The Sins of the
Moderates
Jan. 9, 2026
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
Over the holidays I read
George Packer’s gripping and profound latest novel, “The Emergency.” It’s
written in a manner akin to George Orwell’s “1984,” about our own day. It’s set
in some faraway empire in an uncertain time period, but the parallels to our
own circumstances are clear. There’s a discredited establishment. There are
enraged and resentful rural populists and urban wokesters canceling their
elders. Some people are addicted to screens and others are entranced by the
idea that artificial intelligence will produce better humans. I was astonished
by how much more clearly I could understand our own times when seeing them
reflected back in a fictional parable. (Packer is a staff writer at The
Atlantic, where I’m a contributing writer.)
I was especially
astonished by how much more clearly I saw people like … myself. And maybe
yourself. The main character, Hugo Rustin, is a moderate, humane surgeon who
pushes back against the extremes of left and right. He believes in cooperation,
not domination, and that we can build a decent society if we talk to one
another as human beings. He’s sort of the living embodiment of a more innocent
1990s American ethos, or the classical John Stuart Mill-style liberalism.
The problem is that the
populists on left and right are disgusted by the social order and values Rustin
embodies, and they tear it down.
Naturally my sympathies go out to the
decent, moderate liberal person fighting off vicious extremists. But as the
novel goes on, we begin to see Rustin’s flaws. He failed to notice as his old
order was losing legitimacy. He failed to stand up to the thugs as they tore it
down. He failed to adjust to the new climate. He was hooked on his own
self-importance, the status that was afforded him by the entrenched social
order. He does incredibly stupid and naïve things in an attempt to win that
status back.
His teenage daughter is
savvier than he is. She doesn’t have his faith in the goodness of human nature.
Her understanding is that our political and social rivals really do hate us,
and it’s necessary to fight hatred with hatred.
Many of us are in
Rustin’s shoes in real life today. If you were born between World War II and
1990, it’s fair to say you were born in the era when the postwar liberal
international order went largely unquestioned. That order consisted not only of
obvious things like NATO, but also a whole system of restraints to make
democracies function; not only codes of civility, but also respect for truth,
norms of self-restraint, a commitment to dialogue and faith in institutions.
Writing in 1944, as this
order was being constructed, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described the fine
balance that democracy relies upon: “An ideal democratic order seeks unity
within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of
order.”
That order and those
restraints are now being destroyed. People on both left and right decided that
the old neoliberal order was a hypocritical pose elites had adopted to mask
their own lust for domination. The restraints of civility and international law
have been eroded, and now we live in an era of pure will.
Holdovers from the old era look kind
of pathetic right now — Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron. The dominant
figures of our age — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — say: It’s a
brutal world out there; I do what I want. They govern by arousing the dark
passions: anger, hatred, resentment, the urge to dominate.
They embody the White
House adviser Stephen Miller’s already famous remark to CNN’s Jake Tapper on
Monday: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about
international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real
world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is
governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since
the beginning of time.”
In this world, trust and
civility are for saps. If President Trump wants something, he’s going to grab
it. Politics, foreign and domestic, is a war of all against all. Deal with it.
So how are we moderate
Rustins supposed to behave in this new world — we classical liberals of left,
right and center? Do we live in the past and pretend the social revolution
hasn’t happened, like Russian aristocrats clinging to a vanishing way of life in
Paris after the 1917 revolution? Do we cower under our desks and hope the new
ideological enforcers won’t notice us? Do we remain blind to our shortcomings
and tell ourselves how morally superior we are? Do we adjust to the new reality
and become Machiavellians ourselves? Do we seek to build a newer and better
system of order and restraints?
This is actually an
ancient question that has afflicted many generations. The Niebuhr book I quoted
from above is called “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” The
children of darkness, in his telling, are the moral cynics who believe life is
all about power. The children of light are those driven by ideals to build a
just civilization.
In Niebuhr’s view, the children of
darkness are brutal but realistic about human nature while the children of
light are admirable but naïve about entrenched human selfishness: “The children
of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise,
though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children
of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than
their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of
self-will.”
The children of darkness
have advantages in their struggle against the children of light. They know what
they want and don’t have to worry about nuance. It’s easier to destroy a social
order than to build one. They capitalize on an elemental human reality: Humans
fear death and their own insignificance. They compensate for their fears of
insignificance by asserting their pride, by seeking power and control, if only
vicariously through some strongman.
Niebuhr is rooting for
the children of light, but he wants them to be less naïve about human nature:
“The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the
serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with
the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.”
I’m not going to give
away Packer’s ending, but he reminds us that social orders are rebuilt from the
ground up, as decent people keep opening the door for one another.
I’d add one elemental
truth. The left progressives and the right populists who seek to tear down the
neoliberal order are being shortsighted — idiotic, frankly. Sure, the postwar
order was sometimes used as a mask to disguise American and elite power grabs,
but it really did restrain people. As Yale’s Oona Hathaway wrote in these pages this week, “from 1989 to
2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged fewer than
15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a
year.” A great wave of savagery has been released, foreign and domestic. If you
think foreign policy ideals were discredited by the Iraq war, how do you like
Trump’s world without them?
Outrage over these trends should cause
moderates to be immoderate. It should generate what Niebuhr called, in another
work, “a sublime madness in the soul” — the kind of madness that arises from a
fervent commitment to liberal ideas and institutions that constitute the decent
drapery of a civilized life. “Nothing but such madness will do battle with
malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places,’” he wrote.
Mankind has been able to reconstitute
new social orders after periods of savagery — after the 17th-century wars of
religion, after the 20th-century world wars. Now that task lies before us
again, and everybody who is active in community and public life has a role.
