You're listening to Comedy Central.

Now, it was up in question this week on Queensland's Supreme, we're getting cozy with the legend Mariah Carey, an intimate two part episode.

Nobody knew who I was and they introduced me. Ladies and gentlemen, Columbia recording artist writer Charlie Black and White. Then at the end of it.

Announcer He's like Nobelists.

Now, as we listen to Koslov Supreme on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast so much.

My guest tonight is a senior editor at National Review and L.A. Times columnist, American Enterprise Institute scholar and bestselling author whose latest book is called Suicide of the West How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. Please welcome Jonah Goldberg.

I thought about calling you up sort of a McCrone versus Trump kind of thing and getting all antsy, but I decided we should have done that.

We should have done a little handshake into a kiss into like a little moment into a thing. Yeah. And I could have, like, whispered, I like your musk, which is way I think he was saying to him at one point felt like it felt like a Trump crush really into him, which is something that is good for America.

Yes. Yeah.

Maybe, you know, if it's good for America, for us to get along with, you know, our two hundred year old allies.

That's right.

But if he's only doing it because is sucking up to him less good, right?

I mean, it should be they're getting along because we have mutual interests, we have mutual values and they reflect that. It shouldn't be because the leader of France says not only are you a handsome man, you're a powerful man. Right? I mean, it shouldn't just be sucking up. It should be something more.

I feel like it should just be that. Yeah. Welcome to the show. Great to be here. Thanks. Thank you for coming through.

And you have written quite a book here, Suicide of the West, if ever there there's a title that would catch you. Is that why the title of the book?

Well, in part because I didn't say the death of the West or the decline of the West, as grim as the title sounds and it actually doesn't end.

As grim as it sounds, suicide's a choice choose to do to make these decisions that you're making.

And I think that one of the things that people don't appreciate is that if you you can you can choose not to do them as well.

And then a lot of the things that are are plaguing this country are within our own power to fix. Right.

It's interesting because you talk about nationalism, tribalism, populism, all of these things that you believe are leading to the decline of America.

When you talk about the decline of America, are you specifically referring to capitalism and the way it's made America thrive over the past three hundred years?

In part, I mean, I call this thing the miracle, right? And the miracle isn't just capitalism. It's also natural rights, civil rights, free speech, all of the things that we associate with the Bill of Rights, the idea that the individual sovereign, that we are captains of ourselves, that we are citizens, not subjects, that the government works for us.

We don't work for a government.

These are all unbelievably new ideas in the history of humanity. Humanity split off from the Neanderthals like three hundred thousand years ago. And for most of humanity's existence, we were poor, ignorant, bloody, violent creatures. Right. And and our human nature hasn't changed.

We are still the same creatures we were ten thousand years ago. What has changed are our values, our norms, our institutions. And if you don't have gratitude for them and if you don't try to protect them, they'll go away.

And it's interesting that you say that you go if we if we don't have gratitude for them, if we don't try to protect them, because that seems like an argument many people in America will use for one group or another.

What's interesting in this book is you refer to both sides of the political spectrum doing similar damage to an idea that that may cause damage to that idea in the same way. So, for instance, you write for National Review as a conservative writer, but at the same time, you are not a fan of Trump.

I think that's fair. Right.

So you are saying that populism, both on Trump's side and on the left, there's a danger of that hurting Americans?

That's right.

There's nothing wrong with a little populism, right? There's nothing wrong with a little nationalism. It's like a pinch of salt brings out the flavor in the meal, right. Too much ruins the meal and way too much is literally poisonous. Right. And so all poisons are determined by the dosage. My favorite New Yorker cartoon, which my wife got blown up for me a few years ago and framed, has two dogs drinking martinis at a bar.

And one dog says to the other, you know, it's not good enough that dogs succeed. Cats must also fail.

Right. And that's sort of where we are as a culture right now where it's not.

And this drives me crazy about my own side these days, where I talk to young conservative activists, college students, and I say, look, by all means, fight political correctness, if that's what you want to do. Right.

But just because being rude is politically incorrect doesn't mean being rude is good. And so much of what's happening, I think on both sides of the political aisle is this this idea that you can do almost any horrible thing if it annoys the right people. Right.

And that's a huge part of the defense of Donald Trump, which I just find intellectually bankrupt, which is, well, he's got the right enemies or he's making the right people upset. What you have to look at what what is actually upsetting them. Right.

And some of the things that upset liberals and lefties I can agree with and I'll support. But some of the other things are just sort of crassness rudeness for its own sake. And I don't see why I should defend that just because he's on my team, as it were.

It's interesting that you bring up teams because it does feel like America's. Drifting into a space where politics is solely about teams, you pick your team or whatever your team does, you defend. So the other team, whatever they do, you pick the opposite.

The ref is biased. This is against us. Those are not facts because they don't work in our favor. Does this, in your opinion, lead to a place where the experiments of America begins to decline? Is is that the only thing that's kept it moving or has it just been an illusion that's lasted for three hundred years because there were people who were previously oppressed and that wasn't something that America ever was? No, look.

I mean, look, are there bad things in American history that we need to atone for them to fix or that we have problems today that we need to still work on? Absolutely. My point is, is that, again, human nature has no history. Human nature is a constant.

We have if you took a kid from New Rochelle and you sent them back to a Viking village to be raised by Vikings a thousand years ago, he would end up going pillaging the English countryside. Right. You take a Viking baby and you bring it to New Rochelle.

He's going to grow up to be an orthodontist. Right.

And a very big orphan. Yeah. And so these challenges exist in every generation. It is human nature to want to be part of your tribe.

We are hardwired to be part of a group. That's how we evolve, is to say I will do everything to help in Darwin writes about this. I will do everything to help my team, my friends, my kin, my family, my allies, my coalition.

And the stranger is the enemy. Right.

And what you know, and so people you know, there's a common cliche that says people have to be taught to hate.

No, they actually have to be taught not to hate.

That's what civilizations do is teach people to see.

And it starts with Christianity or Judaism. You go way back in the religion department. But the fundamental insight is that you need to teach people that strangers have human dignity, that strangers are decent people. And just because you don't know them doesn't mean or don't agree with them. It doesn't make them the enemy. And I think we're falling down on that in our politics and our education.

And instead we're telling people, just go with your feelings. Your rage is more important than facts or argument. Right. And that's where you get populism. That's where you get a lot of nationalism, too.

But if you if you have somebody who is trying to end you, how do you then work on responding to that?

Because that's something that I that I'm always trying to figure out in my head is it's one thing for people to say, let's keep politics civil. Let's not have an argument, let's not point each other out as enemies, etc. But there are times when let's say Charlottesville is a good example.

Sure, there are people who are literally saying we are Nazis.

These people are wishing for the end of other human beings. It's a bit difficult at that point to say yes, yes, but let us let us sit with them and engage as they drive over us.

It's a very difficult space to be in.

I agree with you and look like my last name's Goldberg. I'm not really a turn the other cheek guy.

I'm more of a smiting and wrath guy, so I get what you're talking about. But right. But my point is, and I agree with you and tell you about the neo-Nazis.

One of the things that infuriates me about what Steve Bannon and some of the people around Trump did was claim that somehow a bunch of friggin Nazis were part of our coalition. And I would keep trying to explain to these people, no, you and they literally say that they want to get rid of people like me, people like you.

Why? Why should I for a common group with them just to get this guy elected or just for political purposes, whatever?

Some things are existential questions. And I'm not saying that we should have gone into Charlottesville and shot a bunch of Nazis. Right.

But the idea that somehow they have something important to say, though, I need to find common ground with them, I I think is ridiculous. Right.

I also think it's ridiculous to call people who aren't Nazis, Nazis as a way to demonize them.

And I think there's a lot of that that's going on, too. And so it's a prudential question and you have to sort of figure it out as you go. It doesn't mean you can't have big arguments. I've always believed that democracy is about disagreement, not about agreement. It's about having arguments. What I don't like about our politics right now is how people don't think arguments matter at all, that facts don't matter, that, you know, the whole point of the Enlightenment was this idea that you could persuade people.

Right.

And part of the reason I wrote this book is it's much a cautionary tale to my allies. On the right is that a lot of people are just giving up on persuasion and instead it's just hammer and tongs. Cats must fail.

It's all about power.

The arguments in defense of Donald Trump in the in twenty sixteen, we're all about winning and strength, winning and strength or not. They're absolutely a concepts. Winning for what? Strength. For what. Unity. For what it has to be the ideas that underlie it.

And we're in a moment where a lot of people just don't care about ideas anymore.

One of the big ideas that you share in the book is that America needs to focus on less identity politics on both sides and more on merits, because merit's is how capitalism thrives is what moves the society forward.

When you say that, though, do you think sometimes a statement like that ignores the fact that some people's merit is overlooked because of identity politics?

Yeah, look, look, you know, it's funny. Like most of the liberals I talked to, they like the words. They agree with me on the populism and nationalism. And they don't like the and the tribalism. They don't like the identity politics. Right. Right.

I am not saying that you can't all I'm not saying that there isn't discrimination out there. Obviously there is. What I'm saying is that one of the great and glorious things and Barack Obama was very eloquent about this, about this country is is not that America were the founding fathers were hypocrites when they started this country.

They were you know, slavery was a big you know, the big you know, what about that? Right. Right. Great description. What about that?

But you know what I'm getting at, right.

So what happens is then Abraham Lincoln comes along with the Gettysburg Address and he redefines what this country is about, about equality.

And then Martin Luther King says, hey, wait a second. One hundred years later says, wait a second. The Founding Fathers wrote a promissory note to the American people that all men, including black men, are created equal.

It's the unfolding of that story, right? That that is what matters.

And so one of the core values, all of civilization is, is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

And one of the reasons why Martin Luther King was so persuasive is he was appealing to the best ideals of white America and saying you should take people as you find them. One of the great things about the American founding, which doesn't get taught anymore, is that we got rid of titles of nobility.

We got rid of of the notion that simply by an accident of birth, one person is better than another person.

And so a little identity politics, just like a little nationalism in terms of ethnic pride and solidary.

All of that is fine when you start reducing whole categories of people to an abstraction and say, all I need to know about you is the color of your skin.

Right. That's when you get into a problem.

And this idea that all white people are racist is is, first of all, not true. You know, intermarriage rates between white and blacks are going through the roof. They can't all be racists. Right.

But but I think the argument is less all white people are racist and the system has been created by white people to oppress people of color. So I think when when people say why people are racist, I think that's disingenuous. But most of the time, the argument people are saying is, hey, we can admit that the system from the founding fathers through to redlining, through segregation was written in such a way that it would benefit one race over another.

It would it would hamper the cats and allow the dogs to succeed.

And look and I think there's obviously a lot of truth to that. At the same time, the definition of what counts as white changed over time. You the Benjamin Franklin changed for everyone except black people. But it's true that and that's true, too.

And that's my that's part of my point, is that it is an outrage that this country took so long to include everybody in this idea of universal equality.

That is not an argument for getting rid of the value of universal equality. Right. Right. It is.

It is to say that we need to be more consistent in applying these ideals rather than saying these ideals themselves are bankrupt, because it is these ideals that for all of human history, the average human being everywhere on Earth lived on average of three dollars a day, Africa, Asia, Europe, everywhere.

And then once and only once in all of human history, it starts to go like this. And it's because these ideas start getting put into action. I think we should be.

We live in this moment of the greatest alleviation of material poverty in all of human history. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa coming out of poverty. And it's not because of UN programs they help.

It's because of these ideas starting to germinate, lifting people up, maybe have just a little gratitude for them and maybe have a little room to say.

Maybe the entire story of this three hundred year miracle isn't a story of purely of oppression and tyranny where we bad the bad things happen in the past.

Yes. Have things been getting better? Yes, you can say both things.

You can say both things nuanced. The way I'd like to think of it as this I go. Capitalism in many ways should be like software on a phone. It constantly needs to be updated and at some points it feels like the updating has stopped and people allow it to stagnates in the way that it is.

And to your point of gratitude, before I let you go, I think the one thing and I wonder if you can maybe understand this is when people say you should be grateful for what you have.

Do you not think that gratitude is always relative to the bottom versus the top in where you are? Because to say to somebody and you hear this all the time and I'm not saying U.S. politicians will say, oh, black people, you complain about America, go live in Afghanistan, see what that's like. I said, but you're not living in Afghanistan. If I'm in a Michelin star restaurant and the food is not great, you can't tell me to go to Arby's because I complain, right?

I'm saying to you, the food is not what it was promised in this restaurant. So is it not difficult to say to people who have gratitude?

When they are not living in the promise of what the country is meant to be, yeah, I think that that's fair. I think at the same time. So I don't say that to people.

Right. You know, honestly, I'm so and so I'm one of the you one of the good ones.

One of the things I for one of the things look, I mean, I've I've taken slings and arrows from lots of different directions, including from a lot of friends and former friends positions I've taken.

One of the things I would say to people who make that argument is stop making that argument. Right. Right. You know, that's not how you should frame this kind of thing. What I would say is that, you know, the the pursuit of happiness is, is it's not a guarantee. Have the right to pursue it. And one of the great things about. Freedom, the miracle, liberal democratic capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is it gives more people the opportunity to pursue it.

Could that get better?

Yeah, but you can't look at any of the systems we had prior to three hundred years ago.

And I'm not sure you can look at to most of the sort of nationalist or socialist systems and say they're better at it. Right. And so when people say we fall short of ideals, I said, well, of course, that's why they call them ideals.

You're not supposed to be able to like live. They're supposed to be a north star. You know, the thing that your true north that you march towards could always get better at them.

My point is, is that we shouldn't throw them away because this is the only game in town in terms of of what has actually taken humanity out of the muck of its natural environment.

Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural.

If they were natural, you would think they would show up a little earlier in the evolutionary record than about two hundred ninety nine thousand years into our existence here.

And so maybe these are things that we should be a little more protective of.

If a goose, the golden goose, came into your house out of nowhere and started, you know, golden eggs don't sound modern anymore, started squeezing out winning lottery tickets. This is a right analogy, but.

Yeah, but you would your response to it should be gratitude. Not like give me more more lottery tickets than you can produce, but that's what the story is about. It's not really so much about greed. It's about ingratitude.

It says I think fundamentally I understand what you're saying and that's what I appreciate about the book, is it makes me think that it engages in ideas. And fundamentally, what the book is saying is don't throw the baby out with the bath. That's right. That's right. And we can we can disagree about the size of government, all these kinds of things.

But there's some fundamental things that we should all be able to agree, have merit and are worth keeping you stop the conversation.

Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you very much. Suicide of the West is available now. The Daily Show with Criminal Ears Edition, watch The Daily Show weeknights at 11:00, 10:00 Central on Comedy Central and the Comedy Central and watch full episodes and videos at The Daily Show Dotcom. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to The Daily Show on YouTube for exclusive content and more. Hey, everyone, it's Michelle Williams, and I love being able to share my story with you on my podcast, checking in with Michelle Williams were my guests and I we get real as we share the ups and downs of our mental health journeys.

And I'd love for you to join me. Hey, it's going to be your church and your turn up. So listen to checking in with Michelle Williams every Tuesday, a part of the black affect on the radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

This has been a Comedy Central podcast now.