"Never Trump" Conservatives Won't Save Us: They dislike Trump because of who he is, not what he has done.

• Author: Robinson, Nathan J.
• Position: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy - Book review

Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy

by Jonah Goldberg Crown Forum, 464 pp.

It often seems as if conservatives have been fretting about the "decline of the West" for as long as there has been a West to fret about. From Edmund Burke panicking about the French Revolution to Allan Bloom worrying about the effect of Mick Jagger's hip gyrations on the morals of 1980s undergraduates, the right is often defined more by the cultural changes it opposes than the principles it supports. In a 2006 essay explaining his departure from the conservative movement, outgoing National Review director Austin Bramwell issued a plea against those who "carry on the Cold War obsession with the so-called 'crisis of the West.' Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error." In Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg believes he has finally found that fatal error.

The flavor of Goldberg's argument can be gleaned from the book's subtitle. It is a work about decline, one that identifies "nationalism, populism, and tribalism" as the principle enemies of order. To the extent that it can be easily summarized, Goldberg's argument is roughly as follows: Human nature is brutal and uncivilized, and for thousands of years our species divided its time between hunting, gathering, raping, and killing. But, around 300 years ago, a Miracle occurred (the capital M is his): the English, with a bit of help from the Dutch, stumbled upon a winning formula for human life--liberal capitalist democracy. Despite a few regrettable hiccups, such as the transatlantic slave trade and the extinction of a number of native populations, this formula created unprecedented growth, prosperity, and peace.

Yet these days many people are ungrateful for the Miracle. They believe that it has created injustices. These people, Goldberg writes, are the intellectual heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They are Romantics who think civilization is bad and celebrate an imagined ideal of the noble savage. This Romanticism brought us fascism and progressivism, ideologies that produced a broad range of evils, from death camps to the IRS. The Romantics have infected our popular culture, making us celebrate outlaws and iconoclasts like Breaking Bad's Walter White. (His example.) They have also convinced us to value our feelings and emotions too much, leading to the breakdown of the nuclear family. And they have encouraged a "tribal" mind-set, which finds its political voice in populist and nationalist movements of the right and left, such as identity politics. Donald Trump represents the triumph of primitive instinct over ideas. If we do not reject this primitivism, and adhere to the ideas of John Locke instead of Rousseau, we are endangering the Miracle and will destroy the West.

I say this is "to the extent" the argument can be summarized because Suicide of the West is a sprawling treatise that offers Goldberg's reflections on a...