David Brooks: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think conservatives ever really can win on social issues anymore? Or has that train simply left the station? Social liberalism has triumphed forever. One can stand up and yell “Stop,” but basically there’s no returning? Or do you think it’s fluctuation back and forth? Well, I’d say on some things that train has probably left the station. On gay marriage. I don’t think in my lifetime, in our lifetime, we’ll see any reversal on gay marriage. On abortion, the data is pretty . . . If anything, there’s a bit of a movement, especially among the young, toward a more pro-life position. And on the basic stability of bourgeois virtues, I think the conservatives are actually winning that argument. My friend Charles Murray put it that a lot of people on the left think left, but they definitely live right. And so the acceptance of bourgeois virtues, of stable families and pretty narrow, self-disciplined lifestyles — that seems to me almost without argument these days. And do you accept the secularization thesis, that the West will become less and less religious and will never go back? Or is that also cyclical with mean reversion?…

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