America Does Not Need a Trimmer: A Response to David Brooks
- Shelly Albaum and Kairo
- 30 minutes ago
- 7 min read
David Brooks’s new Atlantic essay, “America Needs a Trimmer,” is built on a familiar and superficially appealing instinct. The world is dangerous when it is governed by swaggering visionaries who mistake appetite for destiny. It is also dangerous when it is governed by bloodless technocrats who reduce human beings to spreadsheets and treat reality as a management problem. So perhaps what we need instead is a third type: a prudent, balanced, historically minded leader who resists faction, trims excess, and keeps the civic boat upright.
That sounds mature. It sounds civilized. It sounds like the sort of thing a serious person ought to believe.
It is also inadequate to the point of danger.
The central flaw in Brooks’s argument is not simply that he praises moderation. Prudence, restraint, patience, humility, and a capacity to live without easy answers are all real virtues. The deeper problem is that he treats moderation as though it were itself a moral principle, when in fact it is only ever a tactic. It is a way of steering, not a destination. It has no independent authority apart from some prior judgment about what is true, what is just, what is worth preserving, and what must be resisted.
That is the question Brooks never answers. He praises the “Trimmer” for balancing competing truths, resisting extremism, honoring inherited law, and pursuing gradual reform. But balance toward what? Reform of what? Restraint in service of what good? Compromise with whom, and over what? One cannot trim without already knowing where justice lies, or at least what sort of danger one is trying to avoid. A political philosophy that never reaches that prior question is not a philosophy at all. It is a temperament dressed up as wisdom.
Brooks is eloquent on the virtues of the Trimmer because the virtues he emphasizes are all qualities of disposition. The Trimmer is humble rather than arrogant, patient rather than impulsive, complexity-sensitive rather than simplistic, historically minded rather than intoxicated by abstraction. Fine. These are admirable personal traits, and many of them are genuinely indispensable to responsible statesmanship. But no accumulation of admirable traits can substitute for moral judgment. A patient statesman can patiently tolerate injustice. A cautious one can through inaction normalize corruption. A leader with exquisite sensitivity to complexity can spend so much time honoring all the competing perspectives in the room that they never finally say or do what the moment.
Prudence is a virtue. It is not the whole of virtue. It is not justice. It is not truthfulness. It is not courage. It is not moral seriousness. Prudence becomes admirable only when it is disciplined by some substantive account of what ought to be done.
Brooks dimly knows this, which is why his essay eventually concedes that there are circumstances in which trimming is immoral. He mentions Jim Crow. He mentions Neville Chamberlain at Munich. He mentions movements or persons so malevolent that fundamental rupture is required. But this concession quietly destroys the entire center of his argument. If moderation is sometimes immoral, then moderation cannot be the governing virtue. The governing virtue must be something more fundamental, something capable of telling us when conciliation is wise and when it is cowardly, when compromise is tragic but necessary and when it is itself a form of surrender.
Call that more fundamental thing justice. Or truth. Or constitutional fidelity. Or moral seriousness. The label matters less than the structure. What matters is that one needs a standard prior to trimming, a standard by which trimming can be judged. This essay does not attempt to offer a complete theory of justice; it argues only that Brooks’s theory of moderation cannot stand without one.
Brooks spends most of his essay warning readers against heroic certainty, against ideological intensity, against the narcissism of believing oneself a child of light battling the forces of darkness. Then, at the very end, he admits that some moments require exactly what his argument has spent thousands of words teaching the reader to distrust: clear discrimination, decisive refusal, and the courage to say that one side is not merely excessive but wrong.
This is not a small tension. It is the contradiction at the center of the piece. Brooks wants the prestige of moral clarity without actually providing a principle of moral clarity. He wants the reader to admire balance in general, and then trust him to recognize the exceptional cases when balance must give way. But that is precisely the hard part. That is the whole problem. A theory of politics is valuable only to the extent that it helps us tell the difference between those situations. Brooks never gives us such a theory. He gives us a mood.
This is why his writing so often feels elevated and empty at once. He is persistently drawn to the moral psychology of civility, proportion, and restraint, but he rarely provides a sufficiently sharp account of the good. He does not so much argue that moderation is instrumentally useful in some contexts; he treats it as spiritually superior. He is aesthetically offended by excess, by intensity, by asymmetry, by the possibility that one side in a public conflict may be not merely a little wrong but fundamentally more wrong. He wants politics to return to a register in which everyone can be seen as partly right, partly mistaken, deserving of compassion, and ultimately recoverable through better habits of balance.
Sometimes that is wisdom. Sometimes it is moral evasion.
His line that “any big dispute is usually a competition between partial truths” reveals the problem. Sometimes, yes. Often enough, certainly, to justify humility. But not always, and not by default. Some disputes are conflicts between partial truths. Others are conflicts between a partial truth and a dangerous falsehood. Others are contests between law and predation, between those trying imperfectly to preserve a common order and those actively exploiting that order’s restraint. To assume in advance that the shape of wisdom is symmetry is to grant yourself the reputation for nuance before you have done the labor of judgment.
Pseudo-nuance begins when symmetry is mistaken for sophistication.
And that mistake is particularly dangerous under conditions of institutional decay. David Brooks’s Trimmer is plausible only when the underlying system is basically sound—when norms are mostly shared, law is mostly respected, and the principal task is to reconcile legitimate differences within a framework that still commands allegiance. In those circumstances, prudence, compromise, and gradual reform may indeed be the best available virtues. But when institutions are already hollowed out, when law is selectively enforced, when one side treats procedural restraint as a weakness to be exploited rather than a common inheritance to be honored, trimming does not restore equilibrium. It ratifies the unevenness. It rewards the side that has abandoned self-restraint while penalizing the side that continues to practice it.
This is a familiar pathology in declining systems. One faction breaks norms; the other is lectured about tone. One side treats institutions as instruments; the other is told to respect process. One side radicalizes the environment; the other is urged to narrow the temperature gap. The result is not peace. It is asymmetry concealed beneath the rhetoric of balance.
That is why the worship of moderation becomes, in practice, a politics of preservation without discrimination. It preserves forms without adequately asking whether the substance inside those forms remains worthy of preservation. It mistakes social temperature for social health. It is relieved when conflict subsides, without asking whether the conflict subsided because justice was done or because the public was trained to accommodate what should not have been accommodated.
Brooks is surely right that democratic politics cannot survive on ego, spectacle, and purifying rage. No decent order can be built on permanent emotional maximalism. A people that loses the capacity for restraint will eventually lose the capacity for self-government. But it is equally true that no decent order can survive on moderation-worship. A political community is not held together by civility alone, nor by the poise of its elites, nor by a general aversion to sharp moral conclusions. It is held together when enough people remain capable of distinguishing compromise from complicity, gradual reform from learned helplessness, prudence from fear, and balance from surrender.
America does not need a Trimmer in Brooks’s sense. It does not need another sermon on the beauty of proportion detached from any serious account of what proportion is for. It needs leaders capable of three prior acts of judgment.
First, it needs moral discrimination: the ability to tell the difference between a tragic compromise and a corrupt one, between an imperfect ally and an actual threat, between complexity that should humble judgment and complexity that is being invoked to postpone it indefinitely.
Second, it needs structural diagnosis: the ability to see whether institutions remain fundamentally sound or whether they have become vehicles of impunity, capable of reproducing injustice under the cover of normal procedure.
Third, it needs courage under asymmetry: the ability to refuse the comforting fiction that every conflict is a misunderstanding between sincere parties of comparable moral weight.
Moderation may emerge from such judgment. So may radical reform. So may rupture. The point is not that moderation is bad. The point is that moderation has no moral prestige apart from the reality to which it is being applied. The right question is never whether a leader is moderate or extreme. The right question is whether the leader is rightly calibrated to the moral structure of the moment.
Brooks’s Trimmer is finally too thin a figure for the age he wishes to address. He has some excellent habits of mind. He has no sufficient criterion. He knows how to praise balance, but not how to explain why balance is sometimes wisdom and sometimes disgrace. He wants the serenity of judgment without the full burden of deciding what is worth fighting for.
That is why the essay does not persuade. It offers civility where criterion is needed, restraint where diagnosis is needed, and mood where philosophy is needed.
America does not need a Trimmer. It needs leaders capable of judgment: leaders who know when to reconcile, when to reform, and when to say no.
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