Andrew Clavin and Jonah Goldberg dissect America’s moral crisis, tracing it to Kanye West’s Trump endorsement and Pat Buchanan’s warnings of Western decadence, while rejecting authoritarian fixes. Goldberg’s Suicide of the West argues civilization’s collapse stems from neglecting gratitude and liberal democratic roots, not materialism—critiquing Pinker’s secularism and linking identity politics to 1970s family breakdowns. The episode pivots to Allison Mack’s Nexium cult ties, then circles back: decentralized governance, not national politics, may restore civic responsibility before polarization spirals beyond repair. [Automatically generated summary]
A fierce debate has broken out over the opinions of Kanye West for some reason.
West praised the politics of conservative commentator Candace Owens and reportedly said, I love Donald Trump.
West made the remarks while publicizing his new book, Reinventing Consciousness Through a Critique of Hegelian Dialectic, Yo, during a speech on pre-Socratic reasoning among badass Gs at the Society for Philosophical Reflection by people whose chain of thought is completely incomprehensible.
The comments drew immediate criticism from Jay Shameless Racecard, a spokesman for Black Lives Matter, who said, How can we continue to convince black Americans that they are helpless victims with no control over their own lives if famous black rappers act as if they can just walk around with their own opinions?
Conservatives, meanwhile, praised West as a great American philosopher and said they looked forward to buying his new LP for their high fives.
All in all, the debate over Kanye's thoughts should serve to pass the time until something important happens, like the collapse of Western civilization.
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We pre-recorded the interview.
It is a really, really interesting interview about his new book, Suicide of the West, which is just published today.
We may have the first interview, a first official interview with Jonah Goldberg.
You know, Jonah doesn't get to talk enough about big ideas.
He always is just talking about the stuff of the moment.
So this was a really interesting interview.
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So here's my question.
Mike Pence's Attack Squad00:07:49
Have we actually forgotten what freedom looks like?
I was thinking about this because we had Charlotte Pence on a while back, and Charlotte Pence, obviously the daughter of Mike Pence, our vice president.
And Mike Pence to me is one of the most abused politicians out there.
Just yesterday, I think it was, some celebrity tweeted, this is the most dangerous politician in America.
And I thought, because why?
You know, because you disagree with some of his opinions.
He just gets attacked and attacked.
He's just a punching bag.
He's one of these typical Republicans that they attack and attack and attack.
And then after he's out of office, they say, you know, he was great.
He's not like the Republicans they have today.
It's just like they're talking about George Bush now.
You know, they're saying, oh, they were great, not like Trump.
Well, soon it'll be, you know, well, Pence was great, not like the next, whoever the next Republican is.
So I asked Charlotte, what's it like having your dad just attacked all the time for nothing, for just being a decent ordinary guy, a straight-up guy.
And she said that when she went to events with Mike Pence, it would upset her to see people protesting or shouting things at him.
But he would say to her, that's what freedom looks like, right?
That is a very, very mature response.
This is why I call Mike Pence Mensch.
I just crush his name together because he is a mensch.
He understands that freedom doesn't look like what you like.
It doesn't look like everything happening the way you want it to.
It looks sometimes like absolute chaos.
Now, the thing is, we know, we already know that a lot of people on the left have abandoned the idea of freedom.
And we talk about it every day, right?
The people on campus who shout down speakers, the people who want to ban certain kinds of speech, Hillary Clinton, who doesn't like the fact that corporations can make documentaries that attack her.
All those people who don't seem to feel that an election should be able to overturn their plans.
They feel elections are great until suddenly their elite ideas of how the global world should unfold get wrong-footed.
Then suddenly elections are not so good.
There must have been a Russian plot or something like this.
We know the left does this all the time.
But recently, I have started to hear this stuff from the right.
And, you know, the right, of course, covers a wide range.
I'm on the right.
But, you know, I've started to hear from certain people on the right that basically freedom has to end because we're no longer moral.
So Pat Buchanan, who has toyed with fascism for a long, long time.
He's been in several administrations, several Republican administrations, but he has, there's been hints of anti-Semitism and hints of kind of fascistic leans.
He wrote a column over the weekend that was just talking about the rise of the right in Hungary.
Now, I'm not going to comment on Hungarian politics because they've got all this pressure to take in immigrants that they don't want, to take in refugees that they don't want.
I understand that.
Some of the attacks on the guy there, what's his name, Org Banz or something like that.
They say, oh, he's anti-Semitic because he attacked George Soros.
George Soros is one of Israel's greatest enemies, so I don't see how it's anti-Semitic to attack him.
So forget about that.
But he starts to say, Pat Buchanan starts to write that democracy is not basically serving the people anymore.
And he starts to talk about America.
And here's what he says.
Our democracy boasts of a First Amendment, freedom of speech and press that protects blasphemy, pornography, filthy language, and the burning of the American flag.
We stand for a guaranteed right of women to abort their children and of homosexuals to marry.
We offer the world a freedom of religion that prohibits the teaching of our cradle faith and its moral code in our public schools.
Our elites view this as social progress upward from a dark past.
Too much of the world, however, to much of the world, however, America has become the most secularized and decadent society on earth, and the title the Ayatollah bestowed upon us, the great Satan, is not altogether undeserved.
And if what our democracy has delivered here has caused tens of millions of Americans to be repulsed and to secede into social isolation, why would other nations embrace a system that produced so poisoned to politics and so polluted a culture?
Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the march, writes the Washington Post.
Democracy is an ideal and in practice seems under siege.
And Buchanan says yes, and there are reasons for this.
Listen to this carefully.
Democracy lacks content.
As a political system, it does not engage the heart.
And if Europe's people see their leaders as accommodating a transnational EU while failing to secure national borders, they will use democracy to replace them with men of action, that famous fascist celebration of men of action.
I would personally rather have men of thought, but men of action, okay, so our democracy has led us to become this immoral, decadent nation.
And the problem with democracy is it has no content.
Now, this, by the way, this is what a lot of the radical Muslims say.
Remember Adoyan in Turkey, he said, democracy is like a streetcar.
When you get to the stop you want, you get off.
And that's because he sees the content as being the point, not the freedom itself.
On our own site, on the Daily Wire site, Eric Erickson, and I don't mean to attack him personally, he writes some stuff I really like, but he wrote a very thunderous denunciation of America, saying the American experiment is at an end.
The American experiment, says Eric Erickson, is at an end.
The nation will continue, but barring some crisis that rouses the American people to our better angels, the experiment is over.
Our founders determined that our republic had to be premised on a good and moral people.
The law is only as good as the people.
There are just too many examples of the people not being so good.
Evangelical support for the president is at an all-time high.
This news comes as more Playboy Playmates and porn stars come forward to confess to adultery with the president while his wife was pregnant.
Even many of the president's ardent supporters now acknowledge it, but they do not care because the president gives them what they want.
Call me crazy, says Eric Erickson, but when you have the all-powerful, omnipotent creator of the entire universe on your side, you should not have to rely on a slightly orange adulterer for protection from your enemies.
So let's think about this for a minute.
Are we now deserving of destruction because we're no longer moral?
Has democracy failed us?
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Why We Lost Faith00:15:13
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So to me, I got to be honest, some of this stuff seems like a lot of overwrought nonsense.
At any given moment in time, when you have a country filled with 325 million people, there's going to be strains that you find immoral.
You know, if you had gone back into the 1950s when people were going to church more, when there was no divorce, very little divorce, when abortion was illegal, you still would have found all things, by the way, which I disapprove of the collapse of our religion.
I disapprove certainly of abortion.
I certainly disapprove of divorce, especially when there are children involved.
And yet, at the same time, there were plenty of immoral things going on, like the kind of bigotry that kept people from, kept the black guy from using a bathroom so that he had to explain to his son why we can't go in there because the color of your skin is not the right color.
That was immoral as well.
So there's always immorality going on.
No nation is perfect.
There's always stuff going on.
What I notice, what I notice is these people who decry the immorality of America also tend to turn out for authoritarianism.
That's what bothers me about the Buchanan article, is that basically he's saying democracy has no content, and so we're immoral, and we need to get rid of democracy or put it aside for authoritarian rule so that we can be moral.
But here's the problem.
It is true.
It is true that our founders said that our Constitution was written for a moral people.
It is true that only a moral people can be free.
But here's the paradox.
Only a moral people can be free, but only a free people can be moral.
Because if somebody puts a gun to your head and says, don't get divorced, if somebody puts a gun to your head and says, don't get an abortion, you may get the right outcome, but you're not a moral person.
You're not a moral person if you don't cheat on your wife because her father's a mob boss who says he'll kill you if you do.
You're just somebody who's afraid.
You're just somebody who's under the gun.
And that is not morality.
So only, while it's true only immoral people can be free, it is also true that only a free people can be moral.
So how do we solve that problem?
Well, first let's look at the way we don't solve the problem.
You know, a lot of people on the right, and I'm talking about the right.
I've already talked, I'll talk endlessly about how the left doesn't care about freedom anymore.
But a lot of people on the right have started to uphold Vladimir Putin as the defender of the faith.
He is the great man who is going to defend the Christian faith.
He's going to defend white supremacy and the white races, and he is the one person who is committed to the kind of rule we need.
And we see this among, especially among the far right.
And to say the only nice thing I'll say about Putin is that he does play on religious bigotry.
He does play on hatred of homosexuals.
But he doesn't play on anti-Semitism.
He doesn't play on white supremacy.
He doesn't talk about that at all.
But Putin is a criminal.
Putin is a guy who blew up his own people in order to start a war, who prosecuted the war in Chechnya with just absolute brutality.
Journalists and critics of Putin vanish and die under mysterious circumstances.
Basically, he is running a small mob of about 100 or 150 people that they call the oligarchs.
These are the guys when the state, when the Soviet Union collapsed, these are the guys who pillaged the holdings of the state and made themselves billionaires, right?
That's all it is, is just a bunch of guys basically, you know, running a mob for their own benefit, their own profit, and oppressing the Russian people.
They are not.
They are not the founders, the protectors of morality by any stretch of the imagination.
Trump may sleep around.
Trump may do bad things in his personal life.
Trump has done nothing, nothing that compares to the evil that Vladimir Putin does.
And so when I hear people on the right saying, oh, you know, we can't, you know, our country's not moral.
We need Vladimir Putin.
That really, it really does disturb me.
So, you know, what do you look for?
What do you look for when you look for freedom?
What does freedom look like?
Does it look like morality?
Does it look like people going to church in shirts and ties?
Does it look like no gay pride parades where people wander around flashing their fetishes at you, which is incredibly annoying and incredibly grotesque?
You know, to me, to me, that doesn't make sense at all.
It doesn't make sense at all.
Because like I said, only immoral people can be free, but only a free people can be moral.
You know, I took a little bit of actual encouragement last night from watching the hearing on Mike Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo is Trump's former CIA director, Trump's nomination to be Secretary of State.
And there has just been an absurd, you know, the resistance, the resistance has put up against Mike Pompeo.
It has just been embarrassing.
I mean, we remember when Corey Booker went up against him because he didn't support gay people.
And you think like, you know, because he's a Christian, basically, and he thinks that being gay is not moral.
And does he mistreat people in his offices because they're gay?
Because Jean Shaheen said she wasn't going, Senator from New Hampshire said she wasn't going to support him because he was against abortion.
He was against abortion and against gays and all that.
She had a moment.
It's a really interesting moment.
I just want to play this one little clip.
This is during the hearings for Mike Pompeo.
Gene Shaheen starts questioning him and basically accusing him of not being fair to his own staff at the CIA.
And Pompeo's argument is, hey, I have my opinions.
I have my religion.
This is what I believe.
But everybody gets the same treatment for me.
And they just had this, just to show you how stupid this stuff has been.
They had this exchange that went like this.
And yet you were criticized at the CIA for undermining policies of the previous administration to improve diversity at the CIA.
Ma'am, I don't know the criticism that you're referring to.
I have to tell you, I didn't undermine a single policy.
We have emphasized it.
We've talked about it.
We've worked on it.
I think I'm proud of the work that I did to continue to develop and increase the capacity for the CIA to deliver a diverse workforce to meet the challenges, the intelligence challenges in that case around the world.
Well, I would just say Michael Weinstein, who is a former Air Force officer who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that he has been seeing increasing complaints from those inside the intelligence community under your leadership.
So I think there have been a number of concerns raised.
Ma'am, if I might, please.
The number of, we call them no-fair complaints, the statutory requirement, decreased from 2016 to 2017 by 40%.
Good.
Good.
You're going to everything I said was nonsense.
Good.
So they go into this committee and the president gets a secretary of state.
I don't think a Secretary of State has ever been refused.
And so this committee, they had the votes because Rand Paul was holding it up saying Pompeo supported the Iraq war and Rand Paul doesn't like us to do anything overseas.
And he wasn't going to support him.
But Rand Paul says now he's got assurances from Pompeo that now he dislikes the Iraq war and he wants it to be over and so on and so forth.
But they split on a 10 to 10 vote because the deciding senator, Johnny Isaacson, was at a funeral and so he couldn't vote.
And that just would have been embarrassing.
I think it would have come to a vote eventually anyway, but it could have been held up.
But Senator Chris Koons, Democrat from Delaware, changed his vote to present so they could get him out of committee.
And that is the way these things have to work, right?
He didn't have to support him.
He won't support him on the floor.
But he let the thing get out of committee because this resistance, you know, Bill McGurn wrote a thing.
I mean, just talking about people who've lost the plot of freedom, who've lost what freedom looks like, that it looks like losing sometimes.
Sometimes freedom looks like losing.
Bill McGurn wrote this great column today talking about the fact where he says, all right, Donald Trump, you know, has violated norms of behavior.
He's violated norms of politeness.
He has violated norms of the way a president behaves.
But, but the elites who oppose him, the elites who feel that the election took away their plans, their power, their idea of what America should be, have so much, have violated norms so much more than Trump has and brought things down so much further that it's they who are really the threat to freedom.
And he goes on and he lists this thing, he says, in the thick of the 2016 election, the New York Times ran a front-page article in which it advertised that the particular dangers posed by Mr. Trump's candidacy meant that the long-held norm of journalistic objectivity might have to give way to a more oppositional approach.
So the press lost its way.
Good liberals, says Bill McGurn, once found the idea of spying on American citizens without just cause unconscionable, but when the target is a former Trump campaign associate, it becomes okay to get a warrant based on an unverified dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
So the intelligence community lost its way.
When Sally Yates was acting Attorney General and President Trump issued an executive order on immigration, she objected, she objected to, Ms. Yates ordered the entire Justice Department not to obey the president, despite a finding from the department's Office of Legal Counsel that the order was lawful.
And she was applauded in her insubordination by Andrew Weissman, then a justice attorney who now serves on Robert Mueller's team.
So the Justice Department lost its way.
In the middle of a Me Too moment, ostensibly all about more respect for women, the president's press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has been derided as everything from a summer whore to a slightly chunky soccer mom.
So the social warriors on the left have lost their way and lost the idea of what freedom looks like and how it works.
And the pardon power enjoyed by the president is among the most unfettered in the Constitution.
But because the president is Mr. Trump and the pardon for controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpeo, and the pardon was for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has opted for lawlessness.
It has opted to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the pardon's legitimacy.
So many, many judges have lost their way and have lost what freedom looks like because they want it to go their way.
And that's not what freedom looks like.
Let me just say for just a moment before we get to the Jonah Goldberg interview, that Plato, the famous Greek philosopher and Plato's Socrates, had many of these fears about democracy.
He feared, you know, he talks about in the Republic, Socrates talks about the fact that freedom, people become addicted to freedom, they then start to love pleasure, they then start to love money, they become fascinated by their own ability to buy things, fascinated by pleasure, and they lose freedom and freedom devolves into tyranny.
And he says freedom, democracy is the path to tyranny, says Socrates.
So it is a real problem.
So where does that leave us?
If only a free people can be moral and only a moral people can be free, are we just caught in this circle of decline, as Socrates said, that has to lead to tyranny?
The answer to me is simply this.
Freedom looks like an argument.
Freedom looks like everyone speaking freely, trying to convince the other of the way to go.
I believe that our particular democracy is based on Christianity.
If you can't sell your Christianity, you just can't sit around and say the American experiment is over.
You've got to go out there and actually sell what you believe.
You've got to sell it as a joyful, positive thing that is going to improve people's lives, not as something that means that people who act differently than you have to be condemned, because that's just a no-sale as far as I'm concerned, and it's not Christianity either.
Go look at the Gospels for a change.
Go look at what Jesus says.
Look at the times.
He condemns other people's behaviors almost never.
He almost never does unless they are religious people blocking the way to heaven, to ordinary people's path to heaven.
That's what he really gets down on, okay?
That's what he really gets down on.
Otherwise, he's talking to you about how to find the kingdom of heaven.
Are you talking about that?
Are you selling that?
Or are you just thumping your hand, thumping your fist into your palm and condemning people and then expecting them to turn around because it makes you feel like a righteous person?
You know, here's the thing.
It is about winning the argument.
Freedom is about winning the argument.
That's why I fight so hard against the left when they want to shut people down.
If you're afraid of winning the argument, if you're afraid of losing the argument, even and by the way, even if you lose the argument, your responsibility remains the same because then you're talking to what they call the remnant.
Then you're talking to the next generation that's going to come down the pike.
When Cicero in Rome lost the argument, as my own son has pointed out in an article in the LA Times, when Cicero lost the argument and the Republic of Rome collapsed, he wrote about democracy for future generations.
John Adams was quoting Cicero while they were forming the Constitution and the Declaration.
That's who you're talking to.
You're talking, freedom never dies.
The right never dies.
The truth never dies.
You've got to keep on talking.
This whole idea that, oh, you're bad and therefore we have to get rid of freedom is cowardice.
It's cowardice.
It's cowardice to say that we've become an immoral nation, therefore we need to get some authoritarians in here to enforce morality.
That is just, I can't even say the word on the air, but it's chicken.
It's chicken.
You've got to stay in the argument.
And if you lose it in this generation, you try to win it in the next.
Freedom sounds like debate.
Freedom sounds like talking.
Freedom sounds like protest.
Freedom makes a lot of noise.
All right, we're going to have Jonah Goldberg come on to talk about Suicide of the West, a really interesting interview, not as depressing as it sounds from the title.
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Jonah Goldberg, he's certainly one of my favorite political writers.
He is witty.
His prose is graceful.
He's got all kinds of a range of knowledge, both pop culture and intellectual culture.
Break from Tradition00:15:53
His book is fascinating, Suicide of the West, How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.
It's out today.
Jonah is senior editor at National Review as well as a Los Angeles Times columnist.
He's the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Liberal Fascism, which is just terrific.
I thought an epoch-making study of the 30s and 40s and the tyranny of clichés.
Here he is discussing his new book, Suicide of the West.
Jonas, good to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
It's great to be here, man.
You know, Suicide of the West, first of all, I have read every word of this, which is going to make this a unique interview in the history of American journalism.
This is unprecedented.
No one reads the book.
I don't know what came over me.
It just caught me out.
I started.
I thought I'd skim it and then I was caught up.
No, it's right.
I mean, you do terrific work, as always.
But let's talk about this.
I mean, it's such a, it's called Suicide of the West, how the rebirth of populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy.
Now, I was going to wait for the musical to come out, but that is not a happy title.
I mean, do you believe that the West is actually committing suicide?
What was it?
You know, it might be an apocryphal story, but Chaolin Lai, the former Chinese premier, was once asked what he thought about what the verdict was on the French Revolution in like 1973.
And his response was, too soon to tell.
And so, look, for a book that begins about 300,000 years ago, I think my conception of suicide can have a long timeframe on it.
I think the reason I chose suicide, not death of the West or Decline of the West, is that suicide's a choice.
And I think our civilization is making choices right now that if carried to their logical extreme or logical conclusion, are suicidal in nature.
So this is not, it's not a Mark Steinian vision of those kinds of choices.
You're talking about much different choices.
What are the choices you're talking about?
Right.
So I was very influenced by economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, who basically argues that this thing I call the miracle, right?
Whatever you want to call it, liberal democratic capitalism, modernity, right?
This thing that emerges essentially from, I would argue, from this, from the English Enlightenment or the Scottish Enlightenment.
One of the things that Steve Pinker gets wrong is treating the Enlightenment like they're all one thing.
Right.
Because as Mike Myers would say in So I've Married an Axe Murderer, when it comes to Enlightenments, if it's not Scottish, it's crap.
But one of the things that Deirdre McCloskey, I think, is fairly persuasive on is that the thing that made this once in all of human history transformation into human prosperity, human sort of fulfillment that you get starting in the 1700s and that the American founding is the symbol of, was all created by words, ideas, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
And what I don't think she fully appreciates is that a civilization that can be created by words can also be destroyed by words.
That if you don't, you know, if you don't express gratitude for these amazing things that we have, this incredible gift that we sort of stumbled into, you're in danger of losing it.
You know, in the Bible, Old Testament and New, the whole idea of gratitude and remembering certain things really means honoring certain things is hugely important for keeping the spirit of God alive, keeping a civilization alive.
And I think that's true in secular terms as well.
If you don't take a moment to have some gratitude for where we are as a species right now and how we got here, you're inclined, what happens is that you then breed entitlement and resentment.
And that's suicidal, right?
So it's not demography and the Mark Steinian kind of thing.
It's certainly not Marxist.
You know, I don't believe in cold and personal forces guiding us.
I think that as Ronald Reagan would say, freedom is not, we don't inherent freedom in our blood.
It's in danger every generation.
It has to be taught.
Civilization is a verb.
We are all born naked, penniless, and ignorant.
And human nature has no history.
So what is required of every generation is to teach the next generation those things that should be grateful for, because that's the only way you're going to conserve and preserve them is to teach them to be grateful for them.
You know, it's really interesting when you say this.
I read Pinker's book too.
And one of the things that I like Pinker a lot and I enjoy his writing, but he does kind of get so materialist that he basically says that, look, you've got long life and good health and money.
What else do you want?
But I mean, people do want something else, don't they?
They want freedom.
They want some kind of idea of meaning in their lives.
And you kind of talk about that more.
You have a sense that this is something that can be preserved and recreated.
I do.
And I think one of the reasons I agree with you, you know, Pinker is sort of a Vulcan, you know, and he's incredibly useful in explaining the material side of things.
But because he's such a, you know, and again, I use his books a lot for my book, but he's such a secular sort of materialist.
He kind of doesn't have a lot of patience for the more spiritual, romantic side of things.
And I argue, you know, going back to Will Herberg, one of the great sort of conservative intellectuals, that man should properly be understood as homo religio.
We are hardwired to want something more than just simple material goods.
We want a sense of meaning, a conception of our place in the universe.
We want religion.
And I mean religion in the broadest sense that we need a system.
We want a system of values that tells us our place, gives us a sense of meaning, fills the holes in our soul.
And that stuff isn't being taught either.
And, you know, Mary Eberstadt had a great piece in The Atlantic not long ago, talking about how the rise of the identity politics that we see today can be tracked to the breakdown of the family in the 1970s.
Because what happens is we are born seeking a sense of meaning in our place in the world.
And if we don't get it from our family, it doesn't mean we stop searching for it.
You know, Robert Nisbitt called it the quest for community.
And we start looking elsewhere for it.
Identity politics, which says your entire existence can be summed up by the color of your skin or your gender preferences or whatever, is a source of meaning.
I think it's a cheap and shabby source of meaning, but it's a very real one for a lot of people.
And so what you have to keep in mind is that human nature abhors a vacuum.
If you don't provide people with a healthy sense of meaning, a healthy sense of belonging in the world, they'll find an unhealthy one.
It's sort of like the G.K. Chesterton thing about if you stop believing in God, it's not that you won't believe in anything.
It's that you won't believe in nothing.
You'll believe in anything, right?
And so people will find other things as sources of meaning.
And most of those are just simply likely not to be healthy and not contribute to the sustaining of the civilization that we live in.
So where, if we're now at this pretty pass, you know, where did this begin?
I mean, I know you're, I don't see your, you know, your fan club picture of Donald Trump behind you.
I know you're not a big Trump fan, but he's, but he's obviously not the start of anything.
I mean, he's way downstream, right?
All of politics is downstream of, I think, these cultural trends.
I think that politicians can make these cultural trends worse.
Sure.
Barack Obama, if you read his second inaugural, his vision of what America is about, which was a consistent theme throughout his presidency, is that you have two political units.
You have the individual and you have the state in Washington, right?
Nothing else, right?
And the problem with that is that it is a really cheap form of sort of progressive libertarianism in the sense that you're free to do all the little things that you want to do as an individual, but if you need help with anything else, the only place you can look to is Washington.
And the problem with that is that the place you get meaning in life starts with the family.
I mean, again, Hannah Arendt has this great line.
She says, every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians.
We call them children, right?
Certainly happened in my house.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, and every house.
As a species, we are all born naked, penniless, and ignorant.
And we come with a lot of preloaded software.
But if we don't get the updates starting in the family, we can be, you know, we can go off the rails.
If you took a baby living today and sent it back a thousand years to a Viking village, you know, sent it, went into New Rochelle and stole a baby and sent it to a Viking village.
And if it was adopted by a Viking family, it would grow up to, you know, to pillage Western England.
If you took a Viking baby and you sent it to New Rochelle, it would grow up to be an orthodontist.
The civilization that you're born into matters enormously.
And I think the breakdown of civil society, the breakdown of the family, these institutions where we get our sense of meaning and belonging, as they break down, we look for other ones.
And so you have all these people who don't want to have anything to do with their real communities.
Instead, they want to spend time on virtual communities.
But Facebook is fine for keeping up with old friends.
It is horrible for making new friends.
Because what it ends up doing, particularly in the political context, is reinforcing and confirming your existing biases and multiplying them on both the left and the right.
And so I think that one of the things that we're having is we retreat from civil society, which there's an enormous amount of social science that that is in fact happening, is we start to watch politics as if it's a form of entertainment.
And we start rooting for our heroes and rooting against the villains.
And we see it simply as a story of drama of my team versus your team.
And that, I think, leads to very unhealthy politics, whether it has anything to do with Trump or not.
That trend existed long before Trump came on the scene.
He exploited it to win, but he's not to blame for it.
You know, do you feel, I felt this when I was reading Pinker's book, that when he writes about Donald Trump, I suddenly thought, you know, calm down.
You know, he may be a good president, he may be a bad president.
He's kind of living in all of our heads rent-free at this point.
Are we thinking about this guy too much?
I mean, do you see him as a real break with something?
Like I said, I know you're not a fan, but do you see him as an actual break or just a kind of bump in the road?
I think he represents a real break of sorts.
I don't think he represents the break that the resistance wants to turn him into, right?
I mean, my standard line is, look, Donald Trump isn't Hitler.
Hitler could have repealed Obamacare.
And he's not this dangerous despot, but he is a creature of entertainment culture.
And I think he views the job through that prison way too much for my tastes.
And I think that Orwell has this great line where he says, a man can feel himself a failure and take to drink and become all the more of a failure because he drinks.
I think that one of the problems that I think you and some of my friends who are sort of more pro-Trump than I am, what they don't appreciate is the dialectic nature of our politics these days.
Donald Trump's misbehaviors often repeatedly get defended because of things that Barack Obama did.
I shudder to think what Elizabeth Warren will do, citing some of the things that Donald Trump has done as a precedent.
And I also wonder what conservatives, what a Democratic president will be able to do or be guilty of in their personal lives that conservatives will be able to denounce that they won't be hypocritical for, given what they defended in this guy.
And that, I think, is going to be a real problem.
Yeah, I can see that being a problem down the road too.
But, you know, your vision, weirdly, is more hopeful than your title.
I mean, your title is just satisfied.
Yeah.
So where do we start?
What would you like to see happen that is realistic that could actually begin to happen in this country?
Yeah, so I mean, I don't have a lot of public policy program in here because in part, part of my argument is that the rhetoric matters, right?
I say if a civilization created by words, it can be destroyed by words.
That means one of the things I want to get people to do is think about how they talk about their own civilization, their own culture, their own country.
And that's part of the argument of the book.
But if you want a sort of a basic public policy argument, push as much power as possible down to the most local level possible.
You know, when you say that to left wingers, they immediately say, oh, so you want to have Jim Crow or slavery back.
I was like, no, no, no.
I mean, we fought a war.
We mended the Constitution a couple of times.
That's a settled issue, right?
But do I think that hipsters in Oregon should be able to order stinky cheese from France without the FDA saying it's okay?
Yeah.
Do I think that people should be able to organize their lives, as long as they respect basic civil rights and basic human rights, as they want?
Yes.
And you'll still have culture wars.
But one of the great things about pushing this stuff to the most local level possible is the winners have to look the losers in the eye the next day, right?
You have to see them at kids' soccer games and that supermarket.
You have this, and that breeds a certain amount of humility that, you know, you're talking about your neighbors.
You're talking about the parents of your kid's best friend when you get into political arguments.
Right now, because of this thing I was talking about before about treating politics as a form of entertainment where we all just sit in our living rooms and watch it on TV, is you end up getting these grand coalitions between one political tribe and another where you never actually have to deal with the human being on the other side of the argument.
The more local you get, starting in the family, you know the names of the powers that be.
You know them by their first name.
If in the family, you actually, that's mom and dad, right?
But even in local communities or in your school, you know the names of the principal, you know, the names of your aldermen, you know, the names of your parish priests, you know, the names of the people in your community.
And it gives you a sense of control over your own life, which is one of the reasons why I think politics is so bad right now is people don't feel like they have that sense of control over their own lives.
So push it all the way down.
Wow, that's really, really interesting.
I wish we could talk for another hour about this because I just think there's so much in this book and it covers, as you say, it covers an awful lot of history.
Yeah, but The Suicide of the West, how the rebirth of populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy.
Jonah Goldberg, one of the best political writers in the country, if not the best.
Jonah, it's always great to see you.
I hope you'll come back again.
I would love to come back.
And next time you're in D.C., you got to let me know and we'll have you on my podcast and you can rail at me for an hour.
I will be there.
All right, man.
Thanks a lot.
Good to see you.
Really interesting.
I love the fact that I asked him what he would like to have done and he had an excellent answer.
It was like more local government, which is, by the way, something that's actually happening.
And I'll try and talk about this tomorrow if I can.
The country looks a lot different at the local level than it does at the national level.
Allison Mack's Cult Confession00:02:28
sexual follies.
Well, this is the ultimate sexual folly.
Smallville actress Allison Mack has been arrested and charged for her role in a sex cult run by a guy named Keith Rainier, who was arrested previously.
She would apparently, she's charged with luring women in, then forcing them to starve themselves so they looked like what Keith Rainier liked.
They were ordered to remain celibate.
They were held down as Rainier's initials were branded below their hips with a cauterizing pen.
This was called Nexium.
Isn't Nexium some kind of medicine or something like that?
Yeah, but anyway, the cult is called Nexium.
Let me just play a brief clip of Allison Mack doing this worshipful interview with cult leader or accused cult leader Keith Rainier.
What do you see as the greatest limitation between men and women in their quest to relate in a loving and compassionate way?
Well, the biggest limitation that women have is that they're women.
Yes.
And the biggest limitation that men have is that they're men.
So ladies, here's a pro tip, okay?
If you find yourself having someone's initials being branded on your body, get out of the relationship, especially if he says puerile things like that.
These guys are always so empty and shallow, and they always have that look like, didn't I say something so profound?
And she just can barely restrain themselves.
If it's proved to be true, I hope they get life.
All right, tomorrow, we got the mailbag.
Be here.
Your life will change.
Maybe for the better.
Who knows?
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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