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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Stanley Fish, one of the pioneers of this project, is honest. The literary and legal scholar has made it plain that he considers objective and neutral standards, fair rules of the game, to be a mirage concealing the will to power of whites or the system or the European mind. Even reason is a con. According to Fish, there really is nothing called reason; there is simply argument and other contests of power. Whoever wins the argument gets to claim that reason validates his position. He writes that “like ‘fairness,’ ‘merit,’ and ‘free speech,’ Reason is a political entity,” an “ideologically charged” product of “a decidedly political agenda.”25 University of Virginia law professor Alex M. Johnson contends that “the presumed norm of neutrality actually masks the reality that the Euro-American male’s perspective is the background norm or heuristic governing in the normal evaluative context.”26

  Power politics is as old as politics. Coalitions of interests have vied with each other for power in every political system ever created. It would be easy to dismiss the identity politics of race, gender, and ethnicity as simple reinventions of the sort of coalitional squabbles that defined American politics—and politics generally—forever. Germans versus Anglos, farmers versus city dwellers, Catholics versus Protestants, everyone versus the Jews. And to be sure, some hucksters, like Al Sharpton, are less devotees of Stanley Fish and more devotees of the ward-heeling rabble-rousers common to big-city politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But some differences of degree become sufficiently large to become differences in kind. Racial and gender identity have been abstracted, converted into a permanent and immutable ideological category that claims there is no common ground between groups save perhaps the common effort to overthrow “white male privilege.” Anything associated with the system that white men created is discredited. Argument, grounded in reason, is itself now a tool of oppression. And the unshakable faith that those on the side of “social justice” are right has itself gelled into a kind of tribal ideology.

  The legendary French liberal theorist Raymond Aron commented in 1957 that “the essentials of liberalism—the respect for individual liberty and moderate government—are no longer the property of a single party: they have become the property of all.”27 That is no longer the case. On the left, and increasingly on the right, large swaths of tribalists have forfeited their ownership stake in the liberal project.

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  This effort to delegitimize classical liberal standards manifests itself every day on college campuses. When Swarthmore invited left-wing philosopher Cornel West and conservative philosopher Robert P. George—close friends and colleagues at Princeton—to speak, many students were outraged. “What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion,” Erin Ching told the Daily Gazette, the school’s newspaper. “I don’t think we should be tolerating conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.”28 A student writing in the Harvard Crimson bemoans the ideals of “free speech” and “academic” freedom as systems of oppression. “When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.”29

  When my National Review colleague Kevin D. Williamson and free speech activist Greg Lukianoff spoke on a panel at Yale on the virtues of free speech, many students were livid. The panel was interrupted by a student who shouted: “Stand with your sisters of color. Now, here. Always, everywhere.” Some of the participants were spat on.30

  Again, one could go on not just for pages but at book length documenting these bonfires of asininity at various elite universities.31 And while it would be too generous to credit many of these individual students with an intellectually sophisticated or thought-through ideology, it’s important to recognize that they didn’t invent these ideas: They were taught them.

  Again, this effort to enthrone liberal ideals is inseparable from a desire for power—power for professors, students, activist groups, Democrats, etc. Some of it is just conventional guild protection stuff: As we’ve seen, groups of any kind, once organized and established, guard their status jealously. Various professors specializing to the exclusion of almost everything else in the study of race and gender—but also diversity consultants, administrators, and various outside activist groups—have a vested interest in heightening racial and sexual grievances for the simple reason that they make a living from such things. Women’s studies departments are not particularly popular, which is one reason women’s studies faculty members are eager to create or exploit controversies that make their disciplines relevant. If you are a journalist who only knows how to churn out articles explaining why something is racist, the last thing you want to hear is that racism isn’t as big a problem as you claim it is. The Southern Poverty Law Center once did important work identifying bigoted groups and policies around the country. Now it invents new categories of “hate”—so as to sweep conventional conservatives into its demonology—to justify its fund-raising and relevance.32

  But the pursuit of power isn’t merely reducible to careerism and profit. The more important dynamic, the one that makes this such an appealing ideology, is the desire to have authority over others, to control the terms of debate, and to establish yourself as the new authority on what is or is not legitimate. Every society since the agricultural revolution has created a priestly class that defines the scope of right thinking and right action. For millennia that role was played by actual priests. In modern society the new clerisy is increasingly to be found among the self-anointed class of academics, activists, writers, and artists who claim a monopoly on political virtue. They unilaterally get to decide who is to be anathematized or excommunicated for wrong thinking. And college campuses serve as their most formidable monasteries and citadels.

  Indeed, free speech isn’t merely emotionally painful (“triggering”); it is a threat to ideological hegemony. Identity politics has always been about the politics and psychology of power. By insisting that some questions cannot be asked, some ideas not entertained, the new clerisy is wielding power. The whole notion of creating “safe spaces” should be understood as an effort to control certain battle spaces in the culture war.

  The clerisy changes the rules of what is permissible to say—or how to say it—in the same way Mao’s Red Guard terrified their elders. The stakes may be lower on the Yale campus, but does anyone doubt that some students would love to march ideologically wayward professors around the quad in dunce caps? According to the Anti-Defamation League, Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jewish conservative, came in first on its list of anti-Semitic social media attacks from the alt-right. (I came in sixth.)33 Nonetheless, when he spoke at Berkeley in 2017, he was widely attacked for being a white supremacist. Tariq Nasheed, a self-described “Anti-Racism Strategist,” announced on Twitter: “Suspected white supremacist Ben Shapiro, who tries to mask his racist rhetoric by claiming to be Jewish, is in Berkeley now.”34 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an atheist classical liberal who was mutilated in her native Somalia, and Maajid Usman Nawaz, a former Liberal Democrat politician in England, are committed opponents of Islamic extremism. But, according to the SPLC, they are now anti-Muslim bigots.35 They are routinely banned, protested, and disinvited from speaking at college campuses on the grounds that students cannot be exposed to their injurious and dangerous “hate speech.”

  I was once invited to speak at Williams College by a group that called itself Uncomfortable Learning. The group chose that name because they knew that, if they tipped off students that they might hear conservative or libertarian views, the students would boycott the event. But because “Uncomfortable Learning” sounds so rebellious, and transgressive students assumed they’d be hearing things they already agreed with, the reaction from the audience when I spoke reminded me of my dogs’ reaction when they think we’re driving to the park, only to discover we’re heading to the vet.


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  The great irony of all this is that identity politics wins not by making compelling arguments but by exploiting the inherent decency of the American people, including, most ironically, liberal college professors who are terrified of being called racist, even when the accuser is a cynical opportunist, poltroon, or emotionally immature waif.

  One needn’t be absolutist about such things. The essence of serious thinking is the ability to make meaningful distinctions even when facile analogies can deceive us. Calling someone a “nigger” or “kike” is grotesque, and a campus administrator should have the power to discipline students who do so even if it limits their speech. But using an epithet is not the same thing as “punching someone in the face,” as many students increasingly argue.36 And it is different from making an argument that someone doesn’t want to hear. One Yale student, somewhat infamously, argued that the “Master” of her dorm at Yale had oppressed her because he wanted to debate a (ridiculous) controversy about Halloween costumes. “He doesn’t get it,” she wrote. “And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.”37 The Master has since lost his job, and Yale has banned the use of the word “Master” to spare students further pain. (After all, slaves had “masters” too.)38

  To listen to the activists at Yale, you might think the school was a hotbed of white oppression, willy-nilly excluding minorities from participation in campus life. When this “Master” controversy erupted in the fall of 2015, I took a look at the course offerings at Yale that year. By rough count, Yale offered at least twenty-six courses on African-American studies, sixty-four courses on “Ethnicity, Race and Migration,” and forty-one courses under the heading “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.” These are conservative estimates and do not include independent study. Meanwhile, I found two courses on the Constitution. A single professor teaches all of the courses on the Founding era: three. As for safe spaces outside the classroom and the dorm, I tallied an Afro-American Cultural Center, a Native American Cultural Center, an Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Latino Cultural Center, and the Office of LGBTQ Resources. Plus there were nearly eighty organizations dedicated to specific identity groups in one way or another.39 The same pattern holds at most elite colleges. The moral of the story: Appeasing identity politics demands, like all appeasement, simply leads to more and more demands.

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  Of course, campuses are simply one front in the larger war. For decades, representatives of various identity groups have asserted authority over how to deal with, or even talk about, certain issues. This effort is ideological, but it is also cynical. “Diversity consultants” and similar specialists have a class interest in perpetuating a constant state of uncertainty about what constitutes racism, because such priestcraft gives them power, status, and income. For instance, it is a settled fact of social science that bilingual education hampers English learning and assimilation.40 But for a politician to say so is to invite charges of racism or “insensitivity” from the anointed representatives of the “Hispanic community.” What better way to prevent assimilation than to foreclose debate on the matter by simply declaring assimilation bigoted? No doubt many advocates believe it, but it’s no coincidence that the bureaucrats and educators invested in the business of bilingual education benefit from censoring any competing point of view.

  The most redeeming aspect of political correctness stems from the legitimate effort to create a code of good manners for a diverse society. We have a tendency to concentrate on the forms good manners take rather than the purpose of them. From prehistoric times until today, manners—ceremony, custom, etiquette, etc.—have simply been mechanisms for reducing unwanted conflict by showing respect, particularly to strangers. Some believe that the handshake was born by the need to show that one didn’t have a weapon in hand. At its best, PC is a way to show respect to people. If black people don’t want to be called “Negroes,” it is only right and proper to respect that desire. If Asians object to “Oriental,” lexicological arguments can’t change the fact that it is rude not to oblige them.

  The problem is that the ambitions of political correctness go much deeper than that, which is why activists are constantly changing the acceptable vocabulary. The clerisy doesn’t own anything other than its monopoly over acceptable words. Clear, universal rules about acceptable terminology—i.e., what constitutes good manners—are a threat to that monopoly. And so the rhetorical ground underneath us is constantly shifting. When I was a trustee of my alma mater, a diversity consultant explained to the board that “tolerance” was no longer kosher, because it implied a certain kind of condescension. “Acceptance” was the new word of the moment. These days, “celebration” seems to be the new “acceptance.” But there are enormous differences between “tolerance,” “acceptance,” and “celebration.” “Tolerance” and “acceptance” acknowledge disagreement to one extent or another. The requirement to celebrate, however, is ultimately a form of psychological bullying. It says, “You must abandon your convictions and agree with mine.” It is one thing to argue that a free society should accept gay marriage or allow people to define their gender in terms utterly unrecognizable to science. It is another thing to demand that individuals rejoice—or pretend to rejoice—in the lifestyles or decisions of others. But that is precisely what the jihad against “hate speech” demands. Dissent from the orthodoxy is now the equivalent of violence or complicity in it. The war on tolerance has become an effort to make room for a new intolerance.

  Even democracy is now seen as a threat to tribal power politics. Support for democracy is eroding across the West, particularly among young people. Much of this has to do with the worldwide populist reaction to “globalism,” as we’ll see. But the tribal attack on democracy has been under way for a very long time. Consider Lani Guinier, the Harvard professor who briefly achieved celebrity status for her failed bid to run the Civil Rights Division of the Clinton Justice Department. Guinier argues in her book The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy and in various law review articles that the doctrine of “One man, one vote” needs to be jettisoned in favor a more “authentic” form of democracy. She proposes an idea inspired by her then four-year-old son, Nikolas: “Taking turns.”41 When Nikolas couldn’t get a consensus among his friends about what the kids should play, they decided they should take turns deciding. Similarly “authentic minorities” should have a “turn” at representation even if their “authentic leaders” cannot win a majority of the vote.

  Guinier places enormous emphasis on the term “authentic”; merely being black is not enough. One must represent the authentic spirit of the people, or what the Germans call Volksgeist, of the black community, as determined by those with the deepest investment in a specific definition of authenticity, like Ms. Guinier. “Authenticity reflects the group consciousness, group history, and group perspective”42 of a specific “social group.” “Authentic leadership” is not merely “electorally supported by a majority of black voters.” The leader must be “politically, psychologically, and culturally black.”43

  “Authenticity refers to community-based and culturally rooted leadership. The concept also distinguishes between minority-sponsored and white-sponsored black candidates.” She clarifies: “Basically, authentic representation describes the psychological value of black representation. The term is suggestive of the essentialist impulse in black political participation.” She rejects the principle of color-blindness because it “abstracts the black experience from its historical context” and “ignores the existence of group identity within the black community.”44

  The upshot, as she makes clear at great length in unambiguous prose, is that blacks who are elected with significant shares of the white vote—like then Virginia Democratic governor Douglas Wilder—may not, and often do not, count as authentically black. This is where racial essentialism and political
leftism intersect. According to many on the identity politics left, only left-radical politics are authentically black. This is why Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t count as black among so many black activists. Blacks are supposed to think a certain way, and if they do not, they are essentially inauthentic, or “Uncle Toms.”

  There are countless ominous echoes in these fundamentally romantic, tribalist ideas. Karl Marx believed that the Jew (and the Negro) had authentic natures rooted in psychology, history, and culture (and, in the case of blacks, biology). So did Joseph de Maistre. Needless to say, German nationalists had strong opinions about the essentialism of various groups. German nationalist intellectuals like Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Fichte wrote at epic length about the essential psychological and cultural uniqueness of the German Volk. But perhaps the most interesting parallel is to the great champion of Southern slavery, John C. Calhoun. He argued that a “mere numerical majority” could not overrule a minority if the majority’s decision conflicted with the core interests of the minority, i.e., slaveholding whites. Guinier even invokes Calhoun’s theory of concurrent majorities as one possible remedy to the problem of “One man, one vote.”45