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

  ALSO BY JONAH GOLDBERG

  Liberal Fascism

  Tyranny of Clichés

  Copyright © 2018 by Jonah Goldberg

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownforum.com

  CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101904930

  Ebook ISBN 9781101904947

  Cover illustration: Zak Tebbal

  v5.2

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  To Lucianne Goldberg, happy warrior.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jonah Goldberg

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I

  INTRODUCTION: Stumbling upon a Miracle

  1: HUMAN NATURE: Our Inner Tribesman

  2: CORRUPTING THE MIRACLE: When Human Nature Strikes Back

  PART II

  3: THE STATE: A Myth Agreed Upon

  4: THE BIRTH OF CAPITALISM: A Glorious Accident

  5: THE ETERNAL BATTLE: Reason Versus the Search for Meaning

  6: THE AMERICAN MIRACLE: They Put It in Writing

  PART III

  7: THE ELITES: Aristocrats Unchained

  8: THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: The Birth of the Living Constitution and the Death of Liberty

  9: THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: The Shadow Government

  10: TRIBALISM TODAY: Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics

  11: POP CULTURE POLITICS: Godzilla, Rock & Roll, and the Romantic Spirit

  12:THE FAMILY’S LOSING WAR AGAINST BARBARISM

  13: THE TRUMPIAN ERA: The Perils of Populism

  14: THINGS FALL APART: The American Experiment at Risk

  CONCLUSION: Decline Is a Choice

  Appendix: Human Progress

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART I

  INTRODUCTION

  Stumbling upon a Miracle

  There is no God in this book.

  The humans in this story are animals who evolved from other animals who in turn evolved from ever more embarrassing animals and before that from a humiliating sea of ooze, slime, meats, and vegetables in the primordial stew. We pulled ourselves out of the muck, not some Garden of Eden. Indeed, if the Garden of Eden ever existed, it was a slum. We created the Miracle of modernity all on our own, and if we lose it, that will be our fault too.

  This book assumes that the Almighty does not guide human affairs and does not intercede on our behalf. God is not in the picture. Well, He is in the picture in the sense that the idea of God—and gods—play a very large role in human affairs. But my assumption is that God is in our heads and hearts, not in the heavens above.

  The only concession to my own beliefs lies in the word “assumes” just above. I am making this assumption for the purposes of an argument. I am not an atheist, but I think it is useful to play one for the argument I want to make, as a means of guiding the reader through a way of thinking about the world.

  In Enlightenment-based democracies, claims that something is true because God says so are inherently suspect because part of the point of the Enlightenment was to create a space where people can disagree about what God wants from us—if He wants anything at all. That’s why the highest form of argument in a democracy is one based on facts grounded in reason and decency. I won’t deny I’m passionate in parts of this book, but I try not to let the passion get ahead of the facts or the argument. That is because I think persuasion matters, though you wouldn’t know it from the last few years in American life. On the right and the left, persuading your opponents is out of fashion, replaced by the mandate to rile up your supporters. I am weary of that, particularly on my own “side.” So I’m taking a gamble and doing this the old-fashioned way.

  For the purposes of this book, I assume that nearly all the important truths about good and evil or freedom and tyranny are not self-evident. But they can be discovered. The truths we know we have figured out for ourselves—over a really, really, really long time. After thousands of generations of trial and error, we discovered “best practices” out there in the world, like prizes in some eternal scavenger hunt. If the concepts of right and wrong were as universally obvious to everyone as, say, hot and cold, the library shelves groaning under the weight of tomes chronicling war and barbarity would instead lie empty.

  And for those who can’t suspend their faith in God and believe He revealed to us all we need to know, that’s fine. All I ask is you bear in mind that He took His time revealing it all. The Jews, never mind Jesus, show up very late in the story of humanity. And long after the Ten Commandments and the Bible appeared, most of humanity still spent thousands of years ignoring divine instruction.

  * * *

  —

  But just as God can’t get credit, neither can any of His more popular substitutes. There is no dialectic, inevitability, teleology, or hidden algorithm that made human success a foregone conclusion. What happened happened, but it didn’t have to happen that way. There is no “right side of history.” Nothing is foreordained.

  If you cannot let go of the idea that there is a great plan to the universe—that we as individuals, a nation, or a species have some inevitable destiny—that’s fine too. All I ask of you is to consider a secondary proposition: We have no choice but to live by the assumption that this is the case.

  For instance, many philosophers, physicists, and neuroscientists have depressingly compelling arguments that there is no such thing as free will. Brain scans reveal that many of our conscious decisions were already made subconsciously before they popped into our heads. It looks an awful lot like free will is a story our brains tell us.

  But here’s the problem: Even if you believe there is no such thing as free will, it is impossible to live any kind of decent life based on that belief. Even if our personal choices are some deep fiction, we still have to convince ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. We are still obligated as a society to judge people as if they make their own choices.

  The same goes for every nation and civilization. You can believe that cold, impersonal forces drive humanity to a certain destiny like wind drives a leaf, but we still have to argue about whom to elect president, what Congress should do, and what schools should teach. Prattle on about how free will is a delusion to your friends at the bar all you like; you’re still going to have to choose to go to work in the morning.

  We all understand in our bones that choices matter—paradoxically because we have no choice but to think that way.

  * * *

  —

  Just to be clear, I am not arguing for some kind of nihilism or moral relativism. The philosopher Richard Rorty famously wrote in Consequences of Pragmatism:

  Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that
when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.”

  This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark:

  “Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.”1

  I think there is much truth to this. What societies decide is right or wrong becomes what is right and wrong for most of the people who live in them. But I think the lessons of history show that societies can choose poorly—and that this can be proved empirically through facts and reason. Some cultures are better than others, not because of some gauzy metaphysical claim, but because they allow more people to live happy, prosperous, meaningful lives without harming other people in the process. Because this is true, it is incumbent upon all of us to fight for a better society, to defend the hard-learned lessons of human history, and to be grateful for what we have accomplished. This book begins and ends with that simple idea.

  With all this in mind, let me review, not necessarily in perfect order, what lies in the middle of this book.

  My argument begins with some assertions: Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.

  Imagine you’re an alien assigned with keeping tabs on Homo sapiens over the last 250,000 years.2*1 Every 10,000 years you check in.

  In your notebook, you’d record something like this:

  Visit 1: Semi-hairless, upright, nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food.

  Visit 2: Semi-hairless, upright, bands of nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food. No change.

  Visit 3: Semi-hairless, upright, bands of nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food. No change.

  Except for a few interesting details about their migrations and subsequent changes in diet, forms of rudimentary tools, and competition with Neanderthals, you’d write the same thing roughly twenty-three times over 230,000 years. On the twenty-fourth visit, you’d note some amazing changes. Basic agriculture and animal domestication have been discovered by many of the scattered human populations. Some are using metal for weapons and tools. Clay pottery has advanced considerably. Rudimentary mud and grass shelters dot some landscapes (introducing a new concept in human history: the home). But there are no roads, no stone buildings worthy of the label. Still, a pretty impressive advance in such a short period of time, a mere 10,000 years.

  Eagerly returning 10,000 years later, our alien visitor’s ship would doubtless get spotted by NORAD. He might even get here in time to see Janet Jackson play the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

  In other words, nearly all of humanity’s progress has taken place in the last 10,000 years. But this is misleading. It’s like saying between Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and me, our combined net worth is more than $150 billion. Because for most of that 10,000 years, the bulk of humanity lived in squalor. Indeed, there are many who argue—plausibly—that the agricultural revolution made things worse for most of humanity. Our diet got less diverse, and, for the vast majority of us, our days were now defined by tedious, backbreaking labor.

  The startling truth is that nearly all of human progress has taken place in the last three hundred years (and for many of the billions of non-Westerners lifted out of crushing poverty thanks to capitalism, it’s happened in the last thirty years). Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world. It didn’t seem obvious, but it was as if the great parade of humanity had started walking through a portal to a different world.

  Following sociologist Robin Fox and historian Ernest Gellner, I call this different world “the Miracle.” And we made it, even if we didn’t really know what we were doing. “Unique among species,” Fox writes, “we created the novel environment, and the supernovel environment that followed on the Miracle, by ourselves and for ourselves.”3

  The Miracle is about more than economics, but economics is the best way to tell the story of humanity’s quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty. Until the 1700s, humans everywhere—Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Oceania—lived on the equivalent of one to three dollars a day. Since then, human prosperity has been exploding across the world, starting in England and Holland with the rest of Western Europe and North America close behind. Debate climate change all you like. This is the most important “hockey stick” chart in all of human history:4

  I have included an appendix of charts chronicling the transformation of the Miracle in detail, arguably way too much detail. If you need further persuading on this point, I encourage you to read it. If you don’t, feel free to skip right on by.

  But it is crucial that the reader goes into the rest of this book appreciating just how different humanity’s environment has become in a blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms. As economist Todd G. 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 For the first time in human history, the great challenge is not survival but coping with abundance.

  As I discuss at length, the Miracle was the product of a profound and unprecedented transformation in the way humans thought about the world and their place in it. The prosperity of the Miracle didn’t happen because of the scientific revolution or from accumulating private property or conducting trade. All of those things played important roles, but science, technology, trade, and property existed in countless civilizations prior to the Miracle, and yet we could not achieve escape velocity from the status quo of one to three dollars per day. Ideas changed everything. This new thinking, which I call the Lockean Revolution, was a wide and deep change in popular attitudes. It held that the individual is sovereign; that our rights come from God, not government; that the fruits of our labors belong to us; and that no man should be less equal before the law because of his faith or class. Of course, such a revolutionary way of viewing the world wasn’t universally accepted or implemented overnight, but the mental switch had been flipped.

  For the first time in human history, the state itself was more than a glorified criminal enterprise. The emergence of the state thousands of years ago was a beneficial precondition for the emergence of the Miracle, but that doesn’t change the fact that the state begins as a means of exploitation. All states prior to the Miracle were designed for the betterment of the tiny slice of humans at the top. Everywhere around the world, rulers saw the masses as little more than instruments of their will. To be sure, humans invented all sorts of theologies and ideologies, such as the divine right of kings, that rationalized these systems as something more noble (and some were better than others), but when put to the test, the interests of rulers always came first.

  And yet, these systems endured for thousands of years. In fact, most humans live in societies where the old rules still largely apply. Why? Because there is something about tyranny, monarchy, and authoritarianism that “works,” by which I mean there is something in our wiring that finds such systems natural.

  Which brings us to human nature, the subject of Chapter 1. The first primates with the Latin prefix Homo appear in the fossil record just under six million years ago. Homo sapiens has been around for between 200,000 and 300,000 years. The Miracle began three hundred years ago. That’s a half dozen human lifetimes.*2

  Evolutionary change do
es not work on this short a time line. The needle barely moves over 10,000-year increments. In other words, everyone reading this book carries the same basic programming of the humans who toiled in the wheat fields of Mesopotamia or carried spears through the forests of Africa, Germany, or Vietnam. And even if you account for the view that certain populations have distinct traits that have evolved in shorter periods of time than the last ten or twenty millennia, such differences would be trivial against the backdrop of the innate programming we acquired over the last 200,000 to 300,000 years, never mind the last five to six million.

  For all intents and purposes, human nature holds constant as the world changes around us. This is a truth better comprehended from literature than from science. When we read about characters in the distant past or the distant future, what makes them recognizable to us is that they are still us: human beings with all of the normal joys, desires, and fears we all experience.

  Stated plainly, from the perspective of our genes, we weren’t meant to live like we do today, with wealth, rights, and freedom, and all their fruits. As I describe in the chapter on human nature, our natural condition isn’t merely poor, it’s tribal.6

  For all of human—and most of primate7—history until the dawn of the agricultural revolution, humans lived in small, often wandering, groups. This means that all of human politics, religion, and economics—to the extent we can use such words—was personal. Tribes and bands do have internal politics. We are imbued with a very strong “coalition instinct” that helps us forge alliances based on loyalty and reciprocity. But, again, these are personal, face-to-face interactions. Our understanding of our place in the universe, our sense of self in relation to others, was defined by a small handful of people who had to work cooperatively to survive.