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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Yet I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us…the observers…every person in this house. And I think—I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us…22

  There are many themes to The Exorcist: the limits of reason and technology, the power of faith, the reality of evil, and the very deliberate glorification of religion in both the book and the screenplay, both written by William Peter Blatty. The monster that takes over Regan is a warning against the dangers of nihilism, secularism, and even capitalism, wrongly pursued.

  While obviously a supernatural thriller, the film can better be understood as part of, and a response to, a dark turn in American movies in the early 1970s. Whatever idealism there had been in the 1960s had largely turned to dross, as the costs of free love and sticking it to the Man mounted up. The loss of faith in politics and international and domestic turmoil all contributed to a very bleak—if well-executed—time in American cinema. The Exorcist came out the same year as American Graffiti, Mean Streets, Serpico, The Last Detail, Soylent Green, Walking Tall, and Magnum Force, the sequel to the first Dirty Harry film.23 The following year’s top movies included: Death Wish, Chinatown, The Godfather: Part II, The Parallax View, and Lenny. The year after that included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Stepford Wives. What was the one thing these movies, including The Exorcist, all had in common? The idea that contemporary life was out of balance and off-kilter, inauthentic, or oppressive, and that elites and the system itself were broken, corrupt, or inadequate to the task of making life right.

  “IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS”

  The idea that the world—this world—is…wrong, off balance, fake, fraudulent, unnatural, has been one of the dominant themes of art since the Enlightenment. It is what motivated the romantic poets to fight back against what they saw as the mechanization of natural life. It is the central conceit of the Matrix films, in which a technologically oppressive system parasitically feeds off humanity. It can also be found in a host of baby boomer midlife crisis and middle-age anxiety movies and TV shows, such as Lawrence Kasdan’s 1991 Grand Canyon. In what was supposed to be “The Big Chill of the 1990s” (that was how it was marketed), the film focuses on how a diverse set of characters are lost in the chaos of modern American life, lacking any shared experiences or mutual empathy and desperately looking for a sense of control or meaning. As Danny Glover says in one famous scene, “Man, the world ain’t supposed to work like this.”

  In fairness, the same trope can be found in every generation. So-called Gen-X films were also full of generational angst. Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke spent much of the 1990s making films dedicated to the proposition that the system is a succubus draining out the authenticity of life and the souls of youth. Here’s Hawke in Reality Bites:

  There’s no point to any of this. It’s all just a…a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know…a Quarter-Pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle…and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.

  In another scene, Hawke literally answers the phone: “Hello, you’ve reached the winter of our discontent.”24

  Interestingly, the 1990s may have marked something of a high-water mark of this genre. One can speculate as to why. The 1980s had been a time when conformity and prosperity were on the rise. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent triumphalism of Western democratic capitalism appalled many of the artistic souls who had to endure it.

  The execrable film Pleasantville was an extended metaphor on the horror of conformity. And so was the even more execrable 1999 film American Beauty. “I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the past twenty years. And I’m just now waking up,” declares Kevin Spacey playing Lester Burnham, an updated version of the man in the gray flannel suit desperate to break the chains of conventional morality and selling out to the consumer culture. He commences a “self-improvement” regimen that includes all of the staples: sexual obsessions, pot smoking, flipping off the Man.

  “Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus,” Lester tells his daughter at the dinner table.25

  In Point Break (1991) a small band—a tribe, if you will—of surfers living off the grid dedicate themselves to ripping off the system by donning masks of dead presidents and robbing banks. But Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) explains: “This was never about money for us. It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins…we show them that the human spirit is still alive.”26 The terrible remake of the film was even more ham-fisted in its treatment of these themes.

  The romantic spirit is often at its least subtle when expressing its hatred for capitalism and the market. As John Steinbeck writes in The Grapes of Wrath, “The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”27

  The brilliant TV series Mr. Robot offers the most recent exposition of these themes. Set in contemporary New York, the show follows the mentally unstable computer programmer savant Elliot, hauntingly portrayed by Rami Malek. Elliot seems to live half in dream, consumed with an ongoing dialogue with the ghost (for want of a better word) of his dead father, a Rousseauian rebel determined to take down the system. As Elliot explains to a therapist:

  Oh, I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself’s just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bullshit, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books make us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards. Fuck society.28

  (We later learn that he didn’t, in fact, say anything at all to his therapist. It was just another inner monologue narrated by his authentic self.)

  Elliot and his tribe of hackers, “F-Society,” set out to tear down E Corp, which quickly becomes “Evil Corp.” That might sound didactic, even propagandistic, but the show’s creator, Sam Esmail, deftly avoids such pitfalls. The series is almost an allegorical tale of Rousseauians, who want to “save the world” by restoring it to something more human and natural, and the capitalistic Nietzscheans, who run the system through force of will and nihilistic disregard for morality. What both factions have in common is the romantic conviction that the only legitimate source of truth is found within oneself. In the first season, Tyrell Wellick, a brilliant corporate climber, explains what he felt after killing someone:

  Two days ago I strangled a woman to death just with my hands. That’s a strange sensation. Something so tremendous done by something so simple. The first ten seconds were uncomfortable, a feeling of limbo, but then your muscles tense, and she struggles and fights, but it almost disappears in the background along with everything else in the world. At that moment it’s just you and absolute power, nothing else. That moment stayed with me. I thought I’d feel guilty for being a murderer, but I don’t. I feel wonder.29

  One of the most remarka
ble aspects of the series is how it exemplifies the romantic spirit in the technological age. Romanticism always speaks in the language of its time. That’s partly why we think the romantic era ended: The language changed with the times.

  But the two most egregious films of this neo-romantic genre must be Fight Club and Dead Poets Society. In Fight Club, which opened the same month as American Beauty, Edward Norton plays a young professional driven to madness by the cage of modern capitalism. The film is a riot of Rousseauian and Nietzschean vignettes masquerading as primal yawps. The premise of Fight Club is that young men are orphans of the system, forgotten, exploited, and downtrodden. They were born free but live in chains. “Like so many others,” Norton explains, “I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.”

  The only way to rediscover the freedom and meaning bleached out of them by the system is to rekindle their primal, tribal inner flames and band together, first to fight each other and then to fight the system itself.

  Norton’s alter ego, Tyler Durden, explains:

  Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war…our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

  Another member of Fight Club advises, “Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”30

  And then there’s Dead Poets Society, in which a group of young men at a straightlaced boarding school seek to break the chains of convention and defy the authority of the oppressive system they are destined to inherit. How do they do this? By embracing the work of the romantic poets (and a hodgepodge of later transcendentalists) who had declared war on the Enlightenment two centuries earlier!

  The film begins with the students learning poetry by formula, plotting its “perfection along the horizontal of a graph” and its “importance” on the vertical in order to find the “measure of its greatness.” It is almost as if the system has found its soulless answer to poet August Wilhelm Schlegel’s question “What can a poem prove?” John Keating, the student’s new charismatic teacher played by Robin Williams, tells the boys to rip the introduction from their poetry text books.

  He exhorts his charges to stop and to look inward for meaning and authority: “Boys, you must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Don’t be resigned to that. Break out!”

  When one of the students discovers in an old yearbook that Mr. Keating was a member of something called the Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating tells him, “No, Mr. Overstreet, it wasn’t just ‘guys,’ we weren’t a Greek organization, we were Romantics. We didn’t just read poetry, we let it drip from our tongues like honey. Spirits soared, women swooned, and gods were created, gentlemen, not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?”

  So inspired, the boys get into all manner of trouble. Neil, the leader of the band, takes to heart Thoreau’s dictum, “To put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.” He decides he’s going to be an actor, against the wishes of his father, who wants him to dedicate himself to becoming a doctor. “For the first time in my whole life I know what I wanna do. And for the first time I’m gonna do it! Whether my father wants me to or not! Carpe diem!”

  It all goes badly and Neil ultimately commits suicide out of despair at the prospect of having to sell out to the system. Mr. Keating is fired, but the surviving boys pay tribute to him by standing on their desks, shouting, “O Captain! My Captain!”

  Throughout the film, we are always supposed to take Mr. Keating’s side in every dispute. When the stodgy headmaster chastises him for his unorthodox techniques, Mr. Keating shoots back: “I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.” The headmaster responds, “At these boys’ age? Not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline. Prepare them for college and the rest will take care of itself.”31

  We are supposed to roll our eyes at this. But the headmaster is right, or at least less wrong than Mr. Keating. To be sure, Mr. Keating has something to teach the fogeys about how to make education interesting and entertaining. But what he is not doing is teaching the boys to think for themselves. He is teaching them to embrace the romantic imperative of finding truth—or at least the only truth that matters—within themselves. In other words, he is not teaching them to think for themselves; he is teaching them not to think at all. Dead Poets Society is a rock-and-roll song minus the rock and roll.

  All of this matters, because films like this do not merely reflect our culture but also shape it, giving it voice and validation. Voted the greatest “school film” of all time, Dead Poets Society’s influence has been profound, not just on how normal people view education, but on how educators view themselves.32

  I should note that this trope of a vampiric political or economic order sucking the life force out of humanity is usually described as left-wing, and in the hands of Hollywood it often is. But in other cultures and at other times, this romantic spirit has taken different—or allegedly different—forms. In the American South, the Southern Agrarian poets and writers were a decidedly conservative bunch, but their critiques of capitalism, democracy, and mass culture could easily be described as romantic. In the Soviet Union, the writers and intellectuals who yearned to restore the romantic and religious spirit of Mother Russia were not necessarily lovers of the free market. What they wanted was to restore the glory of soil, nature, church, and tradition to the sanitized world of Marxism. The Nazis were drenched in romanticism and romantic notions going back to gauzy myths of their pre-Christian Teutonic forefathers. In India, Hindu nationalists do not fit easily into our left-right schema (as far as I can tell), but in both their historic and contemporary desire to elevate ancient notions of folk, custom, and nation over “foreign” concepts like capitalism and socialism, they seem to fit perfectly well inside the romantic tradition. And, as will be discussed in another chapter, today romantic nationalism is in full, if noxious, flower amidst the fever swamps of the American right.

  ISN’T IT BYRONIC?

  The classic character of the romantic novel is the Byronic hero. In many of Byron’s works, most famously Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the protagonist is a rebellious soul plagued with the memory of wrongs he’s committed in the past and determined to set things right, or at least atone for them. One can think of countless stock characters in film and television who fit this description. The brooding vampire with a soul archetype (Angel, Vampire Diaries, Twilight) is one. Martin Blank in Grosse Pointe Blank is a classically Byronic figure trying to do right after a career of doing wrong. Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood, and Mel Gibson routinely play Byronic characters in such films as Legends of the Fall, Fury, Unforgiven, and Lethal Weapon.

  One of the central traits of the Byronic hero is the man who “plays by his own rules.” This theme has come to nearly define what we mean by a hero. A fascinating example of this can be found in the changing view of the Muslim prophet Muhammad during the romantic era. In Christian Europe, martyrdom was always held in high esteem. But giving your life was laudable when you were sacrificing it for a capital-T Truth, most specifically for the Christian faith. (Giving your life for your country was also highly valued, but this was often seen as just another form of religious self-sacrifice. See “Arc, Joan of.”) But, Isaiah Berlin notes that by the 182
0s “you find an outlook in which the state of mind, the motive, is more important than the consequence, the intention is more important than the effect.”33

  In Voltaire’s play Muhammad, the prophet emerges, in Berlin’s words, “as a superstitious, cruel and fanatical monster.”34 Voltaire probably didn’t care much about the Islamic faith one way or another; he was trying to get around the censors, to attack organized religion, specifically Catholicism as practiced in France. By the 1840s, the height of the romantic period, Muhammad becomes a heroic man of will. In Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Muhammad is “a fiery mass of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself.” Carlyle couldn’t give a fig about the tenets of faith found in the Koran either. What he admired was Muhammad’s radical commitment. The Muslim prophet’s example served as an indictment of what Carlyle considered to be a “withered…second-hand century.”35

  Today, this fetishization of strength and will is everything in culture. It explains so much, from Donald Trump’s cult of personality to fandom for countless athletes and hip-hop icons, not to mention the hints of grudging admiration one often hears for Muhammad’s extremist followers.36

  From Rebel Without a Cause to cooking shows, the man—or occasionally woman—who plays by his own code, even if that code is evil, has become the stock character of American popular culture. Batman, a.k.a. the Dark Knight, is not evil, but he is a vigilante who plays by his own rules. The pioneering comic book character Wolverine’s slogan? “I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.” In the cult classic comic Watchmen, the character Rorschach’s motto is “Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.”37 In the novel and Showtime TV series Dexter, we meet a brutal serial killer who has found a way to live with himself by following “the Code of Harry,” named after his dead father (who appears as a ghost throughout the series). According to his code, it’s okay for him to murder so long as he’s murdering other serial killers (and, on rare occasions, people who might bring him to justice). Omar in the HBO series The Wire insists that he will only rob and kill other drug dealers and gangsters, because “a man’s got to have a code.” “The Mountain” in Game of Thrones explains that, while he’s fine with slaughtering innocent people, he won’t steal “because a man’s got to have a code.” He later steals, but the audience doesn’t care.