The Munk Debates Podcast - David Brooks on the future of politics and community after COVID-19

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, NYT columnist David Brooks on political and social changes post pandemic.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we normally provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. But our world as we know it has changed and so has our format for the next few weeks. We're bringing you a special series called The Monk Dialogues. We invite the sharpest minds and brightest thinkers for one-on-one conversations live on Facebook to reflect on what our world will look like after the COVID-Dilocks. 19 pandemic. These dialogues provide you, the listener, with original insights into the pandemic's impact on everything from our shared values to the economy to international affairs. This week, we bring you New York Times columnist, political commentator, and best-selling author David Brooks in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths. This is an edited version of the live event recorded Thursday, May 28th. Hello and welcome to the Monk Dialogues, a project of the Peter and Melanie Monk Foundation, presenting sponsors, Gluskin Chef and the Onyx Corporation. My name is Rudyard Griffiths, and I've had the pleasure over these last number of weeks of spending an hour with you every evening

to talk about the effects of COVID-19 on the broader issues and trends that are shaping our society. And tonight we're have a real treat for you. He's a writer and author, a bestseller, books from around the world, David Brooks. I read them regularly as you do in the New York Times. We watch them on the PBS News Hour where he comments on American politics with great sagacity, teaching at Yale and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, also doing some really interesting work with the Aspen Institute around his Weavers project that we will get into this evening.

So, David, we saw each other last December here in Toronto on the Monk debate stage for your Monk debate on capitalism. It's great to be speaking with you virtually this evening. It's great to be back with the Monk community. I'm so pleased. Well, great. David, as I said, the purpose of these dialogues is to kind of stretch our minds into the future and try to think about how this pandemic is affecting us individually. But your expertise also is partly thinking about things in the context of community and how we act or don't. act as a community in the 21st century, confronted by technology, confronted by our economy,

confronted by our politics and the divisions within them. So what do you see, David, as the lasting implications, the lasting impacts of this pandemic on our politics, and maybe specifically our attitudes towards government? I'd love to hear your views on that. Yeah, I take a maximalist view on how much this is going to affect us. You know, sometimes a big event happens and it does, has only a temporary effect in the U.S. 9-11 had an effect on people. They went more religious attendance. They did more volunteering. They gave more blood. But that only lasted nine months. And after that, everything was back to normal. On the other hand, World War II, the people who grew up in the World War II era had a very good sense that we work together. And that was true in Canada and the

US. We work together. We can trust each other. So social trust was very high in both countries. And that lasted 60 years, that whole mentality. And so the reason I I think this is a big event and we'll have a pivotal effect is that it's not only a tragedy and disaster that's hitting us, but it's hitting us in the middle of a social crisis. We already had a social crisis, divisions are rich and poor, divisions white and black, all sorts of social divisions, polarization. And so we had this earthquake. And the earthquake happened.

And then the pandemic hits us like a hurricane. And so it's a hurricane in the middle of an earthquake. And the hurricane is coursing water down through the ravines that were already spliced. open. And so to me, this is a very unusual period where we have two sorts of crises happening at once. And it makes sense to me that that has a big social effect. And the key word I would pick up on in this circumstance is precarity, precariousness, that people already felt very precarious. Their incomes were moving up and down. Their employment was precarious. Now their health is precarious. And so to me, there's going to be the key word as people go forward will be security. How can I be

secure. How can I feel myself surrounded by some sort of order? And so in that kind of a climate, I think you see a big shift in attitudes toward government, a real desire for government to be more active. So you could call it a shift left, but I think of it as a shift that's conservative left. So government will be active, but maybe socially a little more conservative about ideas about immigration, ideas about social experimentation. And so to me, that makes sense. And that would be the mega shift I see. The minor shift I see, the micro shift I see, and I'll just speak about the U.S. for right now, is just the falling fortunes of the Trump campaign. I look today at numbers of how Hillary Clinton polled in certain key states, how Hillary Clinton did in certain key states,

and how Joe Biden is now polling in those states. And Joe Biden is way above where Hillary Clinton polled, where Hillary Clinton did, by seven or eight points in states like Pennsylvania Michigan, Wisconsin, all these swing states. And so if I'm in the Trump campaign, it looks ruinously bad right now. And I will say from my conversations with the Republicans, and especially in the Senate, they're extremely pessimistic right now. The expectation now is that Trump loses that the Republicans lose the Senate. Weirdly, they think they'll pick up a few seats in the House, but not enough to carry a majority. So the macro trend, I think it really is toward a different sort of political order than we've been used to. And the micro trend short term is.

certainly bad for Donald Trump in the U.S. David, a great way to set this up, because I think that's exactly where I want to go with you for this hour is to talk about the macro and the micro. So let's start with the macro. You've written a really interesting column, I think, that would resonate with a lot of Canadians here north of the border, which is this idea that the pandemic, in a sense, is North America's first invasion. You'd have to go back, I guess, to the war of 1812 before Canada, the United States decided

to experience. It's an invasion, at least we felt like it was. I think we actually won that war, but you might still dispute that. Let's call it a tie. Let's call it a time. But no, in all seriousness, though, I think this is a really important insight that we in North America have lived privileged by geography for the better part of the entire post-war period. And while our governments and at times our sense of security was heightened by international

events, certainly during the Cold War 9-11, this is fundamentally different. This is something that came into our societies, into our nations, that permeated our borders, that brought the world's insecurity into us in a way that we've never felt in North America. Can you expand on that? Because I think that's really important to understanding maybe the psychology of North America going forward from this pandemic. Yeah, I was reading a book I'd been assigned in college called The American Mind. And there was a sentence in there that said nothing had ever succeeded like America. and every American knew it.

And I think that's true of Canada as well, my birth country. US and Canada had the benefit of the privilege of not being invaded too often. We were surrounded on two sides by great whopping oceans and Canada to the north by a gigantic frontier. And so we had security. And out of that existential security, we had plenty. We had these vast resources at our disposal

and both countries prospered. And that assumption of prosperity, that assumption of plenty was the backdrop for everything else that followed. And it followed in different ways for the different countries, individualism, plenty, welcoming of immigration. It was that existential sense of security. And I think that existential sense of security has got to be affected and invaded now by this pandemic. This is the first time in both countries that daily life has been upended. Of course, war of 1812 happened, 9-11 happened. But it was not a daily upsetting of life.

And so to me, something changes when you suddenly get awakened to the fact we could get invaded. And the first thing that it gets awakened is, hey, welcome to the rest of the world. Most countries have been invaded. But then you get this shift in mentality. And there's a University of Maryland psychologist named Michelle Gelfand. And she has studied different countries and their various cultures. And she says some countries are tight and some are loose. And the tight ones are those that have been invaded by foreign powers and by foreign

in pathogens by diseases. And the constant set of threat has given them the skill and the experience of tightening up and following rules. And so that would be countries like Germany and Austria and South Korea. And so there's a great deal of order in those countries and maybe a little conformity. And then there are some countries that have never been invaded and not have that sense of threat. And they, she calls them loose countries. And Canada would be one, the U.S. would be one of Australia would be one. And we're just a little more creative, but a little more disorderly in some ways, a little looser. And so to deal with the pandemic, it really helps to be tight. And you can do it as a loose country, but you just have to adjust your behavior. And at least in the U.S., it's taken a

lot longer. And if you look at the countries around the world that have tended to do well, they've been tight countries. And the ones that have not done as well have been looser, but they've also, So the key measure to me has been social trust. Do you trust government? Do you trust people around you? Low social countries have trust countries have struggled. And those would include the U.S., they would include Italy, they would include Spain. And it's just because we don't do coordinated action as well as others.

And I don't think culture is destiny. A loose country can do what South Korea has done and really done track and trace, but it's a harder cultural lift. And so far, that's been the case in a lot of these countries. David, does the pandemic change that feeling to our culture, that looseness, that privileging of individualism? Or are those things just so hardwired in that regardless of the effects of the pandemic over the short term, that that original culture will assert itself? Yeah, this is more of a guess.

But I do think it changes. if you look at the individualism that swept over North America and maybe the entire West, it really started in the 60s. It was a sense that in the 50s life was too conformist. It was too dull. It was unfair to African Americans, unfair to women. And so you need to shake the culture up. And so we had the great Bob Dylan, all the songs I grew up with,

a youth born to run, rambling man, free bird. It was all about freedom. Freedom was the word. And liberation. And that happened in the 60s. And frankly, I'm glad it did. we became a much more open societies. I don't think Silicon Valley and a lot of the creativity that we've experienced could have

happened without that unleashing again and their rebellion against conformity. And so we had a left-wing version of individualism, which was you can have any lifestyle you want. We had a right-wing version, which was you can have any economic policy you want. You can have a solitary entrepreneur can be the hero. But for 60 years, it was pretty much straight individualism. And to my mind, we've overdone that. and that if you have 60 years of straight individualism, you weaken the bonds between people,

you weaken the sense of common good, you weaken the sense of community. And we were sort of seeing the strains of taking a good idea to an extreme. And to my mind, we were already beginning to shift, and the culture was much more going to be about connection. And I think we were beginning of that, but the pandemic accelerates that. And so the pandemic reminds us how interdependent we are. And it reminds us how we have to act together to solve collective problem. And so to me, it takes a culture that was already rebelling against individualism and accelerates the move toward community. And David, if you think about the coming U.S. election, one of the concerns, I think, that has been repeated on these dialogues in our conversations with people like Neil Ferguson, Samantha Power, Reid Zakaria,

Malcolm Gladwell, is this idea that there is a, often these crises, the reaction is to embrace or seek out a more authoritarian view of the world, a view that is offered to the public on the basis that it provides some sense of security and certainty. And maybe even more so in, as you say, a society that has lost those tissues of community that might have allowed itself to bind itself together to heal in the country. consequence, the aftermath of a truly culturally pandemic event like the one that we're going through right now. Do you see that impulse right now in American politics? And again, one might think instinctively that that could benefit Trump in the upcoming presidential election.

Yeah. One of the things I've learned researching social trust is that it doesn't correlate to being a democracy or not. The highest trust country in the world where people have the most trust in government and the most trust in each other is China. And that's because, because China has produced tremendous economic growth over the last few decades. And if you produce growth and prosperity for your people, they trust you. And they're willing to tolerate a lot. I would say the U.S., you would think that would be a danger. And it could be.

If you look at pandemics through the centuries, going back to Periclean Athens, going back to the bubonic plague, they tear societies apart. Daniel DeFoe writing about the plague in England in the 17th century talked about how everybody betrayed each other. when they didn't know who was sick, even members of their own family, they would lock them away, get rid of them because social distrust just got torn apart. And frankly, when this started, I expected a lot more of that. I'm not seeing it. And in the U.S., to the extent there's an authoritarian impulse, we're blessed by the fact that the person who is most authoritarian is also completely incompetent. And so I think he's giving authoritarianism a bad name, which it deserves.

And so all I can say is I can see how you would want to go to an authoritarian. Right. And you look at the polling, senior citizens who supported Trump are beginning to flake away from him. Young people, to the extent he had any, are beginning to flake away from him. And so they're just not seeing competence. And therefore, I think it's a concern, but I just don't see it as a reality. I just don't see evidence of that reality right now. Right.

So what do you think could be the political fault lines engendered by the pandemic? once we come back from the summer and, you know, the campaign enters that crucial final eight to ten weeks stretch. I mean, are we going to see a relitigation of what happened and the government's response? Will that be the focus? Or do you think it's going to be more on the agenda to come? How we are going to put a ravaged economy back on its feet? Right. One of the things that's interesting to me is we're suffering in all our countries around the world, this incredible economic decline of whatever, 25, 30 percent. In the third quarter, we might see, hopefully, a rebound. You could see 24 percent growth. And so a lot of people have said

to me, well, if there's 24 percent growth, people will feel the growth and they'll think, oh, well, Trump's doing a good job. We're coming back. I'm a little dubious about that, because even if you get 24 percent growth, you're still down a net 9 percent, and that's worse than the financial crisis. Second, people don't notice, there's a lot of political science research on this. People don't notice the growth that happens after July. You don't begin to really feel it until six months after it's actually happening. So I doubt Trump will get credit for that. As for whether what we want going forward, I personally think Joe Biden is running the ideal campaign right now.

He's in his basement. He's not making that much news. Trump is getting like 95% of the news coverage right now. And you would think that would classically be bad, but the polling number simply suggests that Trump is suffering right now. And so if I were in the Biden campaign, I'd say, why change a good thing? And whether they want to go ahead and propose sort of a set of New Deal policies, to me, that's a risky proposition because in the U.S., I think there's a great desire for security, there's still such great distrust to government. And this is what has kept the Democrats back. They're the party of government.

And they have not won because there's still that distrust. I think the trust has to be earned gradually. And the one thing worth learning from the New Deal was that at no point, well, maybe in 1937 for a brief window, but at no other point did Franklin Roosevelt seem like an ideologue like he wanted to do this, like he had some grand vision of remaking America. He played up, and all the New Dealers played up this sense, we're just trying stuff out here. we're going to try this. If it doesn't work, we'll try that. There was an intense atmosphere of pragmatism and even a temperamental moderation to the way the New Deal was unfurled, even while they were taking pretty dramatic action. And if I were Joe Biden, that would be a good atmosphere that I'd want to learn from, that we're going to take some action, but we have no ideological priors about it. We're not some scary bunch of socialists. We're just going to try to do stuff that will help people in concrete terms. Because right now, people are, we're just at the tail end, and at least in the U.S. of the subsidies beginning to wear out and the unemployment checks beginning to wear out. The state governments are hurting. They have no revenue. And so things have to be done. But I think I would hope that the response would be, okay, we're responding. We're not,

we don't have some crusade here because the crusade will scare people. David, before we go to audience questions, just one final one. It's just a build on that point because it's an important one. I mean, to what extent do you think there could be pressure on the Biden campaign, and more importantly, if it happens, a Biden government, to look and be inspired by some of the thinking around Bernie Sanders and his campaign. And the reason I say that is that, you know, we're at a moment here where you have 30 million Americans filing for unemployment. You have millions of Canadians doing the same. Yet the world's top billionaires are about half a trillion dollars richer. The stock market, thanks to extraordinary action on the part

of Federal Reserve has soared back to its 2019 levels. I mean, it looks like a rest of the David for a lot of the things that people really didn't like before this pandemic, which was spiraling economic inequality, divisions between rich and poor, a sense that the system was set up to benefit the equity-owning class versus everyone else. Do you see those kind of Sanders' impulses now as something in the rearview mirror, or could they re-emerge as a result of the dynamics of this crisis? It's economic divergence that it's creating. Yeah, I, I, I, I observe that they are still the intellectual energy of the Democratic Party. If I could step back for a minute, in August of 1991, I covered the coup against Boris Yeltsin

the Soviet Union. And then I went down to Ukraine where there was an independence vote, which Canada was deeply involved in. And to me, that was the high watermark of post-Cold War idealism, that globalization was going to work, technology would unite us, that everyone would prosper in a globalized economy, that the world was coming to a peaceful end. And I was in the middle of that and I believed it. I covered Mandela coming out of prison, the Oslo peace process, the Middle East, all good news.

And that was an era of a naive globalization, which I guess I was a part of. And it all began to crumble in a bunch of early steps and then big steps. And it crumbled with the Yugoslavian civil war. It crumbled with what Russia and China have turned into. It crumbled with the financial crisis. It crumbled with the Iraq war. and we're living in the shadow of naive globalization. And the energy in both parties in the U.S., and I think everywhere, is in, okay, what do we do next?

And Sanders offers a clear alternative to globalization and that ideology of the 1990s. And frankly, so does Bernie Trump, and so do a lot of people around the world. And so right now the energy in both those parties is in those two wings. I don't think Bernie Sanders is going away. But I would say there's a reason he lost the primaries. And that's because while people don't like inequality, and I'd be completely happy with an inheritance tax, it's precariousness.

I come back to this, that is what they really don't like. They don't hate Bill Gates. They don't hate Warren Buffett. They just want to feel secure. And so some people want a universal basic income. Some people want some sort of wage subsidies, what we call earn income tax credit. So if you work, you get a living wage.

If I were the Biden campaign, I'd emphasize that. That's the thing people feel when I travel around the country. Frankly, they never talk about Wall Street. They don't like it. But it's not uppermost on their mind. Upper most on their mind is, can I provide for my family? Can I get a, have a decent life? And so I would be cautious of inheriting,

of absorbing too much of the Sanders mantra into the Biden administration. But the great blessing, well, there's not a blessing, but the reality is that you don't have to have that fight anymore. The moderate versus left fight that was part of the primary, it's over because the pandemic has cast us into a recession or depression. And so now we've got to have not redistribution versus moderation. We've got to have growth economics. There has to be a democratic growth and job creation agenda. and that gets us beyond some of the things that really divided Sanders and Warren versus Biden and some of the others. And so to me, the future of the left is less a class left and more or less, let's grow.

Let's create jobs. And that, if Biden handles that well, I think it's a way to avoid some of the ideological fights that have been dogging it. I really think that the world post-pandemic is not going to be about the debates that got started 50 years ago or 100 years ago. It's going to be about something else. it's going to be about how can we provide a secure base from which people can have decent lives. Great insights. Great analysis. David, let's go to audience questions because of preparation for this evening. We've had dozens emailed in. We're also going to be taking questions live from our Facebook audience who's watching right now. So this comes from Charles in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia.

In the past, you've commented that America seems to have lost its way in some respects. Do you believe this pandemic has done anything to help American society refocus on what is important for individuals and for society as a whole? David, this goes to your Weaver's Project with the Aspen Institute, something that's very dear to your heart of trying to find ways for local communities to knit those tissues of community back together. I mean, they've been pulled asunder by this pandemic. Those communities are now going to struggle with a very dark economic picture for a period of time. I sense that you're optimistic, though, and I'm just wondering why. I am. I started this thinking it would make us or break us, and I thought break is a very likely option,

and this still is. But I've been on the phone now for three, four months, pretty much all day. And the first thing I would say about my weavers is that weave is based on the idea that social disconnection underlay a lot of our problems. But community is being solved on the local level all around the country. And I've become friends with Paul Bourne or the Tamarack Institute, who's done so much. much to alleviate poverty in Canada by building community, by building networks of local citizens. And as I look around and call the people I've gotten to know through this project, a couple of

them have said to me, you know, I was born for this moment. They are the sort of people who rush into the hurricane. And so in Baltimore, they're creating new food distribution networks. I just spoke to a young man in San Jose, California, who's got a program called Springboard where they're providing decent education options, online education options for families over the summer. break, not education options that oppress the parents into being there 20 hours a day, but are humane and realistic about what people are going to do. And so I've met so many people who are expanding. And then I've met so many people who think, you know, my life is more local now. And I feel more united. And I spoke to a pollster this week. And this is in the U.S. He said, are we more

united or are we more divided than they were? And twice as many Americans think we're more united than we were before. And there's a whole raft of polling data on this. So there's been some sense of coming together. There's been a renegotiation of values. Before the pandemic, how did you become successful? How did you get prestige in America? You got good grades in high school.

You went to an Ivy in the college. You got a fancy job at Goldman Sachs. That prestige ladder has been flipped. And now the nurses have more prestige. Now the grocery store workers have more prestige. The bus drivers have more prestige. And so you see a transvaluation of values. And I don't want to get too carried away.

But I do think things are shifting. And there's just this universal sense where we can't go back to what we were before. We have to reset. I'm more hopeful than I was three months ago that that's a possibility. Yeah. Now, the whole term, I think a central worker has made us much more aware that many of the people are working, frankly, in low-wage jobs are essential. And they need to be supported.

They need a living wage. They need a society that works for them. Let's take some more questions here. We'll see if this one's coming up from our email or Facebook. It's another email question. This is from Reverend Mark Wilkinson from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He says, I'm an American pastor, a former Republican, now a senior pastor of a church here in Winnipeg.

How do we get back to choosing the greater good over winning at virtually any cost? the national interest over personal's ambition. So, David, on that same theme of the last question and part of our conversation tonight, are there specific policies that you could see that would help in that transition? Or is this literally something in your view that has to come from the bottom up

that it isn't the domain for national governments to create legislative tools or programs that can bring about this flourishing of community? Yeah, well, I think it's both. In the 1890s, I think about this a lot. You had a big economic transition, industrialization, you had waves of immigration, you had deep urban poverty, you had wide inequality of the concentration of wealth. A lot of things were going through. And their countries turned around, and their culture turned around in three ways. First, there's a cultural shift, and the pastor will be aware that the social gospel movement replaced social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was super competitive. Social gospel movement was communal. settlement houses and things like that. And then you had a civic renaissance in the 1890s, the boys and girls scouts, the boys and girls clubs, the NWACP, the unions, the environmental movement, the temperance movement, the settlement house movement. So you had a civic renaissance. And then finally you had the progressive movement, a political movement. So it went cultural, civic, political. And I think we're

sure to going through like that. I think there's a cultural movement, which I talked about earlier. I think we're seeing a civic renaissance of all sorts of organizations that are just spring up to try to serve local community. They're not scaling, unfortunately. And politically, you know, in the U.S., I think the policy that it seems blindingly obvious to me is a national service program where you make it a right of passage for young people to serve their country somewhere other than where they live. Right now, we need about 300,000 workers to do the track and tracing. We have an entire generation, a class of people who are graduating from college and high school with no jobs for the most part, no educational prospect.

no chance to really travel. And we should take that workforce and give them something to do. And I wrote a column to this a few weeks ago. And since then, in the U.S. Senate, not because of my column, just because the case is so obvious, there's been real movement. There's been a whole raft of Democrats when even some Republicans are beginning to sign on. A lot of Republicans privately have said, if you can get it going, I'll be there for you. And so a real unblocking.

So that would be the one obvious policy, I think, just to get, I don't know, what service they do just to get kids from Berkeley in the same team with kids from Mobile, Alabama would do a lot. And this is true in Canada, too, to imagine getting kids from East and West, just having that life experience together. That would go a long way. I should say we're speaking on a day when we've had riots in Minnesota. We've had two cases of real racial prejudice, killing of a young man. And so to the thing in Central Park. But in the U.S., the legacy of slavery is just an ever-present legacy. And it's hard to really talk about unity without addressing that subject. And that requires national leadership. And there are a lot of different ways you

could do it. I have been converted lately to the idea of reparations. I now support them just as a show of dignity to what African Americans have suffered in this country. It's hard for me to see really unity as a country until we make some significant progress on that, and that takes some sort of dramatic step. And to me, that's a national step. Great words. Okay, let's go to our next question here. We'll put that up on the screens from James Jones.

He said, what vital issue do you think will be forgotten in the upcoming issue due to the massive amount of attention being paid to the pandemic. So what could slip through the cracks here, David, that you think warrants real attention? Yeah, the one that leaps immediately to mind is education. I do think online learning is not working. It works for like the tiny sliver of hyper-motivated students, but for most it doesn't.

And I know, you know, we're all calling people around, checking up on our friends. And my friends, their emotional health, is entirely dependent on what age their children are. And so those who children have grown, they're doing pretty well. Those who children are young, they're fine. They were going to be quarantined anyway.

Those children who are 10-11 in school, there's a lot of stress there. And what I worry about is those children who were already disadvantaged educationally, falling further behind losing basically the last half of their school year, losing a summer, and sort of just falling further behind. And we haven't quite solved the problem of online education. And so I worry about that being lost. I do think there's a movement of foot that I've come to be intrigued by, which is called educational pluralism. At least in the U.S., we took this industrial model of, say, high school or elementary school, and we plop them down all over the place, and schools pretty much look alike.

But the creativity that I've seen in the educational landscape has been from small schools, really idiosyncratic schools with a distinct culture. And whenever I go to a school where I think that's really leaving a mark on a student, the school is not afraid to be itself. And I'd love to get to a world where the schools are probably a little smaller, but they're allowed to be more distinct. And they're allowed to really reflect the community and be rooted in the community rather than being these islands plop down in the community where the teachers and the parents don't have that much in common, where the principals are not community leaders. And so I'd love to see a little more of that, but I do worry that that's the issue that's going to get overlooked in amidst everything else. You're listening to The Monk Dialogues,

a special edition of the Monk Debates podcast, where we invite big thinkers to reflect on what our world will look like after COVID-19. This week, New York Times columnist David Brooks on how the pandemic will change politics and society. David, let's go to some more questions here. There were a lot for you, so we'll answer those that we can. The next one up is from Jean.

He's asking Joe Clark, the former Prime Minister of Canada, has talked about the competitive advantage that we have in Canada, given our internal unity relative to the United States. What are your thoughts about Canada and its leverage on the global stage in this new world? You know, David, you did have a long career as a foreign correspondent. You spent a lot of time in the world's capitals and points in between. You know, Canada right now is feeling pretty uncomfortable, squeezed between China and the United States and the growing great power rivalry between your country and Beijing.

What do you see potentially as a path for Canada in this world, that the pandemic in some ways, as you said, has been an accelerant of these tensions and trajectory. that were kind of already set on course prior to the virus's outbreak. Yeah. I now toggle back and forth between Canadian conversations and American conversations. And I always think Americans are so beleaguered because the division, the culture war is just so much more acute. And what we have in this country, we don't disagree more than we used to intellectually.

We just hate each other more over those disagreements with the political scientist It's called effective polarization, emotional polarization. The hatred is much higher. And I don't detect that when I cross into Canada quite as much, though you have a fair share. What I would say is that I mentioned naive globalization and that we sort of either it was betrayed by bad people or we were naive about it. But among the countries that has benefited the most from globalization that has succeeded the most from globalization and done it the best, I would say is Canada, both in immigration policies, in trade policies, even, you know, you guys managed to mostly avoid the financial crisis.

And so I would say Canada, as much as any other country, has an incentive in figuring out a solution to globalization that is not Victor Orban and that is not Bernie Sanders. And I would say that's been the case with Canada. I frankly, it's in a different way with the Scandinavian countries. One of the things that's really hit home for me recently is we had this debate, often around the world, Margaret Thatcher, in your country as well, where you either for the market or you were for the state. And the market was the right, state was the left. But if you look at some of the countries with the most successful societies, and I would include Scandinavia and Canada in that, they have pretty strong markets and pretty strong states. It's not one of the other.

And if you look at Sweden and Denmark and Norway, they can afford their generous welfare state because they have very free markets. And so finding that sweet spot and so we can have continue a globalization with immigration of free movement of goods and services is sort of the panacea for all our country. But I would say Canada is further ahead in that and more dependent on keeping the global system working and not having us retreat to. sort of great power politics of the 19th century where it's the US hating China, China hitting the US and Russia doing its thing and Europe basically splintering each other. The return to 19th century great power politics would be a disaster for all of us, but I think in particular for Canada. Right.

Something we need to avoid, but hard to see how those tensions aren't going to grow, at least in the short term. Let's take another question here from our viewing audience from Jen Kraft. asking, how do you think the experience of the pandemic will affect U.S. citizens' attitudes towards more universal health care? I mean, I think one of the things we've seen, David, in this crisis, has been very poignant. You've just mentioned the legacy of slavery in the United States, the extent to which minority communities, African-Americans, Hispanics, really have borne the brunt of this virus. And I'm sure you would agree, and many other Americans that would suggest,

some kind of moral imperative towards a greater role for the state and the delivery of health care. Do you think there's any, I don't know, new consensus in that in the U.S.? It has been, again, one of those issues that has divided the country? Yeah, if I think about the House Republicans who are just anti-state was the core ideology, I think we've crossed that hurdle. And so the future of the Republican Party is not going to be a libertarian Milton Friedman party. If you look at the rising young Republican senators are people like Josh Hawley from Missouri, now Marco Rubio. And they are working class conservatives.

They look a little more like the British Tory party does under Boris Johnson. They want to use the state to help the working class. And so extending some sort of health insurance, I think, would not be alien to a Republican Party five years from now. The problem in the U.S. is just a transitional one. We, through freakish circumstances in World War II, we developed this system. where we got our health insurance from our employers. And it was just a little regulation when we had wage controls that we said, oh, you can't give people raises, but you can give them health insurance.

And then out of this, boom, you get this unintended explosion of private delivery of health insurance, something that made no sense at the time and nobody planned. But now you got 180 million people on private health insurance and very happy with it. How do you transition them off? And that has been the problem all along. And frankly, that's a structural problem. it's hard for me to see it go away. You could expand Medicaid,

and I think what Joe Biden is promoting is an expansion, Medicare expansion, around that private system. But we're sort of switching people to a universal Medicare for all system. I just think it's a political non-starter. And that's not a judgment on value. It's just a judgment of,

how do you make the switch from one to another? And I don't think that's changing. I would say, if Joe Biden does get elected, I would caution him to do health care later. It's like Republicans always want to do Social Security, Medicare reform, entitlement reform. And a lot of people walk into that battle, nobody walks out. And when Democrats do health care, even when they do it successfully, like Barack Obama, they suffer electoral consequences that are terrible.

And so to me, for Biden, the number one agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs. And then expanding health care would be something of value down the line. Just to slip in, a quick question, David, a vice presidential running mate for Biden, given all we've talked about, I mean, who do you think is the right candidate and then who do you think he's likely to actually choose? Democrats have a tendency to rip themselves to shreds over factional disputes. And so the first qualification to me is pick somebody who will not be an opposite poll in your administration, creating a divided administration. pick somebody with enough character and discipline to be completely loyal to the president. And so character has to come first, somebody who's able to disagree well and be loyal. The second, I would say, is somebody who has the ability to move with the times and to understand we're not going to have the same left-centered debate that has divided the Democratic Party.

We're going to try to transcend that because of the circumstance. And I think highly of Elizabeth Warren, but the problem with her presidential campaign, She ran the same one she could have run four years ago or eight years ago. She didn't move with the times. And that's certainly true of Sanders. I would personally love to see Amy Klobuchar. She's an experienced legislator. She's a Democrat from Minnesota, more moderate probably than the party is.

Kamala Harris, the senator from California, did not run a great campaign. It was a little disorganized. But she's a person of a strong, forceful character and a fantastic presenter. And also, I think, has shown herself, especially since her campaigns, it really be an excellent Democrat, if you want to put it that way. So those would be some of the people. The final thing to be said is, I think America's really ready for a boring administrator. Somebody just gets stuff done.

Our governors now are phenomenally popular. And if Biden want to pick the governor, I think that would sort of short-circuit a lot of the ideological fights that are at the national level and maybe reassure a lot of people. Good. Well, we will see what happens soon, that announcement. Coming up before the Democratic Convention and an online convention, which would be interesting to see how both parties put that together. Okay, let's take another question. We've got about 10, 12 minutes left on our hour with David Brooks in the New York Times.

I'm speaking about the effects of COVID-19, this pandemic on our politics and our shared values. How will it change our sense of community, our sense of collective purpose? This question is from Sandra Yard. She's asking, what might we expect from the religious right in response to the pandemic, David? Again, we've seen this pandemic, unfortunately, become, I guess, couldn't only but become a political football. It's become a political football also within the evangelical community around rights to worship versus the ability of states to enforce stay-at-home and other quarantine orders. Where do you come down on that debate? Because I think it is an interesting one. It goes to the heart of one of the great perennial debates of the freedom of religion.

But also, do you think it potentially energizes those communities in the upcoming election? Yeah. If you looked at a lot of the media coverage, you would get the impression that Democrats all think this and Republicans all think this about staying at home. But that's actually just not the case. So 77% of Americans support staying at home. 82% support the regulations in their local area. And so in a polarized society, we've never seen numbers like this. And so to me, you've got the political class, which is emphasizing the division.

And there's a few completely unrepresentative people on the fringes who are marching on state capitals and carrying guns and waving Confederate flags. But if you look at the actual behavior of people, if they use cell phone technology to measure how people are moving, there's not a big difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats are a little more staged shut, but that's because they're living in urban areas where the pandemic is a way worse. If you look at who's handling this more effectively, red states and blue states, there's no vast difference.

There's some super effective red states, some super effective blue states. And so to me, the polarization is more a surface phenomenon. Now, among religious conservatives, there are some like Franklin Graham who are always going to be the culture warriors. But the vast majority to me, the big story out of this is that regular Republicans, regular religious conservatives are not with the cultural warriors on this. They're like looking

around at their neighbors. They're not making their decision on whether to stay home based on what some national clergy says or what Rush Limbaugh says. They're looking at their neighbors and figuring what's right for here. And my attitude on the debate between open up and lockdown is there's no national answer to that question. It's a local issue that depends on local circumstances. And the more we can make that locally and that's so we can make it ideologically, the better. Trump came out and said, I'm going to declare church's essential services, something in no power to do last week. But that was just a cheap political ploy of when I talk to pastors and people who go to church, they're like, no, not yet.

I'm not going to church right yet. And when I talk to clergy, they're kind of impressed the online participation is very high. And so I think people are basically behaving sensibly. And they're trying to strike a balance between rival goods, between safety and economic survival. And to me, we air if we think we've really got a polarized country on this front because we do not. That's good. That's an important clarification and some reason for hope. Let's take a couple more questions.

PIPA's asking, what's going to happen in the Middle East post-COVID with Israel? David, you've covered the Middle East as a foreign correspondent. This president has really gone out of his way to provide the government of Benjamin Netanyahu with many of its key policy and international demands. Israel has probably of any country in the world a disproportionate effect on U.S. politics. What's going to happen in Israel and how do you think that could play back into the campaign in the fall? Yeah, I confess I've probably been to Israel and the Middle East that Jordan and countries around there probably 25 times, 30 times. I've spent a lot of time there. But I haven't been there in two years. So I always think you're gone six months, you don't know. I used to cover peace processes. And I remember in the early 90s really getting my hopes up that there would be an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Don't really have that hope right now or that I'll see it anytime maybe in my lifetime. To me, the big change in the Middle East has been the pivot away from the central. of Israel, Palestine is the key divide, and the pivot toward Iran versus Saudi Arabia is the key divide. And so a lot of the Saudi and all those countries now somewhat friendly to Israel.

And I think that divide is still the key divide. But I have to say two or three years ago, it really did seem likely that we would see some, whether it's Shia, Sunni or Iran versus Arab, we really see an explosion. And the Middle East has a way of muddling through in a completely unattractive fashion where they don't make real progress, but they do deals with each other. And that's something I'm covering that region. I was with some military commanders, and they were in southern Lebanon. And they were bombing a village that is traditionally an ally, but the village had done something wrong. And I said, well, don't you think if you – this is Israeli troops.

if you bomb the won't that hurt your relationships with the village over the long term? He was like, there's no long term here. We're just playing chess. And that was a good lesson for me, that the people, even though they can be sworn enemies, they play chess. And that chess game is now intricate and stagnant as far as I can see. But I confess, I haven't been there in a couple of years. So I'm not the biggest expert in the world on that. Well, thanks, David.

good insights regardless. Is UBI on the table or is such an economic social investment untenable? I guess this is a hot issue here in Canada too, David, this fact that we've just gone and done what we've done, which has provide millions of citizens with direct financial support, not tied to a specific housing or child care or social assistance program, Do you think there's a real hope for UBI? Or, again, we've amassed credible public debts and deficits as a result.

So in some ways, maybe is the hope of UBI even further off than ever before? Yeah. I would say, I saw a poll in the UK about a week or two ago. And support for UBI was off the charts. It was like in the 70 percentile. I think a lot of people have taken a look and say, hey, I just could use the floor here. I can't speak to Canada on this, but I can speak to the U.S. and I'm speaking to a lot of democratic politicians,

their view is a core value, and I think this is true, Canada, core value is work, that you work for money, you work to provide your place in society, and then if you're going to tie wage benefits and wage subsidies, you tie it to work,

and that if you don't tie it to work, then people begin to, a lot of people say, that's not for me. And so I do worry that UBI would drain the work ethic. Now, in a time of crisis, it's different. There's no work. And so giving people money to do nothing is the right thing to do. But over the long term, I would worry about the cultural effect of basically giving people an option to not work

or to try to work on the black market and then get UBI. But I would support wage subsidies so people who are working 40 hours a week can live at a decent level. But I think it's that cultural value of work that is really the big divider there. Yeah, the dignity of work and the effects on communities and individuals who are denied the dignity of a job. And as you say, more than just the material benefit, but the sense of social standing that comes with employment is absolutely critical. Let's take a final question. We'll squeeze this in under our one hour with David Brooks. Let's see who our final questioner is. It's Cynthia from Salisbury. She's asking, everyone thinks COVID will finally wake people up to the gross inequalities of capitalism. How can

we make the needs of our most vulnerable a real priority in our politics and culture? So, I mean, David, maybe that's just an opportunity for you to, it's a nice broad question. It summarizes a lot of the themes that we've discussed with you over the last hour. Maybe that gives you an opportunity to leave us with some of what you think are the key points to reflect on as we try to think through how will this pandemic change our politics, change our culture, change our society, not next week, not next month, but as we've discussed in the years and maybe the decade to come. Yeah, I think we've done a good job over the last six years of giving people at the top of society room to run, giving them educational opportunities, giving them open space to do their thing.

And unfortunately, the top 20% have outcompeted. They've built structure so it's hard for the bottom 80% to get into certain schools, to get into certain jobs. And so you've just had a mass of people at the super top who are sort of insulated from risk. And the people in the bottom 80% have high risk and low reward. And this shift in risk to me is the key thing that has emerged, but maybe through some people's fault, but in my view, through nobody's fault. People just competed.

They passed their advantages down to their kids. And so they built a shelter for people in the educated class, of which, of course, I'm a part. But shifting that so that there's higher risk and higher reward and lower risk for people in the bottom 80% has got to be the agenda for the future. And rethinking our meritocracy and how we do that has got to be an agenda for the future. Rethinking government, so we have a free market economy where everybody can work their way to be a capitalist, but everybody has a chance to be a capitalist.

I do think we've just come to the dead end that has been recognized both on the right and the left. in different ways. And that's why I think change is coming. And it could be terrible, but I think it's needed. So it'll be an exciting 10 years. Well, David, it'll be exciting 10 years to keep reading your column, to watch you on PBS, to have you up. I hope for future Monk debates when we can all get together safely on a big stage in downtown Toronto. So, David, thank you so much for coming on spending this hour with us. It was a terrific conversation. I've learned a lot. You've shared your wisdom with our audience. So much appreciated. It's a pleasure and I'd love to see you in Toronto face to face again.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was David Brooks, our eighth participant in this a 10-part punk dialogues series. We're going to continue the series for two more weeks. We've got some terrific presenters coming up. Next week, Ian Bremmer, the geopolitical commentator strategist, the founder of the Eurasia Group, Wednesday, June 3rd at 8 p.m. We can talk about China, we talk about Canada's role in the world, some questions that were along those lines to David and that we've revisited in past Monk Dialogues, so do not miss Ian Bremmer on June 3rd. I just want to sign off by recognizing the two organizations that have really helped make

this dialogue series possible, the Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation that, like the Monk Debates, all of our activities through their charitable good works and their sister Foundation, the Aurea Foundation. So again, thank you for tuning in to this dialogue with David Brooks. We'll see you next week, Wednesday night, 8 p.m. for Ian Bremmer. In the meantime, let's keep talking, let's keep dialoguing, let's figure out COVID-19 in the world after as we have these conversations. I'm Rudyard Griffiths. Good night. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths, Ricky Gurfis, Ricky and Debbie Pacheco are the producers.

The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.