Jonah Goldberg's new book, The Suicide of the West, is a must-read. It's an exploration of Enlightenment ideals, why we got here, and why we are falling off. In this episode, Jonah talks about his new book and why he thinks we should all be grateful for the stuff we have, rather than focusing on the things we don't have. He also talks about why we should be thankful for what we do have, and what we can do about it. Jonah's book is out now, and it's a fantastic read, which is why you should buy it. Jonah is a great writer, and I can't wait to talk to him about his newest book and how we can all get better at appreciating what we have. If you're looking for a good night's rest, you'll want to check out Bull & Branch's bedding, which starts out super soft and gets even softer over time. To get you started, go to bullandbranch.co/thesuicideofthewest and use promo code BenGuest to get 50% off your first set of sheets. That's $50 and you can try them for 30 nights for a total of $99.99. Shipping is free, and you get a discount of $50.00 plus free shipping, plus an additional $5 when you buy a second set of four sets of four sheets and a blanket for $99, plus shipping is included in the price of $150.00. You'll get a year of the book and a free copy of his book, which includes shipping and shipping plus an extra $5, plus a $10 discount, plus they'll get you a maximum of $25,000 shipping and an additional four months of shipping. You get all that plus an ad-free version of The Suicide Of The West, plus you get $50,000 in the book, plus all of that gets you a chance to get a maximum discount, and they get an ad free, plus the book is also gets $10,000, plus I'll get an extra chance to watch the book for free, they say so in the ad-only version of the podcasting service, and all that starts shipping an ad on the ad is a maximum, they'll also get an entire day of the ad starts starting a review of the review, and gets an ad discount, they get it in the review starts after they get the ad, they also get it on the other place they receive the ad begins to rate the ad?
00:00:00.000We teach that the story of America, the story of the West, is a story of tyranny and oppression, when in reality, the story of the West is this amazing story of overcoming those things.
00:00:17.000We're here with Jonah Goldberg, and I can't wait to jump into our conversation with Jonah about his brand new book, The Suicide of the West, which is a fantastic read and everybody should buy.
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00:01:47.000So let's jump into, let's start with your book, and then we'll get to the everyday politics of Trump and all of that, which is, I'm sure, the rank punditry that everyone will enjoy.
00:01:55.000But I want to start by talking about your bestselling book.
00:01:58.000Obviously, you've been on the Times Bestseller here for a while, and the book itself is an exploration into Enlightenment ideals, why we got here, and why we are falling off.
00:02:08.000So let's start with the easy question, why are we falling off?
00:02:11.000This is the one that seems to be the most puzzling to folks.
00:02:43.000So the French Enlightenment is not my bag.
00:02:44.000I mean, there are some good guys in the French Enlightenment, but it's not my bag.
00:02:48.000I think one of the reasons why we're falling off is
00:02:52.000Essentially that we teach ingratitude, right?
00:02:54.000So I close the book with this big call for gratitude, because this miracle, which is sort of liberal democratic capitalism, the rule of law, it's not just sort of the alignment of the free market at all, it's what, you know, what Cuba Gooding Jr.
00:03:07.000would call in Jerry Maguire, the Quan, right?
00:03:11.000Rather than be grateful for this unbelievable miracle that pulled us out of the muck of human history, you know, for 250,000, 300,000 years,
00:03:19.000Man's natural environment was grinding poverty punctuated by an early death either from some bowel-stewing disease or violence, right?
00:03:26.000And then once and only once, because of some weird crap that happens in England, we start coming out of it.
00:03:31.000And to me, that's like the goose that lays the golden egg, right?
00:03:35.000We still don't really know why it happened.
00:03:37.000There are lots of good theories, and I guess we're going to argue about some of them.
00:03:40.000But at the end of the day, there's no consensus on why it happened.
00:03:43.000And to me, I think that's a useful thing because
00:03:46.000As Hayek or Schumpeter would say, capitalism depends on values it cannot create once lost and cannot restore either.
00:03:54.000So, the trick is to say, here comes this golden goose, it comes into our lives, it lifts us out of poverty, it extends our lives, and for the first time in human history, the average human being lives on more than three dollars a day.
00:04:09.000You know, if I had a golden goose, I'd build a fence around it, I'd give it good food, I'd take care of it.
00:04:13.000What can I get you today, Mr. Goose, right?
00:04:15.000And instead, we have a policy, a cultural policy, a suicidal policy from all the commanding heights of the culture to teach people to be ungrateful, right?
00:04:24.000The opposite of gratitude is entitlement and resentment.
00:04:29.000We teach that the story of America, the story of the West, is a story of tyranny and oppression and cruelty and bigotry, when in reality the story of the West is this amazing story of overcoming those things.
00:04:42.000Every civilization in all of human history since the Agricultural Revolution had slavery.
00:04:47.000Slavery is not what defines Western civilization.
00:04:49.000The fact that we ended it is one of the things that defines Western civilization.
00:04:52.000So I want to teach about things like slavery, but I want to teach them so we can tell people the good story about how we got rid of it, not that we had it.
00:04:59.000And instead, what you get from the sort of Howard Zinn crowd, from the identity politics crowd, are these arguments that basically say that
00:05:08.000It used to be the argument was we're hypocritical, right?
00:05:12.000That we're not living up to our standard.
00:05:15.000That was the moral grandeur of Martin Luther King's March on Washington speech.
00:05:19.000He was saying, you guys aren't living up to the best story you tell about yourselves.
00:05:24.000No problem with those kinds of indictments.
00:05:25.000I mean, I might disagree on the specifics, but as a principle, now the argument about free speech on campus, about all sorts of once considered sort of ideals about individuality, about merit, those ideals themselves are now being taught as being inherently suspect or oppressive or cruel or bigoted, and that is a suicidal choice.
00:05:44.000I think there are other things going on.
00:05:46.000Capitalism doesn't just simply destroy bad customs, it also is relentlessly corrosive to good ones and so it takes work and upkeep to maintain the family, to maintain institutions, to maintain religious organizations and religious commitments because the relentless rationalism of the marketplace
00:06:27.000So there are theories about the Frankfurt School, there are theories about the decline of religion in America.
00:06:31.000If you had to kind of create a description for what was the mindset that led to this rejection of the Golden Goose, where did that come from?
00:06:38.000Because the truth is that your book really should be called The Rise of the West, not The Suicide of the West.
00:06:42.000The vast majority of it is about how we got out of the muck in the first place.
00:07:17.000You know, the cult of unity, moral equivalent of war, whatever labels, fascism, you want to put on these things.
00:07:22.000These are basically different trade names for the same impulse, which is this sort of tribal desire to get all your meaning from their group, this Rousseauian general will.
00:07:32.000And so since I bring up Rousseau, I'll say, I think that whether it's the Frankfurt School or some other sort of left-wing identity politic ideology, I think the original cause of our problems stem from essentially romanticism.
00:07:46.000Romanticism is a subject that no one wants to revisit because we have bad memories of reading poets we didn't understand or something like that, or not understanding paintings or whatever.
00:07:57.000My understanding of romanticism is that basically it is the argument that your own personal feelings, your emotions, remember emotions and feelings are just synonyms for your instincts basically, right?
00:08:09.000That these are the highest sources of truth, these are the highest sources of authenticity, and because part of my argument is that capitalism and democracy and the market are fundamentally unnatural phenomenon, this is that romanticism is really just your inner primitive screaming in your ear saying, the world shouldn't be like this.
00:08:26.000And it takes on different forms in different places.
00:08:32.000I mean, it takes on all sorts of fascinating different voices, but it is this whispering thing that says, the inner lamp of your own feelings is what should illuminate the world.
00:08:41.000And we hear so much of the stuff about, you know, it's all over pop culture.
00:08:46.000I mean, animism informs rock and roll, informs Star Wars movies, informs all these kinds of things.
00:08:54.000Where any notions of external authority, traditional authority are suspect.
00:09:02.000That is a story that begins basically with the second the Enlightenment appears, basically there is this counter-reaction to it called Romanticism.
00:09:10.000And these two have been at war for all time.
00:09:15.000It is an inherent tension within Western civilization, within the Enlightenment-based democracies, that is this conflict between self-discipline and self-expression.
00:09:22.000You can put a thousand different labels on it.
00:09:25.000And I think a lot of our problems stem from the fact
00:09:27.000That in this, you know, this eternal battle between Locke and Rousseau, Rousseau has been winning for a long time.
00:09:34.000Everybody who controls the commanding heights of the culture, from academia to Hollywood to music, is basically, to one extent or another, on Team Rousseau rather than Team Locke.
00:09:47.000So when it comes to that conflict between Locke and Rousseau, there's a third character, just historically speaking, who is very informative, and that was Voltaire, who sort of stood halfway between the two of them.
00:09:54.000And one of the critiques that I have of the sort of binary distinction between Locke and Rousseau is that the French Revolution, to paint this as a mere division between French Revolution politics and British Enlightenment,
00:10:09.000Misses the fact that the French Revolution considered itself also based on reason.
00:10:12.000So it wasn't a pure expression of romanticism alone.
00:10:15.000Voltaire considered himself the the king of reason, essentially.
00:10:19.000There was a cult of reason in revolutionary France.
00:10:21.000This is one of my big problems with Steven Pinker's book is that he goes 450 pages talking about the Enlightenment and never mentions the French Revolution or any of the philosophy.
00:10:29.000Basically, he does this thing where if it's an Enlightenment philosopher that he doesn't like, it becomes a counter Enlightenment philosopher.
00:10:34.000And I guess the question I'm asking is,
00:10:37.000Are you doing some of that with romanticism?
00:10:38.000Are we saying everyone I don't like is like Rousseau in this romantic category?
00:11:05.000Horrible human being, but much more interesting, much more thoughtful than I had sort of given him credit, even though I'd read a bunch of Rousseau before.
00:11:13.000Again, part of my argument is, again, I don't think intellectual history works... I use Locke and Rousseau as symbols or stand-ins for two impulses, right?
00:11:23.000These impulses run straight through the human heart.
00:11:27.000We all want to be recognized as individuals who make our own unique contributions to the world, that we're special, that if we were gone the world would miss us, right?
00:12:15.000What I have a problem with is when you take that sort of Rousseauian religious spirit, that affiliational spirit, and you try to get out of politics
00:12:23.000What is only rightly reserved from religion, right?
00:12:26.000That would bring me to my point about the French revolutionaries.
00:12:32.000They believed that they were invoking reason, but I think that the second you start talking about the cult of reason and you declare that the Cathedral of Notre Dame will now be the temple of reason and we're going to start over at year zero, there's something else going on.
00:12:47.000And remember, all these guys were deeply influenced by Rousseau.
00:12:56.000I mean, they basically, I mean, they treated him the way the Iranians treated the body of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
00:13:02.000I mean, they really were nuts about him.
00:13:03.000And so one of the key differences, I would argue, between the sort of Scottish-British Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment is that the French Enlightenment sought to make reason a replacement for religion.
00:13:17.000And Robespierre and these guys were very honest about how they were trying to cultivate the religious instinct.
00:13:23.000Very intense nationalists and they wanted to create this sort of idea that the French were the new Jews, the new chosen nation and all that.
00:13:30.000And so I think part of the problem, and this is something that I think is fascinating, is that Rousseau picked up on this better than almost anybody else.
00:13:39.000He recognized that the French philosophers
00:13:42.000were behaving like the priests of the Catholic Church had in the Ansan regime.
00:13:46.000They were committing the sin of what an English philosopher, Harrington, calls priestcraft.
00:13:52.000Sort of like the ancient Greek priests who claimed to have special knowledge about the innards of birds and could tell you whether or not you were going to win a war or whatever, right?
00:14:00.000They were using their guild-like power over the minds of men to manipulate people for their own benefit.
00:14:05.000And that's what Rousseau thought the philosophers and the champions of reason were doing.
00:14:10.000What the other thing that the Jacobins and those guys believed in, which is to borrow a phrase from social science, bat guano crazy, they believed in the perfectibility of man.
00:14:20.000And that is the big difference, I think, between the English, between the two enlightenments, right?
00:14:24.000And I talk about this a little bit in the book, one of the great sort of illustrations, sort of like this Locke versus Rousseau thing between the two different cultures is
00:14:33.000And Yuval Levin gets a lot of this in his book on Thomas Paine and Burke.
00:14:37.000The French gardens of Versailles, right?
00:14:39.000The typical Enlightenment French gardens are all these crazy corkscrew carved, you know, bushes where linear angles that can't be found in nature and all this kind of stuff.
00:14:49.000And the English conception of a garden was just simply
00:14:54.000This zone of freedom where the inhabitants of the garden could be their best selves, right?
00:15:01.000So if you, as Yuval likes to point out in Burke, almost all the metaphors in the language are about space.
00:15:08.000Giving people space to pursue happiness as they see it.
00:15:12.000Giving people space to fulfill themselves.
00:15:15.000All of the language from Paine and or from the French was towards
00:15:25.000And that's why I think that, I think there's that tension, you know, and that tension comes up, that story comes up over and over again in Western civilization of those who believe in the perfectibility of man, because if you believe in the perfectibility of man, you also believe in the perfectibility of society, because you can't get one without the other.
00:15:41.000And those who sort of take, like the Founding Fathers did, human nature as a constant, and the best you can hope for is a good society, not a perfect society.
00:15:50.000And I can't remember how we got here, but I think that'll do for now.
00:15:54.000Yeah, so I'm going to ask you in just a second about the role of religion in all of this, because I know some of the criticism of your book, including some from me, has been about going back further than the Enlightenment and the roots of that.
00:16:05.000But before we get to that, first I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Indochino.
00:17:12.000One of the distinctions that I would make between the French Revolution and the English Enlightenment Revolution is that a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers, putting aside David Hume for a moment, a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers were still ensconced in a certain level of respect for Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:17:53.000Are we going too far in prizing reason as the only value without enough respect to custom?
00:17:58.000Because I think that one of the things that may have happened in the latter half of the 20th century is exactly that.
00:18:03.000That on the one hand you have this wild romanticism that you talk about, and on the other hand you have a materialist atheism that's arisen that's basically said we are sentient balls of meat wandering through the universe and we'll make our own purpose.
00:18:15.000Somehow, despite the fact we have no free will, we'll make our own purpose, and that this sort of takes the heart out of human beings, that this makes you ungrateful for the society that you have that's built on supposedly all these old, awful institutions we have to do away with.
00:19:48.000All of the time, which is a huge bummer, right?
00:19:50.000And a lot of things flow from this, including the sort of innate moral dignity of the individual, including, for the first time in ancient societies, women, right?
00:20:01.000But it's still basically this tribal thing, because it's just for the Jews, really, because they're in hostile territory.
00:20:41.000Augustine, and a lot of people don't seem to know that the city of God and the city of man aren't places, they're states of mind, right?
00:20:47.000And so there's some people who are just good Christians, but they're going to live amongst people who aren't.
00:20:52.000Just simply on almost pragmatic terms, St.
00:20:56.000Augustine argues, you've got to figure out a way for these people to live together without killing each other, because ultimately God is the only person who knows who's saved and who's not, right?
00:21:07.000Fast forward to the religious wars of Europe.
00:21:11.000The Treaty of Westphalia was not a... no one said, oh, we fought these religious wars for a hundred years because we think there's this wonderful principle of religious tolerance.
00:21:21.000They were like, dammit, we just can't kill all the Huguenots.
00:21:24.000I guess we're going to have to figure something out.
00:21:28.000And it's tolerance because of martial exhaustion, right?
00:21:34.000And that's where concepts like free speech come out.
00:21:36.000The right to be wrong comes out of this social space that's created where no one institution can control everything.
00:21:44.000So, one of the arguments I would make coming at this from a more secular perspective on it is, yeah, I entirely agree with you that you can go way too far with the reason stuff.
00:21:56.000I'm sort of a Hayekian in my bones, which also makes me sort of a Burkean in my bones.
00:22:01.000I think that there is more what the Hayekian types would call embedded knowledge in social customs and norms than we can get our heads around, right?
00:22:10.000There are, I mean, all of that, all the cliches about how, you know, your grandmother was right about everything.
00:22:14.000Well, your grandmother was right about everything because she inherited this vast amount of trial and error wisdom that had accumulated over centuries or millennia.
00:22:23.000And you just think about all the embedded knowledge
00:22:25.000That goes into virtually any cuisine you can eat, right?
00:22:28.000I mean, how many people died from eating this poisonous thing or this undercooked thing or this spoiled that until they figured out how to cook food?
00:22:43.000And it's very much like Chesterton's fence.
00:22:46.000The problem is that we are raising people now that
00:22:51.000We're raising generations of people, including among intellectuals, I would say almost particularly among intellectuals, who think that just because they can't see the embedded wisdom and the trial and error that went into some custom or norm, there must not be any in it.
00:23:39.000You know, he makes this point that if something is true, it's true for a lot of reasons, right?
00:23:43.000The number 4 is 4 because 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 is 4, but also because 2 plus 2 is 4, you know, and all that kind of thing.
00:23:50.000You can come at it from a lot of different places, and one explanation doesn't invalidate other explanations.
00:23:55.000So it could all be just God's plan, or it could be evolution, or it could be both, but I certainly think that, you know,
00:24:01.000Big argument, a big part of my book is, you know, Hannah Arendt liked to say, every generation of Western civilization is invaded by barbarians.
00:24:55.000You know, I give my kid rain or shine when I have to leave town.
00:24:57.000I handcuff her to the radiator and I give her a bowl of kibble, whether she's been good or bad, because I'm that good a dad, right?
00:25:03.000And, no, but my point is that the values of what Hayek would call the microcosm,
00:25:07.000are not based on contracts and rationality.
00:25:10.000They're based on deep, powerful notions of solidarity and mutual obligation that are much better expressed and represented by religious concepts, by moral concepts, not by rational concepts.
00:25:25.000So Hayek in The Fatal Conceit talks about the microcosm and the macrocosm.
00:25:30.000In the microcosm, that's the world of kin, family, friends, where your values of reciprocity trump market notions, right?
00:25:40.000It's the Gemeinschaft versus the Gesellschaft.
00:25:43.000And in the macrocosm, that's the world where you deal with strangers.
00:25:47.000And one of the beautiful things about capitalism is it turns strangers from existential enemies into customers.
00:26:38.000Capitalism is downstream of the value-creating engine that is the family.
00:26:44.000This is part of my point about why I say all of the stuff that is around us is an accident, right?
00:26:48.000I mean, one of the common explanations for where capitalism comes from is Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
00:26:54.000I think there's a lot of merit to it, right?
00:26:56.000What I always want to point out is, whether it's true or not, and I think the idea that Protestants invented savings is a little iffy for me, right?
00:27:04.000Right, and Venice was engaged in a fair bit of commerce for a long time.
00:27:08.000But even if you take it on its merits, or its best face forward,
00:27:15.000The Calvinists and the Puritans, they didn't say, if you behave this way, you'll get rich.
00:27:21.000They said, if you behave this way, odds are it's more likely that you might get into heaven.
00:27:25.000And it turns out that when you change your internal habits of the heart and your morals to things like thrift, delayed gratification, honest dealings, you're actually going to do better in business.
00:27:37.000But it wasn't the prosperity gospel, right?
00:27:40.000And so the fact is that capitalism will fail if we don't civilize the barbarians that are born into our family to be citizens in this civilization.
00:27:50.000And I argue that one of the reasons why we have identity politics and all these other problems that are coming up is precisely because of family breakdown, because civil society is eroding
00:28:02.000I mean, people are retreating into their homes to watch politics and stuff as an entertainment rather than... They're finding a tribe outside their family.
00:28:09.000Yeah, and these artificial tribes suck.
00:28:31.000But let's talk about tribalism for a second, because there's been this rich debate.
00:28:35.000You and I are actually on one side of the debate, and I know that Rich Lowry and some others have been on the other side of the debate, the nationalism versus patriotism debate.
00:28:42.000And I want to delve into that in just a second.
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00:29:53.000So the nationalism versus patriotism gets to some of the aspects of tribalism that we've talked about, because there is, I think it's fair to say, good tribalism is in the tribalism of ideas.
00:30:40.000Well, I agree with you on this list of propositions.
00:30:42.000Therefore, we are not part of the same tribe.
00:30:44.000Ignores the fact that people have a natural inclination to identify with people who have a similar history, a similar culture, a similar language.
00:31:18.000And so, I'm with Roger Scruton, I haven't read this, you know, I don't have the connections you do, so I haven't gotten the bootleg copy of this book yet, but I have absolutely no problem with the arguments from people like my colleague Rich Lowry, or from Roger Scruton, that a little nationalism is essential.
00:31:34.000You need some sort of sense of social solidarity and cultural affiliation that binds you together.
00:31:43.000If you listen to Raihan Salaam or Rich, this...
00:31:49.000The idea of a politics of national unity, to me, is much more problematic, because when you say that the highest ideal is not patriotism, which is basically a creedal idea, right?
00:32:01.000There's a certain set of propositions that we agree on, but it's instead this sort of far more mystic idea.
00:32:07.000I mean, Ryan and Rich and Yoram are probably, I would think, in fairness, not ethno-nationalists, right?
00:32:23.000Where there isn't an enormous amount of consensus around customs.
00:32:26.000And it turns out that the consensus is around the creedal stuff, not the weird cultural stuff.
00:32:32.000And so manufacturing this concept of nationalism, I think, very quickly becomes exclusionary to a lot of people.
00:32:39.000It will certainly be seen as exclusionary by a lot of people.
00:32:42.000But what concerns me more is it's sort of getting back to this microcosm versus macrocosm stuff.
00:32:47.000The government in Washington, or the central government, is the only institution that has any claim of speaking for the whole nation.
00:32:56.000And so, almost invariably, when political parties who have control of government take up the mantle of nationalism, it becomes either socialism or some other form of statism.
00:33:07.000And it's weird, there's this vestigial thing from Marxism that still teaches people that socialism and nationalism are opposites.
00:33:15.000Which is a fight that the Trotskyites lost in the Soviet Union about 1926.
00:33:28.000And replace every instance of the word socialist with nationalist.
00:33:31.000And every instance of the word nationalism with socialism.
00:33:34.000It doesn't change the meaning of any of the sentences.
00:33:37.000When you nationalize an industry, you're socializing an industry.
00:33:40.000Nationalized healthcare is socialized medicine.
00:33:42.000So part of my problem with nationalism is that if you want to put teeth on the bones, teeth on the bones, that's not right.
00:33:48.000If you want to put flesh on the bones, that's the cold medicine kicking in.
00:33:51.000If you want to put flesh on the bones on a nationalist program, the only way to do it is by having some sort of large federal and federal government endeavor.
00:34:12.000It first comes out more or less in Germany as a response to the imposition first by the French Revolutionary Army and then by the Napoleonic Army of the Enlightenment, which was seen as a foreign French import.
00:34:26.000And so these guys like Johann Fichte and Johann Herder create these mythical notions of German national identity.
00:34:35.000So ethno-nationalism is a fairly modern concept.
00:34:39.000There have always been countries, but this idea of nationalism is a fairly recent thing, and it is, in its origins, inseparable from ethno-nationalism.
00:34:50.000I think now you can have a civic nationalism.
00:34:52.000Actually, Rousseau is very good on civic nationalism.
00:34:54.000Well, he also wants a totalitarian state with a general will, but one thing at a time.
00:35:04.000I think the founding... I very much want to flip the pyramid.
00:35:08.000I think that I want to send as much power down to the most local level possible.
00:35:13.000Because when you do that, only the issues that really do unite us all will become federal issues or national issues, right?
00:35:21.000So abortion will probably rise to the top because it gets to the very question of who's a human being.
00:35:25.000Slavery rose to the top because it gets to the question of who's a human being.
00:35:29.000But beyond a couple of those kinds of things, push everything else down to the most local level possible.
00:35:34.000The Founding Fathers argued, you know, in essentials, unity, in everything else, liberty.
00:35:40.000And I don't understand, no one's been able to explain to me how a program of nationalism isn't also a program of centralizing and federal government empowerment.
00:35:49.000And I'm open to arguments, but I know, and Ramesh has made one point to me that, you know, some trade stuff could be, you know, like getting out of the Paris Accords with populists and nationalists.
00:36:06.000It was a pullback from the globalists, right?
00:36:07.000But in general, I think the internal logic of a nationalist program that emphasizes that rather than using it as sort of a background flavor with a pinch of salt, invariably or has danger of turning, of sliding into sort of top-down government again.
00:36:23.000So one of the things that's really fun that we get to do is we get to sit here and intellectualize about the state of the conservative movement, if there is one.
00:36:30.000And I want to ask you about that because there's been so much written in the past few years, particularly since the rise of President Trump, about the state of the conservative movement.
00:36:38.000Both you and I were, quote unquote, never Trumpers in the sense that we did not vote for President Trump.
00:37:43.000In a time when the epithet no longer applies, I would say maybe there are a few people who are legit never-Trumpers, like maybe Bret Stephens.
00:38:08.000How do you deal with this kind of thing?
00:38:10.000Yeah, no, look, I share your frustration.
00:38:12.000I think there's a fundamental, and it's difficult because some of the people who, I think it's a very lazy shorthand, right?
00:38:19.000And some of the people who are doing it are friends of mine, and I don't want to, like, get into, I've lost enough friends in the last two years, you know?
00:38:27.000And so, but I think that what happens is to give some of them credit.
00:38:32.000One of the things I think that's going on is they don't want to name names either, right?
00:38:37.000And so what they do is they just use Never Trump as this catch-all thing.
00:38:41.000The problem is when you use Never Trump as a catch-all, it very quickly becomes a straw man.
00:38:46.000And so people like you and me, you read what they say and you're like, well, wait, are they accusing me of this BS?
00:38:53.000And I was like, well, I haven't done this.
00:38:55.000But since they're not naming names, and since so many people on Twitter and elsewhere just sort of refer to me or you or anybody who's ever criticized Trump as never Trump, they leave it sufficiently ambiguous that you feel like maybe they're taking a shot at you when maybe they don't have you in mind.
00:39:16.000And so part of, I think in a lot of ways it's a lot like the way neocon started to get used in the first part of the Bush administration where
00:39:24.000It distorted more than it revealed, right?
00:39:27.000Yeah, it turned into you're either Jew or Iraq war supporter.
00:39:36.000And so, yeah, no, look, it is a frustrating thing, and what happens, and what bothers me is, sort of as a writer, is the way people use it as a way to score cheap points with
00:39:53.000All out pro-Trump people by speaking truth to power, while in reality they're speaking truth to a label that they don't put any details to.
00:40:11.000It's very difficult to give him an overall grade because he's all over the place.
00:40:15.000In some places he's a hammer hitting a nail, and in some places he's a hammer hitting a baby.
00:40:20.000So how would you grade his administration so far?
00:40:23.000And then I'll ask you the brutal follow-up.
00:40:25.000So first of all, I gotta say that I'm not a big fan of the moral equivalence between a hammer hitting a nail and a hammer hitting a baby.
00:40:36.000So I'm not gonna weasel out of it, but I will say up front,
00:40:41.000There is a raging debate in Washington about how much of the good stuff Trump has done has happened because of him or in spite of him, right?
00:40:51.000So one of the things that drove me crazy about Steve Bannon and all that stuff was this constant drumbeat about how Mitch McConnell was the enemy of Donald Trump.
00:41:00.000Mitch McConnell has been the single greatest guarantor of Trump's legacy among conservatives.
00:41:07.000He's the guy who's gotten all of these federal judges across the finish line.
00:41:13.000I think, you know, do I agree with Mitch McConnell and everything?
00:41:15.000No, but I think he deserves enormous credit for that, not to be sort of demonized.
00:41:20.000And so a lot of the stuff, like the stuff that goes on with the EPA, the regulatory stuff, the FCC stuff, the FDA stuff, I think is great.
00:41:29.000I don't, I think that basically what Donald Trump has done is basically says, do all the good stuff, and then he just doesn't pay attention.
00:41:40.000But there is this idea out there that he's actually managing and governing and paying attention to the details, when in reality, one of the sort of accidental byproducts of the way Trump came into office is that a lot of the regular party types wouldn't take jobs in the administration.
00:41:57.000And so the administration, thank goodness, went and got a lot of, including a lot of friends of mine.
00:42:03.000Hardcore movement think tank, um, true believers who went in there and said, who knows how long this thing's going to last?
00:42:14.000So, so going by the normal grading process, which is that whatever happens on a president's watch, that president gets credit for on the domestic regulatory stuff.
00:42:24.000I give them, you know, somewhere between a B plus and an A minus.
00:43:43.000And that means that one day your family will be left bereft if you did not actually go out and get life insurance.
00:43:48.000Almost 100% of people think buying life insurance is a pain in the neck, however, and they are largely right, which is why Policy Genius exists.
00:45:00.000I mean, I did say if I lived in Ohio in 2016, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton.
00:45:05.000I mean, I wouldn't have voted for Hillary Clinton.
00:45:07.000I probably would have voted for Trump.
00:45:22.000Conservative voters, certainly not conservative young voters who are people who I deal with on a frequent basis.
00:45:27.000I was worried that he was going to turn, that he was going to pursue policies that were not conservative because he'd been all over the place, obviously.
00:45:35.000And then he's now governed as a pretty deeply conservative president, even if he doesn't believe a lot of this stuff.
00:45:40.000And then there was my third worry, which is still my worry, which is that he would toxify the Republican Party brand for so long that it would actually do serious damage down the line for young people.
00:45:49.000My only alleviating concern there is that the damage may have already been done.
00:45:53.000So if the damage is already done, then are you really making the damage any worse if he's president for eight years instead of four years?
00:45:59.000So with that said, if the election were held today against Joe Biden, I wouldn't have much of a problem pulling the lever for him, even though I live in California and my vote doesn't matter.
00:46:06.000So what exactly is the biggest holdup for you?
00:46:12.000You know, and I reserve the right to change my answer later.
00:46:15.000First of all, you know, a big part of my argument in my book is about the importance of rhetoric, right?
00:46:20.000That basically this miracle that happens basically happened because the way we talk about ourselves to ourselves, about ourselves, changed profoundly.
00:46:29.000And I think as a matter of statesmanship and rhetoric, the way Donald Trump talks about this country, the way Donald Trump talks about politics, the way Donald Trump talks about his opposition, I think is more damaging both as a sort of just rank punditry brand question, but I also think it is damaging to our sort of political health in the long run.
00:46:53.000I also, you know, I am not convinced yet, by any stretch of the imagination, that the Trump presidency ends well.
00:47:01.000My position has been from the beginning that, you know, character is destiny.
00:47:06.000I don't know that, and I think that at the end of the day, the fundamental thing about Donald Trump is he's a person of bad character.
00:47:13.000And if someone could come up with a definition of good character that was plausible, that Donald Trump could clear, I would love to hear it.
00:47:32.000I don't know, maybe I would vote for Trump against Joe Biden in a weird 2018 sort of election, but my stance towards Trump wouldn't change appreciably anyway as it is.
00:47:44.000Your critique of Trump, like the voting question is one that we just have to get off the table because so many people boil down your view to would you vote for him or not, which is exactly what happened in 2016.
00:47:52.000It didn't matter, people stopped looking at the criticism and whether it was valid or not, it just turned into you were either a member of the tribe or you were not a member
00:47:59.000But see, this is part of my problem with what's going on, and it sort of gets to your Never Trump question from before.
00:48:04.000I keep trying to make this point that Trumpism should not be looked at as an ideological phenomenon.
00:48:14.000And both in terms of Trump's own brain, which
00:48:19.000You know, he admits he's a guy who works on instinct, he wants to be flexible, he doesn't really care about conservative stuff.
00:48:25.000His support for conservative judges is entirely transactional, thank God.
00:48:28.000You know, he basically... Does not look like a horse in the mouth there.
00:48:31.000Yes, you know, thank God, you know, someone told him, you just got to give the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo carte blanche to come up with names and we'll love you for it.
00:48:42.000But this is the same guy who wanted to put his sister on the Supreme Court.
00:48:45.000And so what bothers me about the way the discourse works with Trump is that, for instance, anytime I ever praise Trump, it just disappears like without a ripple, right?
00:49:00.000No one cares, no one, you know, no always Trump types say, good for you, Jonah, or anything like that.
00:49:14.000Tension about anything critical of Trump.
00:49:16.000And Trump encourages this, because what he cares about most is praise.
00:49:21.000And so the best example of this, back when Bannon was still in office, because of the White House dress code, you could only have three layers of clothing, and he was talking about priming Mitch McConnell and all the establishment people, all this kind of stuff, because they weren't supporting the Trump agenda.
00:49:37.000Basically, pelted Jeff Flake and Corker from public life, right?
00:49:40.000And tried to do the same thing with Sass, and wanted to do it with McConnell.
00:49:45.000McConnell voted with Trump's agenda in the Senate like 98%.
00:49:51.000Corker was like 90%, Flake was like 88%.
00:49:55.000But what offended people about those guys wasn't their support, their lack of support for public policy agenda because there wasn't a lack of support.
00:50:03.000It was that every now and then when Trump said something bad or worthy of criticism, they said something and that drove
00:50:11.000His supporters crazy who only want to hear praise for him.
00:50:16.000And meanwhile, Rand Paul did more to undermine Donald Trump's agenda in the Senate in terms of repealing Obamacare and a few other things than almost anybody else, like this Gina Haspel thing.
00:50:26.000But Rand Paul keeps praise and honor upon Donald Trump and so no one gets mad at him.
00:50:32.000So when people say, look, I just care, it's a transactional thing.
00:50:37.000And yet they aim all their ire at anybody who criticizes Trump and not the people who actually undermine his agenda.
00:50:44.000I think something else is going on and is it is psychological thing that borders on a cult of personality from people.
00:50:50.000I think the motivations are all over the map.
00:50:51.000Some people just don't want to, um, they want everybody in the pool so that anything that comes out of the Trump presidency, no one can say, I told you so about.
00:51:00.000Some people just don't want to be reminded of their own hypocrisy.
00:51:04.000You know, there are a whole bunch of people who got very rich talking about the importance of moral values and fidelity and marriage and good character who now say all of that stuff is prudery and they don't want to be reminded of it.
00:51:58.000You know, the category of conservative falls inside anti-left, but not everything anti-left falls inside conservative.
00:52:05.000How do we wrest control of the anti-left movement away from just being merely anti-left and more toward the classical liberal enlightenment values that you espouse in Suicide of the West?
00:52:17.000Irving Kristol used to have a similar distinction.
00:52:21.000That he was anti-left, not anti-state.
00:52:25.000And what he meant by that was he had no problem with public schools teaching good conservative moral values, but he had a huge problem if the public schools were going to teach absolutely crappy left-wing values.
00:52:34.000And so for him, an argument for school choice, and I don't want to distort his position, but from that perspective, an argument for school choice was because he needed a corrective to the bad values being taught, not the evil statism of the government funding
00:52:49.000And I think there's something similar going on today.
00:52:52.000I think it's a fascinating die marker to see who gets upset about this when I say this, because it's happened a few times now.
00:53:01.000I think one of the things that has been deeply corrosive and corrupting on the right, and I'm partly to blame for it, because I was one of the first authors to really shine a light on Saul Alinsky in my first book, but I was shining a light on Saul Alinsky
00:53:17.000To point out what a bad dude he was, right?
00:53:19.000I mean, he literally dedicates his book to Satan.
00:53:28.000And so, and what happened over the last 10, 15 years is a bunch of people said, look how effective Alinsky was.
00:53:37.000And it says, what we got to do is we got to fight like them.
00:53:42.000And so what happens is, it goes from being sort of the conservative mindset, as you put it, to the anti-left mindset.
00:53:49.000And the problem is, is that when at some point, if you argue that we need to adopt our enemy's means for our own ends,
00:54:01.000It becomes very easy as a fact of human nature to lose sight of what your ends were in the first place, and the means become self-justifying.
00:54:09.000And so that's why, you know, as I put it in the book,
00:54:13.000So much of our politics these days on the left and the right is defined by what I call ecstatic schadenfreude.
00:54:20.000It's just that things are worth doing solely because liberal tears are delicious, right?
00:54:25.000I get it as a joke, and look, I've made a nice living for a long time eating bowls full of liberal tears and all the rest, but that can't be the only justification, right?
00:54:34.000It's like, you know, you've talked to a lot more campuses than I do, but I've probably been on 100 campuses the last 15 years.
00:54:41.000One of the things I always try to tell young college kids is just because being a jackass is politically incorrect is not an argument for being a jackass.
00:54:53.000But that's the kind of confusion you get when you mistake means for ends.
00:54:59.000You want to collect liberal tears because you win arguments.
00:55:03.000You don't want to collect liberal tears just because you're a cruel jackass.
00:55:07.000But if you confuse the means and ends, all of a sudden everything becomes self-justifying.
00:55:12.000Okay, so before we take off, I want to ask, aside from your book, we're talking about the creation of good citizens and the creation of people who believe in the enlightenment.
00:55:21.000What are the three to five other books that you would have people read to educate themselves as good citizens who understand these values properly?
00:55:38.000My next book maybe, but not the ones I've written.
00:55:44.000Tom Sowell's Conflict of Visions, Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit, not because I think it's his best book, but I do think it's the most accessible book that gets at a lot of this stuff.
00:55:56.000I mean, I'm a big believer in history.
00:55:58.000Deirdre McCloskey was a big influence on me on all these books, and I like her books, but I'm not sure they get to the core of raising good citizens.
00:56:06.000Whatever the best biography of George Washington is, I think would be pretty useful.
00:56:10.000And then as a follow-on to that, Rick Brookhiser's book on George Washington's
00:56:15.000Guide to manners and civility, because I think that stuff is really, really important.
00:56:19.000And again, you know, this is more of a gotcha question than the Trump stuff.
00:56:32.000So there's a book I really love that almost no one has ever heard of that I was just reminded of today because his son thanked me for mentioning it on Twitter.
00:56:40.000This morning, Arthur E. Kirk called the decline of American liberalism.
00:56:44.000It's pretty largely forgotten, but it's a great history about how charting sort of how liberalism went from meaning classical liberalism in America to meaning sort of collectivism, and I think it's a kind of a useful thing, and it's pretty digestible.
00:56:58.000But I reserve the right to come up with a whole new list of books when I think about it.
00:57:15.000How do you bring up your kids to appreciate these values?
00:57:19.000How do you actually convey these values to small kids?
00:57:22.000So when I grew up, a lot of it was religiously based.
00:57:24.000It was the idea of responsibility and you're responsible for your own actions and values and have consequences.
00:57:30.000But what measures would you take and do you take in raising your own kids to believe in this?
00:57:35.000Yeah, so, you know, this is a tough one for me because
00:57:39.000You know, I'm fully cognizant of my own shortfalls and my own hypocrisy on some of these things.
00:57:44.000And I think any parent... One piece of advice I would give for parents, all parents, is hypocrisy is useful for illuminating some of your shortcomings or some of your ideals and how you're failing to live up to them.
00:57:56.000But if your biggest concern is being a hypocrite as a parent, you're a crappy parent.
00:58:09.000I've woken up in hotels covered with blood that wasn't my own.
00:58:12.000There are all sorts of things that I would not, you know, that I have no problem whatsoever being a hypocrite about and saying, don't do as I did, do as I say, right?
00:58:22.000Because part of being a parent is learning some lessons about your life and trying to
00:58:26.000Hard building of civilization is doing this.
00:58:28.000If we just did what we kept doing, we'd be back in the Stone Age.
00:58:36.000You know, towards the end of the book, you know, as we were talking about before this, God kind of sneaks back in the book.
00:58:42.000And I think that whatever your views on organized religion are, or what denomination or faith you are,
00:58:49.000There is something truly wonderful and important that comes with the concept of being God-fearing in the sense that if you truly believe that God is watching you, right, it's sort of a Hallmark card thing, but it's, you know, good character is what you do when no one else is watching, and if you have it in your mind that, you know, God is watching what you're doing even when other people aren't,
00:59:14.000I think that is a great gut check for kids.
00:59:19.000It's something I teach my daughter, to act as if, you know, somebody up there is watching what you're doing, you know, and as our people would say, the rest is commentary.
00:59:31.000But also, you know, just as a note, the importance of understanding that, you know, conservatism rightly understood and liberalism rightly understood.
00:59:43.000Should see politics as a very small slice of your life.
00:59:47.000And so one of the things I struggle with is, you know, my kid comes home.
00:59:51.000I'm sure this happens with you where it's going out, your kids are younger than my kid, but um, there's always some really dumb crap, you know, about, you know, and so like one, one day my daughter came back having just covered Woodrow Wilson and
01:00:06.000Not like you wrote an entire book about how the guy's kind of a fascist.
01:00:10.000I started to turn green and the buttons start popping off my, you know, it was like, and I try not to sort of make my politics her burden at school, but at the same, so one of the things I just try to do to her is say, hey, look, this defines my career, my life, but the important stuff is stuff we do as a family, stuff we do with the dogs, stuff, you know, that kind of stuff.
01:00:35.000And I think that is an important thing, because so much, so many of the problems we have in our life are that not only is lifestyle being politicized, but our politics are being lifestylized.
01:00:48.000It is simply a, you know, it is almost a fashion choice, but a deeply meaningful fashion choice to people about how you vote, how you think about politics, the words you say.
01:01:00.000And I hate it on the right, and I hate it on the left.
01:01:03.000The important stuff in life is about faith, family, friends, experiences.
01:01:08.000You know, you should live a life, one of the things I try to impress on her is that, you know, without getting too deep in the weeds about death, but, you know, that at the end of your life, you want a eulogy, not a resume.
01:01:19.000And that's the stuff that I try to teach her.
01:01:20.000Well, Jonah Goldberg, it really is an amazing pleasure to have you on the show.