The Ricochet Podcast - Suicide of The West

Episode Date: April 27, 2018

This week, it’s our good pal Jonah Goldberg for the full hour to talk about his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (yes, you MUST buy it!). We delve into the book’s argument, the lineage of the title, and what can be done in terms of suicide prevention. It’s a fantastic conversation. Also... Source

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Requires valid van theft claim. It's what we do. We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Yeah, I'm just walking around, I'm just walking around. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex, and today our guest is Jonah Goldberg on his new book, The Suicide of the West. Let's have ourselves a podcast.

Bye-bye. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 399. Boy, I wonder what we're going to do next week. How do we get this far? Great sponsors, like the people at ButcherBox. Now, ButcherBox delivers healthy, 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, and heritage-breed pork comes directly to your door. Right now, ButcherBox is offering you, the Ricochet listener, free bacon. Did you hear that? Free bacon

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a dollar a day, just from the comfort of your couch. To receive your first month of treatment for free, go to Keeps.com slash Ricochet. And we're also, well, I like to say we're brought to you by Rob Long, who is a proud American and would never leave these shores for some strange place where the food

consists of snails and everyone smokes. So delicious. Don't I wish though. But Rob, you are in Paris, if I'm right. I'm in France, James, and I'm here to celebrate the relationship between the President of France, Monsieur Macron, and the President of the United States. They seem to have had a, despite a weirdly awkward handshake, they seem to have had some kind of good relationship. Monsieur Trump, as I've heard people say.

Et du ton président Trump, the question mark people have been asking me. So I'm here to celebrate that. But I'm also here to celebrate Ricochet. If you're listening to this podcast and you are not a member of Ricochet, shame on you. But I think the shaming on you is now much as effective as it used to be. So let me just tell you this, that on May 10th, Thursday, May 10th, in a couple of weeks, there will be the AEI, American Enterprise Institute, in partnership with Ricochet Podcast Summit, presented by Donors Trust, which is a nonprofit that does a lot of work that a lot of people listening to this podcast would support.

There are a few tickets left. We would like to see you there. We'll be doing an open mic. We'll be open to the public. There'll be a Ricochet meetup the night of Thursday, March 10th. It's an incredible lineup of people um it's actually you know we have some big big stars talking to our members and our podcasters and so normally i beg you to become a member but now i'm going to tell you like if you're not a member uh as the french would say too bad for you

um if you want to come may 10th and 11th you you have to be a member. So it's the first podcast summit. We're calling it the Con... We're not. I'm calling it the ConPodCon Conservative Podcast Convention. If I keep saying it, maybe people will keep saying... It will get into the language

and people will refer to it as ConPodCon. You think, James? What do you think? I think so, and I think you've made the point. Shamez-vous, everybody. Is that the French word foru everybody is that the french word for shame what is the french word for shame pugeot no pugeot is embarrassing that's right that's right i was thinking of maschino too as well peter hello welcome you're out in california not in france and uh from your perspective you're closer to north korea than rob is uh That's the real reason he's in Paris.

Maybe if you went the other direction. But it looks like we have a rapprochement. Rocket Man stepped out of the soil of the North for the first time, did not burst into flames. Very interesting what's going on. Do you think we're being played? I'm sure we're being played. I'm sure they are attempting to play us. What I don't know, reporting on North

Korea is very thin. Back in the old days during the Cold War, criminologists had been figuring out the Kremlin, studying things for four decades before the meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev. You had some idea what the Soviet Union was, what it stood for. North Korea is closed. The ideology is unclear. I just, it's very hard for me to work out quite what they want, aside, of course, from survival. And if they want survival, they're going to insist on retaining nukes. This whole, all that we've seen so far fits a pattern. First, the North Koreans try to scare everybody. And then they try to say, no, no, no, no, no, no no no no we're not scary we're lovely people come see now this is a much more dramatic assertion of that pattern but i'm suspicious i'm suspicious we shall see um i am suspicious but i i feel like we need to sort of give credit where credit is due uh not

that long ago uh when don Trump was tweeting about Rocket Man, the conventional wisdom was that he's bringing us to the brink of nuclear war. These people are savages. They will do it. Within months, I mean 11 months maybe, later, Kim Jong-un is in

a meeting with the leader of South Korea and talking about reconciliation, talking about a formal peace to what has been a suspended war. That seems kind of silly to us, but it's meaningful to, certainly meaningful to the peninsula as a whole, but it's extremely meaningful in terms of language to North Korea. We may be at a turning point. I hope that our president is not so enamored with himself and his – I think to give credit to his effectiveness here, that he's going to be naive.

But this is a remarkable opening. This is something that has not happened and has not been able to happen for three presidential administrations. Oh, well, since the war, I don't think the North and South – I don't think we've seen a handshake like this in over six decades now. Right, right. And also don't forget that the North Korean Kim Jong – I can't pronounce his name, but he's also – he gave a big speech. Thank you. He gave a big speech, what was it, three or four days ago, saying that they were no longer going to test nuclear weapons. They no longer considered that necessary. So there's a big big

concession right there that might have also been made impossible by the giant collapse of the mountain that they were testing them in it all sort of came in under itself but i i would say the the the true um indicator for what's happening in china is a kind of a distant reverse obverse mirror, you know, black mirror, if you will, but is what is China doing? Because China has these schizophrenic attitudes. They're sort of bipolar. On the one hand, they are the chief supporter and paymaster of the North Korean regime. The other is that they have this North Korean offspring that

is incredibly difficult and painful and refuses to come under the boot. But on the other hand, they don't really want, despite all their protestations, they don't really want multilateral talks or unilateral talks between the North Koreans and Americans, North Koreans and South Koreans and Americans. They don't like that idea of losing their hegemony in the region. Remember, North Korea is not distant from China. It's right next to it. The Yalu River is 30 meters wide. Children swim in it in the summer.

It's not a border like any border that we recognize in this country. So they are, of all, they are very confused now, the Chinese. They are kind of getting what they said they wanted all along and I suspect they don't really want it. But they're going to have toged. And I watched a little bit of the reporting on BBC America. By the way, if you want to see the worst possible construction put on Donald Trump and American policy but done with a certain tone, you don't have to flip to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. You could just go straight to BBC America and see look, the South Korean president is moving to make peace because he wants to get something done before President Trump gets the chance. Of course, I'm paraphrasing quite crudely before President Trump gets the chance to get get into Korea and make a mess of it all. And I thought to myself, for the 1,000th time, remember when Trump was making his noises about NATO?

That's gone away now partly because NATO is actually ponying up, putting more money into the budget. But people were saying, my goodness me, the Europeans may have to look to their own defense. What would be wrong with that? South Korea is a democracy. It is a rapidly growing, wealthy economic country. If they can cut a deal with the North Koreans that they and their people can live with, heavily armed North Korea and Seoul, a major modern city of some 20 million people, just tens of miles south of the North Korean border, if they can come to an arrangement that permits them to retain their democracy and feel secure, you know what?

I'd be kind of open to that. Right. And to be fair, why have they come to that arrangement? Why now? And as much as it pains me and grieves me and chafes me in places that I don't want to describe. Talcum powder. Try that. Try talcum powder.

What's the old rational? Walk this way, sir. Walk that way to describe. Talcum powder. Try that. Try talcum powder. Once they told you, walk this way, sir. Like, walk that way. We need talcum powder. But it pains me to say that there was a genuine, and it's a cliche word, but it's true, a genuine reset of the American attitude and perspective on North Korea. Probably a little bit, the fact that our president is a little bit scary or a lot scary, a little scary to those of us who live in the country, a lot scary to those of us who don't. And that was enough to force the North Koreans to sort of take stock and realize that they were no longer playing with a known quantity. And it brought them all the way to a handshake, not only with the former CIA director, the current CIA director, but also with the leader of South Korea. That is, as much as it pains me to say, some things have been effective even or despite the fact that Donald Trump did them.

And this is one of them, and we have to give him credit for it the resetting that relationship if it all goes well right if if north korea ceases to become an international nuclear threat in we'll say 12 months 18 months um that is nobel prize worthy in a way that simply being elected president in 2008 was not there was uh, the BBC's coverage, as Peter noted, is remarkable, but I listen to the BBC World Service, which has a variety of interesting accents, without the smug little faces, but you get the same general dripping condescension of America sometimes, and those plummy, beeb voices telling you that if Donald Trump goes to Korea, well, isn't that hypocrisy?

Because the Republicans, the conservatives would have been screaming if Obama had gone to Korea saying that he was legitimizing the government. But it's perfectly fine if Donald Trump does it. And I wanted somebody on that panel to burst in and say, yes, the difference being conservatives would have screamed because they imagined that Obama would have given away the store. He would have actually borrowed money to buy a store to give away. He would have filled the store with lots of shiny little goodies. And then when six months later, the North Koreans resumed all the testing and the nuclear stuff they wanted to do, we would have moved on to something else entirely. The reason that conservatives are happy that Donald Trump is doing this is because they believe he will not kiss posterior but kick it, regardless of whether or not that happens.

That's what they think. The idea that he may get a deal that isn't in our best interests long term in order to say, I got a deal and cement his job, his image of himself as the dealmaker, we'll see. But it's certainly more hopeful than sending somebody over there who says, please, please, please we want peace so bad. The rattling tends to get people's attention. Peter was talking about how people thought there was going to be. I never thought there was. The North Korean

leadership, mad and crazy though they may be and look from the outside, wants to stay alive and drink and cavort with hookers. China doesn't want everybody to go nuclear. You say that like it's a bad thing. Right. So we have this lacuna here where everyone can walk in and figure out a way to buy some time.

But what is the end result of this? Is the end result then the legitimization of the North Korean regime saying you can have your zhush, you can have your oligarchy, and you can do whatever you absolutely want to those people you've now starved to the point where the average height is 4'3". Go ahead, free reign, just as long as you don't build the nukes. Is that the end? That is exactly what it is. I mean, just to be super blunt, that is exactly the current American policy, or at least the policy in the Oval Office.

It is the result of 30 years of failure of anything else. Not only failure, but spectacular failure. Not just failure to contain North Korea, but to failure to contain its nuclear power, or nuclear weapons ability. That is not just a failure. That's a spectacular failure. It used to be something that we would say back in the 80s when Reagan was president,

it was arguing for welfare reform, which the Democrats were always against. And we would say, here are the facts. Black families, less intact, more fragmented. Black wealth, destroyed. Family wealth, destroyed. Family wealth destroyed. Crime soaring. Mortality rates soaring.

And yet in the same 25 years, there has been an increase of 15 times, 16 times of welfare spending, great society, all sorts of things started. Shouldn't we, whatever we're doing, whatever you call it, it seems to have failed. Shouldn't we be doing something else or at least the opposite? And that's a legitimate argument for the Trump foreign policy machine to make. Like, well, we managed to accomplish this by being jerks on Twitter. That seems like a more effective, maybe it isn't a perfect solution, but it's certainly more effective than 30 years of very smart people, very smart diplomats, having very long-range considered strategic talks

since, I don't know, since the mid-80s, since the death of Kim Il-sung and the installation of his son, Kim Jong-il, and then the installation of his son, Kim Jong-un. It's hard to argue against that. Yeah, if this works, they'll never forgive him. Like the Bourbons, they will remember nothing. They will learn everything. How does that go again?

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That's ButcherBox.com slash Ricochet, promo code Ricochet for $20 off your first order and free bacon. Hurrah. Our thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we are going to talk to – hold on, let me just leave this here. Okay, Jonah, it's pronounced Goldberg, right? I got that? Okay. Senior editor at National Review, host of the Remnant podcast, co-host of The Glop, and his new book everybody's been waiting for four years.

It's here. Suicide of the West, How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. It's now out, and everyone should go buy it immediately. You can follow him. is destroying American democracy. It's now out, and everyone should go buy it immediately. You can follow him. And, of course, his dogs, the stories of them romping about the woods or looking dissatisfied, as they sit on the sofa. You can follow him on Twitter at JonahNRO. Hey, Jonah, are you there?

I am here. I haven't read it yet, so I have to ask, what do you think of the new Star Trek Discovery? I have not seen it. Okay. All right, I haven't read the book. He hasn't seen the show. Thank you, everybody. We'll talk to Jonah next week. We're recording now. This is happening, right? This is the real happening.

Let's quote Yuval's review. Jonah argues that if each generation is not reminded of what it has inherited and why it is worth treasuring, then it will forget, and the wellsprings of our strength will dry up. And so he goes on about the work of reminding us and does so masterfully in the language and concepts of the present. That's a quote that you make often, that every civilization has a band of invaders, of barbarism that we call our children, and we have to school them in what is necessary to keep it going.

So we're not doing that. Let's say, what's the first thing you would say is contributing to the suicide of the West? Well, gosh, where to begin? Indeed. Why don't you start reading your book out loud? Page one. Yeah, so first of all, thanks for having me, guys. It's been a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, all that crap, right?

Control E. F6, the gratitude macro. Yeah, stipulate platitudes. I saw Gratitude Macro last night at 10th Avenue. They were awesome. Go on. So the quote that you're so masterfully mangling comes from Hannah Arendt, where she said, Every generation of Western civilization is invaded by barbarians. We call them children. Right?

And this is sort of a starting point assumption of mine is that there is a thing called human nature. It exists. It basically does not change. And so this means that human nature, as I often put it, human nature has no history. So if you took a baby from New Rochelle and you sent it back a thousand years to be adopted by a family of Vikings, it would grow up to pillage the English countryside. If you took a Viking baby and sent it to new Rochelle, it would grow up to become an orthodontist. Um, in other words, we're born into a civilization and the first civilization we're born into isn't the United States of America or Western civilization or any such abstraction. It's our families. Our families teach us language. They teach us morality. They model behavior for us. They model our expectations. They are, you know,

the authors of our being in a lot of ways. And so one of the first causes of our problems today is the pretty shabby shape of a lot of American families. And, you know, so Mary Eberstadt had a really great piece in the Weekly Standard a few weeks ago. That's not my dog. No, it's fine. I'm muting. I'm muting. Mary Eberstadt had this great piece in the Weekly Standard a few months ago about how identity politics in the form that we have it today really sort of can be traced back to the breakdown of the family. Because part of my argument, because human nature is eternal, we are hardwired to want to belong to groups.

We have a huge social instinct, what Robert Nisbet called the quest for community. And it's an evolutionary adaptation. Darwin talks about this in The Origin of the Species. He says, look, if you have two groups of humans, one that really works well together and cooperates, and one full of atomized individuals, the one that cooperates and works together is far more likely to beat the other one in a fight and therefore be able to pass along its genes. Man is a social animal. This is not a new insight. It goes back to the Greeks. And so the thing is, is if you don't have the right institutions, starting with the family,

but also civil society, mediating institutions, wherever you want to call them, schools, churches, whatever, we don't lose that desire for community. We don't lose that desire to belong to something. We start looking for other desire to belong to something. We start looking for other things to belong to. And one of the things that we're looking to find all our meaning from these days is politics. And we get it severely from politics. Jonah, Peter here, a couple of questions. I haven't read the book yet, but I can't be blamed because the pub date was what, 24 hours ago, something of that nature? Almost 72, my man. Almost 72. Well, my advanced copy seems to have been misplaced in the mail.

So here's Ronald Reagan. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. That's from the 1980s. It's turned into an old chestnut. So what is it that you're saying about – It's a great chestnut, though. It's a great great chestnut and that's the point with which you began but what is it that is distinctive

so the suicide of the i hear you say we've got it our families have to teach children and the title of the book is the suicide of the west i put those two together and it seems to me that jonah must be saying what ronald reagan said is still necessary but we've lost so much ground since then is that what what's distinctive about our time right so uh i think that's right and and i should i should also say though that part of the point that reagan is making is that this is a permanent struggle right yes yes because of the nature of the challenge of the barbarian invasion of children, we start from scratch with every human being. And these desires and this program that we have

run straight through the human heart. And so, you know, and this is one of the reasons why, you know, utopian projects like the French Revolution onward always fail. They don't take account of human nature. One of the reasons why the American founding worked was that they did take account of human nature. And let us pause for just a moment for Rob, who is setting down his baguette. Would you like to defend the French Revolution while you're in Paris? Well, no, you don't have to defend the French Revolution. I mean, even the French kind of roll their eyes at it. But the difference in France is that there's always been a very strong idea of what it is to be a Frenchman, what it is to be French.

I mean the communist – Also the family. It's curious. The French family is very solid, isn't it? or plotting the overthrow and the riots of the, what they call the, uh, the 68ers would gather at the cafe to floor, you know, 50 yards from across the street from brasserie lip where the establishment ain't. And the idea that these two places are fundamentally different.

It's kind of ludicrous. They're both insanely French. Um, but I, but I guess what I would say is I would say is, here's my question to you. If we don't have, if our families are no longer providing

us with a kind of sense of belonging, isn't that then what virtue signaling is? It's the idea of waving a flag to gather your troops around you? Yeah. No, sure. I mean, so we are hardwired with this thing called the coalition instinct,

and it's very easy to trick into, you know, it was originally designed in our genetic makeup for us to recognize our allies within the tribe and the tribe itself as our kin kin people we would fight with people we cooperate with everybody outside of the tribe was an enemy it was presumed to be an enemy um and and you know so people say you have to teach kids to hate no you don't you have to teach kids not to hate because i highly recommend paul bloom's book, Just Babies. It is amazing how much software, moral software, comes to us in babies, even in newborns. Babies cry in specific and national accents. They bond almost immediately with the ethnic type of their parents, and then they distrust people from a different ethnic type.

And one of the great things about the principles of Western civilization in America in general is they teach you to get over that. One of the great things about market economics is they teach you to say that the stranger, if a stranger has apples in man's natural environment, your way of getting his apples is hitting him over the head with a rock. The way you get apples from someone in the extended order of liberty in a market contractual society is you give them money. And so it's no longer zero sum.

It's win-win. But you can still hit them with a rock and get the apples. You can still do that. That's no longer ineffective. But the people who are poorly socialized, that's what they still do. That's where crime comes from, right? And so I just want to make the one point that we can – I'm happy to keep talking about the family, but that was sort of the question that Lilac set it up as. The other part, the suicidal part, has less to do with the family. The breakdown of the family, breakdown of institutions, breakdown of civil society, those things exacerbate our problems.

But the more fundamental problem that I address mostly in the book is essentially a rhetorical problem, right? The way we talk about our civilization today, the way we talk about America is that particularly on college campuses and from Hollywood elites, sorry, Rob, is to say that the story of America and the story of the West is simply one of colonial oppression, imperialism, greed, slavery, and those things are pretty much natural to all civilizations. What makes our civilization so cool is that we learned our lessons from them and we overcame them. So I want to teach about slavery, but what I want to teach about slavery is that every civilization since the agricultural revolution had it, we had it too. We were hypocrites for having it, and one of the great things about hypocrisy is hypocrisy illuminates an ideal and the ideal was was

equality before the law equality before in the eyes of god and that made slavery untenable it doesn't what what makes the west special isn't that we had it but that we got rid of it and the suicidal part comes from people on the left and increasingly some people on the right saying that, no, no, no, the ideal itself is corrupt and unworthy. And we need to retreat to some sort of more traditional understanding of how to organize society when the traditional way of organizing society for 250,000 years was to kill your enemies, rape their women, and enslave their children.

That's not the way I want to go. You know, the example you used there, if somebody has an apple, you hit them with a rock, I think just shows the out-of-touchness and the white privilege you're bringing to this because apples are not available in the city because of food deserts, because capitalism has failed. All right? Now, you look at this in time. You're dealing with a group of people, the new left,

who regards the entire American enterprise. I mean, you just answered my question there, but I'm rephrasing it for fun. It is not that the West is unique in its successes and the way that it transformed and transcended human nature. It's the fact that it's uniquely evil. They can see nothing about it that doesn't deserve suicide. As a matter of fact, they'll fly us to Switzerland and put the tube into the vein. But how exactly do we as a culture then take back the narrative from people who are increasingly drawn to

idealistic, utopian, socialistic notions that there's a better way that we'll figure out once we've destroyed every one of these standing institutions that exist. I have a friend who regards himself as being on the left, but I said, no, you're a liberal. You believe still in the institutions of the country, of the family, of the school. You are aligning yourself with people who regard all of these institutions as corrupt and deserving of death. Your book is the first start, or maybe the latest broadside in the ongoing battle. How great are the forces actually arrayed against the West when you look at their strength? You stole my first answer, which is the best way to compete

with this. Is to buy the book. And really, I've got to emphasize, in quantity. You need to give it to a lot of people. We need to see this on people's homes like the Comey book and Kramer books in Washington. That's right. Tottering stacks. That's right. But beyond my irrepressible desire for filthy lucre and praise, I think the way we've always done it with argument, with words. So one of the things that

was really sort of fascinating for me was looking into how there's this overwhelming consensus among economic historians of the left and the right that the average human being everywhere in the world, since we split off from the Neanderthals 250 300 000 years ago lived on the average about three dollars a day ron china south america north america everywhere that was the norm it was that this great hockey stick and the blade only starts to go up about 300 years ago starting in england spreading to holland then spreading to europe and in the west and it's been going straight up ever since it's this this amazing, new, novel environment. We're the only species in all of human history to create a new environment

that is completely at odds with our natural environment in fundamental ways. And what fascinated me, though, was that there was no consensus about why it happened. The Marxists have all these dumb ideas about the accumulation of capital and all this slavery and this and all that kind of stuff. There's the Max Weber thesis. There are a bunch of different theses. No one can agree on them. The one thing – and so the one answer to the question, which I think is mostly persuasive, comes from Deirdre McCloskey, who said what happened was that the words changed. And when she means by words, she means rhetoric, the way we talk about ourselves.

All a civilization is is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And that radically changed for weird reasons having really to do with the quirkiness and weirdness of England. And all of a sudden, innovation, which had been considered a sin for thousands of years in almost every society, became a good thing, something to celebrate. This Lockean idea that the fruits of your labor should belong to you, that a man's home is his castle, which is this ancient English idea that we turned into the Fourth Amendment. These things – all of a sudden it turned out that if – I think the Max Weber thesis is usually wrong the way people put it but he was right that if you actually behave in a certain way you'll get rich and we behave we change the way we behave we change the way we thought of ourselves and our place in the universe and so we're only place where i think deirdre is a little too optimistic and she doesn't appreciate the fact that i think

it's a fact of logic that something that can be created by words can be destroyed by words and so many people today have this pervasive sense of ingratitude to how good we have it how great this system is does it solve problems sure can we fix those problems sure but the fundamental precepts that sort of guide our civilization and guide our country this is the new radical exciting thing, and it's only six lifetimes old. The preceding 7,500 lifetimes were, you know, man's life was defined by grinding poverty punctuated by an early death either from violence or some bowels-stewing disease. And, you know, maybe we should have some gratitude for that.

Right, or just gratitude for nice underwear. Anyway, James, what are you going to say? Rising crust pizza, good dentistry. There's a lot of things. When Rob mentions good underwear, that's very interesting. When Jonah says that words change, that's interesting too because I heard you pronounce the word

Neanderthal, right? That's the correct pronunciation. I grew up with Neanderthals. I'm not talking about my folks in Fargo, but that was the word we used, Neanderthal. At some point, it became Neanderthal, and I rolled my eyes and thought, oh, this again, okay, I'll give you Beijing over Peking, but I'm not going to give you Neanderthal. But eventually, I went with Neanderthal. And the more we study about them, the more we think that perhaps the reason they died out was that they really were bad at hunting and fighting because their underwear rode up. It was so uncomfortable. It was so poorly made.

There's no solution to that. Well, Rob's absolutely wrong. There's zero solution to that. Sorry. Rob is wrong, and he's in France. That's what I'm telling you. He's wrong, and he's in France are the two things you need to know about him today. Because good underwear actually is going to be what you're going to get if you go to mac weldon mac weldon's

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for everyday life. Quite simply, Mack Weldon is better than whatever you're wearing right now, and they want you to be comfortable. So if you don't like your first pair, you can keep it, and they'll still refund you, no questions asked. Now, I have actually some of the underwear, and it's wonderful, but I also have one of their backpacks. When they say they have more, they've got stylish stuff that you can walk around that makes people say, where exactly did you get that? What I love about this backpack is the same thing we've talked about with some of our suitcases. It's got a built-in charger. I never need worry that I'm going to run out of juice because it's right there in the back of my Mack Weldon backpack.

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Yeah, my ringtone on my phone, which I thought I knew, actually is the Jetson's doorbell. Yes, it is. Wow. I like that. I don't have Rosie the Robot's voice telling you, you know, hello, but I probably should. James, Jonah's voice telling you, you know, hello, Sap, but I probably should. James, Jonah's being very polite, but he wants you to send him a link. I used to have the Flint phone from the In Like Flint movies, which I thought was even better.

That's right. Right. I love that one. Hey, Jonah, it's Rob here. Hey, Rob. I haven't read the book. I haven't even received the book yet. I was waiting for a free copy, and then I realized you're too smart for that. You vowed to buy it for me.

I did vow to buy it for you. I saw Jonah at an AEI reading. He and Rich Lauer were some of the interlocutors. It was really fascinating, and I ostentatiously, very audibly, loudly went up to him as he was sitting at the book table signing books, which the event at AEI and National Review Institute were giving away for free, which I found shocking. Horrendous, yeah. It was horrendous, and I said very loudly, Jonah, I'm planning to buy one of these books for full price because I can afford it, and I'm pretty sure everybody in this room can too. I don't know if I set the right example. But anyway.

And I kept saying to Rob, what was that? So you'd say it again. Louder, louder. I can't hear you even though I'm next to you. So what do you say to people? So I'll just take the alternate view, right? Sure, yes, the shames that the West felt alternate view, right? Sure, yes, the shame that

the West felt led to the abolition of slavery and all sorts of things, but what do you say to people who believe that changing the language actually was liberating and not restricting? So what do you say

to the woke folks? And I mean that with all due respect, who say, no, it really doesn't matter the language we use in terms of gender or sex or whatever it is we use to sort of open things up and that may lead to some of the pillars of the, or the

perceived pillars of the West crumbling, but that's okay. What's the difference between the decay of resolve and the strengthening of it? And how do you know? It's a fair question. And I think part of my answer is, look, I always try to tell college kids when I talk to like young Republican crowd, you know, there's a lot of bad it too. Part of some of the stuff that we call political correctness is really just an attempt to come up with good manners for a increasingly diverse society. You know, when,

when African-Americans said, we don't want to be called Negroes anymore. We want to be called black or African-American. That was fine. You know, it may have seemed like political correctness at the time because people don't like to change the terms, you know, you know, James fought, uh, changing his pronunciation of Neanderthal to the bitter end. But, um, so some of that is fine. It's a way of showing people respect. is that we've, especially young ones, we've come to this place where people think that simply because rudeness isn't politically correct, it's therefore good.

And just being rude for its own sake. And I try to tell people that that's crazy because first of all, politics is supposed to be about persuading people. And if people think you're an ass, you're not going to be able to persuade them about anything. But if you want to be on PC, be on PC but have a point to it. The downside of political correctness is that – and a lot of the stuff that the woke people use, it's really not about that.

It is a way to sort of assert power and control people and be thought police. Some of these people constantly change the language so they can catch you being in some sort of setup of being bigoted or intolerant just because you don't know the right nomenclature. It is what I would argue is a form of priestcraft. I get into a lot of the Schumpeter stuff in the book, but where experts, what James Burnham would call the managerial class, what a lot of people call the new class, these intellectuals who control the commanding heights of the culture, they use language to undermine and belittle people and exert power over people by changing the terms of the rhetoric so that it sort of artificially outs you as some sort of bigot and they manipulate you, manipulate people. When I was on the board of trustees of my college, we got this big lecture about how you can no longer use the word tolerance because tolerance implied that you were merely tolerating somebody else's aberrant behavior and what you really now had to do was use words like acceptance or celebration right and that is an exertion of power that is saying that you if you want to be a decent person in an elite society you can't just be a libertarian who says people

have the right to be wrong or people have the right to do whatever they want, but I don't have to like it. You now have to like it. You will be made to care. And that's the part of political correctness that I don't think is liberating or increases tolerance or happiness, but is actually part of the will to power of certain intellectuals. Jonah, Peter here. You mentioned James Burnham. And of course, the first book called The Suicide of the West was James Burnham's 1964 book, which certainly through the, I don't know what anybody, if anybody thinks of it now, but certainly through the 80s was still considered a kind of classic. What did you have in mind by titling your book, giving your book the same title as James Burnham?

There's some way in which you must have been expecting people to compare, contrast, or reflect on where we are, where we've come since James Burnham. What did you have in mind? Well, you know, it's funny. I did not actually anticipate as many people being sort of vexed by this. Because if you actually go and type almost any common book title into Amazon, you'll find four, five, 10 books of the same title. And it's interesting to me how many people are, I know you're not annoyed by it, but there was a bunch of people who were like very angry that I did this. And that wasn't my intent. Although some of the people who are angry, I'm pretty happy they're angry. But my public, my publisher is furious about my new book, A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace.

But and so part of it is an homage. Right. Part of it is, you know, because James Burnham was another senior editor of National Review. His work was really influential on me. More of a managerial revolution than than Suicide of the West, which was sort of an add-on to it but um uh you know the original working title in the proposal the working title of this was wealth and i was going to have it as a response to pickety's book and then because i can't write about economics for 300 pages and the thesis moved um i then started calling it the tribe of liberty because what i was wanting to do was sort of take advantage of this natural tribal wiring we have to get people to reattach to these notions of liberty that are at the core of our civilization. And then the publishers got into a fight about it, and one of the sort of backup ones was Suicide of the West.

And the reason why I called it Suicide of the West and not Death of the West West or the decline of the West is because suicide is a choice. The whole thesis of my book is that the first sentence of the book is there is no God in this book. I make no claim that capitalism, liberal democracy, the miracle, what I call the miracle, that any of this stuff was inevitable. It wasn't inevitable. If it were inevitable, it would have appeared a little earlier in the evolutionary record. It happened by accident. And it happened through a series of choices about how we were going to organize our lives. And you can unchoose those things. And so part of it, I know it's a gloomy title, but the end of it is a long disquisition about gratitude and about teaching people, you know, if you had a friend who was suicidal, suicidal what would you tell him you would tell him about all the things he has to live for

all the things he should be grateful for all the people that need him and that's what i'm trying to argue in this is the sort of you know it is to say it's not nearly as bad as you think it is but if you keep going around saying it is you're going to screw this thing up got it joda last question mentioned, this is fascinating, that the word tolerance is no longer to be accepted. And when you hear things like this, you feel like Winston Smith in the cafeteria being told that the destruction of words is a wonderful thing. This is how it's always been. It starts with tolerance, and then it has to go up the ladder towards approval and celebration until you finally get to the point where you're required to subsidize it.

But when you find that there's ideas that even some people on the left start to bristle at, you detect that there are fissures, that what they are being asked now to accept as a completely normal paradigm, as opposed to what they used to believe, and they balk. There's a division amongst feminists, for example, as to whether or not the transgender movement is making it unsafe for women. And now you have this deep rift between the transgender activists and what they call the TERFs, the trans-excluding radical feminists, who said, wait a minute, I'm on board with the entire progressive operation for reconstituting every institution, but when it comes to gender, I'm going to draw a line here.

In other words, not everybody immediately goes along and says, yes, this is all fine and well and good. Is this like looking out the window, to use the 1984 example again, is this like looking out the window and saying, you know, not the proles are our only hope, but eventually it will be the people on the left who realize that there is something worth defending. And from that, take the lesson that you're trying to get. Or are we just going to be crushed under the boot of the redefinition of language in society and institutions permanently? Is the left actually going to hit a point where they say, wait a minute, stop, no? stop no i hope so i i don't have a great answer for it um i think you know uh uh you know part you know one of the one of the most radical things that the founding fathers did was get rid of titles of nobility and it never gets sort of celebrated the way it should that was an amazingly new thing

in human history because one of the things that is sort of inherent to humanity is to create aristocracies that people of like-minded interest form coalitions and they form guilds and then they protect their interests against everybody else that's how aristocracies were originally formed and then because they wanted to protect their own interests they said they're hereditary and then all of a sudden you get these notions of bloodlines that last forever and the founding fathers said, screw all that. We're not going to do it that way. And that was an original form of identity politics, which says that simply by virtue of an accident of the priestly caste in academia, these people who get all mired down on these word games and all the rest, is that these are their only weapons. This is a very Nietzschean process where they use the tools that they have to undermine the established order. is that when you actually believe this crap, it is impossible not to run into profound sort of gobsmacking cognitive dissonance.

Because you end up having to have this great chain of being of who's a greater victim. And then you have this new theory of intersectionality that is supposed to reconcile the inherent contradictions between competing victimhoods. And it's all garbage. But it's where you go the second you start creating these abstract categories of people that you claim everyone fits into. But don't you just replace – this is Rob, by the way. Don't you just replace one aristocracy for another? I mean there was a great – in France, I'm thinking about it.

I forget its name. Great French radical Duke who was an aristocrat who said that all authority should be abolished, the church, the government, the law courts. The aristocracy especially should should be abolished, the church, the government, the law courts, the aristocracy especially should all be abolished, except, of course, for dukes, because the dukedom is absolutely essential. Yeah, the linchpin. You can't do that. I mean, you know, there were no aristocrats, but by 1890, there were cartels.

There were sort of, you know, economic cartels of businesses who – and even now, today, there's something distinctly 19th century about seeing Mark Zuckerberg welcoming regulation from the government or the large internet service providers welcoming net neutrality regulation because they know that it will – it's impossible for it not to inure to them it won't increase competition or decrease it how do you i that's one question the second question is just because i know i don't want to take all of your time i just want to ask one question uh after this one so you have a true answer just so you know the second one is um it's exhausting what you're suggesting you're suggesting that every day we have to wake up and fight for liberty and fight for what we have. And it's just tiring. Like isn't there an easier way? Okay.

So first question first. I really like the first question because it's something that I'm kind of obsessed on. One of the things that I've sort of really fixated on is trying to look at modern society and trying to see, like, what if a visitor from Mars visited every 10 years? What would be the things that he would think are consistent today with our sort of feudal or ancient past? Right. Because we tend to think all of the way we do things is completely natural and modern. And we don't have any of this old stuff, any of this old baggage defining us. And this natural tendency towards aristocracy, which the founding fathers understood so much

better than 95% of social scientists, is a constant in human nature. John Adams writes at length about the inevitability of aristocracy and he had all these sorts of solutions about how to keep it in check. Jefferson knew that there was an aristocracy. He just wanted a democratic one that brought the most qualified people up from the muck. And so the founders, their answer to this was, we can't fight this natural human tendency of people to sort of coalesce into interests. They called them factions. What we can do is we can set up a system that makes sure that no one faction can enduringly and arbitrarily wield centralized government power. And so there's this great passage, my favorite passage from Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations is where he talks about how, and I'm just going to have to paraphrase it, he says,

whenever two people of the same trade sit together and have a drink, it is inevitable that the conversation won't turn to a conspiracy against the public where they try to sort of form a monopoly or collude or create a cartel. That is natural. That happens every day. The difference is when the government sanctions it, when you use the government's monopoly on violence and says we're going to honor this faction or this cartel above all others, that's when it becomes tyrannical. Monopolies always die left to the market through creative destruction. They only last when the state steps in. And one of the things I love doing is looking around for examples of how this natural tendency towards aristocracy and towards, you know, you know, feather betting or whatever you want to call it, coalitional interest or guild economics reasserts itself. And my favorite example, just to give you one in Mexican teachers unions, your teaching job is heritable so that if you talk chemistry, you can leave the chemistry teacher job to your kid. And they violently protect this because they think this is a natural way of doing things. And that's the funny thing. It is a natural way of doing things.

It's not that much worse from the teachers union in L.A., by the way. I mean, it's not hereditary, but it's pretty close. And so things like when we condemn corruption in Afghanistan and places like that where people give government contracts to their cousins and we say, no, no, you have to have open bidding. They look at you like you're crazy because and they're right, because from their perspective, this is the way politics has worked for 10,000 years. And it is the way politics works. What's different is us. We're the weird ones because we don't do it that way, and we think that things like nepotism and favoritism and all that kind of stuff are corrupt. But really what they are is natural. And as for your second part of your point, look, I'm a big believer in the fight for liberty begins in your backyard.

You do what you can where you can in your own life. You model good behavior where you can in your own life. You model good behavior where you can and when you can. But what you shouldn't do, I don't think you have to go out and fight every day, although that's some of us. That's our job. And we should be happy warriors about it because it's a pretty freaking good fight. But for those people who want to just have normal lives, they should have normal lives and civilize their barbarian children as best they can. But the one thing I would ask of them is you don't have to be a pill about it, but don't just shrug or surrender to people who crap all over this golden egg

that we've got. Let's actually have a little sense of gratitude. Religion is so much better at teaching people to keep certain memories alive, to honor and remember things, to give thanks for things. That's an important thing that is lost in our culture, and that's something I think everybody can take to heart. Yeah, well, I tweet a lot, so that's how I – Yeah, no, you're a hero. I tweet, so that's why I'm a hero. Jonah, we're going to see you in Washington at the con, pod,Con, as Rob insists that we all have to call it, right?

PodCon? Is that what we're calling it? ConPodCon. Consider it a podcast convention. See, that sounds like one of the creepiest pop culture subcultures where all of John Podhortz's fans show up. Well, that would be con pod con con pod. Yeah, right. See? The book is The Suicide of the West.

Buy it and put it on the bookshelf next to a liberal fascism and the tyranny of cliches, and you will have a triptych of intellectually superior books that you can use for mental ammunition the next time you sit down and talk with people who haven't read jonah a number that is going to uh diminish as more people find out how wonderful this book no doubt is thanks for being with us um everybody look you know buy it there's a there's a link right here in the podcast buy it read it and uh it's it's remarkable really that we got through this whole thing without talking about trump and i imagine that it's almost as if the ideas that you talk about in this book surpass the age of Trump, that they're intrinsic to understanding and preserving America. Not possible.

I did not sit down to write a Trump book. When I started, no one thought he could be president or would even run, including him. And a grateful nation turns its eyes to you and thanks you for that. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. Jonah, best of luck with it. See you soon. Thank you. See you and thanks for that. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. Jonah, best of luck with it. See you soon. See you guys.

Take care. Bye-bye. Rob, Peter, we're going to get to you in just a second here. But, you know, the thing is, I'm sure that people are pulling their hair out when they think about what happens to the West and what is going to become of us. But what about that natural hair loss that some people suffer just because they're getting older, they've got male pattern baldness? You know, hair loss, it is not just your dad's problem. I love this, that I've gotten to a spot immediately from talking about the suicide of the West. But that's capitalism.

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Free month of treatment at keeps.com slash ricochet. Keeps, hair today, hair tomorrow. And our thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, here's the thing. Peter and Rob, they're gone. They just vanished because they had – Wait, I'm here.

Oh, you are. I'm here, too. You want me to go. You want me. That's the thing. You want me to leave. No, nothing. You're both here.

Fantastic. So, guys, we're going to see you in Washington. That's coming up. We want everybody to go and get the tickets we want. Rob, I know that you're probably – you have access to tremendous, fantastic food in France. But when you come back, you're going to order from ButcherBox, right? More than order from it. I think I already have ordered from it, and I'm very pleased with it.

I have to say it's a great, great service. And, Peter, we don't talk about your fundamentals that often, but you know that Mack Weldon is the one place with that perfectly stitched fabric of their own to keep you from going the way of the Neanderthals. And of course, me, well, you know, it keeps us looking pretty good because I've had this receding thing for a long time right now. But Ricochet isn't just our wonderful sponsors. Of course, it's books like Jonah. It's people like you. Join Ricochet.

Support us. Support our sponsors through iTunes and leave some reviews. And make sure that we're here for the 2020 election, which is going to be a burner of Barnes. We'll see you all in D.C. on May 10th and on the 11th. And, Peter, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. See you in D.C., fellas. Go ahead. Go to Ricochet.com.

Become a member and buy a ticket. We'll see you May 10th I had to get that in I forgot to do that okay that's it I'm done I'm done good

through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be the face that I would help for me I realize and I can see That suicide is painless It brings on many changes

And I can take a leave, babe, if I please. The game of love is hard to play. I'm gonna lose it anyway. The losing card was some delay. So this is all I have to say Suicide is painless It brings on many changes And I can take a leave and

If I please The sword of time Appears as king It doesn't hurt When it begins But as it works It's way on end The veins grow stronger

Watch it green Suicide is painless It brings on I can't take a leave if I am pleased. They prayed when once requested me. Ricochet. Join the conversation.