? And when I look at the Trump administration, I see a massive attempt to return us to the life of dog eat dog, the life of nasty British and short, the life where gangsters have maximum freedom to do what they wanna do. And that is the evisceration of all the values of civilization that conservatism is supposed to transmit and preserve. And I think the raw lust for power that Donald Trump embodies has not only eviscerated conservatism, it's invigorated Christianity. Christianity is a system designed around the meek, service to the poor. Jesus never embraced worldly power. Donald Trump is completely about worldly power. It's about domination. And so it's been interesting to me to watch a political leader eviscerate the two philosophies that he claims to stand for, both conservatism and Christianity, and such as the acidic power of nihilism.