Is “Good” the Wrong Question?

I recently read David Brooks’s essay, “Why Do So Many People Think Trump Is Good?”, in which he turns to the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to make sense of our current moral and political life.

Seeing MacIntyre’s name in The Atlantic stopped me in my tracks. I first encountered his work while studying political philosophy at Cambridge, and he has been an important influence on my thinking ever since. MacIntyre, alongside Richard Rorty, also plays an important role in my forthcoming book, Between Justice and Reality, so encountering him in Brooks’s essay felt unusually close to questions I have been living with and writing about for some time.

It is also one of the reasons I have long admired Brooks as a writer and public intellectual. Philosophers capable of illuminating a moment like this one can remain largely unknown outside the worlds in which their work is studied. Brooks has an unusual ability to take thinkers like MacIntyre seriously while making their ideas accessible to a much wider public. He plays an important interpretive role in our public life.

I found myself agreeing with much of Brooks’s diagnosis. But I kept returning to the question contained in his title. Do people who support Donald Trump actually think he is good? I’m not sure “good” is the category doing the work. We still possess words like virtue, character, obligation, responsibility, good and bad, but increasingly lack a shared framework through which those words can be reasoned about together. Moral argument can become preference, indignation, manipulation and power.

But I wonder whether the problem is different from what the question in the title suggests.

Moral language has not disappeared from ordinary life. Between friends, within families, in the promises we make and the obligations we recognize, words like honesty, loyalty, fairness and responsibility still carry enormous weight. Something different seems to happen when we move to the scale of institutions and mass politics.

We may not have stopped believing in morality. We may have stopped believing that the people and institutions speaking its language are themselves bound by it.

For decades, our institutions have continued to speak fluently in the language of character, fairness, responsibility, merit, democratic norms and the common good. At the same time, many Americans have become deeply distrustful of institutions and of the people who lead them. Whatever the causes of that distrust, the consequence matters: moral language spoken at institutional scale can begin to sound less like conviction than performance.

And once that happens, actual conviction becomes harder to distinguish from performance. That makes me wonder whether talking about Trump primarily in the language of good and bad can trap us inside the very problem we are trying to solve.

What if some voters are not making a claim about Trump's virtue at all, but about his utility? What if they see some of the same character deficiencies his critics see but no longer trust the institutions asking them to treat those deficiencies as disqualifying?

Contemporaneous polling is more complicated than either side of that argument. In September 2016, Pew found that 62 percent of Trump supporters volunteered a concern about their own candidate, and character or personality was their most common concern. After the election, Pew also found that 60 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters described Trump as moral. Both facts matter.

But I hesitate to treat the second answer as a complete explanation of what those voters believed. Once political identity and moral identity become entangled, asking someone who has just voted for a candidate to declare that candidate immoral can also implicate the voter's judgment of himself. That is a hypothesis, not a reason to discard the polling. But it is one reason to ask whether our categories are capturing the political judgment people believe they are making.

And telling people more forcefully that Trump is immoral may accomplish surprisingly little. Worse, if they experience that judgment as an implicit condemnation of themselves for having voted for him, their defense of their political choice can become a defense of Trump's morality. We can then interpret that defense as evidence that they have lost their moral compass, which justifies still more condemnation. We find ourselves in a circle.

I live in Cincinnati. Over the years I have become friends with people who voted for Trump. Some have seemed surprised by the way I approach them. I think what they sense is that I am not trying to determine what their vote tells me about their moral worth. I want to understand.

And the uncomfortable truth is that I can often imagine myself feeling some of what they feel if I imagine myself into their circumstances. That does not mean I would reach every conclusion they have reached. It does not make conduct I believe is wrong acceptable. I can imagine myself into their circumstances without imagining myself into all of their conclusions.

That distinction matters because understanding is easily mistaken for exoneration. To say that I understand why someone supported Trump can be heard as saying that I approve of Trump, or that I regard everything done by him or in his name as morally acceptable. I am saying something else.

I am saying that judgment and understanding are different tasks. We still have to make moral judgments. Character matters enormously. But if we want to understand the political moment we are living through, we have to ask not only whether conduct is good or bad, but why our moral judgments have ceased to carry authority in places where they once might have. That is ultimately a question larger than Trump.

A pluralistic republic depends on people who disagree profoundly nevertheless understanding themselves as participants in the same undertaking. The crisis of a pluralistic democracy is therefore not only a crisis of institutions or politics. It is a crisis of formation. What kind of people must we become in order to remain a people?

Perhaps the problem is not simply that we have lost our moral vocabulary. Perhaps we have lost faith in the institutions speaking it. That is a different problem. And it may require a different kind of repair.

Sources: - David Brooks, “Why Do So Many People Think Trump Is Good?”, The Atlantic, July 8, 2025. || Pew Research Center, “In Their Own Words: Why Voters Support – and Have Concerns About – Clinton and Trump,” Sept. 21, 2016. ||  Pew Research Center, “Views of President-elect Trump and his administration,” Dec. 8, 2016.