Politics & Power Quote by David Brooks

Brooks is smuggling an argument about power into a seemingly gentle meditation on “character.” After enough time around campaigns and governing, he suggests, policy becomes the easy part: a deck of proposals, a tax plan, a white paper. The hard part is the moral and emotional casing those ideas come in. “The way we hold ideas” is a phrase doing heavy lifting. It points to temperament, humility, cruelty, curiosity, resentments - the behavioral tells that decide whether an ideology becomes stewardship or a weapon.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke of the technocratic fantasy that better data automatically yields better politics. Brooks is saying voters aren’t irrational for caring about personality; personality is how policy shows up in real life. A leader’s character determines what trade-offs they’ll make under pressure, who they’ll listen to, which facts they’ll bend, and how they’ll treat opponents once the cameras are off. In that sense, “character talk” isn’t gossip; it’s risk assessment.

Context matters: modern politics is saturated with information and starved for trust. When everyone can produce a convincing argument, the differentiator becomes credibility - not as a résumé line, but as a lived style. Brooks also hints at why political discourse feels so vicious: we’re not just debating ideas anymore, we’re debating what kind of people those ideas make us. Character becomes a proxy battlefield, because it’s easier to narrate morality than to adjudicate a 40-page bill.

It’s a shrewd move, and a self-interested one: punditry thrives on diagnosing souls when policy outcomes are messy, slow, and hard to attribute.