Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy
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Leaving aside the weird implication that Barack Obama is sort of president for life in this formulation, the most interesting implication of the ad is what’s not there. Julia has no family, save for her one child, who vanishes from her life after he turns eighteen. But there are no parents, no husband, no loved ones whatsoever. There is no church, no voluntary association of any kind, until, of course, Julia’s golden years, when she has the time to volunteer for a community garden. The state, in other words, takes the place of family, friends, community, and religion.
The desire to be part of a family of some kind is one of the most deeply felt emotional instincts humans have. It’s why nearly every TV show is really about families, either traditional ones or virtual ones. The desire for family is of a piece with what Robert Nisbet called “the quest for community.” Indeed, one reason the “Life of Julia” ad resonated with anyone it is that it offered a vision of belonging to something, an opportunity to have the state step in and fill the holes in your soul. This story—that the state can be your family or provide you with a sense of community—is incredibly powerful and popular. It also leaves conservatives and especially libertarians at a distinct disadvantage. As a matter of core ideology, we do not see the state as a good, reliable, or even possible substitute for the sense of social solidarity and belonging that can only come from civil society, starting with family. (Or at least most of us didn’t before the rise of Trump.)
This vision of the state being our mother or father is popular because it appeals to something deep within us, which is why you can find such appeals in every era of human history. Indeed, this vision is in its own way tribal. We are all equal, we are all dependent on one another, we all need a Big Man—be it Barack Obama or Donald Trump—to lead us and punish our enemies, however defined. But why is it so compelling right now?
One obvious but partial reason is that the economy has been failing large swaths of Americans. Because capitalism is unnatural, it must deliver the goods or people will say, “Why bother?” And, since the year 2000, America’s market economy has not been holding up its end of the bargain. “It turns out,” writes prominent demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, “that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.”12
Between early 2000 and late 2016, America got vastly richer. The net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled, from an estimated $44 trillion to $90 trillion. But per capita growth has only averaged about 1 percent. In other words, the distribution of economic prosperity across the whole society has been painfully unequal. Nicholas Eberstadt estimates that if we merely had the postwar economic growth that was normal before 2000, per capita GDP would have been 20 percent higher in 2016.13
The scope of the problem becomes more apparent when one looks at the state of work in America. “Work rates have fallen off a cliff since the year 2000 and are at their lowest levels in decades,” Eberstadt writes. The official statistics are merely mediocre, but they are also deceptive, because they only track people looking for work. For every unemployed American male between twenty-five and fifty-five looking for work, “there are another three who are neither working nor looking for work.” Meanwhile the work rate for women outside the home—“one of our society’s most distinctive postwar trends,” Eberstadt points out—has been thrown into reverse. Work rates for prime age women “are back to where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s.”14
At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, after roughly ninety straight months of admittedly lackluster economic growth, the share of American males of prime work age who were employed was lower than it was at the tail end of the Great Depression in 1940—when the official unemployment rate was above 14 percent. Since 1948, the share of men over the age of twenty who do not work for pay has more than doubled.15
Again, the overall story is not bleak, but the narrative for one large segment of the American people has been. The rest of America has prospered. In 1979, the upper middle class was 12.9 percent of the population; as of 2014, it was 29.4 percent.16 According to the Census Bureau, after adjusting for inflation, the share of households with annual income of $100,000 or more rose from 8 percent in 1967 to 26.4 percent in 2015.17 In 2015, according to the Pew Research Center, there were 11 percent fewer Americans in the middle class than in 1971, but that’s because 7 percent moved into higher groups while 4 percent fell behind. The share of Americans in the upper middle and highest tiers grew by 50 percent from 1971 to 2015.18
But while it is important to note that income inequality has heightened in large part because the rich got richer and the middle class got much bigger, that doesn’t change the fact that a big chunk of Americans are stuck. And they just happen to be a disproportionate share of Donald Trump’s base.*1
Many want to blame capitalism for this stalling of the economy. And it’s certainly fair to note that the market’s creative destruction often leaves some people holding the bag. Despite Donald Trump’s claims, the coal industry was hurt more by innovation and the market than by the Obama administration. The invention of fracking and other techniques made natural gas a more economically viable commodity than coal. The Obama administration didn’t help the industry, but creative destruction hurt more.19 Similarly, automation has done more to destroy manufacturing jobs than outsourcing or bad trade deals. American manufacturing is actually doing great.20 Manufacturing output is near an all-time high and remains the largest sector of the economy.21 The hitch is that, because of innovation, manufacturing simply requires fewer people to do the same job. We manufacture twice as much as we did in 1984 but with a third fewer workers.22
Also, it should not surprise anyone that when billions of people enter the global labor force thanks to the spread of capitalism and massive improvements in global transportation and communications, winners abroad will create some losers domestically. Still, while it is right and proper for Americans to care more about Americans than about non-Americans, we should not lose sight of the fact that the spread of markets around the world has led to the largest and quickest decline in poverty in all of human history. That it takes time for the American economy to adjust to the sudden expansion of the global market system is not an indictment of the market system. But the way our elites have managed that adjustment is an indictment of them.
There is a reason why the Obama campaign thought “The Life of Julia” would be persuasive. There’s a reason why very smart political consultants opened the Democratic Convention with the words “Government is the one thing we belong to.” And there is a reason why Donald Trump blamed “deindustrialization” on the “failed leadership” in Washington. When civil society is healthy, most people do not look to Washington for the answers to their problems. We look closer to home. It is only when the forests have been cleared that we can see distant peaks. But when the family and civil society are depleted or dysfunctional, we do not lose our desire to “belong” to something, nor do we lose our need for help when misfortune befalls us. And there is the state offering to fill in where other institutions have failed or fled. Statists have argued since the Founding that the government in Washington is the answer to our problems. That argument is more persuasive when the forests have been cleared away and all eyes look naturally to Washington.
This trend benefited Barack Obama because his political philosophy is consistent with it and his campaign always encouraged the idea that he was the representation of a national awakening of some kind. His slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” was a brilliant if creepy new age form of populism. But the erosion of civil society and the traditional economy also helped Donald Trump. Where Obama pressed a technocratic progressive vision of the government as every citizen’s partner and
helpmate, Donald Trump offered nostalgia and nationalism.
I’ll get to the specifics of Donald Trump’s message in a moment. But I need to take a moment to deal with nationalism as an ideology generally. There is a raging debate in conservative circles about nationalism that divides many traditional allies and friends. At National Review, where I am a senior editor, some of my colleagues have led the charge for conservatism to embrace what my friends Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru call “benign nationalism”:
It includes loyalty to one’s country: a sense of belonging, allegiance, and gratitude to it. And this sense attaches to the country’s people and culture, not just to its political institutions and laws. Such nationalism includes solidarity with one’s countrymen, whose welfare comes before, albeit not to the complete exclusion of, that of foreigners. When this nationalism finds political expression, it supports a federal government that is jealous of its sovereignty, forthright and unapologetic about advancing its people’s interests, and mindful of the need for national cohesion.23
On the surface, my only objections to this are terminological. But terminology matters, given that rhetoric shapes how we think about the world we live in. What Lowry and Ponnuru are referring to here, by my lights, is not really nationalism but patriotism. Nationalism is a universal phenomenon. Generically, it has no ideological content save glorification of whatever nation it manifests itself in. In this, it is somewhat similar to generic conservatism and radicalism. A conservative in Russia wants to conserve very different things from a conservative in the United Kingdom. A radical in Spain wants to tear down very different things from what a radical wants to tear down in Saudi Arabia. Likewise, a nationalist celebrates different things in every nation.
One could make the same argument about patriotism, of course. A patriot here is different from a patriot over there. But in the American context, patriotism is defined by adherence to a set of principles and ideals that is higher than mere nationalism. It is also a cultural orientation that is inherent to the idea of American exceptionalism. Despite a common misunderstanding on both the right and the left, American exceptionalism never meant “We’re better than everyone else.” It wasn’t jingoism; it was an observation. Until the last decade or so, the long-running argument over American exceptionalism wasn’t whether we are or are not exceptional but whether our obvious exceptionalism was a good thing. For the left, which wanted America to be more like Europe, it was bad. For the right—both the isolationist and internationalist factions—American exceptionalism was something to be proud of. But it never meant “nationalism.”
Nationalism by definition is concerned with the collective will or spirit. Like arguments about the moral equivalent of war, the fundamental assumptions and emotional heart of nationalism are the cult of unity. We’re all in it together! Let’s unite around a cause larger than ourselves! The word “fascism” is based on fasces—a bundle of sticks around an axe—which was the symbol of Roman authority and meant “strength in numbers.” In America, patriotism can include these things in moments of crisis, but it never loses sight of the fact that the fundamental unit of our constitutional order is not the group but the individual. To the nationalist, the heroic entity is the righteous crowd; to the patriot, the hero is the man who, with law on his side, stands up to the crowd. G. K. Chesterton captured the difference well: “ ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ ”24
I have always argued that a little nationalism is essential to the American project. Nationalism is a pre-rational, emotional, ultimately tribal commitment to one’s home country. This place is mine and I love it not least because it is mine. We are products of the nations we hail from, and a minimal amount of gratitude and appreciation for where we come from is good and healthy. But if a little nationalism is healthy, too much of it is poisonous. Indeed, all poisons are determined by the dose. In other words, nationalism is not, properly speaking, an ideology at all; it is a passion, like lust. Sexual attraction is important for every marriage, but no healthy marriage is based on lust. Strong unions depend on shared values, commitment to certain principles and projects that are more important than the self. So it is with nations. The Founders recognized that political passion is dangerous, which is why they set up a system designed to keep it in check.
Historically, nationalism has always been at war with such artificial restraints on the will of the people, which is why historians usually use the term “romantic nationalism.” Romantic nationalism emerges in the waning days of the French Revolution when French and German intellectuals—and the masses—rebelled against the cold rationality and legalisms of the Enlightenment. The Jacobins of the Great Terror were committed nationalists, convinced that the French were God’s chosen people. They inscribed the words “The citizen is born, lives and dies for the fatherland” above every altar and plastered it on every thoroughfare.25 Robespierre did not shrink from embracing nationalism: “I am French, I am one of thy representatives….O sublime people! Accept the sacrifices of my whole being; happy is the man who is born in your midst; happier is he who can die for your happiness.”26
In Germany, intellectuals like Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Fichte rose up against first the Enlightenment-based autocracy of Frederick the Great and then the cold militaristic pragmatism of Napoleon’s empire. Reason and science served to disenchant the world, to borrow Max Weber’s phrase, and nationalism was a “re-enchantment creed” (to borrow Ernest Gellner’s words). Nationalism, with its myths and fables, would restore some of the meaning lost to the Age of Reason. Marxism would soon provide another such creed. Herder and Fichte borrowed heavily from Rousseau and his idea of creating a society based upon the general will, which Herder redefined as the Volksgeist or spirit of the people.27
He and Fichte used the German language as the defining feature of the mythical German nation. French was the language of Enlightenment thinking, which suppressed the authentic German soul. “Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine,” Herder exhorted. “Speak German, O you German!”28 “Men are formed by language far more than language is by men,” Fichte believed. The German tongue was pure, he insisted, because it had defied the corruption of not just the slime of the Seine but the foreign ideas of the Roman Empire and its alien Latin tongue. “The Germans still speak a living language and have done so ever since it first streamed forth from nature, whereas the other Teutonic tribes speak a language that stirs only on the surface yet is dead at the root.” Fichte was not a biological racist—though he was no fan of the Jews—but his ideas about language would later lend themselves to the more virulent ethnic nationalism of the Nazis: “Of all modern peoples it is you in whom the seed of human perfection most decidedly lies and to whom the lead in its development is assigned. If you perish in your essentiality, then all the hopes of the entire human race for salvation from the depths of its misery perish with you.”29
Racial essentialism, tribal superiority, the elevation of passion and myth—nationalism is not only powerless against these things, it is the medium by which these passions grow like bacteria in a petri dish. Nationalism works on the assumption that the search for meaning and spiritual redemption is a collective enterprise. Lowry and Ponnuru’s “benign nationalism” is certainly at odds with such things, because the best part of American culture stands athwart mindless passions. But all the valuable work in the concept of benign nationalism is done by the word “benign,” not “nationalism.”
That’s because nationalism shorn of negating qualifiers has no internal checks, no limiting principles that mitigate against giving in to collective passion. And that is why nationalism taken to its logical extreme must become statism or some form of socialism. It is a vestigial nostrum of Marxism and Leninism that nationalism and socialism are opposites. But everywhere nationalism has free rein, it becomes some kind of socialism. And every time socialism is
set loose in an actual nation, it becomes nationalism. Take a speech by Hugo Chávez or Fidel Castro and replace words like “nationalist” and “nationalize” with “socialist” and “socialize”; the meaning of the sentence will not change. When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it, and vice versa. When you leave the page and leap into the real world, the terms are not opposites; they are synonyms.
Nationalism uncaged has to become statism, because the state is the only institution that is supposed to represent all of us. Which brings us back to Donald Trump.
In his inaugural address, President Trump laid out his vision of the new order:
At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.30
This is the same song sung by Barack Obama, just set to a different tune, aimed at different ears. Both men bought into the idea that all of America’s problems could be fixed from Washington. Their programs and rhetoric were different in all sorts of important ways, but the underlying assumption of both men was that, if we have the right person sitting in the Oval Office, we can transform the country, or “Make America Great Again.”
In this, Trump differed from traditional conservatives, who argue that Washington is too powerful and too involved in our lives and the economy. Trump argued—or shouted—that Washington elites were too weak, too stupid, to fix our problems. He insisted it would be “easy” to provide better health care to everyone while spending less money at the same time. He could, singlehandedly, counter the tide of globalization through his superior deal making. There would be so much winning, he warned his followers that they would one day suffer from chronic winning fatigue.31
Just as the decay of civil society made the hearts of liberals—but not just liberals—receptive to Barack Obama’s re-enchantment creed of “fundamentally transforming” America, it made many conservatives—but not just conservatives (Trump won millions of votes from Obama voters)32—receptive to Trump’s “America first” nationalism.