24 March 2024

We Are Closer Than You Think to Civilizational Suicide: Lessons From Burnham

FRANCIS P. SEMPA

Sixty years ago, James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West was published to much acclaim from conservatives and much criticism by liberals. It was Burnham’s last book (other than a collection of his National Review columns titled The War We Are In) and, perhaps, his most pessimistic and prophetic work. Western civilization led by the United States, he wrote, was dying, not because of external challenges but, rather, because of internal decay. The West, in other words, was in the process of committing civilizational suicide. And what caused liberals to ridicule and deride the book was Burnham’s conclusion that liberalism was the “ideology of Western suicide.”

Burnham was viewed by the Left as an apostate. In the early 1930s, he had been an organizer and leading theoretician of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite subset of international communism. He broke with Marxism in 1939–1940 and became a respected member of the intellectual non-communist Left, writing for and helping to edit one of its leading publications, Partisan Review. In 1941, Burnham gained international recognition for his book The Managerial Revolution, which combined brilliant sociopolitical analysis with hardheaded geopolitics. Two years later, Burnham penned The Machiavellians, a book that praised Machiavelli and other European writers who looked behind democratic facades and glimpsed the realities of political power. By 1944, Burnham was working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he wrote one of the earliest predictions of the Cold War that would emerge from the ashes of World War II. After the war, he did consulting work for the newly established Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), helped fight the cultural aspects of the Cold War, wrote a trilogy of books that shrewdly analyzed the ideological and geopolitical threats posed by the Soviet Union, and formulated a strategy for winning the Cold War that was generally followed — consciously or unconsciously — by the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

Burnham’s break with liberals resulted from his criticism of their passive containment strategy toward the Soviet empire and liberals’ unwillingness to confront what he called the communist “web of subversion” within the U.S. government. In 1955, Burnham became a founding editor of William F. Buckley Jr’s National Review and thereafter was the magazine’s dominant theoretician until he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1978. In 1959, he wrote a much-underappreciated book about the nation’s founding principles and governmental structure titled Congress and the American Tradition. That same year, he gave three lectures on “American Liberalism in Theory and Practice” at the Carnegie Institute of Technology; four years later, his set of papers on “Liberalism as the Ideology of Western Suicide” served as the subject of a critical seminar at Princeton. In 1964, Burnham synthesized his Carnegie lectures and Princeton papers into Suicide of the West.

Suicide of the West, as Brian Crozier later explained, dissected liberalism. “One by one, in his manner at once gentle and intellectually ruthless,” Crozier wrote in National Review (“The Political Thought of James Burnham” April 15, 1983), “he shows [liberal ideas] up for the woolly and muddle-headed notions they are.” Burnham’s colleague Jeffrey Hart called Suicide of the West Burnham’s “masterpiece” and “one of the central works of political and cultural reflection of our time” (NR, September 11, 1987).

Burnham’s main theme in the book was that the West was contracting both in terms of geography and values. Interestingly, he did not blame liberalism for causing the West’s contractions. “The cause or causes,” he wrote, “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.” The ideology of liberalism, however, serves to “justify” and “reconcile” us to our decline by diminishing the achievements of our country and Western civilization, ridiculing the notion that the United States and the West are somehow exceptional or superior to other countries and civilizations, deriding the sentiment of nationalism, and promoting a universalism that transcends national sovereignty.

Writing in 1964, Burnham could have been describing the American progressives of 2024. “Modern liberal doctrine,” he wrote, “tends naturally toward internationalist conceptions and the ideal of a democratic world order.” “To the liberal,” Burnham continued, “it has become self-evident that ‘national sovereignty is an outworn concept’ that must be drastically modified if not altogether abandoned.” To the liberal, “[p]atriotism and nationalism … are non-rational and discriminatory. They invidiously divide, segregate, one group of men … from humanity, and do so not in accord with objective merits determined by deliberate reason but as the result of habits, customs, traditions and feelings inherited from the past.” “The duty of the fully enlightened liberal,” Burnham wrote, “is to nothing less than mankind.” Indeed, Burnham noted that for liberals, “patriotism plus Christian faith” must be replaced by “internationalism … that views world affairs in global terms” and recognizes that “there is a multiplicity of interests besides those of our own nation and culture.” Today’s progressives frown upon “America first” and see “white Christian nationalists” as the greatest threat to democracy.

Burnham also noted that American liberals have a “thoroughly instrumentalist interpretation of the Constitution,” believing that “the meaning of the Constitution should be understood as wholly dependent on the time and circumstance.” As if he were looking through a crystal ball, Burnham noted that liberals “are pro-[Supreme] Court when it is handing down liberal decisions, and anti-Court when it is on an anti-liberal swing.” Liberals today promote the dangerous idea of a “living Constitution,” and conservative justices who oppose that notion have suffered the slings and arrows of liberal critics: from Sen. Chuck Schumer’s public threats against conservative justices to the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Left’s unrelenting campaign against Justice Clarence Thomas.

Liberalism, Burnham wrote, applauds diversity in religion and cultures and ridicules as “backward” those Westerners who believe in the superiority of their religion and culture. Hillary Clinton called her fellow citizens who hold such sentiments “deplorables,” while Barack Obama warned against people who cling to their religion and guns. Such liberals applaud the professed idealism of an Alger Hiss and a J. Robert Oppenheimer despite Hiss’ treason and Oppenheimer’s dangerous communist associations. Indeed, Hollywood liberals just honored with several Oscar awards the movie Oppenheimer, which portrays the protagonist as a victim of a McCarthy-era witch hunt instead of the security risk that he was.

Today, liberalism — called progressivism — controls our culture, most of our media, our educational institutions, and, at least for now, the federal government. Burnham’s conclusion of Suicide of the West should make those who cherish the values of nationalism and the achievements of Western civilization shudder. “Liberalism,” he wrote, “permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” It teaches us that the collapse of that civilization is not a defeat but, instead, “the transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions and discriminations of the past.” Burnham showed us 60 years ago that we were headed in that direction if liberalism triumphs. Arnold Toynbee taught that civilizations don’t end abruptly; they go through phases on their way to dissolution. If the trends Burnham identified 60 years ago continue, we may be closer than you think to civilizational suicide.

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