Now, after 22 years, columnist David Brooks is leaving the New York Times.

His final column, "Time to Say Goodbye," is a reflection on how much America has changed in those two decades, citing diminishing trust in institutions, technology, and even in one another.

Brooks breaks down what he describes as a collective loss of faith.

He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what it would take for the nation to come back together.

Paolo, thanks.

David Brooks, thanks for joining us again.

You have worked at the New York Times as a columnist for 22 years.

That is a long time in any job.

You recently wrote your last column for the Times, and we'll get to what you said in the piece in a moment.

But I guess, what's the message that you wanted to leave the readers with?

Well, I was reflecting back on my time at The Times, and of course, I came to be a moderate conservative, and I figure that moderate Republicans are now so dominant in American life that my work here is done.

So, no, I'm kidding.

I've been an utter failure to persuade people around to my point of view.

But, you know, we're in a moment, you know, and I reflect back on the times since I joined The Times in 2003.

It's there's been just a tremendous loss of faith that Americans have lost faith.

They've lost faith.

The Iraq war caused us to lose faith in America's role abroad.

The financial crisis caused people to lose faith.

The idea that unregulated capitalism would produce broad prosperity.

The Internet did not bring us all together.

It brought strife.

We have declining levels of social trust.

And so there's been a sense of disillusionment and a loss of faith.

We've lost our humanistic core.

All the things that make us more human, whether it's literature or religion or history or good conversation, those all are in decline.

And so I thought, you know, I've got one more 10-year chapter in my career, probably, maybe my life.

God knows I could die any moment.

But I thought I'd want to use that last chapter to try something new.

and leaving the Times is both exhilarating and terrifying.

But I thought I should try it.

Thank God I can still stay at the NewsHour.

You wrote in your piece a little bit about your evolution.

It said, "I've switched from being solidly right to vaguely centrist.

I've moved left on the death penalty, rightward on abortion, and leftward on economic policy.

In the 1980s, I thought stagnation was the core social problem, so I sided with Republicans.

By the 2000s, I concluded that inequality was the core social problem, so I sided more with Democrats.

Berlin once said, "He was happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency."

That's where I'm happy to be today, a conservative Democrat.

And I wonder, have your beliefs changed since starting at the Times 22 years ago?

Or is this a case of, "I didn't leave the party, the party left me"?

I would say, foundationally, my beliefs have not changed too much.

My two intellectual heroes are, one, Edmund Burke, who was an Irish philosopher in the 18th century, and Edmund Burke believed in epistemological modesty, that the world is just a really complicated place, and we should be careful about how we think we should change it.

So we should do change that's incremental, but constant.

Burke said we should operate on society the way you would operate on your father, surgically.

So just be gentle.

And I still believe that.

The world is really complicated and a lot of our plans go awry because we don't understand how complex the world is.

My second hero is Alexander Hamilton.

And Alexander Hamilton is a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from northern Manhattan.

[laughter] And so Alexander Hamilton believed in creating a country where poor boys and girls like him could rise and succeed.

He believed in social mobility.

And so those two things are still the core of what I believe.

The problem is the Republicans are conservative in no way.

They're not Burkean gradualists and incrementalists.

They believe in radical revolution and dismantling.

So they've become not conservative, but reactionary.

And progressives I still don't totally agree with, but I can't be a Republican these days, so I'm happy to be a conservative Democrat if you've got to put me somewhere.

But my beliefs have partly on policy have changed, as I say, because, you know, the issues change.

What's the crucial issue of our time?

I always think it's very important to ask, what year is it?

And when I was in college in the early 80s, we really did struggling from stagnation, if anybody remembers the Carter era.

And so I thought Reagan and Thatcher were right to boost us out of that.

And then inequality, and I thought Barack Obama, and I think Joe Biden was right to redistribute money to people without college degrees.

Now I think the primary problem is social and relational and almost spiritual.

We've just become sadder and meaner as a society.

As I say, loss of faith, loss of trust.

And so to me, the core arena, if you believe that our problems are primarily spiritual, moral, and relational, it's not in the realm of politics, it's in the realm of culture.

And so I wanna be to play in that playground with a lot of other people who are working on the same thing.

- It's interesting, I wonder, is this, if you look at a young person that's growing up today, depending on when they were born, perhaps their earliest memories might be of, you know, their parents talking about the Iraq war, perhaps it's about the impact the financial crisis had on their home or their life, or certainly this is a generation or two that have grown up now with the internet front and center that is altering their perceptions of reality.

I mean, it's almost like, can you blame them for this lack of trust?

- Yeah, I spend my time around a lot of kids and a lot of young people, including my own kids, and they think you have left us a mess.

Your generation has destroyed a lot of things we believe in.

And one of the most important statistics is interpersonal trust.

People ask, "Do you trust your neighbors?"

And people in my generation, boomer Gen X, 60% say, "Yeah, I trust my neighbors."

For millennial and Gen Z, it's 19%.

And I saw a survey where they asked millennial and Gen Z, "Do you think most people are selfish enough to get you?"

And 72% said, "Yes."

And so they've just seen a world that's become hostile and bitter and rejects them.

Whether they're trying to get into school or get a job, it's just become a lot harsher.

And their social life has no rules.

I often ask my students, why are you guys so high in distrust?

And they say, have you seen my social life?

I had a young woman say, I've had four relationships in my life and all the guys ghosted me at the end.

They didn't have the decency to have a breakup conversation.

So she said, of course I'm distrustful.

That's my experience.

People have been untrustworthy to me.

And so I don't blame the young people for reacting to the world they see around them.

I would only say that America goes through a process of rupture and repair.

When you ask people, like, what made you the person you are?

No one ever says, you know, I took this fantastic vacation in Hawaii.

That made me the person I am.

Nobody ever says that.

People talk about a hard time.

And that's true for in individual lives.

It's true in our national lives, that we go through periods of rupture and repair where we have to tear down the old culture, because it's no longer working for us.

It happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson populism.

It happened in the 1890s when we failed in industrialization.

Happened in the 1960s with riots and bombings and assassinations, and it's happening now.

And the good news, America's been here before and through a process of rupture and repair, we're going to come out of it because we are creative and the best part about America, if you ever get despairing about this country, write all the problems of America on one side of the legal pad and then on the right side write this sentence, "America has more talent than ever before."

And column B is more important than column A. You're making a good case for trying to be optimistic.

Let me pose a counterpoint.

I mean, I think there are a lot of people that say, "You know, that's great, David, this history lesson, but the pace of change is so much more rapid now.

Look at what these AI tools can do.

What am I going to come out of college and what kind of job am I going to be able to do when entry-level work is going to be increasingly farmed out to, you know, Claude and Chachi P.T.

And there's the talent that you're talking about is because of some of our immigration policies and how welcoming we are as a nation.

Some of that talent is deciding to stay elsewhere on the planet.

Well, I'd say first of all, think of somebody who was born in 1890 and died at age 80 in 1970.

They were born into the era of the horse and buggy, and they died at the moment of man on the moon.

That is an immense amount of social change, and frankly, more social change than we have had in our lifetime.

Industrialization was massive, two world wars, a Great Depression, there was a lot going on, and they were able to adapt.

And so I just think we've been here before so many times.

And then if you ask me, I don't know what the future of AI is, neither does anybody else, but I do think it's gonna create a new form of intelligence and that will make us more productive and we'll have to figure out the dislocations.

But think of how poorly America used its talent until recently, recently, until say the mid-1960s, women, we were not using their talent to anything like their full capacity.

Black people, Jews, any ethnic group basically.

We were mining the talent of a few white WASPy guys whose family came over on the Mayflower or the boat after that.

So we were squandering massive amounts of talent.

And now the situation, even despite what's happened over the last few years, just so much better.

I mean, when I do a lot of reporting on AI, and I go to the research facilities, open AI and places like that, you know, the hardest part about writing about AI, it's spelling the names of the researchers, because they're from Ghana, they're from Indonesia, they're from all over the world.

And despite the crackdown on immigration, you look at that, where you going to any college classroom these days?

It looks totally different than it did 60 years ago, but the kids are eager.

And frankly, as someone who came from an immigrant background, at least my grandfather, they've got that hustle.

They've got the same hustle.

It's weird for me to go to New York, where my family really grew up on the Lower East Side and see people who look very different from me, but they speak exactly the same as my grandfather spoke about, I'm gonna make a difference in the world.

I'm gonna do something big.

And to go back to Alexander Hamilton, he brought that spirit and he brought that energy.

And I think they do too today.

- You point out that that has been part of the American DNA, but we're seeing with the election and re-election of President Trump, there's enough people in this country that have kind of a nativist streak that want to hearken back to a time where things didn't look like the Lower East Side that you're describing today.

- Right, and that is true.

There are people like that.

I don't think they're the majority of the Trump coalition.

I think there are some people who just like, we should live in a white America.

I think the majority of the coalition took a look at the country and said, the highly educated class is not paying attention to people like me.

That there's that chasm between those who went to college and those who didn't.

The people who went to college live 10 years longer.

They're much less likely to be obese, much less likely to have opioid addiction, much less likely to get divorced, much less likely to say they have no friends.

And so we've opened up this chasm.

And if when you open up a chasm, and generation after generation, the same families have the advantage, the rest of the country is going to flip the table.

So my problem with Trump is that, well, the good thing about Trump is he's never completely wrong.

When he attacks an institution, there's usually something that institution should have been doing to reform itself.

The problem with Trump is that he overreacts.

And so like he attacked the universities.

And he wasn't entirely wrong about the universities.

They got a little progressive monoculture.

They got a little too elitist.

They got a little too pre-professional.

But the problem is he goes in and he's seeking to defund them, to destroy them, to really crush their ability to do research.

My line about Trump is that he's like, you go to the doctor with acne and the doctor says, "You know what will cure acne?

Decapitation.

We're going to chop your head off and that'll cure your acne."

And that's Trump.

He just destroys.

But the good news is, and let's take this example of the universities, this is the best moment for university reform of my lifetime.

That wherever I go, and this is hundreds of schools, they're doing more character education because they look at the occupant of the White House and say, "You know, we haven't been doing good enough character education."

Then there's a lot of citizenship courses that are now going on, a citizenship program.

How do we raise people to be good Democrats, in the small "d" sense of the word?

And then how to do life.

A lot of this column you also dedicate, and a lot of your recent work, you've talked about character, you've talked about moral decay.

In the case of Trump, you said, "You know, look, he was the effect, he's not the cause of it."

Explain where that decay is coming from.

Yeah, the main story I tell was we all have to have something sacred as a society, and we all have to have a shared moral order.

There's a historian named George Marston who wrote of Martin Luther King, I'm going to paraphrase, that what gave King's rhetoric such force was his conviction that right and wrong were written into the fabric of the universe, that there was a natural order, and that in that order of right and wrong, which King, being a pastor, would say was God-ordained, that segregation is not just wrong sometimes in some places, it's always wrong.

Racism is always wrong.

Rape is always wrong.

It's in the fabric of the universe.

And starting way back in the 1950s, I would say, we told people, come up with your own values, come up with your own truth, come up with your own morality.

We essentially privatized morality.

And we said, it's something you have to do for yourself as an individual.

And that was part of the individualistic move in American culture.

The problem is, if you ask everybody to come up with their own morality, their own values, most of us can't do it unless your name is Aristotle.

And so people are morally unformed.

And then there's no shared moral order.

We don't agree on what's right and wrong.

And if we don't agree on what's right and wrong, we can't trust each other because we don't know what you're going to do what you ought to do.

And we can't settle argument because we have no shared standards.

Walter Lippmann, a great columnist, said, "If what is good and evil is what each individual feels based on their emotions, then we are outside the realm of civilization."

And I think in privatizing morality, we left people naked and alone, morally naked and alone.

And they didn't even recognize that somebody with Donald Trump's character was going to lead to bad things.

What should citizens be determined to try to chart a better path forward for themselves and the policies that they want to see in the communities that they want to build?

Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just being learning the skills to spread that moral ecology.

I think we all touch the people around us.

And we can either look at people as objects and treat them as objects, or we can cast what the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch called a just and loving attention.

That power of attention is just tremendously important of how you gaze at someone, how you do treat someone with reverence and respect.

And when you do that, you create trust.

And then the second thing that anybody could do was I started this little nonprofit years ago called Weave, the social fabric project.

And we left up people who just help people in their community.

We try to give them some financial support and we try to connect them with others and we try to lift them up in any way we can.

And some of those people are, they're very casual.

They're like, we ran into somebody who said, "I practice aggressive friendship."

Which means I'm the person on my block who invites people over for July 4th for the Super Bowl party.

I practice aggressive friendship.

It's great to do that.

With other people who really sit with the poor, sit with people suffering PTSD, they mentor kids.

I ran into a guy years ago named Pancho Aguiles who helps, lives in Houston, used to help people who suffered paralyzed in construction accidents.

He would give them wheelchairs, he would give them the things they would need to lead a dignified life.

They'd have some training in social work so they could help people in the neighborhoods in Houston.

And I once said to Pancho, you know, you radiate holiness.

And he said to me, no, I just reflect holiness, which is the right answer.

And so these people, I'm sure everybody's listening to us, can think of people in the neighborhood.

If I walked up to them and said, who's trusted here?

There are those people in the neighborhood.

And they're leading beautiful lives.

I ran into a woman in Wilkes, North Carolina, who counsels kids who are LGBTQ.

And it's a rural part of Appalachia.

And she is so well known in her community.

When she goes to the Walmart, if she needs to get out of there in less than an hour, before going down an aisle, she'll like peek in to make sure there's nobody she knows.

But she knows so many people in the town, a trip to the Walmart can be two hours because she's behind her friends.

And we can all do that a little more.

And my theory of cultural change is that culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy.

And that's, you know, Christianity started with 12 guys and now there are billions of them because some people said, you know, that's an attractive way to live.

And the same thing with weavers.

If you know people in your life who are living lives of moral purpose, you're gonna say, you know, maybe I can't be as heroic to that person, but I'd like to do a little more.

And that's part of cultural repair.

I don't think our politics can repair before a culture does.

And that's something we all participate in.

- Former columnist at the New York Times and soon to be podcaster as well as writer again, David Brooks, thanks so much for joining us.