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June 10, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:01:59

Jonah Goldberg | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 5

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	We teach that the story of America, the story of the West, the story of tyranny and oppression, when in reality, the story of the West is this amazing story of overcoming those things.
	We'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 But first, I'm going to tell you something else.
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	Okay, so welcome to the show.
	Good to be here.
	Obviously, you are second in importance to our advertisers, but you are still first in our hearts.
	I understand that.
	It was great listening to you at one and a half speed.
	It was really kind of...
	So 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.
	But I want to start by talking about your bestselling book.
	Obviously, 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.
	So let's start with the easy question, why are we falling off?
	This is the one that seems to be the most puzzling to folks.
	You talk in the book about, We are falling off.
	We're falling back into tribalism, that the enlightenment is a miracle that happens.
	You call it the miracle in the book.
	But why do you think people are disowning it?
	Why aren't we appreciating the stuff around us?
	Right.
	So, one caveat.
	I like the Enlightenment.
	You know, what has two thumbs and likes the Enlightenment?
	This guy, right?
	But I don't do what Steven Pinker does and just say the Enlightenment was this one thing.
	Sort of taking a page from Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer, when it comes to Enlightenment, if it's not Scottish, it's crap.
	Okay?
	So the French Enlightenment is not my bag.
	I mean, there are some good guys in the French Enlightenment, but it's not my bag.
	I think one of the reasons why we're falling off is Essentially that we teach ingratitude, right?
	So 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.
	would call in Jerry Maguire, the Quan, right?
	It's the whole package, right?
	Rather 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, Man's natural environment was grinding poverty punctuated by an early death either from some bowel-stewing disease or violence, right?
	And then once and only once, because of some weird crap that happens in England, we start coming out of it.
	And to me, that's like the goose that lays the golden egg, right?
	It's a mystery.
	We still don't really know why it happened.
	There are lots of good theories, and I guess we're going to argue about some of them.
	But at the end of the day, there's no consensus on why it happened.
	And to me, I think that's a useful thing because As Hayek or Schumpeter would say, capitalism depends on values it cannot create once lost and cannot restore either.
	So, 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.
	You 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.
	What can I get you today, Mr. Goose, right?
	And 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?
	The opposite of gratitude is entitlement and resentment.
	We 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.
	Every civilization in all of human history since the Agricultural Revolution had slavery.
	Slavery is not what defines Western civilization.
	The fact that we ended it is one of the things that defines Western civilization.
	So 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.
	And instead, what you get from the sort of Howard Zinn crowd, from the identity politics crowd, are these arguments that basically say that It used to be the argument was we're hypocritical, right?
	That we're not living up to our standard.
	I'm totally open to that, right?
	That was the moral grandeur of Martin Luther King's March on Washington speech.
	He was saying, you guys aren't living up to the best story you tell about yourselves.
	No problem with those kinds of indictments.
	I 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.
	I think there are other things going on.
	Capitalism 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 unless it is sort of tempered and held at bay by other cultural norms, can have negative consequences as well. - So that's what is happening, but why?
	Why was it that, from the 1950s and on basically, especially the United States has decided that all of these old things need to be put away and capitalism needs to be assaulted, Where is that coming from?
	So there are theories about the Frankfurt School, there are theories about the decline of religion in America.
	If 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?
	Because the truth is that your book really should be called The Rise of the West, not The Suicide of the West.
	The vast majority of it is about how we got out of the muck in the first place.
	place.
	That's true.
	It's really only the very end you start talking about, you know, the ingratitude.
	But I guess I'm asking a different question, which is where is the ingratitude springing from?
	Why did that happen?
	I would make the argument, which is controversial in some places, that I've sort of had a reawakening or a rethinking about my understanding and my view towards ideology generally.
	I still love intellectual history.
	I still think I really like arguing about these subtle distinctions.
	But at the end of the day, I've come to believe that basically almost all forms of collectivism Socialism.
	You know, the cult of unity, moral equivalent of war, whatever labels, fascism, you want to put on these things.
	These 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.
	And 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.
	Romanticism 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.
	That's fine.
	My 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?
	For your gut.
	That 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.
	And it takes on different forms in different places.
	Bernie Sanders' voice, presumably.
	Sometimes it's Bernie Sanders' voice.
	I 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.
	And we hear so much of the stuff about, you know, it's all over pop culture.
	I mean, animism informs rock and roll, informs Star Wars movies, informs all these kinds of things.
	Trust your feelings, Luke, right?
	It's all this kind of stuff.
	Where any notions of external authority, traditional authority are suspect.
	That is a story that begins basically with the second the Enlightenment appears, basically there is this counter-reaction to it called Romanticism.
	And these two have been at war for all time.
	They've been at war.
	It is an inherent tension within Western civilization, within the Enlightenment-based democracies, that is this conflict between self-discipline and self-expression.
	You can put a thousand different labels on it.
	And I think a lot of our problems stem from the fact That in this, you know, this eternal battle between Locke and Rousseau, Rousseau has been winning for a long time.
	Everybody 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.
	So 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.
	And 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, Misses the fact that the French Revolution considered itself also based on reason.
	So it wasn't a pure expression of romanticism alone.
	Voltaire considered himself the the king of reason, essentially.
	There was a cult of reason in revolutionary France.
	This 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.
	Basically, he does this thing where if it's an Enlightenment philosopher that he doesn't like, it becomes a counter Enlightenment philosopher.
	And I guess the question I'm asking is, Are you doing some of that with romanticism?
	Are we saying everyone I don't like is like Rousseau in this romantic category?
	Or is there some crossover there?
	Because the truth is that Marx has one foot in rationality and one foot in romanticism.
	Sure.
	And it seems like there's a little bit more blurring of lines than... Yeah, so that's a great question.
	I'm glad to finally get a substantive question on this.
	It's after three weeks on the book tour.
	So, I actually came out of working on this book liking Rousseau a lot more.
	He was a horrible human being.
	Right.
	Horrible 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.
	Again, 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?
	These impulses run straight through the human heart.
	We're all a little Lockean.
	We 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?
	That's a very Lockean kind of thing.
	But we also want to be part of a group.
	We want to derive some of our meaning from being part of a cause that's larger than ourselves.
	We want to derive some meaning for our contributions to some collective endeavor.
	Neither of those things are evil, right?
	And so part of my argument is that That human nature is not inherently evil or good.
	Human nature is human nature.
	It is the one eternal constant.
	What is good or bad are the institutions and morals and customs that we create that channel human nature towards productive ends.
	So, there's something very Rousseauian about being a believing Orthodox Jew as part of a larger community.
	No criticism of that whatsoever.
	What 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 What is only rightly reserved from religion, right?
	That would bring me to my point about the French revolutionaries.
	They 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.
	And remember, all these guys were deeply influenced by Rousseau.
	They marched as they disinterred him.
	They marched his body through and reburied him.
	That's right.
	I mean, they basically, I mean, they treated him the way the Iranians treated the body of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
	I mean, they really were nuts about him.
	And 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.
	And Robespierre and these guys were very honest about how they were trying to cultivate the religious instinct.
	Very 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.
	And 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.
	He recognized that the French philosophers were behaving like the priests of the Catholic Church had in the Ansan regime.
	They were committing the sin of what an English philosopher, Harrington, calls priestcraft.
	Sort 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?
	They were using their guild-like power over the minds of men to manipulate people for their own benefit.
	And that's what Rousseau thought the philosophers and the champions of reason were doing.
	What 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.
	And that is the big difference, I think, between the English, between the two enlightenments, right?
	And 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 And Yuval Levin gets a lot of this in his book on Thomas Paine and Burke.
	The French gardens of Versailles, right?
	The 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.
	And the English conception of a garden was just simply This zone of freedom where the inhabitants of the garden could be their best selves, right?
	So if you, as Yuval likes to point out in Burke, almost all the metaphors in the language are about space.
	Giving people space to pursue happiness as they see it.
	Giving people space to fulfill themselves.
	All of the language from Paine and or from the French was towards was a direction.
	We're heading towards a promised land.
	We're heading towards a utopia.
	And 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.
	And 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.
	And I can't remember how we got here, but I think that'll do for now.
	Yeah, 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.
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	Okay, so, back to deeper topics.
	One 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.
	This is what Burke talks about in his rejection of the French Revolution, is this idea that the Enlightenment Revolution in Britain was based on the idea of respect for a certain level of custom, whereas the French Revolution comes in and they just say everything is getting overturned.
	It was specifically designed to strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.
	Yeah, that's the Voltaire line.
	The Voltaire line.
	So that means that the rejection, are we going too far in prizing reason as the only value without enough respect to customs?
	Because I think that one of the things that may have happened in the latter half of the 20th century is exactly that.
	That 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.
	Somehow, 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.
	Right.
	So, you know, full disclosure, I am not an atheist.
	First sentence in the book is, there's no God in this book, because what I am trying to do is persuade people who disagree with me.
	And appealing to God as the dispositive authority is It turns everybody off, yeah.
	It's a logical fallacy unless you already stipulate that God did it, right?
	Agreed.
	So I'm not an atheist.
	I believe in God.
	I have enormous respect for religion.
	I'm a bad Jew, but I feel guilty about it, so I think there's hope for me.
	And so I'm perfectly happy to pull a Jeremy Corbyn and say it all starts with the Jews, right?
	But in a positive way, right?
	And so, you know, my take on it would be that Until Jews come along, more or less, gods are our servants rather than our masters, right?
	There's a god for war, there's a god for fertility, you give him a bull, you sacrifice some pigeons, whatever, and they deliver.
	It's fee-for-service with gods, right?
	And every city-state has got its own god, it's, you know, whatever.
	God is gumball machine.
	Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And then, um, it's sort of, it's Uber but for gods, right?
	And then, um, uh, and then, The Jews come along and they say, no, no, man, you guys have got it completely wrong.
	Gods don't work.
	First of all, there's only one of them.
	And he doesn't work for you, you work for him, right?
	And he's watching you all the time.
	All of the time, which is a huge bummer, right?
	And 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?
	But it's still basically this tribal thing, because it's just for the Jews, really, because they're in hostile territory.
	And then Christianity comes along.
	This is a sociological argument, but Christianity comes along.
	And universalizes these Jewish precepts and says, no, no, no, everybody is worthy of dignity.
	Everybody is worthy of respect.
	The Golden Rule is pretty, you know, important.
	Christianity also comes along and creates this vitally important thing for the emergence of capitalism and democracy.
	Which is a social space where religion isn't dispositive of every question, right?
	The Augustinian city of God versus the city of man.
	Right, right.
	So it starts with Jesus saying, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, right?
	And then you have St.
	Augustine, 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?
	And so there's some people who are just good Christians, but they're going to live amongst people who aren't.
	Just simply on almost pragmatic terms, St.
	Augustine 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?
	And that creates social space.
	Fast forward to the religious wars of Europe.
	The 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.
	They were like, dammit, we just can't kill all the Huguenots.
	I guess we're going to have to figure something out.
	And it's tolerance because of martial exhaustion, right?
	And that's where concepts like free speech come out.
	The right to be wrong comes out of this social space that's created where no one institution can control everything.
	So, 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.
	I'm sort of a Hayekian in my bones, which also makes me sort of a Burkean in my bones.
	I 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?
	There are, I mean, all of that, all the cliches about how, you know, your grandmother was right about everything.
	Well, your grandmother was right about everything because she inherited this vast amount of trial and error wisdom that had accumulated over centuries or millennia.
	And you just think about all the embedded knowledge That goes into virtually any cuisine you can eat, right?
	I 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?
	It's like a price signal.
	You don't see all of the trial and error that goes into it.
	You just get the end product.
	And it's very much like Chesterton's fence.
	The problem is that we are raising people now that We'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.
	Man does not live by bread alone.
	Man is a, as Will Herberg, one of my favorite intellectuals would put it, man should probably be called homo religio.
	We are religious beings.
	religious beings, you can make a very strong case that it was an evolutionary adaptation that allowed us to survive, because it breeds altruism and cooperation and all these kinds of things.
	Harari makes the case it allows you to expand beyond the 150-person group.
	That's right, yeah.
	And I'm open to all those arguments.
	I'm also open to the transcendent arguments.
	My only point is that, I think it's somewhere in Plato, you know, he makes this point that if something is true, it's true for a lot of reasons, right?
	The 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.
	You can come at it from a lot of different places, and one explanation doesn't invalidate other explanations.
	So 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, Big argument, a big part of my book is, you know, Hannah Arendt liked to say, every generation of Western civilization is invaded by barbarians.
	We call them children, right?
	And that's basically a big chunk of the argument of the book right there, is this idea that you're not born into some abstraction.
	You're born into an actual family.
	And your family is what civilizes you.
	It's what models good behavior.
	It's what teaches you right from wrong.
	It's what teaches you how to use a knife and fork.
	It teaches you all the little stuff and all of the big stuff.
	And it works on principles that have nothing to do with the market.
	Right?
	I mean, I am literally, and I suspect you are too, you're far closer to a communist than your own family, right?
	Of course.
	Because in your own family, it really is from each according to their ability, each according to their need.
	You gotta join bank account the whole deal.
	Yeah, you don't charge your kids for food, yet, right?
	You don't charge them rent, yet.
	If they behave.
	If they behave, right?
	You know, I give my kid rain or shine when I have to leave town.
	I 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?
	And, no, but my point is that the values of what Hayek would call the microcosm, are not based on contracts and rationality.
	They'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.
	So Hayek in The Fatal Conceit talks about the microcosm and the macrocosm.
	In the microcosm, that's the world of kin, family, friends, where your values of reciprocity trump market notions, right?
	It's the Gemeinschaft versus the Gesellschaft.
	And in the macrocosm, that's the world where you deal with strangers.
	And one of the beautiful things about capitalism is it turns strangers from existential enemies into customers.
	Right.
	And so you can't take the values of the microcosm and impose them on the macrocosm without destroying liberty.
	You cannot take the values of the macrocosm and apply them to the microcosm without destroying the values and moral creating engine that is the family and civil society.
	And so the whole point is to keep them separate.
	Keep, you know, sort of like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial.
	You got to keep the Gemeinschaft out of the Gazelle.
	And if you can do that, everything works.
	You know, if you treat your family like it's a business enterprise, you're going to destroy your family.
	If you treat the extended order of liberty like it's a family where the president is our father, you're going to destroy liberty.
	And so you got to keep these things separate.
	And capitalism is downstream of the value creating engine that is the family.
	This is part of my point about why I say all of the stuff that is around us is an accident, right?
	I mean, one of the common explanations for where capitalism comes from is Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
	I think there's a lot of merit to it, right?
	What 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?
	Right, and Venice was engaged in a fair bit of commerce for a long time.
	But even if you take it on its merits, or its best face forward, It's still an accident, right?
	The Calvinists and the Puritans, they didn't say, if you behave this way, you'll get rich.
	They said, if you behave this way, odds are it's more likely that you might get into heaven.
	And 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.
	But it wasn't the prosperity gospel, right?
	And 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.
	And 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 I 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.
	Yeah, and these artificial tribes suck.
	Again, to borrow from social science.
	And, you know, Facebook is fine for keeping up with your old friends that you met in the real world.
	It is horrible for, like, actually creating a sense of real community, because virtual community is not community.
	Yeah, I noticed that on Twitter.
	That was one of the big lessons I've learned from Twitter.
	It's not natural community, guys.
	It's actually more like a mob.
	But let's talk about tribalism for a second, because there's been this rich debate.
	You 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.
	And I want to delve into that in just a second.
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	So 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.
	And then there is bad tribalism, as in the tribalism of race or the tribalism of class, things that you can't change about yourself that you are born into.
	This would be bad tribalism.
	And tribalism of ideas where you are part of a group because you identify as part of this group, this would be a tribalism that is less likely to be a problem.
	Recently, I read a book by, it's going to come out in September, actually, by Yoram Hazoni over at the Herzl Institute.
	And he's a very big proponent of nationalism.
	And the reason that he's a proponent of nationalism and not just patriotism is he says that there are these set of customs and histories that play into the creation of the tribe and simply kind of intellectualized tribalism to, well, I agree with you on this list of propositions Therefore, we are not part of the same tribe.
	Ignores the fact that people have a natural inclination to identify with people who have a similar history, a similar culture, a similar language.
	What do you make of that argument?
	Is there any way to bridge that particular gap?
	So, my standard analogy about all this is that, you know, every poison is determined by the dose, right?
	And so, nationalism is a little bit like salt.
	A pinch brings the meal together.
	Combines all the flavors well, brings out the flavors.
	It really sells the dish.
	A little too much, it ruins the dish.
	Way too much, it's literally toxic.
	And 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.
	You need some sort of sense of social solidarity and cultural affiliation that binds you together.
	My problem is that If you listen to Raihan Salaam or Rich, this...
	The 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?
	There's a certain set of propositions that we agree on, but it's instead this sort of far more mystic idea.
	I mean, Ryan and Rich and Yoram are probably, I would think, in fairness, not ethno-nationalists, right?
	They're not saying that only one ethnicity or true Americans or true Israelis or any of that kind of stuff.
	Right.
	But nationalism becomes very difficult to define, particularly in a multi-ethnic society where there isn't an enormous amount of consensus around customs.
	And it turns out that the consensus is around the creedal stuff, not the weird cultural stuff.
	And so manufacturing this concept of nationalism, I think, very quickly becomes exclusionary to a lot of people.
	It will certainly be seen as exclusionary by a lot of people.
	But what concerns me more is it's sort of getting back to this microcosm versus macrocosm stuff.
	The government in Washington, or the central government, is the only institution that has any claim of speaking for the whole nation.
	And 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.
	And it's weird, there's this vestigial thing from Marxism that still teaches people that socialism and nationalism are opposites.
	Which is a fight that the Trotskyites lost in the Soviet Union about 1926.
	They're not opposites.
	They're far more often the same thing.
	Read a speech by Fidel Castro.
	Read a speech by Hugo Chavez.
	And replace every instance of the word socialist with nationalist.
	And every instance of the word nationalism with socialism.
	It doesn't change the meaning of any of the sentences.
	When you nationalize an industry, you're socializing an industry.
	Nationalized healthcare is socialized medicine.
	So 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.
	If you want to put flesh on the bones, that's the cold medicine kicking in.
	If 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.
	So that's part of my problem with it.
	I also, you know, it's also just worth pointing out that people think that nationalism is this ancient It's also a product of Romanticism.
	It 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.
	And so these guys like Johann Fichte and Johann Herder create these mythical notions of German national identity.
	as a response to all that.
	So ethno-nationalism is a fairly modern concept.
	There have always been countries, but this idea of nationalism is a fairly recent thing, and it is, in its origins, inseparable from ethno-nationalism.
	I think now you can have a civic nationalism.
	Actually, Rousseau is very good on civic nationalism.
	Well, he also wants a totalitarian state with a general will, but one thing at a time.
	It just makes me nervous.
	I think the founding... I very much want to flip the pyramid.
	I think that I want to send as much power down to the most local level possible.
	Because when you do that, only the issues that really do unite us all will become federal issues or national issues, right?
	So abortion will probably rise to the top because it gets to the very question of who's a human being.
	Slavery rose to the top because it gets to the question of who's a human being.
	But beyond a couple of those kinds of things, push everything else down to the most local level possible.
	The Founding Fathers argued, you know, in essentials, unity, in everything else, liberty.
	And 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.
	And 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.
	But also not centralizing.
	So I'm open to the possibility that there are more examples.
	As a pullback from centralization outside the United States.
	That's right.
	It was a pullback from the globalists, right?
	But 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.
	So 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.
	And 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.
	Both you and I were, quote unquote, never Trumpers in the sense that we did not vote for President Trump.
	I believe that we would both consider ourselves that here's the way I define never Trump.
	It ended the day of the election.
	There's no more, there's no more never Trump after that because now he's the president.
	And so he does good stuff and he does bad stuff.
	And when he does good stuff, yay.
	And when he does bad stuff, boo.
	Right.
	You have one president at a time.
	That was my, I wrote a column called never Trump, never more, where I said, I wasn't going to start lying about the guy.
	I was still going to call balls and strikes as I see it, but he won.
	You only have one president at a time.
	And so my understanding of never Trump was always a personal one, which was, I wasn't going to vote for him.
	I wasn't going to endorse him.
	I didn't want anyway.
	Congrats.
	So I said, so you're in the sometimes Trump category, right?
	And that's what I, so one of the pet peeves, obviously that I think both of us have experienced is this constant refrain from some of the bigger Trump fans that we must be never Trump.
	Every time we cap, every time we, we criticize him.
	How do you, how do you deal with, with that criticism?
	And do you think it's even honest at this point?
	I, I don't think that there's a lot of honesty to people who are labeling folks who clearly are not like never Trump is over.
	They just use it as it's now being used as an epithet.
	In 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.
	Sure.
	Jennifer Rubin.
	Yeah, exactly.
	David Frum.
	But we can name them, right?
	It's not like a movement.
	There's this weird sort of notion there's an existential threat from never-Trumpers to take down Trump.
	I don't see that at all.
	In fact, I'm on the horn with people at the White House on a not infrequent basis talking to them because this doesn't exist anymore.
	Like Trump is the president.
	How do you deal with this kind of thing?
	Yeah, no, look, I share your frustration.
	I think there's a fundamental, and it's difficult because some of the people who, I think it's a very lazy shorthand, right?
	And 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?
	And so, but I think that what happens is to give some of them credit.
	One of the things I think that's going on is they don't want to name names either, right?
	And so what they do is they just use Never Trump as this catch-all thing.
	The problem is when you use Never Trump as a catch-all, it very quickly becomes a straw man.
	And so people like you and me, you read what they say and you're like, well, wait, are they accusing me of this BS?
	And I was like, well, I haven't done this.
	But 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.
	Maybe they do have Jen Rubin in mind.
	And 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 It distorted more than it revealed, right?
	Yeah, it turned into you're either Jew or Iraq war supporter.
	Right.
	The new definition, or both.
	Bagel-snarfing warmonger.
	Exactly.
	And 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
	all 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. - So now I'm gonna ask you a tough question, which is, if you can grade President Trump so far, I usually grade him along a couple of lines.
	I grade him on executive policy, I grade him on legislative policy, and I grade him on rhetoric, because it's very difficult to give him an overall grade, because he's all over the place now.
	In some places he's a hammer hitting a nail, and in some places he's a hammer hitting a baby.
	So how would you grade his administration so far?
	And then I'll ask you the brutal follow-up.
	So 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.
	Me neither.
	So I'm not gonna weasel out of it, but I will say up front, There 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?
	So 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.
	Mitch McConnell has been the single greatest guarantor of Trump's legacy among conservatives.
	He's the guy who's gotten all of these federal judges across the finish line.
	I think, you know, do I agree with Mitch McConnell and everything?
	No, but I think he deserves enormous credit for that, not to be sort of demonized.
	And 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.
	I 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.
	I'll take that any day of the week.
	But 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.
	And so the administration, thank goodness, went and got a lot of, including a lot of friends of mine.
	Hardcore movement think tank, um, true believers who went in there and said, who knows how long this thing's going to last?
	Let's get some stuff done.
	Right?
	And so I'm all in favor of that.
	So, 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.
	I give them, you know, somewhere between a B plus and an A minus.
	Okay.
	And then on foreign policy, how do you, how do you grade them?
	I think there are a couple of things that only Trump would have done.
	Very few, but there are a few that are important, right?
	I mean, maybe Ted Cruz would have moved the embassy to Jerusalem?
	Maybe.
	Maybe, you know?
	But almost none of the other guys would have, right?
	So the Jerusalem move, pulling out of Paris, which I think was not the big deal people make it out to be, but symbolically was a big deal.
	Well, reaching out to the Saudis and trying to actually broker an alliance.
	Yeah, no, I think that's right.
	Although, again, I think...
	It may be more of a byproduct of Obama's horrible...
	A lot of Trump's victories are the product of Obama's failures.
	And Obama so messed up the game board that he created these awesome opportunities for Trump to sort of snap up.
	So on the foreign policy stuff, again, with the caveat that I don't think all that much of it is intentional as some of his biggest fans do.
	B plus, A minus.
	Okay, so then here's the brutal follow-up.
	So I'll ask you the brutal follow-up in one second.
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	Okay, so here is the brutal follow-up.
	The election is today.
	Do you vote for President Trump?
	Who's he running against?
	Joe Biden.
	Still probably not.
	I don't vote for Joe Biden either.
	I live in Washington, D.C.
	I truly couldn't give a rat's ass.
	So why?
	What's the downside to voting for President Trump?
	Because I would basically say at this point, here's my view going into the election.
	And again, neither of us voted for President Trump.
	We're talking about some weird 2018 special election, right?
	Right, exactly.
	It's a weird 2018 special election.
	Nothing has changed between now and 2020.
	He's gone into a basement.
	Life has frozen.
	I mean, I did say if I lived in Ohio in 2016, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton.
	I mean, I wouldn't have voted for Hillary Clinton.
	I probably would have voted for Trump.
	So it's, so the things that I was worried about with president Trump were threefold.
	I was worried that he was going to soul suck the party, which seems to have happened somewhat among elected officials, but does not seem to have happened among the intelligentsia or even the people who are necessarily conservative voters.
	Certainly not conservative young voters who are people who I deal with on a frequent basis.
	I 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.
	And then he's now governed as a pretty deeply conservative president, even if he doesn't believe a lot of this stuff.
	And 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.
	My only alleviating concern there is that the damage may have already been done.
	So 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?
	So 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.
	So what exactly is the biggest holdup for you?
	And I don't mean it to be a gotcha.
	Yeah, no, no, I get it.
	You know, and I reserve the right to change my answer later.
	First of all, you know, a big part of my argument in my book is about the importance of rhetoric, right?
	That basically this miracle that happens basically happened because the way we talk about ourselves to ourselves, about ourselves, changed profoundly.
	And 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.
	I also, you know, I am not convinced yet, by any stretch of the imagination, that the Trump presidency ends well.
	My position has been from the beginning that, you know, character is destiny.
	I 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.
	And 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.
	I have not heard it yet.
	Most of his values are basically sort of Nietzschean values.
	You know, winning, strength, defeating your enemies, getting praise.
	And that stuff really turns me off.
	So as a prudential question, I 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.
	Right, that I agree with obviously.
	Your 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.
	It 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 But see, this is part of my problem with what's going on, and it sort of gets to your Never Trump question from before.
	I keep trying to make this point that Trumpism should not be looked at as an ideological phenomenon.
	It is a psychological phenomenon.
	And both in terms of Trump's own brain, which You know, he admits he's a guy who works on instinct, he wants to be flexible, he doesn't really care about conservative stuff.
	His support for conservative judges is entirely transactional, thank God.
	You know, he basically... Does not look like a horse in the mouth there.
	Yes, 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.
	Great.
	That's fine.
	But this is the same guy who wanted to put his sister on the Supreme Court.
	And 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?
	No one cares, no one, you know, no always Trump types say, good for you, Jonah, or anything like that.
	But I criticize him.
	There you go again, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So there is this weird, hyper, Tension about anything critical of Trump.
	And Trump encourages this, because what he cares about most is praise.
	And 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.
	Basically, pelted Jeff Flake and Corker from public life, right?
	And tried to do the same thing with Sass, and wanted to do it with McConnell.
	McConnell voted with Trump's agenda in the Senate like 98%.
	He was Trump's agenda in the Senate.
	Corker was like 90%, Flake was like 88%.
	But 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.
	It was that every now and then when Trump said something bad or worthy of criticism, they said something and that drove His supporters crazy who only want to hear praise for him.
	And 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.
	But Rand Paul keeps praise and honor upon Donald Trump and so no one gets mad at him.
	So when people say, look, I just care, it's a transactional thing.
	I just care about Trump's agenda.
	I just want him to get things done.
	And yet they aim all their ire at anybody who criticizes Trump and not the people who actually undermine his agenda.
	I think something else is going on and is it is psychological thing that borders on a cult of personality from people.
	I think the motivations are all over the map.
	Some 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.
	Some people just don't want to be reminded of their own hypocrisy.
	You 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.
	I get the psychological phenomenon.
	I just haven't seen a lot of evidence that this is really about a policy agenda or anything like that.
	So one of the things that I think has happened here is there's been a conflation between anti-left and conservative.
	People have decided these are both the same thing.
	Rush Limbaugh is the granddaddy of so many of us in the conservative movement.
	For me, I grew up listening to Rush.
	In the middle of the last election cycle, he shifted the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies and renamed it the Advanced Institute of Anti-Left Studies.
	He actually renamed it.
	And for President Trump, it feels like a lot of the support for Trump comes from that, is that Trump hits the right people, and he's hit by the right people, and therefore whatever he does is worthy of praise and honor.
	How do we reestablish the category of conservative falls inside anti-left, but not everything anti-left falls inside conservative?
	How 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?
	That's a good question.
	Irving Kristol used to have a similar distinction.
	That he was anti-left, not anti-state.
	And 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.
	And 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 Public schools, right?
	And I think there's something similar going on today.
	I 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.
	I 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 To point out what a bad dude he was, right?
	I mean, he literally dedicates his book to Satan.
	That's a tell.
	And so, and what happened over the last 10, 15 years is a bunch of people said, look how effective Alinsky was.
	And it says, what we got to do is we got to fight like them.
	And so what happens is, it goes from being sort of the conservative mindset, as you put it, to the anti-left mindset.
	And 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, It 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.
	And so that's why, you know, as I put it in the book, So much of our politics these days on the left and the right is defined by what I call ecstatic schadenfreude.
	It's just that things are worth doing solely because liberal tears are delicious, right?
	I 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?
	It'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.
	One 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.
	But that's the kind of confusion you get when you mistake means for ends.
	You want to collect liberal tears because you win arguments.
	You don't want to collect liberal tears just because you're a cruel jackass.
	But if you confuse the means and ends, all of a sudden everything becomes self-justifying.
	Okay, 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.
	What are the three to five other books that you would have people read to educate themselves as good citizens who understand these values properly?
	Oh, that's an interesting question.
	Well, we'll put aside the entire Shapiro oeuvre.
	As well you should.
	They don't fit into this.
	My next book maybe, but not the ones I've written.
	Tom 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.
	I would not say The Road to Serfdom.
	Gosh, what else?
	I mean, I'm a big believer in history.
	Deirdre 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.
	Whatever the best biography of George Washington is, I think would be pretty useful.
	And then as a follow-on to that, Rick Brookhiser's book on George Washington's Guide to manners and civility, because I think that stuff is really, really important.
	And again, you know, this is more of a gotcha question than the Trump stuff.
	Doing book lists is rough.
	Yeah, no, and it's just off the top of your head.
	And then you spend the next three weeks with that Esprit D'Escalier thing, I should have said this, I should have said that.
	It's a fairly good reading list.
	So 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.
	This morning, Arthur E. Kirk called the decline of American liberalism.
	It'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.
	But I reserve the right to come up with a whole new list of books when I think about it.
	Well, good news is you're on Twitter, so we can definitely find it there, and you'll tweet it out when you think of it.
	Okay, last question for you.
	So that's for the people who listen to the show, probably people who are 14 and up.
	But you're a parent, obviously.
	How do you bring up your kids to appreciate these values?
	How do you actually convey these values to small kids?
	So when I grew up, a lot of it was religiously based.
	It was the idea of responsibility and you're responsible for your own actions and values and have consequences.
	But what measures would you take and do you take in raising your own kids to believe in this?
	Yeah, so, you know, this is a tough one for me because You know, I'm fully cognizant of my own shortfalls and my own hypocrisy on some of these things.
	And 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.
	But if your biggest concern is being a hypocrite as a parent, you're a crappy parent.
	I'll be very clear about this.
	My decision tree went awry in my youth.
	I have made mistakes.
	I've woken up in hotels covered with blood that wasn't my own.
	There 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?
	Because part of being a parent is learning some lessons about your life and trying to Hard building of civilization is doing this.
	If we just did what we kept doing, we'd be back in the Stone Age.
	That's right.
	Embedded knowledge is a hugely important thing, right?
	Trial and error is a hugely important thing.
	That's my general advice for parents.
	You know, towards the end of the book, you know, as we were talking about before this, God kind of sneaks back in the book.
	And I think that whatever your views on organized religion are, or what denomination or faith you are,
	There 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, I think that is a great gut check for kids.
	It'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.
	But also, you know, just as a note, the importance of understanding that, you know, conservatism rightly understood and liberalism rightly understood.
	Should see politics as a very small slice of your life.
	And so one of the things I struggle with is, you know, my kid comes home.
	I'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 To your house, yeah, perfect.
	Not like you wrote an entire book about how the guy's kind of a fascist.
	I 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.
	And 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.
	It 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.
	And I hate all of that crap.
	And I hate it on the right, and I hate it on the left.
	The important stuff in life is about faith, family, friends, experiences.
	You 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.
	And that's the stuff that I try to teach her.
	Well, Jonah Goldberg, it really is an amazing pleasure to have you on the show.
	It's great to be here.
	I really appreciate you stopping by.
	And everybody should go out and purchase a copy of Suicide of the West, or five, and give them to all your friends.
	At least one copy.
	At least one copy.
	Don't just borrow it from a friend, buy it.
	Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Thank you for having me.
	Thank you.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
	Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Caromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.
	Title Credits by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.

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