“The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.”
I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can’t be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn’t materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story.
Simply put, we got where we are because of God. I don’t mean this as an argument for providence or divine intervention. I believe in God, but if you don’t, you cannot discount the importance of God as a human innovation. I don’t mean gods—plural—but God as a single omniscient being looking at us in all of our private moments. Prior to the god of the Jews, gods were more like prickly servants than masters. Humans picked their deities to support their passions, to grant their wishes, to justify their conquests. The Romans, Greeks, Hindus, Vikings, ancient Chinese, Japanese, and others created gods to match their feelings, from hate and anger to lust and compassion. The Hebrew god reversed the division of labor, demanding that the people work for him, not the other way around. The Hebrew god recognized the moral sanctity of the individual Jew, both male and female. The Christian god universalized that moral sanctity. From its earliest days, Christianity recognized that every person was due a certain measure of justice, and every person was obliged to respect others as children of God. The golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the seed from which grew the concept of the individual.2 Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality. For the Romans and Greeks, aristocracy was natural, and some men were simply by nature slaves. Of course, even after Christianity conquered Europe, the natural tendency of elites to lock in their advantages endured. Christianity’s emphasis on human dignity and equality did not destroy monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, or slavery for more than sixteen centuries. But the fuse, one could argue, was lit.
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. As we’ve seen, Christianity divided the world between the City of Man and the City of God, in Saint Augustine’s famous account. These cities are entirely metaphorical, describing states of mind, not actual city-states. Those who live in the City of God devote themselves to love of God. Those who live in the City of Man devote themselves to their self-interests. Augustine clearly preferred the City of God. But he acknowledged that human societies would always be marked by this “fundamental cleavage” between those of faith and those without. The secular and the faithful had to live among each other and work to create political systems that protected their common interests in “earthly peace” and other “necessaries of this life.”3 Now, Saint Augustine was surely more of a theocrat than this makes it sound. But his realism about the nature of this world created a new space between the religious and the secular. For Augustine, society was divided, not between nobles and peasants (or slaves) or between rich and poor, but between believer and non-believer. And most important: The ultimate task of identifying who was who was left to God, not man.4
Protestantism made its contributions, too, as we’ve seen. Martin Luther’s emphasis on “faith alone” as the measure of righteousness liberated the individual conscience from the monopoly of the Catholic Church. It also led to an explosion of sects, which not only created new institutions and new habits of the heart—including a revolutionary respect for innovation—but also forced the state, ultimately, to expand the borders of liberty and tolerance.
The West’s advance was the product of a series of creative tensions: between balancing the rights of the individual and the powers of the state; between the dominant faith and religious minorities; between faith and reason; between religion and government; etc. But there were also creative tensions inside the human heart, some of which are as old as the human heart: between desire and responsibility; between self-expression and self-discipline; between the yearning to shine as an individual and participate in, and contribute to, the community; and, again, between faith and reason. These tectonic plates of human nature shifted and bumped up against each other, within society and within our own souls.
But there was one thing that informed all of these passions and ideas: the idea that God was watching. The greatest check on the natural human desire to give in to your feelings and do what feels good or even what feels “right” can be captured in a single phrase: “God-fearing.” The notion that God is watching you even when others are not is probably the most powerful civilizing force in all of human history. Good character is often defined as what you do when no one is watching. It is surely true that many atheists are people of good character. It is also true that peace has increased as society has become more secular (which is not to say that correlation is causation). But the very notion of what constitutes good character comes from countless generations of people trying to figure out how they should behave when only God knew what they were doing. And that is the most important tension: between our base instinctual desires and what God expects of us. This tension created space for reason to become a crucial moral tool in our lives. The medieval Doctors of the Church used reason to deduce and to discover God’s will and to breach the divides between all people by appealing to conscience. The rabbinical Jewish tradition has its own deep history of using reason and debate to discover the otherwise hidden will of God.
This is obviously not true of every society everywhere. Some societies substituted the honor of their ancestors for God—and that is a very different thing. The ghosts of ancestors do not necessarily tell you to treat strangers as worthy of respect. Regardless, in the West, where the Miracle happened for the first and only time in human history, it was God, as defined by organized Christianity and informed by Judaism, who shaped our understanding of what right and proper behavior was. Religion provides a framework for how people approach the world, for how they prioritize wants and desires, for how they structure their days and their lives. It is—or was—the primary source of ideas about why you should get out of bed and how to behave once you did. God had a magnetic pull on the otherwise inner-directed compass of human nature, pointing us toward something better.
Regardless of whether you believe in God or not, it is simply the case that the idea of God has shrunk in society and in our own hearts. If you believe that man has a strong religious instinct, if I’ve convinced you that nature—including human nature—abhors a vacuum, then you have to believe that God’s absence creates an opening for all manner of ideas to flood in. As the famous line (attributed to Chesterton) goes: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”5 This, as we’ve seen, explains all manner of totalitarian efforts to create a heaven on earth, to replace a religion that places utopia in the hereafter with a “scientific” religion that will usher in a new heaven on earth in the here and now.
But that is not the only possibility. Totalitarian movements have a very poor track record of making people happier, and so even people alienated by capitalism and democracy recognize that such movements may not deliver what they desire. And so they look elsewhere. Some retreat into themselves, in search of their own inner-defined meaning, obsessing over, say, physical fitness.6 Some might retreat into the virtual world of video games. Others might look for new, exotic religions that promise to provide answers they think traditional religion cannot. Some just fanatically pursue wealth or celebrity as an end in itself rather than a means to one.
But most of these things require work and effort, and for many that’s too high a price of admission. In Liberal Fascism, I argued that fears of America ever becoming an authoritarian or totalitarian police state were wildly misplaced. The greater threat, I argued, lay not in Orwell’s 1984 vision of a boot stomping on a human face forever but in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Huxley’s famous 1932 novel of a futuristic society (set in A.D. 2540), children are hatched in artificial wombs, and citizens are kept happy and docile by taking a drug called soma. As I noted in Liberal Fascism, Brave New World raises questions that are more relevant and vexing than Orwell’s 1984. Everyone understands why 1984’s society of perpetual war and propaganda is undesirable. But in Brave New World everyone is more or less happy. The Miracle was built on the bourgeois idea that everyone had the right to pursue happiness, implying it would take effort and work. But what if we can just have happiness delivered? As technology—computers, robots, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and pharmacology—improves, and as entertainment becomes ever more immersive, why go to all the trouble of pursuing happiness when it can come to you on your couch? There’s an app for that, as they say.
My rebuttal remains the same: The promise of such a society is fool’s gold.
Earned success is the secret to meaningful happiness. The government can improve your net worth with a check, but it cannot improve your self-worth. Likewise, entertainment is not a substitute for effort, and it is certainly a poor replacement for God. But the pursuit of fool’s gold has led many people to tragic ends. One of the great morals of life, for individuals and civilizations alike, is “You are what you worship.”7 The theory that capitalism came out of Protestantism may not explain it all, but it explains a lot. Believing that God is not only watching you but has high expectations creates one kind of society. Believing that getting “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat (or whatever comes next) undoubtedly creates another kind. The average iPhone user unlocks his or her phone at least eighty times per day, and that number is rising every year.8 And yet, despite the fact each of us has access to more information in our pockets than any scholar in the world had twenty years ago, we don’t use it. We drown in information but we starve for knowledge. As I was finishing this chapter in 2017, a poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania reported more than one out of three people couldn’t name a single right listed in the First Amendment. Only one in four Americans, 26 percent, can name all three branches of government. That’s down from 38 percent in 2011! A third of Americans can’t name a single branch of government.9
Ignorance of government, in itself, is not necessarily horrifying. But it is troubling, not least because of the national obsession with encouraging people to vote. If you don’t know what the executive branch is, why is it vital that you vote for president? Democracy is supposed to rely on an informed electorate, after all. The answer to this question—why vote?—is invariably romantic, not reasoned. People must express their will! They must participate! Yes, yes, fine. But voting should be the culmination of one’s civic engagement, not the gateway to it. Yet the tide pushes the other way. Legislators in California and elsewhere increasingly want children to vote. Others want people to vote online so as to not have to suffer the inconvenience of pursuing democracy.10 Better to have it delivered like open phone lines during American Idol.
In 1961, John Courtney Murray delivered a brilliant lecture titled “Return to Tribalism.” He had a prophetic warning: “I suggest that the real enemy within the gates of the city is not the Communist, but the idiot.” He did not mean idiot in the “vernacular usage of one who is mentally deficient” but rather in the “primitive Greek usage.” To the Greeks, the idiot was the private individual who “does not possess the public philosophy, the man who is not master of the knowledge and the skills that underlie the life of the civilized city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word ‘civility.’ ”11 (The word “idiot” didn’t take on the connotation of stupid, low-IQ, etc., until the fourteenth century.)12
No doubt this sounds outrageously elitist. So be it. I am an elitist in the sense that I believe in objective standards of right and wrong, excellence and sloth. But let us also be clear: Our elites are a problem as well. Patrick J. Deneen, a brilliant and intellectually anachronistic (in a good way) professor at the University of Notre Dame, writes:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
He goes on to explain that his students—not just at Notre Dame but at other elite schools where he has taught, such as Princeton and Georgetown—are all smart: “They are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject).” He adds, “They build superb resumes” and “are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.”
But…
ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?
Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?
A few hands may go up at this or that question, but that is usually a fluke, accidental knowledge from a quirky class. In short, they are idiots in the original Greek sense. Very clever idiots. Maybe even brilliant idiots. But, in the true meaning of the term, that is no contradiction. “They have learned exactly what we have asked of them—to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present,” Deneen laments.13 The liberal arts as originally conceived were intended to be an antidote to this form of idiocy by equipping students with the arguments and knowledge necessary to protect and defend liberty.
Instead, these are the leaders of tomorrow that the leaders of today have created. They are the children of the new class, so ignorant of their own civilization that they have no response to those who insist with righteous passion that our civilization is not worth defending. They are a reserve army of ingratitude uninterested in defending the very soapboxes they stand on and, often, all too eager to take a sledgehammer to them in the name of fighting “hate speech.” In college, the privileged children of our elite live the most bespoke lifestyles of any humans in history, getting their wants and desires fulfilled on demand. Among the affluent, most do not work to pay their tuitions. They think it is normal that others prepare their food, clean their dorms, fraternities, and sororities, and protect them from not just physical violence but allegedly “violent” ideas—and yet they are convinced they are “independent.” Is it any wonder that they want to make society as whole as sheltered and nurturing as the only world they’ve known? Is it any wonder that they let their feelings and desires guide their sense of right and wrong?
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy….In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.14
The primacy of feeling—that quintessential hallmark of romanticism—has now become a live idea about how we should organize our lives. “It is ideas which rule the world, because it is ideas that define the way reality is perceived…” This line from Irving Kristol is one of his more famous quotes.
But it’s only half the sentence. Here it is in full:
“[Adam Smith] could not have been more wrong. It is ideas which rule the world, because it is ideas that define the way reality is perceived; and, in the absence of religion, it is out of culture—pictures, poems, songs, philosophy—that these ideas are born.”15
Kristol’s point was that conservatives—and defenders of liberty generally—were losing the battle of ideas because they had not come to grips with the fact that the popular culture had left religion behind. Popular culture, with its emphasis on hedonism, animism, or just simple feeling, is the primary public conveyor of meaning in our lives, and it is, with a few exceptions, unattached from (and often hostile to) higher understandings of meaning, morality, or religion. Much of classical music, painting, and architecture was dedicated to the greater glory of God.
We are becoming what we worship, and what we worship is ourselves. Outside of the occasional country-western song, when was the last time you engaged with mainstream popular culture that was dedicated to anything like the greater glory of God? Refreshment of the soul is another matter. But that’s the point. In popular culture, nearly all efforts to refresh the soul fall under the tiresome cliché “spiritual but not religious” or, more likely, “discovering yourself”—not God.
All drama, all comedy, and virtually all entertainment is about human feelings. Characters on the page or the screen may use reason, but reason is always subservient to their emotional motivations. This is nothing new. It has been true from the first play or poem.
The difference now is that our feelings have become an end in themselves. How we feel—not what we conclude—is the higher truth. The gut has defeated the mind.
This—not immigration, inequality, or identity politics—explains why populism is so close to the surface in our life. We want our feelings ratified. Populism is not an ideology. It is a feeling. Populists have programs, but the program is merely a manifestation of popular feeling. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” proclaimed William Jennings Bryan (who was no fool). “I will look up the arguments later.”16 For populists, abstract principles are a handicap. Huey Long, the legendary populist governor of Louisiana, once asked a reporter from The Nation, “What’s the use of being right only to be defeated?” For Long, “the time has come for all good men to rise above principle” so we could make “every man a king.” In other words, what was required was will and strength to smash “the establishment.”17
It was inevitable when we stopped looking up to God for meaning and started looking down into ourselves that we would look to find fulfillment, belonging, and meaning in tribes and crowds. “Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God…,” the theologian and pastor Eugene Peterson writes, “through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.”18 The crowd is reassuring, fulfilling and uplifting. It satisfies our evolutionary sweet tooth for being part of the tribe. Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power that inside the crowd “distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal….It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.”19
The animating spirit—i.e., the feeling—of populism is the spirit of the crowd. Partisans of the left love their crowds, seeing in them moral uplift and “people power.” Partisans of the right love their crowds, seeing in them proof that the “silent majority” is no longer silent. But each side sees the crowds of the other side as something very different and threatening: a demonic “other.” But what they all seem to miss is that finding succor and strength in numbers is tribal passion. It may sometimes be necessary and even noble—in, say, Tiananmen Square, or the streets of Tehran, or the 1963 March on Washington—but the nobility is derived solely from the object of their strength, not from the strength itself. Unity is amoral because unity is force, and force can be used for evil just as much as it can for good. Giving in to the passion of the crowd is inherently corrupting, because it seeks no higher authority than itself and says you have righteous entitlement to act on your gut.
It takes moral leadership to keep a crowd from becoming a mob and losing its way, and moral leadership can come only from conversation, from reminding the crowd that their unity is a means, not an end.
But the culture of feeling is about more than just throngs in the street. It creates a mind-set, an orientation, a sense of entitlement about how the world around us is supposed to unfold. The idea that we could keep our politics walled off and separate from the rest of the culture is fanciful nonsense. In the chapter about popular culture, I noted that, when we watch movies, we watch with our tribal mind more or less intact.
But what happens when news—by which I mean real facts and events affecting our lives—is processed as just another form of entertainment? Political reporting tends to be framed as a drama, with a hero pitted against protagonists. Pundits and reporters covering former president Barack Obama had the tendency to cover every political drama on the calculus of whether he would emerge victorious. Whether his desired policy was sound or constitutional was, at best, a secondary consideration. Today, so much of the pro-Trump media plays the same game. “Will Trump win?” “Will this give Trump a win?” These are the new ideological litmus tests for many on the right. The crowds, virtual and literal, increasingly invest in our politicians—and celebrities generally—our feelings of self-worth. Love me, love my politician.
This desire for the hero to win, regardless of whether the victory is objectively desirable, is not merely romantic. It is also tribal. It says that my team must triumph, our will must be satisfied, and all impediments are equally illegitimate. Barack Obama himself said dozens of times that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to unilaterally grant amnesty to so-called Dreamers. But the moment he decided to do it anyway, there was nary a peep of protest from members of his own team. What mattered was his victory. In an instant, the Republicans who agreed with President Obama for years when he said he couldn’t do it became fools and villains for not changing their minds in lockstep with the president.
When I set out to write Liberal Fascism some fifteen years ago, Charles Murray gave me some vital advice. He told me that if, in the course of my research, I didn’t change my mind on at least a half dozen important questions, I was doing it wrong. His point was that writing a book is an interactive, self-educational process. If you have all the answers before you start—as so many political writers do these days—you aren’t writing a serious book. You’re propagandizing.
I hope readers see this as a serious book. I’ve certainly learned a great deal in writing it. (The original manuscript was twice the length of the copy you’re holding.) There were any number of intellectual and historical surprises along the way that changed my thinking.
The most relevant realization is that I now believe I was wrong about the threat of authoritarianism, as I described it in Liberal Fascism. It’s not that the Huxleyan dystopia is not the more likely path America might take, but rather that there’s no reason to believe the descent would stop there. A society that wallows in feelings and entertainment is not necessarily sustainable, either. When technology and all the myriad forms of simulation that come with it—pharmacological, auditory, visual, pornographic, etc.—advance at a geometric pace, so does our capacity to become numb to it. Like a patient in pain, we need ever more of the morphine drip just to get a fraction of the satisfaction.
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise,” C. S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man. “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”20 The “Chest,” in Lewis’s poetic telling, is one of the “indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”21 In other words, the Chest is where reason and passion merge to form decency, civility, probity, and honor, rightly understood.
Self-indulgence and self-worship strip men of their chests, leaving them ill-equipped to defend what requires defending and hungry for some kind of meaning.
The young Muslim men who left Europe and America to go fight for ISIS had every form of entertainment and distraction available to them, but they found it unsatisfying. The same goes for the alienated and numb cadres who swell the ranks of neo-Nazis, antifa, and countless other groups. They crave meaning that our leading institutions no longer feel compelled to provide, or are even capable of providing, at least for those who need it most.
Francis Fukuyama, the modern popularizer of the idea of the end of history (with his essay and later book of the same name), anticipated this problem on a grand scale. “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again,” he wrote.22
But Fukuyama was optimistic. He thought it would take centuries of ennui, while the evidence suggests that this challenge faces every generation and every heart. Just as capitalism has within it the seeds of its own destruction (as Schumpeter saw), the soft despotism of the Huxleyan life invites its own collapse. The siren call of glory, greatness, national solidarity, or tribal redemption—or vengeance—becomes ever more seductive, at first with alienated individuals but ultimately with groups and even nations. We’ve seen this pattern before. In the aftermath of Napoleon, the West enjoyed the greatest run-up of prosperity in human history. For a century, there were no large-scale wars in Europe. But when the prospect of war approached in 1914, the cream of Western civilization, on both sides of the Atlantic, leapt at the opportunity to prove their glory and their nations’ greatness. In the aftermath of the war, Julien Benda was alone in recognizing that, for all the bloodshed, the urges had not been purged. Thinkers across the West were still dedicating themselves to the “intellectual organization of political hatreds.”23 Benda saw that the tribalisms of nationality, ethnicity, race, and class would lead to a second war even more terrible than the first. We are still far from that, but it’s not hard to imagine how today’s streams could become rivers. Rhetoric yields its own reality, because it transmits ideas, and ideas still rule the world.
This realization dawned on me during the course of this project, not on the page but in real life.
When I started, no serious person—probably including the current president himself—believed that Donald Trump was a plausible candidate for president. His rise in the primaries and his ultimate victory posed a professional challenge—and distraction—I had never planned on.
The fact that Trump’s rise occurred against the backdrop of my thinking about human nature, tribalism, romanticism, and corruption made the whole experience more poignant and acute. In many ways, the existential challenge Trump and Trumpism posed to the conservative movement seemed a microcosm of the challenges Western civilization itself faces.
Consider the emergence of the so-called alt-right. The reason to fret about the growth and (relative) popularity of the alt-right is not that its adherents will somehow gain the power to implement their fantasies. No, the reason to be dismayed by them is that these intellectual weeds could find any purchase at all. They should have been buried beneath layers and layers of bedrock-like dogma with no hope of finding air or sunlight. But such is the plight we face. The bedrock is cracked. The soil of our civil society is exhausted, and the roots of our institutions strain to hold what remains in place.
Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment.
But we live in a culture that never wants its favorite shows to end. The desire to be entertained has rewired much of our civilization, because it has rewired our minds. When everything needs to be entertaining, we judge everything by its entertainment value. Entertainment is fundamentally romantic and tribal. It cuts corners, jumps over arguments, elevates passion, and lionizes heroes. Try to make an exciting movie about how laws are made and policy is implemented—without creating heroes of willpower and villains of greed, without skipping the reasonable arguments on both sides. It is almost impossible.
Donald Trump broke the fourth wall between reality-show entertainment and politics. He feeds off interpersonal conflict and drama. He’s organized his life and presidency not around policy or ideology or even politics properly understood but around ratings. He bulldozed his way through the primaries, first and foremost, because he was so damn entertaining. Saying someone is entertaining is not necessarily a compliment. Horror movie villains are entertaining. But in an entertainment-driven age, being entertaining can be an advantage even if it is not inherently a virtue.
The rise of Trump showed me that the American right was far more susceptible to the corrupting tug of human nature than I had ever imagined. And that breaks my heart. More importantly, I no longer have the confidence I once did that this country is largely immune to authoritarianism. It can survive Trump, of that I have no doubt. But the rise of Trump proved to me that conservatism is far more fragile than I thought, more susceptible to the mob mentality than I ever appreciated. I would very much like to believe that this is a fever that will break. And at times I think it probably will, particularly as the Trump administration fails to deliver on his more grandiose promises to Make America Great Again. But Barack Obama failed to “fundamentally transform America” and the response from the left wasn’t to become more moderate and reasonable. It was to redouble its passions for another try. There is no reason to be confident the same won’t happen on the right. And that will leave traditional conservatives as ideologically homeless as our libertarian cousins have been.
Modern American conservatism is a bundle of ideological commitments: limited government, natural rights, the importance of traditional values, patriotism, gratitude, etc. But underneath all of that are two bedrock assumptions upon which all of these commitments stand: the beliefs that ideas matter and that character matters. We can have debates about what ideas are important and what good character means. Indeed, the reason we can have debates is that we believe that ideas matter. This is our debt to the Enlightenment: that through reason and argument we can identify good ideas and bad. Modern American conservatism arose in the 1940s and 1950s on the back of arguments made necessary by the threat of communism: arguments for Western civilization, the free market, the Constitution, property rights, and all of the underlying concepts that led to the Miracle.
Donald Trump stands athwart both of these pillars of conservatism. His relationship to ideas is entirely ad hoc and instrumental, by his own admission. He boasts that he is not committed to any doctrine save the need for eternal flexibility. As for his character, suffice it to say, any standard of good character that conservatives championed over the last fifty years—honest business dealings, sexual probity, humility, restraint, piety, rhetorical decency—is a bar he would need a ladder to touch. I’ll put it more simply: He is not a good person. If you described him in the abstract to any conservative (or liberal) a decade ago, this would be incontrovertible. He’s boorish and crude. He freely admits his greed, his whining, and his deceptions. He is only civil when civility redounds to his benefit. He respects the law only when he can use it as a weapon, and he sees other people as instruments of his will.
And his biggest supporters don’t care, and too many rank-and-file conservatives don’t care very much. Forget conservatives: That Americans can see him as a representative of America’s best self is a profound corruption of American idealism. Trump appeals to the desire for a tribal Big Man—or, if Trump had his way, a king.
Of course, thanks to the Founding, we don’t have titles of nobility. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying to create new ones. In America, where wealth and celebrity serve as substitutes for ancient notions of aristocracy, Trump took quite seriously the (possibly apocryphal) concept of droit du seigneur, the alleged right of nobles to extract sex from their vassals and serfs. He infamously boasted that his fame allowed him to accost women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…grab them by the pussy.”
While such behavior is indefensible, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to playact as an aristocrat, since we do not, in fact, live in a world of inherited titles. But here lies the problem. Trump leapt from his world of playacting aristocracy and attained real power. And he brought many of the assumptions of his illusionary world with him. As we’ve seen, Western civilization has struggled to beat back the universal human preference for nepotism for millennia. In one fell swoop, Trump has brought it back to the center of political life. His children are ministers with open-ended portfolios in his government, even as they maintain their business interests. As his son, Eric, correctly explained, nepotism is a “factor of life.” But he also added that it is “a beautiful thing.”24 And it can be a beautiful thing in civil society, where building a dynasty for your family is part of the American dream, at least for some. But Eric leapt from that private realm of a family business and imposed it on the people’s business.
All this is a small example of the larger pattern and problem of conservative surrender to Trumpism. It is not an alternative to the worst facets of progressivism. It is a new right-wing version of them, grounded not so much in ideas as in populist grievance and a cult of personality.
This is but one panel in the great tapestry of conservative corruption. During the 2016 Republican primaries, a slew of right-wing radio and TV show hosts followed the famous dictum, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”25 To be sure, some were early adopters who were always more interested in marketing than ideas. They used their talent at guessing where their customers were going and met them there. Others fell one by one to the seduction of popularity and populism. The fact that a celebrity managed to do this from the right is particularly significant—and damning.
The same conservatives who insisted that Bill Clinton’s “affair” with an intern was cause for impeachment saw little to object to in a man whose commitment to marital fidelity is arguably even weaker than Bill Clinton’s. Conservatives who had claimed Rudy Giuliani was unfit for the presidency because of his three marriages and his stance on gay rights leapt to defend or dismiss Trump’s three marriages and his even greater support for gay rights. Self-described libertarians who spent decades championing free trade, unrestrained immigration, and the cult of Ronald Reagan reversed course and hopped on board the Trump train, eagerly embracing positions they had once denounced as backward and racist.
This unqualified support of a leader regardless of the arguments he makes and the actions he takes is precisely the sort of thing that terrified the crafters of our Constitution, which is probably why Trump sees the Constitution as so archaic. As of this writing, a plurality (45 percent) of Republicans say that the courts should have the power to shut down news outlets that publish stories that are “biased or inaccurate.”26
The evidence for the corrupting power of tribal politics and Trump’s cult of personality is all around us. In 2011, only 30 percent of white Evangelicals said that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” In 2016, that number more than doubled, to 72 percent. White Evangelicals used to be the religious group that was least tolerant of immoral acts by public officials. In the wake of Trump, they are now the most tolerant demographic. In fact, they are now far more tolerant of immoral acts than the average American.27
When the Democrats are back in power, what yardsticks of principle will be available for Republicans to hold them accountable? Under Obama, conservatives lamented the abuse of executive orders. Will that really be an argument they’ll be able to make after Trump? What standard of sexual impropriety now bars someone from the presidency? How will conservatives decry “crony capitalism” in Trump’s wake? Who will have the nerve to say the government shouldn’t be “picking winners and losers” in the market after Trump has jawboned one company after another into giving him political victories? What standards of presidential decorum, honesty, and rhetoric can survive four years of Trump’s Twitter tirades and petty insults?
Donald Trump is no dictator, thanks largely to the Constitution and the American people, but you can see how the distance between dictatorship and democracy has shrunk. Before I wrote Liberal Fascism, I subscribed to the view best described by the phrase “It can’t happen here.” Then, after studying the domestic moral horror of the Wilson administration, I modified my view to “It can’t happen here—for long.”* But this view was too generous. Since the New Deal, the conservative movement has been the primary champion of the principles of limited government, free markets, and constitutionalism. But the experience of watching Donald Trump seduce the right has caused me to wonder whether that commitment endures.
Which brings me back to corruption. Like the old joke about the turtle on a fence post—“It must have gotten there somehow”—we know the Miracle happened. The evidence is around us, everywhere. We have good theories about how and why it happened, but they are ultimately just theories. All we know for sure is what happened, because that can be measured. But the second law of thermodynamics tells us that nothing in this world can resist nature without effort.
Imagine a brand-new car in a field. Left untouched for a decade or two, it will still be the same car. But when you return to it, the paint will be faded. Rust will have taken hold in parts. The tires will be flat. Perhaps the windshield will be cracked from so many winters and summers. No doubt bugs and birds will have established nests among the weeds that have taken root in the nooks and crannies. In a century, a passerby will find a shell and some relics. In a thousand years—or maybe ten thousand; nature doesn’t care—it may be like there was never a car there at all. Nature takes back everything, unless you fight it off with every pitchfork at your disposal, and even then, every victory is temporary, requiring the next steward to take the pitchfork like a baton.
On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in the greatest statement about that document ever uttered save for the Gettysburg Address, Calvin Coolidge observed:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. [Emphasis mine.]28
I believe this with all my heart. I believe that, conceptually, we have reached the end of history. We are at the summit, and at this altitude left and right lose most of their meaning. Because when you are at the top of a mountain, any direction you turn—be it left toward socialism or right toward nationalism or in some other clever direction—the result is the same: You must go down, back whence you came.
But as much as I believe all of this to be true, as a practical matter in the real world, it is only true so long as a sufficient number of Americans believe it, too, and work to keep that belief alive. Coolidge was right about the finality of the Declaration as an idea. But that idea, absent the hard work of caretakers, will rust away, reclaimed by human nature.
And more than faith and belief, more than reason and data, the indispensable ingredient for that work to be successful is gratitude. Webster’s Dictionary defines “ingratitude” as: “forgetfulness of, or poor return for, kindness received.”29 The key word is “forgetfulness.” Gratitude is impossible without memory. How can we repay a kindness we do not remember? But “forgetfulness” has a special meaning here. It is not merely a lapse of memory. “Remember” is an active verb. In the Bible, it is an action, not a passive function of the brain: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” is an instruction to do something, attentively and mindfully. When we fail to remember to keep these principles alive in our hearts, and to remind ourselves why we should give thanks for them, we grow ungrateful for them.
There are no permanent victories. The only victory worth fighting for—because it is the only victory that is achievable—is to hand off this civilization to the next generation and to equip that generation to carry on the fight and so on, and forever. We cannot get rid of human nature and humanity’s natural tribal tendencies. But we know that, under the right circumstances, our tribal nature can be grafted to a commitment to liberty, individualism, property rights, innovation, etc. It happened in England, accidentally but organically.
It happened in America by choice. America talked itself into existence. The Founders argued the Constitution out of the ether and they believed it could work so long as people of good character fended off the inevitable entropy of human nature. They wrote it down and made it hard to change to help us in that effort. The only thing that gives the Constitution real lasting power is our commitment to it, and there’s nothing preventing us from walking away from it other than our refusal to do so.
And we cannot be forced to stay committed to our principles. We can only be persuaded to. Reason alone won’t carry the load, but the task is impossible without it. Parents must cultivate their barbarian children into citizens, and the rest of us must endeavor to keep the principles of our civilization alive by showing our gratitude for it. The Miracle of human prosperity from 1700 to now looks like a rocket taking off. Some think we’ve achieved a permanent and stable orbit from which we can look down on the tiny speck that is our tribal past. But there’s no such thing as a stable orbit. We must accelerate and maintain the equipment or fall back to the place whence we came. When the gravitational hand of nature reclaims objects from the heavens, the term for that in physics is “orbital decay.” So it is with our civilization. Give up fighting for it, give up holding human nature at bay, abandon our principles for any reason—selfishness, sloth, forgetfulness, ambition, ingratitude, whatever—and you choose to give in to decay.
Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore.
* Under Wilson, America embraced totalitarianism, imprisoning, persecuting, and censoring dissidents. The government deployed extra-legal violence against domestic enemies. It demonized ethnic groups. The Committee for Public Information was the first modern propaganda ministry, releasing thousands of government agents to foment war lust and ideological conformity. But then the war ended and Wilson’s stroke effectively ended his presidency even before he left office. In 1920 the Republicans ran on a “return to normalcy” and, once in power, released the political prisoners, dismantled Wilson’s propaganda ministry and war socialism, and embraced free-market principles once again, unleashing unprecedented prosperity. (See Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change [New York: Broadway Books, 2009 (2007)], pp. 106-20.) America’s first truly modern war brought out the tribal instinct and, for a time, we abandoned our commitment to the principles of our civilization. But our commitment to those principles reasserted themselves, weakened but for the most part intact. It’s worth noting that FDR lamented the reassertion of the old dogma of individual liberty. In his execrable 1944 State of the Union address, FDR said that if we returned to the “normalcy” of the 1920s, we would be in effect surrendering at home to the forces of fascism we were fighting abroad. (See Franklin D. Roosevelt, “4—State of the Union Message to Congress, January 11, 1944,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518.)