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

by Jonah Goldberg

  Ultimately, wanting to be “China for a day” is no different from talking about how our politics should be like the “moral equivalent of war” (another argument Friedman employs constantly, saying that we must fight climate change the way we fought World War II; “green” he explains, “is the new red, white and blue.”)9 We are hardwired to dispense with pleasantries and protocol when under attack. The technocrats understand this, which is why the Obama administration loved the phrase “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” And it is why the Trump campaign was—and the Trump White House is—so eager to describe America as a violence-plagued hellscape when it serves their political agenda. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” the president declared in his inaugural address,10 which he concluded with an upraised fist.

  How we talk is merely a reflection of what we think. No wonder, then, that the state of public opinion in the West is depressing. A majority of young people no longer believe democracy is “essential.”11 Support for liberty is literally dying out. Among those born in the 1930s, 75 percent of Americans and 53 percent of Europeans say living under democratic government is “essential.” Among people born in the 1980s, the number drops to the low 40s in Europe and the low 30s in America. Only 32 percent of millennials consider it “absolutely essential” that “civil rights protect people’s liberty.”12

  “Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders,” write political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk in the Journal of Democracy. “Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.”13

  There is ample evidence that support for the core rights that define a liberal order is eroding, most precipitously among young people (though it is possible that, as a reaction to the Trump presidency, some young people might develop a heightened appreciation for civil liberties). The younger you are, the less likely you are to support free-speech rights. Forty percent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds told Pew they thought that speech offensive to minorities should be banned.14 A survey of college students in 2015 found that a majority of students favor speech codes for both students and faculty. More than six in ten want professors to provide students with “trigger warnings” before discussing or presenting material some might find offensive. A third of the students couldn’t name the First Amendment as the part of the Constitution that protects free speech. Thirty-five percent said the First Amendment doesn’t apply to “hate speech” (it does), and 30 percent of self-identified liberal students said they believe the First Amendment is outdated.15

  Presumably, most young liberals do not think support for free markets, democracy, and free speech is itself “hate speech.” But it is remarkable how quickly activists can conclude that support for such things are “code words” for hateful ideals. (The Harvard Crimson has a long history of running articles insisting that the eminent scholar Harvey Mansfield, one of the last conservatives at Harvard, is a practitioner of “hate speech.”) Duke historian Nancy MacLean published a book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, in which she argues that the libertarian economics movement, specifically the public choice school, is a thinly concealed racist scheme designed to undermine democracy. Despite the fact the book was torn to shreds for dishonest and shabby scholarship—a work of “speculative historical fiction,” according to MacLean’s Duke colleague, Michael C. Munger—it was, as of this writing, a finalist for a National Book Award. Apparently the thesis is too seductive to care about the facts.16 Just try to talk about individualism, inequality, merit, etc., on a college campus and see how long it takes before someone is offended. In many places where the new class controls the commanding heights of the culture, free speech has come to be defined as assault, and assault as free speech.17

  Before the Obama administration’s deception about a video causing the attacks on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi was debunked, liberal op-ed pages and radio and television shows lit up with calls to “fix” the First Amendment and curtail free speech in America, as if rioting barbarians halfway around the world have a heckler’s veto on what Americans can say.

  It is inevitable that, when the way people think and talk changes, the shape of our politics will change too. Across Europe, illiberal movements have been gaining steam for more than a decade. Marine Le Pen’s National Front has the wind at its back, forcing artificial coalitions between traditional conservatives and socialists to keep it out of power. Emmanuel Macron succeeded in defeating Le Pen, but he needed to form a new party to do it: La République en Marche or simply En Marche, which in English is translated, variously, as “Forward!” or “Onward!” or “Working!” or “On the Move!” As of this writing, it is too soon to form a lasting judgment on Macron, but it appears that he has something of a Napoleonic streak to him. He pledges to go around the French Parliament and impose most of his reforms by decree. He has already extended the state of emergency declared in the wake of some horrific terrorist attacks in 2015.18

  In Austria, a coalition similar to Macron’s narrowly prevented Norbert Hofer from becoming the first right-wing nationalist leader of a Western European country since the end of World War II. In neighboring Hungary, president Viktor Orbán routinely talks of “building an illiberal new national state” modeled after the regimes in Russia, Turkey, and China.19 “Liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” he insists.20 Orbán’s biggest political competition is Jobbik, an ultra-nationalist party that is economically left-wing and anti-capitalist and feeds off a deep reserve of anti-Semitism in the country. An estimated one in five Hungarians have extreme animosity toward Jews.21 In Bulgaria, the nationalist-socialist party, Ataka (Attack), has made huge strides blending a populist anti-immigrant agenda with conventional economic and racial socialism (which, again, are more often than not synonymous historically).

  In Greece, a hard-left nationalist party, Syriza, dominates, while the authoritarian right-wing party Golden Dawn is in a close third. Golden Dawn marches under a banner conveniently reminiscent of the official Nazi flag, displaying a black meander against a backdrop of red.22 The party’s lodestar is the Greek pro-fascist dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who ruled from 1936 to 1941.23

  In Britain, the triumph of the Brexit movement, while salutary on the whole, arguably owed its relatively narrow margin of victory to an undercurrent of nativist and nationalist sentiment (fomented to some extent by Vladimir Putin’s social media troll army). More troubling is the illiberalism of Jeremy Corbyn, the unreconstructed leftist who leads the Labour Party and rejects Tony Blair’s project to reconcile the party with liberal democratic capitalism. A left-wing populist and fervent opponent of all things “Zionist,” Corbyn struggles to avoid the charge of anti-Semitism while pandering to members of his coalition who cannot avoid the charge.

  Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in just a few short years, has gone a long way to meld the illiberal policies of Atatürk with the illiberal theology of the Ottomans, persecuting journalists and imprisoning political opponents by the thousands. As of this writing, Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro continues to prove that things can always get worse under a populist-socialist dictatorship. The oil-rich basket case is now in the throes of Weimar-level hyper-inflation. Parents are forced to give away their children because they cannot feed them as Maduro blames the country’s economic woes on the “bourgeois parasites.”24

  In July of 2017, President Trump visited Warsaw, Poland, and gave a stirring defense of Western civilization, much of which I agreed with. But the speech had an overlay of nationalism to it that did not go unnoticed by the increasingly authoritarian Polish government. The ruling party, Law and Justice, is committ
ed to a campaign of delegitimizing the press, the independent judiciary, and even the apolitical nature of the military under a program called “repolanization.”25

  Tragically, the dream of liberalism is dying away in illiberal countries as well. The “Green” movement in Iran has been crushed from above but has also withered from below. “The educated young who were the backbone of the Green movement are now demoralized and apathetic thirty- and forty-somethings—a transformation not unlike what happened to China’s pro-democracy movement after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre,” writes Sohrab Ahmari.

  “…The situation is equally grim in the Arab lands,” he adds. “Save for Tunisia, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010 and 2011 have everywhere yielded civil war, state failure, or a return to the repressive status quo ante.” Public opinion surveys “suggest that the region’s young aspire to stability, not political freedom.”26 The demoralization of young Arabs is understandable given the failure of the Arab Spring to deliver on its promises, but one has to wonder whether some of that despair derives from the growing global consensus that democracy is losing its appeal.

  THE TRUMP ERA

  And then, of course, there’s Donald Trump. Though you wouldn’t know it from the writings of many liberal intellectuals and journalists, President Trump is very different from far-right and neo-fascist demagogues in some important respects—but, of course, he’s dismayingly similar in others. The differences are worth discussing first.

  Unlike Marine Le Pen, Norbert Hofer, Viktor Orbán, and other illiberal politicians, Trump is not deeply immersed in nationalist ideology—or any ideology. In no way whatsoever is Trump an intellectual. To say someone isn’t an intellectual does not mean he is not intelligent. The question of Trump’s intellect is an open one to all but his most committed followers and detractors—and to Trump himself, who constantly insists that he is man of unimpeachable genius. He certainly possesses a formidable cunning that often catches his opponents off guard. But it is also clear that he knows very little about American political history, and that makes him a fascinating political creature.

  For instance, many of his favorite slogans—“the silent majority,” “the forgotten man,” “America first,” and even “Make America Great Again”—have deep historical roots that he appears to have no appreciation for. He learned the phrase “America first” from a New York Times reporter who was trying to understand his political philosophy.27 “America first” has a complicated and storied pedigree in American politics, as it was the rallying cry of a broad coalition of non-interventionists who wanted to keep America out of World War II in Europe. Over time, it took on a particularly sinister connotation, as the most vocal faction in it was objectively pro-German in the European conflict. In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump was informed that the phrase “the Silent Majority” was used by Richard Nixon in his 1972 campaign.28 It remains unclear whether anyone has explained to him that “the Forgotten Man” was FDR’s slogan in his effort to appeal to the disaffected masses of the Great Depression. Even “Make America Great Again” is not original to him; it was used repeatedly by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign (though he meant something very different).

  Trump’s ideological commitments are similarly inchoate. Over the last thirty years, he has been consistent about only a handful of ideas—protectionism, the wisdom of “taking the oil” from Middle Eastern countries we invaded, and some fairly vague platitudes about cutting back regulations—but, beyond that, he’s been all over the map on guns, immigration, abortion, taxes, health care, etc. Unlike traditional American conservatives, his lodestars have never been limited government, the Constitution, individual liberty, or, needless to say, “traditional values.” There is little reason to believe that he has anything more than a thumbless grasp of such concepts. Rather, his watchwords have always been “winning” and “strength.” His key promise to voters was that America will “win again” and that, if elected, our leaders will no longer be “weak.” “Winning solves a lot of problems,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Post.29

  It should go without saying—but doesn’t today—that winning and strength are entirely amoral values. Successful cheaters and murderers “win.” Good parents do not teach their children that the only thing that matters is winning, nor do they insist that being strong is more important than being decent. A morally and philosophically serious person does not place personal victory as the highest value.

  For Donald Trump, “winning”—at business, in television ratings, and in politics—is all that matters. Suggesting that one of his opponents was akin to a pedophile and that another was the son of an accomplice to Kennedy’s assassination are justified by the fact that he won. He even explains away the fact that he constantly whines on the grounds that it is a useful tool for winning. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”30 Hence his commitment to render all news reporting that doesn’t show him as a winner as not just unfair or biased but “fake.”

  Trump’s ignorance of the politics that came before him, it turned out, was a great advantage politically. The elite political class—on the left and the right, but most importantly in the fiercely arrogant middle—invested too much in the power of political shibboleths and taboos. Trump simply steamrolled over them, speaking in his own authentic manner. For those of us who place a great deal of importance in words, Trump sounded not only ignorant but vulgar. But for millions of voters he sounded real, and his vulgarity proved he wasn’t part of the “establishment” that so many blamed for the sorry status quo. This was his greatest advantage over Senator Ted Cruz, a deeply establishmentarian politician who knew all of the lyrics of populism but could not convincingly carry the tune.

  Similarly, Trump’s anti-political political rhetoric is a clear echo of the language of the 1930s, on both sides of the Atlantic. “The time for empty talk is over,” Trump declared in his inaugural address (and again at his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] in February of 2017). “Now arrives the hour of action!”31 He loves to talk of the “blood of patriots.”

  The 1930s marked a high-water mark in the international cult of “Action!” FDR, Mussolini, Hitler, and countless other leaders all tried to tap into the widespread belief that decadent Western capitalism and “Manchester liberalism” were inadequate to the challenges of the day. In America, FDR tapped into this intellectual fad in an attempt to preserve democracy (if not necessarily capitalism) when he promised “bold, persistent experimentation.” To this day—I have learned to excess—progressives fail to appreciate what is implied in a policy of “experimentation.” The very idea of experimentation presumes that there are no a priori dogmatic, principled constraints on the investigation. “Take a method and try it,” FDR said.32 It sounds so reasonable, but the implication is that democracy, property rights, civil rights, etc., are not prior constraints on political behavior. The whole point of our Constitution was to put certain questions out of the reach of rulers and voters alike. “Experimentation” says all options are on the table—the very definition of the authoritarian method. “I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?” an exasperated Donald Trump remarked at the California Republican Party convention. “We’ve got to straighten out the country.”33

  “Fascism appealed, first of all, to the pragmatic ethos of experimentation,” observed the late John Patrick Diggins.34 Ideology was a deadweight, holding back nations from reaching their true potential. Hitler despised theorists who spoke of principle and doctrine, calling them “ink knights.” What Germany needed, according to Hitler, was a “revolt against reason” itself, for “intellect has poisoned our people!”35

  The point is not that Trump is a Hitler. He’s not: Hitler could have repealed Obamacare quite easily! Nor is he an FDR or a Mussolini. It is that he represents a reversion to a natural type of leader who speaks and thinks in tribal terms. His thinking and rhetoric are less int
eresting than the fact that his thinking and rhetoric found purchase with so many Americans, particularly supposed champions of constitutionalism and limited government.

  Trump is a thoroughly romantic figure in so many ways. He puts his faith not in God or the Constitution or any abstract rules but in his own instincts: “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right.”36 “Experience has taught me a few things,” Trump explains. “One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.”37 In numerous interviews, Trump has explained that his instincts are more reliable than facts. If it feels right to him, it’s right. That’s why he once explained in a sworn deposition that his net worth depends heavily on how he feels about himself any given morning.38 That is also why, as a businessman, he was happy to lie to business partners, abuse eminent domain, and do anything he could get away with under the law.

  As the Trump presidency has unfolded, it’s become clear that Trump’s feelings—particularly his insecurities, his megalomania, etc.—determine the vast majority of his decisions. His refusal to stop attacking the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier during the campaign was indicative of his entire approach to life. If you disagree with or criticize him, you deserve whatever insults and attacks he can muster. And his attacks on a judge of Mexican descent highlighted how democratic norms and decorum have no weight when balanced on the scale of his feelings.

  And while his capacity to personalize every conflict and relationship is the central theme of his psyche, his reliance on feelings does have broader policy and political consequences as well. As a candidate, he encouraged crowds to “knock the crap” out of protestors.39 As president, Trump has condoned and celebrated excessive force for police officers.40 He famously admires Vladimir Putin, and whenever he’s pressed on the fact that he admires a murderous autocrat, he throws America under the bus, arguing that Americans have no right to judge because we do terrible things too.41 There is no venue where he will forgo advancing his own political interests or settling some score, be it an address to a Boy Scout jamboree or to uniformed military.