In David Brooks’s latest article for The Atlantic, he poses a question that’s been bugging him for nearly a decade: “How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent?” To answer this question—how a person who “lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly” could be found morally acceptable by more than 70 million Americans—Brooks looks to the ideas of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died in May at age 94. MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment replaced the primacy of the community with the primacy of the individual. It produced “rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives.” Today, Brooks writes, we are living in a society with no shared moral order. To read his essay on how we got here—and how we might recover from “the moral scourge of Trumpism”—subscribe to The Atlantic for less than $2.50 a week. |
