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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Let us now look more closely at how the story begins.

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  It is something of an article of faith, particularly among some American conservatives, that the Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by John Locke. For generations, this was the consensus opinion of most leading historians as well.11 Some recent scholarship is more skeptical. The skeptics have a much better argument than I thought when I set out to write this book. For instance, I searched the National Archives’ wonderful online database of writings from the Founding, thinking it would be a simple task to find one encomium after another to the man often described as the father of the English Enlightenment, the “philosopher of freedom” and the “founder of liberalism.” There are some, to be sure, but far fewer than you might think.

  Perhaps most shocking: There are no references to Locke in the Federalist Papers (though he does have a brief cameo in the Anti-Federalist Papers). Oscar and Lilian Handlin note that, even though Locke dedicates an entire chapter to slavery, there’s no record of any Founder invoking his work in the many debates about the subject during the period.12

  One of the few unequivocal accolades from a signatory of the Declaration of Independence comes from James Wilson, a prominent drafter of the Constitution and one of the first (six) Supreme Court Justices. At the ratifying convention Wilson said that “the truth is, that the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable authority remains with the people…[T]he practical recognition of this truth was reserved for the honor of this country. I recollect no constitution founded on this principle; but we have witnessed the improvement, and enjoy the happiness of seeing it carried into practice. The great and penetrating mind of Locke seems to be the only one that pointed towards even the theory of this great truth.”13

  We do know that Thomas Jefferson was a great admirer of Locke. Indeed, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson tells a story of Hamilton’s visit to his home. On Jefferson’s walls hung portraits of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon. Hamilton asked who they were. Jefferson replied that they were his “trinity of the greatest men who ever lived.”14 Still, there’s not much evidence in his papers that he read Locke’s Two Treatises. Nor was there a copy in the book collection he bequeathed to the Library of Congress.

  On the other hand, Jefferson took copious notes from Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, which served as the inspiration for his own Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

  The statute is another good example of how ideas drive a story on the ground and how the unfolding story refines those ideas to the point of creating new ones. Locke had argued that Catholics and atheists could not be loyal subjects or citizens. “All those who enter into [the Catholic faith] do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince.” Atheists could not be trusted because “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.”15

  Jefferson, meanwhile, took the internal logic of Locke and extended it to its final conclusion. The statute begins:

  An Act for establishing religious Freedom. Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do…16

  The statute not only disestablished the Church of England as the official faith of Virginia but also guaranteed religious liberty for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and even pagans.

  This is just one facet of the transformation wrought less by Locke himself than by what I call the Lockean Revolution. The intellectual historians who want to play connect-the-dots miss the broader revolution in rhetoric that transformed the world. As the Enlightenment unfolded across the landscape of Europe and America, Locke’s name became a kind of shorthand for liberty and natural rights, even among people who never read or fully understood him.

  What’s indisputable is that Locke was routinely invoked in sermons by pro-revolution pastors, which were often turned into pamphlets. (Sermons were at least 10 percent of all the pamphlets published at the time.)17 So great was Locke’s influence among pastors, and so great was the influence of the pastors with the people, that the historian Clinton Rossiter concluded: “Had ministers been the only spokesmen of the American Cause, had Jefferson, Adams and Otis never appeared in print, the political thought of the Revolution would have followed almost exactly the same line—with perhaps a little more mention of God, but certainly no less of John Locke.”18

  As counterintuitive as it might seem, the Founders’ intellectual debt to Locke may have had more to do with his philosophical (then considered scientific) writings on empiricism than with his political work in the Second Treatise. In 1760, John Adams remarked of Locke’s epistemological writings that he “steered his Course into the unenlightened Regions of the human Mind, and like Columbus has discovered a new World.”19

  As discussed earlier, Locke’s argument for the blank slate helped to undermine the case for hereditary power by arguing that all men were born equally free with the same natural rights. The American founders carried the Lockean argument even further (though not far enough). They declared unremitting war on hereditary aristocracy in all its unnatural or unjust forms (hereditary slavery excepted, unfortunately). Just as Locke and the Glorious Revolution overturned the divine right of kings, the Founders—particularly Thomas Jefferson—took dead aim at the divine rights of nobles and aristocrats. If all men are created equal, and if government is established by the people, not by God, then the government cannot recognize rankings of men. As Thomas Paine put it, “Virtue is not hereditary.”20

  The Founders understood all too well that mediocre men were capable of being born to high stations and exceptional men were often born to low ones. But even then, just because some men proved themselves to be superior to other men, that does not mean they have any special privileges or authority under the law. As Thomas Jefferson explained, just “because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”21 A man entering a courtroom in the newly formed United States of America may have had some piece of paper saying he was a baron or duke, and he’d be free to brag about it at a local tavern. But the judge would give that no weight in his dispute with a bricklayer.

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  The project was more Lockean than anything Locke imagined could happen in England.

  Strictly speaking, aristocracy doesn’t mean “rule of the nobility” but “rule of the best,” which is how the Greeks first conceived of the term. It was only later, when the corrupting influence of human nature worked its will and aristocrats tried to lock in their power for posterity, that this notion became infused with notions of hereditary status. What the Founders wanted was a return to the original Greek conception, which Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy.” He wanted to rake “from the rubbish annually” in search of the “best geniuses.”22

  Public education, the founder of the University of Virginia argued, elevates “those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights of their fellow citizens, and…should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or circumstance.”23 (This is what the “liberal” in “liberal arts” is supposed to mean.)

  After the Revolution, Jefferson fought to rid America of entail (the system of irrevocable trusts that barred the sale or division of landholdings) and primogeniture (requiring all property to be left to the oldest son), which tended to concentrate landed estates, elevating some families and their offspring beyond their
merit. Jefferson considered his successful effort to abolish entail and primogeniture to be among his greatest accomplishments as a legislator. He saw these efforts as essential to eradicating “every fibre…of ancient or future aristocracy” and to lay “a foundation…for a government truly republican.”24

  Identity politics will be a recurring theme in the pages that follow. But, for now, it’s worth making this simple observation: Notions of inherited nobility are an ancient form of identity politics. Identitarianism holds that a person has special status based upon criteria not of his or her own making. The Founders didn’t follow through on this logic when it came to slavery—though many wanted to—but they lit the fuse on the bomb that would demolish such thinking, at least for a time.

  It’s difficult to appreciate today how radical a departure all of this was from the way the world had worked until that moment. George Washington could have been a king. He declined. He even had to be persuaded to be president. When King George III asked his American portraitist, Benjamin West, what Washington would do after winning independence, West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.”

  “If he does that,” the gobsmacked king replied, Washington “will be the greatest man in the world.”25

  But even though the Founders were creating something new in the world, they did not believe that they could repeal the laws of human nature. The Founders knew that one could not eliminate the natural human tendency to form factions, including aristocracies of wealth, status, and power. But the system of government they established, they hoped, would make it impossible for any faction to attain lasting concentrated power.

  The structure of the federal government itself was designed to divide power in all the ways we learned in civics class: checks and balances, divided government, separation of powers. In one of the most famous passages in the Federalist Papers, James Madison writes:

  But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.26

  This was a great advance on Locke, who never gave a persuasive and cogent explanation for why majority rule could not be tyrannical.27 Meanwhile, the Founders understood that the majority could be a threat to liberty too. Obviously they couldn’t see Napoleon coming, but they understood the threat of Bonapartism entirely.28 Close students of history, they appreciated how a conquering general, like a Caesar or Cromwell (two names that appear often in the Federalist Papers), with the masses on his side, could take over the republican government. “Brutus,” one of the anonymous writers in the Anti-Federalist Papers, put it this way:29

  In the first, the liberties of the commonwealth were destroyed, and the constitution over-turned, by an army, led by Julius Caesar, who was appointed to the command by the constitutional authority of that commonwealth. He changed it from a free republic, whose fame…is still celebrated by all the world, into that of the most absolute despotism.30

  The Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, took certain vexatious political questions and made them off-limits (at least in theory) from the politicians. Free speech, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, the right to property (including intellectual property)—these are all massive bulwarks against despotic power. Even the phrasing of the key amendments is essential. “Congress shall make no law” [abridging this right or that]. In other words, the restrictions are all on the power of the state. The rights of the people, collectively and individually, are upstream of the powers of the government.

  This, in short, is the difference between Lockeanism and Rousseauism. For Locke, the individual is prior to the state. For Rousseau, the state—or the general will—is prior to the people. For the Lockeans, our rights come from God, not from government. For the disciples of Rousseau, our rights are indistinguishable, or at least inseparable, from our duties to the state.

  Perhaps the Constitution’s most important contribution is its most prosaic quality: It’s written down and very hard to change. Being written down for all to read gives ownership to everyone and creates what economists call “path dependence” for how political disputes are resolved. It reminds us that our fundamental laws are outside the authority of men. It creates the space necessary for institutional pluralism to flourish. The fact that the Constitution is hard to change—a great frustration to passionate political movements of every stripe—automatically confers deep democratic legitimacy to any successful alterations and provides assurance that we will not sacrifice some fundamental liberty in the heat of a given moment. We may, in such moments, ignore the Constitution, but it sits there, outside the time and space of any political moment, as a national conscience, reminding us that such transgressions must be rectified.

  There is a decidedly deist flavor to the American founding. Deism holds that God or, “the Creator,” is like a watchmaker who makes his creation, winds it up, and then interferes no more. Some of the Founders were indeed deists, and many more were influenced by deism. And, in a sense, they did set up the machinery of liberty and then got out of the way.

  But I think there is a better way to understand the Founders’ vision and how it differed from other Enlightenment projects, specifically those of Revolutionary France. America borrowed a great deal from French thought, but we cherry-picked the best bits without subscribing to their entire worldview. The philosophes and revolutionaries of Paris were far more ambitious than their counterparts in America. Partially thanks to the influence of Rousseau, they wanted to create, guide, and direct a whole new path for humanity. For all their hatred of religion, they nonetheless set out to create a new religion, a whole system of meaning for the French people.31 Taking after Rousseau, the French believed in the perfectibility of man. The scientific revolution had granted the new intellectuals the power to create perfect societies and perfect men. As Nicolas de Condorcet put it, there is “a science that can foresee the progress of humankind, direct it, and accelerate it.”32

  The Americans rejected the perfectibility of man, believing the best government could do was take man’s nature into account and channel it toward productive ends.

  Yuval Levin argues that you can see the differences in these two worldviews in the metaphors the two camps used in explaining what the state should do. The French strain emphasizes movement. The state is there to deliver the people somewhere, advance the “wheel of history,” etc. In the English version, the state is there to create a zone of liberty for people to choose their own direction.33

  One of my favorite illustrations of how this is as much a cultural disagreement as a philosophical one can be found in the differences between French and English gardens. For instance, the French gardens at Versailles, with their ornate, geometric, nature-defying designs, illustrate how the gardener imposes his vision on nature. Nature is brought to heel by reason. The classic English garden, on the other hand, was intended to let nature take its course, to let each bush, tree, and vegetable achieve its own i
deal nature. The role of the English gardener was to protect his garden by weeding it, maintaining fences, and being ever watchful for predators and poachers.

  The American founders were gardeners, not engineers. The government of the Founders’ Constitution is more than merely a “night watchman state,” but not very much more. It creates the rules of the garden and the gardeners and little more. This does not mean the government cannot intervene in the society or the economy. It means that, when it does so, it should be to protect liberty, which Madison defined in Federalist No. 10 as “the first object of government.”34

  As that quintessential Scottish Enlightenment thinker, Adam Smith, wrote in 1755:

  Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.35

  I think the garden metaphor works better than the watchmaker image, because so many of the Founders were active participants in the unfolding American experiment, as George Washington called it. From Shays’ Rebellion to the First Bank of the United States, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812, the Founders were attentive gardeners in this new nation, creating the conditions for prosperity, fending off predators, and even expanding the garden itself.