The Suicide of the West author explains his anti-Trumpism, evolution on culture-war issues, and growing attraction to libertarianism.
In his new book, Suicide of the West, National Review's Jonah Goldberg talks of what he calls "the Miracle"—the immense and ongoing increase in human wealth, health, freedom, and longevity ushered in during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
At turns sounding like Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and economist Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg writes, "In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction….Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it."
As his book's title suggests, Goldberg isn't worried the world is running out of resources. He's troubled by our unwillingness to defend, support, and improve customs, laws, and institutions that he believes are crucial to human flourishing.
"Decline is a choice," he writes, not a foregone conclusion. While he lays most of the blame for our current problems on a Romantic left emanating from Rousseau, he doesn't stint on the responsibility of his own tribe of conservative fear-mongers and reactionaries.
Pope Francis’s condemnation of capital punishment is simple and unambiguous: It is inadmissible. No exceptions for especially heinous crimes; no loopholes allowing execution when other lives might be in jeopardy, as in past Catholic teachings. No, declared the pope; state-sanctioned killing is always an unjustifiable attack on the dignity of human life, it’s always wrong.
That it is. It is an arbitrary and hugely expensive barbarism whose victims in the United States are often black, poor or mentally disturbed — and sometimes innocent. Over the past 45 years, when 1,479 people were executed in this country, 162 people sentenced to death have been exonerated. All the arguments for executing criminals have been debunked: It is useless as a deterrent and it does not save lives by getting rid of murderers. Many countries, including nearly all Western democracies with the shameful exception of the United States, have rejected it.
Since his election to the papacy five years ago, Francis has introduced a less formal, more pragmatic and progressive approach to his ministry, taking strong stands on issues like climate change and consumerism. His approach has often drawn criticism from Catholic conservatives, and the new teaching on the death penalty is bound to generate a heated debate — indeed it already has — on what it means for Catholic judges and politicians in the United States.
The church’s new position on the death penalty carries no formal punishment for defying it, but in eliminating any ambiguity it does compel Catholic officials at least to find concrete reasons to not abide by it. Four Supreme Court justices are Catholic, as is Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the court; among governors, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a Catholic and staunch supporter of the death penalty, has already declared that he will not block an execution scheduled for this month.
There will also be conservative Catholics who reject the pope’s reasoning for changing his church’s teaching on capital punishment after centuries in which it was tolerated. A letter to bishops accompanying the revised teaching explained at length that it was a development of the teachings of the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, reflecting changes in awareness that had taken place in recent times.
Yet the importance of the pope’s definitive rejection of capital punishment is not solely for Catholics, or for Christians, as the Vatican made clear in saying that the church would work “for its abolition worldwide.”
Capital punishment has been long abandoned across Europe and indefinitely suspended in Russia, and even in the United States its use has been declining for years. There were 23 executions in 2017, compared to 98 in 1999, and 14 so far this year. And though 31 states still allow the death penalty, only 10 have carried out executions since 2014.
The man awaiting execution in Nebraska is a prime example of the absurdity of capital punishment. Carey Dean Moore, now 60, has been on death row for 38 years and few Nebraskans remember what he was condemned for. How taking his life would serve justice is a mystery even to many state legislators, who voted to repeal the death penalty in 2015, only to have Governor Ricketts lead a campaign to restore it.
President Trump would most likely be on Mr. Ricketts’ side, not the pope’s. The president has expressed support for the death penalty several times, as in this tweet after a man killed eight people with a truck in New York City last October: “NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!”
In fact, very few of those who have been executed or are on death row committed anything as monstrous as that terror attack by Sayfullo Saipov, who is awaiting trial. Yet even the most serious crimes, in Pope Francis’s view, do not deprive the perpetrator of the “dignity of the person,” and modern prisons are fully capable of protecting citizens from him or her.
For those who have long opposed capital punishment as cruel and pointless, as has this page, the only lingering question is why the Catholic Church or any religious denomination that still condones executions would take so long to recognize that they are simply inadmissible. The same can be asked of Americans, whose Constitution so clearly prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
Seventy-three years after the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took more than 200,000 lives by the end of that year, we are no closer to a world without nuclear weapons. Pledges to achieve that goal, which Japan has advocated for decades, were repeated in ceremonies held over the past week to mark the anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of the two cities in the closing days of World War II. But more than seven decades later, we can hardly say that a path has been laid out to eliminate nuclear arms.
Last year, a landmark treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons was adopted at the United Nations. But without the participation of nuclear weapons powers as well as countries that rely on the “nuclear umbrella” of their allies, including Japan, there is little prospect that the treaty would effectively pave the way for disarmament. Today, more than 14,000 nuclear warheads exist in the world.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama, whose call for a “world free of nuclear weapons” in his Prague speech earned him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, became two years ago the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. The U.S. strategy for nuclear weapons, however, did not undergo substantial changes during the Obama presidency. And his successor, Donald Trump, released a Nuclear Posture Review in February that promoted the use of smaller nuclear weapons that would be easier to use, and did not rule out pre-emptive nuclear attacks in order to protect the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Tokyo said it “highly appreciates” the new U.S. strategy in that it clarifies Washington’s commitment to providing extended deterrence to its allies.
In a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June, Trump signed a joint statement calling for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. But as subsequent progress in U.S.-North Korea relations remains slow, any optimism that the summit would result in the near-term end to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program — a serious threat to regional security — has quickly dissipated.
While campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons as the sole country in history to suffer a nuclear attack during warfare, Japan has continued to rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for its own security — and opposed the U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons on the grounds that such an accord without the involvement of nuclear weapons states would have little effect on nuclear disarmament. Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki called this week on the government to endorse the nuclear ban treaty. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, attending the ceremonies in both cities, reiterated that Japan will seek to contribute to the goal by serving as a bridge between nuclear weapons powers and non-nuclear weapons states — although concrete results from such efforts do not appear to be on the horizon.
This stalemate in the effort to eliminate nuclear arms must not lead us to give up, in view of the threat from such weapons that continues to grip the world to this day.
The 73rd anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II marks the last one under Emperor Akihito, whose abdication next April will officially end his reign and the Heisei Era. The fact that Emperor Akihito, who in 1989 became the first emperor to ascend the throne as “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people” under the postwar Constitution, is stepping down soon due to his advanced age testifies to the lengthy time that has passed since the end of the war.
The Showa Era of his late father, Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, witnessed the turbulence that Japan experienced during its 64-year period — from its rush into war and its devastating defeat in 1945 to the postwar reconstruction and development under the war-renouncing Constitution.
As the subsequent Heisei Era is set to wrap up next year, memories of the last war that Japan fought and lost — which left 3.1 million Japanese dead — may be fading fast for a large majority of the nation’s citizens. The number of bereaved families of the war dead taking part in the government-organized annual Aug. 15 ceremony to mourn for those who died in the war is declining each year. Today, the number of people born after the war has topped 100 million, accounting for more than 80 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, one of the duties that Emperor Akihito has apparently imposed on himself as the “symbol of the state” is his series of visits over the years to places, both in Japan and abroad, that were the sites of fierce battles and devastation during the war — including Iwojima in 1994, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in 1995, Saipan in 2005, Peleliu Island in Palau in 2015 and to the Philippines in 2016.
According to people close to him, his visits to these sites were intended to pray for the souls of all the people who died in the war — not just the Japanese — and to keep the memories of the war from fading away.
Most Japanese now lack firsthand experience of the war, and with the passage of times it will become increasingly difficult for us to keep the memories of the war alive and to pass them on to future generations. The 15th of August should be a day for each and every one of us to think what we can do to remember the war that ended 73 years ago and what it tells us as we go forward.
“Reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse over the last war, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never be repeated. Together with all of our people, I now pay my heartfelt tribute to all those who lost their lives in the war, both on the battlefields and elsewhere, and pray for world peace and for the continuing development of our country,” the Emperor said in his address to the Aug. 15, 2015, Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead on the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII — a message that he essentially repeated in the two past years.
Praying for the people who lost their lives in the war has indeed been a key purpose of the trips that Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko made over the span of his reign to the sites of fierce battles involving Japanese forces in the Pacific War.
Since their days as crown prince and princess, the Imperial couple has visited Okinawa — which experienced fierce ground battles that killed large numbers of civilians in the closing days of the war and came under extended U.S. military rules in the postwar decades — a total of 11 times, the latest in March this year that took place reportedly based on their strong wishes.
