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

by Jonah Goldberg

  “Partisanship, for a long period of time, wasn’t viewed as part of who we are,” explain political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood. “It wasn’t core to our identity. It was just an ancillary trait. But in the modern era we view party identity as something akin to gender, ethnicity or race—the core traits that we use to describe ourselves to others.” But now partisanship is becoming a bigger predictor of behavior and attitudes than race.47

  As other sources of meaning wither, and as we think of ourselves as residents of the national community rather than local ones, the stakes of politics inevitably increase, not just in terms of policy but psychologically. The logic of sports and war takes over. If they win, we lose, and vice versa. Citizens in California and New York become invested in partisan fights in North Carolina or Indiana as if they were skirmishes in a larger war.

  This tribal us-versus-them worldview is intensified on social media, where it is easier to find like-minded but virtual “friends” a thousand miles away than it is to have a conversation with your actual neighbor. On both sides of the political aisle, the point of politics ceases to be persuasion and becomes instead victory, humiliation, and rubbing it in. Studies have shown that when people see someone being shocked with electrodes, the parts of the observer’s brain that feel pain light up as well. In one study, this empathetic response was more likely when the observer was told the victim was a fan of their favorite soccer team. But when the observer was told the subject was a fan of a rival team, the observer’s pleasure centers brain lit up instead.48 This is pure tribalism, and it is wired into us. When one of my people suffers, I feel pain. When “the other” suffers, I take delight.

  I am unaware of whether similar experiments were conducted using ideological or political tribes, but I have no doubt that the same thing would happen. The suffering of liberal avatars is something for conservatives to revel in, and vice versa. In the aftermath of terror attacks and mass shootings, the left openly hopes that the perpetrator was an angry white male belonging to some “right-wing hate group.” When the murderer is confirmed as a radical Muslim, many right-wingers struggle to contain their glee that their worldview has been confirmed.

  Facebook and Twitter have become platforms where you boast of your purity and commitment to the good things and how your ideological opposites are not only corrupt but metaphysically committed to the bad things. (There is a curious paradox of tribal polarization on the left and the right. People tend to argue both that the enemy is totally committed to its evil ideology and that he is willing to sell out for personal profit.) “You want to show that you’re a good member of your tribe,” Westwood told the New York Times. “You want to show others that Republicans are bad or Democrats are bad, and your tribe is good. Social media provides a unique opportunity to publicly declare to the world what your beliefs are and how willing you are to denigrate the opposition and reinforce your own political candidates.”49

  The desire for news that satisfies the popular lust for what might be called ecstatic schadenfreude—obscene pleasure at the sadness of others—has created a market, and when there is a market entrepreneurs rush in. Hence the rise of “fake news” aimed at the trollish hordes on the left and right who think saying “Your tears are delicious” or “Butthurt” is an argument. Bias is endemic to all journalism. Fraud, however, while not new to journalism, is experiencing a kind of new golden age. Outright fabrications fly around the Internet, fueled by pay-for-click ad rates and a burning desire among millions of people to see reality bend in their direction. Meanwhile, half-truths, which are often the most effective whole lies, saturate even respectable news organizations. Headlines have always erred on the side of the sensational. But in an era when millions of people only read the headlines, and when much of the political conversation takes place in the 140-character realm of Twitter, the national conversation has become a noxious smog of feelings and desired yet fake facts. If a fanatic is someone who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject, then fanaticism runs amok on the left and the right these days. Of course, when a president believes that lies are true if they feel true to him, falsehood has a powerful megaphone.

  Tyler Cowen, a brilliant economist at George Mason University, takes the somewhat too cynical view that much of ideological discourse can be boiled down to a desire to see the relative status of one group lowered or raised.50 He was talking about the rarefied world of academics and intellectuals. But it seems obviously even truer in the trenches of the political culture. Whatever you make of the underlying merits of the issues related to the Black Lives Matter movement, symbolically it is very much an argument about the relative status of groups. The effort to force Christian bakers to make wedding cakes for same-sex marriages against their will has very little to do with tolerance and a great deal to do with a vengeful spirit that shouts out: “You will be made to care!” When Hillary Clinton wrote off roughly half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,”51 those supporters turned it into a badge of honor and a foil for rhetorical vengeance.

  Again, I must point out that all of these trends are interrelated to and mutually reinforcing of each other, but one can only think critically about phenomena by isolating them. Mass immigration erodes mediating institutions, and the decline of these authentic communities fuels the migration to “virtual communities” online where resentments are reinforced as like congregates with like, lending support to statements and attitudes we would normally never express in real life. This reinforcement encourages people to say them in real life. The resulting backlash is then celebrated as “winning” on the Internet, which can be increasingly monetized. Immigration and economic churn make people feel insecure, so they go on Facebook, where people curate their lives to make it seem like everything is going swimmingly, and this breeds feelings of envy and status/class anxiety. As Montesquieu said, “If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”52

  And all of these trends cause people to search for new sources of identity—in race, gender, sex, faith, and political affiliation—and as these shallow categories of self-understanding harden, tribal polarization intensifies. What we often call tribalism in modern democracies is actually more properly speaking what you might call “coalitionalism.” But coalitionalism isn’t a word, and sounds too much like normal politics, which has always been about building coalitions, even for tyrants, since the word was invented. Tribalism gets closer to the reality of our polarization.

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  Conservatism was moving in the direction of identity politics for white people long before Trump, and it may have ended up where it is today sooner or later had he never run for president. But I believe the precipitating cause for the right’s surrender to populism and tribalism was the failure of the Tea Parties. The populist movement that rose up to oppose President Obama was the only American populist cause I have ever sympathized with, never mind supported. (I spoke to many Tea Party rallies.) Why? Because as much as I dislike and distrust crowds, the Tea Parties married populism to the principles of the Founding, demanding the government live within its means and abide by the Constitution. I met countless people from the little platoons of civil society who had become animated with passion for the primary documents of our civilization. They held book clubs and seminars in living rooms and rec centers. They studied how the debt and the deficit work. When they held rallies, a few cranks would show, as happens whenever political enthusiasm is high and people gather. But the cranks were held at bay. The crowds cleaned up after themselves and took their citizenship seriously. There was passion, but it was married to principle.

  They succeeded in getting many politicians elected. But ultimately they failed by the standards they set for themselves at the outset. The banks got bailed out. Obamacare stayed in place
. The debt grew bigger. Taxes went up. But those failures are not what turned so many Tea Partiers into tribalists. It was the fact that, despite espousing the principles of the Constitution and arguing for wholly defensible and patriotic goals (whether you agree with them as a policy matter or not), they were still demonized by the media and Hollywood as racist yokels and boobs. This highlights the cancerous dynamic at work. If you tell people that, in effect, fighting for the Constitution and universal principles is just a “white thing,” then many of those whites will eventually agree with you. They will see the Constitution as the document of “real Americans.” But because the Constitution limits their power, they will eventually conclude that loyalty to the Constitution is a waste of time. What starts as a claim that only white people care about the Constitution ends with no one caring about the Constitution. We’re not quite there yet, but in many quarters we’re close. As bizarre as it sounds, there is a growing faction on the right who worship the by-any-means-necessary left-wing agitator Saul Alinsky. They believe the left brilliantly used his tactics to take over the country, and because we are in an existential battle, we must emulate their tactics. Chiefly, if the other side won’t be constrained by the rules, then “we” shouldn’t be either.

  When Trump’s critics decry his violation of “democratic norms,” the immediate response is “What about Obama?”

  And that is a very good question. But my response is: “I criticized Obama for his violations of democratic norms. So I am consistent when I criticize Trump for the same thing.” The most reliable retort for Trump’s biggest backers is: “Well, why should we abide by the rules when they don’t?”

  Donald Trump waded into this maelstrom of dysfunction and intensified it even further.

  For years conservatives have complained that Republicans surrender too easily. And as a senior editor of National Review, I would lose my executive washroom privileges if I dared claim this wasn’t true. I don’t need to recount the history of the New Deal or the Great Society to demonstrate that the GOP often finds itself dragged along in the tide of ever-growing government. Moreover, while I think that conservatives have the right side of the argument on many cultural issues, this record of failure helps explain why Republicans often focus on symbolic social issues that rev up the base. The only problem is that Republicans often throw in the towel on those fights too. Part of this is simply the nature of conservatism. We tend, as Hayek said, to get pulled in directions not of our own choosing. In principle, that doesn’t bother me, because giving society time to digest inevitable changes is an important function. Still, it would be nice to win more.

  Donald Trump tapped into this frustration as well, as all of his Charlie Sheen-like outbursts about “winning” illustrate. The problem is that winning and fighting are not stand-alone principles. In my numerous debates with many of Trump’s biggest conservative supporters, I was constantly astounded by how many supposedly—or formerly—principled conservatives had embraced “winning” and “fighting” as ends unto themselves. Trump could hurl the crudest epithets to defend an objectively immoral or politically indefensible position, and the response from his cheerleaders was “At least he fights!” Trump has become an avatar of “we the people,” and winning has become decoupled from the substance of any victory. When he cannot declare victory, it is because others failed him or unfairly thwarted him. When he declares victory, the substance doesn’t matter. When he does the incomprehensible, it is part of a genius we cannot appreciate. In short, for many people, it is simply a cult of personality.

  In the primaries, pollsters asked Republicans whether they favored single-payer health care, and the vast majority said no. When they were told Donald Trump supports it (accurate at the time), nearly a plurality suddenly supported it.53 In August of 2017, a poll found that half of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 elections if Donald Trump favored it.54

  At the Conservative Action Political Committee—CPAC—meeting in February 2017, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway suggested that the C in “CPAC” will be replaced with a T for a “Trump.”55 That was a glib exaggeration, but listening to the audience cheer as he threw aside free trade in favor of his preferred “economic nationalism,” one could see how the ember of truth in her comment could grow into a flame.

  Barack Obama had a similar cult of personality. Celebrities pledged allegiance to the president.56 One columnist speculated whether he was a “Lightworker,” which he defined as “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”57 Deepak Chopra proclaimed he represented “a quantum leap in American consciousness.”58 “Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings…,” proclaimed life coach Eve Konstantine. “He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence.”59 The mainstream media ignored all of this—and so much more—because they were besotted with him too. “We thought he was going to be…the next messiah,” Barbara Walters confessed.60 And this, too, fueled deep feelings of resentment among millions of dissenting Americans who were not motivated by racism but by simple disagreement, healthy skepticism, or plain old partisanship. But they were called racists nonetheless.

  The liberal pundits, reporters, and politicians who look at Donald Trump and ask “Where did this monster come from?” didn’t create Donald Trump—and they certainly didn’t vote for him—but they helped pile the kindling high for the flames of backlash to come.

  Scholars studying such diverse phenomena as Islamic terrorism, white supremacy, street gangs, and cults have found that the key recruitment tool is always the same: the promise of meaning and belonging. Human beings are hardwired to want to belong, to be part of a cause larger than themselves, and to be valued for their contribution to that cause. Young people with scant social capital—i.e., dysfunctional families, unresponsive schools and communities, etc.—are the most susceptible to such appeals precisely because they have few alternative sources of meaning and belonging. This is the core insight of every Big Brother program and Boys & Girls Club. But the poor, the poorly educated, and those “left behind” by capitalism are not the only people susceptible to such appeals. We all are. Many of the 9/11 terrorists were well educated. Osama Bin Laden was rich. Modernity itself leaves many cold if they don’t have the resources or opportunity to find healthy sources of meaning and belonging.

  In April 1993, Hillary Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared that “we need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”61

  In my first book, I subjected Clinton to withering criticism for her politics-of-meaning speech. I now think I was somewhat unfair. Her diagnosis had merit. It was consistent with the long tradition of critics of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to address the “social question.” People crave the sense of tribal solidarity that allowed us to evolve and to climb to the top of the food chain. Where I still stand in stark disagreement with Clinton is her remedy for the problem: more centralization. Like Obama, Clinton’s answer is to give the state more power in an effort to satisfy our longing for meaning. That approach only fuels the problem, because it makes the state the only source of meaning in our lives, which in turn fuels resentment among the millions who find the state’s definition of meaning wanting. Prior to the Glorious Revolution, a Catholic in England felt that a Protestant on the throne was a threat to his or her whole place in the universe. And vice versa.

 
That is the direction we are heading, and that direction is backward. When the president or a party in power is invested with that kind of meaning and significance, the “outs” feel like they are strangers in their own land. And the party in power does everything it can to exacerbate that feeling. Then, when the other party gets in, it gets its payback. The only solution is to break the cycle by making the state less important and letting the dying reefs of civil society grow back to health.

  That doesn’t mean there aren’t important things for the state to do. But what the state cannot do is fill the holes in our souls. That is what monarchs who ruled by divine right claimed, and it is what theocrats preach.

  *1 I should note that, as this book went to press, many economic indicators were quite positive, particularly the stock market, which the president now cites as a key measure of economic health. It remains to be seen how deeply those trends are felt at the bottom of the economy.

  *2 They also leave out the fact that the U.S. economy was geared in such a way that it could absorb waves of immigrants. George Borjas notes that, in 1914, 75 percent of the workforce at the Ford Motor Company were immigrants (George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative [New York: W. W. Norton, 2016], p. 52). Industrial America is not doing nearly as poorly as some claim, thanks largely to huge advances in automation and innovation. But does anyone believe it can absorb waves of unskilled foreign-born workers the way it once did?

  CONCLUSION

  Decline Is a Choice

  “The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.”