Podcast: Jonah Goldberg Goes Tribal

TRANSCRIPT: Jonah Goldberg Goes Tribal

Jonah Goldberg:

Contrary to a lot of the more hysterical people out there, Donald Trump isn't Hitler, right? I mean, Hitler could have repealed Obamacare.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer. And welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This week I sit down with Jonah Goldberg, senior editor at the National Review, opinion columnist for the LA Times, and host of the Remnant podcast. In his latest book, Suicide of the West, he argues that populism and nationalism are endangering democracy. Today I'll ask him about how identity politics and other tribal forces are affecting the United States, and whether there's anything we can do about them. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

And I'm here with Jonah Goldberg, whose book, Suicide of the West, is a New York Times bestseller. It just came out. I'm delighted to hear it. He's a senior editor at the National Review, also with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. But we are, right now, here in New York City and I'm delighted to have him as my guest. Jonah.

Jonah Goldberg:

It's great to be here.

Ian Bremmer:

Good. Good to be with you.

Jonah Goldberg:

Yeah. Your energy is infectious.

Ian Bremmer:

No, that's good. We need that. Well, video will do that to you, there's no question.

Jonah Goldberg:

That's true. That's true.

Ian Bremmer:

So why don't we jump right in with this question of tribes. So you said aliens looking down, coming through every 10,000 years, they would normally see all this as tribes until this last visit, right?

Jonah Goldberg:

So if you had an alien who was visiting planet Earth once every 10,000 years, since we split off from the Neanderthals about 250, 300,000 years ago, for every visit he made until ... let's say he did it for over 250,000 years. For the first 24 visits, all he would see is semi-hairless apes foraging and fighting for food. We evolved an environment where living within the tribe or the band or the troupe, whatever you want to call it, small group, was everything. All of our politics were personal and defined by the group. The world was divided between us and all of them. And that was our evolutionary adaptation that allowed us to become apex predators, was our ability to cooperate with each other.

Jonah Goldberg:

Fast-forward to today, the point about tribes is that we still have the same wiring we had 10,000 or 100,000 years ago. We still naturally want to divide the world up, our worlds up, into us versus them. What is required, what makes our civilization special is that the West, liberal democratic capitalism, the American founding, had within it this argument that you shouldn't see the world that way. That it wasn't zero-sum. And that is something, writ large, that we're losing sight of again, is that we're trying to retreat back into our tribal selves.

Ian Bremmer:

How much of this gets fixed if women run things?

Jonah Goldberg:

I think you could make a pretty good case that it would help. Women are better at building consensus. There's a lot of social science evidence to support all of that. Whenever you get a real dislocation of men to women, society becomes a lot more violent, first of all. The Wild West was like that. And because of the gender-selection abortions that we see in India and China, I think the ability to keep young men from rising up and embracing a more aggressive form of nationalism will be a real challenge, among other things.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think that in America, young men today are increasingly embracing a more violent form of nationalism?

Jonah Goldberg:

What I do think is ... take violence out of it. That there are a lot of people on the right who are embracing essentially a right wing version of identity politics for white people, which I think is a really dangerous and bad thing. And I think it's in response to the rise of identity politics in general on college campuses, which comes from the left. That doesn't excuse it, but it helps you understand where it comes from. And that they want to create and cultivate this ... not ethnic. It's not Irish pride or Italian pride. But based around this abstract category of whiteness, this white cultural affinity that creeps in, this this weird Aryan stuff.

Jonah Goldberg:

And I think it is a product of these guys who are deracinated, who are looking for meaning and their lives. And they can't find it from the traditional outlets of civil society. They can't find it in the economy.

Ian Bremmer:

It's not working for religion very well.

Jonah Goldberg:

And religion is receding from a lot of these people's lives.

Ian Bremmer:

So what do they hold onto?

Jonah Goldberg:

Identity politics.

Ian Bremmer:

So if you want to take that away from them, what should they grab onto instead?

Jonah Goldberg:

So part of me being a conservative, particularly a small-c conservative, is that I don't want to nationalize politics at all, except for the truly essential things. There's a reason why during a war, everyone drops what they're doing and rally around the cause. The government can't love you. It can only do a few things remotely well, and it should stick to those things. And we should push as much power to the most local level possible, to give people a sense that they have more control over their lives.

Ian Bremmer:

So I'm wondering what it was over the course of the past 10 years in the United States, that you think really hastened this devolution into a much more pernicious, much less civic engagement for the average American citizen?

Jonah Goldberg:

I can think of a bunch of things. I mean, partly is just the last 10 years is when Facebook went like this, right? So I think that's part of it.

Ian Bremmer:

I thought tech would be a piece of it.

Jonah Goldberg:

There are a lot of things that radicalize a lot of people on the right. One was this failure to deal with immigration. Promising that ... from Ronald Reagan's amnesty saying this is the last one, and never following through on it. I think that this obsession with ideological purity that, for some reason, overtook a big chunk of the Republican Party. I mean, I used to joke that the Republican primaries were like C-SPAN reenactments of the end of Spartacus, where each candidate was like, I am Ronald Reagan. No, I am Ronald Reagan.

Jonah Goldberg:

And part of the problem with that is that when you get obsessed with principles ... principles I agree with, by the way. But when you say that's all you believe in, you lose sight of what politics is supposed to be about, which is persuasion. It's not who's the purest, it's-

Ian Bremmer:

Which ideas.

Jonah Goldberg:

It's, how do we bring people in? And instead, these guys increasingly just kept doubling down on their purity rather than doing what Reagan did, which was tell stories that brought people in. And instead, you had these focus-grouped, sort of think-tanky primaries that picked hot button issues and replayed the 1982 Reagan playbook over and over and over again. And one of the beneficial things about Donald Trump is he smashed all of that. He is not the form of the destroyer I would've picked. I mean, he comes right after the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. But-

Ian Bremmer:

Good visual there, by the way.

Jonah Goldberg:

Thank you. Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

Of Trump and the Stay-Puft Man. I mean, either one, it's-

Jonah Goldberg:

And then there's the ... and also, there's all this, again, this stuff that's way upstream of the actual politics. The big sort. People are tending to, in their lives, self-segregate amongst people who agree with them. I think the ... Charles Murray writes about this a lot in Coming Apart. That it used to be that the corporate leadership of a factory town, lived in the town. And now-

Ian Bremmer:

They still helicopter in.

Jonah Goldberg:

Yeah, right. For the photo-op. And then they leave. And so I'm not sure you could pick a single one thing. I think it is a confluence of events.

Ian Bremmer:

Suicide of the West is a pretty bleak concept. If we're really on that path, what's the thing that's going to happen in the next few years that's going to make you say, oh my God, we're at the precipice?

Jonah Goldberg:

Yeah. So I understand why ... certainly it is a bleak sounding title. But I didn't call it the Death of the West. I didn't call it Decline of the West. Part of my argument in the book is that there is no teleology. There is no right side of history. There is no God who's going to guarantee anything for us. And I'm not saying this as an atheist, I'm just saying that we ... it's sort of like the argument about free will versus determinism. Who gives a rat's ass? You still got to get out of bed in the morning, which basically means you have to assume that free will is a thing. And suicide's a choice.

Jonah Goldberg:

And so while I understand the title is bleak, the book actually ends with this call for instilling a sense of gratitude in what we've got.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay. But let me now ask my question again. Which is, so Suicide of the West is a bleak title. Now, what is the thing that over the course of the next five years, if you saw it, you go, wow, I was not successful in stopping the Americans from heading down this path. This is really a tipping point. They may not wake up. What is it?

Jonah Goldberg:

That's a good question.

Ian Bremmer:

Because to say Suicide of the West implies we are really thinking about turning the keys on and staying in the garage. What is it?

Jonah Goldberg:

The only reason the Constitution has binding power is because we give it binding power. If one day we just to say, nah, forget it. Then all of a sudden, we are basically in a world where we just fight over which strong man or strong group gets to run everything. And it wouldn't take much beyond a Depression-style economic ... they came out quite a bit during the Great Depression. There's a reason why FDR was president for life. I think if we had a similar kind of Great Depression, which I don't think is inconceivable, I'm not sure the Constitution survives that.

Ian Bremmer:

So right now, I mean it's less the Suicide of the West, more like, hi, I'm the United States and I have a problem.

Jonah Goldberg:

Yeah. But the suicidal tendencies ... I mean, I could have called it Suicidal Tendencies of the West.

Ian Bremmer:

There you go.

Jonah Goldberg:

But I think the suicidal tendencies are getting stronger. And one of the things that you're supposed to do when you see suicidal tendencies is treat them as the warning sign that they are.

Ian Bremmer:

Your book's about suicide of the West. If you wanted to get beyond the United States and say, this is a Western problem, who else would you point me to and say, Hey Ian, these guys are right there with us?

Jonah Goldberg:

Remember, there was a whole thing from Osama bin Laden, about people respect the strong horse. There is, to an extent the problem that if America falls down, there are a lot of countries that are going to start switching to look to other strong horses. And you can see that already in places like Hungary, where Viktor Orban talks about how capitalism has maybe outlived its utility, and you need this authoritarian-style market management kind of thing. I think the world ... the world that I want to live in. Is going to have a really hard time if America stumbles, because there's nobody poised to fill that role.

Ian Bremmer:

So are you and I a tribe, Jonah?

Jonah Goldberg:

I'm sorry?

Ian Bremmer:

Are you and I a tribe?

Jonah Goldberg:

Us?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, yeah. Versus them?

Jonah Goldberg:

No. I mean-

Ian Bremmer:

The unwashed. I mean, public intellectuals. We dress the same. I mean, you're bigger and hairier, but leave that aside.

Jonah Goldberg:

I'm huge in my field.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Yeah. We're a weird looking tribe. I mean, that's pretty clear. Glasses-wearing. I mean, you know.

Jonah Goldberg:

I think, no, not yet. I mean, I do think there is a tribe of elites, of globalists, or whatever you want to call them, that do have a shared sense of their self-interest. If not ... that is not necessarily always expressed. One of the points I always try to make to policymakers is that complexity is a subsidy, right? And there are a lot of people in the elites who really-

Ian Bremmer:

Benefit from that.

Jonah Goldberg:

... like complexity.

Ian Bremmer:

Sure. Keep people out.

Jonah Goldberg:

Right. It's a moat. And so I think we probably live in that world, but I think we also have a certain amount of sympathy to removing a lot of that moat. And that you actually want an innovative meritocratic in the Jeffersonian sense, where there are paths to the American dream. There are paths to pursuing your own happiness.

Ian Bremmer:

That's the best kind of tribe.

Jonah Goldberg:

It is the best kind of tribe.

Ian Bremmer:

The tribe that cares.

Jonah Goldberg:

That's right. Well, I originally ... for about two years, the working title of this book was The Tribe of Liberty. Because I wanted people to form a tribal attachment to Liberty.

Ian Bremmer:

I'm glad you didn't use that title. That's not a title that sells.

Jonah Goldberg:

That's one of the reasons why I changed it.

Ian Bremmer:

There you go. Jonah Goldberg, New York Times bestselling author, Suicidal Tendencies of the West. You should buy this book.

Jonah Goldberg:

That's the righter message.

Ian Bremmer:

Good to see you, Jonah.

Jonah Goldberg:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

Thank you very much, my friend.

Jonah Goldberg:

Great. Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

That's your show this week. Next week, come back. We've got Israeli former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It's going to be a really great show. I will see you then.

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