David Brooks wrote an essay in the Atlantic recently focusing on support and acceptance for those supporting President Trump now and more importantly voting for him in the 2024 election.
Central to the theme developed by David Brooks is a Scot-American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre who died this year at advanced age. His most visible work written years ago is After Virtue. In this work he deprecates the efforts of the Enlightenment thinkers who were central to our founding. In his analysis the big promise of rationalism he concludes has not been met, but he still sees them as redeeming compared to relativistic or emotional denials of moral rationality. This seems to be a theme of effectiveness.
Though he began influenced by Marxism, he became Catholic and adopted Aristotelian ethics with its analysis grounded in purpose rather than origin for good and of moral actions. Because he views them as a solid foundation, Macintyre questions rights-based philosophies when it prioritizes individual autonomy over communal goods or virtues.
In a recent McIntyre essay “On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century”, natural law begins with the question “What is it to be a good human being?” He suggests that a stable legal environment is one of the goods necessary for human flourishing inter alia. Implied in After Virtue, “a good human being is someone who develops and embodies virtues – character traits such as courage, justice, temperance, wisdom and honesty.” These are not abstract but “cultivated’ through participation in cooperative human activities with internal goods not just external rewards. The practical key to good governance is then based on the theme of balance and effectiveness.
With my effort to understand DJT, reviewing his work The Art of the Deal is autobiographical in great measure, but contains key assumptions. Paramount is “incredible, overarching ambition.” The book focuses on tactics that can be used in making a deal to improve the result – potentially making it into the greatest of all time, that is the most enriching.
His code does not imply Enlightenment values or even the Aristotelian ethics of McIntyre. Instead, it appears to contain a series of amoral, practical, tactical imperatives he allegedly learned from Roy Cohn: 1. Attack, attack, attack, 2. Admit nothing, deny everything, 3. Never admit defeat – claim victory.
The deeper more foundational building blocks underlying historical political initiatives are generally absent from DJT considerations. This is why to many the policies of the administration appear amazingly reactive – effectively scratching ancient itches. They appear not to arise from a coherent framework, but instead from accumulated grievance.
This is what David Brooks grapples with and his final consideration is to endorse pluralism. He likely is looking for a path towards solution countering the effects of a vapid, chaotic, amoral period of American history only partially ascribable to DJT. “In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values” And also, “We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community”
For David Brooks, because of the amoral tenor of the era, the search is for unifying principles. None are apparent so he looks to a well-established moral thinker for insight and finds instead an analysis challenging the Enlightenment philosophies foundational to our Republic. The era is focused on grievance, not rational consensus, so a final option is to endorse pluralism and hope folks can walk and chew gum at the same time when considering the competing narratives of various partisan, social media platforms.
More likely with this approach we will not reduce the polarization within America but potentially increase the complacency and lack of accountability.
