THE TRIBE OF LIBERTY: National Review's Jonah Goldberg wonders how to save civilization in his new book, Suicide of the West.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy - Interview

JONAH GOLDBERG IS worried about the state of the nation. In his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (Crown Forum), he makes the case that the liberal democratic project is not only in danger--it has become a danger to itself.

The United States, Goldberg argues, has forgotten or rejected its core values, allowing its institutions to decay. The result is a nation that no longer has a coherent self-image, a culture that no longer knows what it lives for. "I like getting rich really fast, and I want to make the world get richer really fast," he says. "But the violence that does to established institutions and customs and norms sets a lot of people adrift."

A stalwart of modern conservative political journalism, Goldberg is a longtime editor at National Review, where he helped launch the magazine's online presence. He also currently writes a column for the Los Angeles Times and serves as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And he's the best-selling author of two previous books, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning and The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Like both of those titles, Suicide of the West blends history and philosophy with pop-culture references; as always, Goldberg's deep despair is leavened with a lively wit. In June, he spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie about how and when America lost its way, why tribalism is the culprit, what role Donald Trump plays in the death of the West--and why Goldberg has become friendlier to libertarianism over the course of his career.

Reason: In Suicide of the West, you talk about "the miracle." Describe what you mean by that.

Goldberg: When something hugely providential and wonderful happens that you can't explain, we call it a miracle. For 250,000 years, the average human being, everywhere in the world, lived on about $3 a day or less. Then, once and only once in all of human history, it starts to change. There's unbelievable consensus about this from the hard left to the hard right. Everyone sort of agrees on those numbers to one extent or another. When it comes to the question of why it happened, all consensus breaks down.

But it only happened once, at least in a sustained way. And I think what causes the miracle isn't some specific public policy or anything like that. It's words. It's language. It's the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. This is sort of the Deirdre McCloskey thesis: For thousands of years in Western Europe, innovation was considered a sin, the sin of questioning the established order. Then all of a sudden [you get] this Lockean idea that the fruits of our labors belong to us, that if you can build a better mousetrap, you should reap the rewards of that. And it has this explosive effect that spreads out across the world. It's unnatural.

If it were natural, if this were how human beings just automatically self-organize into prosperous communities of rule of law and individual autonomy, it would have occurred a little earlier in the evolutionary record than 250,000 years after we split off from Neanderthals.

What is the essential insight needed to preserve the miracle? And when you talk about the death of the West, is it really suicide, or is it being imposed on us?

The working title for the book for a couple years was The Tribe of Liberty, and the basic argument was that we need to rekindle a sort of tribal commitment to the institutions of liberty. There are institutions in the economic sense of rules, but also physical organizations, groups, traditions, that civilize us and make us respect and admire and want to preserve liberty. And those things are often taught to us in a prerational way, right? They're taught to us when we're born into any family that has a...