Francis P. Sempa opines (correctly):
Sixty years ago, James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West was published to much acclaim from conservatives and much criticism by liberals. It was Burnham’s last book (other than a collection of his National Review columns titled The War We Are In) and, perhaps, his most pessimistic and prophetic work. Western civilization led by the United States, he wrote, was dying, not because of external challenges but, rather, because of internal decay. The West, in other words, was in the process of committing civilizational suicide. And what caused liberals to ridicule and deride the book was Burnham’s conclusion that liberalism was the “ideology of Western suicide.”…
Writing in 1964, Burnham could have been describing the American progressives of 2024. “Modern liberal doctrine,” he wrote, “tends naturally toward internationalist conceptions and the ideal of a democratic world order.” “To the liberal,” Burnham continued, “it has become self-evident that ‘national sovereignty is an outworn concept’ that must be drastically modified if not altogether abandoned.” To the liberal, “[p]atriotism and nationalism … are non-rational and discriminatory. They invidiously divide, segregate, one group of men … from humanity, and do so not in accord with objective merits determined by deliberate reason but as the result of habits, customs, traditions and feelings inherited from the past.” “The duty of the fully enlightened liberal,” Burnham wrote, “is to nothing less than mankind.” Indeed, Burnham noted that for liberals, “patriotism plus Christian faith” must be replaced by “internationalism … that views world affairs in global terms” and recognizes that “there is a multiplicity of interests besides those of our own nation and culture.” Today’s progressives frown upon “America first” and see “white Christian nationalists” as the greatest threat to democracy.
Burnham also noted that American liberals have a “thoroughly instrumentalist interpretation of the Constitution,” believing that “the meaning of the Constitution should be understood as wholly dependent on the time and circumstance.” As if he were looking through a crystal ball, Burnham noted that liberals “are pro-[Supreme] Court when it is handing down liberal decisions, and anti-Court when it is on an anti-liberal swing.” Liberals today promote the dangerous idea of a “living Constitution,” and conservative justices who oppose that notion have suffered the slings and arrows of liberal critics: from Sen. Chuck Schumer’s public threats against conservative justices to the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Left’s unrelenting campaign against Justice Clarence Thomas.
Liberalism, Burnham wrote, applauds diversity in religion and cultures and ridicules as “backward” those Westerners who believe in the superiority of their religion and culture. Hillary Clinton called her fellow citizens who hold such sentiments “deplorables,” while Barack Obama warned against people who cling to their religion and guns. Such liberals applaud the professed idealism of an Alger Hiss and a J. Robert Oppenheimer despite Hiss’ treason and Oppenheimer’s dangerous communist associations. Indeed, Hollywood liberals just honored with several Oscar awards the movie Oppenheimer, which portrays the protagonist as a victim of a McCarthy-era witch hunt instead of the security risk that he was.
Today, liberalism — called progressivism — controls our culture, most of our media, our educational institutions, and, at least for now, the federal government. Burnham’s conclusion of Suicide of the West should make those who cherish the values of nationalism and the achievements of Western civilization shudder. “Liberalism,” he wrote, “permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” It teaches us that the collapse of that civilization is not a defeat but, instead, “the transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions and discriminations of the past.” Burnham showed us 60 years ago that we were headed in that direction if liberalism triumphs. Arnold Toynbee taught that civilizations don’t end abruptly; they go through phases on their way to dissolution. If the trends Burnham identified 60 years ago continue, we may be closer than you think to civilizational suicide.
My own take on Burnham’s book digs more deeply:
About 300 years ago there arose in the West the idea of innate equality and inalienable rights. At the same time, and not coincidentally, there arose the notion of economic betterment through free markets. The two concepts — political and economic liberty — are in fact inseparable. One cannot have economic liberty without political liberty; political liberty — the ownership of oneself — implies the ownership of the fruits of one’s own labor and the right to strive for prosperity. This latter striving, as Adam Smith pointed out, works not only for the betterment of the striver but also for the betterment of those who engage in trade with him. The forces of statism are on the march (and have been for a long time). The likely result is the loss of liberty and the vibrancy and prosperity that arises from it….
Liberty … is not an easy thing to attain or preserve because it depends on social comity: mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual forbearance. These are hard to inculcate and sustain in the relatively small groupings of civil society (family, church, club, etc.). They are almost impossible to attain or sustain in a large, diverse nation-state. Interests clash and factions clamor and claw for ascendancy over other factions. (It is called tribalism, and even anti-tribalists are tribal in their striving to impose their values on others).
The Constitution might have rescued us from societal and spiritual decay, but for what I have called the Framers’ fatal error:
The Framers’ held a misplaced faith in the Constitution’s checks and balances (see Madison’s Federalist No. 51 and Hamilton’s Federalist No. 81). The Constitution’s wonderful design — containment of a strictly limited central government through horizontal and vertical separation of powers — worked rather well until the Progressive Era. The design then cracked under the strain of greed and the will to power, as the central government began to impose national economic regulation at the behest of muckrakers and do-gooders. The design then broke during the New Deal, which opened the floodgates to violations of constitutional restraint (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, the vast expansion of economic regulation, and the destruction of civilizing social norms), as the Supreme Court has enabled the national government to impose its will in matters far beyond its constitutional remit.
In sum, the “poison pill” baked into the nation at the time of the Founding is human nature, against which no libertarian constitution is proof unless it is enforced resolutely by a benign power.
It may be too late to rescue liberty in America. I am especially pessimistic because of the unraveling of social comity since the 1960s, and by a related development: the frontal assault on freedom of speech, which is the final constitutional bulwark against oppression.
Almost overnight, it seems, the nation was catapulted from the land of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver to the land of the free- filthy-speech movement, Altamont, Woodstock, Hair, and the unspeakably loud, vulgar, and violent offerings that are now plastered all over the air waves, the internet, theater screens, and “entertainment” venues.
The 1960s and early 1970s were a tantrum-throwing time, and many of the tantrum-throwers moved into positions of power, influence, and wealth, having learned from the success of their main ventures: the end of the draft and the removal of Nixon from office. They schooled their psychological descendants well, and sometimes literally on college campuses. Their successors on the campuses of today — students, faculty, and administrators — carry on the tradition of reacting with violent hostility toward persons and ideas that they oppose, and supporting draconian punishments for infractions of their norms and edicts. (For myriad examples, see The College Fix.)
Adherents of the ascendant culture esteem protest for its own sake, and have stock explanations for all perceived wrongs (whether or not they are wrongs): racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, hate, white privilege, inequality (of any kind), Wall Street, climate change, Zionism, and so on. All of these are to be combated by state action that deprives citizens of economic and social liberties.
In particular danger are the freedoms of speech and association. The purported beneficiaries of the campaign to destroy those freedoms are “oppressed minorities” (women, Latinos, blacks, Muslims, the gender-confused, etc.) and the easily offended. The true beneficiaries are leftists. Free speech is speech that is acceptable to the left. Otherwise, it’s “hate speech”, and must be stamped out. Freedom of association is bigotry, except when it is practiced by leftists in anti-male, anti-conservative, pro-ethnic, and pro-racial causes. This is McCarthyism on steroids. McCarthy, at least, was pursuing actual enemies of liberty; today’s leftists are the enemies of liberty.
The organs of the state have been enlisted in an unrelenting campaign against civilizing social norms. We now have not just easy divorce, subsidized illegitimacy, and legions of non-mothering mothers, but also abortion, concerted (and deluded) efforts to defeminize females and to neuter or feminize males, forced association (with accompanying destruction of property and employment rights), suppression of religion, absolution of pornography, and the encouragement of “alternative lifestyles” that feature disease, promiscuity, and familial instability.
The state, of course, doesn’t act of its own volition. It acts at the behest of special interests — interests with a “cultural” agenda. They are bent on the eradication of civil society — nothing less — in favor of a state-directed Rousseauvian dystopia from which Judeo-Christian morality and liberty will have vanished, except in Orwellian doublespeak.
Politics and Prosperity 