The Tom Woods Show, episode 1238.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of Liberty Education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

Folks, we've spent one-third of our lives asleep so it's important to be comfortable,

and the Woods family has just jumped on board the Casper Mattress Bandwagon.

Join me by taking $50 off select mattresses at casper.com slash Woods.

Hi, everybody. Tom Woods here.

Still in New York and a lot of noise in the background, so you may hear that.

Makes the episode more authentic.

We've got Dan McCarthy with us today. He edits modern age, which is a very important,

venerable conservative journal going back to the 1950s. He's also editor at large of the

American Conservative magazine. And Dan is going to talk to us about two books with the same title, one much more recent than the other.

The more recent one is Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg, and the one from, I guess, the 1960s is Suicide of the West by James Burnham.

And they have very different diagnoses of what's going on and what's going wrong in the West.

And I think their very different approaches can help us maybe make a little bit more sense of what's going on today.

But also, it would be interesting probably to try to get to the bottom of which one is hitting the nail closer to the head,

let's say. So let's do that. I'll link to all the books on the show notes page, of course.

So let's jump right in with Dan McCarthy. He was very smart, very knowledgeable about all this stuff,

and my natural automatic go-to guy with a topic like this. Dan, welcome back.

Thanks, Tom. Delighted to be here.

I have read the James Burnham, Suicide of the West. I've not read the Jonah Goldberg one.

So I'm not going to say anything that would be critical of that book because I always thought that's unfair, just because I've heard what other people say. But I do know the general thesis,

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