J

ONAH GOLDBERG IS worried about the
state of the nation. In his new book,
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth
of Tribalism, Populism, National-
ism, and Identity Politics Is Destroy-
ing American Democracy (Crown
Forum), he makes the case that the
liberal democratic project is not only
in danger—it has become a danger
to itself.
The United States, Goldberg argues, has forgotten or
rejected its core values, allowing its institutions to decay. The
result is a nation that no longer has a coherent self-image, a
culture that no longer knows what it lives for. “I like getting
rich really fast, and I want to make the world get richer really
fast,” he says. “But the violence that does to established insti-
tutions and customs and norms sets a lot of people adrift.”
A stalwart of modern conservative political journalism,
Goldberg is a longtime editor at National Review, where he
helped launch the magazine’s online presence. He also cur-
rently writes a column for the Los Angeles Times and serves
as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And he’s the
best-selling author of two previous books, Liberal Fascism:
The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the
Politics of Meaning and The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals
Cheat in the War of Ideas.
Like both of those titles, Suicide of the West blends his-
tory and philosophy with pop-culture references; as always,
Goldberg’s deep despair is leavened with a lively wit. In June,
he spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about how and when
America lost its way, why tribalism is the culprit, what role
Donald Trump plays in the death of the West—and why Gold-
berg has become friendlier to libertarianism over the course of
his career.

Reason: In Suicide of the West, you talk about “the
miracle.” Describe what you mean by that.

Goldberg: When something hugely providential and wonder-
ful happens that you can’t explain, we call it a miracle. For
250,000 years, the average human being, everywhere in the
world, lived on about $3 a day or less. Then, once and only once
in all of human history, it starts to change. There’s unbeliev-
able consensus about this from the hard left to the hard right.
Everyone sort of agrees on those numbers to one extent or
another. When it comes to the question of why it happened, all
consensus breaks down.
But it only happened once, at least in a sustained way. And I
think what causes the miracle isn’t some specific public policy
or anything like that. It’s words. It’s language. It’s the story

we tell ourselves about ourselves. This is sort of the Deirdre

McCloskey thesis: For thousands of years in Western Europe,

innovation was considered a sin, the sin of questioning the

established order. Then all of a sudden [you get] this Lockean

idea that the fruits of our labors belong to us, that if you can

build a better mousetrap, you should reap the rewards of that.

And it has this explosive effect that spreads out across the

world. It’s unnatural.

If it were natural, if this were how human beings just auto-

matically self-organize into prosperous communities of rule

of law and individual autonomy, it would have occurred a little

earlier in the evolutionary record than 250,000 years after we

split off from Neanderthals.

What is the essential insight needed to preserve the mir-

acle? And when you talk about the death of the West, is it

really suicide, or is it being imposed on us?

The working title for the book for a couple years was The Tribe

of Liberty, and the basic argument was that we need to rekin-

dle a sort of tribal commitment to the institutions of liberty.

There are institutions in the economic sense of rules, but also

physical organizations, groups, traditions, that civilize us and

make us respect and admire and want to preserve liberty. And

those things are often taught to us in a prerational way, right?

They’re taught to us when we’re born into any family that

has a commitment to certain ideas. But we have to be taught

those things.

It’s weird we have to be taught to hold a prerational iden-

tity. But it’s true. One of the reasons we were able to get rich

is that [people were willing to commit] to an order where

they individually may not be a winner.

Hannah Arendt says, “Every generation, Western civilization is

invaded by barbarians. We call them children.” We come with

all sorts of factory preloaded software in us. But that software

is unchanging over millennia, for the most part. A baby born in

the Viking age transported to today, you raise it in a nice family

in New Rochelle and it becomes an orthodontist.

One of the things that binds lots of Burkeans and libertar-

ians is this idea that capitalism depends upon values that it

cannot create and cannot restore once lost.

One huge influence on me is Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal

Conceit, where he has the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The microcosm is the world of intimate relationships. The

world, first of all, of family, but also friendships, community.

The rules there are not market rules. As I often say, in my fam-

ily I’m a communist. If you have two kids and one kid is really

talented and the other kid really isn’t, you don’t say, well, he

doesn’t get the operation [he needs to survive], right? Within

52 OCTOBER 2018