Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy

by Jonah Goldberg

  For a certain group of intellectuals on the right and, to a lesser extent, on the left, the Constitution is the wellspring of the American order. From one perspective, this is undoubtedly true. The Constitution provides guardrails for our society in all the formal and legal ways you can think of (even if those guardrails have, over time, succumbed to entropy, thanks to a lack of care in their upkeep). But the Constitution is a cultural and psychological artifact as well. It informs the way we think about government, rights, and civil society. Our tendency to take things for granted rusts all that glitters eventually. So when we say, “I can do this because the Constitution gives me the right to do this,” it seems perfectly natural, but it is actually one of the most radical things a human can say.

  Like the Magna Carta that came before it, one of the greatest services the Constitution provides is that it is simply written down. As Ernest Gellner has noted, humans have a tendency to sacralize texts. That is precisely what Americans have done with the Constitution, thank goodness.

  Barack Obama said in his Farewell Address:

  Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power—with our participation, and the choices we make. Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.25

  Many of my fellow conservatives were angered by this, and given Barack Obama’s remarkable, yoga master-like flexibility in interpreting constitutional text, I can understand why. But on its face, Obama’s claim was right. The Constitution only has real power if the people give it power. James Madison noted as much when he fretted that “parchment barriers” are often inadequate against “the encroaching spirit of power.”26 The real power of the Constitution is to be found not in it but in us. The Constitution is a paper manifestation of a deeper cultural commitment to liberty and limited government, in the same way a marriage certificate is a physical and legalistic representation of something far deeper, mysterious, and complicated. When the marriage fails, the marriage certificate won’t save it. And when the American people lose their love of liberty, the Constitution will not save us either.

  What made the American founding such an amazing one-of-a-kind event was that it took the weirdness of one obscure successful tribe, culled from its cultural peculiarities universal principles, and then wrote them down. The Founders had enormous help from John Locke, who did much of the intellectual groundwork in support of the Glorious Revolution a hundred years earlier. And they also had help from Montesquieu and the Philosophes and many others, including Cicero. The text needed to be amended over time to make those principles more universal, but the basic cultural inheritance was amplified by the intellectuals and statesmen, and their work in turn reinforced the culture.

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  Having made the case, however briefly (or tediously) that America’s love of liberty is in fact a cultural artifact bequeathed to us from England, let me now claw it back—at least somewhat. The problem with this tale, and many like it, is that it is what Rudyard Kipling would call a “just-so” story. A just-so story in anthropology is a form of post hoc fallacy that says because B follows A and C follows B, therefore A caused B and B caused C.

  Though he tries to deny it, Hannan is offering an updated—and often compelling—version of the Whig interpretation of history, as famously formulated by the historian Herbert Butterfield in his conveniently titled 1931 book, The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield criticized previous generations of British historians who described world history as if it were an unfolding novel whose plot and conclusion were knowable to all. The heroes of the tale were lovers of liberty, the villains the forces of absolutism and arbitrary power. Their story was the tale of the inevitable victory of British liberal values.

  As Butterfield put it, there is a lamentable “tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” He adds:

  The whig historian can draw lines through certain events…and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation. The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present—all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress.27

  Teleology, the great sin of historians, is the idea that there is a purpose to things and events—a grand plan that we are all working under. Providence is, of course, the most famous teleological claim: “It’s all God’s plan.” Prior to the Enlightenment, this was pretty much every Westerner’s theory of everything. The great Enlightenment thinkers threw out religion as the driver of history, but they thought they spied a different prime mover: progress, and later History with a capital H. Mankind was ineluctably getting freer and better. Different philosophers debated how this “progress” worked and why it was inevitable.

  Ultimately, teleology is an antidote to despair and nihilism. Just as we as individual humans want to believe there’s a point to our own personal lives, we also want to believe there’s a point to everyone else’s. Indeed, unless you fancy yourself a messiah or prophet of some kind, you pretty much have to believe that there’s an external, metaphysical purpose to life for everyone if you believe in such a thing for yourself.

  The reason I raise the issue of teleology is to illuminate the fact that if there is a purpose to economic and political evolution, we can no more prove its existence than we can prove God’s. It requires a leap of faith. Maybe this is all God’s plan. Or maybe the universe has a purpose.

  Or, maybe, history, like life, is just one damn thing after another.*

  At countless moments in English history things could have gone very differently. The fact that the “good” forces won does not mean they were destined to. The Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of English Catholics tried to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords during a royal address, failed, thus saving England from a very different fate. But it didn’t fail because of the English love of liberty. It failed because one person with knowledge of the scheme to reduce Parliament to rubble and return Catholicism to England sent a letter exposing the plot.28 Whether Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church so he could bed Anne Boleyn or because he wanted a wife to produce a male heir, the fact is that if Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, had been able to provide Henry VIII with a son, or perhaps even if Anne Boleyn had had lower standards and agreed to be his mistress, England might have stayed a Catholic nation.

  It is fine and dandy to pan the river of “Germanic” history to sift out the republican and democratic nuggets as proof England was destined to usher in the era of liberty. But I don’t think it is a gross overstatement to suggest that one can find counterexamples in the historical record.29

  None of this is to say that Hannan—a friend of mine—is wrong. It is to say that he was right when he said the English “stumbled” into modernity. The tradition of English liberty was a flame that could have been extinguished if the winds of history had shifted slightly at any one of a thousand different moments. We are fortunate that circumstances worked out the way they did. But at the most fundamental level, if you take providence or some other teleological theory of the purpose of history out of the equation, modernity happened in England by accident.

  The ingredients for liberty and prosperity have existed on earth for thousands of years, sloshing around, occasionally bumping into each other, and offering a glimpse to a better path. Religious toleration, r
estraints on monarchy, private property, the sovereignty of the individual, pluralistic institutions, scientific innovation, the rule of law—all of these things can be found, piecemeal, across the ages. The Chinese were pathbreaking scientific (and bureaucratic) innovators, but they couldn’t relinquish their political monopoly and eventually snuffed out technological progress in the name of imperial hegemony.30 Private property, likewise, existed in one form or another in countless societies,31 but it alone was not enough absent the other necessary ingredients, and without those ingredients private property was often snuffed out. Prosperity itself wasn’t unknown before the Miracle. But it was always a short-lived and local phenomenon.

  To understand how miraculous the Miracle really is, we should take a moment and look more closely at some of the more well-known competing theories about why the Great Enrichment happened, including the complicated role of Protestantism—real and imagined—as well as the scientific revolution, slavery, imperialism, and other materialist factors.

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  The Protestant origin story of the Miracle takes several forms on its own and informs other theories as well.

  The first and most straightforward theory, famously introduced by the sociologist Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in Germany in 1905 (and in English in 1930), holds that Protestantism, particularly certain Puritan sects like the Calvinists, created new habits of the heart that gave birth to capitalism. The simple version of this story goes like this: The “other-worldly” Catholic cared little about material things in this life and was content to live a materially impoverished life, working as little as he or she needed to. Meanwhile, Weber argued, Protestants believed in accumulating wealth.32 The Puritan, powered by the doctrine of predestination, moved his sights to this world, believing that material success was proof of virtue and a sign that one had been selected for reward in the next life. Hard work was a way to give glory to God. But economic success was achieved not just through hard work but by demonstrating honest dealings, piety (of course), and thriftiness (“The summum bonum of this ethic [is] the earning of more and more money…Acquisition…[is] the ultimate purpose of life,” explained Weber, in a passage casting Benjamin Franklin as the poster boy for Protestant industriousness).33 As Joyce Appleby summarizes Weber’s argument, “Protestant preachers produced great personal anxiety by emphasizing everyone’s tenuous grip on salvation.”34 In turn, this “promoted an interest in Providence in which believers scrutinized [economic] events for clues to divine intentions…[which] turned prosperity into evidence of God’s favor.”35 In other words, acting as if you’re blessed might actually be a sign you’re blessed—the theological version of “fake it until you make it.”

  Let’s put a pin in this theory and what it actually means for a moment. While Weber published his theory in the first decade of the twentieth century, the idea that capitalism depends on “thrift” or the accumulation of capital through savings was central to the bulk of Marxist thought in the nineteenth century. Marx believed that capitalism was, at its core, simply the exploitation of labor. All wealth and value, according to Marx, is created by the workers. All profit that does not go to the workers is essentially theft. Since all value is captured by labor, any “surplus value” collected by the owners of capital is, by definition, exploitative. The businessman or inventor who risks his own money to build and staff a factory is not adding value; he is subtracting value from the workers. Indeed, the money he used to buy the land and the materials is really just “dead labor.”

  Marx is still seen by many as a forward-thinking visionary. But the truth is Marx was a romantic popularizer of ancient biases against money and finance, or “usury” (and, to a very large extent, Jews). “To a degree rarely appreciated, [Marx] merely recast the traditional Christian stigmatization of moneymaking into a new vocabulary and reiterated the ancient suspicion against those who used money to make money,” writes historian Jerry Z. Muller. “In his concept of capitalism as ‘exploitation’ Marx returned to the very old idea that money is fundamentally unproductive, that only those who live by the sweat of their brow truly produce, and that therefore not only interest, but profit itself, is always ill-gotten.”36

  This idea that excess capital or “surplus value” fueled capitalism is essential for numerous Marxist—and Marxish—explanations for its triumph. They all rest on a psychological desire among the enemies of capitalism, starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to claim that capitalism was born in some kind of original sin. Some writers want slavery to be capitalism’s original sin in order to exaggerate the crime of slavery (and to justify calls for reparations) and/or to delegitimize capitalism. But slavery requires no such exaggeration. Its evil stands on its own right. Similarly, claims that the West got rich by pillaging foreign lands amount to an effort to pad the indictment against imperialism. These theories all share the psychological assumption that capitalism marked a wrong turn in humanity’s past. And they often drive people to make patently ridiculous claims. “Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you cannot have modern industry,” Marx wrote. “It is slavery which has given their value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created the commerce of the world, it is the commerce of the world which is the essential condition of the great industry.”37 Never mind that the Japanese dependence on silk from China was at least as great as England’s demand for cotton, yet Japan did not become a capitalist country until after World War II. The idea that the cheap cotton made possible by slavery jump-started capitalism, most recently revived by Harvard’s Sven Beckert, overlooks the fact that the price of cotton didn’t increase appreciably after slavery in the United States was abolished. In fact, in the 1870s, it was 42 percent lower than the pre-Civil War price.38

  Deirdre McCloskey surveys the research and finds the evidence to support such claims somewhere between nonexistent and meager. Yes, of course enormous profits were made from both slavery and empire, but neither “created” capitalism, and the profits were ultimately incidental in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, if capitalism is dependent on the sort of mass-scale exploitation implicit in slavery and imperialism, why did capitalism take so long to materialize? The ancient Chinese, Persians, Romans, and Aztecs all had empires and slaves, yet none were capitalist. Why has capitalism survived the demise of slavery and the age of empire? Why are traditional and anti-capitalist societies more likely to maintain the institution of slavery in one form or another? If capitalism relies on exploitation, why have Westerners gotten so much richer and enjoy such an abundance of leisure time?

  The claim that thrift—i.e., increased savings from profit creating the capital necessary for industrial investment—led to the rise of capitalism falls apart once you realize that it gets the causality backward: Capital accumulation is not the engine of capitalism, it is the by-product of it. Indeed, thrift is hardly a Western or Christian invention, never mind a Protestant one. People have saved or otherwise been careful with their money since money was invented.39 But absent a market system, what someone could do with their money is extremely limited.

  Other materialist theories about the origins of capitalism, some quite interesting and important, ultimately fail to satisfy the question “Where does the Miracle come from?” The relative autonomy of European city-states and principalities surely encouraged freedom and served as tributaries that led to eventual dam breaking. Sure, British and European geography was no doubt essential to Europe’s political development, but the idea that capitalism was inevitable because of Europe’s rivers and temperate climate is the ultimate just-so story.

  The scientific revolution, a miracle in its own right, is obviously a hugely important part of the story. Would the Miracle have happened without Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Thomas Edison, and other great scientists and innovators? I’m inclined to say probably not. But that does not mean that the scientific revolution created capitalism
. The deeper you look at this argument, the more you can see the cart overtaking the horse. The Islamic world and China had their turns at being at the forefront of science for centuries, and yet the Miracle never materialized in either place. Indeed, for a millennium, England certainly, and arguably the entirety of Western Europe, were backwaters. An alien visiting Earth a thousand years ago would not assume that the peoples of Europe were destined to achieve escape velocity from the norm of human existence.

  So what did create it? In order to answer that, we need to circle back to another theory of Protestantism’s role in Western development. This theory holds that Protestantism unleashed the spirit of innovation and liberty. My National Review colleague Charles C. W. Cooke, a Whig imported to our shores from England to do the hard work too few American-born writers will do, argues that Protestantism plays exactly this role. “I have long argued in vague terms that America is a fundamentally ‘Protestant’ society,” he writes, “by which I have absolutely not meant that only Protestants can be good citizens, but rather that the Founders were the product of not just a religiously Protestant inheritance but also of a politically Protestant worldview—and, too, that the two are historically inextricable.

  “This is to say,” he continues, “that once a people becomes accustomed to cutting out the middlemen from their path to God, absolution, and salvation, it becomes easier for them to countenance cutting out the middlemen from their path to liberty and the pursuit of happiness as well.”40

  To be sure, there’s something to this. Protestantism wouldn’t have spread without the printing press, an innovation that disrupted the Catholic Church’s theological monopoly. Protestantism also breathed new life into the idea that the individual is sovereign. But this overlooks the fact that while Protestantism eliminated the middleman theologically, politically Protestants were just as capable of crushing any deviation from orthodoxy as the most zealous Catholics. After all, early Protestants were not political “moderates.” They did more than their share of witch-hunting. In England in the 1650s and 1660s, the Quakers were horribly brutalized by Anglicans. The Puritans of Salem weren’t exactly a live-and-let-live bunch. In Europe, Lutherans and Calvinists adapted political—i.e., monarchical—absolutism to their theology quite easily, as did the Anglicans of Henry VIII’s England. Frederick the Great was the most gifted absolute monarch of the nineteenth century, and he was raised in Calvinism.