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

by Jonah Goldberg

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  People of good faith disagree about which resources or “capital” are key to success in life—political, financial, social, genetic, educational, professional, cognitive, or just plain old luck (which technically isn’t capital). Those are all interesting disagreements, but utterly irrelevant to the point at hand. If you are lacking in any, most, or all of these kinds of intangible capital, the more complex the rules get, the more you are left out in the cold. A dumb rich person with good lawyers or social connections will always jump over the hurdles laid down by government more successfully than dumb poor people lacking lawyers or connections. In feudal societies, the dim-witted scion of a great family could negotiate his way around life quite easily, because the rules were set up for him to do so.

  Some advantages are impossible to completely overcome. As we’ve seen, people will always do favors for friends and family over strangers. Attractive people will always have a leg up on unattractive people. One can minimize such advantages, but one cannot eliminate them. And to try would unavoidably lead to tyranny, for the state can never fully straighten the crooked timber of humanity.

  “Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life,” writes David Brooks. “As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.” That is right and proper. Indeed, that should be the mind-set of all parents. The problem is that we are setting up a system that makes it increasingly difficult for all parents to follow the same strategy. “Since 1996,” Brooks notes, “education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.”56 That spending gets results. And while the children of the affluent do get educated in the three R’s, they are also being taught how to maneuver in a system rigged for the benefit of their faction, as it were. In other words, we’re teaching to the test. I don’t mean that upscale high schools have classes in social networking or the correct pronunciation of elite shibboleths. But they are getting that education all the same. They are also learning, as we shall see, a profound and sophisticated ingratitude toward the country they grew up in.

  The administrative state, launched by Woodrow Wilson, is deeply invested in this project. And the more success they have, the more the arrogant and condescending elitism of the progressives becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start from the assumption that people are too stupid to understand what’s in their interest, and then you proceed to make society a byzantine maze of hurdles, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to claim you’re right.

  All of the educated liberals who cannot fathom why so many working-class Americans voted for Donald Trump need to undertake some vigorous moral—and policy—introspection. For modern progressives have not only helped set up a system that millions of Americans believe is dedicated to making their lives more difficult and their path to success more daunting; the progressives also heap scorn on them for complaining about it.

  It is easy to point at Donald Trump and say the American body politic is rotting from the head down.

  But the real rot is systemic. The shadow government of the new class has fortified itself against democratic accountability and is sawing off the ladder to success beneath it.

  10

  TRIBALISM TODAY

  Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics

  The old American ideal is that all men are created equal and are masters of their fate, captains of their souls. It was, in the words of Barack Obama, “a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.”1 It took a good deal of time for that concept to include women, blacks, and other marginalized groups. But one of the reasons why women and blacks succeeded in changing the Constitution and American attitudes is that they were appealing to that ideal, not rejecting it. It is always easier to win an argument when you can truthfully tell your adversary he’s right in what he believes, just wrong in how he’s applying the principle.

  But America has other ideals too. And sometimes these ideals can be in conflict. The other side of the coin to the conviction that the individual is the master of his fate is the idea that every American be an American. There is a healthy tension between these two principles. The German-Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wanted to be Americans, but they did not want to abandon their culture and language wholesale either. It is the difference between enforced ghettos and free communities. No one should be barred from fully participating in the American experiment on account of ethnicity, race, or religion, but no one should be forced to forsake one’s heritage either.

  The key to resolving this tension was twofold: liberty and time. Giving individuals the freedom to make these trade-offs on their own terms and giving society time to let the melting pot work its magic. That magic depended on many things, but none was more important than simple good manners. America has a culture as deep and rich as any other society, but Americans tend to think otherwise. When they travel abroad, they rub against the other cultures without realizing that the friction comes from the fact they brought their cultural expectations with them. In America, it is simply good manners to take individuals as you find them and not as representatives of some abstract group or classification. Accepting that is part of becoming an American. In other parts of the world, and for most of human history, it has been natural to treat individuals as a member of their tribe. In America, you’re supposed to judge people by their character.

  This cultural norm is as much a product of the Enlightenment as our Constitution, and arguably just as essential. The whole Enlightenment-derived idea behind the American founding is that America can turn Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Chinese, Arabs, etc., into Americans—that is to say, a new people dedicated to the principles of the Founding and the culture of liberty it birthed. The appeal of this vision attracted millions of people from around the world eager to escape the deadweight of history, class, and caste in their native countries. My brilliant friend, the late Peter Schramm, liked to tell the story of his family’s escape from Hungary in the aftermath of its failed revolution against Russian Communists:

  “But where are we going?” I asked.

  “We are going to America,” my father said.

  “Why America?” I prodded.

  “Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place,” he replied.2

  We were once taught that, when America deviated from this ideal, it was a shameful betrayal of our best selves. When, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1889, it agreed with the government that the Chinese “remained strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves,” and that they were unlikely “to assimilate with our own people or to make any change in their habits.”3 I was always taught this was a dark moment in American history.

  To be sure, American students are still taught that. We still believe that the government shouldn’t exclude some groups based upon arbitrary prejudices. But the rest of the melting-pot formula is breaking down in three ways. First, we are now taught that the government should give special preferences to some groups. Second, as a cultural imperative, we are increasingly told that we should judge people based upon the group they belong to. Assimilation is now considered a dirty word. And last, we are taught that there is no escaping from our group identity.

  Multiculturalism and identity politics ideologies contain within them myriad contradictions and inconsistencies, but as a broad generalization it is impossible to deny that our culture is shot through with an obsession with race, gender, and ethnic essentialness. “At a very young age, our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them,” writes the political theorist Mark Lilla. “By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political d
iscourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.”4

  If you can’t see this, you are a rare bird, given that the current debate about the explosion of identity politics isn’t whether or not it exists but whether it is good or bad. For that reason I will not drown the reader with page after page of horrible or hilarious stories from American campuses and left-wing media outlets (though the curious reader will find in the endnotes a micro-fractional list of examples that is at least somewhat illustrative of the point).5 But I will offer a few examples that advance my argument that this turn to the tribalism of identity politics is poisonous to the American miracle.

  Before I begin, I should recap the argument of this book: First, the rust of human nature is eating away at the Miracle of Western civilization and the American experiment. Second, this corruption is nothing new; nature is always trying to reclaim what is hers. But this corruption expresses itself in new ways in different times as the romantic spirit takes whatever form it must to creep back in. Third, the corruption can only succeed when we willfully, and ungratefully, turn our backs on the principles that brought us out of the muck of human history in the first place. The last point, which is the subject of the next chapter, is that the corruption has now spread, disastrously, to the right, not just in America but throughout the West.

  But for more than a generation now, the best principles of the West have been under assault. Intellectuals are recasting the virtues of our system and making them vices. “Merit,” the essence of the Jeffersonian ideal of an anti-aristocratic society, is now code for racism. “Whenever you hear someone (White or Black) oppose affirmative action with the ‘merit plea,’ you are listening to racism,” explains Ibram H. Rogers, author of The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1965-1972.6 CNN commentator Van Jones has said that Republicans who desire a color-blind meritocracy have a racial “blind spot.”7 His colleague Ana Navaro—a liberal Republican—insists that a merit-based immigration points system is “absolutely racist.”8 Which would mean that Canada and Australia rank high on the list of racist nations.

  Color-blindness is in fact a facet of not just meritocracy but also of the principle of universal equality. Perhaps Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous line was that he dreamed of a world where people would be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The moral clarity and power of this appeal is what fueled the success of the civil rights movement. But the forces of identity have been trying to topple the idol of color-blindness for decades. “Colorblindness is the New Racism,”9 proclaims one headline. “Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive,” insists another.10 A third: “When you say you ‘don’t see race’, you’re ignoring racism, not helping to solve it.”11 Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most celebrated author on the issue of race in decades, writes that “the [American] Dream thrives on generalizations, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.”12 The American Dream, he continues, is a “specious hope”13 constructed out of “the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white.”14 That white progress is exploitation and violence, based, he says, in “plunder.”15 “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.”16 Coates’s indictment is primarily of white people, not the Constitution or notions of merit, but his indictment of white people is more than broad enough to include a host of American institutions.

  Feminists have more diverse and often convoluted arguments about merit, vacillating between appeals to merit and equality and claims of beneficial female uniqueness when convenience dictates. Before joining the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor repeatedly suggested that a “wise Latina” would reach “a better conclusion than a white male.”17 Long before debates about transgenderism became mainstream, female identity became severed from biology. It is perfectly fine to criticize former Alaska governor Sarah Palin as a flawed politician, but one would think it would be fairly easy to form a consensus around the claim that she is a woman. And yet, when John McCain picked her as his running mate in 2008, the response from feminists was to insist that ideological conformity negated gender conformity. A spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, wrote of Palin: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”18

  Behind every double standard lurks an unstated single standard, and in virtually every identity politics campaign that standard is power. Whatever accrues to the net benefit of my group or to allied groups advances social justice. Thus, for example, in arguments over equal pay, feminists insist that statistical disparities are prima facie evidence of institutional prejudice against women. The principle they invoke is correct, but the disparities they cite don’t make their case.19 The claims hinge on statistical light shows that use aggregate disparities between male and female compensation to prove discrimination. There’s a similar problem with the argument over women in science. Women tend not to go into the STEM fields in large numbers. A 2016 study found that only 18 percent of computer science majors were female.20 This disparity, according to many feminists and diversity activists, can only be explained by systemic biases. It’s certainly possible that such biases exist. But women are overrepresented in many other fields. Some 60 percent of postdoctoral biology degrees and 75 percent of psychology degrees go to women. Is there some plausible reason to believe those fields successfully purged their ranks of sexism but computer engineers remained a stubborn hotbed of patriarchal bigotry? As psychiatrist and science blogger Scott Alexander writes:

  As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female. And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”21

  As Christine Rosen of The New Atlantis puts it:

  On the one hand, the argument goes, if there were no discrimination, women and minorities would be perfectly represented in every field proportionate to their numbers in the general population because there are no substantive differences between these groups and the white men who have long dominated certain fields (such as technology and engineering). At the same time, however, diversity ideology insists that women and minorities bring a special viewpoint and unique experiences to their work, and companies need this in order to thrive. In other words, they are especially valuable because they are different, and therefore favoring them in hiring is justifiable.22

  For our purposes, the question of whether those choices have some grounding in biology or culture or both is a distraction. The more simple answer is this: Individual women made individual choices to pursue careers that appealed to them. When large numbers of free people make choices, expecting the aggregate results of those choices to be perfectly representative by gender (or race or ethnicity) is not only ridiculous but also sexist (or racist) because it assumes a uniformity of talent, interest, and drive for whole categories of people.

  Unless, that is, you are someone who makes a living from exploiting these disparities. Few feminists complain about the comparative dearth of female sanitation workers, but they are happy to cite disparities at Google or in corporate boardrooms as proof of sexism. And the technique of their argument is consistent with the real aim: power, not policy. As a prominent feminist textbook explains, feminists measure gender equality by “the degree to which men and women have similar kinds or degrees of power, status, autonomy, and authority.”23 Jessica Neuwirth, founder and director of the ERA Coalition, insists that “the entren
ched historical inequality between the sexes cannot be erased by the creation of a level playing field because the players themselves are at two different levels.”24 In other words, the state must intervene on behalf of women because merit is an unworkable standard. The intent of the employer or policy maker and the qualifications or character of the individual job seeker are irrelevant. It is the “system” itself that is corrupt and racist (or sexist). And the proposed remedy is almost always to bend the rules, to discard objective standards in favor of selective ones that arbitrarily designate some group to be entitled to special treatment. This is the logic of the state as an instrument of divine justice manifesting itself yet again.

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  One need not reject the entirety of arguments made by the prosecutors to see the problems with this approach. Freed slaves certainly did deserve forty acres and mule (at least!), as many post-Civil War Radical Republicans proposed. Similarly, the early affirmative action programs targeted specifically to blacks in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts have intellectual and moral merit. Of course, notions of merit and color-blindness can serve to mask conscious or unconscious biases on the part of employers, managers, and others. There are indeed structural problems in American law and culture that are worth addressing or discussing. The embryonic left-right consensus on criminal justice reform has a lot of promise, for example. But the argument being made by countless tenured radicals goes much further than a call for practical reforms. They seek to overturn the status of merit and color-blindness as ideals.