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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Anyone who has bemoaned the demise of a beloved bookstore or bakery because it was more profitable to build a bank branch understands the point. To the mind of the pure profit maximizer a public park is a waste of space compared to a lucrative parking lot. The rationalist who only seeks perfect economic efficiency sees no reason not to use a church as a stable. Schumpeter called the moral and sentimental attachments that tell us there are more important things than simple efficiency and profit maximization “extra-rational” or “extra-capitalist” commitments. The “extra-” here means outside or above or apart from.

  The problem is that, as we’ve seen, the free market needs “extra-rational” customs and traditions to survive. The “capitalist order,” Schumpeter explains, “not only rests on props made of extra-capitalist material but also derives its energy from extra-capitalist patterns of behavior which at the same time it is bound to destroy.”63 As we’ve seen, capitalism emerged from a specific culture and it depends on the habits of the heart that made it possible. Thrift, delayed gratification, and honesty, not to mention the sovereignty of the individual, aren’t products of mere reason but also of extra-rational commitments derived, in the Western context, from Christianity, custom, history, family, patriotism, language, and all of the other ingredients that make up culture and faith. “No institution or practice or belief stands or falls with the theory that is at any time offered in its support,” Schumpeter writes. “Democracy is no exception.”64 Schumpeter is making the same point I made earlier about the Constitution. What sustains the constitutional order is our faith in it—not merely the arguments for it.

  Think of it this way: No one is loyal to their family based solely on some theory of family loyalty. The “theory” is downstream of the more important and powerful emotional and instinctual commitments. The same dynamic applies to the political and religious systems we live under.

  The second component of Schumpeter’s theory is that capitalism’s relentless assault on tradition and custom creates a market opportunity for intellectuals, lawyers, writers, artists, bureaucrats and other professionals who work with ideas to undermine and ridicule the existing system. They do so for a host of reasons. Some have a largely frivolous, even funny desire to “shock the bourgeoisie!”65 Others, like Marx, have a passionate and radical anger at the real or perceived injustices of modern society.

  But there is another, more cynical explanation for why the peddlers of words, symbols, and ideas declare war on the existing system: They have a class interest in doing so. As Joel Mokyr puts it in The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, “Sooner or later in any society the progress of technology will grind to a halt because the forces that used to support innovation become vested interests.” He adds, “In a purely dialectical fashion, technological progress creates the very forces that eventually destroy it.”66

  But the reason groups become “vested interests” isn’t solely economic. When I use the term “class interest,” I do not mean the simple pursuit of economic gain, as the Marxist does, or as the public choice economist does. Man lives by more than bread—or profit—alone.

  Intellectuals surely have a financial motive in arguing for a system in which intellectuals would run things, but they also have a psychological one. That desire is often the more important one. Marx wanted to be the high priest of a new world order, but he didn’t necessarily want to be rich. We are wired to want to have higher status than others. We are also wired to resent those who we believe have undeservedly higher status than we do. Intellectuals and artistic elites have heaped scorn on other elites—the wealthy, the military, the bourgeois, the Church—for centuries.

  Schumpeter’s analysis was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, laid out in his On the Genealogy of Morals. Ressentiment, in Nietzsche’s highly literary telling, is the process by which priests use their skills to redefine the culture’s idea of what is virtuous in order to undermine the power of knights, i.e., the ruling nobility. The knights are non-intellectual men of action who hold more power than the priests, and the priests hate them for it.67 Thus, according to Nietzsche, Christianity elevated the meek and denigrated the powerful (just as Marx lionized labor and demonized entrepreneurs). It’s much more complicated than that—Nietzsche always is—but Schumpeter took this framework and applied it to capitalism over time.

  There is one very common—if not quite universal—thing that unites these different kinds of “priests”: They tend to come from the ranks of the bourgeois and the very wealthy themselves. There’s something about growing up prosperous that causes people not only to take prosperity for granted but to resent the prosperous. “It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in 1968,” writes Deirdre McCloskey. “The most radical environmentalists and anti-globalists nowadays are socialist children of capitalist parents.”68

  The third component of Schumpeter’s theory is that, as capitalism creates more and more mass affluence, it creates more and more intellectuals, until they actually become a “new class.” There have always been court intellectuals and artists. But until very recently they made a living by working for the ruling class (which is why so much classical philosophical writing is esoteric; criticism of the rulers had to be in code). As capitalism makes mass education possible, it creates a mass audience, a whole market, for what the intellectuals are selling. And what the intellectuals are selling is resentment of the way things are. This creates a much broader climate of hostility to the social order itself. “For such an atmosphere to develop,” Schumpeter writes, “it is necessary that there be groups whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.”69 One cannot watch cable television news, listen to talk radio, read a campus bulletin board about upcoming speakers, or listen to the preening speechifying that comes with every Oscar and Emmy award ceremony and not see that denigrating and undermining the established order is now not only a lucrative calling but a major part of the culture.

  James Burnham, the former Communist turned cold-eyed conservative, came to many of the same conclusions in his Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, published in 1941, a year before Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, albeit from a different perspective. By the time Burnham released Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, the “New Class” thesis was widely debated across the ideological spectrum. Burnham argued that the overwhelmingly “liberal” (in the progressive sense) New Class intellectuals weren’t simply interested in power but that they were motivated by guilt:

  For Western civilization in the present condition of the world, the most important practical consequence of the guilt encysted in the liberal ideology and psyche is this: that the liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.70

  I think guilt still plays an important role for some people. But I think, a half century later, guilt has mostly given way to anger. Many academics and writers no longer feel guilty about what Western civilization or America has done, because they no longer feel like they belong to it. Many members of the new class today—particularly those called “globalists”—have a post-national attachment to their cosmopolitan class. They see themselves as citizens of the world, sharing more in common with their compatriots in London and Paris than with the fellow citizens who sweep their floors, create small businesses, or simply feel a patriotic attachment to their own nation and culture.

  Both Schumpeter and especially Burnham were overly invested in their theory of capitalism’s demise. George Orwell was deeply influenced by Burnham’s writing on the New Class and that fascination was a major inspiration for his novel 1984. But Orwell rightly rejected the idea that a managerial dystopia was inevitable. He astutely identified
the problem in Burnham’s worldview. Burnham was in many ways the kind of rationalist Schumpeter had identified. The moral and idealistic commitments that make liberal democracy possible were, for Burnham, an illusion. Everything boiled down to mere contests of power. Burnham, according to Orwell, believed that “power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves decently.”

  This obsession with power distorted Burnham’s analysis of politics. Because power was everything, those in power would always remain in power. “It will be seen,” Orwell writes, “that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”71

  Orwell might be a bit too harsh, but he is ultimately correct. If those in power always win, then the Miracle would never have happened. The kings of Europe would have crushed the bourgeois upstarts. Burnham was incredibly insightful about the way power really works in every society, but he failed to appreciate the way the Founders had created a system that recognized the dangers of concentrated power.

  Schumpeter’s analysis of social evolution is more subtle and dynamic than Burnham’s, taking into account the complex role psychology plays in every society. But Schumpeter suffered from the same conviction that events were evolving in an inevitable direction in accordance with a process ultimately beyond our control to stop.

  If Schumpeter and Burnham were right, the only intelligent course of action would be to surrender to the inevitably of it all and scurry to the “right side of history.” But as I argue in the first pages of this book, I reject that view. Fatalism, not Burnham’s “liberalism,” is the real force driving the suicide of the West. Folding your hands in your lap and saying “Let History take the wheel!” is the fastest route to self-destruction. In other words, Schumpeter and Burnham might be right about capitalism’s doom, but what will make that doom inevitable is taking their word for it. What they offer is not a prophecy but a warning. And that warning is worth heeding.

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  Taken as a warning, their analysis is incredibly valuable. It is true that a free society will create wealthy and influential classes or interests. And they are right that some of these groups will try to undermine a free society for their own benefit. The way those vested interests sabotage the engine of innovation is with words and ideas. And while they may not be succeeding as much as they would like, no observer of the current political and cultural scene can deny that they are constantly trying. But their victory is not inevitable. If it is true that the Miracle was created by words, that means it can be destroyed by words. But it is also true that the Miracle can be sustained by words. Our civilization, like every civilization, is a conversation. Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.

  This works both ways. Every conflict ends when one side stops fighting. Usually we think of the loser as the one who accepts defeat. But the truth is that the battle can just as easily be lost if one side declares premature victory.

  In our own time, the most famous writer to be accused of that sin is the brilliant scholar Francis Fukuyama. As a young State Department intellectual, Fukuyama wrote a short essay for The National Interest titled “The End of History?” in which he argued that the fall of communism meant the debate over human organization had essentially been settled:

  What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.72

  Fukuyama’s argument has been widely misunderstood and caricatured. Despite his reliance on Hegelian philosophy, Fukuyama is less committed to teleology than he is to old-fashioned social science and history. He believed (and still believes) that liberal democratic capitalism is the best possible system for organizing society. The problem is that he took it for granted that the battle was over. His argument was much more plausible in 1989 than it is in 2018, as he has since conceded.

  The point here is that the defenders of the Miracle can never get cocky. They can never lay down their rhetorical swords and retreat to their farms. All we can do is defend the principles and ideals that the Miracle made possible in our lifetimes and hand off the project to our children. When we fail to do that, when we do not fill our children with gratitude for their inheritance, they will remain childish in their expectations of what politics and economics can accomplish.

  Simply put, cultures that do not cherish their best selves die by their own hand. We protect what we are grateful for. That which we resent, we leave out for the trash man or let rot and decay in the elements, as the termites of human nature gnaw away at it. Ingratitude is the spirit that inebriates us with despair and, in our dark moments, makes suicide seem heroic.

  “From whence shall we expect the approach of danger?” asked Abraham Lincoln. “Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”73

  * This phrase is often attributed to Arnold Toynbee, but in no way do I believe that to be the case. The original source is apparently Max Plowman. See “History Is Just One Damn Thing After Another,” Quote Investigator. http://quoteinvestigator.com/​2015/​09/​16/​history/

  5

  THE ETERNAL BATTLE

  Reason Versus the Search for Meaning

  The history of political philosophy is really the history of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The two most important creation myths of the modern West were told by Locke and Rousseau. They are in constant battle with each other to this very day, and as of this writing, Rousseau is winning.

  In fact, for years I’ve argued that almost every political argument boils down to Locke versus Rousseau. It’s a staple riff of mine when I talk to college students. It goes something like this: Locke believed in the sovereignty of the individual and that we are “captains of ourselves.” Rousseau argued that the group was more important than the individual and the “general will” was superior to the solitary conscience. Man is sinful according to Locke, a noble savage according to Rousseau. Our rights come from God, not from government, declares Locke. No, we surrender our individual rights to the judgment of the sovereign, replies Rousseau. Locke says that the right to property and to the fruits of our labors is the keystone of a free and just order. Rousseau says property is the original sin of civilization and, in a just society, property must be managed by the sovereign for the good of the whole community. Locke believes in equality before the law, but tolerates or celebrates inequality of wealth, merit, and virtue in civil society.1 Rousseau believes economic inequality is the source of all social ills, and that “one of the most important tasks of government [is] to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes.”2 Locke sees the formation of liberal governance as the greatest advance for mankind. Rousseau, in the words of Michael Locke McLendon, sees the opposite: “For Rousseau, Lockean freedoms secured through the social contract are nothing more than a ruse, a confidence trick the rich play on the poor to consolidate their power. Thus, modern humans are enslaved socially, economically, and politically.”3

  Look at almost any contemporary debate between the left and the righ
t and you will find echoes of this divide. Progressives take after Rousseau. Leftists insist, with varying degrees of intensity, that the rules of the game are nothing more than a rigged system of exploitative capitalism: “white privilege,” “the patriarchy,” etc. A unifying idea across the left is the Rousseauian idea that income inequality is a great evil, the “defining challenge of our time,” in the words of Barack Obama.4

  The right argues for the other side of the coin. Donald Trump, and some of a Randian bent, cartoonishly insist that great wealth is a virtue unto itself. Conventional conservatives make a more sophisticated argument, emphasizing that freedom and merit will inevitably lead to economic inequality and there’s nothing wrong with that. The job of government, Speaker Paul Ryan likes to say, is to create opportunity for upward mobility, not to tell people you’re stuck in your station, so here’s a check to make life a little less miserable.

  I think this Locke-versus-Rousseau comparison illuminates a great deal. But it should be gripped lightly. There is a temptation, common among intellectual historians and others who believe in the power of ideas, to play a game of connect-the-dots (a tendency I definitely suffer from). A philosopher says X in 1800. Then in 1900 a writer says something very similar to X. Ergo, the intellectuals conclude the philosopher’s influence spanned a century. This obviously does happen—a lot—but almost surely not nearly as much as intellectuals would like to believe.5