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

by Jonah Goldberg

  More than any other Founder, Adams was worried about the possibility that aristocracy—perhaps under some other name—could return. Establishing a nation where ambition is set against ambition almost by definition invites people to strain against any external impediments to their objectives. Men naturally form coalitions—or “factions”—and who is to say some coalition couldn’t get enough power to overwhelm the constitutional order? Jefferson wanted a “natural aristocracy” of merit. But was it not possible, if not inevitable, that, after having climbed the ladder of merit to the heights of power, that same natural aristocracy would then pull the ladder up behind them?

  This is precisely what John Adams feared. A “natural aristocracy” may yield “a body of men which contains the greatest collection of virtues and abilities in a free government, is the brightest ornament and glory of the nation, and may always be made the greatest blessing of society.” But, he noted, it must “be judiciously managed in the constitution.” Because when such constitutional management fails, “it is always the most dangerous; nay, it may be added, it never fails to be the destruction of the commonwealth.”2

  “Every government is an aristocracy in fact,” Adams argued in a letter to Benjamin Rush, and it may contain men of great but dark talents. The solution lay in recognizing and planning for this reality. “The great Secret of Liberty is to find means to limit [the aristocrats’] Power and controul [sic] their Passions.”3

  “I can never too often repeat that aristocracy is the monster to be chained,” he said. “Yet so chained as not to be hurt, for he is a most useful and necessary animal in his place. Nothing can be done without him….Bind aristocracy then with a double cord, shut him up in a cage from which, however, he may be let out to do good but never to do mischief.”4

  If you like the idea of putting the aristocrats in a dungeon of some kind, you will be disappointed. The “cage” Adams had in mind was the United States Senate. He had as his guide the practices of Britain and ancient Rome, each of which had a higher legislative body of nobles whose role and power were clearly delineated in a mixed regime. He did not want to have a House of Lords comprising hereditary nobles, but did not rule out the possibility that it might be necessary.

  Fortunately, we never felt the need to formally restore hereditary aristocracy. But it is clear that Adams and others were deeply concerned about the possibility, if not the inevitability, of a return to aristocracy. Theoretically, it wouldn’t be impossible, but the Founders thought that this liberty-loving people might one day re-embrace aristocracy despite its being entirely prohibited by the Constitution and totally discredited in the hearts and minds of the people. Why?

  A simple answer: They were right. Aristocracies are natural.

  To understand this, we need to get past the word “aristocracy.” It clangs off the modern ear precisely because we so completely associate it with earlier times. And while lords and earls are fit for medieval history and Game of Thrones fans, those are not the only form of aristocracy. It might be better to simply refer to elites or ruling classes. The terms aren’t all completely synonymous, of course. But they can come far closer to being interchangeable than people often realize. In North Korea, the party elite would be instantly recognizable as aristocrats or nobles to a time traveler or alien visitor. They have special rights and privileges and live in special areas reserved for the ruling class. Indeed, in any communist country, members of the Party are simply a modern form of an aristocratic caste class.

  Things are better in free countries, where equality before the law is a more enshrined and valued concept. But can anyone dispute that wealth, power, influence, race, and, perhaps most of all, celebrity can contribute to a kind of informal aristocracy or nobility? Certainly everyone can see the disparities. There may be nothing on the books that says the police should cut a Kennedy or a Kardashian a break. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t get one.

  There’s also the simple fact that there’s a natural human tendency to defer to people with higher status—whether it is earned or unearned. This is neither good nor bad. What matters is why the person being deferred to has status.

  In other words, it is natural and normal to have elites. And, contrary to the populist mood in America and much of the West right now, there is nothing inherently bad about an elite. Like Jefferson’s natural aristocracy, most of us respect people who achieve great things in their pursuit of excellence. We admire elite athletes and elite soldiers. No one wants to be operated on by a particularly average heart surgeon. Culturally, it is only when elites become synonymous with people who practice “elitism”—i.e., snobbery—that America’s rebellious DNA kicks in. Similarly, in politics and economics, our problem with elitism stems from a suspicion that the ruling classes are operating in their own self-interest, not ours. This healthy suspicion can always grow unhealthy and conspiratorial, and both the left and the right have their own versions of anti-ruling class paranoia.

  But it remains the case that every large or complex society has elites. Indeed, every organization of even modest size does as well. The German sociologist Robert Michels coined the term “the Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which holds that all organizations, including those expressly committed to advancing democracy, inevitably become ruled by an elite few.5 A small organization—a business, a political party, or even a society like a tribe or band—can make decisions largely by consensus. But as organizations grow in size, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage decision making inclusively (thus the irony of the iron law: It only kicks in when the cause is sufficiently attractive to large numbers of people). A fire team in the U.S. Army can largely work without much hierarchy, but an army cannot.

  Members of the group specialize in all sorts of ways, including in the realm of leadership and management. These leaders and managers, i.e., elites, emerge within even the most collaborative or consensual organizations—or the organizations simply fall apart under their own weight. The elites take on more responsibilities and, in the process, gain power and expand their access to special knowledge about how the organization works (what Michels calls “administrative secrets”). They can use these “secrets” to elevate their status and consolidate their power even further by allocating resources to reward allies and punish foes.

  Michels’s study focused on, of all things, democratic socialist labor unions, drawing on his own experience in the German Socialist Party. But his insight is applicable to every sphere of human activity that requires a division of labor. Have you ever belonged to an even modest-sized voluntary organization or club where the bulk of the responsibilities didn’t end up falling to a handful of people? What is true for charity drives, high school yearbooks, and peewee soccer leagues is also true of civilizations. The moment we moved from small bands or troops of hunter-gatherers to large agricultural societies, elites in the form of ruling classes were inevitable.

  If elites are inevitable in every society and organization, it becomes silly to fret over the existence of elites. This is particularly true in free societies, where people are permitted to pursue happiness as they define it. Not everyone wants to be rich or a politician or a military leader. But some people do. And those who want something the most are always more likely to get it than people who do not want that thing at all. To fret about political, social, or economic inequality in a free society is to fret about the problem of freedom itself, for in the presence of freedom there will always be inequality of some kind.

  So the relevant question is not “How can we avoid elites?” but “What kind of elites shall we have?” Following that: “How do we keep them accountable to the rule of law and prevent them from acting in their self-interest in a way that is contrary to law, liberty, or the common good?”

  The last three hundred years offer plenty of examples of countries that transitioned to formal democracy only to see it eroded away by a populist tide or yanked out by ambitious elites. But t
he Founders had other examples in mind. England under Cromwell and the dissolution of the Roman Republic loomed large in their historical memory. And so did the great commercial republic of Venice.

  In 1171, Venice established the Great Council, which was made up of aristocrats but also prominent businessmen, magistrates, and other state officials. The Great Council was remarkable in its time for several reasons. It was republican, i.e., the leaders were representative of the people. Every year, one hundred people were nominated to join the council. The members of the nominating committee were chosen by lot to avoid corruption of the process. This not only helped bring in fresh blood to the council but also created legitimacy among newly wealthy merchants. The Great Council, through various mechanisms, also created one of the first systems of checks and balances and divided government. It chose the doge, or chief magistrate of Venice, and required the doge to accept limits to his authority.

  “These political reforms led to a further series of institutional innovations: in law, the creation of independent magistrates, courts, a court of appeals, and new private contract and bankruptcy laws,” write Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. “These new Venetian economic institutions allowed the creation of new legal business forms and new types of contracts. There was rapid financial innovation, and we see the beginnings of modern banking around this time in Venice. The dynamic moving Venice toward fully inclusive institutions looked unstoppable.”6

  Until it stopped. Venice’s economic boom, “supported by the inclusive Venetian institutions,” was also “accompanied by creative destruction. Each new wave of enterprising young men who became rich via the commenda [an early form of joint stock company] or other similar economic institutions tended to reduce the profits and economic success of established elites. And they did not just reduce their profits; they also challenged their political power.”7

  By 1286 the existing elites had had enough. They implemented a law that membership in the council would henceforth be hereditary. By 1297 the council had effectively rendered itself closed to outsiders. The council soon created the Libro d’Oro, or Gold Book, which listed the recognized members of the Venetian nobility. If you weren’t in the book, you could not be a member of the council. If you, or your parents or grandparents, were in the book and had been a member of the council, you were automatically in. Term limits on service were eliminated as well. In short, the council became a permanent and hereditary aristocracy, whereas it had once been an institution advancing republicanism and merit.

  This was the Serrata, meaning closure or lockout. Having closed off politics from upstarts, the council soon set off to close off the economy from upstarts as well. They banned the commenda and other economic innovations that made it possible for entrepreneurs of low birth to get rich. By 1314 the Venetian state began nationalizing—i.e., socializing—trade for the benefit of the elites. Trade was heavily taxed. “Long-distance trade became the preserve of the nobility. This was the beginning of the end of Venetian prosperity,” write Acemoglu and Robinson. “With the main lines of business monopolized by the increasingly narrow elite, the decline was under way. Venice appeared to have been on the brink of becoming the world’s first inclusive society, but it fell to a coup.”8

  The Founders knew this history well. They understood that people were always going to form factions and that there will always be elites. The trick was to prevent any faction, including a majority of the people, from commandeering the state for its own ambitions. “The only remedy” to the problem of majoritarian factions taking over the government and bending it to its will, James Madison wrote, “is to enlarge the sphere, and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that, in the first place, a majority will not be likely, at the same moment, to have a common interest separate from that of the whole, or of the minority; and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be so apt to unite in the pursuit of it.”9

  Madison’s confidence in “enlarging the sphere” was rewarded throughout the nineteenth century. The U.S. population went from just over five million in 1800 to over 76 million in 1900,10 and even as the population grew fivefold, per capita GDP more than tripled.11 Physically, America had conquered the entire territory that would become the “lower 48” (though a few territories would have to wait until the early twentieth century to become states). Whole cities—Chicago, Denver, St. Louis—grew from trading posts at best into teeming metropolises. Hundreds of new colleges sprung up, most of them outside the Atlantic coast. And the American idea expanded too. The slaves were freed. The franchise expanded, even to women, in a few western upstarts like the Wyoming Territory (in 1869) and Utah (where it was passed in the Utah Territory in 1870, repealed by Congress in 1887, and restored upon achieving statehood in 1895-96).

  Material prosperity, combined with political liberty, fostered and deepened America’s culture of freedom. And in such an environment, it was inevitable that great fortunes would be made. Men with names like Getty, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Gould built businesses from scratch. These economic titans were not investors but entrepreneurs. They created new products and services, or new means of producing old ones, on a massive, cost-reducing scale that made former luxuries into affordable creature comforts.

  On the whole, these wealth creators differed from the old aristocrats of feudal Europe, whose wealth depended on exploitation of the poor. The new magnates made their money by helping the poor. Cotton magnate Edward Atkinson spelled it out. “Through competition among capitalists,” he wrote, “capital itself is every year more effective in production, and tends ever to increasing abundance. Under its working the commodities that have been the luxuries of one generation become the comforts of the next and the necessities of the third….The plane of what constitutes a comfortable subsistence is constantly rising, and as the years go by greater and greater numbers attain this plane.”

  Addressing some workers in 1886, Atkinson tried to explain how everyone gained from a free market. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Atkinson observed, made a profit of 14 cents from every barrel of flour shipped over his railroads. His efficiency lowered the price of flour for consumers. “Did Vanderbilt keep any of you down,” challenged Atkinson, “by saving you $2.75 on a barrel of flour, while he was making 14 cents?”12

  The poor benefited in more direct ways as well. Just drive around the country and count the number of libraries, schools, museums, and parks that would not exist but for the largesse of the supposedly “predatory” wealthy. Without the Morgans, Carnegies, Gettys, Rockefellers, Goulds, and Vanderbilts, few of the truly great cultural institutions we take for granted would be standing today. Carnegie poured millions of dollars into public libraries across the country in the Jeffersonian spirit of providing “ladders within reach upon which the aspiring can rise.”13

  The German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” The answer for historians and political theorists has always been: because America has no feudal past. In Europe—and everywhere else—feudal class differences were embedded in notions of wealth and status. The wealthy were aristocrats and the aristocrats were wealthy. The Founders sought to create a new nation where these long-married categories were divorced from one another.

  From the time of the Founding until the early twentieth century, the natural tendency of the haves to form new aristocracies and guilds was held largely in check. This tendency was held at bay thanks to a number of factors. First, economic growth was just too robust. Guilds thrive in moribund economies where competing innovators lack access to capital. Second, the nation itself was too large, too mobile, and too diverse. An established widget manufacturer in Pennsylvania might have had the kind of political clout close to home to thwart competition in his own backyard. But he was powerless to reach into Illinois or Colorado or Cali
fornia. A competing widget manufacturer with a better method in, say, Denver had access to local capital, natural resources, and markets all its own.

  A third, vital, reason: The Constitution was still functioning largely as designed. Local powers could not establish interstate tariffs or other trade barriers preventing new products from rolling across the borders in train cars. Fourth, and relatedly, the state simply wasn’t big enough or intrusive enough to pick winners and losers consistently (although the railroad industry might be a notable exception here). Even if regulators could be captured by established industries, there simply weren’t enough of them, nor were they sufficiently powerful, to block start-up industries.

  And, finally, American culture itself was simply too powerful. Call it the yeoman spirit, or the Horatio Alger ethic, or the legacy of Puritanism, or the new bourgeois ideology sweeping the world, or simply the American dream, but the American people believed in the nobility of entrepreneurialism. And because Americans believed in it, foreigners who believed in it as well flocked to this country by the millions, carrying with them the expectation that the sky was the limit. Barring one man’s ability to make his own fortune was rightly recognized as a threat to every man’s right to try for the same thing.

  In short, America had a functioning government, but it did not have a state. No doubt this sounds odd. But it’s an important distinction. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, historian William Leuchtenburg observes, America “had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term ‘the State.’ ”14 Of course, America had a government, but that is not the same thing as the state.