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

by Jonah Goldberg

  This unqualified support of a leader regardless of the arguments he makes and the actions he takes is precisely the sort of thing that terrified the crafters of our Constitution, which is probably why Trump sees the Constitution as so archaic. As of this writing, a plurality (45 percent) of Republicans say that the courts should have the power to shut down news outlets that publish stories that are “biased or inaccurate.”26

  The evidence for the corrupting power of tribal politics and Trump’s cult of personality is all around us. In 2011, only 30 percent of white Evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” In 2016, that number more than doubled, to 72 percent. White Evangelicals used to be the religious group that was least tolerant of immoral acts by public officials. In the wake of Trump, they are now the most tolerant demographic. In fact, they are now far more tolerant of immoral acts than the average American.27

  When the Democrats are back in power, what yardsticks of principle will be available for Republicans to hold them accountable? Under Obama, conservatives lamented the abuse of executive orders. Will that really be an argument they’ll be able to make after Trump? What standard of sexual impropriety now bars someone from the presidency? How will conservatives decry “crony capitalism” in Trump’s wake? Who will have the nerve to say the government shouldn’t be “picking winners and losers” in the market after Trump has jawboned one company after another into giving him political victories? What standards of presidential decorum, honesty, and rhetoric can survive four years of Trump’s Twitter tirades and petty insults?

  Donald Trump is no dictator, thanks largely to the Constitution and the American people, but you can see how the distance between dictatorship and democracy has shrunk. Before I wrote Liberal Fascism, I subscribed to the view best described by the phrase “It can’t happen here.” Then, after studying the domestic moral horror of the Wilson administration, I modified my view to “It can’t happen here—for long.”* But this view was too generous. Since the New Deal, the conservative movement has been the primary champion of the principles of limited government, free markets, and constitutionalism. But the experience of watching Donald Trump seduce the right has caused me to wonder whether that commitment endures.

  Which brings me back to corruption. Like the old joke about the turtle on a fence post—“It must have gotten there somehow”—we know the Miracle happened. The evidence is around us, everywhere. We have good theories about how and why it happened, but they are ultimately just theories. All we know for sure is what happened, because that can be measured. But the second law of thermodynamics tells us that nothing in this world can resist nature without effort.

  Imagine a brand-new car in a field. Left untouched for a decade or two, it will still be the same car. But when you return to it, the paint will be faded. Rust will have taken hold in parts. The tires will be flat. Perhaps the windshield will be cracked from so many winters and summers. No doubt bugs and birds will have established nests among the weeds that have taken root in the nooks and crannies. In a century, a passerby will find a shell and some relics. In a thousand years—or maybe ten thousand; nature doesn’t care—it may be like there was never a car there at all. Nature takes back everything, unless you fight it off with every pitchfork at your disposal, and even then, every victory is temporary, requiring the next steward to take the pitchfork like a baton.

  On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in the greatest statement about that document ever uttered save for the Gettysburg Address, Calvin Coolidge observed:

  About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. [Emphasis mine.]28

  I believe this with all my heart. I believe that, conceptually, we have reached the end of history. We are at the summit, and at this altitude left and right lose most of their meaning. Because when you are at the top of a mountain, any direction you turn—be it left toward socialism or right toward nationalism or in some other clever direction—the result is the same: You must go down, back whence you came.

  But as much as I believe all of this to be true, as a practical matter in the real world, it is only true so long as a sufficient number of Americans believe it, too, and work to keep that belief alive. Coolidge was right about the finality of the Declaration as an idea. But that idea, absent the hard work of caretakers, will rust away, reclaimed by human nature.

  And more than faith and belief, more than reason and data, the indispensable ingredient for that work to be successful is gratitude. Webster’s Dictionary defines “ingratitude” as: “forgetfulness of, or poor return for, kindness received.”29 The key word is “forgetfulness.” Gratitude is impossible without memory. How can we repay a kindness we do not remember? But “forgetfulness” has a special meaning here. It is not merely a lapse of memory. “Remember” is an active verb. In the Bible, it is an action, not a passive function of the brain: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” is an instruction to do something, attentively and mindfully. When we fail to remember to keep these principles alive in our hearts, and to remind ourselves why we should give thanks for them, we grow ungrateful for them.

  There are no permanent victories. The only victory worth fighting for—because it is the only victory that is achievable—is to hand off this civilization to the next generation and to equip that generation to carry on the fight and so on, and forever. We cannot get rid of human nature and humanity’s natural tribal tendencies. But we know that, under the right circumstances, our tribal nature can be grafted to a commitment to liberty, individualism, property rights, innovation, etc. It happened in England, accidentally but organically.

  It happened in America by choice. America talked itself into existence. The Founders argued the Constitution out of the ether and they believed it could work so long as people of good character fended off the inevitable entropy of human nature. They wrote it down and made it hard to change to help us in that effort. The only thing that gives the Constitution real lasting power is our commitment to it, and there’s nothing preventing us from walking away from it other than our refusal to do so.

  And we cannot be forced to stay committed to our principles. We can only be persuaded to. Reason alone won’t carry the load, but the task is impossible without it. Parents must cultivate their barbarian children into citizens, and the rest of us must endeavor to keep the principles of our civilization alive by showing our gratitude for it. The Miracle of human prosperity from 1700 to now looks like a rocket taking off. Some think we’ve achieved a permanent and stable orbit from which we can look down on the tiny speck that is our tribal past. But there’s no such thing as a stable orbit. We must accelerate and maintain the equipment or fall back to the place whence we came. When the gravitational hand of nature reclaims objects from the heavens, the term for that in physics is “orbital decay.” So it is with our civilization. Give up fighting for it, give up holding human nature at bay, aband
on our principles for any reason—selfishness, sloth, forgetfulness, ambition, ingratitude, whatever—and you choose to give in to decay.

  Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore.

  * Under Wilson, America embraced totalitarianism, imprisoning, persecuting, and censoring dissidents. The government deployed extra-legal violence against domestic enemies. It demonized ethnic groups. The Committee for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry, releasing thousands of government agents to foment war lust and ideological conformity. But then the war ended and Wilson’s stroke effectively ended his presidency even before he left office. In 1920 the Republicans ran on a “return to normalcy” and, once in power, released the political prisoners, dismantled Wilson’s propaganda ministry and war socialism, and embraced free-market principles once again, unleashing unprecedented prosperity. (See Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change [New York: Broadway Books, 2009 (2007)], pp. 106-20.) America’s first truly modern war brought out the tribal instinct and, for a time, we abandoned our commitment to the principles of our civilization. But our commitment to those principles reasserted themselves, weakened but for the most part intact. It’s worth noting that FDR lamented the reassertion of the old dogma of individual liberty. In his execrable 1944 State of the Union address, FDR said that if we returned to the “normalcy” of the 1920s, we would be in effect surrendering at home to the forces of fascism we were fighting abroad. (See Franklin D. Roosevelt, “4—State of the Union Message to Congress, January 11, 1944,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=16518.)

  APPENDIX

  Human Progress

  This book rests on a few core arguments. They are:

  • We are living in an unnaturally prosperous time. Our prosperity is not merely material but political and philosophical. We live in a miraculous time, by historical standards, where every human born is recognized by law and culture as a sovereign individual with inalienable rights. This is not normal in humanity’s natural environment. It is, to use the label I have used throughout this book, a Miracle.

  • We stumbled into this Miracle without intending to, and we can stumble out of it.

  • Human nature not only exists but is fundamentally unchanging.

  • If we do not account for and channel human nature, it will overpower and corrupt the institutions that make prosperity possible.

  The easiest of these propositions to demonstrate is that we are living in a uniquely prosperous time. It may seem obvious to some, but this “Great Fact,” as Deirdre McCloskey calls it, is denied, denigrated, or dismissed by many. Ironically, the Great Fact is demeaned most vehemently by those who believe that material conditions—i.e., economics—represent the heart of political morality. The very essence of socialism—in all of its myriad flavors—is the dogmatic conviction that the virtue of society is determined almost entirely by how fairly wealth and resources are distributed.

  This is an entirely legitimate and defensible worldview. But it has practical problems when turned into public policy. As Margaret Thatcher liked to say, “The problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.”1 We’ll deal with those issues later. There’s another more fundamental problem that needs to be dealt with here. All forms of socialism—in the broadest sense—subscribe to an entirely subjective understanding of poverty. The poorest among us are measured against the richest among us. In other words, when poverty is defined subjectively, a millionaire is poor in a community of billionaires. If one considers poverty to be an objective condition instead of a relative one, the poorest among us live better than the richest in our natural environment. One could quibble with this by pointing to the plight of some homeless people, but the average member of the working poor in the United States in 2018 lives better by any imaginable material measure than the wealthiest human a thousand years ago. And by many measures, a typical poor person today lives better than a rich person even a hundred years ago.

  This is not an argument for saying we shouldn’t do more to help poor people today. It is merely an observation that our standards are so contingent and time-bound that we often lose sight of the mind-boggling progress we’ve made in a remarkably short period of time. This appendix is intended to demonstrate that progress.

  If the time line of human history were a landscape, humans lived in a wasteland for most of it, living off the land, eating tubers, acorns, bugs, and small mammals. “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, “is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.”2 It was only recently that humans became the apex predator on this planet. Our species only started hunting at all about 400,000 years ago, and long after that our prehistoric ancestors were as likely to be hunted as to hunt. Many of our first tools were used to crack open bones to get the marrow. According to some experts, that may have been our niche. “Just as woodpeckers specialize in extracting insects from the trunks of trees,” Harari suggests, “the first humans specialized in extracting marrow from bones. This is because the first members of genus Homo were scavengers, picking over the abandoned kills of superior predators.3

  It probably isn’t necessary to dwell on the poverty of our pre-Homo sapiens forebears. So let us fast-forward a few hundred thousand years to consider the Yanomamö, a tribe living on the banks of the Orinoco River along the border of Brazil and Venezuela. They are one of the few stone-tool-making hunter-gatherer societies left in the world. They live mostly off subsistence hunting, small-garden agriculture, and a little trade; some Yanomamö make baskets, hammocks, and other items to sell to nearby villages.

  In a very rough estimate by Eric Beinhocker, the Yanomamö make on average about $90 a year. (It has to be a rough estimate, Beinhocker notes, because the Yanomamö don’t use money, never mind compile statistics.) According to Beinhocker, “It took about 2,485,000 years, or 99.4 percent, of our economic history to go from the first tools to the hunter-gather level of economic and social sophistication typified by the Yanomamö.”4 In other words, for nearly all of human history, the Yanomamö would be considered incredibly rich. As economist Todd Buchholz puts it, “For most of man’s life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four.”5

  But by modern, official metrics, the Yanomamö are worse than poor. The World Bank defines poverty as living on $1.90 per day.6 Again, putting this in terms of money is a bit misleading, but it captures the material poverty of subsistence or near-subsistence living that defined human habitats for almost all of human history. It should also go without saying that the Yanomamö live without access to health care. A trivial injury for you or me can be a death sentence for them. Yanomamö poverty also encompasses the fact that the typical tribesman faces a paucity of choices about how to spend his or her life. If you subscribe to some “noble savage” nostrums or believe that ignorance is bliss, you might think they have a good deal. Who needs to study art or literature or practice medicine when you can live an “authentic” life of hunting, gathering, and basketmaking? But that option is more or less available to everyone reading this book, and yet you are not heading out for the wilderness.

  While the readers of this book live in the oasis of the now, the Yanomamö still live on the outskirts of it.

  After the onset of the agricultural revolution, it took about 12,000 years for humans to go from the $90-a-year Yanomamö standard of living to that of the ancient Greeks in 1000 B.C. ($150-a-year), according to economist J. Bradford DeLong. And it wasn’t until A.D. 1750 that income reached $180 per year—a doubling of income from Yanomamö standards, yes…but over nearly 14,000 years.7 Economic historian David S. Landes was not exaggerating when he said that “the Englishman of 1750 was
closer in material things to Caesar’s legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren.”8 Douglass C. North and his colleagues write in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History that “over the long stretch of human history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero.”9

  In other words, if the 200,000-year life span of Homo sapiens were a single year, the vast majority of human economic progress would have transpired in roughly the last fourteen hours.10

  * * *

  —

  The spoiler, of course, is that no one truly knows why the Miracle happened. There are many theories but no consensus. The best explanation is that ideas changed. Starting in the 1700s, in a remote corner of Europe, people started to believe that the individual was sovereign, that innovation was good, that the fruits of our labors belong to us. We invented the notion of God-given rights and a way to organize the larger society—the extended order outside of family and tribe—that allowed humans to trade and make contracts rather than club each other. We stumbled into a non-zero-sum system that made people freer and wealthier. I have called this the Lockean Revolution, but John Locke no more created it than Adam Smith created capitalism when he described it.

  I should pause here to explain that my aim in this appendix—or to some extent even in this book—is not to offer an explanation for why the Miracle happened but merely to demonstrate that it happened at all. From the vantage point of human history, this explosion of prosperity is as miraculous as the goose that lays the golden egg waddling into a peasant’s home and producing unimagined wealth. I have already laid out the different theories about the why. But the what is what matters here.