rounding up a bit due to a bit more repetition than absolutely necessary and perhaps an extra tangent or two,
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 Americanstyle 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 Suicide of the West'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 zerosum 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, It doesn't feel like it, "
Goldberg is an antiTrump 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.
Jonah Goldberg justifies inequality and a myriad of global problems as the price for Freedom, as if it existed as an absolute, almost like an object with physical dimensions and qualities.
The object of freedom is to make a commitment in one way or the other, The massive inequality that Goldberg justifies minuses out any aspect of change, Capital and its accumulation above every other consideration is not about stuff or maintaining the ability to maintain "freedom", its about power commoditized and numerical which only has meaning in relation to the interests of the other holders of capital.
And what is that interest, the control of price and the market, That society creates the space for this struggle to take place is of course something Neoliberals barely understand, its not merely the existence of nightwatchmen, monetary policy and prisons that make "capitalism" possible.
The advantages Goldberg accrues to Capitalism were derived from a mixed economy where control of the business enterprise was as essential to ensuring those in positions of power would remain in power as it did secure the needs of society as a whole.
Goldberg would do well to remember the maxim of Machiavelli when he pointed out that men are always ready to overthrow their masters.
Its transplanting it with something that works that is the rarity, The Neoliberal Revolution is over and it was never the sweet words and complex ideology of policy wonks such as Goldberg that made that revolution possible.
The world gave it a try and found it wanting, the age is over, the magic incantation of Neoliberal mantras about freedom have come to an end.
Goldberg seems intelligent so I'm sure he can come up with something new that might find a receptive audience, this however is not it, Really enjoyed it, apart from hanging inalienable rights from somewhere in the stratosphere, I finished this by sheer force of will, I came across Jonah Goldberg in an NPR interview and followed him on Twitter in my quest to try to see
the “other side” aka conservatives.
He seems like a smart, decent human being, But Im rethinking that after subjecting myself to this slog of a book, The main argument that society progressed rapidly after millennia of brutal inequality and we could do well to appreciate that we arent wallowing in the medieval muck anymore is salient, but can also be made in about fifteen pages.
This book is bloated, meandering, and frankly boring, With such brilliant insights as “white men passed the Civil Rights Act!!!” it reads more like a ridiculously long Reddit post from someone who thinks theyre really smart because they read a lot of Breitbart.
I appreciate that he gives credit where credit is due, and I suppose I learned a few things, but this book didnt need to be written and you probably dont need to read it.
Just to clarify: this is not a review, but notes Ive written about the reasons I want to read Goldbergs book, and my expectations Baysian priors, if you will.
The books publication date isnt untilApril,
Jonah Goldberg is attacked from the right as a sitelinkRINO Republican in name only, not because he is a liberal in disguise but because he is disloyal to and willing to criticize members of the GOP who advocate the exercise of power in ways he considers antithetical to conservative principles.
Im a liberal, but Ive spent the last few years studying the trap of partisan tribalism which has captured political discourse in the United States.
That has led me to disassociate myself from either tribal party, If pressed to be precise, Ill admit that I still caucus with the Democrats as a voter, but I despise equally the hatred and unthoughtful anger that both tribes use to “excite the base” and push their agenda.
I read Goldbergs weekly sitelinkGFile column to get the perspective of a thoughtful critic of his own tribe, but Im usually somewhat disappointed.
Despite his critics, hes still firmly a member of the conservative tribe,
How can I tell
Because while he is quite careful in the use of logic when criticizing his own party, he throws out any subtlety when criticizing the enemy.
It really doesnt take long to find evidence: just look at any of his references to “the Democrats” and youll find him painting with a brush a continent wide.
Of course, if he admitted that some liberals werent cretinous miscreants and are actually both smart and wellintentioned, hed lose the rest of his credibility and sitelinkprobably his career.
I continue to read him despite the sizable volume of monetary solicitations that encourages the National to send me because his attacks on the tribalism of the right are enlightening.
And, frankly, reassuring. But Im doubtful that he will prove to be a useful contributor to the more profound debate on how the cognitive instinct towards tribalism is a general societal poison.
He is viewing the problem through an ideological lens just look at the bullet points he and his publisher chose for his blurb, and youll find a strong statement of politically conservative axioms.
As a counter to the “individual is sovereign” bullet point, for example, the recent sitelinkHow Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future discusses how the Enlightenment emphasis on individualism is in contradictory tension with our species evolutionary instinct towards tribalism.
Note that all of Goldbergs other bullet points emphasize the societal we instead of the “sovereign” I and you should be reminded of the contrast between libertarianism and various other forms of conservatism.
Still, an important part of the solution to the general problem requires a careful consideration of the arguments one might not agree with, and might even find sitelinkthreatening to ones cognitive identity.
So it goes on the toberead shelf,
And then: Goldberg was interviewed on KQED Forum in May: sitelinkJonah Goldberg on How Tribalism is Threatening American Democracy, I shouldn't have been surprised that he sounded more reasonable than I expected, but I was, I suspect there were two reasons for that, First, he's speaking to a broad audience and doesn't want to alienate potential readers book buyers, so he is going to tone down the partisanship.
But the second is that his day job, as it were, is mostly preaching to his own church, Yeah, he's famous for being critical of Trump, but that doesn't mean he isn't going to play to his audience and be scathing towards the real opposition.
But the book is, again, to a broader audience, so there's no rationale for entertaining the troops sorry for the mixed metaphors,
So maybe the book will be better than I'd hoped, In the course of the Trump presidency I developed an appreciation for the positions taken by Jonah Goldberg and David French who from the National and subsequently in sitelink The Dispatch mounted a conservative resistance to the GOP's maddening embrace of Trump's blend of populism and tribalism.
In light of which, I really wanted to like this book much more than I did, In fact, all the way through the book, I had the peculiar experience where every time I encountered Goldberg expounding upon this or that topic, I found myself reminded of earlier books that I had read and other authors who were far more engaging.
For example, Goldberg certainly mounts a persuasive defence of the merits of capitalism and liberalism, but I simultaneously found myself harkening back to the witness of Michael Novak's sitelink The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism read so many years ago and wanting to pull it off the bookshelf.
John Locke figures heavily in Goldberg's history of our nation's founding relative to Jacques Rousseau and again, this was ok as far as it went but again it served to remind me of the benefit of reading Thomas G.
West's sitelink The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedomor Bernard Bailyn's sitelink The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Goldberg devotes the better part of a chapter to rock and roll as the manifestation of of romanticism reasserting itself in contemporary life but again, it was all to reminiscent of and made me long to reread Alan Bloom's philosophical treatment of the same in sitelink The Closing of the American Mind, which I read two decades ago but can recall as if it were yesterday.
That being said, if there was anything I enjoyed or took a guilty pleasure in, it was Goldberg's concluding chapters characterization of the rise of Trump as a rightwing manifestation of American populism and tribalism mirroring the "identity politics" of the left, in much the same manner as the cult of personality surrounding Obama's rise was subsequently echoed by Trump's followers.
In making his cogently argued case against Trump, Goldberg covered all the reasons why I find Trump so revolting myself from Trump's ambivalence towards or fundamental opposition to conservative principles to the moral abdication of Evangelical Christians in their realpolitik embrace of Trump himself.
All things considered, it was a book that left me wanting something more, Good, but not great,
p. s. I am sympathetic to the following excerpts from a review in sitelink The New Chicagoan:
Suicide of the West is an excellent diagnosis for the issues facing the foundations of Western civilization, but it stops short of providing much direction for the way forward.
Goldberg endorses the idea of “earned success,” or finding fulfillment because an individuals contributions to civil society are valued by civil society, Civil society, too that web of institutions between the individual and the state is also endorsed as a way to reinforce underlying first principles, But as Goldberg notes, civil society is itself in a frayed state and will need to be resuscitated if it is to serve its purpose.
The conclusion that ingratitude is at the heart of the “suicide of the West” is also not entirely convincing, although not entirely wrong either, Gratitude does not guarantee stability, as he argues, but it does make the defense of civilization an easier task,
Ultimately, the liberal democratic capitalist order only works if the people are virtuous, because virtue more than any other factor can stave off the entropy inherent in human nature.
This is a point that Goldberg largely skips but also implicitly rejects with his ingratitudebased conclusion,
“There is no God in this book,” he declares on page one, and for the most part that holds true, Organized religion, the engine of most virtues, is mentioned in passing, as he writes much, much later: “If you believe that man has a strong religious instinct, if Ive convinced you that nature including human nature abhors a vacuum, then you have to believe that Gods absence creates an opening for all manner of ideas to flood in.
”
This point, that the absence of widespread belief in God creates chaos, seems to explain more of the decline of the West than ingratitude does.
The hollowing out of institutional values is one of the worst selfinflicted wounds that could have been committed, and one of the most difficult to reverse.
Rebuilding civil society and creating a process that helps people earn success are goals with difficult but clearcut methods of achieving, But how does the Catholic Church, for example, get people back into the pews How does it rebuild its credibility after almostyears of sexual abuse scandals And what are the consequences if it cant find the answers Because fixing that is not quite as clearcut, and yet the ramifications will be just as large.
Contra Goldbergs points about civil society and earned success, organizations like bowling leagues, Meals on Wheels, and fraternal clubs dont create virtue, They can reinforce it, but creating virtue takes two institutions: the family, and organized religion, Goldberg goes into detail on the role of the family and how it is under attack by certain political and cultural forces, But organized religion is just as important at forming values that will create a healthy, even grateful, society, and it deserved more space than it received in the book.
.