And Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy

This week I've reviewed two very different yet very good books...this one and Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights
By: David Kinley. Both are exceptionally well written. Both present unique perspectives on the current state of affairs and both bring up compelling points for the reader to carefully consider. it's the solutions that are so incredibly diverse and that lends credence to the idea that these are incredibly challenging circumstances with equally divisive perspectives depending on where you are on the proverbial totem pole of life in this nation. Goldberg has an astute mind and knack for creating highly readable - dare I say even entertaining - works that tend to have a certain following but do far less to convert critics which is a shame as this material is exactly the "food for thought" needed. I would highly recommend this and Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights By: David Kinley as two "must read" books for anyone interested in the current state of affairs as well as proposed solutions.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Do not be alarmed that the author writes for a conservative magazine as it has little to do with politics in that tiresome sense of the word. A student of history and philosophy, "Suicide" is among the fairest works I have read. As a classical Liberal, who also believes corporations and big money has gotten out of control, i have become have been increasingly alarmed by the timbre of discussion. Both parties equally at fault, both acting like unschooled children. Both equally tearing down this amazing experiment called Liberal Democracy. Jonah Goldberg has written the book that helps us see the forest for the trees. An almost unbelievable amount of research must have gone into writing this book. Even more time spent putting it all together -- some very deep thought is in evidence here! Mr. Goldberg has done us a tremendous favor. Even if you don’t share his conclusions, it will help free your mind to better discover what your own might be. We need this level of discourse from all sides of the equation so please share it with others. Then write your own! I am not exaggerating when I say that this sort of big thinking just might help us save liberal democratic civilization.

My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University Press, 1955) in English at Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri (USA). From the fall semester of 1964 of my junior year onward, I took five courses from Ong at SLU.

In light of my interest in Ong’s account of our Western cultural history, the conservative polemicist Jonah Goldberg’s alarmist new book Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (Crown Forum/ Penguin Random House, 2018) caught my attention. Jonah Goldberg (born in 1969) holds the Cliff Asness chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

In the past, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008), Russell Kirk (1918-1994), James Burnham (1905-1987), Michael Novak (1933-2017), and Patrick J. Buchanan (born in 1938) have influenced conservatives by publishing books and articles. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether Jonah Goldberg’s alarmist polemic will appeal to conservatives and conservative-leaning voters.

As far as I know, the late Michael Novak, who held the George Frederick Jewett chair at the American Enterprise Institute, is the only famous conservative polemicist who was familiar with Ong’s work, but Novak did not attempt to use Ong’s thought in any of his own publications. But why not? Evidently, Novak had certain reservations about Ong’s thought. Moreover, Ong’s thought tends to be irenic and contemplative in spirit. By contrast, Novak’s publications tend to be conservative polemics. His most widely known book is The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (American Enterprise Institute/ Simon and Schuster, 1982). In 1996, SLU conferred an honorary doctorate on Novak.

In the book Right from the Beginning (Little, Brown, 1988), Patrick J. Buchanan discusses his alcohol-fueled years (1962-1965) of working for the now-defunct conservative newspaper the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (pages 263-264, 267-276, and 286-288). As a pugnacious undergraduate, he attended Georgetown University, the Jesuit university in Washington, D.C., where he grew up (pages 198-231). However, nothing in his book suggests that he knew of Ong at the Jesuit university in St. Louis.

But let me switch gears here. Before I retired from the University of Minnesota Duluth in 2009, I used to teach an introductory-level survey course of Literacy, Technology, and Society, in which I used Ong’s thought as the basic conceptual framework. Briefly, among the required readings, I had the students read Ong’s book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982), Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking Penguin, 1985), Postman’s book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Knopf, 1992), Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or, The New Prometheus (1816), Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

If we were to construct a technophobe/technophile spectrum with a mid-point, Postman would clearly be on the technophobe side of the mid-point, but Ong would be on the technophile side, although he is not uncritical of technology, as certain contemporary technophiles tend to be.
As Jonah Goldberg notes (page 338), in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985, pages vii-viii), Postman discusses both Huxley’s novel and Orwell’s. In addition to noting this, Jonah Goldberg himself discusses both Orwell’s novel (pages 116, 334, 335, and 338) and Huxley’s novel (pages 335, 338, and 343) – and Mary Shelley’s novel (page 246).

However, apart from Postman’s discussion of Huxley and Orwell in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), it strikes me that Postman’s book Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (Knopf, 1999) is more related to certain themes in Jonah Goldberg’s new book.
Postman and some of his faculty colleagues at New York University started the doctoral program in media ecology, in which graduate students studied both McLuhan and Ong. Lance Strate, a graduate of the NYU program, served as the supervisory editor of the Media Ecology book series published by Hampton Press, in which I published three books.

Now, in the 2016 presidential primaries in the Republican Party, the New York developer Donald J. Trump effectively used alarmist rhetoric to rally his supporters. Consequently, he emerged as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, with ardent supporters. Despite a strong showing in the presidential primaries in the Democratic Party by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. In the general election, Trump emerged victorious in the Electoral College, but Hillary won the popular vote. To his credit, Jonah Goldberg is keenly aware of just how narrow Trump’s Electoral College victory was.

As I write, Thomas B. Edsall, a weekly columnist at the New York Times (NYT), has published “Meet the New Boss. Actually Quite Different from the Old Boss,” in the NYT dated April 26, 2018. He says, “For dour decades, from 1968 to 2008, what was loosely described as the Republican establishment – the party’s congressional leaders, campaign operatives, donors, lobbyists and special interests – reigned supreme.” But Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election effectively ended the supremacy of the old Republican establishment.

Edsall concludes, “The post-Trump world is a Humpty Dumpty story. No one is going to put things back together again.” Edsall may be right about that. Jonah Goldberg is not trying to put things back together again before Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 2016. Instead, Jonah Goldberg is trying to put together something new for conservatives to rally around in time for the 2018 mid-term elections.

No doubt the Democratic Party will rely heavily on anti-Trump sentiment in the 2018 mid-term elections. But the Republican Party may not be able to rely heavily on pro-Trump sentiment. Clearly Jonah Goldberg’s new book is his bid to influence conservatives and conservative-leaning voters in the Trump era as conservatives re-group for the 2018 mid-term elections.

REVISITING JAMES BURNHAM

As Jonah Goldberg knows, the conservative polemicist James Burnham in the title of his book Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (John Day, 1964), his last book-length study. Perhaps Jonah Goldberg sees himself as the new James Burnham.

But Burnham is most widely known for his book The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (John Day, 1941). According to Jonah Goldberg, “George Orwell was deeply influenced by Burnham’s writing on the New Class and that fascination was a major inspiration for his novel 1984” (page 116).

However, in the book James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (ISI Books, 2002), Daniel Kelly (1938-2012) offers the following assessment of Burnham’s 1964 book Suicide of the West:

“Sill, the book had much to offer. For one thing, it was the first attempt at a comprehensive study – psychological and sociological as well as political and intellectual – of American liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century. For another, though it overemphasized some aspects of liberalism and virtually ignored others, focusing on what it saw as the pith of the ideology, and omitting nuance, it often hit its target squarely. But what in retrospect is most striking about the book is its success as a work of prophecy. For if its image of the postwar era’s liberalism was debatable, it faithfully captured the liberalism of the 1970s and 1980s” (page 290).

As an aside, perhaps I should note here that Ong reviewed the 1953 book that Burnham edited and contributed to titled What Europe Thinks of America in the now-defunct journal Social Order (Saint Louis University), volume 4, number 4 (April 1954): pages 181-182. In the early 1950s, Ong had worked in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe tracking down the 750 or so books (most in Latin) that he lists and briefly annotates in his book Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press, 1958). Consequently, Ong was interested in what Europeans thought about America.

Oddly enough, Ong’s concluding summary of the book still resonates today, even with certain issues that Trump discusses concerning nationalism versus globalism:

“Can a democracy such as America’s, where the real concerns of the citizens are habitually internal concerns, be geared to an international outlook? Is our government, internally sound, necessarily irresponsible internationally? This question, which is becoming more and more common in Europe, recurs in several writers here. It leads to a conclusion, which [Raymond] Aron, [Julian] Amery, and [Vittorio] Zincone advance and in which all the other members of this symposium would seem to concur: Europeans are troubled, but not despairing, about the quality of the United States’ international leadership, which they realize was forced on the United States, but which they also realize needs more than a crusader spirit and an ill-concealed and unfulfillable wish that all issues be statable in terms of good people vs. bad people, white vs. black” (page 182).

WALTER J. ONG’S THOUGHT

Now, Ong’s father and his father’s family were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Their family ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.

Harvard College was founded by WASPs in 1636. The curriculum of Harvard College in the seventeenth century was based on teaching the logic of the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) -- as was the curriculum of Cambridge University in East Anglia.

Ong’s massively researched doctoral dissertation was a study of Ramus’ work in the context of the history of the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (also known as dialectic). His dissertation, slightly revised, was published in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958. For a critique of certain aspects of Ong’s study of Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Ramism, see Peter Mack’s book Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Brill, 1993, pages 334-355).

Historically, WASPs, and former Protestants, dominated the prestige culture in American culture both before and after the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Revolutionary War – up to relatively recent times. See Robert C. Christopher’s book Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite (Simon and Schuster, 1989).

Just as the Jim Crow laws and customs of the past are now part of history, so too the WASP dominance of the American power elite in the past is now part of history. However, just as the passing of the Jim Crow era into history does not mean that all forms of racism have been eliminated, so too the passing of the WASP-dominated era of the American power elite does not mean that all problems involving the American power elite have been eliminated.

But Christopher’s detailing of the de-WASPing of the American power elite should lead us to expect that various special-interest groups such as people of color and white women will continue to jockey for position in the emerging new power elite. This is what so-called identity politics is all about. Naturally, other special-interest groups will also continue to jockey for their share of the power pie, figuratively speaking. But the re-WASPing of the American power elite seems unlikely.

Now, the Canadian Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) responded positively to certain aspects of Ong’s account of our Western cultural history and amplified them with his own examples in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962). Among others thing, McLuhan frames his overall argument as an alarmist jeremiad. He is alarmed at the possibility that the contemporary communications media that accentuate sound will produce what he refers to as retribalization. For McLuhan, tribalization represents pre-alphabetic cultures, including pre-historic cultures. For McLuhan, detribalization involves phonetic alphabetic writing. But couldn’t we organize resistance to the alleged threat of retribalization? Or is it the case that the impact of the communications media that accentuate sound so powerful that we cannot possibly resist retribalization?

On the technophobe/technophile spectrum with a mid-point, McLuhan would be on the technophobe side of the mid-point.

However that may be, Jonah Goldberg notes (page 336) that the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray (1904-1967) published an article titled “The Return to Tribalism” in the Catholic Mind, volume 60 (January 1962): pages 5-12; reprinted in the book Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray, edited by J. Leon Hooper (Georgetown University Press, 1994, pages 147-156). According to Jonah Goldberg, Murray warned ominously of the growing number of so-called idiots – in the primitive Greek usage of the term. “To the Greeks, the idiot was the private individual who ‘does not possess the public philosophy, the man who is not master of the knowledge and the skills that underlie the life of the civilized city’” (page 336).

Now, even though Ong was positively impressed with McLuhan’s 1962 book in certain ways, Ong eventually claimed that the contemporary communications media that accentuate sound do NOT represent the rebirth of pre-literate orality, but rather a new kind of orality – which he famously refers to as secondary orality, as distinct from the primary orality of pre-literate cultures. As baseball announcers like to say, secondary orality is a whole new ballgame. However, the whole new ballgame engendered by secondary orality in Western culture over the last half century or so is still unfolding.

Both Ong and McLuhan see the Gutenberg printing that emerged in the mid-1450s as the technological game changer in our Western cultural history. It helped usher in the era of modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement in philosophy and the arts.

Ong discusses the Romantic Movement in imaginative literature in his book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971, pages vii, 3, 8, 14, 17, 19-21, 255-256, 264, 276-283, 294, 295-295, 323-326, and 332).

Ong also discusses Romanticism in imaginative literature in his succinct encyclopedia entry “Classic and Romantic” in the book The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, edited by Stephen spender and Donald Hall (Hawthorn Books, 1963, pages 78-80).

I mention Ong’s discussions of Romanticism because Jonah Goldberg discusses Romanticism in his chapter “Pop Culture Politics: Godzilla, Rock & Roll, and the Romantic Spirit” (pages 237-261) – and elsewhere (see esp. pages 29 and 139; see the index for further references). In effect, he works with the contrast affective versus cognitive. He aligns the Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) with the cognitive polarity – which is fine with me. He then aligns the Romantic Spirit with the affective polarity, but he tends to see the affective polarity as problematic, to say that least. No doubt the affective dimension of life can become problematic.

Years ago, both Ong and McLuhan took popular culture seriously enough to discuss it. For example, Ong published the article “The Comics and the Super State: Glimpses Down the Back Alley’s of the Mind” in the Arizona Quarterly, volume 1, number 3 (Autumn 1945): pages 34-48.

McLuhan published the book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Vanguard, 1951). Ong reviewed McLuhan’s book in “The Mechanical Bride: Christen the Folklore of Industrial Man” in the now-defunct journal Social Order (Saint Louis University), volume 2, number 2 (February 1952): pages 79-85.

Overall, I prefer Ong’s extrapolations concerning the Romantic Spirit over Jonah Goldberg’s. Nevertheless, I should point out here that Jonah Goldberg’s view of the Romantic Spirit resembles Steven Pinker’s view of Romanticism in his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018). Their two books have certain other resemblances as well. Jonah Goldberg discusses Pinker in passing (pages 28, 30, 130, and 270).

Now, Ong sees the critical mass of contemporary communications media that accentuate sound as a game changer, but NOT in the sense of promoting retribalization, as McLuhan claims. In terms of the affective versus cognitive contrast, the communications media that accentuate sound resonate deeply in the human psyche on the cognitive level. However, unlike Jonah Goldberg, Ong does not necessarily agree that this deep affective resonance is problematic. For Ong, the affective resonance of secondary orality could potentially promote psycho-spiritual renewal, which is more deeply affective than cognitive.

For bibliographic information about Ong’s 400 or so publications, see Thomas M. Walsh’s “Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006” in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Walsh (Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).

WAS MARSHALL MCLUHAN RIGHT ABOUT RETRIBALIZATION?

Now, if it were the case that the contemporary communications media that accentuate sound would lead to the retribalization of the West, as McLuhan claims, then we would have sufficient reason to see the use of the communications media that accentuate sound as representing the suicide of the West. In addition, if it were the case that the contemporary communications media that accentuate sound are leading us into retribalization, then the instances of supposed tribalism that Jonah Goldberg discusses could be understood as examples of what McLuhan refers to as retribalization. Or are supposed retribalization and supposed tribalism just alarmist expressions?

But Ong countered McLuhan’s claim that the communications media that accentuate sound are going to lead to the retribalization of the West, by claiming instead that they represent a new kind of orality – something new under the sun, as it were.

Similarly, Ong countered David Riesman’s alarmist claim about so-called other-directness in his book The Lonely Crowd (Yale University Press, 1950), by claiming instead that being other-directed can be a healthy positive orientation. However, as Riesman operationally describes and explains his terminology, so-called other-directedness represents a noteworthy departure from the kind of inner-directedness he values most highly.
Jesuit spirituality involves cultivating one’s inner-directedness. Ong cultivated his inner-directedness through his practice of Jesuit spirituality. In addition, he discusses key features of the Jesuit practice of discernment and decision making in some of his publications. In short, he practiced inner-directedness, but also discerned other-directedness as a potentially positive orientation to cultivate. Ong’s two most relevant publications about Jesuit spirituality are the following pieces:

(1) the article “‘A.M.D.G.’ [Abbreviation for the Latin Ad majorem Dei gloriam, For the greater glory of God]: Dedication or Directive?” in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review for Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pages 257-264; reprinted in Review for Religious, volume 50, number 1 (1991): pages 35-42; reprinted in volume three of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Scholars Press, 1995, pages 1-8);

(2) the book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986, esp. pages 78-81 and 87), the published version of Ong’s 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

The Jesuit practice of discernment of spirits is designed to help us get in touch with our feelings and take them into account as we weigh different possible moral courses of action we may take in our decision-making.

In any event, according to Jonah Goldberg, the contemporary trends named in the subtitle, taken together, are destroying our American experiment in representative democracy, and he is sounding the alarm about them to alert conservatives and conservative-leaning Americans about them. Jonah Goldberg may be right about the threat to our American experiment in representative democracy. But I suspect that he’s exaggerating the threat.

For the record, I am not in favor of the tribalism, the populism, the nationalism, and/or the identity politics as Jonah Goldberg himself operationally defines each of these terms. However, I am not as alarmed as he is about these contemporary trends. His use of the term “Rebirth” in his subtitle acknowledges that similar trends have emerged in the past in American history, but without destroying our American experiment in representative democracy.

For the sake of discussion, let’s consider what Jonah Goldberg refers to as tribalism. He is clearly referring to the tendency to form a sense of an in-group that could be referred to as a tribe, figuratively speaking. However, figuratively speaking, WASPs formed a sense of an in-group, with various out-groups such as African Americans, Jewish Americans, Catholic Americans, and so on. In short, the formation of in-groups and out-groups in American culture has a long history.

Ong explores the psychodynamics of out-group versus in-group formations in his title essay “The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today” in his book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, 1962, pages 260-285); reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002, pages 277-300).

Independently of Ong, in the book A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2011), Grace Elizabeth Hale explores just how popular it became for white middle-class Americans to imagine themselves to be what Ong refers to as outsiders inside society today.

In any event, when Jonah Goldberg refers to identity politics today, he is referring to the politics that privileges certain favored people who are deemed to be what Ong refers to as outsiders inside society today. The people who are favored in identity politics include people of color generally and women generally -- not just women of color but also white women, including white women from a WASP family background.

In the 2016 presidential election, Trump campaigned as an outsider against the Republican establishment – and as an opponent of so-called political correctness and identity politics.

In conclusion, you’re guess is as good as mine as to whether Jonah Goldberg’s new book will influence conservatives going into the 2018 mid-term elections.

While reading parts of this book, I felt tempted to title my review (something like): "News Flash: Conservative Intellectual Blames Liberalism for America's Ills," but that's both snarky and somewhat of an overstatement. Though I disagree with his conclusions and his extension of specific (carefully selected) examples to general principles, I respect Mr. Goldberg for his intelligence, the depth of his knowledge, and his writing ability. He's obviously done a great deal of research, and it's probably best to view this book as a serious attempt to explain the fractures in our society from an honest, though factional viewpoint.

My first critique of the book has to do with its absolutism (hence my temptation regarding my review's title). One of the book's central premises is that capitalism is intimately linked to individual liberty as protected in our United States Constitution. Mr. Goldberg states that capitalism is the only economic system that creates (rather than redistributes) wealth, and he argues strongly for the corollary that capitalism is the only economic system that promotes individual liberty. He idealizes those people (e.g. Locke) whose thoughts and writings lay upon (and sometimes blazed) the path leading toward our system of government and our economic system. He criticizes, in very personal terms, those whose life experiences, inclinations, and thought experiments led them in other directions. It's a stretch for me to accept that everyone in "Locke's Camp" is honest, decent, and hard-working while everyone in "Rousseau's Camp" is self-serving, lazy, and insincere, but that's the way things come across in this book.

My second critique has to do with the conditions under which Mr. Goldberg acknowledges conservatism's obligation to address capitalism's side effects. This is important, because he, in the strongest of terms, links conservatism and capitalism with representative democracy and personal freedom. But on multiple occasions, he admits that capitalism and the singleminded pursuit of individual wealth can result in serious collateral damage to those impacted by capitalism's "creative destruction" (his term). Rather than following those acknowledgments with discussions of how his ideal government, which is so tightly linked with, and dependent upon, conservative principles, might address or alleviate those issues, he moves directly to a criticism of progressives' attempts to right economic wrongs.

In fact, he all but forecloses on the notion that the federal government should act to mitigate them. Instead, he passes that charter off to non-state actors (religious, charitable, and service organizations for example). And he (inevitably) pivots away from these difficult facts to emphasize the errors, missteps, etc. that result from progressives' attempts to address real social problems. He goes so far as to argue that progressives' efforts, however well-intentioned, actually undermine non-state actors' efforts.

He rarely admits, or even acknowledges, that progressives have pushed for regulation of child labor, women's suffrage, the end of Jim Crow laws, etc. in the face of intense opposition by conservatives. Instead, he paints all of progressives' efforts as part and parcel of regressive thought -- ideas that drive our society toward tribalism and away from the pluralistic socioeconomic models that underpin our freedom and prosperity.

Yes, he does weave right wing tribalism (and its destructive side-effects) into his narrative, but the majority of that discussion is condensed into a couple of chapters near the end of the book, so I came away with the feeling that, despite the book's title, it was yet another skewed, doctrinaire assessment of our country's ills.

I feel compelled to close with some caveats, however: I think Jonah Goldberg is smarter (probably a lot smarter) than I am. And I have absolutely no doubt that he's spent much more of his professional life pondering these issues than I have. It might be that I'm simply too limited in my thinking to provide a valid assessment of his work. It might also be that my background (math / science / engineering) blinds me to the subtleties of his analysis.

So I score the book as "A Three" -- a balanced rating in an out-of-balance world.

As always, YMMV.

This is a hugely, desperately important book. The subtitle sums up its main point, except that what it hails as humanity's "miracle" and seeks to defend is not just American democracy, but the liberty, prosperity, and scope for individual achievement that grew from the Enlightenment, of which American-style political and social freedoms provide the supreme example. It is a warning and a call to action. I can only hope it will be heeded.

The Introduction is the best and most essential part of the book, but the rest provides useful explanation, history, and examples. I would sum up the book's thesis as follows: human evolution necessarily lags far behind our accomplishments. Humans remain essentially tribal, which means we long to be part of communities led by strong leaders, view resources as limited and subject to zero-sum calculations, and are essentially xenophobic. The ability to understand and appreciate any other way of life, no matter how much better, how indisputably better, the quality of that way of life, must be trained into us, constantly renewed, actively appreciated, and defended. But that training, appreciation, and defense is falling by the wayside, and we are in serious danger of reverting to our natural condition.

One key line: "Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of people's lives. It has only a single fatal flaw. [in italics:] It doesn't feel like it."

Goldberg is an anti-Trump conservative, and his discussion of Trump, of Trump's effect on the conservative movement, and of his potential longterm impact on our ability to defend our society will give conservatives and libertarians who have become tolerant of Trump's presidency some disturbing food for thought.

In perhaps an excess of caution, I will avoid "spoiling" the last line of the Conclusion, but it left me profoundly affected by its concise and lingering power.

The opening statement of the book is “There is no God in this book.” An unexpected opening statement. More on that later.

Overall, I found the book very challenging, as Goldberg brings in so much history that I was either unaware of or vaguely aware of. It would do me much good to read the book again, which I intend to do within a year, but have some other books to read right now. He is clearly passionate and knowledgeable about what he writes and has strong convictions about his understanding of history and how events have impacted humanity to where it is today. What I found very refreshing is that he does not denigrate opposing views or people, though he does not hesitate to give his reasons for showing what he believes the fallacy of their understanding. For example, it will become clear he is opposed to Bernie Sanders worldview; however, I did not find him condescending of Sanders or any others. If one is a big fan of Sanders, they may feel differently. I am neither a fan or detractor of Sanders, I believe he has some valid ideas, though I do not think if all his ideas were implemented society would be better.

The first two chapters (Part I) lay a foundation for the book in which Goldberg states humans are by nature tribalistic, meaning our default way of behaving is to attach ourselves to groups who believe as we do and that as a tribe we will devote our energies to ourselves. And when it means destroying those of other tribes, we will do that – literally. Of course, in our culture with its laws, killing others is typically a last resort that we seek to avoid. However, throughout the 400,000-year history of humans on earth, that has not been the culture, and he gives story after story how for over 99.9% of humanity’s time on earth the tribal mentality meant people living in conflict. Goldberg makes much of the fact that it is such a short period of humanity’s history that we have found a better way than tribalism, and that we are very susceptible to returning to it – which he sees us doing.

Part II addresses humans’ attempts movement to more stability and security than tribal mentality provided through the State, and then the Miracle.

The State comes into being when “a host of thinkers talk of something called ‘the social contract’ as the beginning of modern society. From this “men in a state of nature agree to sacrifice some personal freedoms in exchange for security.” Goldberg mentions several of these thinkers but gives most space to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (leading to socialism) and John Locke (leading to capitalism).

And then, the Miracle. Through no systematic approach or goal in mind, humans came upon capitalism which opened the door to living with other tribes in ways that made it beneficial to all to engage in commerce with one another. And that is why Goldberg calls it the Miracle, because it happened by accident, not intentional. It also offered a way out of tribalism and living in conflict with other tribes as Goldberg presents his case for capitalism as a necessity to escape the throes of human natures’ default of tribalism.

Part III addresses the threats/attacks on the Miracle. What stood out to me was Woodrow Wilson and his desire to move away from democracy to an autocratic state. Chapters 7-8, The Elites, and The Progressive Era, are not in reference to elites or progressive Democrats today, but primarily Woodrow Wilson and before him. Chapters 9-12 address from FDR forward, with chapters 13-14 focused primarily on Trump and “the right” attack on the Miracle and taking us back to tribalism. So, the threats to American democracy are now coming from both the right and the left as Goldberg lays it out.

But Goldberg is not done. There is the Conclusion and the Appendix.

The Conclusion begins with “I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can’t be removed from it.” And then the second paragraph begins, “… we got here because of God. I don’t mean this as an argument for providence of divine intervention. I believe in God, but if you don’t, you cannot discount the importance of God as a human innovation.” Goldberg then contrasts that “humans picked their deities to support their passions” but “the Hebrew god reversed the division of labor, demanding that the people work for him, not the other way around.” And then “the Christian god universalized” the Hebrew god. There is much more to the Conclusion, but a key point I understood from it is that without a god (again, he is not arguing for factual evidence of God, but for the sociological effect of god) that directs us to moral and ethical behavior that “does to others as you would have them do to you” that capitalism will fail. And the removal of god from the social conscience he concludes leads to tribalism, the default of human nature.

The Appendix: Human Progress, is filled with statistics. I am going to assume they are accurate. What Goldberg does with the data is ascribe much influence of capitalism to positive gains in education, science and medical advances, technological gains, and environmentalism. If you are a “liberal” reading this book, you may to well do give this book and appendectomy (lol!!!). I understand the correlation he makes because of capitalism encouraging innovation; however, capitalism of itself from what I observe has fed destroying the environment, and I do not give capitalism near the impact on education, science, and the medical field as does Goldberg, while I am inclined to see more validity to his views on its impact on technological progress.

If you read all this, hope you find it helpful. If you have read the book, and think I have misunderstood it, I am interested in your understanding.

I think this book is meant as a #NeverTrumper manifesto, an attempt to create intellectual backbone for that wispy band of conservative holdouts, who crouch behind the crenellations in their National Review fastness, wondering why the final assault on them has yet to begin—not realizing it is because everyone has forgotten about them. Strictly speaking, though, I have no idea what the point of this book is, because it’s a jumble of thoughts, anecdotes and superficial facts, strung together with no clear audience and only the most simplistic of analysis. It’s a boneless mess. And I'm very conservative, so I should have liked this book. But I didn't.

The miniscule hard core of Goldberg’s argument is clear enough, to be fair, mostly because it is repeated like a prayer on a Buddhist prayer wheel. It is that we, the West, have created a world that is a “Miracle,” and we are in danger of losing it by our actions. From there, though, chaos promptly enters Jonah Goldberg’s writing, blurring it to incomprehensibility. One of the major problems with this book shows up immediately—a miserable failure to precisely define, or even to try to define, every crucial term, starting with “the Miracle.” The second major problem also rears its head quickly—constant bootstrapping and begging the question. For example, on the very first page we are told that “the highest form of argument in a democracy is one based on facts grounded in reason and decency.” Why is this limited to democracy? More broadly, why is this true? What is “decency” in this context, and what is it doing here, especially since in the prior sentence Goldberg rejects any role for religious belief in his analysis? Who knows? Not the reader, certainly, at any point in this book.

Let’s start with the most simple question—what is this “Miracle”? At first, the reader intuits it is the material progress made in the modern world, represented at its core by GDP per capita, globally and within certain regions and countries. This is well-trodden ground, covered recently by everyone from Angus Deaton in "The Great Escape" to Gregory Clark in "A Farewell to Alms." Even this simple, because wholly derivative, discussion of material progress is obscured by hurried denial of all causes other than “ideas,” by which Goldberg means “Enlightenment political ideas,” having rejected in all of five words that the Scientific Revolution had any relevance, and not having addressed a single one of the vast number of competing theories advanced to explain this material progress. Not happy to limit himself to one facile claim, at other (repeated) points Goldberg, without discussion, also directly equates the “Miracle” with being the same thing as “liberalism” and as “capitalism.” Again, none of these terms are ever defined (leaving aside for now that under any definition, these are indirectly related to material progress at best). “Liberalism” seems to be shorthand for “Enlightenment ideas as embodied in John Locke,” though it is also casually and ludicrously equated with the rule of law, with an implication that pre-Enlightenment such a thing did not exist and could not have existed. “Capitalism” seems to bear some relation to the “free market,” but is often used in a sense so broad as to have nothing to do with the market, and is sometimes tied to the Enlightenment, or to certain political ideas, sometimes not. Interspersed with all this are various simplistic conclusory statements such as a claim that, until the West magicked up the undefined “Miracle,” all governments were solely and entirely devices for the elites to exploit the masses (something easily disproved by, say, the career of Charlemagne), and a wide variety of other non sequiturs and claims advanced without any evidence or reasoning.

The second step of the Goldberg “analysis” is that, assuming we agree that in the West, we have gotten ourselves a “Miracle,” we are in danger of committing suicide (a very different suicide from that James Burnham identified in the book from which Goldberg steals his title). For Goldberg, “suicide” is any retreat from liberal democracy, the apogee both of our civilization and of any civilization that can ever exist, a height from which no further advances are possible. Suicide is any slipping back down the mountain, which necessarily means a total reversion to a nightmare of tribalism. Goldberg says “[a]fter thousands of generation of trial and error, we discovered ‘best practices’ out there in the world, like prizes in some eternal scavenger hunt.” He says explicitly there is no better way; “You’re standing at the end of history.” What that means is opaque (although he is very much aware that Francis Fukuyama is widely ridiculed for a similar, but at least clearly presented, claim), but it appears to mean mostly that we’re rich, since “no other system creates wealth.” And so on. There is a danger, though. That is backsliding, which means “corruption,” “decay,” a turn to the “reactionary,” “giving in to the drumbeats of our primate brains,” “rot,” and “putrefaction”—all in the space of one page, and all meaning choosing anything different than (take your pick) liberalism, capitalism, or liberal democracy.

Leaving aside its mental confusion (we’ll return to it, don’t worry), Suicide of the West is a common type of modern hack political book—the narration of (cut-rate and cut-down) history masquerading as analysis. For, after all, narrating history is a lot easier than analysis, so spreading a thin layer of thought on a slanted rehash of history is an easy way to push out a book. And although Goldberg cites a variety of mostly modern, though all secondary, works that revolve around modernity, a lot of his footnotes are to lightweight material: blog posts, newspaper articles, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and so forth (and those that are books often cite to “Kindle location,” a miserable practice that should be forbidden by any decent press).

So, Goldberg begins the “substance” of his book by regurgitating Steven Pinker, to demonstrate that human nature exists, and that it is tribal and mostly unpleasant, as shown by that we tend to kill each other, and primitive man killed at a massive rate. His point seems to be that if we don’t cling tightly to the Miracle of liberal democracy, we’ll all immediately start killing each other with spears in dawn raids. For the limited point that human nature exists, Pinker is correct enough, but since Goldberg is a huge Pinker fanboy, he immediately slides from this relatively narrow point into lecturing us that bad people are leading a “rebellion against the unnatural nature of the Enlightenment and all of the Enlightenment’s offspring: capitalism, democracy, natural rights, and science.” This claim of the Enlightenment being the source of everything good in the modern world, of course, a constant and ludicrous trope of Pinker, which I already dissected and refuted in my review of Pinker’s most recent book, so I will not repeat that demolition here, though at least Pinker writes clearly and precisely. Goldberg is trying (I think) to establish that if anyone dares attack the Enlightenment, or claims that the West made any moral progress prior to the Enlightenment, that person must want us to go back to the torture practices of the Aztecs and the Assyrians, which he narrates in great detail in case we miss the point, footnoting mostly to Pinker. Then Goldberg solemnly tells us, “But few societies put more time, energy, and ingenuity into the practice [of torture] than medieval Europeans.” His evidence for this? Nothing, which is not surprising, considering it’s wholly untrue, since the use of torture by medieval Europeans has been exaggerated for propaganda purposes for centuries—something of which Goldberg seems unaware, because he (like his hero, Pinker) seems to know zero history other than that history “everybody knows,” mostly gleaned from surfing the Internet.

On and on the silliness goes. Thus, we are told, with a straight face, that “Slavery was destroyed by capitalism.” For this bold and radical claim, which ignores the social movements (found only in Christianity) that actually destroyed slavery, as well as many other sophisticated (and unsophisticated) arguments about the interplay of capitalism and slavery, along with the inconvenient fact that slavery existed in the West long after the Enlightenment was in full flower and without real objection from its leading lights, we are directed to a blog post at “Cafe Hayek.” That ten-line, 2009 post states that “Slavery and capitalism are opposites.” For proof, or rather to “challenge the notion that slavery is or ever was essential to capitalism” (not the same claim at all, and in fact there are three distinct claims about slavery now being made) a link to a 2005 column is provided. That link is dead. Oh well—I guess we will remain in the dark. Then Goldberg tells us that “we needed a war to end the institution.” Huh? I thought capitalism destroyed it. Then we are told that “the very notion that humans can sell their services or labor in a free market is a remarkably recent idea,” which would have been news to the medieval artisan and the ancient Greek farmer. We are also told that “the child of a [Roman] slave did not inherit that status,” which is flatly untrue. And that’s about the level of facts, reasoning and backup that is found throughout the book. Your mileage will not vary.

This ends Part I. Next, in Part II, Goldberg steps back to give us his not-very-deep thoughts, in separate chapters, on “the State,” Capitalism, Reason, and the “American Miracle.” As far as the State, we get a second Cliff Notes version of the Enlightenment, in which John Locke is again the only person who matters and all other political thinkers of the time, not to mention modern thinkers, are ignored. And, certainly, anybody who sees any value to pre-Enlightenment societies, from James C. Scott to Christian integralists, or who sees any problem with liberal democracy or the ever-expanding sphere of unhinged personal autonomy and emancipation from non-chosen ties that is the Enlightenment’s real gift to us, from Ryszard Legutko to Patrick Deneen, does not appear. Offerings are burnt at the altar of the supposed social contract. Much rambling about Hammurabi, Gregory VII and Henry IV, and chaotic discussion about monarchy, aristocracy and father figures, ensues. We are then abruptly offered a cheesy conclusion about the State, which has little to do with what preceded it: “[E]very effort to do away with liberal democratic capitalism is reactionary, because they all attempt to restore the unity of purpose that defines the premodern or tribal mind.” Leaving aside the breathtaking hubris, bad history, and total falsehood of this claim, it illustrates Goldberg’s main method of “analysis,” which is repeating his pre-baked conclusion at random places, hoping it becomes ever more fixed in the reader’s mind.

Then the focus turns to Capitalism, where the talk is again mostly about modern prosperity, and again ignores competing theories about the Great Divergence, and also ignores that it indisputably began long before the Enlightenment. We are treated to endless confusion, along with near-continuous channeling of Deirdre McCloskey, of whom Goldberg is also a fanboy, as he is of the amazingly stupid Matt Ridley. I know a great deal about this topic, and I cannot fathom most of what Goldberg says, since it is incoherent, but it apparently revolves around claims that until the Enlightenment, for both Catholics and Protestants, we had no progress, because “Notions of betterment, innovation, and improvement were seen, literally, as heresy. . . . [C]uriosity was a sin, and the innovator [was] a heretic.” Thus capitalism, which is undefined, but is also the Miracle, and also the Enlightenment, created the Scientific Revolution, of which Thomas Edison was a part. To narrate these claims is to refute them.

Grinding on, Reason began with John Locke, whose only opposition was Rousseau, who was a romantic and a reactionary, which are the same thing. Rousseau’s descendants still fight reason with ignorance, though (and presumably want to torture everyone). Then the American Founders channeled Locke, giving us the best government ever (although, of course, every time he mentions something good about the Founding, Goldberg also hastily offers pre-emptive apologies for everything bad of the time, such as slavery and the supposed bad treatment of women, since he does not want to become persona non grata on the DC and New York cocktail party circuits). James Madison invented separation of powers out of whole cloth, in an improvement on Locke. (The names Polybius and Montesquieu do not appear.) Thus, we got the “American Miracle,” which bears an undefined relationship to the “Miracle,” but must be good, given its name.

Goldberg again and again tells us variations on that any deviation from the “liberal order of the Miracle” are both “fundamentally romantic” and “reactionary.” Those are not compliments. By “romantic,” he seems to mean in the Rousseau and Goethe sense, and by “reactionary” he means “a return to some form of tribal solidary where we’re all in it together.” Again with the pre-baked, and ludicrous conclusions; the basic contention seems to be that the hive mind was everyone’s goal until 1750. For Goldberg, with no exceptions, all political ideas since the Enlightenment that are not the Enlightenment are both romantic and reactionary. Communism? Yup. Nazism? Yup. Bernie Sanders? Yup. Trump? Yup. Environmentalism? Yup. To accomplish this neat division, he seems to define “romantic” as “any of the stupid illogic that disagrees with John Locke.” And he defines “reactionary” not with its proper meaning, the creation of a new political order by reference, at least in part, to the past, but with the puerile and simplistic meaning of “wholesale return to some imagined Golden Age”–that of forced unity, or the Borg, or something. In other words, he creates imaginary meanings and then uses those meanings to shunt all other political analysis into a siding, in which he can ignore it. This, if one can be chosen, is the besetting failure of this book. It refuses in any way to engage with the thinking of anyone else. Not for Goldberg a grappling with those many modern conservative thinkers who reject the Enlightenment in whole or in part. Not for Goldberg a grappling with the struggles of Americans living under “liberalism” and “capitalism” that led to the rise of Trump. Not for Goldberg any attempt to see why progressives think what they think. No, all of them are simply knuckle-dragging tribalists, eager to destroy the Miracle and cast us all into the pit.

Then the reader is frog-marched through Part III. We are told how aristocracies are natural, and because they are always bad, they are always trying to destroy the Miracle, for which claim a thumbnail history of Venice is offered. Following we get a long (but good) explanation of the Progressive Era, summarizing Goldberg’s earlier "Liberal Fascism." Then the administrative state, which is a form of elitist aristocracy, and therefore a form of anti-Miracle “corruption,” cribbed (with attribution, as always) from Charles Murray and Philip Hamburger. Then a screed on “Tribalism Today,” which you would think would focus on white nationalists or some other undesirables, but mostly talks about leftist identity politics. We get bonus stupidity, though, such as the claim that “the struggle for gay marriage [succeeded] because it appealed not to radicalism but to bourgeois values about family formation.” And, on a more personal note, Goldberg talks glowingly of Hungarians escaping from Communism in 1956 as saying they are going to America, not because they were forced into exile by the evils of Communism, but “Because, son, we were born Americans, but in the wrong place,” which, as the child of a Hungarian refugee from Communism, I find offensive and disloyal, and not likely something a real Hungarian would say. Finally, though, we do get a nod to the problem that identity politics on the Left may create the same on the Right, immediately followed by the claim that economic protectionism of any sort is a manifestation of tribalism.

To end the book, we get a chapter on “The Trumpian Era,” which does touch on Trump (highly negatively), but is mostly an attempt to draw a magic circle around “democracy” and to claim that no democracy, no Miracle. Not that any evidence for this is offered, except pointing out that much the world is still crappy, and most of the world is not democratic, so it must be that crappiness is caused by lack of democracy. We also get snark about Michael Anton. (On a side note, Goldberg claims Anton is a “multimillionaire hedge fund partner,” a claim he has repeated, if you search the internet. I had never heard that, so I went hunting. The only job Anton has had that meets that description is “Managing Director” of BlackRock, from October 2015 to February 2017. According to his federal financial disclosure forms, he was paid a base of $200K a year by BlackRock, and got a bonus of $150K one year and $170K in the second year. Those are pittances by New York hedge fund standards. There is no indication of any ownership or partnership status, and no assets other than retirement accounts, plus a bank account with around $100K. I conclude Goldberg is spreading a falsehood, though I suppose it’s hardly a slur to say a man is rich.) And we get the cliché-named chapter “Things Fall Apart,” saying that because, as Charles Murray has demonstrated, the family has fallen apart, and Trump is a jerk, the flood-tide of tribalism is about to sweep over us all.

None of this is even remotely convincing, even if some of the facts adduced are not totally wrong. One problem, I realized after getting to the end, is that Goldberg just can’t write. Page after page bounces around from idea to idea, usually roughly related to whatever the basic focus of the chapter is, but rarely tied together in any coherent way. Ideas bleed from chapter to chapter, uncertain where their home is. It does not help that typos abound (Phil Gramm is introduced in one sentence, and called “Graham” in the next), and that the book features a total lack of consistency as to the generic pronoun (sometimes “they,” sometimes “he” or “her”). And even Goldberg’s attempts to show his pop culture chops backfire—he talks constantly about Game of Thrones, the nihilistic fantasy TV series, such as quoting a character, the “Mountain,” as saying “a man has to have a code.” But it is not the Mountain, Gregor Clegane, who says that. It is his brother, Sandor Clegane, the “Hound,” and this is an bush-league error, since the brothers are utterly different characters and hate each other. The Mountain only says a few words and is quickly killed and turned into a zombie, while the Hound is a cynical motor mouth with a heart of gold. These are small problems (if irritating), compared to the rambling of the book, which could be boiled down to a short and punchy (if mostly wrong) pamphlet by a competent writer (like me). (And if I were constructing a counter-argument to that pamphlet, I would demonstrate that, in the material realm, the Enlightenment, a movement of political ideas, had nothing to do with the creation of the modern world; and that in the political realm, there are many, and probably better, alternatives to the pass that the Enlightenment has led us, none of which involve tribalism or barbarism, or, for that matter, rot and putrefaction. Another day, perhaps.)

But really, all this aside, the larger problem for Goldberg is that he and all his conservative tribe are failures. He seems to try to avoid this self-realization, by positioning his writing as being for a non-existent constituency for warmed-over Reaganism, styling himself as putting forth a middle ground. However, the reality is that nearly everything Goldberg has worked for, politically, his whole life, has either been denied effect (the entire program of the Heritage Foundation) or has been a heinous mistake (e.g., the Iraq War). He doesn’t seem to mind, though. He notes that “For years, conservatives have complained that Republicans surrender too easily.” After listing numerous conservative failures over decades, from the New Deal to social issues (the latter described as “symbolic,” of course, signaling that he really isn’t a troglodyte like those Middle Americans), he claims that failure and defeatism “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.” This is nearly unbelievable—Goldberg, who claims to represent a once important, powerful faction, is happy to lose on every issue that supposedly matters to him, as long as we get “time to digest” losing? He should resign his pundit’s seat and go meditate in silence on his sins, since apparently manning the barricades isn’t on his to-do list.

Anyway, analyzing this book is like nailing jelly to the wall. I feel sorry for Goldberg; he obviously had no third party with a critical eye, or one well-versed in ancient or modern political thought, read this book. It could have been improved, or even made useful, such as some of the books Goldberg himself has read, because he refers to them, such as Yuval Levin’s "The Fractured Republic." Maybe possible pre-publication readers were all too busy manning the battlements, scanning for the horizon for the chimerical attack on the last redoubt of #NeverTrumpism. As I say, that attack will never come, and so I predict this book (unlike the original and durable Liberal Fascism) will deservedly drop like a stone from the public eye.

This is a well-argued defense of classical liberal principles, and as a reader I could not but compare it to some of the over-the-top defenses of classical liberalism in the late 19th century by conservative (or do I mean liberal?) judges and intellectuals as they failed to clearly see that some changes would be needed by the government as a last-ditch mechanism to restore a balance in the system so that individual freedom and free-enterprise would be able to flourish. This book is a proud defense of liberty; a paean to liberty. His attack on tribalism and the divisive nature of liberal politics is excellent. and his economic arguments in the appendix, while well argued and thoughtful, did not totally convince me. But will those who should read it read it?

This book is filled with a lot of uncomfortable learning. And should be read by everyone from Trump fans to Bernie supporters.
It's packed with history, and the listener (or reader) should be prepared to stop and process a lot of it.
This is a dense book--but made better by the reading of the author.
Jonah Goldberg is a conservative, not a Trump conservative, but a libertarian leaning conservative.
His book does a good job of explaining to the right and left--the rise of Trump--although he admits was not the goal--but albeit logical conclusion to our increasing cultural divide.
Jonah, a Jewish conservative, is a NOT a fire breathing alt-right writer, and makes no effort to defend racism or bigotry of any kind.
His understanding of how we got here over the last 50 years is very interesting, and he traces the roots from Locke and Rousseau up through Wilson and FDR, to the modern progressive movement. It's a good read (and a better listen.)

This book was an interesting read. While I do not agree with everything written, it was an interesting take on what is happening in the country. Read it with an open mind and do check a few of the opinions against the facts. In all, it was informative and a good reminder of where we used to be and where we could be headed. I would recommend this book to most adults.

This book starts out really well, but then it ends very poorly. For about the first 4/5 of the book, he makes a very interesting and compelling argument. There are dozens of little points he makes here and there where I think he is either wrong or he exaggerates or misunderstands something.

As an example of the kind of thing he is wrong about, at one point, he argues that in medieval Catholic theology, innovation was stifled because curiosity was regarded as a sin. This is at best a half-truth. Yes, it is true that in Catholic moral theology, there is indeed such a thing as the 'sin of curiosity', but this word 'curiosity' is being used in a very precise and technical way, it does not even remotely mean anything like what Goldberg thinks it means, namely, that it is wrong to think of new ideas.

But, in any big book that cites hundreds of other books, these kind of little mistakes are going be made.

The bigger problem with the book and the reason why I dinged it and removed a star is that at about the 4/5 mark, Goldberg literally throws out everything that he has been talking about up to that point, and goes on an extended multichapter rant about Donald Trump! Now, some of the complaints he makes about Trump are actually to his thesis, but the vast majority of his complaints have nothing at all to do with the topic of the book and are really just a string of ad hominems and insults, even while he complains about Trump relying on ad hominems and insults! About 20 pages into his 'why I hate Donald Trump and his supporters' rant, he sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton talking about the 'basket of deplorables' who voted for Trump (and yes, his rant really does go one that long) I started wondering whether I was suddenly reading a completely different book, after all, what do Trump's executive orders have to do with the history of the Enlightenment, he really loses sight of the topic of his own book.

Goldberg claims that the original manuscript was about twice its current length, but I really think that, if anything, it wasn't whittled down enough because the last 1/5 of the book contains a lot of stuff that is completely unrelated, I get that he is extremely angry and bitter that Trump won, but he needed to stay on topic and not just endlessly vent his spleen just because he can.

If he wants to write about how much he hates Trump, he can do that, but most of that stuff didn't belong in this book and a better editor would have removed it.

This book talks about western and European ideas and values without mentioning the salient point of race. It examines the ideas like they are easily transferable, they are not. In one breath in the first few chapters he talks about how colonialism wasn’t able to instill western western in the next he talks about how important Hispanic Americans are. They both fail to see the thread. No mention that the US was a white super majority until the immigration act of 1965, which the public was promised would not change the racial makeup and integrity of the nation, it did oh did it! I’m guessing this book and Goldberg’s book of the same name is an attempt to ideological jack the more prescient original nook by the same name by Birman, or an attempt to dissuade people and distract them from Pat Buchanan’s wonderful book the death of the West. I gave it two stars because it was short so it didn’t waste much of my time.

Suicide of the West is the most thought-provoking book I’ve read since Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg’s first book. He somehow does two things at once. He makes you stand on your mental tiptoes to grasp the content but, at the same time, makes the content accessible by putting it on the lower shelf. He makes you think but doesn’t leave you confused. I’m a life-long conservative and deeply believe in those ideas that animate conservative philosophy. He rightly points out that, when it gets down to it, conservatism is about two things: ideas matter and character matters. Our nation flirts with suicide whenever those central tenets are disregarded. As a mental health professional, I have a duty to warn should a client express suicidal intent. Jonah Goldberg has fulfilled his duty to warn. The suicide has yet to happen, but it could. The label on the conservative bottle has been peeled off and taped onto a different bottle containing tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics. The contents of the first bottle are life-giving. But drinking the tasty contents of the second bottle will kill us if we’re fooled into drinking them. If we give up our principles (the first bottle) in the pursuit of power (the second bottle), we’ll end up with neither power nor principles. As he warns us in the last line of his book, “Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore.”

This is my first Jonah Goldberg book. I'm impressed with how he can weave a long, involved story into a coherent narrative. The only flaw is that this could have been edited and shortened by 50 pages.

Goldberg's thesis that man naturally leans toward tribalism makes sense, as he defends his thesis very well. Man is by nature a brutal, tortuous animal whose only loyalty is to the family (tribe). He gives us ample examples of that. Humans didn't get away from tribalism until 300 years ago. But then American progressives slowly got us back to that and now we are facing nationalism, populism and political isolationism.

While I may not agree with everything Goldberg has said, this book gives us plenty to think about.

In Jonah Goldberg's latest book, he argues that tribalism, populism, and nationalism are ruining American democracy. But these -isms aren't new inventions. Drawing on extensive research, these -isms are actually the way things have historically been. It has only been since around the year 1700 that we have seen an explosion in freedom, respect for others, and staggering economic growth. Goldberg offers some theories about why what he calls “The Miracle” happened, but he's more interested in showing how the Miracle created the modern world and how it's in danger of slipping away.

The political left and right define freedom in different ways. The right prefers negative liberty, which is defined as freedom from government interference. The left generally strives for positive liberty, that is the state must guarantee things like health care, employment, etc. As Goldberg himself points out, “What often gets left out of the debate is the fact that economic growth and technological innovation do more to provide positive liberty than any government could.” The Miracle of democratic capitalism has done more to advance the relative wealth of society than anything else in all of human history. Once we started believing that all men and women were created equal and that each of us has certain unalienable rights, the standard of living, life expectancy, and technology we have at our fingertips accelerated at an incredible rate. The idea of negative liberty taking root has been the greatest welfare program in all of human history. I don't think he should have made a purely economic argument, but I wish he had spent more time on it instead of tucking it away in an appendix.

Goldberg spends most of the book showing where we were pre- and post-Miracle, leading to the theme of gratitude. We are not grateful for what the past has given us and, as a result, are in danger of losing the spark that made the modern world as great as it is. I think his core argument can be summed up in this passage found on page 66:

"Under the best of circumstances, every important endeavor requires work. Every person who has ever been married understands that marriage requires effort. Every athlete understands the importance of practice and training. Every general knows that troops lose their edge unless it is carefully maintained. The Miracle of liberal democratic capitalism is not self-sustaining. Turn your back on its maintenance and it will fall apart. Take it for granted and people will start reverting to their natural impulses of tribalism. The best will lack all conviction and the worst will be full of passionate intensity. Things will fall apart."

I fear that the left will ignore this book because of its all-consuming desire for identity and grievance politics. Some on the right will ignore it because people view Goldberg as anti-Trump. This is one thing that Goldberg is arguing against. We must not view politics as an us vs them sport where we celebrate our team's win and our enemy's loss. That is our tribal brain at work. My hope is that we're not already too far gone to realize the great gift we've been given and have debates over the best way to preserve it.

This book was an interesting read. While I do not agree with everything written, it was an interesting take on what is happening in the country. Read it with an open mind and do check a few of the opinions against the facts. In all, it was informative and a good reminder of where we used to be and where we could be headed. I would recommend this book to most adults.

This book starts out really well, but then it ends very poorly. For about the first 4/5 of the book, he makes a very interesting and compelling argument. There are dozens of little points he makes here and there where I think he is either wrong or he exaggerates or misunderstands something.

As an example of the kind of thing he is wrong about, at one point, he argues that in medieval Catholic theology, innovation was stifled because curiosity was regarded as a sin. This is at best a half-truth. Yes, it is true that in Catholic moral theology, there is indeed such a thing as the 'sin of curiosity', but this word 'curiosity' is being used in a very precise and technical way, it does not even remotely mean anything like what Goldberg thinks it means, namely, that it is wrong to think of new ideas.

But, in any big book that cites hundreds of other books, these kind of little mistakes are going be made.

The bigger problem with the book and the reason why I dinged it and removed a star is that at about the 4/5 mark, Goldberg literally throws out everything that he has been talking about up to that point, and goes on an extended multichapter rant about Donald Trump! Now, some of the complaints he makes about Trump are actually to his thesis, but the vast majority of his complaints have nothing at all to do with the topic of the book and are really just a string of ad hominems and insults, even while he complains about Trump relying on ad hominems and insults! About 20 pages into his 'why I hate Donald Trump and his supporters' rant, he sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton talking about the 'basket of deplorables' who voted for Trump (and yes, his rant really does go one that long) I started wondering whether I was suddenly reading a completely different book, after all, what do Trump's executive orders have to do with the history of the Enlightenment, he really loses sight of the topic of his own book.

Goldberg claims that the original manuscript was about twice its current length, but I really think that, if anything, it wasn't whittled down enough because the last 1/5 of the book contains a lot of stuff that is completely unrelated, I get that he is extremely angry and bitter that Trump won, but he needed to stay on topic and not just endlessly vent his spleen just because he can.

If he wants to write about how much he hates Trump, he can do that, but most of that stuff didn't belong in this book and a better editor would have removed it.

Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy takes us through history revealing the way mankind has chosen to govern themselves- both good, bad and even ugly. Jonah Goldberg has done his research well, giving his readers much to think about. Goldberg begins by taking God out of the picture, so we can only focus on ourselves and our choices or the choices made for us.

He begins by talking about the earliest form of governing- tribalism. Tribal life- gangs, mafia, terrorists, the clan, cults, even dictatorship govts., etc. is very seductive to people, because the Western way of life involves nothing but a ton of work. Even the family unit is tribal, making it very easy for individuals to go backwards to this governing way of life. He then goes into Romanticism- people who dream that there must be a better life. The most dangerous governing is corruption and today, Goldberg finds that the Left and Right in our country are actually manifestations of corruption.

Throughout history, bandits who terrorized towns, took what they wanted, until a smarter more educated thief offered the towns protection at a price- taxes. The formation of the United States was actually revolutionary in every sense of the word. Our Constitution is us and we must put out the effort to keep it exactly as it was written, because as imperfect as everything is in life, that piece of paper is all that stands between us and going back to Tribalism, which is where we are sinking into now. According to our Constitution, only Congress can levy a tax and taxation must have representation.

Our Congress has been giving our taxation rights away- to the FCC in 1996, and again to the Universal Service Fund to tax long distance phone calls- all without our consent behind our backs in a shadow government, which grows in size daily. They have given taxing rights also to the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, FTC, and more.
This shadow government is now our 4th branch of govt., which was never in our Constitution. So corrupt, because no one puts in the hard work to get them out of our lives by removing their power. Goldberg ends by stating, you really can’t take God out of our history. He makes it clear that the distance between dictatorship and democracy has shrunk in our government and that we are at the brink of our own suicide. I only hope we can put in the hard work to stop it. 4 ½ STARS.

This book talks about western and European ideas and values without mentioning the salient point of race. It examines the ideas like they are easily transferable, they are not. In one breath in the first few chapters he talks about how colonialism wasn’t able to instill western western in the next he talks about how important Hispanic Americans are. They both fail to see the thread. No mention that the US was a white super majority until the immigration act of 1965, which the public was promised would not change the racial makeup and integrity of the nation, it did oh did it! I’m guessing this book and Goldberg’s book of the same name is an attempt to ideological jack the more prescient original nook by the same name by Birman, or an attempt to dissuade people and distract them from Pat Buchanan’s wonderful book the death of the West. I gave it two stars because it was short so it didn’t waste much of my time.

Suicide of the West is the most thought-provoking book I’ve read since Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg’s first book. He somehow does two things at once. He makes you stand on your mental tiptoes to grasp the content but, at the same time, makes the content accessible by putting it on the lower shelf. He makes you think but doesn’t leave you confused. I’m a life-long conservative and deeply believe in those ideas that animate conservative philosophy. He rightly points out that, when it gets down to it, conservatism is about two things: ideas matter and character matters. Our nation flirts with suicide whenever those central tenets are disregarded. As a mental health professional, I have a duty to warn should a client express suicidal intent. Jonah Goldberg has fulfilled his duty to warn. The suicide has yet to happen, but it could. The label on the conservative bottle has been peeled off and taped onto a different bottle containing tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics. The contents of the first bottle are life-giving. But drinking the tasty contents of the second bottle will kill us if we’re fooled into drinking them. If we give up our principles (the first bottle) in the pursuit of power (the second bottle), we’ll end up with neither power nor principles. As he warns us in the last line of his book, “Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore.”

This is my first Jonah Goldberg book. I'm impressed with how he can weave a long, involved story into a coherent narrative. The only flaw is that this could have been edited and shortened by 50 pages.

Goldberg's thesis that man naturally leans toward tribalism makes sense, as he defends his thesis very well. Man is by nature a brutal, tortuous animal whose only loyalty is to the family (tribe). He gives us ample examples of that. Humans didn't get away from tribalism until 300 years ago. But then American progressives slowly got us back to that and now we are facing nationalism, populism and political isolationism.

While I may not agree with everything Goldberg has said, this book gives us plenty to think about.

In Jonah Goldberg's latest book, he argues that tribalism, populism, and nationalism are ruining American democracy. But these -isms aren't new inventions. Drawing on extensive research, these -isms are actually the way things have historically been. It has only been since around the year 1700 that we have seen an explosion in freedom, respect for others, and staggering economic growth. Goldberg offers some theories about why what he calls “The Miracle” happened, but he's more interested in showing how the Miracle created the modern world and how it's in danger of slipping away.

The political left and right define freedom in different ways. The right prefers negative liberty, which is defined as freedom from government interference. The left generally strives for positive liberty, that is the state must guarantee things like health care, employment, etc. As Goldberg himself points out, “What often gets left out of the debate is the fact that economic growth and technological innovation do more to provide positive liberty than any government could.” The Miracle of democratic capitalism has done more to advance the relative wealth of society than anything else in all of human history. Once we started believing that all men and women were created equal and that each of us has certain unalienable rights, the standard of living, life expectancy, and technology we have at our fingertips accelerated at an incredible rate. The idea of negative liberty taking root has been the greatest welfare program in all of human history. I don't think he should have made a purely economic argument, but I wish he had spent more time on it instead of tucking it away in an appendix.

Goldberg spends most of the book showing where we were pre- and post-Miracle, leading to the theme of gratitude. We are not grateful for what the past has given us and, as a result, are in danger of losing the spark that made the modern world as great as it is. I think his core argument can be summed up in this passage found on page 66:

"Under the best of circumstances, every important endeavor requires work. Every person who has ever been married understands that marriage requires effort. Every athlete understands the importance of practice and training. Every general knows that troops lose their edge unless it is carefully maintained. The Miracle of liberal democratic capitalism is not self-sustaining. Turn your back on its maintenance and it will fall apart. Take it for granted and people will start reverting to their natural impulses of tribalism. The best will lack all conviction and the worst will be full of passionate intensity. Things will fall apart."

I fear that the left will ignore this book because of its all-consuming desire for identity and grievance politics. Some on the right will ignore it because people view Goldberg as anti-Trump. This is one thing that Goldberg is arguing against. We must not view politics as an us vs them sport where we celebrate our team's win and our enemy's loss. That is our tribal brain at work. My hope is that we're not already too far gone to realize the great gift we've been given and have debates over the best way to preserve it.

This is a thoughtful and well reasoned book. I don't agree with everything the author expresses, but I respect his thoughtful positions. His thesis is basically that the West has abandoned the ideas and values that led to liberty and the explosion of creativity and wealth it has experienced over the last few hundred years. He does a very good job of supporting that idea and this was a enjoyable book to read and consider. Recommended.

Jonah Goldberg is, of course, one of the more gifted polemic writers operating today (along with Coates and Williamson and a few others). His work here is certainly less polemic than much of his earlier work, and is, in my opinion, better and more entertaining for it. This is an important work, is almost certainly going to be considered Goldberg's seminal work, and is well worth reading, regardless of your political ideology.

Jonah Goldberg has written an excellent book describing how our country has fallen into the state we are in and gives very positive, thought provoking ideas of how we can choose to become better people, better communities and ultimately a better country. Very worth the time.

this country was founded on ideals that fostered prosperity and strength. Whether those principles have evolved or been twisted is ultimately up to the reader to decide. Although the book runs a bit long and is at times a tad fry, it is an intelligent presentation of classic conservative position. Some interesting perspectives.

This is truly a deep, insightful book. The trip thru human history by the alien observer is some of the best prose I've ever seen! The realization that the miracle is Unnatural, that the normal condition of man is absolute grinding poverty and the prosperity we now enjoy is what is strange is vital to making the choice to not commit suicide.

I can't believe the research that went into this amazing work. I learned a LOT from it. For example, the split between Locke and Rousseau is better explained than anything I'd run across before.

Even if you don't like what the founders built, I think that you'll still enjoy this book.

An interesting treatise on the history and state of our democracy and all the areas we include into this, such as capitalism and feminism and George Washington.. There's a lot here that will enlighten and plenty that will have you arguing with the page. Enjoy!

Goldberg does a great job outlining the miracle that is Western civilization and capitalism and the threats posed to it on both sides of the aisle. Goldberg weaves pop culture references, history, philosophy, and economics into a beautiful tapestry and plea for gratitude for the incredible civilization we have inherited and a call to save it while we can.

This is an important book. I cannot stress that enough. Jonah Goldberg has done an incredible job with Suicide of the West, showing our current digression of culture and politics into toxic tribalism, both on the Left and the Right, and impressively unpacking the foundations of the ideologies/philosophies that brought us here. We are clearly at a political and cultural crossroads on where things go from here, and Goldberg hones in very clearly on this idea. 5/5.

Let me say at the outset, Mr. Goldberg would have done better by omitting sniping remarks against the Left, not because they are not without merit, but because the comments have a tendency to impede an objective assessment of his thesis. On the other hand, he is a well-known quantity, and perhaps his detractors would have already cast his views as conservative, so best be it to let some of his biases be known. The best section is the Appendix. In my opinion this section is a "tour de force" economic argument -- we live in an unprecedented, prosperous and in the context of history, an absolutely remarkable epoch. I can't add much to the comments already here, but I will share some of my personally memorable quotations:

It is always easier to win an argument when you can truthfully tell your adversary he's right in what he believes, just wrong in how he's applying the principle.

Peter Schramm, liked to tell the story of his family's escape from Hungary in the aftermath of its failed revolution against Russian Communists: “But where are we going?” I asked.
“We are going to America,” my father said.
“Why America? I prodded.
“Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place,” he replied.

Merit, the essences of the Jeffersonian ideal of an anti-aristocratic society, is not code for racism.

Color-blindness is in fact a facet of not just meritocracy but also the principle of universal equality.

Our animal brains have programs and subroutines designed to keep us alive, not determine the truth. The ability to reason is an important tool for survival. But is it more important than fear? Anger? Loyalty? Remember, for primitive man, survival was a collective enterprise, and the cognitive tools we developed were far more varied and complicated than simply rational. . . . The group that follows prohibitions against eating unclean food has an evolutionary advantage all the same. Similarly, groups that adhere to notions of retributive justice—both internally for traitors and externally for strangers—will be more likely to pass on their genes. More broadly, groups that have a coherent vision of group meaning—religious, political, social, etc. – will likely be more successful at cooperating, and cooperation is the core evolutionary adaptation of humanity.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

The out-of-wedlock birth rate for whites (29%) is now higher than what it was for blacks (24 percent) when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his (in)famous 1965 report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

The imperial arrogance of progressive social engineers and social justice warriors had earned an apocalyptic backlash so powerful that even clear-eyed conservatives who recognized Trump's dishonesty and demagoguery couldn't resist it. Indeed, as much as I hold Trump in contempt, I am still compelled to admit that, if my vote would have decided the election, I probably would have voted for him.

Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putman:
In a massive survey of over 30,000 Americans, he found that there was an undeniable correlation between increased diversity and breakdowns in community. He is adamant that racism isn't the primary explanation. . . . According to Putman, people who live in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

One of the great cleavages between left and right is a disagreement over the definition of freedom. The left tends to define freedom in material terms, the right in political ones. . . . Thus the state must provide or guarantee health care, income (or employment), etc. This is so-called positive liberty. The right prefers “negative liberty” – freedom from government interference. What often gets left out of the debate is the fact that economic growth and technological innovation do more to provide positive liberty than any government possibly could.

A wonderful book with the world's most misleading title. It is about history, human nature, and so much more. It is filled with profound ideas, presented in a very accessible way - an easy, yet thought provoking read.

Should be a classic, but will not be, due to some editors terrible title decision.

Only the first and last chapters have any valuable points. The rest of the book is biased right-wing polemics without any good arguments. Also, the title is misleading as he talks mostly about the USA and his vision is very narrow. For example, compare the book with Yuval Harari books: Homo Deus and Sapiens. Overall his argument is this: our western civilization has been built on rationality, so we need to control our emotions. However, during his polemics, if conservatives succumb to their emotions that is acceptable and if liberals do that then it is bad. One last item that shows his bias level, is his equivalency of Trump with President Obama. I am not a fan of Obama, I think he missed the opportunity of one in an era and I do not appreciate both his domestic (especially his economics-he helped significantly more Wall Street than main streets). Also, I believe, he and both Clintons were responsible for coming of Trump. But all these, do not excuse even comparing Trump with Obama.

It's refreshing to find a well reasoned historically based political analysis to counter the florid double talk of recent progressive promoting tomes like 'The Soul of America' by Jon Meacham. It's unfortunate that the meaningless 'soul' idea will find popular support among today's unthinking socialist egalitarian majority so as to ratify the slow decline and demise of the American dream. Decline is no longer a choice; it has become irreversible with small likelihood of mitigation by push-back like Goldberg's.

Jonah Goldberg is a wonderful writer, with the gift of communicating complex intellectual history and concepts to lay readers.

This book is right up there with Tom Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Both books that teach you things, but, more importantly, they teach you how to think about things: history, politics, and human nature.

And best of all, Goldberg is intellectually honest and lighthearted, which is very hard to do.

Excellent read, thoughtful and profound. Be prepared to read and reread for fuller understanding. I don’t agree with all the author’s conclusions, but then, I haven’t done the research he has. Highly recommended.

Mr. Goldberg takes the reader through the history of liberal democracy and market capitalism and why this “Miracle” is some thing that runs counter to human nature. Read it and pass it on. The ideas here in matter too much and need to be part of the discussion at every dinner table and gathering of intelligent people.

This is a thoughtful, comprehensive, well researched assessment of our humanity, its basic forms, and its cultivated heights. It is clearly conservative to its core, but with a deeply considered assessment of alternative thought processes.

I listened to the audible version read by the author. I enjoyed it. The author did a good job reading it and the sound quality is good as well. Some audiobooks even those with good content can be ruined by poor narration and sound quality. It is a thoughtful and well written book . The author takes his subject matter seriously but not himself. The tone of the book is good-natured and light hearted. Very much out of keeping with the times sadly .

Begins with, "There is no God in this book." Concludes with, "we got where we are because of God." Huh? Liar. There are some valid points in this book, but it is skewed towards his politics which brings into doubt his conclusions. He conveniently leaves out examples of his party while pointing fingers at the other party. He does not hold everyone equally accountable for the state of decay he says we are in. Knowing who he writes for, I was not expecting it, but he tries to come off as non-partisan and fails. Then to conclude it all with God just taints the whole book and all of its conclusions. Next time, tell the reader what they are in for from the get go so as to not have to question every premise laid out previous to the ending.

Jonah’s exposition on human nature, tribalism, and “The Miracle” should be a must read for every high school and college student. However, this book becomes a transcendent instant classic with his argument (with appropriate passion) about the indispensable virtue of gratitude.

I will be buying a copy for each of my children. I hope it will influence their lives like I believe it will mine.

Goldberg takes unrepresentative views from an insignificant minority of progressives and couches those thoughts as defining the "Left". And of course inserting unflattering though inaccurate adjectives in their description.

Interesting book. Thought provoking. Lots of unexamined assumptions. As belief in the gods decreases in the US (people identify more and more as "nones") there will have to be other unifying core shared values identified. Obviously that's not happening, as the US is so divided.

The US is signatory to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which it states our human rights stem from our shared common humanity, (not from the gods). The shifting of the foundational underpinnings of the West seem to make Mr. Goldberg nervous. Returning to outmoded, and outdated cultural unifiers probably is not what's going to work.

I wonder if Jonah Goldberg supports his own people's Jewish tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics (Zionism)? or does he only criticize these natural impulses when practiced by the goyim?

A pedantic pollywoggle thinly disguised Goldberg's anti-Trumpism confirmation bias via assuming the nature of man is decay which The Miracle of capitalism and liberalism elevated via merit. Goldberg eliminates God in the introduction as an assumption then invokes God for his confirmation bias to begin and end with anti-Trumpism though he invokes it in the introduction and conclusion. Though Goldberg spews against 'feeling' he imbibes it himself under the cloak of Buckley eruditism to hide his downright hatred. To mask his disgust he conflates populism (i.e. Trump) with identity politics (the left) to given himself cover --- to cover. Disappointing given Goldberg's excellent work in Liberal Fascism and The Tyranny of Cliches. Guess Goldberg is not in touch with his 'inner feelings' - reaction formation?

It is sad that this steaming pile of self important pseudo intellectual tripe has shamelessly been titled Suicide of the West. There actually is a masterpiece by the same name, written by James Burnham.
Buy that book and read it.

Subtitle needs to be: How never-Trumpers at the National Review and the Weekly Standard are Killing Circulation of their Once Great Periodicals. Most of what Jonah G. writes is merely an op-ed with a smattering of facts. This is no different except that maybe instead of facts he's fortune-telling and hoping an American demise will materialize just to prove him right. These aloof political writers forget that they live in this country too, yet they seem to be unable to accept that Trump is President and if his "boat" goes down we'll all go down with it.

I found this book to be shallow and disjointed . there were no big ideas here. The author doesn't seem to understand that blind obedience to the cheap labor/open borders lobby is not patriotism. His arrogance comes through in is the way he stereotypes the Americans who are outside the beltway as gap tooth idiots. It's clear the lobbyist paymasters on K street guide his thinking .

The argument and narrative are incomplete. The author seems to think "identity politics" is a uniquely "left wing" problem. This completely ignores that the last election was won almost entirely by "white identity politics." It is impossible to have an honest discussion about identity politics today with out diving deep into the identity politics of conservatism as well as those of liberalism, and by failing to do so the author delivers an incomplete argument. His book will reinforce the excessive partisanship we see today, and those that wish to demonize the other will find plenty of material, but it will fall flat to those who would seek a complete analysis.

While Goldberg presents some interesting premises, he ultimately relies on his own assumptions and constructions of American exceptionalism as evidence of his claims. Quickly turns from what seems like a fresh defence of American liberalism to an exhausting assault of strawmen from the annals of the National Review. Save your money and Google William F. Buckley.

The author's viewpoint is conservative. He often refers to others as "left-wing". He claims not to get into partisan politics in his writing, but the entire premise of his book is tilted towards partisanship. He sets up his argument by spending the first 200 pages explaining the history of American political philosophy. It is very dense and a love of politics and history cannot help diffuse this density.
The most alarming chapter was when explaining identity politics and tribalism, the author focused solely on the progressive movement. Did not mention his conservative brethren at all.
Buyer beware.

The election of Donald Trump seems to have sparked a fire in the minds of intellectuals across America. Since the election, there has been a remarkable effort on both sides of the political debate to figure out how it could have happened, what caused it, and how we can reverse those causes. The growing consensus is that, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, the West has gone through a significant change in ethos that has led its inhabitants to abandon the very principles that made it successful. As Goldberg describes it, through populism, nationalism, and identity politics, our culture is committing suicide. This book is Goldberg's analysis as to why this is happening.

As I was reading, I consistently recalled Morse's Juggernaut: Why the System Crushes the Only People Who Can Save It. The plan of the book is similar: Lay out the argument for the modern Classical Liberal Capitalist system, and show how it was vulnerable to the dangers of progressivism. While Morse's tome is based in economics, and Goldberg's in politics, the idea is the same: The West was founded on Individualism and the family. Around the early 20th century, the West experienced a kind of close that allowed the forces of hierarchy and statism to regain control. What we see in the 21st century today is the residual effect. Progressivism led incontrovertibly to a point where group identity would dominate and overthrow the free enterprise mentality that the West was founded on.

Goldberg shines in his scathing critiques of progressivism, which will be familiar yet still fresh to readers of his other books (Liberal Fascism and The Tyranny of Clichés). In this work, he takes a decidedly philosophical approach from the opening where he explores the necessity of objective truth. He adds tints of evolutionary biology with his exploration of human nature. Goldberg's readers are used to his wide-angle perspective; in Suicide of the West, he expands it further. This might be frustrating for those interested in a more zoomed-in approach, but most will recognize that what is happening in the West cannot be explained by sound bites and memes. A fuller understanding is necessary.

The only real disappointing aspect of this book is that it is unlikely to appeal to anyone on the other side of the debate. Modern liberals could benefit from Goldberg's insights, but are unlikely to read, or, if they do, are unlikely to be convinced. Anyone who considers himself to be a modern liberal these days, even if they agree with the thesis of this book, will object to Goldberg's criticism of progressivism as the root of the Trump problem, just as diehard conservatives object to Mark Lilla's criticism of Reaganism as the root of the problem. Some biases are impossible to break.

Altogether, this is a welcome addition to the debate. In addition to Goldberg's incisive wit and penetrating commentary, he provides a valuable overview of our condition, one that might just help turn it around if the right readers get ahold of it.

SUICIDE OF THE WEST is economic history, evolutionary history, political history, pop cultural history, (regular) cultural history and the history of political philosophy. Its thesis is as follows: (classical) liberal capitalism along with its corollaries (the government works for us; we do not work for the government; our rights come from God, not from the government; as individuals we can utilize our entrepreneurial impulses to better our lot; the free markets free us from zero-sum economic games, and so on) was a great accident. Pivotal figures such as Locke and Adam Smith did not create these phenomena but they codified them and energized them. Once again, these are accidental. JG calls them miraculous. Our default position follows human nature. Absent the Lockean/Founding Fathers intervention we would be rushing in the direction of totalitarianism and autocracy. We would fear all non-kin strangers and we would thump them on the head, rape and steal their women and scratch out a subsistence living with low life expectancy. We would be living the nasty, brutish and short lives articulated by Hobbes.

Our danger now is that we have taken our current, miraculous condition for granted and constantly risk regressing to the behaviors prompted by nature. In short, we are always only a step or two away from losing our liberty, our freedom and our prosperity. One of our central problems in these endeavors is our occasional (sometimes common) failure to remember that liberal, market capitalism is an economic system. It cannot solve our deeper psychological challenges: our need to 'belong' and our desire for meaning in our lives. When we expect our economic systems to address these needs (the kinds of needs that relate to friends, family and faith) we risk losing everything.

Bottom line: in a Reaganesque spirit, JG is addressing not just the importance and success of our system but, equally, its fragility. Our dangers are complacency, ingratitude and a sense of entitlement. If we turn to tribalism, populism, nationalism and identity politics (i.e. succumb to the siren songs of human nature) we risk destroying all that we should be holding near and dear.

This is argued very nicely in a substantial book (one that was originally twice this length) of some 450 pp. of relatively dense text and extensive reference material. The good news is that JG writes with a light touch, graced with humor, e.g. and personal asides. He relies at times on materials from our popular culture. What, e.g., do the various incarnations of Godzilla tell us about our plight?

I particularly like JG's ability to utilize evolutionary history. It was from him, e.g., that I became aware of the work of Lawrence Keeley (WAR BEFORE CIVILIZATION: THE MYTH OF THE PEACEFUL SAVAGE). Since debates concerning our system often come down to our view of human nature and the claims of Hobbes/Locke vs. Rousseau, just how peaceful were those pre-modern savages? The answer: not very. By the same token, JG provides an extensive appendix on human progress that looks at such things as the average daily 'wage' across human history and the relativity of our notions of 'poverty'. I remember meeting with a Russian delegation in the District of Columbia that sought to assess the nature of local poverty. They were taken to the poorest sections of the District and immediately responded that 'these people are not poor. They have shelter, centralized heating, automobiles, color television sets, and so on.' Many of the contemporary American 'poor' live lives that would, in some areas, rival the lives of pre-modern kings. In other words, there is a great deal of common sense here, combined with hard facts, but then the use of reason and evidence (as opposed to the 'feelings' associated with romanticism) is one of the crucial elements in our success.

The only regrettable part of the book is that it includes an extended diatribe against Donald Trump, particularly when JG admits that if the results of the election had all come down to his personal vote he would have cast it for Trump. The diatribe arises in part because of JG's belief that personal morality is part of the conservative code. Trump's many transgressions are, for him, beyond the pale. To that some would answer with the parable-like story that is making its rounds on the internet. Consider a family with a basement infested with vermin. Many people tell that family that they sympathize with them, that they would like to help, and so on, but the vermin remain. Along comes an individual in a soiled outfit, using salty speech—the sort of individual with whom you would not seek to develop a personal relationship. However, that individual tells you that he will free your basement of vermin and then proceeds to do so.

At the close of the book JG argues that if we jeopardize and then lose our "miracle" "we are committing a suicidal act on a civilizational scale" (p. 379). With such stakes we might desire a leader of Churchillian stature but Churchill sleeps in Bladon Churchyard and we must now do what we can, not what we might prefer, no matter how understandable our inclination to wring our hands.