The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
00:07:51 · Scott Galloway, David Brooks
[00:07:51] S0: You summarized... I remember after January 20, I was... I think a lot of us on the left just felt sort of flummoxed and flat footed. We did not even know how to describe or even process what we were feeling. And you summarized it perfectly. You said that you you felt moral shame, that to watch the loss of your nation's honor is embarrassing and painful. What do you think we lost that day? [00:08:15] S2: 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 twenty five million lives in Africa who might have otherwise died of HIV. And so we made our mistakes like Vietnam and Iraq, but they were straight... 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 in... With JD Vance in that Oval Office, I I had experienced an an 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 a horror of incompetence. These are new experiences, new and shocking experiences.
00:09:23 · Scott Galloway
[00:09:23] S0: Yeah. As as... Well, I think a lot of moderates try and find their political home base. I think I've... I yeah. 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, 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. They're... They... But we just often take things too far. We let 250,000 people across the border in December of twenty third, inspiring an overreaction where we start basically... 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 to some of this our fault.
00:10:30 · David Brooks
[00:10:30] S2: Oh, absolutely. You know, I would say one flaw. And now when where I position myself, I I read one of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin, 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 the with moderate or to the Democrats, I guess, but I am the conservative version of that. And 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. But the ultimate sin for me that progressives committed over the last seventy years is they created worlds in the universities and in the media and the cultural institutions and the nonprofits where there was no room for voices that were working class voices, and there was no room for conservative voices. So when I joined journalism as a police reporter, I worked around lot of high school grads. Journalism had a strong working class component in those days. And when I went to college, there was mostly progressives, but there were a lot of conservatives around. Over the ensuing forty years, that's been purged. And as far as I know, if you look at the editorial staff of the major mainstream media organizations, there's not a single Trump supporter in an editorial position as far as I know. And so if you tell half the country that your voices are not worth hearing, they're gonna flip the table. And worse, if you create a meritocratic system where the children of the rich have advantages in getting to the Ivy League schools over the children of the poor, and that goes on generation after generation, they're gonna flip the table. And one of the things that disturbs me most about American life is how we've developed a caste system. So college educated people live fifteen years longer than high school educated people. High school educated people are five times more likely to die of opioid addiction, five times more likely to have kids out of wedlock, 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends. And so we've created this class divide on the basis of education.
00:12:40 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
And it was mostly progressives who were in charge of our educational institutions so that fixing that problem is one of the things I think progressives have to have to work on. [00:12:51] S0: Yeah. I think a lot about this, and the way I describe what you just described is this magic drug that does all the wonderful things you're talking about if you take it. And yet we as progressives who run these institutions have decided to hoard this drug through artificial scarcity, that America has become a rejectionist kind of LVMH exclusionary culture. That once I have a house, I get very concerned with traffic and show up and make sure no one else can build a house because the incentive is to see the value of my house go up. Once I have a college degree, I kind of enjoy hearing that the admissions rate has gone from seventy six percent to nine percent, which is my alma mater, UCLA. Do you think that there's this virus that infects Democrats and Republicans where we've decided once you get there, pull up the bridge behind you. There were more LVMH than what was originally envisioned for America.