Politics & Power Quote by David Brooks

America, in Brooks's telling, isn't held together by procedures so much as by a story people tell themselves while filling out those procedures. Calling the country "not just a democracy" demotes civics to scaffolding and elevates culture to the load-bearing wall: a national habit of self-invention, status climbing, and relentless comparison. "Competitive mobility" is the antiseptic phrase for an everyday pressure cooker, one that turns class anxiety into personal ambition and makes the marketplace feel like a moral test. Pair that with "personality aspirations" and you get the modern American creed: you don't simply want security; you want to become someone.

The move from "clash of interests" to "clash of dreams" is the rhetorical pivot. Interests sound negotiable; dreams sound sacred. Brooks is pointing at why American politics so often refuses to behave like a bargain between coalitions. When voters see policy as a referendum on their identity arc - who deserves to rise, what kind of life counts as respectable, whether the culture rewards the right virtues - compromise starts to look like betrayal. The subtext is both diagnosis and warning: a polity organized around aspiration will politicize dignity, shame, and recognition, not only taxes and regulations.

Context matters. Brooks, a center-right columnist shaped by post-Reagan individualism and the culture-war era, is trying to explain polarization without reducing it to tribal stupidity. But he also smuggles in a subtle absolution: if politics is dreams, then anger is understandable, even inevitable. That's persuasive - and risky. It flatters the electorate's self-image while quietly sidelining material power, institutions, and inequality that shape which dreams get to feel realistic in the first place.