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

by Jonah Goldberg

  All drama, all comedy, and virtually all entertainment is about human feelings. Characters on the page or the screen may use reason, but reason is always subservient to their emotional motivations. This is nothing new. It has been true from the first play or poem.

  The difference now is that our feelings have become an end in themselves. How we feel—not what we conclude—is the higher truth. The gut has defeated the mind.

  This—not immigration, inequality, or identity politics—explains why populism is so close to the surface in our life. We want our feelings ratified. Populism is not an ideology. It is a feeling. Populists have programs, but the program is merely a manifestation of popular feeling. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” proclaimed William Jennings Bryan (who was no fool). “I will look up the arguments later.”16 For populists, abstract principles are a handicap. Huey Long, the legendary populist governor of Louisiana, once asked a reporter from The Nation, “What’s the use of being right only to be defeated?” For Long, “the time has come for all good men to rise above principle” so we could make “every man a king.” In other words, what was required was will and strength to smash “the establishment.”17

  It was inevitable when we stopped looking up to God for meaning and started looking down into ourselves that we would look to find fulfillment, belonging, and meaning in tribes and crowds. “Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God…,” the theologian and pastor Eugene Peterson writes, “through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.”18 The crowd is reassuring, fulfilling and uplifting. It satisfies our evolutionary sweet tooth for being part of the tribe. Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power that inside the crowd “distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal….It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.”19

  The animating spirit—i.e., the feeling—of populism is the spirit of the crowd. Partisans of the left love their crowds, seeing in them moral uplift and “people power.” Partisans of the right love their crowds, seeing in them proof that the “silent majority” is no longer silent. But each side sees the crowds of the other side as something very different and threatening: a demonic “other.” But what they all seem to miss is that finding succor and strength in numbers is tribal passion. It may sometimes be necessary and even noble—in, say, Tiananmen Square, or the streets of Tehran, or the 1963 March on Washington—but the nobility is derived solely from the object of their strength, not from the strength itself. Unity is amoral because unity is force, and force can be used for evil just as much as it can for good. Giving in to the passion of the crowd is inherently corrupting, because it seeks no higher authority than itself and says you have righteous entitlement to act on your gut.

  It takes moral leadership to keep a crowd from becoming a mob and losing its way, and moral leadership can come only from conversation, from reminding the crowd that their unity is a means, not an end.

  But the culture of feeling is about more than just throngs in the street. It creates a mind-set, an orientation, a sense of entitlement about how the world around us is supposed to unfold. The idea that we could keep our politics walled off and separate from the rest of the culture is fanciful nonsense. In the chapter about popular culture, I noted that, when we watch movies, we watch with our tribal mind more or less intact.

  But what happens when news—by which I mean real facts and events affecting our lives—is processed as just another form of entertainment? Political reporting tends to be framed as a drama, with a hero pitted against protagonists. Pundits and reporters covering former president Barack Obama had the tendency to cover every political drama on the calculus of whether he would emerge victorious. Whether his desired policy was sound or constitutional was, at best, a secondary consideration. Today, so much of the pro-Trump media plays the same game. “Will Trump win?” “Will this give Trump a win?” These are the new ideological litmus tests for many on the right. The crowds, virtual and literal, increasingly invest in our politicians—and celebrities generally—our feelings of self-worth. Love me, love my politician.

  This desire for the hero to win, regardless of whether the victory is objectively desirable, is not merely romantic. It is also tribal. It says that my team must triumph, our will must be satisfied, and all impediments are equally illegitimate. Barack Obama himself said dozens of times that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to unilaterally grant amnesty to so-called Dreamers. But the moment he decided to do it anyway, there was nary a peep of protest from members of his own team. What mattered was his victory. In an instant, the Republicans who agreed with President Obama for years when he said he couldn’t do it became fools and villains for not changing their minds in lockstep with the president.

  When I set out to write Liberal Fascism some fifteen years ago, Charles Murray gave me some vital advice. He told me that if, in the course of my research, I didn’t change my mind on at least a half dozen important questions, I was doing it wrong. His point was that writing a book is an interactive, self-educational process. If you have all the answers before you start—as so many political writers do these days—you aren’t writing a serious book. You’re propagandizing.

  I hope readers see this as a serious book. I’ve certainly learned a great deal in writing it. (The original manuscript was twice the length of the copy you’re holding.) There were any number of intellectual and historical surprises along the way that changed my thinking.

  The most relevant realization is that I now believe I was wrong about the threat of authoritarianism, as I described it in Liberal Fascism. It’s not that the Huxleyan dystopia is not the more likely path America might take, but rather that there’s no reason to believe the descent would stop there. A society that wallows in feelings and entertainment is not necessarily sustainable, either. When technology and all the myriad forms of simulation that come with it—pharmacological, auditory, visual, pornographic, etc.—advance at a geometric pace, so does our capacity to become numb to it. Like a patient in pain, we need ever more of the morphine drip just to get a fraction of the satisfaction.

  “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise,” C. S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man. “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”20 The “Chest,” in Lewis’s poetic telling, is one of the “indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”21 In other words, the Chest is where reason and passion merge to form decency, civility, probity, and honor, rightly understood.

  Self-indulgence and self-worship strip men of their chests, leaving them ill-equipped to defend what requires defending and hungry for some kind of meaning.

  The young Muslim men who left Europe and America to go fight for ISIS had every form of entertainment and distraction available to them, but they found it unsatisfying. The same goes for the alienated and numb cadres who swell the ranks of neo-Nazis, antifa, and countless other groups. They crave meaning that our leading institutions no longer feel compelled to provide, or are even capable of providing, at least for those who need it most.

  Francis Fukuyama, the modern popularizer of the idea of the end of history (with his essay and later book of the same name), anticipated this problem on a grand scale. “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again,” he wrote.22

  But Fukuyama was optimistic. He thought it would take centuries of ennui, while the evidence suggests that this challenge faces every generation and every heart. Just as
capitalism has within it the seeds of its own destruction (as Schumpeter saw), the soft despotism of the Huxleyan life invites its own collapse. The siren call of glory, greatness, national solidarity, or tribal redemption—or vengeance—becomes ever more seductive, at first with alienated individuals but ultimately with groups and even nations. We’ve seen this pattern before. In the aftermath of Napoleon, the West enjoyed the greatest run-up of prosperity in human history. For a century, there were no large-scale wars in Europe. But when the prospect of war approached in 1914, the cream of Western civilization, on both sides of the Atlantic, leapt at the opportunity to prove their glory and their nations’ greatness. In the aftermath of the war, Julien Benda was alone in recognizing that, for all the bloodshed, the urges had not been purged. Thinkers across the West were still dedicating themselves to the “intellectual organization of political hatreds.”23 Benda saw that the tribalisms of nationality, ethnicity, race, and class would lead to a second war even more terrible than the first. We are still far from that, but it’s not hard to imagine how today’s streams could become rivers. Rhetoric yields its own reality, because it transmits ideas, and ideas still rule the world.

  This realization dawned on me during the course of this project, not on the page but in real life.

  When I started, no serious person—probably including the current president himself—believed that Donald Trump was a plausible candidate for president. His rise in the primaries and his ultimate victory posed a professional challenge—and distraction—I had never planned on.

  The fact that Trump’s rise occurred against the backdrop of my thinking about human nature, tribalism, romanticism, and corruption made the whole experience more poignant and acute. In many ways, the existential challenge Trump and Trumpism posed to the conservative movement seemed a microcosm of the challenges Western civilization itself faces.

  Consider the emergence of the so-called alt-right. The reason to fret about the growth and (relative) popularity of the alt-right is not that its adherents will somehow gain the power to implement their fantasies. No, the reason to be dismayed by them is that these intellectual weeds could find any purchase at all. They should have been buried beneath layers and layers of bedrock-like dogma with no hope of finding air or sunlight. But such is the plight we face. The bedrock is cracked. The soil of our civil society is exhausted, and the roots of our institutions strain to hold what remains in place.

  Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment.

  But we live in a culture that never wants its favorite shows to end. The desire to be entertained has rewired much of our civilization, because it has rewired our minds. When everything needs to be entertaining, we judge everything by its entertainment value. Entertainment is fundamentally romantic and tribal. It cuts corners, jumps over arguments, elevates passion, and lionizes heroes. Try to make an exciting movie about how laws are made and policy is implemented—without creating heroes of willpower and villains of greed, without skipping the reasonable arguments on both sides. It is almost impossible.

  Donald Trump broke the fourth wall between reality-show entertainment and politics. He feeds off interpersonal conflict and drama. He’s organized his life and presidency not around policy or ideology or even politics properly understood but around ratings. He bulldozed his way through the primaries, first and foremost, because he was so damn entertaining. Saying someone is entertaining is not necessarily a compliment. Horror movie villains are entertaining. But in an entertainment-driven age, being entertaining can be an advantage even if it is not inherently a virtue.

  The rise of Trump showed me that the American right was far more susceptible to the corrupting tug of human nature than I had ever imagined. And that breaks my heart. More importantly, I no longer have the confidence I once did that this country is largely immune to authoritarianism. It can survive Trump, of that I have no doubt. But the rise of Trump proved to me that conservatism is far more fragile than I thought, more susceptible to the mob mentality than I ever appreciated. I would very much like to believe that this is a fever that will break. And at times I think it probably will, particularly as the Trump administration fails to deliver on his more grandiose promises to Make America Great Again. But Barack Obama failed to “fundamentally transform America” and the response from the left wasn’t to become more moderate and reasonable. It was to redouble its passions for another try. There is no reason to be confident the same won’t happen on the right. And that will leave traditional conservatives as ideologically homeless as our libertarian cousins have been.

  Modern American conservatism is a bundle of ideological commitments: limited government, natural rights, the importance of traditional values, patriotism, gratitude, etc. But underneath all of that are two bedrock assumptions upon which all of these commitments stand: the beliefs that ideas matter and that character matters. We can have debates about what ideas are important and what good character means. Indeed, the reason we can have debates is that we believe that ideas matter. This is our debt to the Enlightenment: that through reason and argument we can identify good ideas and bad. Modern American conservatism arose in the 1940s and 1950s on the back of arguments made necessary by the threat of communism: arguments for Western civilization, the free market, the Constitution, property rights, and all of the underlying concepts that led to the Miracle.

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  Donald Trump stands athwart both of these pillars of conservatism. His relationship to ideas is entirely ad hoc and instrumental, by his own admission. He boasts that he is not committed to any doctrine save the need for eternal flexibility. As for his character, suffice it to say, any standard of good character that conservatives championed over the last fifty years—honest business dealings, sexual probity, humility, restraint, piety, rhetorical decency—is a bar he would need a ladder to touch. I’ll put it more simply: He is not a good person. If you described him in the abstract to any conservative (or liberal) a decade ago, this would be incontrovertible. He’s boorish and crude. He freely admits his greed, his whining, and his deceptions. He is only civil when civility redounds to his benefit. He respects the law only when he can use it as a weapon, and he sees other people as instruments of his will.

  And his biggest supporters don’t care, and too many rank-and-file conservatives don’t care very much. Forget conservatives: That Americans can see him as a representative of America’s best self is a profound corruption of American idealism. Trump appeals to the desire for a tribal Big Man—or, if Trump had his way, a king.

  Of course, thanks to the Founding, we don’t have titles of nobility. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying to create new ones. In America, where wealth and celebrity serve as substitutes for ancient notions of aristocracy, Trump took quite seriously the (possibly apocryphal) concept of droit du seigneur, the alleged right of nobles to extract sex from their vassals and serfs. He infamously boasted that his fame allowed him to accost women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…grab them by the pussy.”

  While such behavior is indefensible, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to playact as an aristocrat, since we do not, in fact, live in a world of inherited titles. But here lies the problem. Trump leapt from his world of playacting aristocracy and attained real power. And he brought many of the assumptions of his illusionary world with him. As we’ve seen, Western civilization has struggled to beat back the universal human preference for nepotism for millennia. In one fell swoop, Trump has brought it back to the center of political life. His children are ministers with open-ended portfolios in his government, even as they maintain their business interests. As his son, Eric, correct
ly explained, nepotism is a “factor of life.” But he also added that it is “a beautiful thing.”24 And it can be a beautiful thing in civil society, where building a dynasty for your family is part of the American dream, at least for some. But Eric leapt from that private realm of a family business and imposed it on the people’s business.

  All this is a small example of the larger pattern and problem of conservative surrender to Trumpism. It is not an alternative to the worst facets of progressivism. It is a new right-wing version of them, grounded not so much in ideas as in populist grievance and a cult of personality.

  This is but one panel in the great tapestry of conservative corruption. During the 2016 Republican primaries, a slew of right-wing radio and TV show hosts followed the famous dictum, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”25 To be sure, some were early adopters who were always more interested in marketing than ideas. They used their talent at guessing where their customers were going and met them there. Others fell one by one to the seduction of popularity and populism. The fact that a celebrity managed to do this from the right is particularly significant—and damning.

  The same conservatives who insisted that Bill Clinton’s “affair” with an intern was cause for impeachment saw little to object to in a man whose commitment to marital fidelity is arguably even weaker than Bill Clinton’s. Conservatives who had claimed Rudy Giuliani was unfit for the presidency because of his three marriages and his stance on gay rights leapt to defend or dismiss Trump’s three marriages and his even greater support for gay rights. Self-described libertarians who spent decades championing free trade, unrestrained immigration, and the cult of Ronald Reagan reversed course and hopped on board the Trump train, eagerly embracing positions they had once denounced as backward and racist.