DAVID BROOKS

Hatred has become the defining emotion of our political life. As my colleague Thomas B. Edsall reported last week, according to a recent paper, 42 percent of the people in each party regard their opposition as “downright evil.” Nearly 20 percent of both Democrats and Republicans believe that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.” Roughly 20 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans say that the world would be better off if large numbers of the other party died.

Some people believe that fire can be fought only with fire. We’ve got to face the world as it is. If the other side is going after you with full viciousness, you’ve got to find a leader who can do the same to them. This is a knife fight. We need a brawler.

This is the argument white evangelicals made in deciding to back Donald Trump. We’re under siege. He’ll fight for us.

And this is the argument many of the Democratic campaigns are already making. Republicans are irredeemable. Racism is ubiquitous. Capitalist greed is ubiquitous. We need someone who can match Trump blow for blow — the indignation of Bernie Sanders; the confrontational, prosecutorial style of Kamala Harris.

Other people are in the as-they-go-low-we-go-high camp. People in this group argue that if you meet fire with fire all you will do is unleash an inferno that will destroy everything you care about. If you descend to hatred you’ll turn yourself into a mirror image of what you detest.

People in this camp believe that we can change our laws only after we’ve changed our politics. Moreover, they believe that after Trump, Americans yearn for a moral cleansing. You succeed politically when you appeal to voters’ basic decency.

So far, Cory Booker is the candidate who has placed the biggest bet on this latter argument. He agrees with many of his rivals on policy, but he argues that how you behave is just as important as what you propose.

Three emotions run through Booker’s campaign. The first is an unabashed patriotism, and with it the conviction that despite our differences, Americans are still connected by sacred bonds.

“Patriotism is love of country, and you cannot love your country unless you love your fellow countrymen and women,” he told an Iowa audience in February. Republican or Democrat — we are brothers and sisters under the skin.

The second is the dogged but radical hopefulness that he inherited from the black church. Booker uses religious categories more naturally than any other candidate: grace, faith, sacrificial love, the command to love your neighbor as yourself, the awareness that love has a redemptive power to cast out fear. The gospels are pretty clear that the correct response to hate is love.

“Love means that I see you, I see your worth, I see your dignity,” Booker said at that rally last month. “Your destiny is my destiny.”

The third emotion is simple gratitude. Booker had to overcome challenges in life, and he has seen many more, but his family story is a success story. The church raised money for his grandmother to go to school. His parents worked at IBM. He was elected class president in high school before going off to Stanford and Yale Law.

Others see America’s institutions as systems of oppression, but Booker calls the founders “imperfect geniuses.” America needs reform, but our inheritance is a precious one.

The knife fight view is correct if you believe that war is our permanent state — if you believe that our evolutionary roots sentence us to inevitable tribal conflict and the only choice is conquer or be conquered.

But I’d say that Booker has a fuller and more realistic view of our situation. Fanaticism is not the normal human state. Fanaticism is a disease that grows out of existential anxiety. It grows when people fear that they are being delegitimized. It grows when people are isolated and insulated from one another. It grows when you have leaders, like our president, who reduce everything to us/them stereotypes and so poison the public mind.

The disease is in our context and not in our souls. And that context can be changed with better leadership.

I write this to you from Nebraska City, Nebraska, just over the Iowa line. I just had lunch with 15 locals, many probably Trump supporters and some probably not. But it didn’t come up. The idea that any of these good people are “downright evil” because of some political affiliation is ridiculous and a sign of how deranged our discourse has become.

When you’re in the midst of everyday life, the idea that you can deal with one group or another only through condemnation and attack is absurd. You don’t build a better society by turning yourself into a rotten human being.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e11dc369-5c43-4b4a-b707-e888732e81c1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/cory-booker-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

How do you answer hatred? How should you respond when your political opponents assault you with insult, stereotype and contempt? That’s the moral question we all have to answer during this election campaign.

Booker finds his moment

<h1>Agnes McKeen lives in Klamath Falls, Oregon. About three years ago, at 16, Agnes’ son Harrison took his own life.</h1>

“In losing Harrison I lost all direction for every ounce of love that a mother has for her child; I lost any idea of where to direct that love. Just because Harrison’s gone doesn’t mean my love for him went away,” she says.

“And I had to learn to love that which is not physically here. And now my son’s energy is woven into the fabric of the universe, and that’s where I directed my love. ... So now my love goes to the community.”

She expresses it by trying to help people prevent suicide and deal with the grief that comes in its wake.

You’ve probably seen the recent statistics about the suicide epidemic — that suicide rates overall have risen by over 30 percent this century; that teenage suicides are rising at roughly twice that rate; that every year 45,000 Americans kill themselves.

And yet we don’t talk about it much. It’s uncomfortable. Some people believe the falsehood that if we talk about suicide, it will plant the idea in the minds of vulnerable people. Many of us don’t know what to say or do.

A person may be at risk of committing suicide when he or she expresses hopelessness or self-loathing, when he or she starts joking about “after I’m gone,” starts giving away prized possessions, seems preoccupied with death, suddenly withdraws or suddenly appears calm after a period of depression, as if some decision has been made.

When you’re around somebody like that, don’t try to argue with her or him. Don’t say, “You have so much to live for!” Or, “Do you realize how much this will devastate the people around you?” If you gasp or act shocked you’ll burden the person with even more shame and guilt, pushing that person even harder to withdraw.

Sufferers will often lie about their plans. According to one study, 80 percent of suicide victims deny suicidal thoughts before killing themselves. The first thing to do, Agnes advises, is validate their feelings: “I can only imagine what you’re feeling right now.” Then ask directly: “Are you thinking about ending your life?” Remember, the person in front of you is only contemplating suicide because he thinks it is the only way to get out of the pain.

Your next job is to help them cope. People contemplating suicide are often in the grips of a temporary mood catastrophe, to which they unfortunately see a permanent solution.

The pain is real but not forever. Most people who attempt suicide and fail are later glad they failed. Get them to talk about the pain, so they can understand its contours. Ask them to record their thoughts in a journal. Over time most of them will see that there is a compulsive voice in their head telling them that they are worthless and that there is no hope, and that this voice is a lying voice.

The voice may be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Ask them to write down a life plan for those moments when the lying voice gets loudest: Whom will they call? Where will they go? Hang the contact information right on the wall. Don’t let such a person swear you to secrecy. You’re going to find more help. Try anti-suicide apps, like Tec-Tec, available through Apple or Amazon.

We also need to go broader. Suicide is a societal problem. It’s strongly associated with social isolation. Men die at higher rates than women, single people more than married people, rural people more than urban people, Native Americans and whites more than blacks or Latinos.

It’s also a values problem. Our individualistic culture means there are vast empty gaps in our social fabric where people suffer alone and invisibly. It’s also a guns problem. A lot of people die simply because at their lowest moment, there happened to be a gun around.

Agnes wrote to me that if you meet someone who has lost someone to suicide, there are better ways to begin a conversation. “SAY THEIR LOVED ONE’S NAME!” Share a memory. When you ask how the survivor is doing, don’t let her say, “It’s not about me.” Because it is, and about her recovery.

Agnes believes in professional help but says what’s really necessary is belonging and peer counseling, “people pouring their heart out, and it creates the mentality that, ‘if they can do it, I can do it.’ ... Give folks a feeling of hope that we can rise out of this and we can do it together.”

Her life has been messy, like a lot of lives, but Agnes has a hard-earned wisdom. “I woke back up after losing Harrison on Dec. 28, 2015. I was sitting on my front porch talking to Harrison like I still do. I said, ‘Gosh darn it, Harrison, didn’t you know how much I loved you!’ I felt him move through me. I could feel the warmth, like you get when you wrap your hands around a cup of coffee. And I heard him say, ‘Of course I know, Ma.’ I felt him.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="0584ffa4-5084-4937-87f2-87698070c9af" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/opinion/suicide-prevention.html">The New York Times</a>.

She expresses it by trying to help people prevent suicide and deal with the grief that comes in its wake.

How to fight suicide

<h1>I feel bad for Josef Stalin. He dreamed of creating a totalitarian society where every individual’s behavior could be predicted and controlled. But he was born a century too early. He lived before the technology that would have made being a dictator so much easier!</h1>

In the first place, he’d have much better surveillance equipment. These days most interactions are through a computer, so there is always an electronic record of what went on.

The internet of things means that our refrigerators, watches, glasses, phones and security cameras will soon be recording every move we make. In 2017, Levi Strauss made an interactive denim jacket, with sensors to detect and transmit each gesture, even as minimal as the lifting of a finger. Soon prosecutors will be able to subpoena our driverless cars and retrieve a record of every place they took us.

And this is not even to mention the facial recognition technology the Chinese are using to keep track of their own citizens. In Beijing, facial recognition is used in apartment buildings to prevent renters from subletting their apartments.

One Chinese firm, Yitu, installed a system that keeps a record of employees’ movements as they walk to the break room or rest room. It records them with blue dotted lines on a monitor. That would be so helpful for your thoroughly modern dictator.

In the second place, thanks to artificial intelligence, Uncle Joe would have much better tools for predicting how his subjects are about to behave. As Shoshana Zuboff wrote in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” when you are using Google, you are not Google’s customer. You are Google’s raw material. Google records everything you do; then it develops models that predict your behavior and then it sells those models to advertisers, which are its actual customers.

Thanks to this business model, some of the best minds in the world have spent tens of billions of dollars improving tools that predict personal consumption. This technology, too, has got to come in handy for any modern-day Stalin.

Third, thanks to big data, today’s Stalin would be able to build a massive Social Credit System to score and rank citizens, like the systems the Chinese are now using. Governments, banks and online dating sites gather data on, well, everybody. Do you pay your debts? How many hours do you spend playing video games? Do you jaywalk?

If your score is too low, you can get put on a blacklist. You may not be able to visit a museum. You may not be able to fly on a plane, check into a hotel, visit the mall or graduate from high school. Your daughter gets rejected by her favorite university.

Back in Stalin’s day, social discipline was so drastic. You had to stage a show trial (so expensive!), send somebody to the gulag or organize a purge. Now your tyranny can be small, subtle and omnipresent. It’s like the broken windows theory of despotism. By punishing the small deviations, you prevent the big ones from ever happening.

Fourth, you don’t have to go through all the trouble of staging a revolution. You just seduce people into a Faustian bargain. You offer to distract them for eight hours a day with animal videos and relatable memes, and they surrender their privacy to you and give you access to their brains.

As online life expands, neighborhood life and social trust decline. As the social fabric decays, social isolation rises and online viciousness and swindling accumulate, you tell people that the state has to step in to restore trust. By a series of small ratcheted steps, you’ve been given permission to completely regulate their online life.

This, too, is essentially what is happening in China.

As George Orwell and Aldous Huxley understood, if you want to be a good totalitarian, it isn’t enough to control behavior. To have total power you have to be able to control people’s minds. With modern information technology, the state can shape the intimate information pond in which we swim.

I don’t want to pretend that everything will be easy for the Stalin of the 21st century. Modern technology makes it easier to control people, but it also creates a mindset in which people get much angrier about being controlled.

When people have a smartphone in their hand, they feel that they should have a voice, that they should be broadcasting, that they should have agency and dignity. When they discover they are caught in an information web that is subtly dominating them, they react. When they realize that ersatz information webs can’t really create the closeness and community they crave, they react.

Angry movements and mobs arise spontaneously. What you get is a system of elite domination interrupted by populist riots.

Human history is a series of struggles for power. Every few generations, just for fun, the gods give us a new set of equipment that radically alters the game. We thought the new tools would democratize power, but they seem to have centralized it. It’s springtime for dictators.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8ac1a006-7b70-46b4-8e60-692e5c23d9d8" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/internet-technology-stalin-dictators.html">The New York Times</a>.

In the first place, he’d have much better surveillance equipment.

If Stalin had a smartphone

<h1>I’ve been traveling around the country for the past few years studying America’s divides — urban/rural, red/blue, rich/poor. There’s been a haunting sensation the whole time that is hard to define. It is that the racial divide doesn’t feel like the other divides. There is a dimension of depth to it that the other divides don’t have. It is more central to the American experience.</h1>

One way to capture it is to say that the other divides are born out of separation and inequality, but the racial divide is born out of sin. We don’t talk about sin much in the public square any more. But I don’t think one can grasp the full amplitude of racial injustice without invoking the darkest impulses of human nature.

So let’s look at a sentence that was uttered at a time when the concept of sin was more prominent in the culture. The sentence is from Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address. Lincoln had just declared that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. He was fondly hoping and fervently praying that the scourge of war would pass away. But then he added this thought:

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

There are a few thoughts packed into that sentence. First, there is a natural moral order to the universe. There is a way things are supposed to be — more important than economic wealth or even a person’s life.

Second, moral actions are connected to each other. If somebody tears at the moral order by drawing blood through the lash of slavery, then that wrong will have to be paid for by the blood of the sword. History has meaning. It’s not just random events.

Third, sin is anything that assaults the moral order. Slavery doesn’t merely cause pain and suffering to the slave. It is a corruption that infects the whole society. It is a collective debt that will have to be paid.

Fourth, sin travels down society through the centuries. Lincoln was saying that sometimes the costs of repairing sin have to borne generations after the sin was first committed.

From these thoughts we can appreciate the truth that while there have been many types of discrimination in our history, the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups.

Slavery and the continuing pattern of discrimination aren’t only an attempt to steal labor; they are an attempt to cover over a person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.

That injury shows up today as geographic segregation, the gigantic wealth gap, the lack of a financial safety net, but also the lack of the psychological and moral safety net that comes when society has a history of affirming: You belong. You are us. You are equal.

Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?

But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.

Coates’ essay seems right now, especially this part: “And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. … What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”

We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation — the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.

The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

This article originally appeared in <a id="018bb096-e53d-4df1-a689-bf7e6d14aee4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/case-for-reparations.html">The New York Times</a>.

One way to capture it is to say that the other divides are born out of separation and inequality, but the racial divide is born out of sin.

The case for reparations

<h1>The Brits and Canadians I know certainly love their single-payer health care systems. If one of their politicians suggested they should switch to the American health care model, they’d throw him out the window.</h1>

So single-payer health care, or in our case “Medicare for all,” is worth taking seriously. I have just never understood how we get from here to there, how we transition from our current system to the one Bernie Sanders has proposed and Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and others have endorsed.

Despite differences between individual proposals, the broad outlines of Medicare for all are easy to grasp. We would take the money we’re spending on private health insurance and private health care, and we would shift it over to the federal government through higher taxes in some form.

Then, since health care would be a public monopoly, the government could set prices and force health care providers to accept current Medicare payment rates. Medicare reimburses hospitals at 87 percent of costs while private insurance reimburses at 145 percent of costs. Charles Blahous, a former Social Security and Medicare public trustee, estimates that under the Sanders plan, the government could pay about 40 percent less than what private insurers now pay for treatments.

If this version of Medicare for all worked as planned, everybody would be insured, health care usage would rise sharply because it would be free, without even a co-payment, and America would spend less overall on health care.

It sounds good. But the trick is in the transition.

First, patients would have to transition. Right now, roughly 181 million Americans receive health insurance through employers. About 70 percent of these people say they are happy with their coverage. Proponents of Medicare for all are saying: We’re going to take away the insurance you have and are happy with, and we’re going to replace it with a new system you haven’t experienced yet because, trust us, we’re the federal government!

The insurance companies would have to transition. Lots of people work for and serve this industry. All-inclusive public health care would destroy this industry beyond recognition, and those people would have to find other work.

Hospitals would have to transition. In many small cities the local health care system is the biggest employer. As Reihan Salam points out in The Atlantic, the United States has far more fully stocked hospitals relative to its population and much lower bed occupancy than comparable European nations have.

If you live in a place where the health system is a big employer, think what happens when that sector takes a sudden, huge pay cut. The ripple effects would be immediate — like a small deindustrialization.

Doctors would have to transition. Salary losses would differ by specialty, but imagine you came out of med school saddled with debt and learn that your payments are going to be down by, say 30 percent. Similar shocks would ripple to other health care workers.

The American people would have to transition. Americans are more decentralized, diverse and individualistic than people in the nations with single-payer systems. They are more suspicious of centralized government and tend to dislike higher taxes.

The Sanders plan would increase federal spending by about $32.6 trillion over its first 10 years, according to a Mercatus Center study that Blahous led. Compare that with the Congressional Budget Office’s projection for the entire 2019 fiscal year budget, $4.4 trillion. That kind of sticker shock is why a plan for single-payer in Vermont collapsed in 2014 and why Colorado voters overwhelmingly rejected one in 2016. It’s why legislators in California killed one. In this plan, the taxes are upfront, the purported savings are down the line.

Once they learn that Medicare for all would eliminate private insurance and raise taxes, only 37 percent of Americans support it, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. In 2010, Republicans scored an enormous electoral victory because voters feared that the government was taking over their health care, even though Obamacare really didn’t. Now, under Medicare for all, it really would. This seems like an excellent way to re-elect Donald Trump.

The government would also have to transition. Medicare for all works only if politicians ruthlessly enforce those spending cuts. But in our system of government, members of Congress are terrible at fiscal discipline. They are quick to cater to special interest groups, terrible at saying no. To make single-payer really work, we’d probably have to scrap the U.S. Congress and move to a more centralized parliamentary system.

Finally, patient expectations would have to transition. Today, getting a doctor’s appointment is annoying but not onerous. In Canada, the median wait time between seeing a general practitioner and a specialist is 8.7 weeks; between a GP referral and an orthopedic surgeon, it’s nine months. That would take some adjusting.

If America were a blank slate, Medicare for all would be a plausible policy, but we are not a blank slate. At this point, the easiest way to get to a single-payer system would probably be to go back to 1776 and undo that whole American Revolution thing.

This article originally appeared in <a id="4bfcf80d-9f0e-4833-a0ed-bdc8ec6d9d72" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/medicare-for-all.html">The New York Times</a>.

Despite differences between individual proposals, the broad outlines of Medicare for all are easy to grasp.

The impossible 'Medicare for all'

<h1>I often wonder who didn’t love Donald Trump. I often wonder who left an affection void that he has tried to fill by winning attention, which is not the same thing. He’s turned his life into a marketing strategy. As Michael Cohen said in his testimony Wednesday, even the presidential campaign was a marketing campaign to build the Trump brand.</h1>

In turning himself into a brand he’s turned himself into a human shell, so brittle and gilded that there is no place for people close to him to attach. His desperate attempts to be loved have made him unable to receive love.

Imagine what your own life would be like if you had no love in it, if you were just using people and being used. Trump, personifying the worst elements in our culture, is like a providentially sent gong meant to wake us up and direct us toward a better path.

Nonetheless, his kind of life has an allure for other lonely people who also live under the illusion that you can win love and respect with bling and buzz. Michael Cohen was one of these people. He testified that in serving Trump he felt he was serving a cause larger than self. Those causes were celebrity and wealth.

He was like Donald Trump Jr. — living in Trump’s orbit, desperate for approval, not realizing that it would never come because Trump is incapable of hearing any cries except the roar of his own hungers.

Getting arrested seems to have been a good education for Cohen. He now realizes that Trump will not provide him with the sustenance he needs. I believe that Cohen basically told the truth in his testimony Wednesday, but I don’t believe that he is a changed man.

There is none of the purgation of self and transformation of spirit that happens among people who have truly been altered. He’s just switched teams and concluded that the Democrats can now give him what he wants, so he says what appeals to them. That may be progress, but it is not moral renewal.

Cohen has left the Thugs for Trump club and passed that baton to certain Republicans in the House. I would have loved to have been in the strategy session when the House Republicans decided to be incurious about Trump’s sins and crimes but to rip the skin off of Cohen.

Normal people have moral sentiments. Normal people are repulsed when the president of their own nation lies, cheats, practices bigotry, allegedly pays off porn star mistresses.

Were Republican House members enthusiastic or morose as they decided to turn off their own moral circuits, when they decided to be monumentally unconcerned by the fact that their leader may be a moral cretin?

Do they think that having anesthetized their moral sense in this case they will simply turn it on again down the road? Having turned off their soul at work, do they think they will be able to turn it on again when they go home to the spouse and kids?

This is how moral corrosion happens. Supporting Trump requires daily acts of moral distancing, a process that means that after a few months you are tolerant of any corruption. You are morally numb to everything. You end up where Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, blandly ended up Wednesday, in referring to the hush-money scheme: “I think it’s news we knew about.”

I’ve heard the rationalizations. This is gang warfare. We have to do everything we can to defend our team. The other team leaves us no choice. Those are the sorts of things people say to give themselves permission to yield to their venal ambitions. Those are the sorts of things rookies and amateurs say.

Professionals know that effectiveness in any realm, especially politics, depends on having some guiding and consistent integrity that people can trust, loyalty to something higher than your next appearance on Fox News or MSNBC.

Here is the commandment that experience teaches us: Immorality usually bites you in the ass. If you behave in a way that betrays relationship and obliterates the truth and erases your own integrity, you will sooner or later wind up where Michael Cohen has wound up — having ruined your life.

In “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck writes: “Humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last. ... A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: was it good or was it evil? Have I done well — or ill.”

That is the passage that confronts us as we decide to defend or condemn Trump. The moral drama is the central drama. Did you, at your crucial moment, side with generosity or greed?

This article originally appeared in <a id="1139e453-3ffd-437d-90b9-7c000df000a9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/opinion/michael-cohen-testimony.html">The New York Times</a>.

In turning himself into a brand he’s turned himself into a human shell, so brittle and gilded that there is no place for people close to him to attach. His desperate attempts to be loved have made him unable to receive love.

Morality and Michael Cohen

<h1>Ideas drive history. But not just any ideas, magnetic ideas. Ideas so charismatic that people devote their lives to them.</h1>

In his 1999 book, “The Real American Dream,” Andrew Delbanco described the different ideas that, at different stages, drove American history. The first stage in our history was driven by a belief in God. The Pilgrims came because God called them to do so. God’s plans for humanity were to be completed on this continent.

The second phase, through the 19th century, was organized around Nation. The pioneers were settling the West. It was the age of American exceptionalism. America was to be a universal nation, a home and model for all humankind, the last best hope of Earth.

The third phase, from 1960 to today, was organized around Self. Each individual should throw off constraints. The best life was the life of maximum self-expression, self-actualization and maximum personal freedom, economic as well as lifestyle.

We are now leaving the era of Self. The right and left now offer two different magnetic ideas. The Trumpian right offers Tribe. “Our” kind of people are under threat from “their” kind of people. We need to erect walls, build barriers and fight. The earlier American nationalism was about frontier; this is about the fortress. Tribalism is a magnetic idea that has mobilized people from time immemorial.

The left offers the idea of Social Justice. The left tells stories of oppression. The story of America is the story of class, racial and gender oppression. The mission now is to rise up and destroy the systems of oppression. This, too, is an electric idea.

The problem with today’s left-wing and right-wing ideas is that they are both based on a scarcity mindset. They are based upon us/them, friend/enemy, politics is war, life is conflict.

They are both based on the fantasy that the other half of America can be conquered, and when it disappears, we can get everything we want. They are both based on the idea that if we can just concentrate enough power in the centralized authoritarian state, then we can ram through the changes we seek.

So a lot of us reject these two ideas. A lot of us don’t want to live in a war society, whether it’s a tribal war or a class war. If the 2020 choice is between Donald Trump and a Democrat who supports the Green New Deal, I’d vote for any moderate alternative.

The problem with moderates has always been that they don’t have a magnetic idea. Recent moderation has been a bland porridge that defines itself by what it doesn’t like.

What is the core problem facing America today? It is division: The growing gaps between rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and less educated, black and white, left and right.

What big idea counteracts division, fragmentation, alienation? It is found in Leviticus and Matthew: Love your neighbor. Today’s left and right are fueled by anger and seek conflict. The big idea for moderates should be solidarity, fraternity, conversation across difference. A moderate agenda should magnify our affections for one another.

There are four affections that bind our society, and moderates could champion a policy agenda for each:

We are bound together by our love of our children. The first mission is to promote policies to make sure children are enmeshed in webs of warm relationships: child tax credits, early childhood education, parental leave, schools that emphasize social and emotional learning.

We are bound to society by our work. The second mission is to help people find vocations through which they can serve the community: wage subsidies, apprenticeship tracks, subsidies to help people move to opportunity, work councils, which are clubs that would offer workers lifelong training and representation.

We are bound together by our affection for our place. The third mission is to devolve power out of Washington to the local level. Out-radicalize the left and right by offering a different system of power, a system in which power is wielded by neighbors, who know their local context and trust one another. Create a national service program so that young people are paid to serve organizations in their community.

We are bound together by our shared humanity. The fourth mission is to embrace an immigration policy that balances welcome with cultural integration. It’s to champion housing and education policies that encourage racial integration. Neither left nor right talks much about racial integration anymore. But it is the prerequisite for national unity.

Moderation is not an ideology; it is a way of being. It stands for humility of the head and ardor in the heart. When you listen to your neighbor, you see how many perspectives there are and you’re intellectually humble in the face of that pluralism. When you listen to your neighbor, you see that deep down we’re the same and you hunger to deepen that connection.

Let the left and right stand for endless political war. The moderate seeks the beloved community. That, too, is a magnetic idea.

This article originally appeared in <a id="32b2ce93-cb9c-4419-a18f-a8e6238b0d81" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/opinion/moderate-politics.html">The New York Times</a>.

The second phase, through the 19th century, was organized around Nation.

An agenda for moderates

<h1>A crucial question of the Trump years has always been: Will our institutions hold? Will the legal, political and social institutions of American life be able to withstand the norm-destroying corruption of King Chaos?</h1>

The U.S. Congress has not fared well. Many Republicans have been supine while Donald Trump has shriveled congressional authority and shredded the rules of basic democratic behavior.

The American legal system, however, seems to be holding up pretty well. Even under the intense Trumpian pressure my Times colleagues described this week.

Robert Mueller is a solid rock in the face of waves of calumny. If anything, the investigators at the Southern District of New York seem to be picking up the pace. These investigations are being led, it should be noted, by Republicans.

The SDNY investigation seems to be zeroing in on the $107 million Trump inauguration extravaganza. From the hints dropped by the subpoenas, one gets the impression that the inauguration was a shambolic grabfest in which people with money tried to turn it into power and people who suddenly had power tried to turn it into money.

Some legal experts believe the inauguration is being aggressively probed as a racketeering operation — a continuing criminal enterprise, complete with mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and the rest.

So why aren’t the legal authorities wilting? One explanation: institutions and character. The legal institutions instill codes of excellence that are strong enough to take the heat. The people in authority have enough character to live up to those codes.

The head of the SDNY office is Geoffrey Berman, a Trump appointee. Berman has recused himself where that is appropriate and pushed ahead where that is appropriate. The people on his team are famously independent professionals.

Let’s just pick out one, to illustrate the type: the man Berman chose to be his deputy, Robert Khuzami.

Khuzami was born in Brooklyn (you can’t understand the Trump presidency without understanding the resentments and cultural geography of the New York boroughs) and raised in Rochester. According to a 2013 Times DealBook story, he was born into a bohemian family, with ballroom-dancer parents, a muralist sister and a drummer brother. They joke that Robert is the “white sheep” in the family.

He began college at the State University of New York at Geneseo before transferring to the University of Rochester. He supported himself as a dishwasher, bartender and overnight dockworker. He went to Boston University law school and his career took off.

Khuzami has served through three separate intense investigations. In the 1990s he was part of the team that prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” who led a foiled plot to blow up the United Nations and other landmarks. In 2009, in the wake of the financial crash, he was named head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, revitalizing a demoralized unit. And now he is part of a team taking on the president of the United States.

In between his government service, he’s taken lucrative private sector jobs, as general counsel for Deutsche Bank and as a partner at Kirkland &amp; Ellis.

Andy McCarthy was one of Khuzami’s fellow prosecutors in the Blind Sheikh case. In his book “Willful Blindness,” McCarthy describes Khuzami as fearless, dogged and willing to contend with the thorniest knots of evidence. In an email to me, McCarthy wrote that Khuzami “is as terrific as you may suspect he is.”

Over the years, Khuzami’s employees have generally described him as intimidating but likable. He was intimidating after the financial crisis. In the 2011 fiscal year, for example, the SEC brought a record 735 enforcement actions. In the same year, his division collected $2.8 billion in penalties and disgorgement.

His critics have often come from the left. Khuzami spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention, in defense of the Patriot Act. Some argue, plausibly, that as general counsel to Deutsche Bank from 2004 to 2009, he should have been aware of the financial shenanigans of that era. Others argue that since he’s been through the revolving door between the elite firms and big government, he’s actually been soft on Wall Street bigs, charging them penalties but not actually holding them responsible.

The critics may have a point. But when you look at Khuzami and the prosecutors like him, you see people who had been formed — who have been carved by institutions and experience for a moment and role like this.

Khuzami is a tested professional. He’s proved his skill at the highest levels. He’s a Wall Street and legal insider. He’s seen national security, Wall Street and white-collar corruption from all angles. And he’s a patriot. He’s given up lucrative jobs to serve.

The point of this is not to lionize Khuzami. He’s part of a team. There are teams like that spread anonymously throughout the U.S. government. They are clinging tenaciously to the old standards of right and wrong, to the Constitution and the rule of law. And if we get through this, it will be because of people like them.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9f9dbf42-836a-44f4-aea6-246c6ec19366" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/opinion/trump-investigation-robert-khuzami.html">The New York Times</a>.

The U.S. Congress has not fared well. Many Republicans have been supine while Donald Trump has shriveled congressional authority and shredded the rules of basic democratic behavior.

The lawyers who did not break

<h1>I start with the pain. A couple times a week I give a speech somewhere in the country about social isolation and social fragmentation. Very often a parent comes up to me afterward and says, “My daughter took her life when she was 14.” Or, “My son died of an overdose when he was 20.”</h1>

Their eyes flood with tears. I don’t know what to say. I squeeze a shoulder just to try to be present with them, but the crying does not stop. As it turns to weeping they rush out of the auditorium, and I am left with my own futility. What can I say to these parents? What can I say to the parents still around who don’t yet know they may soon become those parents?

This kind of pain is an epidemic in our society. When you cover the sociology beat as I do, you see other kinds of pain. The African-American woman in Greenville who is indignant because young black kids in her neighborhood face injustice just as gross as she did in 1953. The college student in the Midwest who is convinced that she is the only one haunted by compulsive thoughts about her own worthlessness. The Trump-supporting small-business man in Louisiana who silently clenches his fists in rage as guests at a dinner party disparage his whole way of life.

These different kinds of pain share a common thread: our lack of healthy connection to each other, our inability to see the full dignity of each other, and the resulting culture of fear, distrust, tribalism, shaming and strife.

On Dec. 7, 1941, countless Americans saw that their nation was in peril and walked into recruiting stations. We don’t have anything as dramatic as Pearl Harbor, but when 47,000 Americans kill themselves every year and 72,000 more die from drug addiction, isn’t that a silent Pearl Harbor? When the basic norms of decency, civility and truthfulness are under threat, isn’t that a silent Pearl Harbor? Aren’t we all called at moments like these to do something extra?

My something extra was starting something nine months ago at the Aspen Institute called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. The first core idea was that social isolation is the problem underlying a lot of our other problems. The second idea was that this problem is being solved by people around the country, at the local level, who are building community and weaving the social fabric. How can we learn from their example and nationalize their effect?

We traveled around the country and found them everywhere. We’d plop into big cities like Houston and small towns like Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and we’d find 25 to 100 community “Weavers” almost immediately. This is a movement that doesn’t know it’s a movement.

Some of them work at organizations: a veteran who helps other veterans with mental illnesses in New Orleans; a guy who runs a boxing gym in Appalachian Ohio, where he nominally teaches young men boxing, but really teaches them life; a woman who was in the process of leaving the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago when she saw two little girls playing with broken bottles in the empty lot across the street. She turned to her husband and said: We’re not moving away from that. We’re not going to be just another family that abandoned this place.

Many others do their weaving in the course of everyday life — because that’s what neighbors do. One lady in Florida said she doesn’t have time to volunteer, but that’s because she spends 40 hours a week looking out for local kids and visiting sick folks in the hospital. We go into neighborhoods and ask, “Who is trusted here?” In one neighborhood it was the guy who collects the fees at the parking garage.

We’re living with the excesses of 60 years of hyperindividualism. There’s a lot of emphasis in our culture on personal freedom, self-interest, self-expression, the idea that life is an individual journey toward personal fulfillment. You do you. But Weavers share an ethos that puts relationship over self. We are born into relationships, and the measure of our life is in the quality of our relationships. “We” precedes “me.”

Whether they live in red or blue America, they often use the same terms and embody the same values — deep hospitality, showing up for people, and keep showing up. They are somewheres, not anywheres — firmly planted in their local community. I met one guy in Ohio who began his work by standing in the town square with a sign: “Defend Youngstown.”

The phrase we heard most was “the whole person.” Whether you are a teacher, a nurse or a neighbor, you have to see and touch the whole person — the trauma, the insecurities and the dreams as much as the body and the brain.

But the trait that leaps out above all others is “radical mutuality”: We are all completely equal, regardless of where society ranks us. “I am broken; I need others to survive,” an after-school program leader in Houston told us. “We don’t do things for people. We don’t do things to people. We do things with people,” said a woman who builds community for teenagers in New Orleans.

Being around these people has been one of the most uplifting experiences of my life. Obviously, it’s made me want to be more neighborly, to be more active and intentional in how I extend care.

But it has also changed my moral lens. I’ve become so impatient with the politicians I cover! They are so self-absorbed! Social scientists tell us that selfishness is natural, people are motivated by money, power and status. But Weavers are not motivated by any of these things. They want to live in right relation with others and to serve the community good.

Their example has shown me that we don’t just have a sociological problem; we have a moral problem. We all create a shared moral ecology through the daily decisions of our lives. When we stereotype, abuse, impugn motives and lie about each other, we’ve ripped the social fabric and encouraged more ugliness. When we love across boundaries, listen patiently, see deeply and make someone feel known, we’ve woven it and reinforced generosity. As Charles Péguy said, “The revolution is moral or not at all.”

So the big question is: How do we take the success the Weavers are having on the local level and make it national? The Weavers are building relationships one by one, which takes time. Relationships do not scale.

But norms scale. If you can change the culture, you can change behavior on a large scale. If you can change the lens through which people see the world, as these Weavers have changed mine, then you can change the way people want to be in the world and act in the world. So that’s our job. To shift the culture so that it emphasizes individualism less and relationalism more.

Culture changes when a small group of people, often on the margins of society, find a better way to live, and other people begin to copy them. These Weavers have found a better way to live. We at Weave — and all of us — need to illuminate their example, synthesize their values so we understand what it means to be a relationalist and not an individualist. We need to create hubs where these decentralized networks can come together for solidarity and support. We need to create a shared Weaver identity. In 1960, few people called themselves feminists. By 1980, millions did. Just creating that social identity and that sense of mutual purpose is an act of great power.

I guess my ask is that you declare your own personal declaration of interdependence and decide to become a Weaver instead of a ripper. This is partly about communication. Every time you assault and stereotype a person, you’ve ripped the social fabric. Every time you see that person deeply and make her or him feel known, you’ve woven it.

We also need to have faith in each other. Right now, millions of people all over are responding to the crisis we all feel. We in the news media focus on President Donald Trump and don’t cover them, but they are the most important social force in America right now. Renewal is building, relationship by relationship, community by community. It will spread and spread, as the sparks fly upward.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c76ab093-a4f3-4604-841f-a16ba6087fbe" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/opinion/culture-compassion.html">The New York Times</a>.

Their eyes flood with tears. I don’t know what to say. I squeeze a shoulder just to try to be present with them, but the crying does not stop.

A nation of weavers

<h1>I’ve always thought Americans would come together when we realized that we faced a dangerous foreign foe. And lo and behold, now we have one: China. It’s become increasingly clear that China is a grave economic, technological and intellectual threat to the United States and the world order.</h1>

And sure enough, beneath the TV bluster of daily politics, Americans are beginning to join together. Mike Pence and Elizabeth Warren can sound shockingly similar when talking about China’s economic policy. Nancy Pelosi and Republicans sound shockingly similar when they talk about Chinese human rights abuses. Conservative and liberal policy thinkers can sound shockingly similar when they start talking about how to respond to the challenge from China.

For the past few decades, China has appeared to be a net positive force in world affairs. Sure, Beijing violated trade agreements and escalated regional tensions. But the Chinese economic explosion lowered our cost of living and expanded prosperity worldwide.

But a few things have now changed. First, instead of liberalizing, the Chinese regime has become more aggressive and repressive.

Second, the Chinese have changed their economic focus so that their economy can directly replace ours. The regime’s “Made in China 2025” policy is an attempt to go up the value chain and dominate high-tech industries like aerospace, robotics and biotech.

According to a report just released by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, China’s artificial intelligence industry has grown by 67 percent over the past year and has produced more patents than its U.S. counterparts. One estimate suggests China is investing as much as 30 times more capital in quantum computing than the U.S. My colleague Thomas L. Friedman notes that China already has the No. 1 and No. 3 drone manufacturers in the world, and it is way ahead of us on technologies like facial and speech recognition.

All this would be fine if China were simply competing, but it’s not. It’s stealing. A commission led by retired Adm. Dennis Blair and former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman estimated in 2017 that the annual loss to the U.S. economy from Chinese intellectual property theft was between $225 billion and $600 billion.

Some of the theft is done through hacking. Some of it is done by surreptitiously buying tech firms through shell companies in order to seize the technologies. Some of it is pure espionage and thuggery. Sometimes China offers to give American companies access to its markets in exchange for the technology, and then after China has digested the knowledge it closes off access. This is not competition. This is replacement.

Third, Beijing is trying to seize the controlling centers of the new tech economy. If China can set the standard for 5G communication and dominate artificial intelligence and quantum computing, then it will be able to write the rules and penetrate the fibers of our society and our lives in ways that we cannot match.

Fourth, the Chinese challenge is no longer just economic; it’s moral and intellectual. It’s a clash of two value systems. And many people around the globe now believe that Beijing’s values are better.

We used to think China would democratize. Wrong. We used to think the regime would liberalize. Wrong. We used to think the Chinese people would rise up and join the free democratic world. Wrong.

For the past few decades, China has appeared to be a net positive force in world affairs. Sure, Beijing violated trade agreements and escalated regional tensions.

DAVID BROOKS

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