Podcast: Depolarizing America

When thinking about the American people, columnist David Brooks is a glass-half-full kind of guy, but I, on the contrary, see the glass overflowing with goodness.

In his farewell column to The New York Times readers, Brooks wrote, “The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.”