Conservative hero, author, and columnist Jonah Goldberg appeared before a half-packed Campbell Hall Sunday evening as a UCSB Arts & Lectures public speaker.
The theme of his talk mirrors the title of his recent, provocative book, The Suicide of the West.
A senior editor at the National Review and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Goldberg’s thoughtful columns have appeared in the L.A. Times for years. If you have been reading those columns as I have, then you can already predict some major themes of his talk.
Goldberg’s demeanor at the lectern was alternately serious and humorous, and he openly admitted he was attempting to step back from that yawning chasm dividing the two Americas of today.
He expressed some regrets about the tone of comments in his 2006 book, Liberal Fascism. He made a number of references to pop culture that resonated with the audience of college students and adult silverbacks, many from Montecito (like the McCaws, who sponsored his presentation).
Goldberg brings home the importance of essential debates about “the West” and the fundamental nature of our Euro-American civilization.
Since around 1968, and intensified around 2015, the core values of the liberal democratic order itself are on the table and openly challenged.
Goldberg is correct in framing the main problem this way, and he rightly slams Americans for not valuing Western civilization nearly enough.
He quaintly calls this “the Miracle,” meaning the period 1750 until today, when the Enlightenment liberal democracy and the industrial revolution produced all the prosperity that we now enjoy in America.
Skipping quickly to solutions for these threats to American democracy and capitalism, Goldberg outlines four threats: tribalism, identity politics, nationalism, and populism.
But in his Campbell Hall talk, he focused mainly on our lack of gratitude for Western civilization’s accomplishments, and the first two threats.
Our Founding Fathers embodied European Enlightenment thinking in their focus on the natural “rights” of the individual human, and Jefferson agreed with John Locke that each citizen should be free to seek “life, liberty, and property” (Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness”).
This idea led to entrepreneurial thinking and scientific progress, then combined with the Industrial Revolution and technological innovations to produce the West’s ongoing dominance of the earth (Goldberg’s so-called “Miracle”).
Like many, Goldberg identifies emotional “tribalism” and group-think as very specific cancers eating away at American values and democracy. He quoted Hannah Arendt on the point that every generation fights off tribalism that rises up against civilized order (The Suicide of the West, p. 277).
“Identity politics” is a highly contentious public issue today, and both left and right accuse the other of practicing negative identity politics, which Goldberg terms another type of the bad “tribalism.”
David Bromwich some time ago wrote his essay about identity politics in “A Dissent on Cultural Identity,” showing the divisive dangers of extreme overemphasis on one’s own group, defined however by gender, race, ethnicity, language, or whatever.
While the Progressives’ huge identity politics practices have had many plusses, it’s easy to detect where they’ve gone overboard — do we need debates and laws over transgender bathrooms in really small rural schools?
Goldberg would scoff at our local state Senator Hannah Beth Jackson’s new California law mandating that at least one member of a corporate board be female.
Goldberg delivers a hit when noting how extreme emphases on gender, ethnic origin, sexual preference, and race have divided us, and in his view weakened our communal unity.
He is less successful in admitting how “tribal” emotional politics have now surfaced on the right: Just watch the rallies when the President is campaigning in the American heartland — the anger, the screams at the press, the race-baiting, the ugly misogyny.
Together, tribalism and identity politics have led us to forget the values that have bound us together as a nation of immigrants.
Goldberg believes we’ve lost our appreciation for the core ideas that have led to American wealth, democracy, and global ascendancy (at least since World War II ended in 1945). He always connects democracy and capitalism.
Goldberg asserts that European “romanticism” and Rousseau’s emphasis on feelings lay behind these dis-unifying movements.
In earlier societies, tribal members were simply that, and never thought about their ‘membership’ in the small community where they knew every other face. As an original conservative No-Trumper, Goldberg does see some of this tribalism behind the president’s ascent to power, and thus tribalism surfacing on the right, too.
The “Miracle” is based on bourgeois ideas of property and individual freedom and human rights, and Goldberg includes the marvel of capitalism and “the market,” and of innovation.
However, when he bemoans the loss of civility and the nasty infighting between left and right in our society today — I don’t need to point to the Kavanaugh debacle, which was ugly from every point of view — he certainly downplays his own early writings hammering Progressives and liberals.
In his 2006 book, Liberal Fascism, he lambasts the left, calling them “the real racists” in an extended troll of the Democrats.
Now, he said, he is trying to walk back some of that fury. Recently, Goldberg supported the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
I taught Western Civilization classes at several schools between 1972 and 2017, and I assure readers Goldberg is emphatically correct in stressing that we no longer teach about the glories of Western Civilization, or enough civics, or foster appropriate gratitude for what those before us built.
He consistently worries about the plight of the nuclear family with two parents and children with them. Although I support multiculturalism, there has been too much degradation of the Western canon as simply the achievements by The Oldest Dead White European Males (title of Bernard Knox’s 1993 book).
For example, there has been a profound drop in the number of “Western Civ” courses taught in California public high schools, and the importance of teaching “civics” in fifth grade and other classes has also declined markedly.
In bringing the question of “the West” and gratitude for its accomplishments to the fore, Goldberg does us all a service. A genuine discussion of western values, and what western liberal democracy means, is long overdue.
Yet most scholars have rejected his attempt to equate New Deal liberalism with European fascism. He also hangs too much weight on the “tribalism” point.
At the same time, it was also hard to square the pleasant and learned Goldberg I saw Sunday evening with his ranting and ferocious barking in 2006, as well as a controversial appearance in convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza’s vicious 2016 film, Hillary’s America.
The largely liberal audience of students and affluent silverbacks appreciated Goldberg’s reasonable tone and intellectual discourse as he attempted to reach across the aisle.
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Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West is available at Chaucer’s Bookstore, as well as David Bromwich, The Moral Imagination and Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics (1993).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity, and has written extensively about the local backcountry. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
