David Brooks: Why America’s Decline Story Is 75% Bonkers (#267)

I'm going to ask David Brooks, my guest today, to begin this episode by reading aloud from one of his wonderful recent articles.

David, please go ahead.

There's a story haunting American politics.

It's a story told by right-wing populists like Donald Trump and J.D.

Vance, and left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders.

The story goes something like this.

There once was an America in the 1950s and 1960s that made stuff.

People could go off to work work in factories and earn a decent middle-class wage.

Then claimed globalization, the era of market-worshiping neoliberalism.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, America signed free trade agreements like NAFTA.

China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Jobs were shipped overseas, factories shut down.

The rich prospered while members of the working class got pummeled and ended up voting for Trump.

The problem with this story is that it's 75% bonkers, historically inaccurate on nearly every front.

That is quite a story, one that has shaped American politics across the spectrum.

But as David Brooks has said, it's also 75% bonkers.

I'm eager to dig into what's true, what's false, and what it all means.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.

On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists.

Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Today I'm delighted to be with David Brooks.

He's a Canadian-born American author, political and cultural commentator, and columnist at the New York Times.

He began his career as a police reporter in Chicago before moving on to senior positions at the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Atlantic, NPR, and PBS.

His latest book, which is wonderful, is How to Know a Person.

I always look forward to his New York Times columns, and I'm so glad he's with us today.

Welcome, David, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways.

Great to be with you.

Thank you.

David, as you just read, there's a powerful story told by both the left and right-wing populace about globalization, free trade, and free markets destroying American manufacturing and hollowing out the working class.

How much of that story is true and how much is myth?

It's maybe 25% true, I'd say.

Here's the thing, I think that story gets wrong.

It imagines that there was some period of libertarian market-worshiping globalization and neoliberalism.

The problem is that in that era, which is generally thought to be the era in in the 90s to early 2000s, federal spending on social programs went up, not down.

Government policy became more progressive, favoring those down the income scale, not less.

And the economy grew more regulated, not less.

U.S.

tariff rates were basically the same.

That era of like Obama and Clinton, it was not libertarian paradise.

It was a group of Democrats, at least in those two presidencies, that tried to create a growing economy and then use government to make it a little more civilized.

And so there never was a pure neoliberal era.

The second problem is that it gets the chronology wrong.

America really did deindustrialize and working class people really did get pummeled.

But that happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, not in the 1990s or 2000s, the alleged neoliberal era.

Noah Smith, who's an economics writer who writes wonderful substack, divides recent American economic history into three periods.

There was the period from 45 to 73, which was a period of broad prosperity.

Then there was the period from 73 to 94.

That's when jobs really got hammered.

That's when we de-industrialized.

And then there was a period from 1994 to today when wage growth has gone up, when standard of living gone up, when the American economy has surged ahead of the European economies.

And so that period of neoliberalism is actually the period when we're doing reasonably well.

And the third problem with the story, it exaggerates how much foreign competition has hurt American workers.

Yeah, there really was a China shock, and we really did lose some jobs to China.

But American manufacturing has always been, or at least in the modern era, a pretty small part of our entire economy.

And global trade, we're not an export-import economy.

We're not like China or Germany.

We're pretty much a domestic economy.

Most of our economic activity is with each other.

So globalization really didn't have that devastating effect.

And so that's why I think the story is basically wrong.

And the final upshot is that it underestimates how well we're doing.

It tells people a false story when economically we're not doing too terribly.

As I said, the American economy and the Economist magazine points this out regularly.

It's surging ahead.

Wages are growing with people at the bottom seeing faster wage growth than the top.

Now, everything's not hunky-dory, but if you want to know where the pain in our society, in my view, it's not in economics.

It's a social pain.

It's a spiritual pain.

One of the big stories to me of the recent years of the 21st century has been the disconnect between economic performance and social performance.

And let me just close with one little study that I found fascinating on the subject.

It was done very recently by the Gallup organization.

They asked people all around the world, do you feel like you're flourishing or languishing?

And all around the world, people say, I feel like I'm flourishing.

In almost every country, people say, my life is getting better.

I'm flourishing.

The society I'm living in is in better shape than it was.

And so you see this surge in global optimism.

But there are two regions not seeing a surge where everything's going south in the wrong direction.

And what are those regions?

North America and Western Europe, the rich nations.

In America, for example, 20 or 30 years ago, 67% of Americans said, yes, I'm flourishing.

Now, only 49% say that.

So that indicates that our problem is not an economic problem.

Our problems are about sociology.

They're about psychology.

They're about spirituality.

They're about morality.

And that's really where the core problems we should be thinking about are.

Many argue that it's time to turn away from globalization and free market capitalism.

Do you think that's the right move or is it a dangerous over-correction?

I think it's generally a dangerous overcorrection.

I'm still a free trader.

I'm sobered by what's happened in the industrial Midwest in particular.

And you can talk to an economist for why free trade is still a good thing.

But I'll just say historically, If you look at countries that have done well, and at moments at their peak, when they're proud, they're growing, they're dynamic.

And I'm thinking of Venice in the Renaissance.

I'm thinking of Florence a few centuries later.

I'm thinking Britain in the 19th century.

I'm thinking America in the 20th century.

What do all these things have in common?

They're crossroads nations.

They're places where ideas and products and people are flowing in and out.

And to me, that's been America's greatest strength.

that people, products, and ideas flow in and out.

And it's all a big scramble, all a big mix.

We are a network society.

People used to say we're a universal nation.

And what they meant by that is we have people from all over the world.

That's one of the keys to American success.

So to walk away from that and to try to build walls around yourself, either economic or cultural or even physical walls, to me that's just not the strength of any successful civilization.

If populism and protectionism continue to dominate, not just in America, but globally, what do you think the next generation will face?

Well, you can see what they're already facing, which is pessimism and despair.

There's a favorite saying of mine from the attachment theorist, the psychologist, John Bowlby, who was a British guy from the 20th century.

And he said, all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.

And so people need a secure base if they're going to go out and be entrepreneurs, if they're going to do anything that involves some risk, if they're going to do anything that involves some courage.

And in my explanation of what's happened in society is that secure base base has been robbed of people.

And that secure base consists of being surrounded by a loving family, having lots of friends, and being surrounded by a coherent moral order.

Something weird is happening in which Americans are getting sadder.

And you can see then the rising depression rates, the rising suicide rates, the number of people who say they have no close personal friends is up by fourfold since 2000.

The number of people who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000.

I just described to you the numbers of people who say they're flourishing is down sharply, and the numbers who say they're struggling in life is up sharply.

And so that sadness to me comes from social isolation more than anything else.

But the one part that I think gets underdiscussed is the sense that people live in a moral order.

For people to experience meaning in their life, they've got to have a sense they're contributing to some good.

and that they know the difference between right and wrong.

And if they're struggling to fight some injustice, they've got to know that the thing they regard as an injustice is truly wrong.

There's a historian named George Marsden who said about Martin Luther King that what gave his rhetoric such force was the conviction that right and wrong are not just arbitrary things, but they're written into the fabric of the universe.

That slavery is not wrong in some places.

It's wrong everywhere and in all cases.

Segregation is not wrong in some places.

It's universally wrong.

It is evil.

And so King had that moral order.

I think over the last 60 or 70 years, we've privatized morality.

We've told people to come up with their own values based on their own emotions.

And most people can't do that.

And when you privatize morality, you leave people without a coherent moral order.

And you can't trust anybody because trust is bared on shared values.

And this was observed very early by a great columnist named Walter Lippmann.

And Lippmann wrote way back in 1955, if what is right and wrong is based on each individual's feelings, then we have left the realm of civilization.

And it took many decades for leaving the realm of civilization to come true, but I think it has now.

And we've lived in a world of privatized morality.

And that's a world that's lonelier, that's disconnected, where people really struggle for a sense of purpose and meaning.

And what do you think has happened socially and culturally in addition to this decline in individual morality?

I think what's happened socially is people are disconnected.

So 36% of people say they feel lonely most of the time.

45% of high school students say they feel persistently hopeless.

I talk to young people and some are, you know, I teach a lot in universities and some are doing well, obviously.

And I had a kid come up to me not long ago and say, we're the most rejected generation.

He said, we have to apply to 20 schools to get into one because, you know, a lot of the colleges now accept like 4% of the applicants.

And then if you want an internship, a summer internship, you have to apply to 250 to get that internship because the rejection rates are so high.

Goldman Sachs has 3,000 interns to summer, but they get 330,000 applicants.

And then you get a job.

And I've known so many young people now who are in the Indeed hell, where they're applying to hundreds and hundreds of jobs through Indeed.

And something about the labor market is broken.

And so that rejection is bound to have an effect on you.

If you're rejected socially, if you reject it economically, you know, people who feel rejected feel risk averse and they feel scared.

And that's one problem.

And the second problem is just a sense of why is there a rise in mental health?

There's a group called FHIR, which advocates for free expression on campus.

They did a survey of students on college campuses.

And of those who call themselves very conservative, 35% said they suffer from mental health problem most of the time.

Of those who call themselves very liberal, 57% call themselves suffering from mental health problem most of the time.

These are truly horrendous numbers.

That's a hard way to go through life.

And I think part of it comes from the collapse of trust.

And to me, that's one of the reasons America's really been struggling.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And if people believe that most people are out to get them, then if you extrapolate that, that explains the numbers, the polls that say that a majority of Americans say the country's in decline, the system is broken, and leaders don't care about ordinary people.

Yeah, and there was another poll done two years ago by Ipsos, and they asked people all around the world, is your country in decline?

And Americans were very average.

Over 60% said our country's in decline.

More than 60% say the experts don't get people like me.

So you see why populism is a thing,

because people think their country is broken, everything is chaotic, and they need a strong leader willing to break the rules to restore order.

And so global populism is not just an American thing, obviously.

Every country pretty much has a Donald Trump, whether they call her Georgia Maloney or Nigel Farage or Victor Orbon or, frankly, Vladimir Putin.

Global populism is caused by, first, what I've been describing, I think, the decay of society.

And second, that the decay is not equally distributed.

That along with the social breakdown, we've had a widening class chasm.

And the crucial thing there is we used to have a class chasm on the basis of income.

And you could predict how somebody was going to vote or behave on the basis of income.

That's no longer really true.

What is true is you can predict how they'll vote or behave based on education levels.

And so we have a caste society that divides those who went to college and those who didn't.

And those who went to college live 12 years longer than those who didn't.

They're five times less likely to die of opioid addiction.

They're much more likely to say they're happy.

And the thing that gets me is people in the working class without a college degree, they're 2.5 times more likely to say they have no friends.

So why would this college divide, why would it yield this longevity gap of 12 to 15 years, a friendship gap, and then an education performance gap?

The children of the college educated by sixth grade are four grade levels above the children of the less educated.

Daniel Markovitz teaches at Yale Law School.

He wrote a great book a couple of years ago called The Tyranny of Merit.

And he pointed out the education achievement gap between the college educated and the children of the non-college non-college educated is now greater than the achievement gap between blacks and whites in the era of Jim Crow.

That was a disgrace and a shame on our country.

And yet we've replicated it.

We've created an achievement gap that's even bigger based on whether you were fortunate enough to grow up in a home with college educated parents or less.

It's a class gap.

And so people who haven't gone to college, they look around and say, society's rigged.

I don't see myself in the media.

I don't see myself on the university campuses.

And so I'm going to flip the table.

And that's what populism is.

David, you've talked about all different kinds of crises.

A moral crisis where people no longer see morality as black and white, if you will.

It's no longer clear.

You've talked about an education crisis where there's an education elite.

You've talked about a social crisis where people are isolated.

And a crisis in trust, trust in people not being out to screw you or take advantage of you, and a decline in trust in institutions.

How do we fix all this?

Oh, it's impossible.

We should just, you know,

I'm actually quite optimistic.

And I say this because think about when you grew as a person.

And I ask people, you know, what made you who you are?

Nobody ever says to me, you know, I went on this vacation in Hawaii.

It was fantastic.

And that made me the person I am today.

Like, nobody ever says that.

They all point to a hard time in their life when they had to get through it, often with the help of others.

And so in our own personal growth, it's rupture and repair.

And for folks who are married, your marriage is built out of periods of rupture and repair.

You have fights or whatever, but you repair and it gets stronger.

And in my view, American history is a story of periods of rupture and repair.

The 1770s, we really had to tear society apart.

And it was not a happy story to live in 1770s America.

The 1830s, the age of Andrew Jackson populism.

This was the age of an Indian Deportation Act.

This was the age of strong populism.

Brutal period to live through.

Civil War, no walk in the park.

1890s.

We really failed at trying to cope with industrialization for several decades.

The 1880s and 1890s were a period of the second longest American depression.

They were an era of lynching and racial terrorism, massive political corruption, widening inequality in the cities, concentrated poverty, and eventually America repaired it.

The 1960s, they were no joke either.

There was assassinations and riots, and yet we recovered.

And I look at each of these periods, I think we go through rupture, but we repair.

Cultures fix themselves.

And so I think we've gone through a probably necessary period of rupture, but we're going to repair it.

What do you see as the most urgent questions facing us today?

How do you repair a society that's broken?

And how do you find morality that we can believe in?

There was a book in the 1980s by a guy at Chicago named Alan Bloom called The Closing of the American Mind.

He talked about moral relativism.

And I look back on when he was writing in the 1980s, and that seems like a stroll through the garden compared to what we're living through today.

Because we don't have moral relativism, sort of a soft, bland moral relativism.

We have, first, nihilism.

a loss of belief in anything.

And second, people using politics to fill a hole in their soul.

So they want to feel righteous, so they go to politics.

They want to feel belonging and they go to politics.

But asking politics to fill a hole in your soul is asking more of politics than it can do.

You think you're trying to find some sense of purpose in your life by being really active and really partisan, but you're just entering an endless culture war.

And if you don't have a shared morality, you can't ever solve your debates because you have no criteria upon which to solve them.

And so the debates just get louder and louder and louder.

And so I think a core challenge is we're not a Christian country.

We're a pluralistic country with people from all religions and no religion.

How do we create a shared sense of values?

How do we do that in such a diverse country?

And I think it's very doable.

If we can have basic morality, everyday morality, on how to treat each other with consideration and respect in the normal circumstances of life, That would go a long way to helping the problem of trust, helping the problem of loneliness and all the various angers that are floating around society.

That is wonderful.

David, what are the three takeaways you would like to leave the audience with today?

My first takeaway is there's a disconnect between our economic problems and our social problems.

And right now our social problems are worse.

My second takeaway is rupture and repair.

The idea that any relationship in any nation goes through periods when it suffers a rupture and it does repair and gets gets stronger.

And we're going to do that.

My third takeaway is we're not in a political crisis.

We're in a moral and social crisis.

And you have to think about turning around an entire historic tide that is causing people like Donald Trump and Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin to run the world.

And in my view, we need a different kind of leader.

Thank you, David.

This has been wonderful.

I always look forward to your columns.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure to be with you.

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I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.

Thanks for listening.