David Brooks’ Lost Soul

Stripped down, here’s David Brooks’ take on “Joe Biden and the Struggle for America’s Soul”: 

Joe Biden built his 2020 presidential campaign around the idea that “we’re in a battle for the soul of America.”  What is a soul? Biden is not using the word in a religious sense.    .    . He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

The soul is.   .   . the emotions that make us feel admiration at the sight of generosity and disgust at the sight of cruelty.   .   . when [people] feel their lives have no moral purpose, they experience a sickness of the soul — a sense of lostness, pain and self-contempt.

Because we have souls, we are morally responsible for what we do.   .   . Donald Trump, and Trumpism generally, is the embodiment of an ethos that .    .    .  deadens the soul under the reign of the ego. Trumpism.    .    . represents .     .    . amoral realism[—] a dog-eat-dog world. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Might makes right.    .    . People are selfish; deal with it. [R]ed in tooth and claw. Other people are.    .   .  objects to be utilized. 

Biden [is] about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.   .   .  between systems that put the dignity of individual souls at the center and systems that operate by the logic of dominance and submission. [His] presidency, as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “is preeminently a place of moral leadership.”

Biden [has] put human dignity at the center of his political vision. He treats people with charity and respect. The contest between Biden and Trumpism is.    .    . between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite. 

Brooks’ focus on soul interests me, because Democrats, government elites, and the media in their obsession with holding power seem unmoored to morality. In conjunction with gangster cartels, they open the Southern border to millions of illegal immigrants, to sex traffickers, drug dealers, terrorists, convicted criminals. They want illegal immigrants to become Democratic voters that turn their party into a permanent majority. What is the morality in the murders, rapes, and hundreds of thousands drug deaths that accompany an open border?

It’s a similar story in our big cities. “Harm reduction” policies that keep homeless, drug-addled repeat criminals on our streets, terrorizing law-abiding citizens, especially citizens of the same-color — a combination of killing, stealing, and harming innocents that is the opposite of Brooks’ “soul-like generosity.” But it does align Democrats with progressive black leaders, politicians who, the party believes, help secure the 25% of Democratic vote that’s black.

To hold the progressive vote, Democrats war against natural gas and “atoms for peace,” clean energy that would lift our middle and lower classes toward much-needed prosperity. Progressivism also means “abortion on demand,” key to keeping unmarried women’s Democratic votes. But what is the soul in terminating a fetus visible to and felt by a mother, an unborn with a heartbeat that feels pain?

For outright immorality that is “bad soul” in 3D, nothing tops our bent justice system that through lies, fraud, and corruption, uses secret police to tear at the opposing party while suppressing evidence of illegal activity by those in power. Republicans certainly have their bad eggs. But the Democratic Party is a criminal organization fighting dirty, backed by state police and state-guided media.

Joe Biden, a 21st Century icon of “moral leadership”? No way, Mr. Brooks.