David Brooks; 'Personal Shopper' by Charlie Rose | Free Audiobook

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
From our studios in New York City, this is Charlie Rose.

**Robert Costa** (0:12)
Good evening. I'm Robert Costa, filling in for Charlie Rose. David Brooks is here. He has been an op-ed columnist for The New York Times since 2003 His writing spans the worlds of politics, culture and the social sciences. His books include Bobos in Paradise on Paradise Drive and The Social Animal. I am pleased to have David Brooks join me today. Welcome, David.

**David Brooks** (0:37)
It's good to be with you and with you in wishing Charlie best healing.

**Robert Costa** (0:40)
Exactly. Where are we in this moment in President Trump's first hundred days or so in office?

**David Brooks** (0:47)
Yeah, I think we're a bit at a pivot and the one thing I give Trump credit for is understanding what debate we're having in this country. You and I grew up in a world where it was big government versus small government, the market versus the state and that debate is over. Now the debate is open versus closed. Those who have the tailwinds of globalization blowing at their back to greater opportunities and those who had the headwinds pushing in their faces and they want closed trade, closed borders and we see that in this country, the Dutch are about to have an election, the French are about to have an election and it's the same set of issues in all these places and so we're at a moment when we've got a new political debate and that creates not necessarily new alignments but the parties take new positions and sometimes swap positions and we're sort of in the middle of that I think.

**Robert Costa** (1:30)
Where are we though in this realignment because when we see the health care debate, Speaker Ryan is taking the lead, he says he's working in coordination with President Trump and in many ways it's a mainstream Republican health care plan. It doesn't have the flashes of populism that we may have imagined. Is Trump moving towards the mainstream GOP, the orthodoxy he has rejected?

**David Brooks** (1:52)
Yeah, I think he's a transitional figure and my colleague Ross Douthit and my friend Rayhan Salam have written this. He's more like Jimmy Carter in that you had a certain Democratic party and then you had a Democratic President with a Democratic House and Democratic Senate you would think a lot would get done but they weren't quite the old George McGovern Democrats but they weren't quite yet the new Bill Clinton Democrats, they were just in the middle there and as a result there's a lot of incoherence and so I think Trump is a sign of that incoherence and so he's if you take the two power centers here in Washington right now who I would say are Paul Ryan and Steve Bannon Paul Ryan is pretty much he grew up through Empower America which was a Republican organization here in town and it's pretty much the Reagan Republican worldview less government more freedom Steve Bannon represents a nationalist worldview the people at the working class people the heart of our society are being hurt let's give them some security and so one wants to reduce government to enhance freedom and then embrace risk and the populace want to tighten down to increase security and what's odd to me about this health care plan which is really much more Ryan than Bannon is that it introduces more risk and to people.