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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN, the Axviles, with your host, David Axelrod.

For two decades, Jonah Goldberg has been a conservative provocateur, writing for the National Review and elsewhere.

His latest book is Suicide of the West, How the Rebirth of Nationalism, Populism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.

I sat down with Jonah last week at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics to talk about his life, his career, his continuing critique of President Trump and the future of our democracy.

Jonah Goldberg, welcome here, welcome to the Institute of Politics, good to see you.

Just reviewing your biography, it is clear why you might be a natural born contrarian growing up on the Upper West Sama, New Yorker myself.

You're from Stuyvesington? I am indeed. The other side of town. But there aren't a lot of conservatives up there on the Upper West side of Manhattan.

No, my standard joke is we were like Christians in Ancient Rome. And you know, you meet in Central Park and draw a little scene in the dirt.

I'll meet you under the Catechomes at Zaybars. Yeah, so I go back and forth about this. I have friends who grew up in the Soviet Union.

And they claim that if I had grown up there, you know, like sometimes wonder whether or not the context is different.

If I grew up in some small conservative southern town, when I've grown up a liberal, I like to think not, but who knows.

And it was, my parents were pretty political. My dad was a journalist. My mom was a lot of different things.

But I never really realized how political I was probably until college. It just never really, it wasn't a big part of my identity.

Let's talk about your folks. Well, first of all, where are the Goldbergs from?

My mom grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, back when that was still a southern town. And my dad grew up in the Bronx on Gunhill Road.

And when did his family, they must have come here at some point? Yeah, the Goldberg side.

They're from that whole, you know, early late 1900s, really, not probably late 1900s, run from the pogroms.

Late 1800s? Late 1800s, yes. Like the Lithuania, Poland, that whole realm.

My grandfather ran a garment factory in the garment district, and my grandmother ran a sewing machine.

And she heard, she heard Trotsky speak on the house floor on the lower east side twice.

No kidding. Yeah, because back then they would recruit down there. And so my dad and his two brothers were the first members of the Goldberg family.

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