All of the good things we enjoy in the West today (high living standards, long life expectancies, a reasonable degree of social and political freedom) are the products of capitalism and liberalism, the combined triumph of which Goldberg refers to as “the Miracle.” The Miracle is mysterious - an “unplanned and glorious accident” - and profoundly unnatural, in two senses. Suicide of the West is a long book, but its argument is rather simple. (As David Neiwert wrote in Prospect at the time, perhaps the defining feature of fascism is its anti-liberalism, making the book’s title roughly as coherent as “Ptolemaic quantum theory.”) Goldberg’s second book, 2012’s The Tyranny of Clichés, was a more modest turkey shoot in which he excoriated liberals for the overuse of hackneyed phrases such as “the right side of history” and “diversity is our strength.” Now, in The Suicide of the West, an older, more circumspect Goldberg, having spent more than a decade arguing that liberals are mindless crypto-fascists, is here to warn us that incautious rhetoric is tearing the country apart. His first effort, 2008’s Liberal Fascism, was a long “ Dems are the real racists” troll in which Goldberg argued, absurdly, that fascism was left-wing because of its collective and utopian elements - a sleight of hand that relied on defining “right wing” as “classically liberal” and “collectivism” as inherently leftist. writing-speaking-moderating circuit, Goldberg’s main specialty has always been owning the libs. Although a prominent Never Trump-er during the 2016 primary campaign and a mainstay of the D.C. Goldberg, a senior editor at National Review and the Asness Chair of Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute, is, even in these desperate times, an odd candidate for conservative intellectual hero. David Brooks of the New York Times opinion page labeled it “epic and debate-shifting,” while National Affairs’ Yuval Levin gushed in his review that “more than any book published so far in this century,” Suicide of the West “deserves to be called a conservative classic.” A somewhat more reserved Adam Keiper, writing in The Weekly Standard, called it “big, baggy, sometimes frustrating, and often brilliant.” With the conservative Establishment currently under siege, is this the book to drive out the barbarian hordes? His latest effort, The Suicide of the West, which borrows its title from a 1964 book by the conservative political theorist James Burnham, is a long meditation on how “the rebirth of tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy.” So far, it has received effusive praise from the center-right media. Jonah Goldberg has allegedly written a brilliant book.

Liberal fascism by jonah goldberg