A leading conservative thinker and commentator gives an overview of the psychologies and personalities driving the United States today. Excerpted from “David Brooks: Politics and Culture in the Age of Obama,” January 11, 2011.

DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, The New York Times; Commentator, PBS “NewsHour”

 

I did start out as somewhat of a lefty. I grew up near Greenwich Village in New York. My parents were professors in the ’60s, and when I was five years old they took me to a “be-in,” where hippies would go just to “be.”  It was in Central Park in New York City. As part of the be-in, they set a garbage can on fire and threw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I was five years old and I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can; I reached into it and grabbed the money and ran away. That was sort of my first step over to the Right.

But you never know where life will take you. I was a Jewish kid, but I went to Grace Church School. I was part of the boys choir at Grace Church, and I thought I was going to live a nice assimilated life until I married a woman who was a Protestant who then converted to Judaism about three years after we were married. Now we keep a kosher home, our kids go to Jewish day school, and she announced she wanted to become a rabbi. My line is this: How do we know God exists? Because only he would go so out of his way to screw me this badly. So life has its surprises, but we’re still happily married.

I’m going to try not to talk too long. I’ve been with San Francisco audiences before, and I know you didn’t come here to hear me speak; you came here to hear yourselves speak. [audience laughter]

I am going to talk about psychology, oddly enough, and political events, but through a psychological lens. I’m going to do it in three different sections, but all of which get back to this concept of psychology.

I felt I really had no choice but to start with the events in Tucson of the last week. I started my career as a police reporter in Chicago covering crimes. The thing you learn – and the institution of journalism, practiced correctly – is always that seeing is more important than thinking. The most important thing is to look at the evidence first. There has been a lot of punditry and commentary around what happened in Tucson. But I think if we start with the evidence, and we start with what little we know about Jared Loughner, the kid who allegedly committed this thing, we know that he has had – from his online writings – an obsession with mind control. You see in the writings [the] struggle of a man trying to control his mind. We know he created these videos, and the last video he created was called “My Final Thoughts.” If you go online and watch those videos, what you see is a man who’s trying to create what he calls a currency, which is a language for controlling thoughts. You see him vaguely understanding that he’s having trouble controlling his own thoughts, and then making accusations about the government controlling our grammar. They’re all about the struggle to control thoughts.

We know from testimony from his friends that [they] more or less cut him off for the last several months, because they found his behavior too disturbing. We know he went to this town hall with [Representative] Giffords and asked her an extremely bizarre question having to do with how can government function when words have no meaning? He was dissatisfied with her answer.

So we see all the evidence that we have in front of us suggesting that what was involved with this is a young man possibly suffering from mental illness and possibly from schizophrenia and not practicing politics as it’s normally understood. That’s sort of where the evidence, to the extent that we have it, leads us. Yet I think so much of the commentary in the last few days has not been following that evidence but has been going off in a different direction, talking about civil discourse and our politics. I’m all for civil discourse; I’m all for sensible politics. But there’s no evidence that that was germane to this kid. I think journalism has been guilty of a great wrong and not following the evidence over the last four days.

To the people who talked about civil discourse in regards to this, we’re simply talking about a thing that was not germane to this particular tragedy. Those who accused political players of contributing without any evidence I think made extremely grave accusations without any sense of responsibility.

I’m not sure there’s a larger political meaning to this horrible thing, but if there is, I think it is a function that we in the media have to pay much greater attention to psychology and psychological issues and less to politics. Not everything is explicable by the normal political logic.

The second thing is: We as a society have to pay greater attention to the treatment of the mentally ill. We have a system – and really, part of the system was created here in California during the Reagan governorship and has spread outward – of giving people suffering from some severe mental illnesses the choice to control their own destinies. Often that means that they end up on the streets, [and] a large number of them end up in jails. Ninety-nine percent of them are not violent in any way, but 1 percent or so are violent.

We have to ask some fundamental questions. The most important question is: How do we allow a kid who is widely perceived as mentally troubled to get access to guns? The second is: How do we think about involuntary commitments and involuntary treatment? Have we erred too much on the side of giving those people individual choice, or do we need to shift more to protect community safety? I think that we probably do, not that I’m an expert.

But that to me is the fundamental issue before us, and the treatment and the over-politicization of this event, frankly, has made me angry over the last few days, because I think it’s not journalism at its best.

 

Stranger in a Strange Land

So that’s my first little psychological theme tonight. The second is broader, and it comes back to my normal life in Washington. That is the importance, when you look at politics, of thinking of psychology. I was given a piece of advice by a guy named Robert Novak when I took my current job. He said, “Interview three politicians every day, because it’ll teach you to get to know them.” I spend a lot of time around politicians, and from that experience I can tell you they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They have what I call logorrhea dementia: they talk so much they drive themselves insane.

They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space so you’ll talk to them. They’ll grab you by your lapels; they’ll stroke the back of your head. I had a Republican senator grab my inner thigh throughout an entire dinner and squeeze it, for emphasis.

They have these intense social skills, if you want to put it that way. If they don’t have it, they work on it to make sure they get it. I recall covering Mitt Romney in New Hampshire during the last presidential race; he was campaigning with his five perfect sons: Bip, Chip, Rip, Sip and Dip. We go into a diner, and he goes around to each table in the diner. He introduces himself to the people at the table and says, “What village in New Hampshire are you from?” and they mention the name of a village, and he describes the home he owns in their village. He meets about 30 or 40 people. As he’s leaving the diner, he waves and he first-names everyone he just met. I was like, “Wow, this is not a profession I will be going into.” But that is the sort of psychological skills that many of them have and the psychological complexity many of them have.

I asked a friend who was in government, “What’s the one thing you’ve learned being in government you didn’t know before?” I ask that question of almost everyone I interview. President Bush at the end of his term told me there’s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in government. He was absolutely right about that. Often people say, “Our military is way more sophisticated than I thought.” “Our intelligence is much worse than I thought.” But this particular person said, “I used to think politics was about 75 percent personality and relationships; now I realize it’s 99 percent personality and relationships.”

People, especially people in public life, are just odder than you can possibly imagine. Maybe we’re all odder than we can possibly imagine. But the story I tell to illustrate that was told to me by Bob Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots. He was in a business delegation to Russia. He had a meeting with Putin with his other business leaders.

Kraft’s team is a great team; they’ve won the Super Bowl. He had on his finger his first Super Bowl ring. Vladimir Putin saw this ring and said in the middle of the meeting, “Can I see that ring?” Kraft handed it to him, and Putin put it on his finger. During the meeting, Putin was gesturing with the ring on his finger. At the end of the meeting, Kraft says, “You know, Mr. President, I’d be happy to make you a copy of that ring, but that particular ring has great sentimental value to me; it’s our first Super Bowl ring.” Putin pretends he doesn’t hear him, and he puts the ring in his pocket. Then Kraft goes back to the State Department and says, “I don’t want to make a big international incident, but I’d really like that ring back. I’ll make him a copy; I’d be happy to.” So the embassy sends their feelers out to the Kremlin, and they come back to him the next day and they say, “You know, we think we’re going to issue a press release that you’ve decided to donate that ring to the Russian people.” And that’s exactly what happened.

It’s a sign that our entire world is run by four-year-olds.

When you cover politics, you’ve always got to be aware of this psychology. Even among the people you admire. I’m to the right of Barack Obama, but I am a personal great admirer of his personal traits. But one of the things you’ve seen, when you put psychology at the center of view, [is that] psychology changes as context changes. There’s the great concept called the fundamental attribution error, which is the mistake of attributing to a permanent character trait things that are actually the product of context.

For example, Obama has various traits, but they change as the context changes. One of the traits I admire in him is a genuine niceness. Usually when I criticize a candidate or a politician or a president, the aides call me the next morning and they scream at me, “David, you’re a complete and total idiot.” With the Obama people, they call you the next morning and they say “David, we really respect your work, we love you, you know how much we admire you; it’s so sad you’re a complete and total idiot.” That niceness made you feel good. It was one of the nice things about the administration.

But I would say over the last three months as I’ve talked to people in the administration, they’ve begun to see a downside to that niceness. That downside is [that] there’s no fear of the president within the government. I recently was talking to somebody, and he said, “You’d be amazed how little the sentence ‘the president has already decided this’ matters in a meeting.” The president’s made the decision, but they’re going to go off on their own way anyway.

Another member of the administration told me, “We know there’s this culture of no-drama Obama, of niceness. So we know, if there’s a really problematic issue, we’re going to try to not bring it to the inner circle, because they’ll reject it. They don’t want the violence and the conflict.” So you’ve begun to see the administration straight up to the president begin to acknowledge that this trait, this niceness, which was so good in many circumstances, is not so good when the government is going off on its own and ignoring the president, which happens a lot.

So that’s a psychological trait and you [have seen] him begin to adjust and actually name a new chief-of-staff, Bill Daley, in part to take care of this problem. The second trait he has – which has changed meaning, I think, over the last few months – is the trait of self-confidence.

I’m convinced the unit “Obama” will be the unit of measure for self-confidence in about 80 years. We’ll say, “Oh, he has 80 Obamas.” “He has 120 Obamas.” People in this job have a high degree of self-confidence, but Obama is sort of off the charts. This, negatively, in the first couple years caused him to think he could just control the country. I thought it led him to misread the country. But in the past two months especially, and as I’ve covered and watched him adjust to the electoral disaster he suffered in a very cool and calm way, he shifted and adjusted, seeing his own situation without a sense of self-pity or defensiveness. Just analytic, because he knows he can change without fundamentally altering his faith in himself, which I believe is unshakeable. That has been a good side to the self-confidence, which earlier appeared hubris; now, to me, it appears more as security.

The Republicans have changed too, over the last few months. The Republican Tea Party is something we all saw last year. My one-line explanation of it was people who use Abbie Hoffman means to achieve Norman Rockwell ends. There was this search for sort of an old-fashioned America, an order and a security, but using Abbie Hoffman frantic gestures and sometimes-overheated rhetoric to get there. To me, that part was a real problem.

I’ve covered the new congressmen as they’ve come in to Washington, and I will tell you they are by and large a much more impressive group than I anticipated. Most of them were successful businessmen and women; many of them were really extremely successful legislators, [such as] Marco Rubio, as speaker of the Florida house. Out of government, they indulged in the luxury of believing what it was pleasant to believe. In government, they’ve had a series of meetings over the last couple weeks where they’ve now had to grapple with the things actually involved in government.

Out of government they can say, “We’ll slash the federal budget by hundreds of billions of dollars.” Now they’ve sat in these orientation sessions, and they say “We’re going to cut the government in half.” Do you want to cut defense? “Nah.” Do you want to cut Medicare? “Nah.” Social Security? “Nah.” Well, here’s what’s left – and now they grapple with that.

Believe me, they still think they’re going to cut. They still say, “Oh, we’ll cut. It’s going to be tougher, but we’ll cut.” They’ve grappled with it like businesspeople. Then you say, We’re in the middle of a fiscal year. The government has already signed contracts. You really can’t cut this much in the middle of a contract. They say, “Okay, I acknowledge that, we’ll scale back a little.”

So I’ve seen an evolution in things. I’ve also seen an evolution in their opinion of President Obama. Many of them came in believing that he was a socialist who wanted to make us Sweden. I think because of his gestures [they’ve changed their minds]. Believe me, I argued this case that he was not; that he was sort of a moderate, liberal pragmatist. But believe me, I made no headway with these people until, I’d say, the last couple of weeks. There’s beginning to be a glimmer of opening. So the psychology has shifted for the better.

If you had asked me months ago, are we headed for gridlock? I would have said, “Absolutely, gridlock. Nothing going to get done. Fiscal disaster.” Now I’d say there’s probably a two-thirds chance that will happen. But when you see the psychology shift, you begin to think there’s more possibility for compromise, for flexibility, for reversing some of the disasters ahead of us. I say that because the psychology has shifted – this new optimism I’m manufacturing for myself. I [also] say that because various things simply have to happen. We have to raise the debt limit. We have to pass a budget. Circumstance will impose certain compromise. And I say that in part because of the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission, which has had a big cultural effect on Washington and maybe the country. While they didn’t get their [plan] enacted, they put everything on the table. When you go from congressional offices to the White House to the Treasury Department, every single policy is now up for discussion, whether it’s Social Security, taxes, defense budget, education budget or entitlement reform. It’s all there, and people are talking about it in much more radical ways than before.

Finally – and this I know from conversations with the president and those around him – the president, especially in the State of the Union speech, sees a need to reframe the whole debate. We’ve had the big government versus small government debate. But there’s another way to talk about it, which is not big government or small government but the quality of government. Does government enhance social mobility and achievement or does it not enhance social mobility and achievement?

This breaks down the traditional frame we’ve had. There’s a tradition in this country that has been neglected over the past 30, 40 years. We all know the conservative movement that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom; we know the liberal movement that believes in using government to enhance equality. But there’s a third tradition in this country, which has gone neglected. It believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility and industry. It begins with Hamilton, it goes to Lincoln, the Railroad Act, the homestead legislation, it goes to Teddy Roosevelt, it jumps to California in the middle of the 20th century, where you had the government using government funds to create the best school system in the country, the highways, the water projects, using government to enhance growth and productivity. 

When you start talking about those terms, using government to enhance capitalism’s productivity as opposed to big government versus small government, you break the intellectual logjam. When you go to the conservative Republicans or the liberal Democrats, you find them agreeing on what the government needs to do to enhance productivity. Things like infrastructure programs, human capital programs, energy reform. If you reframe the debate in that way, suddenly some of the old debates are there, but they can be fenced off.

I think the president knows that. The other thing they’re trying to do is sequencing policies correctly, so you begin with some agreement and then you progress step-by-step. The president is greatly drawn to the idea of some big tax reform first, because we agree on what needs to be done. We need to simplify the tax code and lower the rates. Then there are so many moving parts, you can actually begin to get agreement.

For all these reasons, some of the polarization, some of the gridlock, which seemed inevitable, I think now, while likely, are not inevitable. The psychology is beginning to shift a little. So I’m oddly hopeful about Washington the way I wasn’t months ago.

It’s Hard to be Humble

The third theme I want to talk about is also psychology, but this again expands one step outward. This is the question of the national psychology. I’m going to tell this story very quickly but starting decades ago, because when you’re talking about the national psychology, you’re on an entirely different frame. I’ve expressed my optimism about Washington, but is the country ready for the sort of shared sacrifices that are needed to get control of our problems?

The essential problem was illuminated to me several months ago when I was driving home. On my NPR station in D.C., we’ve got a program every Sunday night that airs old radio broadcasts. The particular Sunday night I was listening, they aired a show called “Command Performance.” “Command Performance” was a variety show that went out to the troops in World War II. The particular show they re-broadcast that night was the final episode; it was aired on V-J Day, the day World War II ended. In fact, it was broadcast live, just hours after the Japanese announced their surrender. They had all the stars on it: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich. Bing Crosby was the host; he gets out there onstage and he says, “Hours ago we learned we won World War II. But I guess we don’t feel proud; we just feel humble.”

This theme of humility was echoed throughout the whole program. In the middle of the program, Burgess Meredith comes out and reads a passage from Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent. Pyle had written and Burgess Meredith read, “We won this war because we have great allies. We won this war because we have brave soldiers. We won this war because we’ve been blessed by material abundance. We did not win this war because we are God’s chosen people or were destined to rule the earth or because we’re better than anybody else. We’re just glad we got through it. We should feel humble, not proud.”

That was remarkable given the circumstances. Just hours after they’ve won the greatest victory in American history, this tone of humility. Then I drive home and turn on the TV and there’s a football game on. The quarterback throws a pass, somebody catches the pass and is tackled and the cornerback does what all professional athletes do after tackling this wide receiver; he does a victory dance celebrating his great achievement. It occurred to me watching that, that I’d seen more self-puffing, self-celebration after a two-yard gain than I’d seen after winning World War II.

This is a change in culture, from a culture of self-effacement – “I’m no better than anybody else but nobody’s better than me” – to a culture of self-esteem – “look at me, look how good I am.”

This is not only my nostalgia for an era in which I was not alive. There’s actually some evidence to support this. My favorite bit of polling evidence to illustrate this was done by the Gallup Organization. They periodically ask high school kids, “Are you a very important person?” They asked this question in 1950, and 12 percent of high school students said, “I am a very important person.” They asked again in 2005; 82 percent said they were a very important person.

This is a change in how you see yourself. This change, this rise in self-esteem, I think had a left-wing variant, maybe out here, especially in Marin County in the ’70s, where we had an era of self-exploration and self-expression, what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism, and Tom Wolfe called the me decade. I think there was a right-wing variant in the 1980s when self-promotion, self-branding, the economics of self-promotion took the fore. So our conceptions of ourselves changed.

This changed expansion of self had material effects. If you look at consumption in the 20th century, it floats along very solidly until about the ’70s, and then it shoots up. So personal debt as a percentage of GDP was very stable for most of the 20th century at about 45 percent of GDP. Then, starting in the ’70s up until 2007, it shoots up to 143 percent. Total debt is stable at about 140 percent including household debt and finance debt, and then it shoots up to 350 percent. This is a complete change in culture. If you see yourself as a very important person, you’re going to want to outfit your life as befits your station, and you’re going to want to prove to your neighbors and friends your station with your material belongings. That is one effect of the changes in our view of ourselves.

 

Generation Debt

The second is the public debt. Every generation has an incentive to spend on themselves and push the cost to future generations. No generation until our own has really done it in a massive scale, and I think that’s in part because they saw themselves as part of a long, historic flow from which they were no more important than anybody else. That sense of the long historic flow, the debt owed to the past and owed to the future, has been lost. As a result, we are running these phenomenal deficits with really no end in sight. By 2019, interest payments on the debt alone will be about $900 billion, which is completely unaffordable.

Then there’s, finally, a deeper political shift. Previous Americans thought of America as a republic and believed in republican virtue. Republican virtue was a distrust of self: that we all have a tendency within ourselves to favor ourselves, to be biased toward ourselves. So republican virtue is the kind epitomized by George Washington, which was self-restraint, that democracy needed institutions to restrain the will of ourselves. That sense of republican virtue has been lost, and now we emphasize the democratic virtues. The democratic virtues hold that what the people want should be met by the government, that government should be responsive to people. It should be meeting the immediate demands of whatever the people want at that moment. This is a very different view of government, and I think it’s led to the partisanship.

Partisanship is a version of narcissism. It’s a belief that your side has 100 percent of the truth, rather than being a balancing of the truth. And the country would be better off without all the tension between your side and the other side but simply if your side triumphed. All these problems grew out of a different sense of self, a different sense of expanded self, a growth of self-esteem.

This is what helped contribute to the bubble, to the financial crisis and to the great sense of political disillusion. More than all the causes, it’s a deeper problem that we faced when we became a more proud-of-ourselves nation. I would say, and this may be wishful thinking, that in the last few months, you begin to see a change in that; you begin to see a rise in the savings rate.  You begin to see changes in consumption patterns. You begin to see a revolution against some of the polarized rhetoric that marks the politics. I do think there’s been a bit of a psychological shift, a desire for maybe less self-puffery, maybe a sense of increased modesty.

It is certainly true in the younger generation. If you want to feel good about the country, look at people under 30. They are a tremendously community-oriented generation. A friend of mine who’s president of George Washington University says of the community service that his students do, “I don’t know where these students find lepers, but they find them and they read to them.” That is a sign of a different mentality they have. All the social indicators that went up in the wrong direction for decade after decade are now beginning to come down. Domestic violence is down. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down by a third. Teenage pregnancy is down by a third.

This is an incredibly wholesome and responsible generation. They’re all going to have the biggest mid-life crisis in human history in about 10 years. But up until that point, they’re really repairing the society.

And finally my sense that America’s recovering from maybe an explosion of self-esteem comes as all optimistic beliefs come just by the act of walking around San Francisco. Walking around Des Moines. Walking around Albany. The act of observing American life is an incredibly, still heartening thing because you come to the belief that the culture that defined us 200, 300 years ago is still alive.

You see the culture of self-improvement. You see the culture of pragmatism and adjustment. You go to a suburban elementary school, you see the kids coming out of the elementary school; they’ve got these 80-pound backpacks on their back. If the wind blows them over, they’re like beetles, stuck there on the ground. You’ve got the moms or the dads driving up to pick them up; in neighborhoods like this they’re driving Saabs, Audis and Volvos, because in areas like San Francisco it’s socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy.

Because they’re enlightened and progressive, they’re taking the kid out to Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, the ice cream company with its own foreign policy.

Then they’re going out to the Whole Foods Market or the Trader Joe’s, one of the socially enlightened grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they’re on loan from Amnesty International. My favorite section of the Trader Joe’s is the snack foods section, because they couldn’t have pretzels and potato chips; that’d be vulgar. So they have these seaweed-based snacks, what we buy in my household, it’s called Veggie Booty with Kale. It’s for kids who come home and say “Mom, I want a snack that will help prevent colo-rectal cancer.”

So you begin to see the dynamism in America. I always say that if you want to get a good sense of the country, go to Home Depot and watch an American man buy a barbeque grill, because that’s when he’s most emotionally exposed. He’s going into the store and he’s doing the manly waddle men do in the presence of large amounts of lumber. He’s going up to the big grills, the Weber Genesis grill, because in America it makes sense to name a grill after a book in the Bible. He chooses the 942-inch grill surface, in case he gets the urge to roast a bison.

He buys his grill, takes it out to the truck in the big-box mall. He’s in one of these giant parking lots with the PetSmart over here and a PETCO over there. Then maybe along the highway, there are all the suburban theme restaurants, which if they merged would be called Chili’s Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina. Then the Wal-Mart over here, and over here, my favorite, is the Costco, which is like Wal-Mart on acid. You can get your bags with 60 pounds of tater-tots, your packages with maybe 120 pounds of detergents, little packages with 6,000 Q-tips inside, which is 12,000 swabs cause there’s one at either end. I always go to these places thinking, “Who comes here shopping for condoms?” The quantities are so gigantic; then you realize there are a lot of optimistic people in America.

Finally, they’re all having the same conversation about how much money they’re saving by buying in bulk. They’re saying, “We should get 10,000 popsicles, because we were thinking of having kids anyway.”

Then you realize that we go through these cycles, but psychology is very fluid. People change, people learn, people improve, people adjust. And a country that can invent Veggie Booty with Kale will be fine in the long run.

 

Question and answer session with DAN SCHNUR, American cultural and political commentator

SCHNUR: In his book What it Takes, Lawrence Cramer talks about how a man or a woman looks in the mirror and says, “I am the most qualified person on the planet to be the leader of the free world.” Talk a little bit ... about the dividing line between ego and confidence and hubris in our political leaders.

BROOKS: You have to have a sense of hubris to run. Barack Obama, who is a man, as I said, I greatly admire, will say things in public and private which take your breath away. The one that got out in the public was something he had said to one of his domestic advisors and was reported by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker. It was Obama talking to his aide, and he said, “I want you to know I’m a better speechwriter than any of my speechwriters. I know more about policy and any policy area than any of my policy advisors. And I’m a better political analyst than my political director.” If you can say that with a straight face, then you have a high degree of self-confidence. I don’t think you run if you don’t, and maybe you don’t achieve greatness if you don’t.

But I would say the one thing he has also, and I think great leaders have maybe more than him even, is a phrase that goes back maybe to David Hume. The phrase is epistemological modesty. It’s the awareness that the world’s incredibly complicated and that we can never possibly really understand the world. Therefore, you act while being aware of how flawed your understanding is. You don’t design policies that are going to depend on you being a good knower of the world and a good designer of extremely complicated plans. If you look at the wise leader, one of the things we’ve learned is that there is a difference between IQ, which maybe helps you a little, and mental character. It’s the difference between processing speed and the ability to know your own mind, to weigh your conclusions to the strength of the evidence, to doubt your own biases, to look at your own thought processes honestly. These thoughts are completely unrelated to IQ. It’s what they call meta-cognition: to think about your own thinking.

This is the real source of wisdom. The people that have that have modesty; they know they’re stupid. They’re people like Warren Buffett. [They] know they don’t understand and therefore are always on guard about themselves. Politics is a harsh taskmaster, and if people don’t come in with a sense of their own weakness, they’re reminded of that, because politics is so complicated like any field of endeavor. Peter Drucker once said that every time you make a decision, write down your reasoning for the decision, seal it in an envelope and open that envelope in nine months. You realize how wrong you were almost every time.

But I do think the president has adjusted and has become aware of how little he can possibly know and control.

SCHNUR: David, you talked in your remarks, semi-facetiously, I hope, that we are a [world] run by four-year-olds.

BROOKS: I was being generous.

SCHNUR: You talked about mental character, about modesty, about your admiration for President Obama. Who are the other six-year-olds in American politics? Who else do you admire on the current or recent political landscape and why?

BROOKS: I spend all of this time around politicians – if you go to lunch and dinner as I do with them – I often come away thinking “impressive in private,” “reasonable in private.” Then I see them on C-SPAN when they’re back to being their idiotic selves. I think most of the people in private know that their own position has some weaknesses, know the opposition’s has some strengths. They’re reasonably well informed. But politics is a team game, and they have to hew to the party when they’re in public.

The people in government are generally in it for the right reasons. The life just isn’t that glamorous. You wouldn’t do it unless you thought you were serving the country. Politics probably doesn’t seem glamorous, but I used to think it was. I was on a shuttle to New York on a Thursday night. It was [supposed to leave at] 10 p.m. but it was late so we sat on the tarmac for two hours. We got in at like 1 a.m. There were about nine members of the House delegation from New York as well as Senator Chuck Schumer on that shuttle. They do that every week. The people who serve from out here, they fly back here every weekend and they fundraise. Their lives are just miserable. They wouldn’t do it unless they thought they were doing good. In general, they’re worth more than the cynical way we treat them. I think the press is more cynical than the politicians, and the voters are more cynical than the press. It’s not quite fair.

I keep a list of 5 or 10 people in Washington at any given moment I really admire; in case I’m feeling depressed, I can think of those people. They’re people like Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, “The Situation” – no, I’m just kidding. My all-time list includes people like San Francisco native George Shultz, who served continually the country, not himself, in whatever role. Jim Lehrer is on that list, though don’t tell him that; I’ll deny it. But of the current senators, I really admire Ron Wyden from up the coast here. Here’s a senator with strong Democratic convictions but who’s always willing to work with people [across the aisle] with very sophisticated policy ideas. I’m a big admirer of Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina. Again, somebody with strong conservative convictions but willing to take risks, even at his own political danger. I could go on, but there are many admirable people in politics. Individually they’re good. It’s the system they’re enmeshed in that is problematic.

SCHNUR: One of the questions from our audience [asks], Are voters angry, or are the subset of angry voters just the loudest?

BROOKS: Voters are angry. We’ve seen a series of institutional failures in government, in business, the church. The underlying theme of this last election is a fear of national decline. If you ask Americans, “Are America’s best days behind it?” 65 percent say, “Yes.” We’ve gone through periods of pessimism, but never as sustained a period as we’re in now. People fear not only have we lost something, but our institutions are fundamentally not up to the task, and anger and disillusion flow out of that.

Obama tapped into it; the Tea Party movement tapped into it. We’re not done with this. We are in a period of high social self-organization. We saw the Obama movement. We saw the Tea Party movement. I’m convinced that we’re going to see – or maybe it’s already starting – a movement of people who fundamentally want to take care of the fiscal situation. There’s no question about this; we are literally marching off a cliff fiscally. Countries fail because they lose wars or they get buried under their own debt. Serious nations don’t walk off a cliff. With the right leaders, with the right donors, there will be a mass movement in the next five years that will simply say, “We’re willing to take a sacrifice, if everybody’s willing to take a sacrifice, to avoid a fiscal catastrophe.”

I go around Capitol Hill, to the White House, and I say, “Do you think there will be a national bankruptcy?” Almost universally, people say. “Yes.” I remember asking a White House economist, “Do you think we could take actions before we have a national bankruptcy?” He said, “No.” I said, “What kind of national bankruptcy will it be? Like Argentina? Greece? Decline and fall of the Roman Empire?” “It’ll be pretty bad, not as bad as the Roman Empire, but pretty bad.” Serious countries don’t do that. There’s such a degree of anger, there will be a mass movement based on patriotism that says that at a time when soldiers and marines are sacrificing their lives in Afghanistan, are you really not willing to sacrifice your cost of living adjustment? I think that’ll come.