Opinion
The Opinions
Thomas L. Friedman Says We’re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.
Two columnists debate this strange moment.
Dec. 12, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
  
By David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman
Produced by Derek Arthur
We’re living in a strange moment. According to the columnist Thomas L. Friedman, it’s a completely new era, called the Polycene — one in which everything moves faster and science, technology and politics are more connected than ever. The columnist David Brooks sits down with Friedman to make sense of what the modern world’s cascading crises mean for the future.
Thomas L. Friedman Says We’re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.Two columnists debate this strange moment.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Brooks: My name is David Brooks. I am a columnist at The New York Times. I’m joined by my friend and colleague Thomas L. Friedman, who I will start calling Tom from here on out. We’ve been working together for a long time.
Between us we have three Pulitzer Prizes. Some would point out that Tom has all three, and I have never been nominated. But when it comes to Pulitzers, I’m a socialist. I believe in sharing them equally from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
So, it’s good to be with you in the Pulitzer category, Tom.
Thomas L. Friedman: [Laughs.] Always, David.
Brooks: One of the things I love about Tom’s writing is that he’s not just reacting to whatever happened in the last 12 hours. He does big sweeping columns, which help us explain the times.
We’re going to talk about a piece called “ Welcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?” You repeat the term “the Polycene,” and we’re going to talk about your theory of where we are as a world.
Before we get there, there’s a great saying in Talmudic scholarship — and I think our ancestors were probably debating the Book of Job somewhere back in the shtetl in the 19th century — that goes, “Find the disagreement under the disagreement.”
Sometimes, when two people disagree, it’s because they have very different ways of looking at the world. You and I have discussed this many times, that we often come out to the same spot. We have pretty similar views, but we come by very different avenues. One of the pleasures of reading you is I get the pleasure of agreeing with you and also the pleasure of disagreeing with you at the same time.
Friedman: Ditto.
Brooks: Correct me if I’m wrong. I would say the simplistic way to summarize the difference in the way we see the world is that you would be more technology-first and I would probably be more culture-first.
Friedman: Yes.
Brooks: So, I’m going to make my little two-minute critique of the technological viewpoint.
Friedman: Go for it.
Brooks: My view of the problem with the technological viewpoint is that technology is obviously very important in driving world events, but it sometimes falls into the danger of what you might call Norman Angellism. Norman Angell is famously a guy who wrote a book called “The Great Illusion” in 1910, saying the world is so interconnected, we can never have a world war. Four years later, World War I.
I think technology explains a lot, but it often doesn’t explain the biggest world events, like World War II. The war maybe had some technological impulse. I’d say it came about mostly because of German humiliation after Versailles and a belief in dictatorships in that era, which was pretty universal.
Am I getting this wrong or right? Why do you think technology is so forward, if I’m summarizing your view correctly? And how did you get here?
Friedman: I would say a couple of things, David. One is that it’s a little bit of a misinterpretation of me. I get this a lot.
When I wrote “The World Is Flat” — let me just back up.
I was in China last year and I was at Beijing Airport. I was coming to a conference, so they sent a college student to greet me, and we were sitting waiting for my luggage, and she said: “Mr. Friedman, I just have to ask you one thing. Is the world still flat?” And I said, “Actually, it’s flatter than ever in the way I meant it.”
What did I mean? I meant that we had created a technological platform on which more people could do more things in more ways with more other people for less money, from more places than ever before.
That’s what the book was about. What the book wasn’t about is what people would do on that platform driven by culture or politics or something else. I got conflated into the Norman Angell thing by people saying, “Well, because the world’s flat, therefore everyone will love each other and it’ll be Mark Zuckerberg’s world of just building wonderful communities.” I never, never believed that.
So the better real frame for my thinking, David, is actually the book I wrote before “The World Is Flat,” which was a book that basically took on the challenge of, what is the system that would replace the Cold War system? At the time, there were several big ideas out there.
Francis Fukuyama said it’ll be the end of history. Didn’t work out.
Second was Sam Huntington: It’ll be a clash of civilization. Well, that didn’t work out, because there are more clashes within civilizations — Sunnis and Shiites, just to name one — than between them.
Third was Robert Kaplan. He said it would be the coming anarchy. Well, we’ve had a lot of anarchy, but a lot of stability, too.
I weighed in with “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.” My argument was that what’s going to actually replace it is a tension between culture — the olive tree, the things that anchor us, root us, and drive us into the world — and this new globalization system.
Then, to take up the Norman Angell point, sometimes that globalization system will actually restrain behavior. Putin will invade Crimea, but he might not go to Kyiv. China will threaten Taiwan, but they won’t actually invade. And sometimes you’ll burst through that system, but my real framework is that it’s a tension between the two. That’s my real worldview.
Brooks: Now, one more point on this and then we’ll get to your column. What about the argument that the reaction to technology — and I would say the counterreaction — is often more important than the actual technology?
One of the things I’ve learned over the course of my career is to not only look at the people who everyone is focused on, but to look at the people who are silently watching.
By 1968, you would’ve seen the hippies and you would’ve seen the new left and the peace movement, and you would’ve thought, “Man, this is going to be a liberal era.”
But quietly, in the hallways of Yale University, there were two guys named Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and they were saying: “This is disgusting. These people are taking us off the rails.” And they turned out to be more powerful.
When you get a technological advance, you always get a nostalgic counterreaction. In someways, the counterreaction is more important than the actual technology itself.
Friedman: Well, I actually agree with that, which is why so much of my writing is also about community and things like that. The head of Anthropic is in the other room, and I was just listening to him, and he was talking about the power of computing.
This piece on the Polycene actually follows one that I did on A.I. ethics, and what I said is that the faster, more powerful, more integrated, complex the world gets, the more everything you learned at Sunday school matters more than ever.
If you ask me what’s the most dangerous statistic in the world today, in the world of A.I., it isn’t anything with chips. It’s the Gallup poll that said fewer people than ever are going to church.
Because if we’re going into a world where we’re all much more empowered and all much more interconnected, then what you learned in Sunday school matters more than ever, starting with “Do unto others as you wish them to do unto you.”
But it’s even more complicated. If we don’t endow those values into this new species we have spawned — artificially intelligent beings — all hell is going to break loose.
I’ve got a lot more David Brooks in me [laughs] than you realize. I start in a different place, but as you know, I end in the same place you are.
Brooks: We’re going to do a David Brooks exorcism. [Laughs.]
Friedman: That’s right.
Brooks: OK, let’s get to the column. So you’ve got this term, the Polycene. Just give us a summary of what the argument is.
Friedman: One of the things I wanted to do in this column was something I’ve never done. I have some real thought partners around the world; I’m really privileged over the years and I consider myself an acorn collector. That’s what I’m really good at. I see stuff out there, but I’m not smart enough to crack them. I’ve developed this set of partners over 40 years who are just so much smarter than me, and we crack acorns together.
Two summers ago, I was actually in Aspen and my friend Craig Mundie, former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, who’s been my A.I. tutor since “The World Is Flat,” came and tutored me on A.I. He gave me my introductory tutorial to A.I.
What a great thing. Craig’s a supercomputer designer. He explained to me that the goal of A.I. was polymathic artificial general intelligence. That’s an artificial brain that’s mastered chemistry, biology, physics, baseball, Mozart and the New York Yankees and can then reason across all of them. I’d never heard that term before.
A week later, I get an email from my climate tutor, Johan Rockstrom, talking about polycrisis.
I said: “Well, that’s interesting. I’ve just been with my A.I. tutor talking about polymathic. Now you’re talking about polycrisis.”
The idea that the world isn’t a binary thing of hot and cold. It’s that climate change triggers deforestation, triggers crop loss, triggers internal migration, triggers state collapse — a polycrisis.
Anyway, at the same time, I started giving a speech on foreign policy that Secretary of State Blinken started citing. The speech was about two secretaries of state: Henry Kissinger, Tony Blinken. Two Middle East October wars: October 1973, October 2023.
Kissinger, to do his job, to put together the first disengagement agreement between Syria, Egypt, Israel, needed three dimes — I’m dating myself here — a dime to call Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel; a dime to call Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt; and a dime to call Hafez al-Assad, the president of Syria. Three dimes, Kissinger’s airplane, three months, Kissinger magic, and he produced the first disengagement agreements — the diplomatic equivalent, David, of tic-tac-toe: three across.
Fast forward 50 years later. Tony Blinken saw double everywhere he went. He had to deal with inside Hamas and outside Hamas, political Hamas and military Hamas, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In Lebanon, he had the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. In Syria, he had the Syrian government, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. In Yemen, he had 18 tribes. In Iraq, he had 18 militias. And in Israel, he had 18 parties.
Tony Blinken wasn’t playing tic-tac-toe. He had a Rubik’s Cube. His world had become incredibly polymorphic and polyamorous.
Last example, I’m thinking about the community and the time I grew up in: Minneapolis in the ’50s, St. Louis Park. Everything was binary then. You’re either a man or a woman. You’re either white or Black. You’re either Christian or Jewish. You are either at work or at home. My world was entirely binary.
Fast forward to today, in my little town, St. Louis Park, the mayor is a Somali woman. The new mayor of St. Paul is a Hmong woman from Laos who defeated an African American guy. And the elementary school around the block from me now has 30 different languages in it, which is 29 more than when I was there. My universe there has exploded into polymorphism.
So, the net effect of all that is, I came back to Craig and I said: “Craig, we are not in the Cold War anymore. We are not in the post-Cold War. We’re not in the post-post-Cold War. What do we call this era?” And he suggested we call it the Polycene.
Brooks: OK. Now, the New York Times audience wants us to have a long conversation on polyamory. We’re not giving them that satisfaction. We are both married ——
Friedman: That’s right. Exactly.
Brooks: And I don’t think either of our wives would like that.
Friedman: Exactly. And we love our wives. [Laughs.]
Brooks: But let me challenge you on two things. It’s the same challenge, but it’s on different spheres. First, on the domestic, and the core of my challenge is that the world wasn’t that simple in the past, simpler than it is now, or that we were in a weird moment that you and I both grew up in, and that was just a weird moment.
Friedman: Right. Which I’ve come to believe a lot more. But go ahead, please.
Brooks: So, the domestic. You talked about your childhood in Minneapolis or St. Paul.
Friedman: St. Louis Park.
Brooks: St. Louis Park. I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City. And when I was in fourth grade, we heard a loud boom. And it turned out there was a radical group called the Weathermen, who were building bombs in a townhouse right by my school, and they blew themselves up.
New York was so violent in the 1970s. There was a serial castrator who was nicknamed Charlie Chopoff, who was castrating kids — and it wasn’t even a big story because there was so much chaos. So, the simple world, I’m not sure it was that simple. Uh, and ——
Friedman: I grew up in a different place, but ——
Brooks: It’s easy to think the past was simple, but it wasn’t that simple.
Then on a grander, global scale, we both grew up in the Cold War, and it was a world of binary superpowers. But that was a weird historical moment.
Our mutual friend Robert Kagan sometimes suggests we’re just going back to the world of great power rivalries. If you’re dealing in Thucydides’ world, in rivalries between Greek city-states, it was pretty damn complicated. If you’re Machiavelli dealing with the rivalries in Italian city-states, pretty damn complicated. If you’re Queen Elizabeth trying to balance power in her era — Queen Elizabeth I — pretty damn complicated.
Then you go back to the 19th century, Metternich and all those people. … Aren’t we just going back to normalcy?
Friedman: It’s a good question, and I will respond at two different levels.
One is that I do believe we grew up, born in 1953 in my case, in this period of incredible income compression and incredible political compression. That is, the Minnesota politics I grew up with was very binary and very, very moderate. So, I think we did grow up in a unique time.
But here’s where I would push back on you, David. It’s true what you said about Queen Elizabeth and all of those things, but it wasn’t true that individuals in Queen Elizabeth’s time had a phone that could reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before, and could call in an airstrike in their backyard or develop a weapon or a drone that could actually threaten Queen Elizabeth’s army.
The new thing to me today, which is the basis of the Polycene, is the degree to which the world has become sharded, and it’s become sharded because each individual now has a tool to express their voice and express their power like never before. We’re all connected. And it’s that combination of sharding, empowerment and connectivity that I really think is new — even from the age Bob Kagan’s talking about.
Brooks: Gotcha, gotcha. OK. Let me try my theory of where we are today, because I want to understand how it fits within yours. I think it does, but I haven’t connected the dots. My theory is that you go through historical tides and something will sweep over, at least Western history and maybe global history, where a lot of countries are affected by the same ideas all at once.
In the 1770s, the 1780s, you had the democratic tide — you had the American Revolution, the French Revolution, you had John Locke and the ideas that bubble up to the democratic revolutions of 1848.
Then around the early 20th century, you have a totalitarian tide. You get the Russian Revolution, you get the Nazis, you get the Chinese Revolution. People believed that democracy was inefficient. We have scientific means to manage society, and we’re going to do it from the top. And they tried that. Good luck to you.
Then in the 1980s, you had the liberal tide. You had Margaret Thatcher, you had Ronald Reagan. In China you had Deng Xiaoping. You had Mikhail Gorbachev, and liberalism seemed to be the wave.
Since 2013 or so, we’ve lived in the global populist tide. You get Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, I don’t have to tell you, the AfD, Nigel Farage. In Latin America, I mean, it’s just everywhere. Japan and South Korea have versions of it.
I think the global populist tide has been caused by a rejection of elites, a loss of faith in societies, and a sense that a lot of people feel they’re not respected and not seen. So, my explanation is, as you’d expect, cultural. It has an economic element. I think it’s a class revolt among other things. But, how do we fit these two stories together?
Friedman: As you said, we’re going to end up in the same place. I think we’re here for our third civil war, David.
Brooks: That’s cheerful.
Friedman: Yeah, exactly. Let me start with what is a bedrock thing in my identity, and I think it’s in yours, too. For me, the two most powerful emotions driving human beings are one: humiliation and dignity. The quest for dignity and the revulsion of humiliation.
That’s why I changed my business card back in 2015 from New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist to New York Times Humiliation and Dignity Columnist. I felt that’s really what I was covering, whether it’s about China or Russia or Palestinians or anything else.
But the second thing, the second most powerful human emotion, I believe, is home. It’s a quest for home, to be anchored in the world. As my friend Andy Karsner describes it, “to be anchored in a community where people are connected, protected and respected.”
Best definition of home I’ve ever heard.
I believe we have had three civil wars basically over home. The first was, “I can’t feel at home if I’m a Southerner and I can’t enslave a Black person,” and “I can’t feel at home if I’m a Northerner and you are enslaving a Black person.” It was a struggle over who gets to belong and be home in this world.
The second one, the 1960s civil rights movement, was about the failed Reconstruction and the fact that we didn’t deliver on the promise of liberty for all.
I think we’re in our third civil war now, only it’s not just about race, it’s about what I call race, pace and price. First of all, it’s again about race, but in a very different way. Now it’s, “I don’t feel at home in a minority majority country where I, as a white person,” this is what some argue, “don’t feel at home where the mayor of St. Paul is a Hmong refugee.” That applies to a certain number of people.
The second is about the sheer pace of change. Back in the late ’70s, my aunt and uncle grew up in a small town, Willmar, Minn., and I visited Willmar for 50 years. One day around 1975, my aunt came to a family event in Minneapolis. She pulls me aside and says, “Tom, I have to tell you, I was in the grocery store on Saturday and I heard someone speaking Spanish.” [David laughs.]
It was her first encounter with the other, and she never forgot it, and I never forgot it. And today, Willmar is roughly a third people of color. That’s how fast the pace of change is of who belongs here in terms of ethnic identity.
Then they went to work and their boss rolled up a robot over their shoulder and it seemed to be studying their job.
So, people’s sense of home, people’s sense of cultural norms, which are what anchored you at home, and people’s sense of work, which also anchors you at home, all got disrupted. That’s pace.
The last is price. There’s a whole generation that can’t afford a home anymore to get anchored in the world, to be connected, protected and respected.
So, our civil war right now — our third civil war, I believe — is about identity, belonging and a place called home. I think it’s going on all over the world. Ben-Gvir, the leader of the nationalist front in Israel, a nationalist group in Israel — for his ads during the last campaign he just bought the side of Egged buses, the main buses in Israel, and all the ads said were, “Who is the landlord here?”
Who gets to be at home?
Along comes a guy — a political genius in his own way — named Donald Trump who says: “I have a metaphor that can cut across all three of these lines, and it’s called a wall. I’m going to build a wall against those people who don’t make you feel at home in your own home; I’m going to build a wall against the pace of change of those things that make you not feel at home in your own fold; and I’m going to bring down the walls to home ownership.”
The last he’s failed to do. But that’s how I think we meet somewhere in a very core way because again, these quests for humiliation and dignity and a place called home, I think, matter more than ever, which is why I say Dorothy got it exactly right: “There’s no place like home.”
Brooks: Yeah. The great Brooks Friedman Confluence has indeed happened. I agree with you completely, but it’s easy for people like me — who believe in progress and who basically believe a lot of these inventions, including A.I., are wonderful — to be condescending toward those who we would call reactionary. And so how do we not make it seem like they’re the backward, primitive, intransigent ones and we’re the modern, enlightened, pluralistic ones?
Friedman: Remember, I was a little Jewish kid from Minnesota who wanted to cover the Arab Muslim world in the ’70s. Not a natural thing.
My secret for survival was to learn to be a good listener because I discovered two things happen when you listen. One is what you learn when you listen, because all the stories I got wrong were because I was yapping when I should have been listening. But much more important is what you say when you listen because listening is a sign of respect.
What I learned was if I just listen to people — and I mean deep listening, not just waiting for them to stop talking — it was amazing what they would let me say to and about them. I could go into a room with 30 young Arab students and they’ve got my columns printed out — some things on Israel. They’re ready to carve me up.
You spend an hour listening to them, and at the end of the hour, everyone’s got their cellphone out and they want a picture with you because so many people are just starved to be respected and heard. That became my survival mechanism. As you know, I’m not out there saying, “You’re all great, you’re all wonderful, it’s all the other guy’s fault.” I’m in everybody’s face. But I will listen. I do it not to get things wrong, but much more importantly, because that’s what unlocks a conversation, and it all goes back to respect.
Brooks: Yeah, there’s a great book I’ll recommend to our listeners called “Crucial Conversations” by a whole bunch of authors. The lead one, or at least one of them, is a guy named Joseph Grenny. In that book they have a sentence: “In any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present, nobody notices. When it’s absent, it’s all anybody can think about.”
Friedman: Oh, I love that.
Brooks: I just think that is profoundly true.
Now, there are two topics I want to cover that are implicit in your column, and one is A.I. In the next room we have the C.E.O. of Anthropic ——
Friedman: I just came from there.
Brooks: Well, the simple question is, and I’ve had trouble understanding this. I use A.I. every day.
Friedman: Yes, me too.
Brooks: I find it moderately useful. I think my physicist friends find it extremely useful, but the stuff we write about is subjective.
Friedman: Yeah.
Brooks: So my question is really, I’m just going to be basic: How big is it and what’s it going to do to our governance?
Friedman: I’m in the category of it’s the biggest thing ever. The way I would explain it is a concept that Craig Mundie and I developed. We divide the history of the world into just three basic phases.
The first is the age of tools — literally from the dawn of man to the printing press. We analogize humans to H2O molecules, so we call it the age of ice. Humans were very separated, as H2O molecules are in ice, and they move very slowly.
Technology is heat. We get the printing press; it melts the ice into water. Water begins the age of information. Ideas now flow, people flow, capital flows. The age of water lasts from the printing press through the computer age.
We’ve got more technology, A.I. We are entering the age of vapor. A vapor is going to go into everything. That’s why it’s different, and why you have to understand it. It’s going to go into your glasses, your watch, your toaster, your refrigerator, your car, your microphone, this chair — which will say, “God, that question made Tom Friedman really uncomfortable” very soon.
A.I. is going to go into everything. That’s why I just spent a lot of time trying to understand it. But you get overwhelmed by it. As a journalist thinking about A.I., I just want to focus on one thing, and for me it’s the ethical question. If we are going to have a tool that is actually going to be able to solve probably every problem we have — from energy to biology — what a tragedy it would be — and this is going to get right back to where you live — if we couldn’t get the best out of that tool and cushion the worst because we didn’t trust each other. And we didn’t trust the artificial species, and we couldn’t build trust into that, and we couldn’t trust China, our biggest competitor in this.
It always comes back to these core principles, which you focus on: trust, community and, again, it comes back to Sunday school. No matter how fast the technology gets.
Brooks: As you’re mentioning, all the vapor, I, of course, have a famous sentence running in my head, which comes from world literature: All that is holy is profane. All that is solid melts into air.
Friedman: One of the most brilliant lines from “The Communist Manifesto.”
Brooks: Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. A humanist would say: Vapor is the worst. I need spiritual depth. I need intellectual depth. I need to know who my heroes are. I need to be able to read serious books in a slow way, and I need to base my political system on some unchanging principles.
Should we be worried in the world of poly that all that is solid is melting into air, and this will turn into a psychologically unsustainable condition for a lot of people?
Friedman: My answer will be the best question I ever got on a book tour. It was 1999. I was on a book tour with “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.” I’m at the Portland Theater in Portland, Ore. Last question — it’s always the last question that gets you — young man waving from the balcony.
Remember, it’s 1999, and this thing called cyberspace has just been invented. And he says: “Mr. Friedman, I have a question. Is God in cyberspace?”
And I said, “Uh, uh, uh uh, I have no idea.”
It really bothered me, so I called my spiritual teacher, he’s a guy named Rabbi Zvi Mark. I got to know him when I was the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute, and I said, “Zvi, I got this question. What should I have said?”
And he said: “Well, Tom, in our faith community, we actually have two concepts of the Almighty. The one concept is the Almighty is almighty. He smites evil and rewards good. And if that’s your view of God, he sure ain’t in cyberspace, which is full of gambling, cheating, people smearing one another, pornography.”
But he said: “Fortunately, we have an alternative concept of the Almighty, that God manifests himself by how we behave. So, if we want God to be in cyberspace, if we want God to be present, we have to bring him there by how we behave there.”
You’re right back at Sunday school.
Brooks: OK, our final topic: How do we govern the age of the Polycene? I’ll set this up by making an observation that our teams are not doing particularly well. I’m probably a little more center-right than you, and you’re more center-left.
But I look around the world, at Keir Starmer’s government. I look at Macron’s government in France. I look at center-left governments around the world. Not doing well. So, how do people like us envision government in the age of the Polycene?
Friedman: Really good question. I think first of all, we have to start with a bedrock principle from my teacher and friend Dov Seidman, which is that because of everything that’s happened technologically, interdependence is now our condition, not our choice. Technology, climate, communications have all made us interdependent.
We are either going to build healthy interdependencies and rise together, or we’re going to build unhealthy interdependencies and fall together. But, baby, whatever we’re doing going forward, we’re doing it together. So I start with that point, which is that every problem now that needs solving is at a planetary scale — governing A.I., nuclear weapons, climate — and therefore, every solution will have to be at a planetary scale.
I believe that the politics that will work in such a world is really just what I call common sense and common purpose.
If I were running for office now as a Democrat or a moderate Republican, I’d be running on common-sense solutions, but also national unity, because nothing can happen without it.
I had a funny experience, David. My lecture agent called me a year ago and said, “You have a lecture offer from Pittsburg State University.” And I said: “Oh, that sounds interesting. Please sign them up.” I go down there. Lovely people, lovely students. At the end, they asked a professor to interview me. I don’t remember what question he asked me. I just remember my answer.
My answer was: “Donald Trump says his favorite word is tariffs. My favorite word is public: public schools, public libraries, public parks, public service, public health, public places.”
I got the loudest ovation of the night. I’m telling you, the hidden secret in America today is how much people do not like what Donald Trump is doing in tearing us apart.
Yes, there are people on the far left who love it, they feed on it; people on the far right who are tweeting it out; and, in the middle, is a huge number of people who want us back on our journey of making out of many, one.
Brooks: But then you have a nice riff in the column about — what is it? And/or?
Friedman: I’m not an either/or person. I’m a both/and person, and that’s because of the way I grew up. I grew up in a time where politics works, in Minnesota.
On immigration, I’ve said this all along: I’m for a really high wall. A country has got to control its borders with a very big gate — because I still want immigration. I’m for better police and more police. I’m for growing the pie and redividing the pie. I’m for all kinds of energy, as long as they’re tending toward clean.
David, it’s not because I can’t make up my mind; it’s because I have made up my mind. It’s that synthesis between them where the real solutions and energy is. So, I’m a both/and person.
You are center-right, I’m center left. The country is two-thirds both/and — and the politicians who figure that out, I think, are going to do really well going forward.
Brooks: The counter view would be a more tragic view of history. One of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin. He once said he considered himself on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.
One of his core ideas is pluralism, but the idea that ideas don’t fit together. That there are inevitably tensions and trade-offs between liberty and inequality, between freedom and order, between cultural coherence and diversity, and you just have to make trade-offs. They do not fit together. There’s no both/and; you have to dial it a little more on diversity, a little more on order.
As societies, we’ve gone a little over on the pluralism side, and a lot of people are saying, “Dial that back a little.” Right? Yes. And if we, if we did our politics on these terms ——
Friedman: But I think that is both/and. It’s not either/or. We’re not going to stay out in the far right or far left.
Brooks: We’ll close with this. Are we getting out of this? This is the No. 1 one question I get asked.
Friedman: I am in a struggle with myself, David, every morning. I get up and I say, “Today’s the day I write the column: Folks, we’re not going to make it.”
If we stay on this trajectory where this administration is taking us — and it’s not just the problem of this administration, but it is a big part of the problem — three more years of this, we’re not going to make it.
Because I do live by the bedrock view that I heard a very, very senior Republican former president, who will go unnamed, say fairly recently: We can survive anything, as long as our institutions survive basically intact. But if we lose our institutions, the courts, the F.B.I., the police, the, the, the — what I call the beautiful state, not the deep state — the ability to rebuild out of this is going to be extremely difficult.
So, the optimist in me wants to believe that the institutions will hold, but that’s what I’m watching most closely.
Brooks: Yeah, I think that’s right. And given that there’s only one former Republican president living, I think I can guess who your source is.
Friedman: No comment.
Brooks: It’s been a pleasure talking. We should do this more often.
Friedman: Would love to, David.
Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by xiaokebetter/Getty
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman
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