To the Old Right
Acknowledgments
For her perseverance in getting me to complete this book, and for coming to see me in the Reagan White House to persuade me to start writing books, my eternal gratitude goes to Fredi Friedman, editor, counselor, agent, friend. To Tom Dunne, my thanks for going ahead with it. Special thanks to Marcus Epstein for the invaluable assistance and untold hours he devoted to researching ideas, issues, and anecdotes. Also, thanks to Michael Rubin for helping match footnotes to text.
—Pat Buchanan, June 2011
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Disintegrating Nation
1. The Passing of a Superpower
2. The Death of Christian America
3. The Crisis of Catholicism
4. The End of White America
5. Demographic Winter
6. Equality or Freedom?
7. The Diversity Cult
8. The Triumph of Tribalism
9. “The White Party”
10. The Long Retreat
11. The Last Chance
Notes
Index
Also by Patrick J. Buchanan
About the Author
Copyright Page
Preface
“What happened to the country we grew up in?”
Like Death of the West, a decade ago, this book seeks to answer that question. But Suicide of a Superpower is being published in another time in another America. When Death of the West came out on New Year’s, 2002, the nation was united and resolved. America had just swept to a bloodless victory over the Taliban and a triumphant George W. Bush had the approval of nine in ten of his countrymen. In his State of the Union address that same month, the president informed the “axis-of-evil” nations we were coming for them, and, in his second inaugural address, he would call Americans to a great crusade to “end tyranny in our world.” Hubristic times.
This book is published after ten years of war in Afghanistan, eight in Iraq, the worst recession and debt crisis America has faced since the 1930s, with the nation divided and seemingly everywhere in retreat. We have entered an era of austerity and retrenchment unlike any this generation has ever known. But not only is it in the realm of economics and politics that America appears in a downward spiral. Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation.
When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization. Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” And so it is. We are the Prodigal Sons who squandered their inheritance; but, unlike the Prodigal Son, we can’t go home again.
Introduction
DISINTEGRATING NATION
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.1
—KAHLIL GIBRAN, 1934
The Garden of the Prophet
I think the country is coming apart …2
—GEORGE KENNAN, 2000
The centrifugal forces have become dominant.3
—LEE HAMILTON, 2010
“Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” was the title of a 1970 essay by Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik. Forced into exile, Amalrik died in a car crash in Spain in 1980. Few had taken him seriously. Yet, nine years after his death, the Soviet Empire had collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated.
What has this to do with us? More than we might imagine.
As did the Soviet Union, America commands an empire of allies, bases, and troops. America, too, is engaged in a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. America, too, is an ideological nation. America, too, is a land of many races, tribes, cultures, creeds, and languages. America, too, has reached imperial overstretch.
Many will reflexively reject the comparison. Where the Soviet empire was a prison house of nations whose Marxist ideology had been imposed by force and terror, America is a democracy whose allies have freely sought her protection.
Yet the similarities should alarm us.
For ethnonationalism, the force that tore the Soviet Union apart, that relentless drive of peoples to separate that translates into tribalism within a country, is not only pulling our world apart, it is tearing at the seams of American union. And the ideals that once defined us as a people—freedom, equality, democracy—have been corrupted into concepts more reminiscent of Marxist revolutions than of the American Revolution.
For what is a nation?
Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection.… mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone”?
If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation?
The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birthrate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America. The Atlantic titled its January/February 2009 cover story “The End of White America?” Newsweek’s 2009 Easter cover was “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” The statistics bear these stories out.
And for the United States, as for any nation, the death of its cradle faith brings social disintegration, an end to moral community, and culture war. Meanwhile, globalization dissolves the bonds of economic dependency that held us together as a people, as the cacophony of multiculturalism drowns out the old culture.
Is America coming apart? This book’s answer is yes.
Our nation is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically. Not only do we not love one another, as Christ’s teaching commands, we seem to detest each other in ways as deep as Southerners detested a mercantile North and Northerners detested an agrarian slaveholding South.
Half of America views abortion as the killing of the unborn meriting the wrath of God. The other half regards right-to-life as a reactionary movement and repressive ideology. In 2009, George Tiller became the fourth abortionist to be assassinated, while James Pouillon was shot and killed outside Owosso High School in Michigan while staging an anti-abortion protest.4 Advocates of gay marriage see adversaries as homophobic bigots; opponents see advocates as seeking to elevate unnatural acts to the moral and legal status of sacred matrimony. Where one half of America sees progress, the other half sees decadence. The common moral ground on which we once stood united is gone.
Christmas and Easter, the holy days of Christendom, once united us in joy. Now we fight over whether they may be mentioned in public schools. Half of America regards her history as glorious; the other half reviles it as racist. Old heroes like Columbus and Robert E. Lee may be replaced on calendars by Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, but the old holidays and heroes endure as the new put down only the shallowest of roots in middle America. Mexican Americans may celebrate Cinco de Mayo, but to most Americans that was the date of a skirmish in a war about which they know little and care nothing, that took place in the year of the bloodiest ba
ttle ever fought on American soil: Antietam.
Our twenty-four-hour cable news networks have chosen sides in the culture and political wars. Even our music seems designed to divide us. Where we once had classical, pop, country and western, and jazz, now we have countless varieties tailored to separate and exclude races, generations, and ethnic groups.
We are seceding from one another not only on matters of morality, politics, and culture, but race. When President Obama was inaugurated, there was talk and hope of a new “postracial America.” But three weeks into Obama’s administration, Attorney General Eric Holder began Black History Month by calling us a “nation of cowards” for not discussing the subject of race more openly. Conservatives who opposed Justice Sonia Sotomayor and stood with Sergeant James Crowley in his confrontation with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. were denounced as racists. They threw the same ugly word back in the face of their accusers and Barack Obama.
In August 2009, when crowds turned out for town hall meetings to oppose health care reform, Majority Leader Harry Reid called them “evil-mongers” and Speaker Nancy Pelosi called their conduct “un-American.”5 Yet, by year’s end, Americans had a more favorable view of the Tea Party than of the Democratic Party.
When Congressman Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at Obama during an address to a joint session of Congress, his apology was accepted by the president, but that did not satisfy the Congressional Black Caucus, which demanded a roll call vote to rub Wilson’s nose in it. One Black Caucus member, Congressman Hank Johnson, said Wilson had “instigated” racism and must be rebuked or we will “have folks putting on white hoods and white robes again, riding through the countryside intimidating people.”6
In “Inside the Mind of Joe Wilson,” Rich Benjamin, the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, said that the congressman’s outburst “exposes a virulent racism and paranoia against undocumented workers.”7 Jimmy Carter said Wilson’s shout had been “based on racism.… There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”8
Carter returned to his theme the following day:
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.…
I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shares the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans.9
How did Carter know what was in Joe Wilson’s heart?
How did Carter know an “overwhelming portion” of those who had turned out for town hall meetings were motivated by “the fact that [Obama] is a black man, that he’s African-American”?
That same week in September 2009, Kanye West stomped onto the stage at the MTV Music Video Awards to grab the microphone from country music singer Taylor Swift and tell her she did not deserve her best female video award for “You Belong with Me.” And that the award should have gone to Beyoncé.10
Race consciousness is rising. Indeed, the first year of the Obama presidency seems to have radicalized much of white America. Ron Brownstein wrote of a startling survey done by the National Journal:
Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year’s turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations, and the financial industry.… Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick “none”—a grim statement.11
By fall 2009, a majority told a USA Network polling firm that we Americans are “too divided” over race and religion, while three-fourths said we are “too divided” over politics and economics. A majority believe our divisions have worsened in the new century. Only one in four saw racial and religious diversity as a national strength.12
Consider but a few of the issues over which we have fought, often for decades: prayer and the Ten Commandments in public schools, crosses in public parks, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research, affirmative action, quotas, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, letting Terri Schiavo die, amnesty, torture, the war in Iraq. Now it is “death panels,” global warming, gay marriage, socialism, history books, and whether Barack Obama is really a citizen of the United States. If a married couple fought as bitterly as we Americans do over such basic beliefs, the couple would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago.
The crudeness of our public debate is matched by its incivility. In politics it is insufficient to defeat an opponent. One must demonize, disgrace, and destroy him. The tradition of political foes being social friends when the sun goes down, maintained by Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn when he invited Republicans to his “Board of Education” meetings in his office after hours, is passé. Today, we criminalize politics and go for the throat.
In January 2011, when a crazed gunman nursing a grudge against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot her in Tucson, killed six others, including a nine-year-old girl and a federal judge, and wounded a dozen more, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos instantly tweeted: “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin.”13 This began a week-long campaign to indict Palin and conservative commentators as moral accomplices who had set the table for mass murder by having created a “climate of hate” in which the killer acted. Rather than bring the nation together in mourning, the massacre drove a new wedge between us.
In February, when Governor Scott Walker proposed requiring Wisconsin state employees to contribute more than a pittance to their generous health and pension benefits and restricting collective bargaining to wage increases no higher than the rate of inflation, the state capitol was invaded by scores of thousands of enraged and raucous demonstrators. Wildcat strikes by teachers followed with Democratic state senators fleeing to Illinois to prevent a quorum from voting on the proposal.
Yet, it is not only the rancor of our politics pulling us apart. We have gone through such periods before: the Truman-McCarthy era, Vietnam, and Watergate. But those turbulent periods were followed by eras of good feeling: Eisenhower-JFK, and the Reagan decade that saw a rebirth of national confidence crowned in 1989 by a peaceful end to a Cold War that had lasted a half-century.
Something is different today. The America we grew up in is gone. The unity and common purpose we had when we could together pledge allegiance to a flag that stood for “one nation, under God, indivisible” is gone. In America today, the secession that is taking place is a secession from one another, a secession of the heart.
“E pluribus unum”—out of many, one—was the national motto the men of 1776 settled upon. Today, one sees the pluribus; but where is the unum?
“What happened to the center?” asked retired congressman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, as he returned to Indiana. “The question at Gettysburg”—will America remain one nation?—is “the operative question of today.”14
President Carter echoed Hamilton:
This country has become so polarized that it’s almost astonishing.… Not only with the red and blue states … President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen—even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the war between the states.15
Six months after his comeback victory in 2010, Governor Jerry Brown of California was echoing his old rival Jimmy Carter: “We are at a point of civil discord, and I would not minimize the risk to our country and our state.… We are facing … a regime crisis. The legitimacy of our very democratic institutions [is] in question.”16
Barack Obama did not disagree. He had begun his presidency in what seemed a new Era of Good Feeling, when even Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard christened him the “bearer of moral authority as our first African-American president.”17 By Labor Day 2010, Obama was ruefully relating to an audience in Wisconsin, “They talk a
bout me like a dog.”18
This, then, is the thesis of this book. America is disintegrating. The centrifugal forces pulling us apart are growing inexorably. What once united us is dissolving. And this is true of Western civilization. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” Theodore Roosevelt warned the Knights of Columbus in 1915. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”19
What Roosevelt warned us against, we have become.
Meanwhile, the state is failing in its most fundamental duties. It is no longer able to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars.
As the bonds of brotherhood are corroded, a crisis of democracy impends. America is running the third consecutive deficit of 10 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP). Unfunded liabilities of the federal government run into the scores of trillions. By Herbert Stein’s Law, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. By the middle of this decade, if it does not roll back the welfare-warfare state, the United States will face monetary and fiscal collapse. Already, Standard & Poor’s has begun the process of down-grading U.S. debt and global creditors are signaling that the United States may be forced to default or float its way out of this crisis with a Weimar-style inflation that destroys the dollar. In 2010, only a debt crisis in Greece and Ireland threatening the euro sent panicked investors running back to the dollar.
On the news of Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga in 1777, which portended the loss of the North American colonies, John Sinclair wrote to Adam Smith in despair that Britain was headed for ruin.
“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” replied Smith.20
We are severely testing Smith’s proposition.
1
THE PASSING OF A SUPERPOWER
America is in unprecedented decline.1
—ROBERT PAPE, 2008
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 1