In his 1964 book Suicide of the West, political philosopher James Burnham argued that liberalism—the contemporary strain exemplified by Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Herblock—may not have been directly responsible for the contraction of Western civilization but certainly “motivates and justifies” that contraction, permitting the West “to be reconciled to dissolution.”
Burnham’s book is worth revisiting chiefly as a specimen of Cold War conservative thought. Although he offered a psychological account of liberalism, linking it to feelings of guilt, he largely eschewed examining its moral and spiritual dimensions, the aspects of political life that animated his fellow Communist-turned-conservative Whittaker Chambers. Many of the specific policies and precepts that Burnham offered as tests for determining whether a person is a liberal have aged badly. And his proclivity for using medical metaphors to describe liberalism—“syndrome,” “infected,” “encysted”—portends later, lazier polemicists’ tendency to pathologize disagreeable views.
Burnham was not hopeful about the outcome of the crisis he saw unfolding; aside from his book’s last paragraph, a halfhearted admission that the “final collapse of the West is not yet inevitable,” he left little room for optimism.
By contrast, Jonah Goldberg, in borrowing Burnham’s title for his own latest book, wants to emphasize that the mortal injury, precisely because it is one we are inflicting on ourselves, can still be averted. “Decline is a choice,” he writes. There is still time to unchoose it.
Goldberg’s book is a big, baggy, sometimes frustrating, often brilliant combination of intellectual history and political essay. He says that the original manuscript was twice as long as the final product; it certainly should have been much further pruned. But at its best, the book makes a simple, vitally important argument about gratitude and perpetuation. And it synthesizes the research and theories of dozens of sociologists, historians, and economists in a new and helpful way. If Suicide of the West—like Goldberg’s first book, the bestseller Liberal Fascism—comes to be so widely read and debated that it shapes the public understanding of its subject, we will be much better off for it.
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We got it good these days, and we oughta appreciate it. This is where Goldberg’s argument begins: with gratitude. Ours is an age of unprecedented material prosperity, with more wealth and health, less poverty and hunger, than ever before. The stats and graphs that Goldberg offers to prove this point, mostly collected in a 27-page appendix, are worth marveling over.
Why is it that infant mortality has fallen and crop yields have risen and cancer is more survivable? Ultimately, it’s because of capitalism, “the best anti-poverty program ever conceived” and “the most liberating force in human history.” The rise of capitalism—and the liberal democratic order that supports it and is supported by it—is such a happy aberration in the history of humankind that Goldberg refers to it throughout as “the Miracle.”
The opening chapters of Suicide of the West are spent proving just how miraculous the Miracle is by way of describing the long, grim slog that preceded it. “The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death,” Goldberg writes. Which isn’t the same thing as chaos: From the facts of our evolved nature—the differences between the sexes, the biology of human reproduction, our ability to think abstractly—emerge certain ordering tendencies. One of these is tribalism, the tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them.” It was once essential to everyday survival; even today, we can work around it but cannot do away with it.
Goldberg takes us on a hundred-page trip from tribalism to aristocracy to nation-states to early capitalism, leaning heavily on the work of Deirdre McCloskey, Douglass North, and Francis Fukuyama—and, to a lesser extent, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Game of Thrones. Goldberg doesn’t skimp on the tales of war and slavery and torture. (He does arguably skimp on the philosophical and artistic achievements of, say, ancient and medieval civilizations.)
And then the Miracle came. “It is impossible to authoritatively answer the question of why” capitalism arose. Maybe “Christianity was a necessary ingredient.” Maybe the scientific revolution was. Maybe the most important factors arose from the “weirdness” of England in the 1700s. Ideas mattered, of course, and Goldberg sometimes refers to the Miracle as the “Lockean Revolution,” but he is careful not to overstate the contribution of Locke or any other philosopher.
Goldberg is partial to McCloskey’s thesis that shifts in rhetoric—in how people talked about innovation, entrepreneurship, and the economy—were crucial to the Miracle. “Capitalism, like democracy, is talk, talk, talk all the way down,” McCloskey says. But if words giveth, words can taketh away. Arguments against liberal democratic capitalism can undo the Miracle. Worse yet, the absence of positive arguments for the Miracle can harm it; neutrality and silence work to capitalism’s disadvantage. “Every generation takes the Miracle for granted,” Goldberg writes. But liberal democratic capitalism is so unnatural that if it isn’t regularly affirmed, it will crumble as human nature reasserts itself.
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Here is where the second part of Goldberg’s argument comes in. “Recognizing our good fortune is the first step in securing it for posterity”—but only the first step. Gratitude must be accompanied by efforts to protect the fragile, unnatural Miracle.
In the United States the task of defending liberal democratic capitalism is inseparable from the task of defending our political order. Although the Miracle originally emerged as “an unplanned and glorious accident,” the American Founders “put it in writing,” first in the Declaration of Independence and then in the Constitution. The principles described and embodied in those founding documents contributed to “the greatest run-up in material prosperity of any nation in human history.” (Those principles also, “when carried to their moral and logical conclusion, commanded the end of slavery and Jim Crow.”)
The challenge of justifying and sustaining American political principles is hardly new in our day. Abraham Lincoln recognized the problem when he was still in his 20s. Speaking to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, in 1838—not long after the last of the Founders had died—Lincoln noted that the direct memory of the revolutionary era and its feelings “must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.” To perpetuate our political institutions, he argued, we must combine reason and reverence—relying on rational arguments and veneration for the Constitution and for the memory of George Washington. When, a quarter-century later, the philosopher-president alluded at Gettysburg to the Declaration of Independence, he demonstrated how the work of perpetuation, while ostensibly about the past, gives meaning and direction to the future.
Goldberg examines several threats, historical and present-day, to the perpetuation of American political and economic institutions. In a chapter on the Progressives of a century ago, he explains how they believed, broadly speaking, that it was time to evolve beyond the Founders and their ideas. A chapter on the administrative state shows how the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, insulated from politics in a way that distorts our constitutional order, contributes to a complexification of life that can especially harm the poor and poorly educated. A chapter on populism—including “Trumpian” populism—rightly links it to demagoguery and the erosion of norms. A chapter on the changing nature of the family is an opportunity to remember that that smallest of social institutions is civilization’s first line of defense against the nonstop “barbarian invasion” we call “children.” (Goldberg has for the last two decades attributed that gag to Hannah Arendt, although his formulation is, no surprise, much more charming and pithy than Arendt’s original.)
The perpetuation of our political and economic order is also threatened by romanticism, Goldberg argues, although the picture here is more mixed. Romanticism never goes away; it is a “pre-rational passion written into the human heart,” recurring in different guises as revolts against science, liberalism, capitalism, and other aspects of modernity. People susceptible to the romantic temptation may believe that there were better ways of living together before democratic capitalism or that there are better ways of living together now; they’re wrong. Still, Goldberg calls romanticism “the wellspring of most of the great art of the last three hundred years” and discusses some of the ways it suffuses contemporary popular culture—from rock music to monster fiction, from Dead Poets Society to Breaking Bad. Goldberg’s affection for much pop culture keeps him from making the curmudgeonly mistake some conservatives make of writing it off altogether.
Goldberg’s discussion of today’s neo-tribalism on the left—especially the rise of identity politics and the obsession in schools and corporations with “diversity”—hits familiar alarming notes, although some of the examples he offers are arresting. “I took a look at the course offerings at Yale” in 2015, he writes.
The overreach of progressive tribalism, Goldberg warns, is provoking a backlash:
The American melting pot is split open on the left and now cracking on the right.
For most conservative readers, there will be little new here—although putting the familiar subjects of regulation, family, romanticism, and identity politics in the context of the survival of our overall political and economic system may deepen appreciation of these matters’ connectedness.
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Among the ways that the 1964 Suicide of the West has become outdated, perhaps the least significant is the technological. But there are in James Burnham’s book a few empirical claims that have been obviated by the march of material progress. For instance, in a brief discussion of population and food he argues along Malthusian lines, based on the facts of fertility and fertilizer, that much of the world’s population will inevitably go hungry in the years ahead. He could not have known about the technological transformation of agriculture—the “Green Revolution”—that would make it possible for the world’s population to more than double while the average global food supply per person rose considerably.
In his own Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg invites us to speculate about the ways the perpetuation of liberal democratic capitalism may be transformed if technology profoundly alters how we relate to one another, displaces humanity in some vital way, or fundamentally alters human nature itself.
Goldberg discusses the first possibility. “Despite the fact each of us has access to more information in our pockets than any scholar in the world had twenty years ago,” he writes, “we don’t use it. We drown in information but we starve for knowledge.” If perpetuation depends on “talk, talk, talk,” surely it matters that the Internet in general and social media in particular seem to worsen tribalism, contribute to envy, and pollute the public discourse with falsehood. Future changes in the technologies of communication may exacerbate these trends.
Goldberg mentions, too, the second possibility. Advances in computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence may lead to economic displacement. “Creating new sources” of “meaningful, valued work,” he writes, “may be one of the most important political and cultural tasks of the next century.” (His quick take—that “this is a good problem to have compared to the historical alternatives”—is glib but not wrong.) Meanwhile, developments in pharmacology—think Brave New World—and immersive entertainment might challenge capitalism another way. Why should we bother to pursue happiness if we can find it in a pill or a simulation? “The promise of such a society is fool’s gold,” he writes.
As for the third possibility, of fundamentally transforming what it means to be human: Goldberg does not directly address this matter, but it is worth at least a moment’s consideration. In practice, liberal democratic capitalism depends on real human capacities, relationships, and longings; in theory, our American political order arises from self-evident truths about our having been “created equal” and endowed with rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what if we can radically alter our capacities—our strength, intelligence, memory, lifespan? What if one generation can dictate the traits of the next? What if we can transform the moral constitution of human beings? These possibilities may seem too speculative to discuss meaningfully, but they are all among the ambitions of today’s biotech researchers. In the course of posthuman events, we would have reason to worry about a very different kind of “suicide of the West.”
Such a future is not inevitable. Nor is the nearer at hand kind of surrender Goldberg warns us away from. If the miracle of liberal democratic capitalism survives into the next generation, a share of the credit will be due to the talk, talk, talk of Jonah Goldberg.
