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

by Jonah Goldberg

  In 2012, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy asked a good question: Why is African-American participation in professional baseball at an all-time low?35 Economics doesn’t offer much insight. Baseball offers the highest return for professional athletes of any professional sport. But culture plays a big role, albeit one that is hard to quantify. Basketball and football are more popular and glamorous. Baseball is a slower sport, less amenable to television coverage. Public policy plays some role as well. Local governments find baseball diamonds an expensive line item.

  But one partial answer jumped out: fathers. “If you did a survey, I believe you’d find that the one thing average and above average players have in common is a father,” Gerald Hall Jr., the baseball director for a local youth league, told Milloy. “Baseball is, at heart, a father-and-son sport. And if you’re a kid that has nobody to throw to, nobody to talk to, nobody to discipline you in the way that baseball demands, you’re not likely to play the game.”

  Tony Davenport, a local coach, agreed. “You have to catch the kids early, start with the basics—how to hold a bat, the proper throwing motion, catch with the glove, not your hand,” he said. “A lot of kids really enjoy it if they continue to be provided with guidance.”

  Basketball is a sport that’s largely picked up from peers. So is football. But baseball is arcane. It requires explanation and patience. You don’t have to subscribe to all the sentimental arguments about the importance of fathers to appreciate how an absent father creates difficulties. A simple division of labor suggests that it’s hard for a single parent to both prepare or provide dinner (or work two jobs) and play catch with a kid or sit on a couch for a few hours watching and explaining a game at the same time. But here’s the important part: This observation is true not just for baseball but for an entire suite of life lessons, skills, and tasks, from playing a musical instrument, to learning a trade, to understanding good habits.

  Single parents—either never married or divorced—simply have less time to dedicate to parenting than they otherwise might. This has numerous knock-on effects. Struggling single parents are more likely to let the TV, iPad, or Xbox serve as a babysitter. They take less time vetting peers who might seduce their kids into bad habits. They model behaviors—like serial dating or understandably short tempers—that may not always be ideal.

  Of course, the world is full of counterexamples of successful people raised by single parents. In many of these cases, grandparents or other members of the extended family stepped in. In others, the mother did it all. Some mothers can do it all. But that is a lot to ask of them, and not the best way to organize a society.

  It all boils down to conversation, gratitude, and remembering. People tend to value what societies celebrate. The broader conversation about marriage, family, and parenthood has decayed. It’s in better shape than it was in the days when Betty Friedan could liken housewives to concentration camp victims and fringe radicals were shouting “Smash monogamy!” Serious people don’t say “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” anymore. But the rhetoric about marriage and parenting is shot through with culture-war politics on the right and identity-politics victimology on the left. In the mushy middle, it’s usually adorned with self-help nostrums and silly verbiage about DIY “life hacks.”

  Gay marriage notwithstanding, among the cosmopolitans at the commanding heights of our culture, it is simply déclassé to extol the benefits of the bourgeois married lifestyle, at least in a public forum. Meanwhile, intellectuals and activists hector and demonize anyone who bestows undue honor on marriage or, more often, scorn or stigma on promiscuity, divorce, or out-of-wedlock birth. Dan Quayle, who, as vice president, criticized the TV show Murphy Brown for celebrating out-of-wedlock birth, was vilified by cultural elites for his prudishness and Comstockery. But, as a matter of public policy, he was right.36

  Those who would prefer to, at best, ignore the role of culture in the degradation of the family emphasize purely material explanations for the decomposition. The family, they say, has come apart because of the disappearance of the “family wage,” which was held aloft by large levels of unionization. And while it would be foolish to argue that the structure of the economy plays no role in encouraging or discouraging people to form families, such claims are overblown.

  The materialists aren’t wrong that economic conditions are important. Their error is in assuming that economic explanations tell the whole story.

  The sacrifices inherent to parenthood require an enormous amount of social support to remain attractive, particularly in an age when there are so many enjoyable distractions made possible by the mass affluence of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter recognized that the family was the one indispensable institution to liberal democratic capitalism. The sacrifices it demands of parents, he said, “do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money.”37 They demand more intangible things, like time, emotional commitment, and the subordination of our wants and desires to the needs of our children. These sacrifices need to be honored, publicly and passionately.

  At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that the plight of the family traces the larger argument of this book in miniature. In case I did a poor job showing that, let me magnify the point. It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e., principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling. That is to say by modeling right behaviors and instructing people through words and images what right behavior looks like. Institutions, not the government, are the chief mechanisms for communicating and rewarding these values. Moreover, modernity itself requires that citizens have divided and diverse loyalties. One of these is loyalty to self: We all have a right to pursue happiness as we see it. But others include loyalty to family, friends, faith, community, work, etc. Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude—and the effort that gratitude demands—all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually hate the traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in.

  Hannah Arendt once observed that, in every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians: We call them “children.” The family is the first line of defense against this barbarian invasion. The metaphor is inapt, because parents aren’t at war with babies themselves. But parents are at war with the darker side of human nature, which we all work to trim away from for our children by inscribing in their hearts notions of decency, fair play, and self-restraint. When parents fail to do that, other institutions, including the government, try to step in and remedy what they can. But no teacher, counselor, social service worker, priest, rabbi, imam, or police officer will deny that, when the family fails to do its part, the work of every institution downstream of the family becomes that much more difficult. This doesn’t mean that every failed family produces criminals, never mind marauding barbarians. But when the family fails, it becomes harder to produce good citizens dedicated to the principles and habits that created the Miracle in the first place.

  13

  THE TRUMPIAN ERA

  The Perils of Populism

  Let’s pick up where we left off in the last chapter.

  Civilization is an ongoing conversation: Change the conversation, you change the world. If a baby born today is no different from a baby born 50,000 years ago, then the only thing keeping that baby from growing up into a barbarian is the conversation he or she is born into. This is the moral of everything we have discussed so far.

  Deirdre M
cCloskey says that the Miracle happened because of words and talk. “The economy is nothing without the words supporting it,” she insists. “Capitalism, like democracy, is talk, talk, talk all the way down.”1 *1

  This is true about more than just the economy. It is true about politics, family, religion, and every human endeavor. We are a cooperative species, and it was our ability to communicate concepts that sent us skyrocketing up the food chain.

  One need not be too literal here. It’s not, strictly speaking, the words themselves but how we use them, the concepts they form and convey. But it is axiomatically true that what can be created by conversation can be destroyed by conversation. A holiday dinner can be a lovely affair or a dark and dismal disaster, all depending on the course of the conversation. So it is with our civilization. The Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution represented the ascendance of a new bourgeois worldview that elevated liberty, commerce, innovation, hard work, and the autonomy of family and individual alike. This worldview bubbled up from below far more than it trickled down from above. The bourgeoisie asserted their rights. And once they were won, those rights steadily became more and more universal because that was the only way the conversation could go. Once you say that all men are created equal and that we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it becomes ever more difficult to say, “Well, except for those people.” Once you insist that the only legitimate form of government is government by consent of the people, it’s very difficult to walk that back.

  Indeed, until fairly recently, dictators and totalitarians had to claim the mantle of democracy, talking as if it were something even they had to believe in, if they wanted to be seen as legitimate rulers. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy—they all insisted that they spoke for the people’s will, even if they rejected the “mechanical” fictions of Western politics and held Potemkin elections. East Germany called itself the “German Democratic Republic.” North Korea still goes by the name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and the mullahs in Iran feel the need to hold elections and referenda for the sake of appearances, just like Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Napoleon before them. Even the deceit of dictators was a tribute paid to democracy’s virtue.

  In the West, the left and right argued about how and where to draw the line between social welfare and economic liberty, but the rest of the conversation usually boiled down to which party was more committed to democracy, free speech, and personal liberty. Progressives from FDR to Barack Obama believed that granting “economic rights” would liberate people. Recall that FDR proclaimed that “necessitous men are not free men.”2 Conservatives in the classical liberal tradition argued that this approach was a violation of liberalism properly understood and was destined to constrict freedom in the end. These disagreements were—and remain—intense, but if you took each side at its word, both believed they were on the side of liberty and each used rhetoric to that effect.

  That started to change in the early part of the twenty-first century.

  For the last two decades, the rhetoric of Western elites has grown increasingly hostile to democracy, free speech, and capitalism. One reason is the widespread belief that authoritarian societies develop faster and better than democratic and free-market ones. This is a very old notion that emerges in new wrappings every generation. Mussolini made the trains run on time. Lincoln Steffens returned from the Soviet Union to declare, “I have been over into the future, and it works.”3 They said it about Napoleon’s command economy and they probably said it about Hammurabi’s too. There’s just something deeply seductive about the idea of society being run by a strong father figure or some wise council of experts.

  This is particularly true among the class of people who believe they should be on just such a council. They cast their gaze abroad and look for examples of societies doing things the “right” way and then insist we should be following that example. That’s what countless intellectuals in America said in the 1920s and early 1930s about fascist and communist regimes in Europe, and, like a dog returning to its vomit, they do so today.4

  William Easterly, one of the most brilliant scholars of development economics alive today, documents how this cult of authoritarianism thrives among the global caste of development experts and the journalists who rely on them.5 Part of the problem of looking to “successful” autocracies as models is that it is something of a statistical mirage. It’s true that in the last fifty years nine out of ten of the countries with truly extraordinary economic growth have been autocracies. This suggests that autocracy offers the best path to prosperity. The problem is that, over that period, there were eighty-nine autocracies. In other words, being an autocracy, under the best of circumstances, offers perhaps a one-in-nine chance of leading to prosperity. But even this is misleading, because the policies implemented by the successful autocracies tend to move countries away from despotism.6

  Lee Kuan Yew, the founding dictator of Singapore, is the global elite’s favorite benign despot, and for good reason. His policies did lead to amazing economic growth. But how did he do that? By wrenching out the corruption—both in the conventional sense and in the way I’ve been using it—from Singaporean society. He was an at times brutal modernizer. In the 1990s, Singapore had one of the highest per capita execution rates in the world.7 Under the “Singapore model,” graft and other forms of bribery are ruthlessly proscribed, and the rule of law, including property rights and contract enforcement (under British common law), is just as ruthlessly protected. Lee Kuan Yew believed in low regulation, low taxation, and free trade.

  In other words, the crucial ingredient of Singapore’s growth wasn’t despotism but the imposition of market mechanisms and, to some extent, the legacy of British colonialism. Lee Kuan Yew’s success no doubt depended in part on his ability to not be corrupted by power and keep the country on a path to modernization—and, I would wager, eventual democratization—but it also stemmed from the unique nature of Singapore itself, a small island nation. But for every Lee Kuan Yew there are many more Hugo Chávezes, Fidel Castros, and Robert Mugabes. Betting on authoritarian states on the assumption you will get a Lee Kuan Yew is playing a lottery with millions of lives.

  The more important point, however, is that fawning on dictatorships is morally grotesque. It is ultimately just a form of power worship. For instance, New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman has spent much of the last two decades gushing over China’s enlightened authoritarian capitalism. Look to China, he insisted in column after column, speech after speech, and book after book. They only care about “optimal policies”!

  Well, okay, let’s look to China. Authoritarianism under the emperors and then under Mao immiserated, oppressed, or murdered hundreds of millions of people in China. Then, in the late 1970s, China introduced rudimentary markets and property rights. And, suddenly, the Chinese economy took off. For the first time, hundreds of millions of Chinese people could eat meat, enjoy electricity, and acquire other things long considered staples here and unattainable luxuries there. Yet, here in America, and around much of the developed world, the reaction to China’s success was “Wow. It must have been the authoritarianism.”

  Friedman was in many respects the head cheerleader:

  Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.8

  It’s worth explaining what Friedman means by “one-party democracy.” At the time he
wrote this, the Democratic Party controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. But the party in the “one-party democracy” Friedman lamented was not the ruling party but the minority party, because it refused to capitulate to the majority. The benefit of autocracy is that it is autocratic and can dispense with persuasion and impose the best policies.

  In his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, Friedman has a chapter titled “China for a Day (but Not for Two).” In it, he openly pines for America to be like China—but just for a day. On this day there would be no rule of law, no constitutional safeguards, and no democratic debate. Instead “enlightened” experts would simply be able to impose the best policies—i.e., the policies Friedman agrees with.

  This is a perfect example of how words can camouflage things. His columns are full of the sorts of buzzphrases and jargon that fill the air at Davos meetings and TED talks. But what does “China for a day” mean that is substantively different from “king for a day” or “tyranny for a day” or, for that matter, “Nazis for a day”? Saying “China for a day” gives the “argument” a certain cachet, but that cachet is just a different label on the same ancient bottle. (Also, if there is any lesson worth taking to heart from the last thousand—or 10,000—years, it is that if you give people absolute power “just for a day,” expect them to find reasons to give themselves an extension. Absolute power is like being granted a wish by a genie: The first thing you do is wish for more wishes.)