Arthur Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, the center-right Washington think tank that has, amid a decade of turmoil inside the Republican Party, remained a sober, respected voice on matters of policy—while gradually shedding its George W. Bush-era reputation as a leading voice for pugnacious, interventionist foreign policy.
Brooks, who is stepping down in June 2019 after 10 years at the helm of AEI, has consistently struck me as the smartest figure on the American right—someone not given to bouts of provocation or hyperbole, but rather someone who speaks with equal authority on macroeconomics and family budgeting, global starvation and American giving, corporate structure and worker behavior, cultural evolution and societal happiness.
Brooks also conjures comparisons to “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the character in the Dos Equis beer commercials. He performed as a professional French hornist before entering the world of academia. He converted to Roman Catholicism when he was 16 after a quasi-supernatural experience at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. He met his future wife, who spoke no English, while touring in France—and immediately moved to Barcelona to learn Spanish and begin his courtship. He befriended the Dalai Lama during a trip to India some years ago, leading to repeated visits with one another and a joint New York Times op-ed.
Less flashy but equally fascinating—at least in the annals of Washington— Brooks enhanced AEI’s reputation as an engine of introspection and debate, even as anti-intellectualism and lowest-common-denominator conservatism became the currency of the modern GOP. Brooks employs scholars from across the ideological spectrum, including Never-Trumpers, and unlike the rival Heritage Foundation, AEI has kept its distance from the administration.
In March, Brooks announced his impending retirement. We sat down recently to discuss the polarization of the electorate, the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the reason he remains optimistic about America’s future. Excerpts of that conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.
Arthur Brooks: For me, unity is a really big deal. By that I don’t mean agreement. The founding model in this place was super old school—a competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society, which was so subversive in the ’30s and ’40s because there was no competition of ideas. Disagreement is the essence of how we can unify as a people. We have a moral consensus about pushing opportunity out to people who need it most. Then we actually have to become a constellation of disagreement around that so that we can find the best way to do it. In the same way that you need a competition within the economy so that you can serve consumers best. Competition is hugely important in all areas. It’s a moral good. When you basically see a culture that's not trying to win competition vigorously and civilly and respectfully, but rather trying to shut down competition by any means necessary, that’s like an economy that's going from free enterprise to mercantilism. That’s basically what’s happened. We’ve gone from free enterprise of ideas to mercantilism of ideas. That’s what’s happening on both right and left today. That’s really disappointing.
Now, I’m sanguine still. Why? Because that happens periodically and competition also always wins out. There are basically two kinds of people in life: people who want to win competition and people who want to shut it down. People who don’t understand competition actually are the ones who want to shut it down because they don’t understand that competition requires rules. It requires moral precepts. Pepsi doesn’t want to go blow up the Coca-Cola bottling factory. It wants to take their customers fair and square for the better product and better pricing. The same thing should be true in American politics and policy.
PM: So you see intellectual sabotage?
Brooks: Yeah, and it’s not just unfair, it’s stupid because it leads to mediocrity. It leads to a flaccid set of political parties and not very creative ideas. When you’re shutting down the competition like this you don’t solve problems. You perpetuate problems, and you simply build up power structures. So all politics becomes a rent-seeking mechanism: my tribe, your tribe. I’m going to get power, I’m going to deny you power as opposed to colluding within the kind of the noble cause of solving ideas by competing at the head. What’s always disappointing to me is when we’re moving in the wrong direction and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction on that by moving to intellectual mercantilism. I want to move to intellectual free enterprise. That’s what I want.
PM: And the folks who want to suppress competition of ideas now have tools at their disposal the likes of which they’ve never had before, to do just that.
Brooks: I have a book coming out next year called The Culture of Contempt. We’ve created a culture of not anger, not disagreement, it’s contempt. And we need to strike back. We’re the majority. We don’t want this. Americans are being held hostage and terrorized by the fringes. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not like 50 percent of Americans thinks one thing and 50 percent thinks another thing. No, 15 percent on each side are effectively controlling the conversation and 70 percent of us don’t hate each other. I can ask any audience, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” Every hand goes up. And yet, you’re willing to have somebody, some fringe person on your side of the debate, say that your brother-in-law or your mother or your aunt is evil and stupid.
PM: But isn’t the problem more that the fringe used to be called “the fringe” for a reason—and today the fringe represents a broader chunk of both politicians and voters?
Brooks: They always do in this cycle. It’s always the case that when you get into a time of really big political polarization, that people are manipulated by people who are at the fringe. It’s only in retrospect that people go, “Whoa, man, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that we were putting up with that.” We need a kind of an ethical populism. What basically happened is that political establishment was a little bit too reticent. It was not paying attention, and the result was that the fringe picked up the football and ran off with it. But there’s going to be a backlash. If I have anything to say about it, there’s going to be a backlash of people who say that your radical, hateful views, and I’m no liberal, but I don’t hate liberals. I refuse to hate liberals. Refuse. I think there’s a lot of Americans that want to join me in that.
PM: How do you think we got to this point?
Brooks: The two things to read are Reinhart and Rogoff’s book, This Time Is Different. It came out in 2010—the single best book ever on financial cycles and financial crisis. The second is an article that was written in the European Economic Review in early 2017 by three German economists that looks at the knock-on political effect of financial crises—not a regular recession, but a big overhang of assets that becomes a bubble and then pops, which typically happens a couple times a century. So it’s silver and the railroads in 1894 and 1896, or it’s the stock market in 1929, or it's the real estate market in ’08. The most interesting thing for me is that in the decade after a financial crisis, the knock-on effect over 10 years is not low growth, it’s uneven growth. The big thing that happens for 10 years is that you have asymmetric economic growth where 80 percent of the income distribution gets none of the rewards of the growth after the recession. Of course you get populism after that. It’s natural. It’s just the way it works.
PM: But populism is not inherently a bad thing.
Brooks: Bernie Sanders is a populist. Bernie Sanders’ populism is all about scapegoating. It’s rich people, it’s bankers, it’s Republicans—it’s all these people who got your stuff. That’s the kind of populism that we frequently see as opposed to a kind of ethical populism, which basically says we have good values, let’s go share. Let’s make sure that our values are ascendant to save our country. Right? Wouldn't that be great? But it turns out it’s easier in the political process when people are suffering a lot to say somebody came and got your stuff. Whether it’s immigrants or whether it’s trading partners or whether it’s bankers or whatever.
PM: What about conservatism? In your nine years at AEI, what’s been the single most important, most fundamental change you have seen in conservatism itself?
Brooks: Well for sure it’s the rise to Trump.
[ed. Great interview, although my perspective on the question of 'how we got here' wouldn't be limited to just the Great Recession. There's also: a dishonest and ill-conceived war with Iraq (and everything that followed - legitimizing torture; a new Homeland Security bureaucracy and rise of the surveillance state; the demise of habeas corpus and the normalization of indefinite political imprisonment; neoliberalism in general (including the demise of Glass-Steagall) and the focus on maximizing short-term corporate shareholder profit as a national economic policy, etc.); plus, John McCain's decision to cast Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. It's just been a cascading series of moral and ethical failures since 9/11 - but beginning with the Reagan administration.]
Brooks, who is stepping down in June 2019 after 10 years at the helm of AEI, has consistently struck me as the smartest figure on the American right—someone not given to bouts of provocation or hyperbole, but rather someone who speaks with equal authority on macroeconomics and family budgeting, global starvation and American giving, corporate structure and worker behavior, cultural evolution and societal happiness.Brooks also conjures comparisons to “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the character in the Dos Equis beer commercials. He performed as a professional French hornist before entering the world of academia. He converted to Roman Catholicism when he was 16 after a quasi-supernatural experience at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. He met his future wife, who spoke no English, while touring in France—and immediately moved to Barcelona to learn Spanish and begin his courtship. He befriended the Dalai Lama during a trip to India some years ago, leading to repeated visits with one another and a joint New York Times op-ed.
Less flashy but equally fascinating—at least in the annals of Washington— Brooks enhanced AEI’s reputation as an engine of introspection and debate, even as anti-intellectualism and lowest-common-denominator conservatism became the currency of the modern GOP. Brooks employs scholars from across the ideological spectrum, including Never-Trumpers, and unlike the rival Heritage Foundation, AEI has kept its distance from the administration.
In March, Brooks announced his impending retirement. We sat down recently to discuss the polarization of the electorate, the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the reason he remains optimistic about America’s future. Excerpts of that conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.
***
POLITICO Magazine: For conservatism, for Republicanism, for the institutions of government and for the country as a whole, from your perch over the past 10 years, what went wrong?Arthur Brooks: For me, unity is a really big deal. By that I don’t mean agreement. The founding model in this place was super old school—a competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society, which was so subversive in the ’30s and ’40s because there was no competition of ideas. Disagreement is the essence of how we can unify as a people. We have a moral consensus about pushing opportunity out to people who need it most. Then we actually have to become a constellation of disagreement around that so that we can find the best way to do it. In the same way that you need a competition within the economy so that you can serve consumers best. Competition is hugely important in all areas. It’s a moral good. When you basically see a culture that's not trying to win competition vigorously and civilly and respectfully, but rather trying to shut down competition by any means necessary, that’s like an economy that's going from free enterprise to mercantilism. That’s basically what’s happened. We’ve gone from free enterprise of ideas to mercantilism of ideas. That’s what’s happening on both right and left today. That’s really disappointing.
Now, I’m sanguine still. Why? Because that happens periodically and competition also always wins out. There are basically two kinds of people in life: people who want to win competition and people who want to shut it down. People who don’t understand competition actually are the ones who want to shut it down because they don’t understand that competition requires rules. It requires moral precepts. Pepsi doesn’t want to go blow up the Coca-Cola bottling factory. It wants to take their customers fair and square for the better product and better pricing. The same thing should be true in American politics and policy.
PM: So you see intellectual sabotage?
Brooks: Yeah, and it’s not just unfair, it’s stupid because it leads to mediocrity. It leads to a flaccid set of political parties and not very creative ideas. When you’re shutting down the competition like this you don’t solve problems. You perpetuate problems, and you simply build up power structures. So all politics becomes a rent-seeking mechanism: my tribe, your tribe. I’m going to get power, I’m going to deny you power as opposed to colluding within the kind of the noble cause of solving ideas by competing at the head. What’s always disappointing to me is when we’re moving in the wrong direction and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction on that by moving to intellectual mercantilism. I want to move to intellectual free enterprise. That’s what I want.
PM: And the folks who want to suppress competition of ideas now have tools at their disposal the likes of which they’ve never had before, to do just that.
Brooks: I have a book coming out next year called The Culture of Contempt. We’ve created a culture of not anger, not disagreement, it’s contempt. And we need to strike back. We’re the majority. We don’t want this. Americans are being held hostage and terrorized by the fringes. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not like 50 percent of Americans thinks one thing and 50 percent thinks another thing. No, 15 percent on each side are effectively controlling the conversation and 70 percent of us don’t hate each other. I can ask any audience, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” Every hand goes up. And yet, you’re willing to have somebody, some fringe person on your side of the debate, say that your brother-in-law or your mother or your aunt is evil and stupid.
PM: But isn’t the problem more that the fringe used to be called “the fringe” for a reason—and today the fringe represents a broader chunk of both politicians and voters?
Brooks: They always do in this cycle. It’s always the case that when you get into a time of really big political polarization, that people are manipulated by people who are at the fringe. It’s only in retrospect that people go, “Whoa, man, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that we were putting up with that.” We need a kind of an ethical populism. What basically happened is that political establishment was a little bit too reticent. It was not paying attention, and the result was that the fringe picked up the football and ran off with it. But there’s going to be a backlash. If I have anything to say about it, there’s going to be a backlash of people who say that your radical, hateful views, and I’m no liberal, but I don’t hate liberals. I refuse to hate liberals. Refuse. I think there’s a lot of Americans that want to join me in that.
PM: How do you think we got to this point?
Brooks: The two things to read are Reinhart and Rogoff’s book, This Time Is Different. It came out in 2010—the single best book ever on financial cycles and financial crisis. The second is an article that was written in the European Economic Review in early 2017 by three German economists that looks at the knock-on political effect of financial crises—not a regular recession, but a big overhang of assets that becomes a bubble and then pops, which typically happens a couple times a century. So it’s silver and the railroads in 1894 and 1896, or it’s the stock market in 1929, or it's the real estate market in ’08. The most interesting thing for me is that in the decade after a financial crisis, the knock-on effect over 10 years is not low growth, it’s uneven growth. The big thing that happens for 10 years is that you have asymmetric economic growth where 80 percent of the income distribution gets none of the rewards of the growth after the recession. Of course you get populism after that. It’s natural. It’s just the way it works.
PM: But populism is not inherently a bad thing.
Brooks: Bernie Sanders is a populist. Bernie Sanders’ populism is all about scapegoating. It’s rich people, it’s bankers, it’s Republicans—it’s all these people who got your stuff. That’s the kind of populism that we frequently see as opposed to a kind of ethical populism, which basically says we have good values, let’s go share. Let’s make sure that our values are ascendant to save our country. Right? Wouldn't that be great? But it turns out it’s easier in the political process when people are suffering a lot to say somebody came and got your stuff. Whether it’s immigrants or whether it’s trading partners or whether it’s bankers or whatever.
PM: What about conservatism? In your nine years at AEI, what’s been the single most important, most fundamental change you have seen in conservatism itself?
Brooks: Well for sure it’s the rise to Trump.
by Tim Alberta, Politico | Read more:
Image: Andrew Harnik/AP Photo[ed. Great interview, although my perspective on the question of 'how we got here' wouldn't be limited to just the Great Recession. There's also: a dishonest and ill-conceived war with Iraq (and everything that followed - legitimizing torture; a new Homeland Security bureaucracy and rise of the surveillance state; the demise of habeas corpus and the normalization of indefinite political imprisonment; neoliberalism in general (including the demise of Glass-Steagall) and the focus on maximizing short-term corporate shareholder profit as a national economic policy, etc.); plus, John McCain's decision to cast Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. It's just been a cascading series of moral and ethical failures since 9/11 - but beginning with the Reagan administration.]
