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

by Jonah Goldberg

  What is true of nations is also true of institutions. Anyone who has relied on church or family during a personal storm understands how rooted institutions provide us not only physical shelter but, even more important, emotional, psychological, or spiritual shelter. We lash ourselves to these oaks of the culture. Chopping them down with the aim of building a perfect society is the perfect recipe for destroying a good society. Because when you destroy existing cultural habitats, you do not instantly convert the people who live in them to your worldview. You radicalize them. This is a point many on the left understand very well when it comes to American foreign policy. They are among the first to argue that nation building or “imperialism,” invites a backlash. The war in Iraq did not deliver democracy, they argue; it delivered ISIS.

  But when it comes to domestic cultural imperialism, many of the same people have a blind spot. They see nothing wrong with forcing Catholic institutions to embrace gay marriage or abortion. They think the state should force small business owners to celebrate views they do not hold. They brand any parent or institution that resists allowing men to use women’s bathrooms as bigots. They constantly change the rules of our language to root out disbelievers so they can hold them up for mockery. In June of 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders voted against the confirmation of Russell Vought, President Trump’s nominee for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought had written that Muslims were not “saved” because they do not accept Jesus Christ.57 This is not a radical interpretation of Christianity. It is Christianity. “I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, that this nominee is really not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about,” Sanders said. “I will vote no.” In other words, a faithful Christian cannot serve in government, according to Sanders. He has no such policy for Muslims who hold a very similar view toward Christians.58

  Sanders’s office issued a statement clarifying his position: “In a democratic society, founded on the principle of religious freedom, we can all disagree over issues, but racism and bigotry—condemning an entire group of people because of their faith—cannot be part of any public policy.” This is correct on its face. No public policy can discriminate against someone on the basis of faith. But there was no evidence whatsoever that Vought would discriminate against Muslims at the OMB. Meanwhile, Sanders’s own policy is that no one who actually believes in Christian doctrine has a right to make policy.

  Later that same summer, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin interrogated a judicial nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, about her Catholic faith, insinuating time and again that one cannot be a devout Catholic and a judge. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein said. “And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern…”59

  You can agree with Sanders, Feinstein, and Durbin if you like, but ask yourself, How do you expect believing Christians to respond to this? Will they instantly embrace this radical reinterpretation of our Constitution—which would have barred every president we’ve ever had from the office (to the extent that they were all truthful when they said they were Christians)—or would they feel like Sanders is trying to take their country away from them? No doubt there is a diversity of responses among even the most orthodox Christians to Sanders’s views, but can anyone doubt that many would take offense?

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  It is a cliché of the left to say that “perception is reality.” Well, the perceived reality for millions of white, Christian Americans is that their institutional shelters, personal and national, are being razed one by one. They do not like the alternatives they are being offered. Some fraction may indeed be racists, homophobes, or Islamaphobes, but most simply don’t like what they are being offered because they do not know it or because they do know it but prefer what they perceive to be theirs. And yet people like Sanders insist that resistance to their program is not just wrong but evil.

  The grave danger, already materializing, is that whites and Christians respond to this bigotry and create their own tribal identity politics. I don’t think the average white American is nearly as obsessed with race, never mind invested in “white supremacy,” as the left claims. But the more you demonize them, the more you say that “whiteness” defines white people, the more likely it is white people will start to defensively think of themselves in those terms. Some liberals will—and do—embrace a self-hating creed. Recall that Robert Frost said a liberal is a man so broad-minded he won’t take his own side in an argument. But most white people will respond differently. They will take the identity peddlers’ word for it and accept that whiteness is an immutable category. White working-class voters who said that they felt like “strangers in their own land” were 3.5 times more likely to vote for Trump.60 In 2016, the more aggressively a person embraced the white identity, the more likely that person was to vote for Trump.61

  Now, one last essential point needs to be made. Neither the left nor the state is entirely, or even in some cases primarily, to blame. Capitalism itself is a big part of the problem. The creative destruction of capitalism is constantly sweeping away traditional arrangements and institutions. The thriving communities that grew up around the steel and coal industries, only to be denuded by market forces, are just two obvious examples of how capitalistic innovation unsettles the status quo.

  Whenever misfortune befalls us, we are instinctually inclined to assume there was agency behind it. Someone must be responsible! The ruling classes! The industrialists! The Globalists! The New Class! Immigrants! (And for generations of bigots: the Jews!) And while some of these actors may deserve some blame, in some sense the real demon lurking in the shadows is change itself. Populist demagogues promise not only that they have the answer to ease the pains of change (“Free silver! Tariffs! Share the wealth! Build a wall!”), but that they will punish the culprits responsible. Such promises are a thick miasma of snake oil containing healthy portions of nostalgia, demonization, and scapegoating.

  Such siren songs—whether from technocrats or demagogues—are inevitable by-products of capitalism. That’s because innovation and efficiency maximization are at eternal war with “the way we’ve always done it.” Capitalism arouses in us feelings of nostalgia for an imagined—and, in some cases, actual—better past when people knew their place in the universe, and their work and their identity were inextricably intertwined.

  Here lies the eternal tension inherent in Enlightenment-based societies. The extra-rational institutions of family, faith, and community in all their forms are in constant battle with the force of change and the sovereignty of the individual. Our inner Rousseauians crave community and group meaning. Our inner Lockeans demand that we be given the tiller in finding our own fate. Because capitalism is unnatural and government (broadly understood) is natural, we constantly look to the state to fix the very real problems and anxieties that inevitably emerge from capitalistic destruction.

  No one wants to be replaced by a machine or told that her work is no longer valued. It is here where the left often has the better part of the argument, for they at least recognize the havoc that the market can wreak on those left behind. Donald Trump was not the first to appeal to the “Forgotten Man.” He appropriated the phrase—without credit, of course—from Franklin Roosevelt, who argued that “better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”62

  The Luddites had a point. The Industrial Revolution destroyed whole ways of life for English communities. And while we should be grateful for the Industrial Revolution, one can understand why the immediate victims of it were not inclined to say “Thank you.” Their rage as they saw this new system like a tornado razing their villages was wholly understandable.

 
But while we can concede the obvious merits of Roosevelt’s views, there remains an inherent defect in this thinking. And it is at once a practical and a philosophical objection. When can you know? When can the neo-Luddites or the technocratic liberals know that the forces of creative destruction are not to the ultimate benefit of mankind or the nation? So far, the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of innovation. When do you think we should have frozen technological progress? Would we have been better off if Rousseau went back in time and stopped the first man who put a fence around a piece of land and called it his own? Perhaps not. What about in Byron’s age? When life expectancy in England was forty years,63 and when as late as 1851, more than a third of all boys aged ten to fourteen worked, as did about a fifth of all girls?64 Should we have frozen the economy during the 1950s? The wages were good, but life expectancy was sixty-five65 and countless diseases were a death sentence.

  The larger problem is that any attempt by the state, or an outraged populist movement, to suppress innovation and more humanely or rationally plan the economy inevitably leads to restrictions on our liberties. No doubt some are easy to tolerate and even welcome. (For instance, it bothers me not a whit that the state makes it difficult for consumers to find child pornography.) But economic liberty is ultimately inseparable from liberty. Socialist society, as Robert Nozick famously put it, must “forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.”66

  The rising tide of protectionism in this country and across the West is merely the most obvious symptom of the larger malady. We live in a moment of ingratitude. Thankfulness is wanting, not just in regard to capitalism, but in regard to democracy itself. In our romantic rage against the machine, we do not differentiate between causes. The state gets blamed for the faults of capitalism. Capitalism gets blamed for the faults of the state. And everywhere we are told that it doesn’t have to be like this and that some other tribe is responsible for our ills. And so we build coalitions of tribes determined to dethrone the authors of our misfortune.

  This is the prologue to the story of Donald Trump’s victory and the rise of the “alt-right.” It is also the context for the ascent of Marine Le Pen, the victory of Brexit, and the new global crusade against “globalism.” In the face of the staggering rebuke to the progressive project, we see progressives on their hands and knees searching amidst the wreckage they created, searching for the ideals they were all too happy to smash when they were in power.

  11

  POP CULTURE POLITICS

  Godzilla, Rock & Roll, and the Romantic Spirit

  And their children wept, & built

  Tombs in the desolate places,

  And form’d laws of prudence, and call’d them

  The eternal laws of God.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, THE FIRST BOOK OF URIZEN (1794)1

  The fate of our times is characterized by intellectualization and rationalization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

  —MAX WEBER, SCIENCE AS A VOCATION (1917)2

  “Don’t write about romanticism.”

  In the course of working on this book, I heard that advice—if not always in those words—from my wife, a brilliant writer and editor; my actual editor (who cleaved the original manuscript in half); and any number of trusted friends. Sometimes they just said it with their eyes. There’s something about the word “romanticism” that elicits both an eye roll of the soul and a reflexive crouch of the mind. What is romanticism again? I had to learn about that in college, but I never really got it.

  The academics haven’t helped. It’s a term that has been stretched and twisted like taffy. No word, not even “fascism,” has proved more difficult to define, particularly among the scholars who study it.3 For starters, every country has its own kind of romanticism, because romanticism expresses itself in the language and culture in which it appears. Thus, romanticism is often found everywhere and nowhere depending on whom you listen to. Adding to the problem, romanticism often manifests itself most acutely as a rebellion against definitions, distinctions, and classifications. The romantic is usually quick to say, “Don’t label me, man.”

  Even Isaiah Berlin began his seminal 1965 A. W. Mellon lectures on the “Roots of Romanticism” by declaring he wasn’t going to make that blunder. “I might be expected to begin, or to attempt to begin, with some kind of definition of Romanticism, or at least some generalisation, in order to make clear what it is that I mean by it. I do not propose to walk into that particular trap.”4 In 1923, the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy gave a lecture to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America titled “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” After getting some laughs by recounting all of the different people who’d been declared “the father of Romanticism”—Plato, Saint Paul, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, etc.—he then listed all of the different kinds of romanticism and declared: “Any attempt at a general appraisal even of a single chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’ as a whole—is a fatuity.”5

  In his acclaimed book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, David Brooks argues that modern American culture is suffused with romanticism. But perhaps because he was better at taking editorial advice, he rejected the term in favor of “bohemianism.” “Strictly speaking, bohemianism is only the social manifestation of the Romantic spirit,” Brooks writes. “But for clarity’s sake, and because the word Romanticism has been stretched in so many directions, in this book I mostly use the word bohemian to refer to both the spirit and the manners and mores it produces.”6

  Given the success that book had, maybe I should have listened to those warning me off from romanticism. But I’m sticking with it because, as a historical and social phenomenon, it’s the better term. No one talks about “Bohemian nationalism.” So herewith I will offer some notes toward a definition.

  As we saw in the early discussions of Rousseau, romanticism is often described as a rebellion against reason, and it often is. Others describe it as the primacy of emotions and feelings. That gets closer to it, I think. The emphasis on feelings certainly explains why romanticism’s first and most powerful expression was artistic.

  The Age of Reason was a revolution not just of the mind but of the whole of society. And for many, it felt like an invasion. In Germany and large swaths of Europe, that feeling was literally true. Romanticism, Joseph Schumpeter noted, “arose almost immediately as a part of the general reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century that set in after the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.”7 The poets—and painters, and novelists—were the frontline soldiers in the human soul’s great counteroffensive against the Enlightenment. William Blake, the great romantic poet, loathed everything that John Locke and Isaac Newton bequeathed to the world. When Blake proclaimed, “A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage,”8 the cage he had in mind was the Enlightenment. It wasn’t quite the humans versus the machines; it was more like the champions of the soul against the promoters of machine thinking.

  I happen to think the romantics were on to something. Even sticking to my promise to keep God out of this book, I believe that there is more to life than what can be charted, graphed, or otherwise mathematized. And these things are important. What we imbue with significance is in fact significant; there is meaning to the meaning we impose on things.

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  It is my argument in this chapter that the romantic era in our culture—including that slice we call popular culture—never ended. It has ebbed and flowed, I suppose, but it has always dominated much of what we call popular culture. And today it essentially defines our shared culture. In fact, “shared culture” might be a better term for popular culture because popular culture is seen as for the masses, when the truth is that almost everyone, rich and poor, goes to the movies, watches at least some popular TV shows, and is at least somewhat familiar with pop music. Cl
ass differences explain far less than age differences when talking about different tastes in popular entertainment.

  The main reason I think the romantic era never ended is that it wasn’t an era; it was a reaction. Until the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, humans did not, as a rule, divide the world into secular and religious, the personal and political, reason and superstition. Science was magic and magic was science for most of our time on this earth. The ancient Roman priests who studied the entrails of birds to predict the future weren’t asking anyone to make a leap of faith. This was sound science. And it was magic. And it was religion. Scholars have debated the strange and often beautiful relationship between magic and science for a very long time. Was medieval magic rational? Anti-rational? Non-rational? Were the alchemists just the first chemists?9

  The Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution are widely credited with giving birth to a more secular and less superstitious world. All of that is true enough. But the process was more complicated than it may seem. The image at the heart of the Enlightenment is light—the idea being that science and reason banished the shadows of ignorance. But that metaphor is misleading when it comes to the human mind. The Enlightenment was really more like the Unbundling. In the medieval and primitive mind, science, magic, religion, superstition, and reason were all more or less fused together. The pieces started to separate with the Protestant Reformation, when magic and religion started to be considered unrelated things. Then science and religion drifted apart from each other. Then, after the Enlightenment, traditional religion and politics split off.