Read the full transcript of author David Brooks’s talk titled “How The Elite Rigged Society (And Why It’s Falling Apart)” at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 on Feb 18, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Confession
DAVID BROOKS: So I have a confession to make. I’m a member of the educated elite. My parents were historians of Victorian England. Our turtles when I was growing up were named Israeli and Gladstone. The culture in our home was think Yiddish, act British.
Very stiff upper lip. We showed no emotion. And then when I was seven, I read a book called “Paddington the Bear” and decided I wanted to become a writer. And that was central to my identity ever since in high school, which you call like fourth form or something like that. I wanted to date a woman named Bernice and she didn’t want to date me.
She dated some other guy. And I remember thinking, what is she thinking? I write way better than that guy. And so those were my values.
And then when I was 18, the admissions officers at Columbia, Wesleyan and Brown universities decided I should go to the University of Chicago. And some of you may know the saying about Chicago, it’s where fun goes to die. My favorite thing about Chicago, it’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas.
So it’s very educated elite. And I fit right in. I had a double major at Chicago in history and celibacy while I was there. And then after school, I got a job where an educated elite person should get a job. I was hired to be the conservative columnist of the New York Times, a job I likened to being the chief rabbi at Mecca. Not a lot of company there.
And then I got a job on PBS, which is our PBS NewsHour, which is our version of Newsnight. And again, educated elite. We have a wonderful audience, somewhat seasoned. And so if a 93-year-old lady comes up to me at the airport, I know what she’s going to say. “I don’t watch your program, but my mother loves it.”
The Good and Bad of the Educated Elite
So we members of the educated elite did some good things. We created the internet, brunch and mocktails. You’re welcome. We did some bad things.
We designed a meritocracy designed around the skills we ourselves possess and rigged the game so we succeeded and everybody else failed. By age 12, American children of affluent kids are four grade levels above everybody else. By university age, rich kids are 77 times more likely to go to university or die going to university than kids from poor schools. In adulthood, 54% of the people at elite workplaces went to the same 34 elite colleges.
So we ended up creating a caste system. People with high school degrees die nine years sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees are five times more likely to have kids out of wedlock. People with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends.
So we created a caste system, even though we pretend to be egalitarian. But the worst things we did were not material. America has a very strong economy. The worst things we did were spiritual. We privatized morality and destroyed the moral order. George Marston is a great historian who said, what gave Martin Luther King’s rhetoric its power was the sense there’s a moral order built into the universe.
That if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If segregation is not wrong, nothing is wrong. We took that essential moral order that holds people together and we decided it’s up to you to find your own truth. Find your own values.
Back in 1955, a great American journalist named Walter Lippmann understood this was going to be a big problem. He said “if what is right and wrong depends on what each individual feels, then we are outside the bounds of civilization.”
The Sad Society
And so without a strong moral order, it’s hard to have trust. It’s hard to find your meaning in life. And so America, and I think Britain too, has become a sadder society. Rise in mental health, rise in suicide. 45% of high school students say they are persistently hopeless and despondent.
Since 2000, the number of Americans without close personal friends is up by fourfold. Since 2000, the number of people who say they are in the lowest happiness category is up by 50%. We’ve just become sadder. The third thing the educated elite has done, and this may not please you, is we produced Donald Trump. Some people think Donald Trump is a populist. Donald Trump and Elon Musk went to University of Pennsylvania and Ivy League school and became billionaires.
J.D. Vance went to Yale. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Yale. Stephen Miller went to Duke. Fox News types like Laura Ingraham went to Dartmouth. And they represent the educated elite. And the key factor of the educated elite is that they’re not pro-conservative. They’re anti-left. They don’t have a positive vision, a conservative vision for society.
They just want to destroy the institutions that the left now dominates. And this means, in the first place, they’re astoundingly incompetent. I have a lot of sympathy with what drove people to vote for Trump, but I’m telling you as someone who’s on the front row to what’s happening, do not hit your wagon to that star. Thank you.
You’re supposed to boo. Pete Hexeth gave away our bargaining chips with Putin before we even had negotiations. Elon Musk has 25-year-olds firing people who are controlling our nuclear codes. It’s like Sam Bankman-Fried got control of our nuclear arsenal.
Second, elite narcissism causes them to eviscerate every belief system they touch.
Conservatives believe in healthy societies are built on healthy institutions. They’re anti-institutional. Conservatives believe in steady and gradual change.
They’re a disruption. Conservatives believe in constitutional government. Donald Trump says “I alone can fix this.” Conservatives believe in moral norms. They’re destroying moral norms.
The other belief system that they are destroying is Judeo-Christian faith. Judeo-Christian faith is based on service to the poor, service to the immigrant, service to the stranger. I went to Namibia, South Africa through the 1990s and 2000s, and I watched people die of AIDS. Then I went back with my friend Mike Gerson, and I saw those 25 million lives saved. I saw people living lives of dignity.
And so what’s the first thing Donald Trump did? He eviscerated that program. My friends in America are conservative evangelicals in government who want to fight sex trafficking, poverty. They want to preserve national security. Donald Trump is declaring war on those Christians. So don’t.
The Path to Revival
So I’ve described three different things we educated elites brought you. We destroyed the social fabric through inequality. We destroyed the moral fabric through privatizing morality. And we destroyed the institutional fabric, what’s happening right now.
How can we come back? Well, we already are. I often ask people, tell me about a time that made you who you are as a human being. And they never say, I went on a fantastic vacation to Hawaii. They never say that.
They say, I went through a really hard time. The death of someone, the loss of someone, moving away from home, entering a new vocation. Paul Tillich, a theologian, said those moments of suffering interrupt your life, and they remind you you’re not the person you thought they were. They carve through the floor of your basement of your soul, and they reveal a cavity below, and they carve through that floor, and they reveal a cavity below.
In moments of suffering, you see yourself in a more deep way than you ever did before. And in those moments of suffering, you can either be broken, or you can be broken open. And people who are transformed decide, I’m going to be broken open.
And nations that are going to be transformed by moments of suffering say, we’re going to be broken open. We’ve been through periods of national crisis before. Across the world, nations have constantly hit a spiritual and cultural crisis and then revived. This country, between 1820 and 1848.
I was here in the 1980s. Britain recovered in the 1980s. Australia in the 1970s. Germany and Japan after World War II. South Korea in the 1980s. Rwanda after 1994. Chile in the 1990s. My own country, we’ve done this again and again.
We’ve grown not through a happy merry ride. We’ve grown through a process of rupture and repair. When society and culture is in crisis, and we figure it out. 1770s, the old colonial order had to go. Sorry. 1830s, the East Coast elite had too much power.
Andrew Jackson brought an era of populism. 1860s, the slavery order had to go. Abraham Lincoln brought forth national redemption. 1890s, we had failed at industrialization. We had a civic renaissance of all these civic organizations that filled in the hole and created a sane society. 1960s, the conformist culture of the 1950s had to go.
And we had the changes that came there. The temptation of those who don’t read history is to think this time is different. We’re in another period of rupture and repair. We have spiritual resources.
I’m a conservative. I believe that we are inheritors of a great spiritual legacy, what Michael Oakeshott called the great conversation. We have the voice of Genesis, that we’re all made in God’s image. That’s the foundation of democracy. We have the voice of Exodus, that we wander through the wilderness and eventually get to the promised land. We have the voice of Jesus, even if you’re not Christian, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit.
That’s a source of great strength. In my country, we have the voice of Alexander Hamilton. Poor boys and girls should rise and succeed. We have the voice of Edmund Burke, that we should be modest about what we can know because culture is really complicated.
And we should operate on society the way we would operate on our father, gradually and carefully. We have the voice of John Stuart Mill. We value diversity and pluralism because it leads to what he called “adventures in living.”
When you have a spiritual, moral, and relational crisis, the job is to shift the culture. And we are moving, I think, from a hyper-individualistic culture the last 60 years toward a communal culture. I didn’t like the social justice movement, but it was an attempt to find community. I’m not particularly a big fan of MAGA, but it’s an attempt to find community. Culture change is about a shifting of the heart.
It’s about providing new answers to the question, how should I live my life? It’s about soul craft. And it isn’t done the way you do political change. Culture change works differently.
It’s done, as Walter Batchett put it, if you want to win people over, enjoy the things that conservatives enjoy. Culture changes when a creative minority find a beautiful way to live. Culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy. That’s the story of the early church. It’s the story of the Clapham sect. They weren’t my cup of tea, but it’s the story of Bloomsbury.
I was mentored by William F. Buckley. It’s the story of the conservative movement in America. Culture changes on a personal level.
Shifting Culture Through Generosity and Moral Formation
When we relate to each other with attentive and generous gaze. Simone Weil said, “attention is the purest form of generosity.” Culture changes on a spiritual level. T.S. Eliot said, “you can’t create a system so perfect that the people in it don’t have to be good.” It’s when you put moral formation at the center of your society. And finally, it happens at the civic level.
When a thousand voices and a thousand different organizations create civic institutions that provide healing and relationship in society. That’s how culture changes. I was at a bar about two months after October 7th.
And if you had seen me there, you would have thought, sad guy drinking alone. I call it reporting. So I’m scrolling through Twitter. And it has all these brutal images from the Middle East.
But I come across a video of James Baldwin. And he says, “you know, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like.
“But there’s enough. And what you’ve got to remember is that when you walk down the street, every person you meet, you could be that person. That could be you. You could be that monster. You could be that saint.
“And you have to decide who you’re going to be.”
Now, James Baldwin was treated shabbily by my society because of his race and other things. But he had a right to be bitter.
But even in that circumstance, he uttered the ultimate humanist statement. You could be that person. That person could be you. And the phrase that rang in my head when I heard that was defiant humanism. That even in harsh and brutal times, we’re called upon to see each other in the fullest, deepest, and most respectful way that God imagined that they would be seen.
