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Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism
Suicide of the An essay on the meaning and destiny of liberalism
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
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About the author
James Burnham
42 books180 followersJames Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years, as his thinking developed, he left Marxism and produced his seminal work The Managerial Revolution. He later turned to conservatism and served as a public intellectual of the conservative movement. He also wrote regularly for the conservative publication National Review on a variety of topics.
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November 8, 2009
The premise of The Suicide of the West is that the West is in decline, and the decline is fueled by the rise of liberalism. Despite the strong title, most of the book is an attempt at an objective definition of liberalism. Only the beginning and end actually discuss why liberalism could potentially lead to the end of Western Civilization. Burnham doesn't believe liberalism is the cause, per se, of the decline of the West, but "that liberalism has come to be the verbal systematization of the process of Western contraction and withdrawal; that liberalism motivates and justifies the contraction and reconciles us to it." To me that sounds like a convoluted way of saying it is the cause, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
What exactly is this dangerous ideology capable of motivating the decline of Western Civilization? "Modern liberalism, which contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being. Ideals that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define "the good society." Liberalism is about optimism. Liberals believe that all men have equal civilizing potential. They hold that freedom of speech should extended to all, no matter how extreme their ideas, and that the vote of the people should always decide who is right. Liberalism believes in the potential of humankind to be raised to a state of world peace and harmony never before seen in history. Terrible and obviously suicidal, right? I didn't think so either.
The question is, do I, or indeed, do liberals really believe this? With enough education, science, technological progress, good government etc. is it possible to take humans with all our foibles and create the perfect society? What about just ending hunger? Poverty? War? Oppression? The belief that any or all of those goals are realistically achievable is actually fairly modern according to Burnham. It became popular within the last 400 or 500 years, starting with Bacon and Descartes. Before them, and others like them, achieving the perfect society wasn't the goal or ideal of government. It simply wasn't considered possible given human nature and human history. People weren't waiting on science to create an earthly paradise, they were waiting on Jesus.
If liberals believe that they should work on the noble goal of forming a perfect society, what do conservatives want? A conservative wants slow change. He prefers either to maintain the status quo or possibly even return to how things were in "the good ole' days." The basic idea is "if things work okay now, why risk the unknown potential negative implications associated with changing them? Instead, let's do everything we can to maintain what we have." Does that sound pessimistic to you? Depressing even? It does to me. Is it realistic though? Is it more rational than the liberal's constant tendency to reform? Maybe.
If a perfect society is possible, why haven't we achieved it yet? A liberal's answer is fairly simple: people are still ignorant and we still have not created the necessary social institutions to remedy the ignorance. For someone like Burnham, this is the perfect chance to lay into the ideology and, at times, succeed in making it look pretty absurd.
He does this by showing how liberalism explains away any crime committed by someone who is poor, a minority or in almost any other social situation, as a failure of society, rather than as a personal failure of the criminal. He shows that often the problems liberals are trying to solve are problems of people who have no desire to have their problems solved and how liberals, motivated by guilt, waste enormous resources trying to bring about worldwide equality.
It's hard to argue that liberalism is ALL bad, and Burnham doesn't. He cautiously concedes that liberalism has led to some societal good. Still, despite the fact that many liberal ideals are laudable, most attempts to implement them are misguided. The human condition can be improved, but you can't always convince terrorists to resort to peaceful methods for achieving their goals by negotiating with them. You can't solve hunger by sending lots of money to Africa and alas, you'll never create a perfect society by having millions of voters with diverse motivations and interests participate in a democracy. To state the root of the problem, "the liberal assumes... that men, given a knowledge of the problem and freedom to choose, will opt for peace, justice and plenty. But the facts do not bear him out either for individuals or for societies. Individuals choose, very often, trouble, pain, injury, for themselves and for others." In other words, the problem of liberalism lies in human nature as defined by history.
Most people desire life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the social conditions necessary to optimize those rights. The question then becomes, what is the best way to achieve these conditions? An ideologist will have a ready answer to almost any problem that arises. In the case of liberalism, the solution is almost always the opposite of "conserving" tradition or the status quo. Instead, a liberal's approach is to value hope over experience and to destroy or drastically reform existing foundations and build again. Occasionally this approach leads to desirable results but, as any software developer will tell you, starting over usually isn't the best way to fix a bug.
The correct approach, Burnham would argue, is to look at each problem individually and without the lens of an ideology, liberal or otherwise. Something much easier said than done. He points out: "As a rule, a man, when his ideological lenses are shattered, is in haste to replace them with another set ground to a new prescription. The unfiltered world is not his dish of tea."
A conservative prefers renewal to reform. He advocates an "equality of legal rights" rather than striving for equality of class or condition. He opts for individual improvement over collective, patriotism over internationalism, family and community over the "bloodless abstraction" of humanity and peace over strength as the "highest social value."
Again, why is liberalism the root of the Suicide of the West? Because it values global equality over strength, global order over national order. It means that the West must stop expanding either through the spread of native ideas and truths that we hold to be inalienable as well as stopping all physical expansion such as colonialism or imperialism. Burnham argues that if we choose not to expand, we are choosing to contract. Liberalism doesn't deny this contraction, in fact it tries to reconcile us to it.
Despite being written over 45 years ago, The Suicide of the West feels fresh and remains relevant. It definitely altered my way of viewing the world and it has really caused me to take a closer look at what I know and believe.
What exactly is this dangerous ideology capable of motivating the decline of Western Civilization? "Modern liberalism, which contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being. Ideals that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define "the good society." Liberalism is about optimism. Liberals believe that all men have equal civilizing potential. They hold that freedom of speech should extended to all, no matter how extreme their ideas, and that the vote of the people should always decide who is right. Liberalism believes in the potential of humankind to be raised to a state of world peace and harmony never before seen in history. Terrible and obviously suicidal, right? I didn't think so either.
The question is, do I, or indeed, do liberals really believe this? With enough education, science, technological progress, good government etc. is it possible to take humans with all our foibles and create the perfect society? What about just ending hunger? Poverty? War? Oppression? The belief that any or all of those goals are realistically achievable is actually fairly modern according to Burnham. It became popular within the last 400 or 500 years, starting with Bacon and Descartes. Before them, and others like them, achieving the perfect society wasn't the goal or ideal of government. It simply wasn't considered possible given human nature and human history. People weren't waiting on science to create an earthly paradise, they were waiting on Jesus.
If liberals believe that they should work on the noble goal of forming a perfect society, what do conservatives want? A conservative wants slow change. He prefers either to maintain the status quo or possibly even return to how things were in "the good ole' days." The basic idea is "if things work okay now, why risk the unknown potential negative implications associated with changing them? Instead, let's do everything we can to maintain what we have." Does that sound pessimistic to you? Depressing even? It does to me. Is it realistic though? Is it more rational than the liberal's constant tendency to reform? Maybe.
If a perfect society is possible, why haven't we achieved it yet? A liberal's answer is fairly simple: people are still ignorant and we still have not created the necessary social institutions to remedy the ignorance. For someone like Burnham, this is the perfect chance to lay into the ideology and, at times, succeed in making it look pretty absurd.
He does this by showing how liberalism explains away any crime committed by someone who is poor, a minority or in almost any other social situation, as a failure of society, rather than as a personal failure of the criminal. He shows that often the problems liberals are trying to solve are problems of people who have no desire to have their problems solved and how liberals, motivated by guilt, waste enormous resources trying to bring about worldwide equality.
It's hard to argue that liberalism is ALL bad, and Burnham doesn't. He cautiously concedes that liberalism has led to some societal good. Still, despite the fact that many liberal ideals are laudable, most attempts to implement them are misguided. The human condition can be improved, but you can't always convince terrorists to resort to peaceful methods for achieving their goals by negotiating with them. You can't solve hunger by sending lots of money to Africa and alas, you'll never create a perfect society by having millions of voters with diverse motivations and interests participate in a democracy. To state the root of the problem, "the liberal assumes... that men, given a knowledge of the problem and freedom to choose, will opt for peace, justice and plenty. But the facts do not bear him out either for individuals or for societies. Individuals choose, very often, trouble, pain, injury, for themselves and for others." In other words, the problem of liberalism lies in human nature as defined by history.
Most people desire life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the social conditions necessary to optimize those rights. The question then becomes, what is the best way to achieve these conditions? An ideologist will have a ready answer to almost any problem that arises. In the case of liberalism, the solution is almost always the opposite of "conserving" tradition or the status quo. Instead, a liberal's approach is to value hope over experience and to destroy or drastically reform existing foundations and build again. Occasionally this approach leads to desirable results but, as any software developer will tell you, starting over usually isn't the best way to fix a bug.
The correct approach, Burnham would argue, is to look at each problem individually and without the lens of an ideology, liberal or otherwise. Something much easier said than done. He points out: "As a rule, a man, when his ideological lenses are shattered, is in haste to replace them with another set ground to a new prescription. The unfiltered world is not his dish of tea."
A conservative prefers renewal to reform. He advocates an "equality of legal rights" rather than striving for equality of class or condition. He opts for individual improvement over collective, patriotism over internationalism, family and community over the "bloodless abstraction" of humanity and peace over strength as the "highest social value."
Again, why is liberalism the root of the Suicide of the West? Because it values global equality over strength, global order over national order. It means that the West must stop expanding either through the spread of native ideas and truths that we hold to be inalienable as well as stopping all physical expansion such as colonialism or imperialism. Burnham argues that if we choose not to expand, we are choosing to contract. Liberalism doesn't deny this contraction, in fact it tries to reconcile us to it.
Despite being written over 45 years ago, The Suicide of the West feels fresh and remains relevant. It definitely altered my way of viewing the world and it has really caused me to take a closer look at what I know and believe.
February 5, 2017
“Suicide of the West,” subtitled “An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism,” is a classic work of political science, now fifty years old. It is much referred to by conservatives but little read by conservatives. It is NOT about how liberalism is the cause of the suicide of the West. In fact, liberals will find little to object to in this book. Nor is it an attempt, in any way, to refute liberalism as Burnham defines it (although in part this is because Burnham obviously believes it to be self-refuting). Nor is it a polemic. Rather, it is Burnham’s analysis of what liberalism is, and why it dominates thinking in the West as the West dies.
Burnham believed that the West was in likely-terminal decline. By “suicide,” he meant the West was “contracting,” using the explicit metaphor of diminishing colored areas on an old-fashioned atlas. He believed the contraction was not due to lack of power, but primarily due to lack of “the will to survive”—therefore, civilizational suicide, not murder. Burnham explicitly rejected that liberalism is responsible for this decline. Instead, it is that “liberalism has come to be the typical verbal systematization of the process of Western contraction and withdrawal; that liberalism motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles to it.”
Implicit in this, of course, is that such a contraction is bad. Most liberals would say it’s not bad, that the West deserves to contract and for the most part its expansion was a force for evil, as silly and ahistorical as that is. It is difficult to get someone in public life to say today that it is bad the West has contracted (witness how Marc Andreesen was recently forced to apologize for a tweet, “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades,” which is inarguably true.) Burnham would just say attempts be positive about Western decline prove his point.
Arnold Toynbee, in his once-world famous, but now largely forgotten multi-volume “A Study Of History,” charting the rise and fall of 26 different world civilizations, refused to discuss where in his cycle of history the modern West stood. I thought this was a significant lack in Toynbee’s work. One way of looking at “Suicide of the West” is as a gap filler for Toynbee’s books. It is not that Burnham analyzes the reasons for the decline of the West, which he explicitly does not. But he effectively locates the West on Toynbee’s continuum. In Toynbee’s terms, our dominant classes, as they have become uniformly liberal, have shifted from being a creative minority to being a dominant minority, vulgarized and disinterested in the obligations of citizenship, with an accompanying collapse in self-confidence. This leads to an inevitable decline and ultimate replacement by a new civilization born from the old.
In any case, as an analytical essay, “Suicide of the West” is interesting. Like most fifty-year-old books, it is apparent where it was wrong and where it was right. In its general analysis of liberalism it’s still very accurate. In other things, particularly as it relates to the ultimate threat of Communism, it turned out wrong. (George Orwell rightly criticized Burnham for always “predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening”—a form of analytical tunnel vision.) But to me, the book is most interesting for two reasons. First, because liberalism has become even more dominant and less tolerant than it was in Burnham’s day, as shown by Burnham’s own analysis. Second, because of the challenge that Burnham’s analysis poses to conservatives, who in the past fifty years have, whether they admit or not, adopted much of the liberal program that they had not adopted in Burnham’s day, and if that is true, may not have a coherent reason for further resistance.
Naturally enough, Burnham begins by defining liberalism, at length. He begins by listing examples of people and institutions of the time (1964) that were universally recognized as liberal—what he calls examining “laboratory specimens” as the first step in research. (This leads to a few statements that are a combination of funny and sad, like “The New York Times may not have quite the undiluted liberal blood line of the Washington Post, and its admits a few ideological deviants to its writing staff”—days of long ago, indeed.) He also notes non-liberal institutions (newspapers, magazines), all of which today are now dead or just as uniformly liberal. Burnham concludes that although the population itself is not majority liberal, “what is certain is that a majority, and a substantial majority, of those who control or influence public opinion is liberal”—in all areas, ranging from teachers; editors and writers; radio and TV producers, directors, and writers; most clergy; all great charitable foundations; and so on. (Burnham also points out that the same, roughly, holds outside America, and gives examples, but generally confines his analysis to America for brevity.) From a historical perspective, this section is interesting, because indeed what we have seen in the fifty years since is “a continuation of the thing that is happening.”
These examples, of course, reveal by themselves nothing about liberalism itself. Burnham notes that liberals may disagree among themselves—but not about core matters. “Liberals differ, or may differ, among themselves on application, timing, method and other details, but these differences revolve within a common framework of more basic ideas, beliefs, principles, goals, feelings and values.” Of course, liberals mostly aren’t even aware of this framework; they assume it is “self-evident and unquestionable,” “a matter of what seems open to rational discussion.” To smoke out what this framework is, Burnham provides thirty-nine statements, on a wide range of issues, noting that all liberals agree with the vast majority (and conservatives reject the vast majority).
The sentences include some obviously prototypically liberal: “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security.” “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.” “We have a duty to mankind; that is, to men in general.” “Wealthy nations, like the United States, have a duty to aid the less privileged portions of mankind.” But, if one is being honest, the majority of them are ones that today’s conservatives would be forced to agree with in public. “Political, economic or social discrimination based on religious belief is wrong.” “Colonialism and imperialism are wrong.” “Communists have the right to express their opinions.” “All nations and peoples, including the nations and peoples of Asia and Africa, have a right to political independence when a majority of the population wants it.” “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions.” They also include a few today’s liberals would reject outright, though that says little about Burnham’s overall analysis, such as “In determining who is to be admitted to schools and universities, quota systems based on color, religion, family or similar factors are wrong.”
And a few are ones that conservatives of fifty years ago might have disagreed with, but no conservative would be likely to publicly disagree with now. “Hotels, motels, stores and restaurants in southern United States out to be obliged by law to allow Negroes to use all of their facilities on the same basis as whites.” “All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong.” Sure, there was a range of conservative opinion on these issues in Burnham’s time, and a range of conservative rationales for opposing these statements, from pure racism to rights of property and association. But that conservatives have changed their tune on this indirectly poses a challenge to conservatives on an issue much in evidence today—namely, the acceptability of, and the acceptability of state and private disapproval of, homosexual acts. Not that the book mentions anything about homosexuals. But it does mention a lot about race. And it’s the comparison of Burnham’s 1964 conservative opinions about race, as well as conservative opinions of the time that Burnham does not discuss, like interracial marriage, to today’s conservative stands about homosexuality that poses the challenge for conservatives. If conservatives were, on the whole, wrong about that issue, what makes them think that they’re not wrong about this? (I am perfectly well aware that there are good and coherent responses to this—but this is still a hard argument for today’s conservatives to overcome.)
In any case, Burnham’s conclusion from the coherence of liberal thought on these thirty-nine statements is that “liberalism is a Weltanschauung, a world-view and life-view; the dominant Weltanschauung of the United States and much of the West.” He calls this belief system the “liberal syndrome”—not necessarily a totally rigid set of rules, but “a set of symptoms or elements that are observed to occur together.”
Burnham then steps behind these conclusions held in common to inquire what lies beneath philosophically. He concludes that liberalism is the main line of most post-Renaissance thought, although it consists of “tendencies, rather than anything absolute.” Its starting point is the nature of man: “liberalism believes man’s nature to be not fixed but changing, with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive (good, favorable, progressive) development.” This is contradiction to traditional, conservative views of the imperfection and imperfectability of man. (These two opposite viewpoints are commonly noted, for example by both Edmund Burke in his arguments with Thomas Paine, and more recently by Thomas Sowell, at length, in his excellent “A Conflict of Visions.”) Second, liberalism believes in the supremacy of unaided reason, simultaneously creating skepticism of what is and optimism toward what may be. Third, because “there is nothing in essential human nature to block achievement of the good society, the obstacles therefore must be, and are, extrinsic or external”—namely, ignorance and bad social institutions. This means, again, that liberals are optimistic—or more, that they are certain that the “good society” is achievable, and achievable by us, now. Fourth, because ignorance and bad social institutions are the legacy of the past, anything traditional or long-established is automatically under suspicion, and “we should be ready to undertake prompt, and even drastic and extensive, innovations, if these recommend themselves from a rational and utilitarian standpoint.” Liberals reject the metaphor of Chesterton’s Fence. One example Burnham gives is various facially inefficient legislative devices, such as seniority appointments to chairs of committees, which liberals reject but which are found in all legislative bodies.
Given these premises that ground liberalism, what liberal programs that “explain the means and the rules by which the progress that is possible will be brought about in practice”? First, universal education to overcome ignorance—but only education in rational inquiry, rejecting all “superstition” and tradition qua tradition, as well as attempts to inculcate virtue or values, other than the core values of liberalism. Total freedom of expression is key to this, resulting in the rational pursuit of truth—but not objective truth, only truth defined by the majority consensus. (Many modern liberals, of course, effectively reject freedom of expression by defining as anti-rational anything that, regardless of reasoning, reaches a conclusion not in the liberal program.) Second, total reform of all institutions, to rationalize them and eliminate any tradition-based elements. This includes reforming any structure, such as the criminal justice system, to the extent that it attributes any cause to bad behavior other than ignorance or bad institutions. (In many ways, the liberal vision is the vision that Kipling rejected in “The Gods of The Copybook Headings,” where Kipling saw as the harbinger of decline the societal state where “All men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins.”)
Burnham next examines, when all these things are accomplished, “how liberalism imagines the structure of the good society within which those values will be realized.” Naturally, only a pure democracy, “one man one vote,” is acceptable. Plebiscites are optimal; intermediary institutions that characterize a republic are bad, much less any limitations on the basic principle, such as age or property voting qualifications. Optimally, this total democracy will be world-total. Egalitarianism is key—no qualitative differences can be recognized among people that suggest one person is more fit to govern or direct society than another. Similarly, national differences are pernicious, and patriotism is likewise pernicious, for it undercuts the aspiration to a universal good society, and of course all national, ethnic and racial groups are equal in their ability to reach that good society. Religion must be a purely private matter; the good society is totally secular, for religion is bound to tradition, irrationality and a jaundiced view of human nature, the opposite of liberal premises. Government, on the other hand, is good and should be expanded into every area of human life, because it can achieve the goals needed (Burnham points out that this is a change from earlier liberal conceptions, and attributes the change to the correct perception that the state had changed from largely an instrument of tradition to an instrument of change, the raison d’etre of liberalism.) Violence, because it is irrational, is to be avoided on every level. (In one of the asides that highlights the differences of past liberalism, Burnham here notes that “liberals aim sharper polemics against capital than against income,” because capital is associated with the past and tradition, and is therefore irrational and therefore bad. Today’s liberals, of course, largely rail against income, and ignore capital, in part because most great accumulations of capital are reliably extremely liberal, something Burnham could not, or at least did not, foresee.)
The author then pivots to the philosophical consequences of this set of beliefs, defining them with precision as an ideology. Liberals, of course, don’t see their beliefs as an ideology—their beliefs are merely commonplaces to them, with which no rational person could disagree. Burnham defines an ideology as “a more or less systematic and self-contained set of ideas supposedly dealing with the nature of reality . . . and calling for a commitment independent of specific experience or events.” He notes that “an ideologue—one who thinks ideologically—can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular evidence or observation.” This by definition excludes practical experience and rejects reality—or rather requires reality’s interpretation in light of the goal. Burnham believes that there are a range of commitments to ideologies, and liberalism’s is loose but definitely exists. He gives examples, such as urban renewal projects that merely cause more problems than they fix, but which are nonetheless held up as successes.
Burnham’s most detailed example, though, is an unfortunate one. He claims that it is liberal ideological thinking that we can feed the entire world—it is ideological thinking to believe “the proposition, derived not from fact but from doctrine, that we have the ability to provide all men with enough food.” In Burnham’s “fact,” overpopulation and lack of land make this impossible, and to feed everyone we would have to make a series of ludicrous assumptions—thus proving this to be a liberal ideological fantasy that rejects reality. But of course Burnham was wrong, and he himself was guilty of ideological thinking. As population has exploded in the past fifty years, poor people the world over not only eat better, but have vastly more wealth, due to private enterprise and effort, and the only hungry people are those made hungry by bad politics or bad cultures. Sure, liberalism had nothing to do with this—it was private enterprise and hard work, and liberal doctrine provided nothing except support for post-colonial tinpot dictators who starved their people while mouthing liberal platitudes. But Burnham was wrong that it couldn’t be done, suggesting again that undue pessimism is a problem for his analysis, and perhaps for conservatives as a whole.
Burnham concludes, “A discussion with a convinced ideologue on matters covered by his ideology is sure to be a waste of time, unless you share the ideology. What is there to discuss? His ideology is proof against the shock of any seemingly conflicting facts which you might bring forward. He will either reinterpret those facts so that they become consistent with his ideology, or deny them. There are no facts that could convince an intransigent John Bircher that there are no communists in the upper echelons of the American government. A debate between Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., can be a good show (and has been), but not a genuine discussion.” This insight, of course, explains the closed liberal world-view that is even more true today than in 1964.
Next, Burnham detours into reinforcing his analysis, by laying out explicit statements to which liberals as a whole adhere, set alongside possible alternative views. These statements are mostly a reformulation of the thirty-nine earlier statements Burnham used to flesh out what liberals really believe. Here, Burnham is trying to determine “what liberals really believe?” Liberals tend to, in Burnham’s view, believe in generalities, because “modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments.” But he concludes that they do believe in the thirty-nine statements, each of them, but most of all they believe that people are not innately defective, and with the right education and institutions will be perfected. Burnham concludes, aiming at what he believes to be the heart of the matter, channeling St. Paul, “if human nature is scored by innate defects, if the optimistic account of man is unjustified, then is all the liberal faith vain.”
None of Burnham’s analysis of liberals seems to me to be particularly controversial. In fact, today’s liberals would, I think, agree with almost all of his analysis. There is nothing negative in how Burnham frames his analysis, other than his belief that liberals are wrong in all their core premises, and therefore in their beliefs. He is specifically not concerned with refuting the liberal world view, which he anyway regards as a vain project like any argument with an ideologue, explicitly analogous to arguing with a Communist or a segregationist.
[Review continued as first comment.]
Burnham believed that the West was in likely-terminal decline. By “suicide,” he meant the West was “contracting,” using the explicit metaphor of diminishing colored areas on an old-fashioned atlas. He believed the contraction was not due to lack of power, but primarily due to lack of “the will to survive”—therefore, civilizational suicide, not murder. Burnham explicitly rejected that liberalism is responsible for this decline. Instead, it is that “liberalism has come to be the typical verbal systematization of the process of Western contraction and withdrawal; that liberalism motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles to it.”
Implicit in this, of course, is that such a contraction is bad. Most liberals would say it’s not bad, that the West deserves to contract and for the most part its expansion was a force for evil, as silly and ahistorical as that is. It is difficult to get someone in public life to say today that it is bad the West has contracted (witness how Marc Andreesen was recently forced to apologize for a tweet, “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades,” which is inarguably true.) Burnham would just say attempts be positive about Western decline prove his point.
Arnold Toynbee, in his once-world famous, but now largely forgotten multi-volume “A Study Of History,” charting the rise and fall of 26 different world civilizations, refused to discuss where in his cycle of history the modern West stood. I thought this was a significant lack in Toynbee’s work. One way of looking at “Suicide of the West” is as a gap filler for Toynbee’s books. It is not that Burnham analyzes the reasons for the decline of the West, which he explicitly does not. But he effectively locates the West on Toynbee’s continuum. In Toynbee’s terms, our dominant classes, as they have become uniformly liberal, have shifted from being a creative minority to being a dominant minority, vulgarized and disinterested in the obligations of citizenship, with an accompanying collapse in self-confidence. This leads to an inevitable decline and ultimate replacement by a new civilization born from the old.
In any case, as an analytical essay, “Suicide of the West” is interesting. Like most fifty-year-old books, it is apparent where it was wrong and where it was right. In its general analysis of liberalism it’s still very accurate. In other things, particularly as it relates to the ultimate threat of Communism, it turned out wrong. (George Orwell rightly criticized Burnham for always “predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening”—a form of analytical tunnel vision.) But to me, the book is most interesting for two reasons. First, because liberalism has become even more dominant and less tolerant than it was in Burnham’s day, as shown by Burnham’s own analysis. Second, because of the challenge that Burnham’s analysis poses to conservatives, who in the past fifty years have, whether they admit or not, adopted much of the liberal program that they had not adopted in Burnham’s day, and if that is true, may not have a coherent reason for further resistance.
Naturally enough, Burnham begins by defining liberalism, at length. He begins by listing examples of people and institutions of the time (1964) that were universally recognized as liberal—what he calls examining “laboratory specimens” as the first step in research. (This leads to a few statements that are a combination of funny and sad, like “The New York Times may not have quite the undiluted liberal blood line of the Washington Post, and its admits a few ideological deviants to its writing staff”—days of long ago, indeed.) He also notes non-liberal institutions (newspapers, magazines), all of which today are now dead or just as uniformly liberal. Burnham concludes that although the population itself is not majority liberal, “what is certain is that a majority, and a substantial majority, of those who control or influence public opinion is liberal”—in all areas, ranging from teachers; editors and writers; radio and TV producers, directors, and writers; most clergy; all great charitable foundations; and so on. (Burnham also points out that the same, roughly, holds outside America, and gives examples, but generally confines his analysis to America for brevity.) From a historical perspective, this section is interesting, because indeed what we have seen in the fifty years since is “a continuation of the thing that is happening.”
These examples, of course, reveal by themselves nothing about liberalism itself. Burnham notes that liberals may disagree among themselves—but not about core matters. “Liberals differ, or may differ, among themselves on application, timing, method and other details, but these differences revolve within a common framework of more basic ideas, beliefs, principles, goals, feelings and values.” Of course, liberals mostly aren’t even aware of this framework; they assume it is “self-evident and unquestionable,” “a matter of what seems open to rational discussion.” To smoke out what this framework is, Burnham provides thirty-nine statements, on a wide range of issues, noting that all liberals agree with the vast majority (and conservatives reject the vast majority).
The sentences include some obviously prototypically liberal: “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security.” “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.” “We have a duty to mankind; that is, to men in general.” “Wealthy nations, like the United States, have a duty to aid the less privileged portions of mankind.” But, if one is being honest, the majority of them are ones that today’s conservatives would be forced to agree with in public. “Political, economic or social discrimination based on religious belief is wrong.” “Colonialism and imperialism are wrong.” “Communists have the right to express their opinions.” “All nations and peoples, including the nations and peoples of Asia and Africa, have a right to political independence when a majority of the population wants it.” “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions.” They also include a few today’s liberals would reject outright, though that says little about Burnham’s overall analysis, such as “In determining who is to be admitted to schools and universities, quota systems based on color, religion, family or similar factors are wrong.”
And a few are ones that conservatives of fifty years ago might have disagreed with, but no conservative would be likely to publicly disagree with now. “Hotels, motels, stores and restaurants in southern United States out to be obliged by law to allow Negroes to use all of their facilities on the same basis as whites.” “All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong.” Sure, there was a range of conservative opinion on these issues in Burnham’s time, and a range of conservative rationales for opposing these statements, from pure racism to rights of property and association. But that conservatives have changed their tune on this indirectly poses a challenge to conservatives on an issue much in evidence today—namely, the acceptability of, and the acceptability of state and private disapproval of, homosexual acts. Not that the book mentions anything about homosexuals. But it does mention a lot about race. And it’s the comparison of Burnham’s 1964 conservative opinions about race, as well as conservative opinions of the time that Burnham does not discuss, like interracial marriage, to today’s conservative stands about homosexuality that poses the challenge for conservatives. If conservatives were, on the whole, wrong about that issue, what makes them think that they’re not wrong about this? (I am perfectly well aware that there are good and coherent responses to this—but this is still a hard argument for today’s conservatives to overcome.)
In any case, Burnham’s conclusion from the coherence of liberal thought on these thirty-nine statements is that “liberalism is a Weltanschauung, a world-view and life-view; the dominant Weltanschauung of the United States and much of the West.” He calls this belief system the “liberal syndrome”—not necessarily a totally rigid set of rules, but “a set of symptoms or elements that are observed to occur together.”
Burnham then steps behind these conclusions held in common to inquire what lies beneath philosophically. He concludes that liberalism is the main line of most post-Renaissance thought, although it consists of “tendencies, rather than anything absolute.” Its starting point is the nature of man: “liberalism believes man’s nature to be not fixed but changing, with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive (good, favorable, progressive) development.” This is contradiction to traditional, conservative views of the imperfection and imperfectability of man. (These two opposite viewpoints are commonly noted, for example by both Edmund Burke in his arguments with Thomas Paine, and more recently by Thomas Sowell, at length, in his excellent “A Conflict of Visions.”) Second, liberalism believes in the supremacy of unaided reason, simultaneously creating skepticism of what is and optimism toward what may be. Third, because “there is nothing in essential human nature to block achievement of the good society, the obstacles therefore must be, and are, extrinsic or external”—namely, ignorance and bad social institutions. This means, again, that liberals are optimistic—or more, that they are certain that the “good society” is achievable, and achievable by us, now. Fourth, because ignorance and bad social institutions are the legacy of the past, anything traditional or long-established is automatically under suspicion, and “we should be ready to undertake prompt, and even drastic and extensive, innovations, if these recommend themselves from a rational and utilitarian standpoint.” Liberals reject the metaphor of Chesterton’s Fence. One example Burnham gives is various facially inefficient legislative devices, such as seniority appointments to chairs of committees, which liberals reject but which are found in all legislative bodies.
Given these premises that ground liberalism, what liberal programs that “explain the means and the rules by which the progress that is possible will be brought about in practice”? First, universal education to overcome ignorance—but only education in rational inquiry, rejecting all “superstition” and tradition qua tradition, as well as attempts to inculcate virtue or values, other than the core values of liberalism. Total freedom of expression is key to this, resulting in the rational pursuit of truth—but not objective truth, only truth defined by the majority consensus. (Many modern liberals, of course, effectively reject freedom of expression by defining as anti-rational anything that, regardless of reasoning, reaches a conclusion not in the liberal program.) Second, total reform of all institutions, to rationalize them and eliminate any tradition-based elements. This includes reforming any structure, such as the criminal justice system, to the extent that it attributes any cause to bad behavior other than ignorance or bad institutions. (In many ways, the liberal vision is the vision that Kipling rejected in “The Gods of The Copybook Headings,” where Kipling saw as the harbinger of decline the societal state where “All men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins.”)
Burnham next examines, when all these things are accomplished, “how liberalism imagines the structure of the good society within which those values will be realized.” Naturally, only a pure democracy, “one man one vote,” is acceptable. Plebiscites are optimal; intermediary institutions that characterize a republic are bad, much less any limitations on the basic principle, such as age or property voting qualifications. Optimally, this total democracy will be world-total. Egalitarianism is key—no qualitative differences can be recognized among people that suggest one person is more fit to govern or direct society than another. Similarly, national differences are pernicious, and patriotism is likewise pernicious, for it undercuts the aspiration to a universal good society, and of course all national, ethnic and racial groups are equal in their ability to reach that good society. Religion must be a purely private matter; the good society is totally secular, for religion is bound to tradition, irrationality and a jaundiced view of human nature, the opposite of liberal premises. Government, on the other hand, is good and should be expanded into every area of human life, because it can achieve the goals needed (Burnham points out that this is a change from earlier liberal conceptions, and attributes the change to the correct perception that the state had changed from largely an instrument of tradition to an instrument of change, the raison d’etre of liberalism.) Violence, because it is irrational, is to be avoided on every level. (In one of the asides that highlights the differences of past liberalism, Burnham here notes that “liberals aim sharper polemics against capital than against income,” because capital is associated with the past and tradition, and is therefore irrational and therefore bad. Today’s liberals, of course, largely rail against income, and ignore capital, in part because most great accumulations of capital are reliably extremely liberal, something Burnham could not, or at least did not, foresee.)
The author then pivots to the philosophical consequences of this set of beliefs, defining them with precision as an ideology. Liberals, of course, don’t see their beliefs as an ideology—their beliefs are merely commonplaces to them, with which no rational person could disagree. Burnham defines an ideology as “a more or less systematic and self-contained set of ideas supposedly dealing with the nature of reality . . . and calling for a commitment independent of specific experience or events.” He notes that “an ideologue—one who thinks ideologically—can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular evidence or observation.” This by definition excludes practical experience and rejects reality—or rather requires reality’s interpretation in light of the goal. Burnham believes that there are a range of commitments to ideologies, and liberalism’s is loose but definitely exists. He gives examples, such as urban renewal projects that merely cause more problems than they fix, but which are nonetheless held up as successes.
Burnham’s most detailed example, though, is an unfortunate one. He claims that it is liberal ideological thinking that we can feed the entire world—it is ideological thinking to believe “the proposition, derived not from fact but from doctrine, that we have the ability to provide all men with enough food.” In Burnham’s “fact,” overpopulation and lack of land make this impossible, and to feed everyone we would have to make a series of ludicrous assumptions—thus proving this to be a liberal ideological fantasy that rejects reality. But of course Burnham was wrong, and he himself was guilty of ideological thinking. As population has exploded in the past fifty years, poor people the world over not only eat better, but have vastly more wealth, due to private enterprise and effort, and the only hungry people are those made hungry by bad politics or bad cultures. Sure, liberalism had nothing to do with this—it was private enterprise and hard work, and liberal doctrine provided nothing except support for post-colonial tinpot dictators who starved their people while mouthing liberal platitudes. But Burnham was wrong that it couldn’t be done, suggesting again that undue pessimism is a problem for his analysis, and perhaps for conservatives as a whole.
Burnham concludes, “A discussion with a convinced ideologue on matters covered by his ideology is sure to be a waste of time, unless you share the ideology. What is there to discuss? His ideology is proof against the shock of any seemingly conflicting facts which you might bring forward. He will either reinterpret those facts so that they become consistent with his ideology, or deny them. There are no facts that could convince an intransigent John Bircher that there are no communists in the upper echelons of the American government. A debate between Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., can be a good show (and has been), but not a genuine discussion.” This insight, of course, explains the closed liberal world-view that is even more true today than in 1964.
Next, Burnham detours into reinforcing his analysis, by laying out explicit statements to which liberals as a whole adhere, set alongside possible alternative views. These statements are mostly a reformulation of the thirty-nine earlier statements Burnham used to flesh out what liberals really believe. Here, Burnham is trying to determine “what liberals really believe?” Liberals tend to, in Burnham’s view, believe in generalities, because “modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments.” But he concludes that they do believe in the thirty-nine statements, each of them, but most of all they believe that people are not innately defective, and with the right education and institutions will be perfected. Burnham concludes, aiming at what he believes to be the heart of the matter, channeling St. Paul, “if human nature is scored by innate defects, if the optimistic account of man is unjustified, then is all the liberal faith vain.”
None of Burnham’s analysis of liberals seems to me to be particularly controversial. In fact, today’s liberals would, I think, agree with almost all of his analysis. There is nothing negative in how Burnham frames his analysis, other than his belief that liberals are wrong in all their core premises, and therefore in their beliefs. He is specifically not concerned with refuting the liberal world view, which he anyway regards as a vain project like any argument with an ideologue, explicitly analogous to arguing with a Communist or a segregationist.
[Review continued as first comment.]
December 5, 2023
10/10.
This book is no less than a complete diagnosis of the phenomenon of liberalism (meaning modern liberalism/Leftism) and its ultimate meaning. Liberalism is rooted in the main strand of philosophical thought post-Renaissance, the strand that runs from Descartes to Bacon to Locke and to the philosophes in pre-revolutionary France. From here, liberals gain the belief that man is perfectible; that he is not innately evil, but has instead been suppressed by tyrannical regimes and ignorance; thus, man is to be educated. With his prejudices gone, Peace, Justice, Freedom, and Equality will be reached.
Liberals believe that prejudices are fundamentally irrational; if they cannot be readily justified, they are part of "ignorance" and should be done away with. Christian theology — a remnant of outdated word-twisters. Patriotism and nationalism — an irrational favoring of one's own group. Hereditary distinctions — oppressive measures propped up by the "overprivileged". A dislike of homosexuals — a stupid remnant of Middle Eastern hallucinations. Thus, the liberal sees himself at the front of History, leading the crusade toward the Land of Reason. In this land, all distinctions, hierarchies, and evil will be gone.
The liberal does not believe in Christianity; thus, he does not have the rational framework for the expiation of guilt that Christianity brings. Christianity solves the universality of human guilt by having God Himself, incarnated as Christ, come down to earth and die for our sins so that we can be forgiven in the next world. But what if you abandon Christianity and still have guilt? You believe people are good — but here they are suffering, in slums, underfed, and overworked. The crusade must begin! So the upper-class White liberal identifies themself with the downtrodden, picking up a social, economic, and racial slave morality, denigrating that which is high and deifying that which is lowly. Through the fight for Social Justice they repent for their sins of Whiteness, wealth, and other types of "privilege". The goal really never matters, but simply the act of identifying with the "oppressed". If one supports the right goals and has the right ideals, then one has sufficiently atoned for one's advantages.
It can be clearly seen that this crusade never reaches its goal. The fight against poverty and for the African is an eternal struggle. Advantages are given, grades are boosted, and resources are lavished on third-world hellholes — but they never seem to fix the problem. The Black radicalization from "freedom" to "let me use your water fountain" to "equal rights" to "affirmative action" to "systemic racism" to reparations and burning down cities — all while being given more and more tokens for no reason — illustrates this perfectly.
The liberal will keep on fighting, as long as they punch Right. Communism is no problem — it has the right ideals, but its methods may be a little off. Communists are racial and economic egalitarians, they support the social welfare state, they despise imperialism, they support feminism, and they are against outmoded religious and hierarchical beliefs — in short, they are liberals with balls. The liberal, wanting "world peace", relinquishes his country's ability to use nuclear weapons or even have a national interest; the communist, wanting to destroy "imperialistic capitalism", foments revolution in the third world to dialectically create world peace. The liberal puts his hands up in world affairs: he relinquishes his prosperous colonies, he favors "self-determination" over his nation's interest, and he never uses enough force to support the West (Vietnam, Suez Crisis, Bay of Pigs fiasco).
Thus the liberal, feeling ever guilty about his country's inequalities and oppressions, feeling a deep sense of shame about the Western civilization he inherited, gives it all up. Liberalism is the ideology of suicide. It transmutes diseases into palliatives: the geographical shrinkage of Western power with decolonization becomes a great achievement for "self-determination" and the fight against imperialism; racial riots in the streets, destroying business and civilization itself, become a pious fight against systemic racism; the destruction of the family, low birthrates, and the rise of divorce become measures of women's newfound freedom; letting pornographers and communists reach their tentacles into every vein of our society becomes a great triumph for "freedom of speech".
Liberalism is the opium one takes when one is dying. Liberalism is seeing your foot rot due to gangrene and proclaiming, "I don't have to cut my toenails!". Liberalism psychologically and philosophically justifies Western suicide.
What places do the liberals dominate? The universities, the public sector (government jobs), the media, the intellectual sphere (writing, book publishing), social work, and entertainment. Liberalism is dominant among Blacks, Jews, and non-Western immigrants. It does not predominate in rural areas, in the military, in small business owners, and in the Deep South of the US (although this is less true now).
Since the mid-1960s, when this book was written, liberalism has become the de facto way of thinking for Westerners. It is truly Plato's cave — one is kept there by the slavery of fear, social reprobation, constant media programming, and censorship. These become ingrained in most people, such that illiberal ways of thinking seem to be only suited for cavemen. Conservatives in Burnham's day supported Southern segregation; believed there were real, intractable differences between Whites and Blacks, as evidenced by history and the state of Africa; backed federal laws against pornography; wanted to repeal social security and the New Deal; and believed that school prayer and other Christian practices should be innate aspects of public schools. They didn't even think about homosexuals or transgenders . . .
The Right has collapsed. All the institutions infiltrated and converged to liberalism, everything kept shifting Leftward — including conservatism itself. Now "conservatives" support MLK Jr.; fight for "democracy" across the world; despise genetic and racial distinctions; go to war with traditional Christian countries overseas; cannot seem to condemn homosexuality without a sense of shame (if they ever do it); and essentially worship the market economy. This stupid thing called "modern conservatism" is really 19th-century liberalism. It conserves no hierarchies, traditions, or wisdom of past ages. It cannot justify the West nor the group who created it. It destroys everything in globalistic consumerism, ever guilty about not being as suicidal as the liberals.
After reading this book, you will think: "both political parties are suicidal". Both are, for all intents and purposes, liberal. Burnham's book will assuredly prove that to you. As the West commits suicide by shrinking geographically, being invaded by aliens, and cheering for its own decline, one cannot help but mourn its death. Yet all civilizations eventually lose their life-sustaining spirit and collapse. Such was the story with Egypt, with Rome, and today with the West. All material things are temporal and age. With age comes tiredness.
And so we come to a key point of life that the liberal denies: tragedy. The liberal cannot accept tragedy because, for them, man is perfectible. The lack of Peace, Justice, and Harmony is not caused by the innate faults of man, but by ignorance and injustice. But he who has studied history knows better. The highest strivings of individuals and civilizations will eventually lead to rubble. Erosion and forgetfulness negate even the greatest achievements. Alas, so it is with the West. Spiritual weakness, internal subversion, and misplaced guilt have destroyed its pre-eminence and beauty in this world.
The West has always been high-striving. Its Faustian nature aims to reach the infinite. Yet, if we recognize the tragic nature of man, we must also realize that the West must have a tragic fate. Just as Prometheus attempted to defy the gods by stealing fire and eventually suffered his fate of eternal torment, so too the West's attempt to overcome the limitations of man has led to eternal tragedy. Who are the main characters in this great modern tragedy? The liberals. May we recognize the great folly of their attempt to destroy all hierarchy and to break all natural boundaries. May we see their true function, as heralds and harbingers of the suicide of the West. May we remind ourselves in these foggy times of the true function of the liberal: to wish for death.
This book is no less than a complete diagnosis of the phenomenon of liberalism (meaning modern liberalism/Leftism) and its ultimate meaning. Liberalism is rooted in the main strand of philosophical thought post-Renaissance, the strand that runs from Descartes to Bacon to Locke and to the philosophes in pre-revolutionary France. From here, liberals gain the belief that man is perfectible; that he is not innately evil, but has instead been suppressed by tyrannical regimes and ignorance; thus, man is to be educated. With his prejudices gone, Peace, Justice, Freedom, and Equality will be reached.
Liberals believe that prejudices are fundamentally irrational; if they cannot be readily justified, they are part of "ignorance" and should be done away with. Christian theology — a remnant of outdated word-twisters. Patriotism and nationalism — an irrational favoring of one's own group. Hereditary distinctions — oppressive measures propped up by the "overprivileged". A dislike of homosexuals — a stupid remnant of Middle Eastern hallucinations. Thus, the liberal sees himself at the front of History, leading the crusade toward the Land of Reason. In this land, all distinctions, hierarchies, and evil will be gone.
The liberal does not believe in Christianity; thus, he does not have the rational framework for the expiation of guilt that Christianity brings. Christianity solves the universality of human guilt by having God Himself, incarnated as Christ, come down to earth and die for our sins so that we can be forgiven in the next world. But what if you abandon Christianity and still have guilt? You believe people are good — but here they are suffering, in slums, underfed, and overworked. The crusade must begin! So the upper-class White liberal identifies themself with the downtrodden, picking up a social, economic, and racial slave morality, denigrating that which is high and deifying that which is lowly. Through the fight for Social Justice they repent for their sins of Whiteness, wealth, and other types of "privilege". The goal really never matters, but simply the act of identifying with the "oppressed". If one supports the right goals and has the right ideals, then one has sufficiently atoned for one's advantages.
It can be clearly seen that this crusade never reaches its goal. The fight against poverty and for the African is an eternal struggle. Advantages are given, grades are boosted, and resources are lavished on third-world hellholes — but they never seem to fix the problem. The Black radicalization from "freedom" to "let me use your water fountain" to "equal rights" to "affirmative action" to "systemic racism" to reparations and burning down cities — all while being given more and more tokens for no reason — illustrates this perfectly.
The liberal will keep on fighting, as long as they punch Right. Communism is no problem — it has the right ideals, but its methods may be a little off. Communists are racial and economic egalitarians, they support the social welfare state, they despise imperialism, they support feminism, and they are against outmoded religious and hierarchical beliefs — in short, they are liberals with balls. The liberal, wanting "world peace", relinquishes his country's ability to use nuclear weapons or even have a national interest; the communist, wanting to destroy "imperialistic capitalism", foments revolution in the third world to dialectically create world peace. The liberal puts his hands up in world affairs: he relinquishes his prosperous colonies, he favors "self-determination" over his nation's interest, and he never uses enough force to support the West (Vietnam, Suez Crisis, Bay of Pigs fiasco).
Thus the liberal, feeling ever guilty about his country's inequalities and oppressions, feeling a deep sense of shame about the Western civilization he inherited, gives it all up. Liberalism is the ideology of suicide. It transmutes diseases into palliatives: the geographical shrinkage of Western power with decolonization becomes a great achievement for "self-determination" and the fight against imperialism; racial riots in the streets, destroying business and civilization itself, become a pious fight against systemic racism; the destruction of the family, low birthrates, and the rise of divorce become measures of women's newfound freedom; letting pornographers and communists reach their tentacles into every vein of our society becomes a great triumph for "freedom of speech".
Liberalism is the opium one takes when one is dying. Liberalism is seeing your foot rot due to gangrene and proclaiming, "I don't have to cut my toenails!". Liberalism psychologically and philosophically justifies Western suicide.
What places do the liberals dominate? The universities, the public sector (government jobs), the media, the intellectual sphere (writing, book publishing), social work, and entertainment. Liberalism is dominant among Blacks, Jews, and non-Western immigrants. It does not predominate in rural areas, in the military, in small business owners, and in the Deep South of the US (although this is less true now).
Since the mid-1960s, when this book was written, liberalism has become the de facto way of thinking for Westerners. It is truly Plato's cave — one is kept there by the slavery of fear, social reprobation, constant media programming, and censorship. These become ingrained in most people, such that illiberal ways of thinking seem to be only suited for cavemen. Conservatives in Burnham's day supported Southern segregation; believed there were real, intractable differences between Whites and Blacks, as evidenced by history and the state of Africa; backed federal laws against pornography; wanted to repeal social security and the New Deal; and believed that school prayer and other Christian practices should be innate aspects of public schools. They didn't even think about homosexuals or transgenders . . .
The Right has collapsed. All the institutions infiltrated and converged to liberalism, everything kept shifting Leftward — including conservatism itself. Now "conservatives" support MLK Jr.; fight for "democracy" across the world; despise genetic and racial distinctions; go to war with traditional Christian countries overseas; cannot seem to condemn homosexuality without a sense of shame (if they ever do it); and essentially worship the market economy. This stupid thing called "modern conservatism" is really 19th-century liberalism. It conserves no hierarchies, traditions, or wisdom of past ages. It cannot justify the West nor the group who created it. It destroys everything in globalistic consumerism, ever guilty about not being as suicidal as the liberals.
After reading this book, you will think: "both political parties are suicidal". Both are, for all intents and purposes, liberal. Burnham's book will assuredly prove that to you. As the West commits suicide by shrinking geographically, being invaded by aliens, and cheering for its own decline, one cannot help but mourn its death. Yet all civilizations eventually lose their life-sustaining spirit and collapse. Such was the story with Egypt, with Rome, and today with the West. All material things are temporal and age. With age comes tiredness.
And so we come to a key point of life that the liberal denies: tragedy. The liberal cannot accept tragedy because, for them, man is perfectible. The lack of Peace, Justice, and Harmony is not caused by the innate faults of man, but by ignorance and injustice. But he who has studied history knows better. The highest strivings of individuals and civilizations will eventually lead to rubble. Erosion and forgetfulness negate even the greatest achievements. Alas, so it is with the West. Spiritual weakness, internal subversion, and misplaced guilt have destroyed its pre-eminence and beauty in this world.
The West has always been high-striving. Its Faustian nature aims to reach the infinite. Yet, if we recognize the tragic nature of man, we must also realize that the West must have a tragic fate. Just as Prometheus attempted to defy the gods by stealing fire and eventually suffered his fate of eternal torment, so too the West's attempt to overcome the limitations of man has led to eternal tragedy. Who are the main characters in this great modern tragedy? The liberals. May we recognize the great folly of their attempt to destroy all hierarchy and to break all natural boundaries. May we see their true function, as heralds and harbingers of the suicide of the West. May we remind ourselves in these foggy times of the true function of the liberal: to wish for death.
May 26, 2016
I have read Burnham before, decades ago, but don't recall the circumstances. I recently thought to reread him, and he remains as trenchant as ever. Some of the things that you might think would date the book (like the collapse of Soviet communism) didn't have that effect at all. If book reviews like this can have spoilers, here it is. Liberalism should be defined as the soothing philosophy that rationalizes and explains our decline as a civilization, seeking to prepare us for the inevitable. In doing so, liberalism becomes a central part of the problem -- a doctor with a death wish and no working definition of health.
December 6, 2023
Excellent, well written book on the ideology of modern liberalism.
Burnham goes through the principles of liberalism analyzing them in abstract, and then he analyzes how they find their practical application in the real world.
The liberal's mode of thought is based on purely abstract ideological thinking, completely divorced from historical realities. The liberals have principles that are rooted only in the figments of their own imagination and that if applied to the real world inevitably lead to collective suicide. Burnham makes the great point that this way of thinking is anti-science. Science is based on predicting the future based on what happened in the past (in the real world or through experiments), therefore the idea that all of humanity - for the first time ever - could leave in peace, equality, and without racism or any other kind of hierarchical social structure is pathetic wishful thinking. It is absurd to look at uncivilized peoples and imagine, without any logical argument, that they would reach White people's level of prosperity and morality and friendliness to outsiders if only they were "educated". "Education" is war cry of the liberal who is convinced that everybody will think like him if only everybody was exposed to his ideas.
Burnham discusses a much more disturbing aspect. It is the gross inconsistencies of the liberals' application of their own principles. While a liberal is hostile to nationalism in Western countries, he is instead very proud to support nationalism in African and Asian countries - even of the violent variety. While a liberal claims that social groups such as race are illegitimate and they need to be abolished, he is ready to justify or minimize non-whites attacks on White people because of our collective guilt of belonging to the White race! Burnham discusses the "anti-colonial" movement in countries such as Algeria or Kenya. White people who settled in mostly uninhabited African lands created farms out of the desert and brought prosperity to the region. White people lived there, in Algeria for example, for several generations, but suddenly they were violently expelled by non-whites who simply took all their properties. The liberals support this, inexplicably. According to the principles of liberalism, a White man born in Algeria has the same rights as an Arab to live there, so him being kicked out only because of the "color of his skin" is the gross violation of the principle that racial groups and privileges shouldn't exist. However, try to propose to a modern liberal that today in 2023 White people should deport every non-white from Europe. It's the same thing that Africans did to us in Africa (actually, Whites have been there for longer and created prosperity, didn't go to consume the resources of the native populations). But proposing to deport all non-whites from Europe would enrage the liberal who would inevitably call you a "Nazi". But why? Don't White people have a right to a homeland? And even more disturbingly, who is to say that non-whites will not want to kick White people out of Europe too?
Burnham is excellent in bringing up these intellectual inconsistencies of the liberals, and he explains how the dialectic of non-whites (and communists) does not accept these abstract general principles. In fact, non-whites listen to the liberal ideology and don't understand (let alone agree with and adopt) its abstract principles. Abstract principles are only part of White people's culture and are completely alien to non-whites. When you say "equality" the non-white understands that he has the right to take your stuff. When he'll end up having more stuff than you, the principle will be immediately abandoned. It is irrational to expect that humans from a completely different culture which has never displayed gratitude or generosity towards outsiders will fully subscribe to the liberal principles even when their application will not be to their advantage.
This brings me to the only aspect that this book doesn't discuss. The presence of a fifth column in White people's civilization. If you think about it carefully, it is difficult to accept that our intellectual elites have subscribed to a clearly suicidal ideology. Even if you do accept that, its application seems to violate its own internal principles. In astronomy, when the observed bodies don't behave like you'd expect the first explanation one thinks of is that there may be another body hitherto not discovered that influences what you're seeing. In fact, Burnham's book suddenly acquires true clarity if you understand that liberalism in its most anti-western manifestation is driven by Jews. A foreign, non-European race that seems to have the goal to destroy the hegemony of the White race. Everything suddenly makes sense. This is why liberalism always turns out to be anti-white even in cases when objectively speaking White people are the victims according to liberal principles. The suicidal aspect of liberalism is nothing more than the action of a foreign hostile element. The excellent book The Culture of Critique presents very strong and clear historical evidence that it is the Jews who created and push the suicidal ideologies of the West to pursue their own racial interests. Reading that book will really help you make sense of the phenomena described in Suicide of the West.
Burnham's book gets very close to noticing this: he mentions a liberal who argues for decolonialism saying: "The French are ours, fellow members of Western, Christian civilization, educated and materially privileged". Immediately afterwards Burham notices that this man was not a Christian, but a Jew! Pretending to be one of us while giving the liberal speech!
Burnham dedicates a chapter on the US foreign policy after WWII until 1964, and it is illuminating to see how, even back then, the US was enabling the decline of Western civilization. President Eisenhower, who as a military commander defeated the Third Reich, and as US President forced White Americans to racemix with black people at bayonet point (look up the Little Rock incident), is also the one that betrayed the European powers in the Suez Crisis. I have the feeling that these 3 things are related.
The last point of Burnham's book is the function of liberalism, which also explains why it is so widespread: it is like a numbing drug, "a drug to enable our minds [...] to leave the real world and take refuge in that better world of his ideology where tigers purr like kittens and turn in their claws to the United Nations". A normal person would be enraged at thinking that White people don't have a single city in the West where they are still a majority. The capitals of our civilization, e.g. London, Paris, Rome, New York - are in practice no longer part of Western Civilization; they have been conquered. White people, especially White men, are being systematically eliminated from advertisement and from our own culture (like when they use a non-white actor to play a famous White historical or fictional figure), and liberals don't see the profound injustice and the danger because of the drug of liberalism! Will liberals finally wake up when White people will be not just marginalized, but openly persecuted?
"There is a really dazzling ingenuity in the liberal explanations of defeat as victory, abandonment as loyalty, timidity as courage, withdrawal as advance. The liberal ideologues proceed in a manner long familiar to both religion and psychology: by constructing a new reality of their own, a transcendental world,
where the soul may take refuge from the prosaic, unpleasant world of space and time".
Burnham goes through the principles of liberalism analyzing them in abstract, and then he analyzes how they find their practical application in the real world.
The liberal's mode of thought is based on purely abstract ideological thinking, completely divorced from historical realities. The liberals have principles that are rooted only in the figments of their own imagination and that if applied to the real world inevitably lead to collective suicide. Burnham makes the great point that this way of thinking is anti-science. Science is based on predicting the future based on what happened in the past (in the real world or through experiments), therefore the idea that all of humanity - for the first time ever - could leave in peace, equality, and without racism or any other kind of hierarchical social structure is pathetic wishful thinking. It is absurd to look at uncivilized peoples and imagine, without any logical argument, that they would reach White people's level of prosperity and morality and friendliness to outsiders if only they were "educated". "Education" is war cry of the liberal who is convinced that everybody will think like him if only everybody was exposed to his ideas.
Burnham discusses a much more disturbing aspect. It is the gross inconsistencies of the liberals' application of their own principles. While a liberal is hostile to nationalism in Western countries, he is instead very proud to support nationalism in African and Asian countries - even of the violent variety. While a liberal claims that social groups such as race are illegitimate and they need to be abolished, he is ready to justify or minimize non-whites attacks on White people because of our collective guilt of belonging to the White race! Burnham discusses the "anti-colonial" movement in countries such as Algeria or Kenya. White people who settled in mostly uninhabited African lands created farms out of the desert and brought prosperity to the region. White people lived there, in Algeria for example, for several generations, but suddenly they were violently expelled by non-whites who simply took all their properties. The liberals support this, inexplicably. According to the principles of liberalism, a White man born in Algeria has the same rights as an Arab to live there, so him being kicked out only because of the "color of his skin" is the gross violation of the principle that racial groups and privileges shouldn't exist. However, try to propose to a modern liberal that today in 2023 White people should deport every non-white from Europe. It's the same thing that Africans did to us in Africa (actually, Whites have been there for longer and created prosperity, didn't go to consume the resources of the native populations). But proposing to deport all non-whites from Europe would enrage the liberal who would inevitably call you a "Nazi". But why? Don't White people have a right to a homeland? And even more disturbingly, who is to say that non-whites will not want to kick White people out of Europe too?
Burnham is excellent in bringing up these intellectual inconsistencies of the liberals, and he explains how the dialectic of non-whites (and communists) does not accept these abstract general principles. In fact, non-whites listen to the liberal ideology and don't understand (let alone agree with and adopt) its abstract principles. Abstract principles are only part of White people's culture and are completely alien to non-whites. When you say "equality" the non-white understands that he has the right to take your stuff. When he'll end up having more stuff than you, the principle will be immediately abandoned. It is irrational to expect that humans from a completely different culture which has never displayed gratitude or generosity towards outsiders will fully subscribe to the liberal principles even when their application will not be to their advantage.
This brings me to the only aspect that this book doesn't discuss. The presence of a fifth column in White people's civilization. If you think about it carefully, it is difficult to accept that our intellectual elites have subscribed to a clearly suicidal ideology. Even if you do accept that, its application seems to violate its own internal principles. In astronomy, when the observed bodies don't behave like you'd expect the first explanation one thinks of is that there may be another body hitherto not discovered that influences what you're seeing. In fact, Burnham's book suddenly acquires true clarity if you understand that liberalism in its most anti-western manifestation is driven by Jews. A foreign, non-European race that seems to have the goal to destroy the hegemony of the White race. Everything suddenly makes sense. This is why liberalism always turns out to be anti-white even in cases when objectively speaking White people are the victims according to liberal principles. The suicidal aspect of liberalism is nothing more than the action of a foreign hostile element. The excellent book The Culture of Critique presents very strong and clear historical evidence that it is the Jews who created and push the suicidal ideologies of the West to pursue their own racial interests. Reading that book will really help you make sense of the phenomena described in Suicide of the West.
Burnham's book gets very close to noticing this: he mentions a liberal who argues for decolonialism saying: "The French are ours, fellow members of Western, Christian civilization, educated and materially privileged". Immediately afterwards Burham notices that this man was not a Christian, but a Jew! Pretending to be one of us while giving the liberal speech!
Burnham dedicates a chapter on the US foreign policy after WWII until 1964, and it is illuminating to see how, even back then, the US was enabling the decline of Western civilization. President Eisenhower, who as a military commander defeated the Third Reich, and as US President forced White Americans to racemix with black people at bayonet point (look up the Little Rock incident), is also the one that betrayed the European powers in the Suez Crisis. I have the feeling that these 3 things are related.
The last point of Burnham's book is the function of liberalism, which also explains why it is so widespread: it is like a numbing drug, "a drug to enable our minds [...] to leave the real world and take refuge in that better world of his ideology where tigers purr like kittens and turn in their claws to the United Nations". A normal person would be enraged at thinking that White people don't have a single city in the West where they are still a majority. The capitals of our civilization, e.g. London, Paris, Rome, New York - are in practice no longer part of Western Civilization; they have been conquered. White people, especially White men, are being systematically eliminated from advertisement and from our own culture (like when they use a non-white actor to play a famous White historical or fictional figure), and liberals don't see the profound injustice and the danger because of the drug of liberalism! Will liberals finally wake up when White people will be not just marginalized, but openly persecuted?
"There is a really dazzling ingenuity in the liberal explanations of defeat as victory, abandonment as loyalty, timidity as courage, withdrawal as advance. The liberal ideologues proceed in a manner long familiar to both religion and psychology: by constructing a new reality of their own, a transcendental world,
where the soul may take refuge from the prosaic, unpleasant world of space and time".
January 14, 2022
This book is officially horrible. I don't even know where to start. First, well, it is racist. It is openly and unapologetically racist. I really don't throw this critique around willy-nilly, as my many critical reviews of anti-racist texts on this site will show. He argues that it's a liberal shibboleth to believe that all peoples and races are equally capable of being civil or civilized. He repeatedly demeans black leaders, refers to Third World leaders as savages and barbarians, and acts like a global tide of black and brown people is coming to swamp and destroy Western civilization. Crime, for him, is largely a racial problem, and he uses coded but obvious language when discussing who the worst criminals out there are. Despite being written in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, it holds no sympathy for that movement and opposes school integration as liberals' trying to force homogenization on southerners' way of life. That makes this book important to read for understanding conservatism in the 50s and 60s, but it also makes it painful to read.
The book is also openly pro-imperialist. Imperialism, for Burnham, was essentially a form of charity for benighted savages. ZERO abuses of imperialism are mentioned; instead, he fixates on how European societies cultivated land, built infrastructure, and created political institutions. This is not only historically dubious (of course, imperialism is incredibly complicated and there was certainly some general development under imperial rule in many places, as well as widespread abuse and exploitation) but clearly a sort of brief against decolonization. In his zero-sum worldview, Burnham views decolonization as the collapse of Western Civilization's power in the world and largely as a gain for the communist bloc (a total monolith, in his opinion). He says, for instance, that Ike should have let Britain and France seize the Suez Canal in 56 (a clear violation of international law and an act sure to inflame the entire region against the West, creating space for Soviet penetration) in order to recapture key geopolitical nodes for the West (ignoring that we've been able to use Suez and project power around the world without relying on formal imperial control, which is expensive, unethical, and counterproductive). You don't have to defend the abuses and incompetence of postcolonial regimes to argue that imperialism was also immoral and unsustainable. Burnham of course ignores that the failure of many postcolonial regimes was significantly influenced by imperial manipulation of tribal/ethnic politics and continued interference thereafter. Nope, in his Manichean worldview, the West is purely good, civil, and advanced, and the Third World a land of racially inferior barbarians in need of both domination and tutelage.
I should at least give the argument a synopsis. Burnham argues that liberalism isn't so much the cause of the suicide of the West but it's justifying and compensating ideology. Liberalism turns the global advance of communism and the collapse of Western empire, as well as efforts to accommodate those trends, into either the preservation of peace or the fulfillment of justice or duty to humanity. Liberalism saps the national will to reverse this decline or fight the Cold War, provides justification for crime or Third World aggression/poverty, and leads to a relativist view of the world that doesn't mind seeing Western Civ and even the US decline. Of course, I think he's saying that liberalism is both the source of the decline and its justifying ideology, but that's just my read of his case.
Burnham is the kind of critic who has never held office or even really imagined what it is like to be anything other than what he is: wealthy, white, male. He blasts FDR for Yalta, Truman for not going all the way in Korea, Ike for Hungary and Dien Bien Phu, and Kennedy for failing to seize Cuba. Ok, what were the alternatives? Could taking any of these moves bogged the US down in even worse forms of conflict in peripheral areas? Could they have risked nuclear annihilation? Burnham doesn't consider it; he can only see each crisis as a test of strength and a manifestation of decline (rather than adaptation to drastically changed global circumstances). Should the US push the European powers toward decolonization given that the taint of empire was one of the main liabilities for US global credibility post WWII and given that our EU allies were wasting valuable resources trying to hang on to colonies and given that anti-colonial nationalism was a nearly irresistible force? No, says Burnham, we have to hang on to empire, no matter the cost and strategic stupidity, to hold the lines against the barbarians and the communists and to show strength, above all. This is a near fascist way of thinking, and its terrifying that so many conservative luminaries found his mentality persuasive.
Burnham is also verifiably wrong about numerous things. Ironically, he treats liberals as pure ideologues while failing to apply that scrutiny to his own thinking. For example, he follows the "rule" that there will always be mass poverty and hunger in the world, that essentially nothing can be done to help the barbarous nations of the Third World, much less the "savages" of American society. This is not a product of evidence but of his a priori tragic view of the world in which the world will always basically be the same, no matter the progress of science, morality, ingenuity, and so on. Within his worldview, the Great Society's slicing into poverty rates is inexplicable, as is the later 20th century's drastic reduction of hunger in the world, the raising of standards of living for literally billions of people, the eradication of diseases like smallpox, all done in large part because of the spreading of mostly Western technology, the "do-gooding" of the liberals and technocrats he so detests, and the opening of markets to societies that Burnham dismisses as barbarous who, in many ways, are now outcompeting the US. Burnham's entire thought process is a giant cul-de-sac, a static and blinkered worldview in which, because he was born on top, his being on top is right and deserved and others' being below is also right and deserved. One of the main reasons I am a liberal is that I just can't accept this worldview, intellectually or emotionally. It is little more than a brief for laziness, cruelty, and inaction in the face of injustices that he would never accept if done to him, even in fractional terms.
This book is worth reading not so much as an argument but as a historical text. It suggested a few interesting things to me about conservative internationalism in the early Cold War. The first is the extent to which conservatives viewed decolonization as a net loss in the Cold War, even if postcolonial states didn't immediately turn communist. The second is the importance of civilizational framing to conservative attitudes toward the Cold War and the importance of ideas about decline and decadence to modern conservatism in general, including its application to foreign policy.
There are a few critiques of liberalism in here worth considering. Liberalism can be a bit dry; who wants to fight or sacrifice for social security or a modest increase in health benefits? Of course, this is easily refuted. Having grown up in comfortable circumstances, Burnham seems unwilling to consider fighting for unionization or equal civil rights as something meaningful, something people would and did die for. Burnham makes some half-decent critiques of liberals' skepticism of patriotism and the military; they are overblown but he's not totally wrong. He makes a solid point that too many liberals look at fascism as their true enemy while failing to muster true outrage at communism. There's an element of this, but it isn't because liberals and communists share core principles. Also, this point totally ignores Cold War liberalism; after all, the US started containment and the Korean War, not to mention the Vietnam War later on, under liberal administrations. So even when Burnham makes halfway decent points, he still oversimplifies and omits evidence that doesn't support his case.
Jonah Goldberg wrote a book on the "Suicide of the West" that(while I still mostly disagree with it) is not racist, imperialist, etc, and makes a good argument about how the rise of tribalism and other bad ideas is undercutting the foundations of a very successful society that has made enormous progress. He (mostly) doesn't catastrophize, misrepresent liberals, and so on. It's a book that liberals can and should constructively debate with. This one isn't. There are many books by conservatives that have moderated and/or challenged my views; if you think I'm just some liberal ideologue I will gladly point you to those books and to the peer-reviewed scholarship I have criticizing certain aspects of liberalism. This book simply fails in that regard, as it does in pretty much every regard.
The book is also openly pro-imperialist. Imperialism, for Burnham, was essentially a form of charity for benighted savages. ZERO abuses of imperialism are mentioned; instead, he fixates on how European societies cultivated land, built infrastructure, and created political institutions. This is not only historically dubious (of course, imperialism is incredibly complicated and there was certainly some general development under imperial rule in many places, as well as widespread abuse and exploitation) but clearly a sort of brief against decolonization. In his zero-sum worldview, Burnham views decolonization as the collapse of Western Civilization's power in the world and largely as a gain for the communist bloc (a total monolith, in his opinion). He says, for instance, that Ike should have let Britain and France seize the Suez Canal in 56 (a clear violation of international law and an act sure to inflame the entire region against the West, creating space for Soviet penetration) in order to recapture key geopolitical nodes for the West (ignoring that we've been able to use Suez and project power around the world without relying on formal imperial control, which is expensive, unethical, and counterproductive). You don't have to defend the abuses and incompetence of postcolonial regimes to argue that imperialism was also immoral and unsustainable. Burnham of course ignores that the failure of many postcolonial regimes was significantly influenced by imperial manipulation of tribal/ethnic politics and continued interference thereafter. Nope, in his Manichean worldview, the West is purely good, civil, and advanced, and the Third World a land of racially inferior barbarians in need of both domination and tutelage.
I should at least give the argument a synopsis. Burnham argues that liberalism isn't so much the cause of the suicide of the West but it's justifying and compensating ideology. Liberalism turns the global advance of communism and the collapse of Western empire, as well as efforts to accommodate those trends, into either the preservation of peace or the fulfillment of justice or duty to humanity. Liberalism saps the national will to reverse this decline or fight the Cold War, provides justification for crime or Third World aggression/poverty, and leads to a relativist view of the world that doesn't mind seeing Western Civ and even the US decline. Of course, I think he's saying that liberalism is both the source of the decline and its justifying ideology, but that's just my read of his case.
Burnham is the kind of critic who has never held office or even really imagined what it is like to be anything other than what he is: wealthy, white, male. He blasts FDR for Yalta, Truman for not going all the way in Korea, Ike for Hungary and Dien Bien Phu, and Kennedy for failing to seize Cuba. Ok, what were the alternatives? Could taking any of these moves bogged the US down in even worse forms of conflict in peripheral areas? Could they have risked nuclear annihilation? Burnham doesn't consider it; he can only see each crisis as a test of strength and a manifestation of decline (rather than adaptation to drastically changed global circumstances). Should the US push the European powers toward decolonization given that the taint of empire was one of the main liabilities for US global credibility post WWII and given that our EU allies were wasting valuable resources trying to hang on to colonies and given that anti-colonial nationalism was a nearly irresistible force? No, says Burnham, we have to hang on to empire, no matter the cost and strategic stupidity, to hold the lines against the barbarians and the communists and to show strength, above all. This is a near fascist way of thinking, and its terrifying that so many conservative luminaries found his mentality persuasive.
Burnham is also verifiably wrong about numerous things. Ironically, he treats liberals as pure ideologues while failing to apply that scrutiny to his own thinking. For example, he follows the "rule" that there will always be mass poverty and hunger in the world, that essentially nothing can be done to help the barbarous nations of the Third World, much less the "savages" of American society. This is not a product of evidence but of his a priori tragic view of the world in which the world will always basically be the same, no matter the progress of science, morality, ingenuity, and so on. Within his worldview, the Great Society's slicing into poverty rates is inexplicable, as is the later 20th century's drastic reduction of hunger in the world, the raising of standards of living for literally billions of people, the eradication of diseases like smallpox, all done in large part because of the spreading of mostly Western technology, the "do-gooding" of the liberals and technocrats he so detests, and the opening of markets to societies that Burnham dismisses as barbarous who, in many ways, are now outcompeting the US. Burnham's entire thought process is a giant cul-de-sac, a static and blinkered worldview in which, because he was born on top, his being on top is right and deserved and others' being below is also right and deserved. One of the main reasons I am a liberal is that I just can't accept this worldview, intellectually or emotionally. It is little more than a brief for laziness, cruelty, and inaction in the face of injustices that he would never accept if done to him, even in fractional terms.
This book is worth reading not so much as an argument but as a historical text. It suggested a few interesting things to me about conservative internationalism in the early Cold War. The first is the extent to which conservatives viewed decolonization as a net loss in the Cold War, even if postcolonial states didn't immediately turn communist. The second is the importance of civilizational framing to conservative attitudes toward the Cold War and the importance of ideas about decline and decadence to modern conservatism in general, including its application to foreign policy.
There are a few critiques of liberalism in here worth considering. Liberalism can be a bit dry; who wants to fight or sacrifice for social security or a modest increase in health benefits? Of course, this is easily refuted. Having grown up in comfortable circumstances, Burnham seems unwilling to consider fighting for unionization or equal civil rights as something meaningful, something people would and did die for. Burnham makes some half-decent critiques of liberals' skepticism of patriotism and the military; they are overblown but he's not totally wrong. He makes a solid point that too many liberals look at fascism as their true enemy while failing to muster true outrage at communism. There's an element of this, but it isn't because liberals and communists share core principles. Also, this point totally ignores Cold War liberalism; after all, the US started containment and the Korean War, not to mention the Vietnam War later on, under liberal administrations. So even when Burnham makes halfway decent points, he still oversimplifies and omits evidence that doesn't support his case.
Jonah Goldberg wrote a book on the "Suicide of the West" that(while I still mostly disagree with it) is not racist, imperialist, etc, and makes a good argument about how the rise of tribalism and other bad ideas is undercutting the foundations of a very successful society that has made enormous progress. He (mostly) doesn't catastrophize, misrepresent liberals, and so on. It's a book that liberals can and should constructively debate with. This one isn't. There are many books by conservatives that have moderated and/or challenged my views; if you think I'm just some liberal ideologue I will gladly point you to those books and to the peer-reviewed scholarship I have criticizing certain aspects of liberalism. This book simply fails in that regard, as it does in pretty much every regard.
September 11, 2022
Burnham no longer recognizes dialectical materialism but dialectical materialism still recognizes him."---Leon Trotsky.
James Burnham was the Original Gangster of American neoconservatism, going from Trotskyst to Editor at NATIONAL REVIEW magazine to, shortly before his death, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan. This knife-edged essay on how "liberalism is the philosophy of Western suicide" should be read by both left and right critics of liberalism, if only to see if any other political philosophy is sustainable in the twenty-first century.
James Burnham was the Original Gangster of American neoconservatism, going from Trotskyst to Editor at NATIONAL REVIEW magazine to, shortly before his death, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan. This knife-edged essay on how "liberalism is the philosophy of Western suicide" should be read by both left and right critics of liberalism, if only to see if any other political philosophy is sustainable in the twenty-first century.
September 13, 2024
Hard to summarize or explain this book simply. I like Doug Wilson's review that says "Liberalism should be defined as the soothing philosophy that rationalizes and explains our decline as a civilization, seeking to prepare us for the inevitable. In doing so, liberalism becomes a central part of the problem -- a doctor with a death wish and no working definition of health."
Lots of telling insights and things that have been interesting to mull over while listening to this work. But primarily it shows the emptiness of any worldview apart from a robust biblical foundation. The simplest building block of Liberalism is their belief in the inherent goodness of man and down stream of that idea is disaster. We need to recognize our sin and turn to Christ. There is no other way.
Lots of telling insights and things that have been interesting to mull over while listening to this work. But primarily it shows the emptiness of any worldview apart from a robust biblical foundation. The simplest building block of Liberalism is their belief in the inherent goodness of man and down stream of that idea is disaster. We need to recognize our sin and turn to Christ. There is no other way.
March 10, 2020
This is a clear analysis of modern western political ideology; what we in Europe not so much call Liberalism, as he does, but rather Social Democracy or Progressivism. The word itself is a great example of appropriation of the meaning of a word that originally stood for something much different.
After the first world war this political doctrine began its predominance within political institutions of the western world. This is the point in time Burnham marked when Western Civilization began its decline.
The doctrine developed by altering certain key propositions of classical liberal thought, placing more emphasis on the values of distributive justice and peace, compared to the more self-sufficient, sovereign classical liberal tradition that is placing comparatively more weight on freedom and liberty.
Following Burnham's analysis, it was surprising to me that back in the 60s it was possible to foresee so lucidly many of the problems that Western Civilization is running into right now. The defining features of this political doctrine:
* rationalistic optimism: belief in the infinite potential for progressive human development
* permissiveness: making no differences to inferior cultures and devaluing the own culture
* egalitarianism: remedy economic indifference by progressive income tax and a welfare state
* democratism: democratic institutions based on one man one vote will under all conditions lead to optimal results
are leading to declining societies and a downward leveling of culture and wealth that is more and more approaching the standards of poor and backwards nations.
I felt this is a fair and objective book in trying to ascribe valid premises when characterizing the base line of this political ideology.
As a libertarian tending person I was missing a more pronounced comparison of Liberalism vs Libertarianism which are inverse in many respects. Burnham sticks almost always to a conservative counter point when looking for a theoretical opposite of the ideas that are put forward by Liberalism.
I was often reminded at Thomas Sowell's - A Conflict of Visions, where Sowell tries to reveal the bloodlines of thought of modern liberalism and conservatism that are a result of so different visions of the human condition.
After the first world war this political doctrine began its predominance within political institutions of the western world. This is the point in time Burnham marked when Western Civilization began its decline.
The doctrine developed by altering certain key propositions of classical liberal thought, placing more emphasis on the values of distributive justice and peace, compared to the more self-sufficient, sovereign classical liberal tradition that is placing comparatively more weight on freedom and liberty.
Following Burnham's analysis, it was surprising to me that back in the 60s it was possible to foresee so lucidly many of the problems that Western Civilization is running into right now. The defining features of this political doctrine:
* rationalistic optimism: belief in the infinite potential for progressive human development
* permissiveness: making no differences to inferior cultures and devaluing the own culture
* egalitarianism: remedy economic indifference by progressive income tax and a welfare state
* democratism: democratic institutions based on one man one vote will under all conditions lead to optimal results
are leading to declining societies and a downward leveling of culture and wealth that is more and more approaching the standards of poor and backwards nations.
I felt this is a fair and objective book in trying to ascribe valid premises when characterizing the base line of this political ideology.
As a libertarian tending person I was missing a more pronounced comparison of Liberalism vs Libertarianism which are inverse in many respects. Burnham sticks almost always to a conservative counter point when looking for a theoretical opposite of the ideas that are put forward by Liberalism.
I was often reminded at Thomas Sowell's - A Conflict of Visions, where Sowell tries to reveal the bloodlines of thought of modern liberalism and conservatism that are a result of so different visions of the human condition.
August 28, 2020
Well Written Right Wing Book
I’ll give James Burnam credit for good writing. This book came up as a offered no from my ebook library and I was confused by the title. The author has been gone for awhile but was a supporter of Joe McCarthy and with William Buckley, created the right wing National Review magazine. Burnam is concerned about liberalism. He first defines it and it sounded great to me Equal rights, democracy, etc I have always thought it was weird that the right obsesses so much about liberals because I don’t know many people who call themselves that. The Liberal party is nonexistent. But he acknowledges that liberals don’t call themselves that, the right do and they define us. Burnam blames the left for Joe McCarthy, saying they needed a boogey man and one the fun was over, they cast him aside. He gets to his main point at the end of the book, the liberal which he defines in beliefs, is really a wrong headed Westerner who doesn’t know what they’re doing. They are too nice to Negroes (1962), giving up “our” colonies and everything we built there to let the native peoples there run amok and destroy everything. Eventually they might even take over the West and we’ll suffer. While it was written a few decades ago, these beliefs are still common today. That’s why we have a president in the USA who creates an US vs Them. Scenario. Burnam also talks about the Liberals as having the wrong enemy. They think the Right are very bad though they are fellow Westerners who just have the “right” ideas, and Facism is absorbent yet they don’t recognize how horrible Communism is. He mentions how dangerous China and Russia are (though it was the USSR at the time). and he advocates for Cuba to be occupied by the USA rather than Russia. They’ll love us for it. His obsession isn’t for the rights of all people, his desire is to keep other people down so Westerners can flourish. I don’t think that’s much different from the Right today. It was good for me to read this because it was well written and clear and allowed me to see what the Right really thinks and wants. I knew before but this is very articulate.
I’ll give James Burnam credit for good writing. This book came up as a offered no from my ebook library and I was confused by the title. The author has been gone for awhile but was a supporter of Joe McCarthy and with William Buckley, created the right wing National Review magazine. Burnam is concerned about liberalism. He first defines it and it sounded great to me Equal rights, democracy, etc I have always thought it was weird that the right obsesses so much about liberals because I don’t know many people who call themselves that. The Liberal party is nonexistent. But he acknowledges that liberals don’t call themselves that, the right do and they define us. Burnam blames the left for Joe McCarthy, saying they needed a boogey man and one the fun was over, they cast him aside. He gets to his main point at the end of the book, the liberal which he defines in beliefs, is really a wrong headed Westerner who doesn’t know what they’re doing. They are too nice to Negroes (1962), giving up “our” colonies and everything we built there to let the native peoples there run amok and destroy everything. Eventually they might even take over the West and we’ll suffer. While it was written a few decades ago, these beliefs are still common today. That’s why we have a president in the USA who creates an US vs Them. Scenario. Burnam also talks about the Liberals as having the wrong enemy. They think the Right are very bad though they are fellow Westerners who just have the “right” ideas, and Facism is absorbent yet they don’t recognize how horrible Communism is. He mentions how dangerous China and Russia are (though it was the USSR at the time). and he advocates for Cuba to be occupied by the USA rather than Russia. They’ll love us for it. His obsession isn’t for the rights of all people, his desire is to keep other people down so Westerners can flourish. I don’t think that’s much different from the Right today. It was good for me to read this because it was well written and clear and allowed me to see what the Right really thinks and wants. I knew before but this is very articulate.
June 28, 2015
When reading about William F. Buckley and the early days of National Review James Burnham is usually front and center. His practicality about politics was very unique at the magazine. A common story is his support for Nelson Rockefeller in 1964 when his colleagues were behind Barry Goldwater. He agreed with Goldwater on nearly everything, but felt that Rockefeller actually had a chance of winning and the election was too important to fall in love with a pipe dream.
Here Burnham explains why American liberalism has no answers for communism. He takes particular issue with the policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union. He sees it not as a solution, but a way to ignore issues that won't go away. Starting with the foolish agreements at Yalta and subsequent acquiescence at the Suez Canal and Cuba, Burnham wonders why we are so ready to surrender. More specifically he wonders why we are committing slow suicide rather than confront the world in front of us.
The cold war is over but the same inaction is with us. Some in the west hope that our enemies will self-destruct while oters are sympathetic with the anti western criticism and feel that we have it coming. Together they create a pretty big coalition of stasis. With Iran on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon we are likely heading back into familiar disagreements. In that way Burnham's book is timeless.
Here Burnham explains why American liberalism has no answers for communism. He takes particular issue with the policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union. He sees it not as a solution, but a way to ignore issues that won't go away. Starting with the foolish agreements at Yalta and subsequent acquiescence at the Suez Canal and Cuba, Burnham wonders why we are so ready to surrender. More specifically he wonders why we are committing slow suicide rather than confront the world in front of us.
The cold war is over but the same inaction is with us. Some in the west hope that our enemies will self-destruct while oters are sympathetic with the anti western criticism and feel that we have it coming. Together they create a pretty big coalition of stasis. With Iran on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon we are likely heading back into familiar disagreements. In that way Burnham's book is timeless.
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April 12, 2021Suicide of the West — An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism
James Burnham ©1964
A short book report by Ron Housley
I picked up a copy of this book in 1972 ($6.95 hardcover) and have been hauling it around with me for half a century. It was published when I was still in high school; I finally read it this week.
It is unusual for a book written nearly 60 years ago to still be in print; it is still in print, apparently something of a classic.
James Burnham’s “Suicide of the West” starts out with a list of nineteen (19) basic beliefs that he classifies as “liberal beliefs.” Most of us would concur that his list does, indeed, identify beliefs that a liberal would hold; I agreed with each one of them.
But looking at it this way reverses the proper thinking order. It immediately brings to mind David Hume’s query: “Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?”
Here the question becomes: Do the liberals endorse the beliefs on Burnham’s list because the beliefs are liberal, or are the beliefs liberal because liberals hold them? If the former, then we are left without a standard by which to judge whether any given belief is liberal.
To extricate himself from the dilemma, Burnham would have had to offer us some principles or standards by which to judge any belief’s liberal-ness; but the reader is left to his own classification devices to trace the connection between each belief and the conclusion that it is a liberal belief.
The whole thing seems like asking “What is chemistry?” and answering: it is whatever chemists study. Here we have: “What is a liberal belief?” with the answer: it is whatever liberals believe.
Burnham gets away with it because nearly everyone agrees that the nineteen beliefs are liberal beliefs.
BELIEFS AS “IDEOLOGY,” OR NOT
Burnham discusses how it is commonplace for liberals to accuse their ideological opposites (like conservatives) as “biased,” because the conservative passes judgment on each issue based on his particular perspective and store of knowledge. But liberals do not seem to accuse one another of this type of bias, because their perspective is that they are just engaging with common sense; and that they are therefore not looking at everything through an ideological lens(!).
I don’t speak with an accent; I just speak the language normal.
The question then arises: how can one evaluate any political question if not by reference to some standard or principle; and if a standard or principle be part of one’s evaluation, wouldn’t that be instance of what the liberal considers to be “bias?” Conversely, if one’s evaluation is devoid of any standard or principle, then wouldn’t any conclusion just be contextless and even arbitrary? Shouldn’t each political question ultimately come down to looking at the principles by which beliefs are gauged?
LIBERAL IN 1964 V. LIBERAL TODAY (2021)
Regardless of the timelessness of the nineteen basic liberal beliefs, these beliefs appear to have dominated what Burnham sees as the slow suicide of Western culture, hence the book’s title.
I thought it was curious that the book wanted to frame the cultural decline as a “contraction,” as if to step away from any implication of a value judgment (but why not make a value judgment?); and it was curious that the book emphasized territorial loss of the West, without emphasizing loss of ideological stature.
Additionally curious is that today’s (2021) cultural decline involves the same issues that Burnham spotlighted nearly 60 years ago. In both cases, both then and now, the decline tracks closely with ideas coming out of academia. Today’s “critical Theory” explosion comes from ideas hatched in the 1950’s when Professor Burnham was writing “Suicide of the West.”
“CRITICAL THEORY”
In one of the early chapters I found it ironic to see Academic Freedom, a 1964 hallmark of liberalism, as one of the casualties today, squarely on the cultural chopping block and headed for extinction. On p. 70 James Burnham says that man has “…the right to put forward his point of view…however unpopular at the moment; in the ‘free forum of ideas’ reason will freely pick and choose.” He would not have believed that this uncontroversial element of liberalism would be undermined and uprooted a mere half-century later. There is nothing like reading a book over 50 years old to bring clarity to the proposition that rapid societal deterioration is possible even in the world’s most advanced culture.
Burnham might likely think twice before writing: “the great crime is to prevent other people from speaking up.” Little could he have known the forces already conceived and gestating in 1964 would blossom into a full-blown counter force within the lifespan of his younger readers.
Then I was horrified and disappointed to discover Professor Burnham supporting one of critical Theory’s worst elements: more than once in this volume, he specifically touted the notion that there is no such thing as objective knowledge; he told us this as if it were objective knowledge that there is no such thing as objective knowledge(!).
Page 75 tells us that “Truth in any specific scientific field is simply the present consensus of scientific opinion.” This pillar of postmodernism, which would ultimately destroy academic freedom itself, was apparently percolating in Burnham’s mind way back then. It does not appear that he saw the connection between that idea and the outcome which it would wreak. He could not have known this was a central element of a theory that would be fully unleashed on us a generation later.
TODAY’S CONSERVATIVES – YESTERDAY’S LIBERALS
Another interesting observation from reading this 60 year-old book is to see how today’s Conservatives have embraced nearly all of the tenets of yesterday’s Liberals. When I look through the nineteen basic Liberal beliefs from 1964, it is more than curious how many of those beliefs are part of the Conservative’s platform of 2020.
During my own lifetime, I have been witness to both political parties picking up the oars to both row in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. But the idea that someone would propose going in the other direction has been entirely abandoned. The sight of anyone seriously advocating for freedom (in the face of ever-expanding coercive regulation) is today but a figment of the imagination.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
Nowhere in the entire book, neither in all the discussion of the nineteen beliefs held by liberals, nor in all the discussion about the liberal view of man as such, nowhere do we see included any reference to mankind’s landmark discovery of individual rights.
Even as I approached the final chapter, I remained on alert for the some assessment of liberalism’s regard for individual rights. Afterall, I was reasoning, individual rights were vital to my understanding of the laws which oversaw America’s unique historical accomplishment. Surely in the survey of liberal beliefs there would be some acknowledgment of how rights were acknowledged and protected before consensus shifted to denigrate the value which protecting rights had played over the years. But alas, nothing
BAD SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Burnham does ask: “What blocks human achievement?” and he holds this question up as critical to guide our thinking about political issues. His answer is two fold: Ignorance and Bad Social Institutions. What he never does is to identify that the “Bad” in “Bad Social Institutions” is the violation of Individual Rights.
When we get to the discussion of achieving a “good society,” and whether such a goal is achievable, we get a question discussed in an Individual Rights vacuum.
Burnham’s conversation identifies that Conservatives want to keep things as they are and that Liberals want to change things. The premise is that “Bad Social Institutions” are a legacy of the past; but they are defined not by their “badness” but by their “past-ness.” Thus, the liberal argument is that they must be changed because they are “past,” even if they are not bad, even if they are good.
Our history is littered with the attempts to substitute “old” rights-violating institutions for “new” rights-violating institutions. What the culture has lost sight of is the vision to change a rights-violating institution into a non-rights-violating institution. I can’t remember the last time I saw that happen, either in 1964 or today.
IGNORANCE
In addressing the second obstacle to a good society, ignorance, Burnham tells us that education must promote rational inquiry. But rational inquiry doesn’t exactly square with his own critical Theory contention that truth cannot be objective.
Thus he crafts a lengthy description of how the education establishment’s attitude toward ignorance has emphasized curricula programmed to inculcate those values aligning with the list of nineteen liberal beliefs. We get glimpses into the early manifestations of critical Theory upon formal education with the example of “freedom of expression” being taught to refer only to the truth of majority consensus — allowing allegiance to the notion that there is no objective truth.
BASIC AXIOMS AND PRINCIPLES
Much ado is made of the point that 1964 liberalism has no effectiveness against the Left — and hence Communism is left to metastasize around the globe. Meanwhile, the same liberalism has been effective in stopping the Right’s attempt to preserve the various manifestations of liberty.
Burnham miscalculates his prediction that Communism will “achieve world power before the end of this century” (p. 288); but he did not miscalculate that the elements of authoritarianism and statism would continue to expand globally, including within the United States. And perhaps his biggest miscalculation of all was to presume that the Right would in any way resist the juggernaut of vicious, ever-expanding nationalism. He may be turning in his grave over the Right’s role in leading the charge!
I see where James Burnham died in 1987, at which point I had his book in my possession for 15 years, still unread. The century finally came to an end without Communist world domination; but something just as dangerous had taken control: the irrationality of postmodernism’s social justice activism had the ear of our political and academic leaders.
In all of the years I wandered around with his unread book, my understanding of liberalism’s content and implications was more imprecise than it had to be. I should have read Burnham’s book back when I first bought it.
James Burnham ©1964
A short book report by Ron Housley
I picked up a copy of this book in 1972 ($6.95 hardcover) and have been hauling it around with me for half a century. It was published when I was still in high school; I finally read it this week.
It is unusual for a book written nearly 60 years ago to still be in print; it is still in print, apparently something of a classic.
James Burnham’s “Suicide of the West” starts out with a list of nineteen (19) basic beliefs that he classifies as “liberal beliefs.” Most of us would concur that his list does, indeed, identify beliefs that a liberal would hold; I agreed with each one of them.
But looking at it this way reverses the proper thinking order. It immediately brings to mind David Hume’s query: “Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?”
Here the question becomes: Do the liberals endorse the beliefs on Burnham’s list because the beliefs are liberal, or are the beliefs liberal because liberals hold them? If the former, then we are left without a standard by which to judge whether any given belief is liberal.
To extricate himself from the dilemma, Burnham would have had to offer us some principles or standards by which to judge any belief’s liberal-ness; but the reader is left to his own classification devices to trace the connection between each belief and the conclusion that it is a liberal belief.
The whole thing seems like asking “What is chemistry?” and answering: it is whatever chemists study. Here we have: “What is a liberal belief?” with the answer: it is whatever liberals believe.
Burnham gets away with it because nearly everyone agrees that the nineteen beliefs are liberal beliefs.
BELIEFS AS “IDEOLOGY,” OR NOT
Burnham discusses how it is commonplace for liberals to accuse their ideological opposites (like conservatives) as “biased,” because the conservative passes judgment on each issue based on his particular perspective and store of knowledge. But liberals do not seem to accuse one another of this type of bias, because their perspective is that they are just engaging with common sense; and that they are therefore not looking at everything through an ideological lens(!).
I don’t speak with an accent; I just speak the language normal.
The question then arises: how can one evaluate any political question if not by reference to some standard or principle; and if a standard or principle be part of one’s evaluation, wouldn’t that be instance of what the liberal considers to be “bias?” Conversely, if one’s evaluation is devoid of any standard or principle, then wouldn’t any conclusion just be contextless and even arbitrary? Shouldn’t each political question ultimately come down to looking at the principles by which beliefs are gauged?
LIBERAL IN 1964 V. LIBERAL TODAY (2021)
Regardless of the timelessness of the nineteen basic liberal beliefs, these beliefs appear to have dominated what Burnham sees as the slow suicide of Western culture, hence the book’s title.
I thought it was curious that the book wanted to frame the cultural decline as a “contraction,” as if to step away from any implication of a value judgment (but why not make a value judgment?); and it was curious that the book emphasized territorial loss of the West, without emphasizing loss of ideological stature.
Additionally curious is that today’s (2021) cultural decline involves the same issues that Burnham spotlighted nearly 60 years ago. In both cases, both then and now, the decline tracks closely with ideas coming out of academia. Today’s “critical Theory” explosion comes from ideas hatched in the 1950’s when Professor Burnham was writing “Suicide of the West.”
“CRITICAL THEORY”
In one of the early chapters I found it ironic to see Academic Freedom, a 1964 hallmark of liberalism, as one of the casualties today, squarely on the cultural chopping block and headed for extinction. On p. 70 James Burnham says that man has “…the right to put forward his point of view…however unpopular at the moment; in the ‘free forum of ideas’ reason will freely pick and choose.” He would not have believed that this uncontroversial element of liberalism would be undermined and uprooted a mere half-century later. There is nothing like reading a book over 50 years old to bring clarity to the proposition that rapid societal deterioration is possible even in the world’s most advanced culture.
Burnham might likely think twice before writing: “the great crime is to prevent other people from speaking up.” Little could he have known the forces already conceived and gestating in 1964 would blossom into a full-blown counter force within the lifespan of his younger readers.
Then I was horrified and disappointed to discover Professor Burnham supporting one of critical Theory’s worst elements: more than once in this volume, he specifically touted the notion that there is no such thing as objective knowledge; he told us this as if it were objective knowledge that there is no such thing as objective knowledge(!).
Page 75 tells us that “Truth in any specific scientific field is simply the present consensus of scientific opinion.” This pillar of postmodernism, which would ultimately destroy academic freedom itself, was apparently percolating in Burnham’s mind way back then. It does not appear that he saw the connection between that idea and the outcome which it would wreak. He could not have known this was a central element of a theory that would be fully unleashed on us a generation later.
TODAY’S CONSERVATIVES – YESTERDAY’S LIBERALS
Another interesting observation from reading this 60 year-old book is to see how today’s Conservatives have embraced nearly all of the tenets of yesterday’s Liberals. When I look through the nineteen basic Liberal beliefs from 1964, it is more than curious how many of those beliefs are part of the Conservative’s platform of 2020.
During my own lifetime, I have been witness to both political parties picking up the oars to both row in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. But the idea that someone would propose going in the other direction has been entirely abandoned. The sight of anyone seriously advocating for freedom (in the face of ever-expanding coercive regulation) is today but a figment of the imagination.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
Nowhere in the entire book, neither in all the discussion of the nineteen beliefs held by liberals, nor in all the discussion about the liberal view of man as such, nowhere do we see included any reference to mankind’s landmark discovery of individual rights.
Even as I approached the final chapter, I remained on alert for the some assessment of liberalism’s regard for individual rights. Afterall, I was reasoning, individual rights were vital to my understanding of the laws which oversaw America’s unique historical accomplishment. Surely in the survey of liberal beliefs there would be some acknowledgment of how rights were acknowledged and protected before consensus shifted to denigrate the value which protecting rights had played over the years. But alas, nothing
BAD SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Burnham does ask: “What blocks human achievement?” and he holds this question up as critical to guide our thinking about political issues. His answer is two fold: Ignorance and Bad Social Institutions. What he never does is to identify that the “Bad” in “Bad Social Institutions” is the violation of Individual Rights.
When we get to the discussion of achieving a “good society,” and whether such a goal is achievable, we get a question discussed in an Individual Rights vacuum.
Burnham’s conversation identifies that Conservatives want to keep things as they are and that Liberals want to change things. The premise is that “Bad Social Institutions” are a legacy of the past; but they are defined not by their “badness” but by their “past-ness.” Thus, the liberal argument is that they must be changed because they are “past,” even if they are not bad, even if they are good.
Our history is littered with the attempts to substitute “old” rights-violating institutions for “new” rights-violating institutions. What the culture has lost sight of is the vision to change a rights-violating institution into a non-rights-violating institution. I can’t remember the last time I saw that happen, either in 1964 or today.
IGNORANCE
In addressing the second obstacle to a good society, ignorance, Burnham tells us that education must promote rational inquiry. But rational inquiry doesn’t exactly square with his own critical Theory contention that truth cannot be objective.
Thus he crafts a lengthy description of how the education establishment’s attitude toward ignorance has emphasized curricula programmed to inculcate those values aligning with the list of nineteen liberal beliefs. We get glimpses into the early manifestations of critical Theory upon formal education with the example of “freedom of expression” being taught to refer only to the truth of majority consensus — allowing allegiance to the notion that there is no objective truth.
BASIC AXIOMS AND PRINCIPLES
Much ado is made of the point that 1964 liberalism has no effectiveness against the Left — and hence Communism is left to metastasize around the globe. Meanwhile, the same liberalism has been effective in stopping the Right’s attempt to preserve the various manifestations of liberty.
Burnham miscalculates his prediction that Communism will “achieve world power before the end of this century” (p. 288); but he did not miscalculate that the elements of authoritarianism and statism would continue to expand globally, including within the United States. And perhaps his biggest miscalculation of all was to presume that the Right would in any way resist the juggernaut of vicious, ever-expanding nationalism. He may be turning in his grave over the Right’s role in leading the charge!
I see where James Burnham died in 1987, at which point I had his book in my possession for 15 years, still unread. The century finally came to an end without Communist world domination; but something just as dangerous had taken control: the irrationality of postmodernism’s social justice activism had the ear of our political and academic leaders.
In all of the years I wandered around with his unread book, my understanding of liberalism’s content and implications was more imprecise than it had to be. I should have read Burnham’s book back when I first bought it.
November 9, 2021
Unlike his excellent The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, which has stood the time, Suicide of the West is clearly a product of its time and more of a mixed bag. I can see why many critics of contemporary progressive politics ("liberalism" in the American sense) are enthralled by Burnham's seemingly prophetic diagnosis of establishment liberalism in the 21st century, despite the fact that it contains obvious flaws, starting from the loose definition of liberalism. (I will let that slide, since it corresponds to the accepted loose definition of the term in American discourse.) Many see in Burnham someone who successfully stepped outside the establishment discourse (what some neo-reactionaries today would call "The Cathedral"), observed its growth, and jotted down its peculiar features. And indeed, Burnham diagnosed several of the key features of liberalism and forecast the increasingly hegemonizing role of liberal discourse in media and the schools. In so doing, however, he committed several fallacies and dubious assumptions that drag the book down.
The first problem with the book is the pessimistic tone. Burnham measures the Western civilization's success in purely geographical terms, as the extent of the world map under its control or influence. This is a very simplistic viewpoint indeed. A commercial society can be culturally and economically vibrant and dominant without significant colonial or military successes. And even in his own terms, since he views the world through the lens of 19th century colonial geopolitics, Burnham vastly underrates the massive geopolitical influence of the West in the post-WW2 era. In this regard, Burnham, as a pessimistic hawk, overstated the dominance of the Soviet Union. And since the whole book is about the "suicide of the west," the central thesis becomes weak.
The second problem is the book's explicit racism. And I don't mean racism in the diluted sense where everything to the right to Hillary Clinton is racist. I mean racism in the old-fashioned sense of believing in the importance of the differing genetic and cultural abilities of different races. For sure, Burnham is no foaming-at-the-mouth redneck, but he holds some nostalgia for the times of Cecil Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling. Of course, some people on the right are trying to resuscitate this colonial and racist legacy, and for them Burnham provides ample ammunition. And to the extent that uncontrollable immigration flows destabilize Western societies, they have a point that cosmopolitanism has its downside. But Burnham's analysis, here, overstates the case.
The third and related problem is Burnham's steep-leaning ideological bent. It leads to a failure to apply balanced and symmetrical reasoning to the ideological landscape. In other words, although Burnham accurately describes several of the peculiar details of the progressive liberal establishment and the trans-Atlantic alliance that reflects its values, he fails to identify the corollary details of the distinct countervailing groups who oppose it - e.g., rural conservatives, Christian evangelicals, reactionary elites, libertarian free-marketeers, anarchists, communists, etc... For him, "non-liberalism" is a catch-all term for all of these groups, and the book fails to analyse (or even acknowledge) the distinct histories, ideologies, and ethical world views of these groups. He claims, counterfactually, that only "liberalism" is a distinct all-encompassing world view, whereas viewpoints that oppose it are supposedly either common sensical, realistic, or skeptical towards big ideologies. This is patently false, as many people hold strong moral and political views with long historical pedigrees, whether stemming from the Bible or other cultural traditions. The choice, therefore, is often between one totalizing Weltanschauung and another. Liberalism, in this sense, is hardly the Unicorn that he paints it to be. It is simply the dominant ideology of the West. Relatedly, in his skepticism towards the liberal principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press he veers too far towards authoritarianism, which defeats the very purpose of his charge "stifling" liberal discourse, and undermines the credibility of his broader political challenge to liberalism.
However, let me end on an uplifting note. Burnham's analysis, despite the aforementioned problems, can be very illuminating for somebody who is steep in Western establishment liberal discourse. Indeed, the capacity to step outside of the parameters of acceptable opinion is an endangered species in today's society. A free society requires a healthy mix of different contending ideological dispositions, and to the extent that "liberalism" (in the vague American sense, not in the principled philosophical sense) leads to a hegemonic discourse of vapid platitudes, it should be questioned, challenged, and - if need be - resisted with the power of ideological critique. Although Burnham's book lacks the logical rigour or philosophical depth of a true classic, and although it is blind to its own biases and flaws, it is a worthy participant in the ongoing Kulturkampf whose permanent ramifications - political orders conjured - will outlive its temporary quakes.
The first problem with the book is the pessimistic tone. Burnham measures the Western civilization's success in purely geographical terms, as the extent of the world map under its control or influence. This is a very simplistic viewpoint indeed. A commercial society can be culturally and economically vibrant and dominant without significant colonial or military successes. And even in his own terms, since he views the world through the lens of 19th century colonial geopolitics, Burnham vastly underrates the massive geopolitical influence of the West in the post-WW2 era. In this regard, Burnham, as a pessimistic hawk, overstated the dominance of the Soviet Union. And since the whole book is about the "suicide of the west," the central thesis becomes weak.
The second problem is the book's explicit racism. And I don't mean racism in the diluted sense where everything to the right to Hillary Clinton is racist. I mean racism in the old-fashioned sense of believing in the importance of the differing genetic and cultural abilities of different races. For sure, Burnham is no foaming-at-the-mouth redneck, but he holds some nostalgia for the times of Cecil Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling. Of course, some people on the right are trying to resuscitate this colonial and racist legacy, and for them Burnham provides ample ammunition. And to the extent that uncontrollable immigration flows destabilize Western societies, they have a point that cosmopolitanism has its downside. But Burnham's analysis, here, overstates the case.
The third and related problem is Burnham's steep-leaning ideological bent. It leads to a failure to apply balanced and symmetrical reasoning to the ideological landscape. In other words, although Burnham accurately describes several of the peculiar details of the progressive liberal establishment and the trans-Atlantic alliance that reflects its values, he fails to identify the corollary details of the distinct countervailing groups who oppose it - e.g., rural conservatives, Christian evangelicals, reactionary elites, libertarian free-marketeers, anarchists, communists, etc... For him, "non-liberalism" is a catch-all term for all of these groups, and the book fails to analyse (or even acknowledge) the distinct histories, ideologies, and ethical world views of these groups. He claims, counterfactually, that only "liberalism" is a distinct all-encompassing world view, whereas viewpoints that oppose it are supposedly either common sensical, realistic, or skeptical towards big ideologies. This is patently false, as many people hold strong moral and political views with long historical pedigrees, whether stemming from the Bible or other cultural traditions. The choice, therefore, is often between one totalizing Weltanschauung and another. Liberalism, in this sense, is hardly the Unicorn that he paints it to be. It is simply the dominant ideology of the West. Relatedly, in his skepticism towards the liberal principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press he veers too far towards authoritarianism, which defeats the very purpose of his charge "stifling" liberal discourse, and undermines the credibility of his broader political challenge to liberalism.
However, let me end on an uplifting note. Burnham's analysis, despite the aforementioned problems, can be very illuminating for somebody who is steep in Western establishment liberal discourse. Indeed, the capacity to step outside of the parameters of acceptable opinion is an endangered species in today's society. A free society requires a healthy mix of different contending ideological dispositions, and to the extent that "liberalism" (in the vague American sense, not in the principled philosophical sense) leads to a hegemonic discourse of vapid platitudes, it should be questioned, challenged, and - if need be - resisted with the power of ideological critique. Although Burnham's book lacks the logical rigour or philosophical depth of a true classic, and although it is blind to its own biases and flaws, it is a worthy participant in the ongoing Kulturkampf whose permanent ramifications - political orders conjured - will outlive its temporary quakes.
June 24, 2024
The Suicide of the West by James Burnham is an influential work of political philosophy that was written in 1964, during the Cold War era and amidst the birth of the New Left and related countercultural movement activities. It fits in a long right-wing tradition of polemics on Western declinism, though it may be its most thoughtful and incisive iteration. Possibly more familiar to contemporary readers of politics, Jonah Goldberg has authored a book of the same title but makes a contrasting argument despite sharing a similar perspective. In other words, Burnham sees civilizational failure as the natural endpoint of liberalism, while Goldberg sees the abandonment of certain features of liberalism as heralding a decline of the West.
Burnham, a former Trotskyite turned co-founder of National Review, argues that liberalism, the dominant ideology of Western civilization, is leading to its decline and eventual collapse. Burnham contends that liberalism is not equipped to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in his time, such as communism, totalitarianism, and social decay. He claims that liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society, eroding its intellectual, moral, and spiritual foundations. He also asserts that liberalism is out of touch with reality, and that it prevents Western civilization from defending itself against its enemies. Burnham warns that unless Western civilization abandons liberalism and adopts a more realistic and positive worldview, it will succumb.
The Suicide of the West is divided into four parts: The Nature of Liberalism, The Sources of Liberalism, The Consequences of Liberalism, and The Fate of Liberalism. Burnham starts by defining liberalism as "a set of beliefs about the nature of man, society, and the world" that is based on "the principles of liberty, equality, democracy, progress, tolerance, and social justice." He distinguishes liberalism from other ideologies, such as conservatism, socialism, fascism, and communism. He also identifies the main features of liberalism, such as its rationalism, humanitarianism, universalism, relativism, and optimism. Despite this definition's similarity to what many call "Classical Liberalism" or libertarianism or neoliberalism, I think Burnham's conception is quite a bit narrower. Often his critique is trained more on the psychological proclivities and unreflective rhetoric of those who would be identified as Progressives or Social Democrats or socialists today. There is certainly overlap in these different ideological systems so for the sake of the review, I'll accept Burnham's definition despite having a more capacious definition of liberalism personally.
In the book's second portion, Burnham traces the historical origins of liberalism to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He argues that liberalism emerged as a reaction to the feudal and aristocratic order of the Middle Ages, and as a response to the challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and imperialism. He also examines the intellectual progenitors of liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, and Darwin. This section is a somewhat pat intellectual history that appears in many works on liberalism. It would have been interesting to have Burnham engage more directly with these thinkers, though this would have made for a longer and less punchy work.
In part three, Burnham analyzes the effects of liberalism on Western civilization. He claims that liberalism has weakened the moral and spiritual foundations of Western culture, by undermining its religion, tradition, authority, and patriotism. He also argues that liberalism has eroded the political and economic stability of Western society, by promoting class conflict, social unrest, welfare dependency, inflation, and corruption. He further asserts that liberalism has endangered the security and survival of Western civilization, by failing to confront and resist its external enemies, such as communism and totalitarianism. Apart from this last point, many of Burnham's arguments are tendered by the post-liberals of today. However, today's critics of liberal are less concerned with the maintenance of the American creed, and more concerned with restoring a recognizably human civil society.
In the final section, Burnham predicts the future of liberalism and Western civilization. He asserts that liberalism is doomed to collapse under its own contradictions and failures. He foresees that Western civilization will either commit suicide by surrendering to its enemies or abandoning its values; or it will undergo a revival by renouncing liberalism and embracing a new ideology that is more realistic and positive. He suggests that such a new ideology could be based on the principles of nationalism, elitism, discipline, order, and faith.
3-4 generations later Burnham's prediction has not materialized (not that we can completely foreclose that possibility). However, I don't think this should much count against Burnham's points. He's expressing an ideological position that cites certain empirical realities, especially those concerning human nature, that highlight some of the weakness of a popular and effective but flawed ideology that pervades society (probably more so in our day than his actually).
It is important to reckon with the fact that human moral and aesthetic proclivities will vary, and we have to have a way of managing this disagreements. Ironically, the best system for this is probably liberalism, but it should be a liberalism that is tempered by many of the complaints Burnham raises. For instance, the meliorist impulse of a liberal society should be restrained so that it does try and achieve impossible, ultra-egalitarian ends.
This is certainly an engaging and provocative read that more contemporary cheerleaders and critics of liberalism should pick up.
Burnham, a former Trotskyite turned co-founder of National Review, argues that liberalism, the dominant ideology of Western civilization, is leading to its decline and eventual collapse. Burnham contends that liberalism is not equipped to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in his time, such as communism, totalitarianism, and social decay. He claims that liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society, eroding its intellectual, moral, and spiritual foundations. He also asserts that liberalism is out of touch with reality, and that it prevents Western civilization from defending itself against its enemies. Burnham warns that unless Western civilization abandons liberalism and adopts a more realistic and positive worldview, it will succumb.
The Suicide of the West is divided into four parts: The Nature of Liberalism, The Sources of Liberalism, The Consequences of Liberalism, and The Fate of Liberalism. Burnham starts by defining liberalism as "a set of beliefs about the nature of man, society, and the world" that is based on "the principles of liberty, equality, democracy, progress, tolerance, and social justice." He distinguishes liberalism from other ideologies, such as conservatism, socialism, fascism, and communism. He also identifies the main features of liberalism, such as its rationalism, humanitarianism, universalism, relativism, and optimism. Despite this definition's similarity to what many call "Classical Liberalism" or libertarianism or neoliberalism, I think Burnham's conception is quite a bit narrower. Often his critique is trained more on the psychological proclivities and unreflective rhetoric of those who would be identified as Progressives or Social Democrats or socialists today. There is certainly overlap in these different ideological systems so for the sake of the review, I'll accept Burnham's definition despite having a more capacious definition of liberalism personally.
In the book's second portion, Burnham traces the historical origins of liberalism to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He argues that liberalism emerged as a reaction to the feudal and aristocratic order of the Middle Ages, and as a response to the challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and imperialism. He also examines the intellectual progenitors of liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, and Darwin. This section is a somewhat pat intellectual history that appears in many works on liberalism. It would have been interesting to have Burnham engage more directly with these thinkers, though this would have made for a longer and less punchy work.
In part three, Burnham analyzes the effects of liberalism on Western civilization. He claims that liberalism has weakened the moral and spiritual foundations of Western culture, by undermining its religion, tradition, authority, and patriotism. He also argues that liberalism has eroded the political and economic stability of Western society, by promoting class conflict, social unrest, welfare dependency, inflation, and corruption. He further asserts that liberalism has endangered the security and survival of Western civilization, by failing to confront and resist its external enemies, such as communism and totalitarianism. Apart from this last point, many of Burnham's arguments are tendered by the post-liberals of today. However, today's critics of liberal are less concerned with the maintenance of the American creed, and more concerned with restoring a recognizably human civil society.
In the final section, Burnham predicts the future of liberalism and Western civilization. He asserts that liberalism is doomed to collapse under its own contradictions and failures. He foresees that Western civilization will either commit suicide by surrendering to its enemies or abandoning its values; or it will undergo a revival by renouncing liberalism and embracing a new ideology that is more realistic and positive. He suggests that such a new ideology could be based on the principles of nationalism, elitism, discipline, order, and faith.
3-4 generations later Burnham's prediction has not materialized (not that we can completely foreclose that possibility). However, I don't think this should much count against Burnham's points. He's expressing an ideological position that cites certain empirical realities, especially those concerning human nature, that highlight some of the weakness of a popular and effective but flawed ideology that pervades society (probably more so in our day than his actually).
It is important to reckon with the fact that human moral and aesthetic proclivities will vary, and we have to have a way of managing this disagreements. Ironically, the best system for this is probably liberalism, but it should be a liberalism that is tempered by many of the complaints Burnham raises. For instance, the meliorist impulse of a liberal society should be restrained so that it does try and achieve impossible, ultra-egalitarian ends.
This is certainly an engaging and provocative read that more contemporary cheerleaders and critics of liberalism should pick up.
January 25, 2022
It's impressive for a book of this kind to remain profoundly relevant over a half-century after publication. And this relevance is unarguable despite the book discussing at length several situations that have been completely mooted by subsequent events. In places, Burnham is downright prescient. As just one example of many, he's discussing the liberal tendency to respond to situations that require a strong response with a "dribble of force." I'm reading this at the same moment of time that the government is announcing the deployment of 8000 troops to Ukraine.
So after all this, why 4 stars instead of 5? Because the book is overly academic. Many good points are extend beyond the merely tedious to the downright pedantic. Several portions are so excessively detailed as to become soporific. Trimming 20-25% of the extra verbiage would make the book much better. Even so, it's a must read.
So after all this, why 4 stars instead of 5? Because the book is overly academic. Many good points are extend beyond the merely tedious to the downright pedantic. Several portions are so excessively detailed as to become soporific. Trimming 20-25% of the extra verbiage would make the book much better. Even so, it's a must read.
November 10, 2021
Burnham makes good points, but this book suffers from spending its entire time talking about how to define liberalism, who believes in liberalism, and why. To understand his argument on why liberalism leads to suicide, read the first and last chapters.
You can hear pieces of his argument in what Fukuyama would eventually argue in full. But otherwise, Burnham spends all his time defining the “meaning” and “definition” of liberalism, and very little on the destiny part.
You can hear pieces of his argument in what Fukuyama would eventually argue in full. But otherwise, Burnham spends all his time defining the “meaning” and “definition” of liberalism, and very little on the destiny part.
December 28, 2022
Burnham argues that "liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide."
He presents liberalism as an ideological belief in nineteen different axioms, making that case over several chapters. He then simplifies his case somewhat and articulates liberalism as a preference for some classical values over others -- that the conservative would prefer, in this order:
Liberty
Freedom
Peace
Justice
While the modern liberal would prefer them thusly:
Peace
Justice
Freedom
Liberty
The articulation of the nineteen liberal axioms, side by side with their conservative, non-ideological opposites, is alone enough to shed light on the current milieu.
Recommended.
He presents liberalism as an ideological belief in nineteen different axioms, making that case over several chapters. He then simplifies his case somewhat and articulates liberalism as a preference for some classical values over others -- that the conservative would prefer, in this order:
Liberty
Freedom
Peace
Justice
While the modern liberal would prefer them thusly:
Peace
Justice
Freedom
Liberty
The articulation of the nineteen liberal axioms, side by side with their conservative, non-ideological opposites, is alone enough to shed light on the current milieu.
Recommended.
March 28, 2018
I'd heard James Burnham referenced quite a bit in conservative circles, but had, for one reason or another (mostly time constraints) had to defer getting to him. "Suicide of the West" was my first introduction to his work (aside from an aphorism read here and there). The title was obviously an influence on later polemics. "Suicide of the [Fill in the Blank]" is a favorite with the Buchananite right. And while there's some ideological overlap with Pat Buchanan and James Burnham, there are some large distinctions, i.e. Burnham's belief that an American retreat from empire and the world police role is a sign of weakness and harbinger of the sun setting over the Occident, whereas there's nothing the paleo-conservatives would like more than to pull out of almost everywhere (especially Israel).
A large portion of the book is taken up with James Burnham giving a taxonomy of what liberalism is and how it morphed in the twentieth century to elevate peace above liberty. This, in Burnham's view, has now grown into a sort of way to rationalize every loss of Western power at the hands of nations whose democracy ends with calling themselves democratic, and whose true nature is usually bloody and corrupt in the extreme. Burnham is not a flamethrower, a la most modern conservatives, like Anne Coulter, and since he was a creature of the left at one point (even keeping up a correspondence with Trotsky), he can explicate the essence of liberalism and explain its roots better than most of the people who call themselves liberal. He can also explain exactly where and how it diverges or aligns with harder left ideologies, without descending into paranoid hyperbole, which is a major problem these days when anyone who wants their grandma to be able to purchase her medicine is deemed a "commie" and anyone who thinks maybe we shouldn't grant citizenship to drug dealers with face tattoos is a "Nazi".
Ultimately, "Suicide of the West" is not about how liberalism is the cause of the ills of the West, but how liberalism has developed as a way to rationalize self-loathing, justify the unjustifiable, and to believe that all human defects are correctable. It should go without saying that, if you agree with Burnham's diagnosis, then things have only gotten worse since he died. The Neoconservative takeover and demolition of the Republican Party and large swaths of the Middle East is complete, and the neoliberal asset-stripping and piracy of Wall-Street have only accelerated every negative pathology Burnham attributes to liberalism. And anyone whose views are even a faint echo of Burnham's have no place at his old stomping grounds, "National Review," let alone in polite company or the wider discourse. Conservatism by its very nature and definition is not supposed to "get with the times" which makes every conservative media outlet and think tank a form of, as Burnham would have it, appeasement on the installment plan.
As for the writing itself, James Burnham has a good sense of humor, a keen ability to turn a phrase, and is obviously a learned man on a diverse set of subjects. But the levity is offset by the fact that both the rigor James Burnham displays in this work as well as the country he is writing about have already been consigned to the dustbin of history, most probably. Burnham wasn't a fatalist (odd for a conservative with somewhat Spenglerian cast of mind), so he wouldn't share my view that it's over, and he even cited this book itself in the closing pages as an argument that all might not be lost. I hope he's right, and if not, may he at least rest in peace.
A large portion of the book is taken up with James Burnham giving a taxonomy of what liberalism is and how it morphed in the twentieth century to elevate peace above liberty. This, in Burnham's view, has now grown into a sort of way to rationalize every loss of Western power at the hands of nations whose democracy ends with calling themselves democratic, and whose true nature is usually bloody and corrupt in the extreme. Burnham is not a flamethrower, a la most modern conservatives, like Anne Coulter, and since he was a creature of the left at one point (even keeping up a correspondence with Trotsky), he can explicate the essence of liberalism and explain its roots better than most of the people who call themselves liberal. He can also explain exactly where and how it diverges or aligns with harder left ideologies, without descending into paranoid hyperbole, which is a major problem these days when anyone who wants their grandma to be able to purchase her medicine is deemed a "commie" and anyone who thinks maybe we shouldn't grant citizenship to drug dealers with face tattoos is a "Nazi".
Ultimately, "Suicide of the West" is not about how liberalism is the cause of the ills of the West, but how liberalism has developed as a way to rationalize self-loathing, justify the unjustifiable, and to believe that all human defects are correctable. It should go without saying that, if you agree with Burnham's diagnosis, then things have only gotten worse since he died. The Neoconservative takeover and demolition of the Republican Party and large swaths of the Middle East is complete, and the neoliberal asset-stripping and piracy of Wall-Street have only accelerated every negative pathology Burnham attributes to liberalism. And anyone whose views are even a faint echo of Burnham's have no place at his old stomping grounds, "National Review," let alone in polite company or the wider discourse. Conservatism by its very nature and definition is not supposed to "get with the times" which makes every conservative media outlet and think tank a form of, as Burnham would have it, appeasement on the installment plan.
As for the writing itself, James Burnham has a good sense of humor, a keen ability to turn a phrase, and is obviously a learned man on a diverse set of subjects. But the levity is offset by the fact that both the rigor James Burnham displays in this work as well as the country he is writing about have already been consigned to the dustbin of history, most probably. Burnham wasn't a fatalist (odd for a conservative with somewhat Spenglerian cast of mind), so he wouldn't share my view that it's over, and he even cited this book itself in the closing pages as an argument that all might not be lost. I hope he's right, and if not, may he at least rest in peace.
January 5, 2023
"Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide."
With those explosive words, Burnham capably constructs his theory about the decline and fall of the West, which many see as inevitable at this point. What Burnham argued nearly sixty years ago has become presciently prophetic, to a degree I believe he would scarcely imagine. I've read this treatise for college courses previously, for the first time in about 2005, for a History Since 1945 upper division course, but this time around, I'm reading it for an online discussion group, so I wanted it to be fresh in memory.
The title is somewhat misleading, however: it should perhaps be alternatively titled "What is a Liberal, and Why Does it Matter?" Burnham's inquiry began decades ago when the author was perusing an old historical atlas from his school days. Therein, with new eyes, he observed from a perspective informed by analyzing trends over millennia, in some cases: nascent empires which rose and fell, represented by variegated colors on the maps. When reaching more modern times, Burnham observed that within "two generations," Western civilization has been indisputably shrinking, beginning largely with the defection of Russia, of all places. From 1917 to 1921, Russia, a formerly highly influential power, not only separated itself from Western civilization but became directly hostile to it, in moral, philosophical and religious, as well as material, political and social dimensions. This open hostility was finally symbolized by the sealing of the borders, which has, culturally, at least, persisted even after the so-called fall of Communism and its Iron Curtain, a notion which should at best be treated with skepticism.
As in the case of several other prominent books I've read recently, Burnham argues yet again for the world that Hitler created: specifically that after WWII the disintegration of "Western Europe" accelerated, with China's isolation and the breakaway of territories over which the West had long held sway, for some cases, centuries. That included, most significantly, Germany itself, which became concealed along with many other contributors to Western Civilization behind the Iron Curtain.
Burnham argues that liberalism, though he is reticent to define it precisely, has held sway in the original "social media" of the day, the newspapers - most prominently the NY times and WaPo - since the 1930s. The second chapter, "What is a Liberal," begs a question as explosive as the question What is A Woman? these days. However, B. does provide a list of telltale queries to determine whether an individual harbors more "liberal" or "conservative" views by the way they answer questions such as "everyone has a right to free, public education," "political, social or economic discrimination based on religious belief is wrong," and "except in cases of a clear threat to national security or, possibly to juvenile morals, censorship is wrong." This list is more comprehensive than many others I've seen, and, despite being rather replete with heavily-laden terms, at least attempts some metric to determine where someone stands on vital issues, if somewhat dated by this list, which was compiled some six decades ago.
The beginning should perhaps start with the end, where he essentially summarizes his thesis. The book is academically oriented in that respect, structured in the manner of a Ph.D. dissertation, perhaps sans extensive literature review. In a nutshell, B. makes the following assertions (since he is so fond of lists!):
1) "Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place. Implicitly, all of this book is merely an amplification of this sentence."
2) "Liberalism is not equipped to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in our time."
The reasons are many and varied. Perhaps at its core, his argument is that the ideology he terms "liberalism" is fatally flawed: "the characteristics of all liberals - or perhaps all ideologies, is that to believe that there are solutions to social problems." We see this manifest in the approach of many well-meaning political leaders, who genuinely believe that they can somehow legislate their way to a solution.
I was, in fact, engaged in just this discussion the other day, regarding the failure of "the government" to take aggressive action to stop mass casualty events. The other individual was advocating, as we are incessantly told, that stricter laws and banning the ownership of certain types of weapons would solve the problem, but therein lies yet another problem: the idea that there is a legislative solution to everything... which there isn't. When I pointed out, for example, that the border is completely unregulated and that untold numbers of illegal goods, including drugs, weapons, endangered species, and, heaven forbid, even slaves, are pouring in on a daily basis, resultant of the seemingly insurmountable obstacle that criminals don't follow laws, which certainly seems to be a supportable argument, the person had no real reply, because there just isn't one.
A related point: B. states that "believing that man's capacity for self-improvement and to achieve complete social harmony and ultimate freedom is borne of the idea of "faith in intelligence," that man can actually do anything. It's yet to be determined whether this is accurate, but I think we can agree, it ain't looking good. B. further states, "inside the liberal system of ideas, we have so far found, human nature is changing and plastic, with an indefinitely large potential for progressive development. Through reason, freed from superstition, authority, custom and tradition, human beings can discover the truth and the road toward the betterment of society. There is nothing inherent in human nature that prevents the attainment of peace, freedom, justice and well-being - of, that is, the good society. The obstacles are ignorance and faulty social institutions. Because both theses obstacles are extrinsic and remediable, historical optimism is justified. Social problems can be solved: the good society can be achieved, or at any rate approximated."
He also argues that this is the ideology of, well, the Ideologue, which entails further faulty reasoning, or, in some cases, none at all: "All conceivable evidence will be explained away in order to defend the chosen doctrine. It is a characteristic of ideological thinking, whatever the given ideology, that it cannot be refuted by logical analysis or empirical evidence. Actually, the internal logical structure of developed ideology is usually quite good anyway, rather like the logical structure of paranoiac obsessions, which ideologies resemble in other ways also, and when a logical gap appears... sufficient ingenuity can always patch it up again. The ideology is a way of interpreting the world, an attitude toward the world and a method for dealing with the world. So long as I adhere faithfully to the ideology there is no specific happening, no observation or experiment that can unmistakably contradict it. I can always adjust my categories and my attitude to allow for whatever it is that happens or that I observe; if necessary, I can shut my eyes."
Therefore, ideas become so ingrained into the national mentality that we can't think of any other way to be: "the liberal is not devoid of humility: he can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason. But what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems, or a political problem of which there is no 'rational' solution at all. Such a problem must be counterfeit. And the 'rational' solution of any problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution... Of course, the Rationalist is not always a perfectionist in general, his mind governed in each occasion by a comprehensive Utopia; but invariably he is a perfectionist in detail."
Translation: there is no problem which does not have a solution; man IS capable of solving every problem we confront... so confounding issues such as the aforementioned mass casualty events, terrorism and the like, which seem to defy legislative solution, exist because people whose ideas run counter to liberal ideologies are blamed for standing in the way, rather than conceding the very likely probability that some problems simply cannot be legislated to a solution.
And who are those standing in the way: John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," sums up by suggesting that in the liberal view, "the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement... The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is an antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind."
Therefore, "the purpose of genuine education as understood by liberalism is, precisely, to liberate the mind from the crippling hold of custom and all non-rational belief," to include all "myriad beliefs within the range that liberalism regards a non-rational or irrational, as the debris of superstition, prejudice, intuition, habit and custom, would be admitted to he curriculum as miscellaneous data to be studied objectively by psychology, history, anthropology and the social sciences, and so, too religion or rather religions. This from Robespierre during the height of the terror put forward the first law requiring compulsory, but free, stat0funded education, to convert all to this view."
This complex book is as timely as ever. Admittedly, it took me some time to get through, as I had to look up many of the names and references to events with which I was not familiar. The more I read, however, the more I saw modern-day parallels: indeed, many of the figures who were once household names in the 1950s and 60s, have an almost carbon-copy counterpart in the modern day: talking heads in the media/entertainment industry (Stephen Colbert seems the most prominent currently, a name which will likely fade into obscurity in a few decades, only to be replaced by yet another clone); politicians who are pretty much interchangeable, religious leaders, world leaders, and so on. I would make the assertion that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but I think the author would dispute that view. His is that Western civilization, itself a nebulous term difficult to define, is indeed headed for an evermore-dramatic collapse, and that things will certainly not stay the same forever; time will tell whether that dreary prophesy comes to pass - or, rather, when, I suppose.
I include in closing a choice bit of graffito which was scrawled on a wall of a tavern in Pompeii. The passage was written by Wilhelmina Jashemski, one of the most prominent archaeologists to excavate there. “Dr. Della Corte who for many years was Director of the Excavations at Pompeii is busy copying and studying these graffiti as they are called. One day he copied a short poem scratched on a tavern that had just been excavated on the Via dell’ Abbondanza. The same day a pouring rain destroyed the wall and poem. This is what it said:
‘Nothing can last for ever!
When the sun has shone, it sets in the ocean.
The moon, which just now was full, wanes…’”
Professor Jashemski wrote in her memoirs regarding the ancient city’s fragility, which is reflective of our own. When lost in the present, I always strive to look to the past. As an ancient historian, that brings me both comfort and dread. I remain uncertain as to the effect that introspection may have on our longevity; that is, we, unlike ancient civilizations, are aware of our own mortality - we have enough history to know that things don't last forever, and that mighty empires and entire civilizations can indeed simply disappear, which was inconceivable millennia ago. To that end, let us never forget how tenuous complex civilization is, and how fleeing it can be, in the stream of time.
------IMPORTANT PASSAGES-------
"The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us."
-Marquis de Condorcet.
Funny you should mention that...
"Civilization is not a static condition but a dynamic development."
"Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow. 'democracy,' 'equality,' 'popular government,' 'free speech,' 'peace,' 'universal welfare,' 'progress,' are symbols that warm the heart; but the mind has a hard time getting through the smoke that surrounds them."
"I do not suggest that liberalism is "the cause" of the contraction and possible, on the evidence probable, death of Western civilization. I do not know what the cause is of the West's extraordinarily rapid decline, which is most profoundly shown by the deepening loss, among the leaders of the West, of the confidence in themselves and in the unique quality and value of their own civilization, and by a correlated weakening of the Western will to survive. The cause or causes have something to do, I think, with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury; and I suppose, with getting tired, worn out, as all things temporal do. "
"Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution; and this function its formulas will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way: for even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished or altogether collapses, we or our children will be able to see that ending, by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as 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."
"Liberalism has always stressed change, reform, the break with encrusted habit whether in the form of old ideas, old customs or old institutions. Thus liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society; and in point of fact it is through its negative and destructive achievements that liberalism makes its best claim to historical justification."
"Suicide," it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and "bad." Oddly enough, this objection is often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down."
With those explosive words, Burnham capably constructs his theory about the decline and fall of the West, which many see as inevitable at this point. What Burnham argued nearly sixty years ago has become presciently prophetic, to a degree I believe he would scarcely imagine. I've read this treatise for college courses previously, for the first time in about 2005, for a History Since 1945 upper division course, but this time around, I'm reading it for an online discussion group, so I wanted it to be fresh in memory.
The title is somewhat misleading, however: it should perhaps be alternatively titled "What is a Liberal, and Why Does it Matter?" Burnham's inquiry began decades ago when the author was perusing an old historical atlas from his school days. Therein, with new eyes, he observed from a perspective informed by analyzing trends over millennia, in some cases: nascent empires which rose and fell, represented by variegated colors on the maps. When reaching more modern times, Burnham observed that within "two generations," Western civilization has been indisputably shrinking, beginning largely with the defection of Russia, of all places. From 1917 to 1921, Russia, a formerly highly influential power, not only separated itself from Western civilization but became directly hostile to it, in moral, philosophical and religious, as well as material, political and social dimensions. This open hostility was finally symbolized by the sealing of the borders, which has, culturally, at least, persisted even after the so-called fall of Communism and its Iron Curtain, a notion which should at best be treated with skepticism.
As in the case of several other prominent books I've read recently, Burnham argues yet again for the world that Hitler created: specifically that after WWII the disintegration of "Western Europe" accelerated, with China's isolation and the breakaway of territories over which the West had long held sway, for some cases, centuries. That included, most significantly, Germany itself, which became concealed along with many other contributors to Western Civilization behind the Iron Curtain.
Burnham argues that liberalism, though he is reticent to define it precisely, has held sway in the original "social media" of the day, the newspapers - most prominently the NY times and WaPo - since the 1930s. The second chapter, "What is a Liberal," begs a question as explosive as the question What is A Woman? these days. However, B. does provide a list of telltale queries to determine whether an individual harbors more "liberal" or "conservative" views by the way they answer questions such as "everyone has a right to free, public education," "political, social or economic discrimination based on religious belief is wrong," and "except in cases of a clear threat to national security or, possibly to juvenile morals, censorship is wrong." This list is more comprehensive than many others I've seen, and, despite being rather replete with heavily-laden terms, at least attempts some metric to determine where someone stands on vital issues, if somewhat dated by this list, which was compiled some six decades ago.
The beginning should perhaps start with the end, where he essentially summarizes his thesis. The book is academically oriented in that respect, structured in the manner of a Ph.D. dissertation, perhaps sans extensive literature review. In a nutshell, B. makes the following assertions (since he is so fond of lists!):
1) "Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place. Implicitly, all of this book is merely an amplification of this sentence."
2) "Liberalism is not equipped to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in our time."
The reasons are many and varied. Perhaps at its core, his argument is that the ideology he terms "liberalism" is fatally flawed: "the characteristics of all liberals - or perhaps all ideologies, is that to believe that there are solutions to social problems." We see this manifest in the approach of many well-meaning political leaders, who genuinely believe that they can somehow legislate their way to a solution.
I was, in fact, engaged in just this discussion the other day, regarding the failure of "the government" to take aggressive action to stop mass casualty events. The other individual was advocating, as we are incessantly told, that stricter laws and banning the ownership of certain types of weapons would solve the problem, but therein lies yet another problem: the idea that there is a legislative solution to everything... which there isn't. When I pointed out, for example, that the border is completely unregulated and that untold numbers of illegal goods, including drugs, weapons, endangered species, and, heaven forbid, even slaves, are pouring in on a daily basis, resultant of the seemingly insurmountable obstacle that criminals don't follow laws, which certainly seems to be a supportable argument, the person had no real reply, because there just isn't one.
A related point: B. states that "believing that man's capacity for self-improvement and to achieve complete social harmony and ultimate freedom is borne of the idea of "faith in intelligence," that man can actually do anything. It's yet to be determined whether this is accurate, but I think we can agree, it ain't looking good. B. further states, "inside the liberal system of ideas, we have so far found, human nature is changing and plastic, with an indefinitely large potential for progressive development. Through reason, freed from superstition, authority, custom and tradition, human beings can discover the truth and the road toward the betterment of society. There is nothing inherent in human nature that prevents the attainment of peace, freedom, justice and well-being - of, that is, the good society. The obstacles are ignorance and faulty social institutions. Because both theses obstacles are extrinsic and remediable, historical optimism is justified. Social problems can be solved: the good society can be achieved, or at any rate approximated."
He also argues that this is the ideology of, well, the Ideologue, which entails further faulty reasoning, or, in some cases, none at all: "All conceivable evidence will be explained away in order to defend the chosen doctrine. It is a characteristic of ideological thinking, whatever the given ideology, that it cannot be refuted by logical analysis or empirical evidence. Actually, the internal logical structure of developed ideology is usually quite good anyway, rather like the logical structure of paranoiac obsessions, which ideologies resemble in other ways also, and when a logical gap appears... sufficient ingenuity can always patch it up again. The ideology is a way of interpreting the world, an attitude toward the world and a method for dealing with the world. So long as I adhere faithfully to the ideology there is no specific happening, no observation or experiment that can unmistakably contradict it. I can always adjust my categories and my attitude to allow for whatever it is that happens or that I observe; if necessary, I can shut my eyes."
Therefore, ideas become so ingrained into the national mentality that we can't think of any other way to be: "the liberal is not devoid of humility: he can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason. But what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems, or a political problem of which there is no 'rational' solution at all. Such a problem must be counterfeit. And the 'rational' solution of any problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution... Of course, the Rationalist is not always a perfectionist in general, his mind governed in each occasion by a comprehensive Utopia; but invariably he is a perfectionist in detail."
Translation: there is no problem which does not have a solution; man IS capable of solving every problem we confront... so confounding issues such as the aforementioned mass casualty events, terrorism and the like, which seem to defy legislative solution, exist because people whose ideas run counter to liberal ideologies are blamed for standing in the way, rather than conceding the very likely probability that some problems simply cannot be legislated to a solution.
And who are those standing in the way: John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," sums up by suggesting that in the liberal view, "the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement... The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is an antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind."
Therefore, "the purpose of genuine education as understood by liberalism is, precisely, to liberate the mind from the crippling hold of custom and all non-rational belief," to include all "myriad beliefs within the range that liberalism regards a non-rational or irrational, as the debris of superstition, prejudice, intuition, habit and custom, would be admitted to he curriculum as miscellaneous data to be studied objectively by psychology, history, anthropology and the social sciences, and so, too religion or rather religions. This from Robespierre during the height of the terror put forward the first law requiring compulsory, but free, stat0funded education, to convert all to this view."
This complex book is as timely as ever. Admittedly, it took me some time to get through, as I had to look up many of the names and references to events with which I was not familiar. The more I read, however, the more I saw modern-day parallels: indeed, many of the figures who were once household names in the 1950s and 60s, have an almost carbon-copy counterpart in the modern day: talking heads in the media/entertainment industry (Stephen Colbert seems the most prominent currently, a name which will likely fade into obscurity in a few decades, only to be replaced by yet another clone); politicians who are pretty much interchangeable, religious leaders, world leaders, and so on. I would make the assertion that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but I think the author would dispute that view. His is that Western civilization, itself a nebulous term difficult to define, is indeed headed for an evermore-dramatic collapse, and that things will certainly not stay the same forever; time will tell whether that dreary prophesy comes to pass - or, rather, when, I suppose.
I include in closing a choice bit of graffito which was scrawled on a wall of a tavern in Pompeii. The passage was written by Wilhelmina Jashemski, one of the most prominent archaeologists to excavate there. “Dr. Della Corte who for many years was Director of the Excavations at Pompeii is busy copying and studying these graffiti as they are called. One day he copied a short poem scratched on a tavern that had just been excavated on the Via dell’ Abbondanza. The same day a pouring rain destroyed the wall and poem. This is what it said:
‘Nothing can last for ever!
When the sun has shone, it sets in the ocean.
The moon, which just now was full, wanes…’”
Professor Jashemski wrote in her memoirs regarding the ancient city’s fragility, which is reflective of our own. When lost in the present, I always strive to look to the past. As an ancient historian, that brings me both comfort and dread. I remain uncertain as to the effect that introspection may have on our longevity; that is, we, unlike ancient civilizations, are aware of our own mortality - we have enough history to know that things don't last forever, and that mighty empires and entire civilizations can indeed simply disappear, which was inconceivable millennia ago. To that end, let us never forget how tenuous complex civilization is, and how fleeing it can be, in the stream of time.
------IMPORTANT PASSAGES-------
"The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us."
-Marquis de Condorcet.
Funny you should mention that...
"Civilization is not a static condition but a dynamic development."
"Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow. 'democracy,' 'equality,' 'popular government,' 'free speech,' 'peace,' 'universal welfare,' 'progress,' are symbols that warm the heart; but the mind has a hard time getting through the smoke that surrounds them."
"I do not suggest that liberalism is "the cause" of the contraction and possible, on the evidence probable, death of Western civilization. I do not know what the cause is of the West's extraordinarily rapid decline, which is most profoundly shown by the deepening loss, among the leaders of the West, of the confidence in themselves and in the unique quality and value of their own civilization, and by a correlated weakening of the Western will to survive. The cause or causes have something to do, I think, with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury; and I suppose, with getting tired, worn out, as all things temporal do. "
"Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution; and this function its formulas will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way: for even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished or altogether collapses, we or our children will be able to see that ending, by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as 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."
"Liberalism has always stressed change, reform, the break with encrusted habit whether in the form of old ideas, old customs or old institutions. Thus liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society; and in point of fact it is through its negative and destructive achievements that liberalism makes its best claim to historical justification."
"Suicide," it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and "bad." Oddly enough, this objection is often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down."
March 11, 2017
First off, how do you even kill a country? Seems to be treated as more than a metaphor here. A psychological disease, transmitted through the intellect. Plaque around its beating heart. That conservatism is healthier. Better for you. Like cold showers and oatbran. Interesting. But I don't even know if that's what the book wanted to be interesting about itself.
July 27, 2011
Written in 1964, it is a powerful indictment of "Liberalism" and its logical end. It was a little weird to read this in a post-Reagan and post-USSR world, but it was still relevant and illuminating. Chapter 9 on the "Order of Values" should be read by all, before Obama takes the oath.
May 2, 2017
An alternative title for this would be The Decline of Western Liberalism. This was the best essay of definition and criticism of what Burham calls the ideology of liberalism. I found this book helpful in understanding the assumptions behind sentiments in political discourse.
November 8, 2018
8/10 - non-fiction
April 22, 2018
As a rabid anti-communist and former Trotskyist Burnham viewed the world on both world historical and systemic terms. He believed in objective political analysis and put forth sweeping claims. For more: read George Orwell’s Second Thoughts on James Burnham.
Burnham argued the West was committing suicide on a global scale because of its unrelenting adherence to the doctrine of (modern) liberalism. He wrote scathingly of modern liberalism most likely because it shares a close resemblance with communism in which they both have a combination of historical determinism and radical Pelagianism. Liberalism, according to Burnham, made the West feel a constant guilt and undermined its confidence even in its own institutions. He feared the West might have lost the Cold War to zealous communism—keep in mind this was published in 1964.
Burnham argued that an enemy on the Right was imperative to modern liberalism and when this enemy wasn’t apparent or existent “liberalism must invent him.” Hence fascism has “a prominence that has no objective historical justification.”
He presented 39 tenets of modern liberalism and for one to pass as a liberal one must agree with 85% of them. Reading them in 2018 shows how much liberalism has influenced the Right as many conservatives would agree with the tenets as well. As the saying goes, “Conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit.”
Despite being a non-ideologue and pragmatist his core thinking ability in 1964 mirrors some traits of today’s far-right, as in: neoreactionary analyses of Leftism, the alt-right’s declensionism, and general fears of the Left’s pathological altruism.
I recommend this book to people interested in (apocalyptic declinist) liberal critique during the 60s, or those interested in the viewpoints of an ex-Trotskyist who worked for the OSS and co-founded The National Review.
Burnham argued the West was committing suicide on a global scale because of its unrelenting adherence to the doctrine of (modern) liberalism. He wrote scathingly of modern liberalism most likely because it shares a close resemblance with communism in which they both have a combination of historical determinism and radical Pelagianism. Liberalism, according to Burnham, made the West feel a constant guilt and undermined its confidence even in its own institutions. He feared the West might have lost the Cold War to zealous communism—keep in mind this was published in 1964.
Burnham argued that an enemy on the Right was imperative to modern liberalism and when this enemy wasn’t apparent or existent “liberalism must invent him.” Hence fascism has “a prominence that has no objective historical justification.”
He presented 39 tenets of modern liberalism and for one to pass as a liberal one must agree with 85% of them. Reading them in 2018 shows how much liberalism has influenced the Right as many conservatives would agree with the tenets as well. As the saying goes, “Conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit.”
Despite being a non-ideologue and pragmatist his core thinking ability in 1964 mirrors some traits of today’s far-right, as in: neoreactionary analyses of Leftism, the alt-right’s declensionism, and general fears of the Left’s pathological altruism.
I recommend this book to people interested in (apocalyptic declinist) liberal critique during the 60s, or those interested in the viewpoints of an ex-Trotskyist who worked for the OSS and co-founded The National Review.
January 31, 2022
Burnham thinks that the West is probably in terminal decline, arguably slowly committing suicide. He does not contend that liberalism is the cause of the decline, but rather its ideology. He argues that liberalism’s indispensable function, and the source of its popularity, is akin to that of a comforting nurse in an assisted suicide facility (since such places did not exist in his day, he uses “the murmuring of a mother to a child who is gravely ill”).
Few books could aspire to be as prophetic and accurate as this one 58 years after they were written. I thought Burnham was going to miss that the Left’s ardently professed love of free speech proved to be a pose and a cynical lie, to be renounced when they had the whip hand. But then I read “liberals began in 1962 to develop the doctrine that words which are ‘inherently offensive’, as far-Right but not communist words seem to be, do not come under the free speech mantle”. The writing is first rate.
Although Burnham says the causes of the decline are beyond the scope of the book and does not explore them in any detail, I think he does hint at them in his discussions of liberal guilt and self-loathing, moral relativism/non-judgmentalism/permissiveness, loss of traditional moorings, and loss of faith and self-confidence. He also directs the reader to Oswald Spengler and Arnold Joseph Toynbee with regard to the causes.
Those interested in sampling a much shorter version of this book could productively read Chapter 1 and the last three chapters without missing much, which would cut its length from 306 to 70 pages. The intervening chapters are concerned with laying a solid foundation by demonstrating with logic and example certain points about liberalism. However, those points will be glaringly self-evident to most people.
Few books could aspire to be as prophetic and accurate as this one 58 years after they were written. I thought Burnham was going to miss that the Left’s ardently professed love of free speech proved to be a pose and a cynical lie, to be renounced when they had the whip hand. But then I read “liberals began in 1962 to develop the doctrine that words which are ‘inherently offensive’, as far-Right but not communist words seem to be, do not come under the free speech mantle”. The writing is first rate.
Although Burnham says the causes of the decline are beyond the scope of the book and does not explore them in any detail, I think he does hint at them in his discussions of liberal guilt and self-loathing, moral relativism/non-judgmentalism/permissiveness, loss of traditional moorings, and loss of faith and self-confidence. He also directs the reader to Oswald Spengler and Arnold Joseph Toynbee with regard to the causes.
Those interested in sampling a much shorter version of this book could productively read Chapter 1 and the last three chapters without missing much, which would cut its length from 306 to 70 pages. The intervening chapters are concerned with laying a solid foundation by demonstrating with logic and example certain points about liberalism. However, those points will be glaringly self-evident to most people.
January 12, 2024
The philosophy of “I know it when I see it.” The author uses vibes to claim that western civilization is killing itself. He briefly pretends there is some mathematical framework to this belief but it’s just the idea that colonialism was cool and now it’s not, as well as communism’s rarity before 1903 and popularity now, hence the west is doomed.
He dispels all hope of properly addressing this imagined problem when he says that the analysis will limit itself to the US. It is like your doctor saying “I have some bad news” followed by a rant about high crime for the rest of the appointment. Burnham does in fact look outside the US in chapter 6 and beyond, finally showing just how vile his ideas are. There is also a blurb about genetics that has aged terribly.
Burnham dedicates the majority of this work to define liberalism. It’s a confusing decision since it doesn’t help to illuminate his claimed problem, he even says liberalism isn’t the problem. It is distracting from his thesis, which might be the point. It boils down to the idea that liberalism defaults to assuming a good potential in others and the idea that reform improves society because there is no endpoint to justice. His analysis is weak but not entirely free of value. Burnham’s name may be forgotten outside of the far right, his for of reactionary political theory is hard to take seriously today, but unfortunately his influence is still pervasive throughout US politics.
To his credit, Burnham isn’t against the reconstruction amendments when it comes to US citizens. He also pushes back against the most hideous forms of antisemitism. However, these stances are purely in a libertarian frame. Ethical concerns outside of the US are beyond the scope of the book while fear of otherness is not. Burnham is also correct that US political theory in the early 20th century was extremely naive and ill equipped to understand the world, his attempts to correct this just add to that claim.
Why do I enjoy reading old works like this? If ever I question the need to reform, these historical thinkers will remove all doubts. When I wonder if the US conservatism of the past was more reasonable than today’s, Burnham smacks some sense back into me.
He dispels all hope of properly addressing this imagined problem when he says that the analysis will limit itself to the US. It is like your doctor saying “I have some bad news” followed by a rant about high crime for the rest of the appointment. Burnham does in fact look outside the US in chapter 6 and beyond, finally showing just how vile his ideas are. There is also a blurb about genetics that has aged terribly.
Burnham dedicates the majority of this work to define liberalism. It’s a confusing decision since it doesn’t help to illuminate his claimed problem, he even says liberalism isn’t the problem. It is distracting from his thesis, which might be the point. It boils down to the idea that liberalism defaults to assuming a good potential in others and the idea that reform improves society because there is no endpoint to justice. His analysis is weak but not entirely free of value. Burnham’s name may be forgotten outside of the far right, his for of reactionary political theory is hard to take seriously today, but unfortunately his influence is still pervasive throughout US politics.
To his credit, Burnham isn’t against the reconstruction amendments when it comes to US citizens. He also pushes back against the most hideous forms of antisemitism. However, these stances are purely in a libertarian frame. Ethical concerns outside of the US are beyond the scope of the book while fear of otherness is not. Burnham is also correct that US political theory in the early 20th century was extremely naive and ill equipped to understand the world, his attempts to correct this just add to that claim.
Why do I enjoy reading old works like this? If ever I question the need to reform, these historical thinkers will remove all doubts. When I wonder if the US conservatism of the past was more reasonable than today’s, Burnham smacks some sense back into me.
December 6, 2018
I am a traditionalist conservative. I read this book, because Clyde N. Wilson mentioned it in one of his books as having been definitive in his early life as being the test for young conservatives. Burnham, in this book, lists 19 criteria for being a liberal. He insists that conservatives would have an opposite stance. Unfortunately, Burnham's criteria have little to do with principles that constitute traditionalist conservatism. I do not have to believe that noneuropeans are somehow less "civilized" than Europeans in order to be conservative. Nor do I believe that conservatism is the opposite of liberalism in the way that he has defined it. I consider myself strongly conservative, and yet I scored in the eighties on Burham's liberalism test. By that score, he would call me a liberal, which no liberal would accept anymore than I would. Burham's idea of a conservative is the average person's definition of a redneck Neo-Nazi. Conservatism is just a different philosophical school of thought from liberalism. Just because liberals consider equality one of the foundational principles of their philosophy doesn't mean that conservatives consider inequality one of their fundamental principles. It's absurd.
Aside from his liberal test, the book was interesting. I do agree that liberalism is leading to the destruction of western civilization. Liberalism's worship of equality has led them to not only denigrate their own heritage, but to place other cultures above their own. Since liberals dominate the education system, they have used it to indoctrinate future generations in their nonsensical philosophy.
Aside from his liberal test, the book was interesting. I do agree that liberalism is leading to the destruction of western civilization. Liberalism's worship of equality has led them to not only denigrate their own heritage, but to place other cultures above their own. Since liberals dominate the education system, they have used it to indoctrinate future generations in their nonsensical philosophy.
February 6, 2021
Liberalism played an important role in reforming western civilization; ending the counterproductive practice of imprisoning debtors, long sentences in harsh prisons which was essentially a death sentence for relatively petty crimes, and grisly public executions. Small minorities of vocal liberals have increased tolerance and representation for those of us who are not elites.
But what happens when this ideology becomes ascendant? What are the consequences for losing reverence for traditions, favoring disarmament, and putting our faith in experts and institutions rather than the average citizen and the community. What happens when equality and pursuit of material abundance becomes a greater priority than survival?
I believe the author was writing this book in frustration over the way that the west was handling conflict. Many American lives had been sacrificed to oppose right-wing dictators in Europe. The Allies handed over half of the West to communist during the Yalta agreement and then promptly engaged them in the cold war; which they planned to win by advancing right wing dictators and strategies of containment (a thoroughly defensive strategy, that could not afford any losses as they would be permanent).
These ideas are relevant in the present year 2021 as we are seeing Liberalism taken too far and largely unopposed in any meaningful way.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who has questions about our culture and future. Most of the book provides an objective view on liberalism and liberals, the remainder is commentary on consequences of liberalsim and where these ideological beliefs may take us in the future.
But what happens when this ideology becomes ascendant? What are the consequences for losing reverence for traditions, favoring disarmament, and putting our faith in experts and institutions rather than the average citizen and the community. What happens when equality and pursuit of material abundance becomes a greater priority than survival?
I believe the author was writing this book in frustration over the way that the west was handling conflict. Many American lives had been sacrificed to oppose right-wing dictators in Europe. The Allies handed over half of the West to communist during the Yalta agreement and then promptly engaged them in the cold war; which they planned to win by advancing right wing dictators and strategies of containment (a thoroughly defensive strategy, that could not afford any losses as they would be permanent).
These ideas are relevant in the present year 2021 as we are seeing Liberalism taken too far and largely unopposed in any meaningful way.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who has questions about our culture and future. Most of the book provides an objective view on liberalism and liberals, the remainder is commentary on consequences of liberalsim and where these ideological beliefs may take us in the future.
September 21, 2022
Burnham's dissection of liberal ideology is spot-on. However, his analysis of particular foreign and domestic policy is not so great, though this only constitutes maybe a third of the book and is not particularly important to his description of liberal ideology. The latter often makes good points in regard to liberal failings, but then asserts common conservative talking points on specific issues without the same level of rigor as applied to liberalism. This is much to his detriment and gives his would-be critics easy ammunition. I rather wish he had refrained, but 14 chapters in he clearly felt himself on a roll. So it goes.
On the whole, I think Burnham gives liberalism a little too much credit insofar as (I believe) it is more a symptom of the decline of Western hegemony than its primary cause. The Fourth Turning and Dalio's Principles For Dealing With the Changing World Order fill in more of this picture from different perspectives. Nevertheless, a society can decline slowly or quickly. Burnham identifies and accurately characterizes a key component which, at its worst, has accelerated decline.
(For what it's worth, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative; I am a crazy anarchist.)
On the whole, I think Burnham gives liberalism a little too much credit insofar as (I believe) it is more a symptom of the decline of Western hegemony than its primary cause. The Fourth Turning and Dalio's Principles For Dealing With the Changing World Order fill in more of this picture from different perspectives. Nevertheless, a society can decline slowly or quickly. Burnham identifies and accurately characterizes a key component which, at its worst, has accelerated decline.
(For what it's worth, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative; I am a crazy anarchist.)
November 14, 2022
An insightful albeit outdated (written in 1964) book by one of the pillars of the conservative movement in the United States, James Burnham. It is an analysis of the condition of the Western civilisation in the XXth century and of a role of liberalism in physical shrinking and decline in power of the West as it was perceived at the time.
I liked elegant and streamlined structure of the treatise, dissecting and measuring the policies, alignment patterns, roots and future of liberalism in a form that is easy to understand and follow. Even though the author clearly believes in the supremacy of some nations and peoples over the others and is overtly pessimistic about the future of the West against the communism, his general attitude and understanding of strengths and weaknesses of liberalism is correct: it is an ideology, an idealistic one at that and it may make the holders of its values to act against their best interest in order to fulfil some higher moral commandments that are easily exploited by the radicals from the left, thus being much more useful in opposition and not in power.
It is an old book and it has some quirks you could expect from the older conservative works, but it is still worth reading as a peculiar and sometimes still relevant outlook on the state of Western civilisation and the position of liberalism in its current controlling structure.
I liked elegant and streamlined structure of the treatise, dissecting and measuring the policies, alignment patterns, roots and future of liberalism in a form that is easy to understand and follow. Even though the author clearly believes in the supremacy of some nations and peoples over the others and is overtly pessimistic about the future of the West against the communism, his general attitude and understanding of strengths and weaknesses of liberalism is correct: it is an ideology, an idealistic one at that and it may make the holders of its values to act against their best interest in order to fulfil some higher moral commandments that are easily exploited by the radicals from the left, thus being much more useful in opposition and not in power.
It is an old book and it has some quirks you could expect from the older conservative works, but it is still worth reading as a peculiar and sometimes still relevant outlook on the state of Western civilisation and the position of liberalism in its current controlling structure.
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