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‘Suicide of the West’ Review
I just finished Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West last night. Overall, I think it’s a very good book and one that people on both the Left and Right will benefit from reading. The book is not full of pop-culture references and humorous or snarky asides, which may disappoint regular readers of his G-File newsletter. It’s definitely a serious book, more in the style of his first title, Liberal Fascism, than his second, The Tyranny of Cliches. While I generally agree with the overall premise and conclusions, I do have a few quibbles about some of his writing decisions. Before I get into those, here’s a quick summary.
The basic premise is that we have reached a pinnacle when it comes to finding a way for humanity to prosper, and that if we aren’t careful we will throw it all away. He starts by observing that for most of human existence, life has been pretty miserable. We first appeared about 250,000 years ago, and for 99 percent of that time nothing changed. He points to about 300 years ago, when what he refers to as “the Miracle” happened, that life really started to improve drastically. The values of the Enlightenment combined with the economic benefits of capitalism combined in a place where they were allowed to develop (England) and then were given a true home here in America where they have flourished and changed the world. But the “Miracle” goes against human nature. We didn’t evolve in such a way to ensure the “Miracle” happened and if we let human nature take its course, we’ll lose what we have gained.
In fact, Goldberg makes a good case that we’ve already dropped below the pinnacle. The progressive movement of the early 20th century damaged the balanced structure that the Founders designed by letting an administrative state transform into a shadow government unchecked by the formal system defined in our Constitution. In that sense, I found the book to be kind of depressing. At this point, it would take a new revolution to free ourselves from the bureaucracy that we’ve allowed to take over so much of our formal government, and there’s no sign that people have the slightest interest in doing anything of the sort. Unfulfillable promises to “drain the swamp” aside, the administrative state is here to stay.
This biggest critique I have with Suicide of the West is the way Goldberg chose to start it. He explicitly states “There is no God in this book.” He makes his case without arguing that rights are “God given” or that the “Miracle” was predestined. I can understand why he wants to avoid the fallacy of appeal to authority, but that sentence is not true. God definitely is in the book. He admits as much in the conclusion, pointing out that without the societal changes wrought by Judaism and even more so by Christianity, the “Miracle” would not have been possible. Given that, the decision to start the book with a statement that will rub many evangelical Christians the wrong way seems an odd one.
Goldberg goes into great depth to support his arguments, and backs up his conclusions with considerable research. Some of it, such as the analysis of the positions of Burnham and Schumpter, can get a little dry. Like Sahara-Desert dry. And there is the point where Goldberg says that the “list [of Human Universals] is too long to reprint here,” followed by two solid pages of the list. Those missteps aside, the book is well done. Overall, the tone is a scholarly one. This is not a fiery tome that lends itself to sound bites and memes.
The second half of the book focuses on the fact that the “Miracle” isn’t self-sustaining. Just like capitalism has creative destruction, the “Miracle” allows ideas to flourish that are detrimental to the success it brings. It doesn’t change human nature, and if we lose our sense of gratitude for all the factors that led to the “Miracle” we’ll go back to our natural states of tribalism and authoritarianism. The identity politics of the left are incompatible with the “Miracle,” as is the authoritarian nationalism showing up in Europe and already exists in most of the non-western world. No one will even accuse Goldberg of being a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter but the book isn’t an attack on Trump. (He started writing it before Trump even announced he was running for president.) He’s pretty clear in saying that he doesn’t see Trump as being a positive factor in all this but he does point out that Trump isn’t causing the problems. He’s just symptomatic of them.
I’m going to have to read the book again to clarify some of the ideas and where those lead. For example, it struck me early on that there is a tension between the idea that the “Miracle” increased freedom by allowing us to have profitable interactions with strangers, to not put friends and family first or give them special favors, and the conservative idea that the disintegration of the nuclear family has been bad for society. Goldberg does spend time talking about the importance of the family and other moderating institutions. There’s clearly a balance that needs to be established and better maintained. One interesting omission (in my mind anyway) is Federalism. He makes no mention of any level of government outside the Federal one. I think that might be part of the balance we need to restore to help keep the effects of tribalism at bay.
As I said at the beginning, I recommend this book for people across the political spectrum who are interested in serious discussion of the big picture issues today. I’m looking forward to hearing what other Ricochet members have to say.
Published in General
No. We have to switch to a deflationary monetary policy and free up the economy even more to increase purchasing power for everyone. Robots and globalized labor is going to kill too many of us. It’s deflation we will be forced to cooperate with. It’s a bit late.
To be clear, I agree that part of this is about pro / anti-cultural marxism and the related.
America needs a number of changes to improve economic conditions and eliminating the fed is one of them, but taxes, spending, and regulation are also part of that solution.
However, said suboptimal allocation of resources coupled with current innovations is not going to result in some Malthusian calamity.
Right, but no one gets what the ultimate problem is, and they really need to. It’s causing many social problems.
The other thing is the changes I’m talking about take tons of power away from government and Wall Street. We’ll have martial law before that happens.
Listen to the interviews of David Stockman on the Tom Woods Show and Contra Krugman around September 2016. He lays it all out. (The other video I referenced is quite different from this, fyi)
You say this all the time – do you have examples? Because as far as I can tell you’re being criticized for two things: the content of your truth and constantly misrepresenting what other people are criticizing you for. Not for having principles.
As for Jonah, there too the criticism or anger is not because he believes in principles when it’s time for fighting. It’s the content of those principles, the prioritization, and the disconnect from results, with a big portion due to the suspicion that he’s just rationalizing his Trump distaste and sometimes he does that by straw-manning.
Last – of course people want you to join their side. That’s how politics works. That’s how most things work. Your truth will determine which side you join so your side and your truth are aligned at least to a minimum level. But none of that is immutable; places like this are supposed to be about discussing, persuading, and learning so that your truth can change or you can learn more about particular viewpoints or “sides”.
You keep saying that as if were an ubiquitous occurrence. Who wants you to give up principles? Who? Where? When?
More trade, less government. We all act otherwise because there really aren’t any better options. It will end badly.
I don’t think that the United States during reconstruction could reasonably be described as homogenous. It’s not just the South; the Italians weren’t yet the problem that they’d be later, but the Irish were already barbarizing New York and Boston. The South West was more distinctively distinctive than it is today, too. We’ve introduced new forms of diversity, but the Teddy Roosevelt/ Wilson/ Klan violent xenophobia didn’t come from nowhere. We benefitted because the Palmer raids and other forms of oppression were exceptionally effective at closing down domestic terrorism and ethnic separatism, including a chunk of machine politics, and Harding and Coolidge were exceptionally effective at healing the nation, starting to reduce ethnic organized crime, and further reducing a lot of the ethnic machine politics.
It’s easy to fail to see a lot of the divisions that tore America apart during the years between the Civil War and Harding because they were mostly resolved. The Second Klan being called the armed wing of the temperance movement, for instance, just doesn’t make sense to most modern ears.
If by “Americanism” you mean patriotism rather than a repeat of nationalism, Jonah’s not opposed to that. He’s also deeply unopposed to religious identification.
He’s using the term the way that Jonah uses the term. It’s broader than literally tribal societies, but less broad than the United States. I don’t know to what extent you’re wrestling with Jonah’s ideas and to what extent you’re quibbling with his labels.
I agree. I don’t think that Jonah disagrees, either. It does create a temptation to be tribal, though. There’s also a degree to which some people will use a claimed fear as an excuse (I should be clear that I don’t mean you here). There are a bunch of people who will look at a mostly unTrumplike Republican Congress, at a mostly not Trumplike Gubernatorial set of wins, at a mostly not-Trump resembling vast array of Republican state legislators, a not particularly Trump resembling Bush presidency, and at a Trump Presidency (and minority of most of the other things) and say “clearly only Trump-like politicians can win elections”.
That you support a coalition and lack some particular flaws does not make it unreasonable to identify those flaws in the coalition.
I don’t think that there’s been a particularly important anti-electoral college movement among Republican never Trumpers; I don’t recall Jonah or anyone else addressing that argument in the last year. Jonah does talk about the more doctinaire never trumpers on podcasts and such talking about the book pretty often, and I think there’s a brief mention in the book.
Does this sort of thing seem to you like something that is likely to have a clear and articulable line?
I’m not afraid of the Republican Party broadly; I happily devote a fair amount of effort to supporting the Right. Roy Moore and Don Blankenship scared me because I’m afraid of the left (well, mostly; I wouldn’t be a fan of a Moore/ Blankenship dominated Senate in its own right, either, but that doesn’t seem like a plausible threat). When the left has maximized its militaristic language, we got massive landslides for Nixon and helped many millions of Southerners gradually become comfortable with the idea of not being Democrats. This country was later saved by the insanity of Code Pink, by the Battle For Seattle, and such. Wilson’s late period stridency gave us the only moment in modern history where we’ve had a solid conservative supermajority under Harding.
There’s a similar question when it comes to the instrumentalization of civil society. When Falwell and his sort engage in their more wholehearted identifications of Christianity and Trump, it reduces the strength of our shared culture, which is bad because it makes us more vulnerable to leftism, but also for other reasons. When Ralph Reed and his sort of organizer identified the best of the conservative movement and highlighted it for Christians, they did good work in moving both the church and the country in a sound direction.
It’s the difference between a discrete or classical contract and a relational contract. If you work for a business that will see customers once and never see them again (eg., you run an undistinguished pilgrim concession stand in Mecca in the days before the internet made reviews accessible), you benefit in the short and long term when your colleagues cheat. If you’re in something more like a business in which your clients and you are bound up in lifelong relationships, though, it starts to become important to hold your colleagues to a higher standard, even if you’re in competition with people who cheat.
Of course there were differences; of course there were sub groups; of course there were divisions. I’m not arguing that we were were literally all the same. However: Yes there was racial homogeneity; yes there was broad religious homogeneity (Christian); yes most people lived agrarian lifestyles; yes the public square was much more rigid than say today; yes there was no longer a question of slavery or secession. Plus, my original point was about the time of the founding, was extended to the Civil War and just after. Now you’re extending my point to Harding. Well, I think it probably still applies to some extent even then, despite the immigrant waves and strife (there’s always strife), but that wasn’t my original point.
I was not talking about Jonah, I was talking about the left. They think the American Dream is racist. American exceptionalism is racist. Christianity is racist.
My problem with Jonah is ignoring these issue.
Good to see you posting, BTW.
I’m exploring the terms. In this particular case I’m exploring the assumptions Bryan was making and the terms he was using. I don’t care whether you want to call that “wrestling” or “quibbling” – that’s just an unnecessary diversion IMO that doesn’t add anything substantive or interesting. Bryan (and Jonah) are trying to draw sharp distinctions; I’m trying to suggest that there are also important similarities. I’m trying to figure out whether one is being highlighted and the other downplayed in order to make some other argument fit; I’m trying to figure out if he’s using “tribal” the way Jonah has argued that people use the word “fascism”. I suspect that the answer is “yes” at least to some extent.
I’ve said this before, but you guys might find Dr. Joseph Salerno’s work on “Mises and Nationalism” interesting. There are short podcast interviews.
No, but then I’m not the one trying to draw clear lines around Tribalism, as something clearly in opposition to whatever good thing Jonah is claiming is better.
There were more homicidal race riots than you found in Western Europe, because there wasn’t really racial homogeneity. The Indian Wars were another example of the sort of internal violence you don’t find in many democratic countries, at least not on that scale, and that resulted from heterogeneity.
The Klan was founded and flourished chiefly because there was less religious homogeneity than in almost any country on earth; Catholic organized crime and terrorism was one of the central issues of the beginning of the twentieth century. Catholic machine politics was the central political divide in the North before and during the Civil War in a way that found few parallels elsewhere in the democratic world.
You might not consider them to be keenly divided along those lines, but Bryan was able to win the Democratic nomination three times on the back of resentment that the city folks dominated Congress and the Presidency (accurately about the latter). He lost each time, in part because the urban vote was a big deal, and the resentment went both ways.
Particularly during the life of the first Klan, there was a far more lively question of secession than in most democratic countries. It was less strong than, for instance, at the height of the Civil War, but still unusually high for a modern state. I don’t know how much you know about the convict lease system, but the question of how widespread slavery was was unusually accute, domestically, for a democratic nation in the late 19th century.
The part I was referring to was “it led to war. Followed immediately by homogeneity in that regard and a return to acceptable levels of deviation instead of dissolution into separate tribes.” ie., following the Civil War. I didn’t know how far you were taking it. I was saying that there’s a moment of truth to homogeneity under Harding, but the period before Harding, and that era of reconstruction seems to me to reach a logical narrative height under Wilson, when the wave crested.
There’s always strife, but there was really a lot of it in Reconstruction era America. It’s one of the primary things that people noted about the country.
Jonah does defend America and Christianity against charges of racism in the book. In the case of Christianity, he doesn’t mention the other side but he still describes how it helped us transcend racial identities. With America he details the Zinn approach and explains its errors.
That said, I don’t think that a minority of the left opposing the American dream is a good reason for finding a new tribalism. Misconceptions about American exceptionalism even less so. Jonah isn’t wrong to try to set out relatively timeless principles in a way that avoids an excessive engagement with the foolishness of the moment.
Also, thank you. :-)
Would it be helpful to think of it in terms of the rule of law rather than the rule of man? Because we live in a world of finite and diverse population within which patterns may be found, and of particularly small populations for some demographics, it is easy to have laws of general application being discriminatory in impact, but in general one can edge more towards a Van Burenite Spoils System approach or to a more Chester Arthurite neutral approach. One can take a more MLK approach (“All God’s Children” in the context of American founding documents clearly refers primarily to his American children, but explicitly crosses racial divides for him) or a more separatist approach in which White success is deprecated.
Identity is a deeply complex and flexible thing that strongly resists the sort of bright lines that you’re calling for; the key difference between those who voted for Scottish Independence, for instance, was not whether people felt Scottish (each side had a similar correlation with that), but whether they felt British. Similarly, you’ll sometimes find women on the right who deny identifying as women politically. Most of the people who told pollsters they don’t feel British still support the UK when there’s a sporting event that sees national subdivisions merged, and most women who get upset about being politically identified as women follow the behavior that those political models predict, but there’s a difference between those who enthusiastically embrace identities and those who reject them, and the various points between.
Jonah frequently reiterates that he’s not opposed to a degree of tribal identity. As he often puts it, the poison is in the dose. He would prefer, though, for us to try to find our beliefs on the basis of principles that are not attached to the identities of those proposing them or affected by them. As those groups become bigger, they become more abstract. At the point where it’s really America (the patriotic rather than nationalistic form, the one where “the people” is the people, not “the people who agree with us/ share ethnic qualities with us”), it’s abstract enough that it’s barely tribal at all; America is genuinely massive and deeply diverse. Still, the key line isn’t between different demographics and their propensity to qualify as tribes, but between interest in demographics and more depersonalized approaches.
Right. But the Indians weren’t exactly part of the tribe. What exactly do you think I was arguing when I responded to Nick H’s and CBA’s comments? The “Miracle” being referred to only worked assuming a baseline of sameness; elements outside of some standard deviation (e.g. Indians) were not part of it and war was one result long with some tribalism and authoritarianism of our own.
Yes, and once again differences outside the standard deviation led to violence, authoritarianism, and tribalism. The Miracle seems to be getting narrower.
Ok. Again I think you’re extending my original comments far beyond the timeline I was referring to.
Ok, you’re right. There was no sense in which the country was broadly homogeneous within which The Miracle worked and outside of which led to violence, tribalism, or authoritarianism.
As I said originally, the Miracle was only operative unless you were Indian, Catholic, or a slave (and later non-white).
That’s not to take away from The Miracle by the way. That’s only to illustrate that The Miracle isn’t the opposite of tribalism – that tribalism ran concurrent with The Miracle in our country and I suspect everywhere else too.
I don’t think I’m calling for bright lines. I think I’m arguing that the lines aren’t nearly as bright as some are saying; I think I’m arguing that tribalism as it’s being defined is either highly selective or a distinction without much difference or meaning. It seems to be a poor foil for rule of law since rule of law seems to presuppose some baseline level of tribalism to begin with and can actually run concurrent with severe tribalism up to war and authoritarianism – after which we’re back, even if only temporarily, to a victorious tribe enjoying its Miracle.
I’m not so sure it’s a minority of the left, but the point is that we don’t have to find a new tribalism because the new tribalism finds us. Perhaps we can wait it out, or perhaps it will only get worse. History seems to suggest that it only gets worse until it’s resolved, one tribe again either through persuasion or otherwise.
Perhaps I can clarify how I’m engaging on this; more like what areas I’m exploring because I’m interested in answers, and it turns out that if I want to explore some of these areas then I can only do so as the Devil’s Advocate. I think there are four engagement vectors.