Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Sonia Sotomayor, said the New York Times, “has championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career.” As a student at Princeton, she filed a complaint with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare demanding that the school be ordered to hire Hispanic teachers. At Yale, she co-chaired a coalition that demanded more Latino professors and administrators and “shared the alarm of others in the group when the Supreme Court prohibited the use of quotas in university admissions in the 1978 decision Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.”138 Alan Bakke was an applicant to the University of California Medical School at Davis who was rejected, although his test scores were higher than almost all of the minority applicants admitted. Bakke was white.

  Tribal politics has been a constant of Sotomayor’s career. As a federal judge she ruled that the New York state law denying convicted felons the right to vote violated civil rights laws. There is a disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics in prison, said Sotomayor. To deny felons the vote thus has a disparate impact on minorities and is impermissible.139

  In a 2001 speech, Sotomayor rejected the notion advanced by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor that, in deciding cases, a wise old man and wise old woman would reach the same conclusion: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”140

  The American Bar Association found that Sotomayor’s dictum—that “gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging”—turns out to be true.141 A study of twenty-two years of decisions from six federal circuits found that in racial harassment cases, plaintiffs lost 54 percent of the time when the judge was an African American, but 79 percent of the time when the judge was white. Another study of 556 federal appellate court cases involving charges of sexual harassment and sex discrimination found that plaintiffs were twice as likely to emerge victorious if a female judge was on the panel.142

  Decades ago, it was said that blacks in the Deep South could not get justice from an all-white jury. In the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Gregory Peck stars as Atticus Finch, defending a black man falsely accused of the attempted rape of a white woman, the issue is dramatized. Considering the O. J. Simpson murder trial, prosecutors now concede it is much more difficult to convict even patently guilty black felons if they are tried before largely black juries. Race-based justice may be America’s future.

  TRIBALISM IN THE FIFTIETH STATE

  In Hawaii, the last state to join the American Union, tribalism is rising. A bill sponsored by Senator Daniel Akaka would create a racially exclusive native government independent of the state government and free from state taxes. This Hawaiian native government would be ceded a share of the 38 percent of land under public ownership. Some 400,000 Americans of Hawaiian ancestry would be eligible to vote, and a nine-member commission staffed by experts in genealogy would decide who they were. Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, asked Congress a pertinent question: “If ethnic Hawaiians can be accorded tribal status, why not Chicanos in the Southwest? Or Cajuns in Louisiana?”143

  In 2010, the Akaka bill, backed by Obama, passed the House 245–164. “We have a moral obligation, unfulfilled since the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, that we are closer to meeting today,” said Akaka. Should the bill become law, “The native governing entity will need to enter into negotiations with the State of Hawaii and the United States.”144

  As Irish independence led to demands for Scottish independence, a native government in Hawaii, restricted to persons of Hawaiian blood, would be a major step toward the creation of other ethnic enclaves inside the United States along the lines of the Indian nations.

  In mid-2010, another nation within the American nation, the Iroquois Confederacy, refused to allow its lacrosse team to travel on U.S. passports to England for the Lacrosse World Championship. The invitation to participate as Iroquois was a rare example, they agreed, of international recognition of Iroquois sovereignty. But to require them to travel on U.S. passports was an attack on their real identity.145

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton interceded to let them leave using Iroquois passports. But the British refused to let them enter without U.S. passports. The team stayed home, but made its point. We are Iroquois first, American second.

  ANGRY WHITE MEN

  “[A]little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” wrote Jefferson of Shays’s rebellion.

  A rebellion is under way in America: a radicalization of the working and middle class, such as occurred in the Truman-McCarthy era, during the George Wallace campaigns, and in the anti-amnesty firestorm that killed the Bush-Kennedy-McCain push for citizenship for illegal aliens. What all these movements had in common was populist rage against a reigning establishment. But what explains the failure of the establishment to understand its countrymen?

  When the urban riots of the 1960s exploded from Harlem in 1964 to Watts in 1965, to Detroit and Newark in 1967, to Washington, D.C., and scores of cities in 1968, liberals declared this to be a natural reaction to poverty, despair, and “white racism,” as did the Kerner Commission appointed by LBJ. When campus radicals burned ROTC buildings, opposition to the war in Vietnam explained why the “finest young generation we have ever produced” was behaving so.

  But when Tea Party dissidents came out to town-hall meetings to denounce Obamacare, the reaction was hysterical. To Harry Reid, they were “evil-mongers.” To Nancy Pelosi their conduct was “un-American.”

  Robert Gibbs compared them to the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the Florida recount.146 Some commentators saw racism at the root of the protests. In “Town Hall Mob,” Paul Krugman wrote that “cynical political operators are.… appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.”147 Cynthia Tucker calculated that 45 to 65 percent of the vocal opposition to Obama was driven by racial animus toward a black president.148

  This hyperbole revealed how out of touch the left had become. For, six months later, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found the Tea Party movement was more positively regarded—41 percent held a favorable view to 24 percent who held a negative view—than either political party.149

  What explains the alienation of a vast slice of working-class America?

  In “Decline of the American Male” in USA Today, David Zinczenko writes: “Of the 5.2 million people who’ve lost their jobs since last summer, four out of five were men. Some experts predict that this year, for the first time, more American women will have more jobs than men.”150

  Edwin Rubenstein, a former editor at Forbes, looking back to the beginning of the Bush II presidency, wrote that for every 100 Hispanics employed in January 2001, there were 124 holding jobs in July 2010. But for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001, only 97.8 were still working in 2010.151

  Between January 2001 and July 2009, Hispanic employment surged by 3,627,000 positions. Non-Hispanic positions fell by 1,362,000.152 For the white working class, the Bush decade did not begin well nor did it end well, which may explain why Obama did better among these voters than did Kerry or Gore.

  Why the alienation in Middle America?

  In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered and jobs outsourced. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only crime, rising illegitimacy, and rising dropout rates. They watch on cable as illegal aliens walk into their country and are rewarded with free health care and education for their kids, take jobs away from U.S. workers, and carry Mexican flags while marching in American cities to demand U.S. citizenship.

  They see Wall Street banks bailed out and read that the bankers used the billions not to l
end but to trade, and that the bonuses are back. They see their government shoveling billions out to Fortune 500 companies and banks to rescue the country from a financial crisis created by that same government, and by those same companies and banks. They sense that they are losing their country. And they are right.

  5

  DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER

  Russia is disappearing. So is Japan. Europe is next to go.1

  —JOHN FEFFER, 2010

  Epoch Times

  Within a hundred years.… God will come down to earth with his big ring of keys, and will say to humanity: “Gentlemen, it is closing time.”2

  —PIERRE EUGÈNE MARCELLIN BERTHELOT (1827–1907),

  French statesman

  Demography is destiny.

  Auguste Comte, the philosopher and mathematician known as the father of sociology, is said to have coined the cliché. Yet there is truth in it. Europeans crossing the Atlantic in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries sealed the fate of Native Americans. That a defeated Germany’s population was surging while that of France was stagnant was a justifiable cause of grave apprehension in a Quay d’Orsay that had pushed the Allies into imposing the vindictive peace of Versailles, that dishonored, dismembered, and divided the defeated Germany of November 1918.

  Yet demography is not always destiny, for all human capital is not created equal. In making history it has often been the quality of a people that mattered most. Consider what a handful of Greeks in fifth-century Athens created, what three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae prevented, what a Galilean carpenter’s son and a dozen disciples gave the world. Consider what a few score men in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 achieved. By 1815, an island of eight million off the coast of Europe had seen off Napoleon, gained mastery of the world’s oceans, and created an empire that would encompass a fourth of mankind. Consider what a dozen Bolshevik gunmen began when they stormed the Winter Palace and ran off a panicked ruling council.

  But demography has taken on even greater importance in our time. Why?

  First, because democracy is the religion of the West. In the American creed, political legitimacy comes solely from the consent of the governed, each of whom has the same single vote. Democracy is a force multiplier of demography. Numbers eventually equal power.

  Second, with the surge of ethnonationalism worldwide, and of identity politics in America, demography will increasingly dictate the division and distribution of society’s wealth and rewards. A third and related reason is egalitarianism, the ideology that holds that all ethnic groups are equal and where inequality exists institutional racism is the probable cause.

  As the West worships at the altar of democracy, is deeply egalitarian, and has thrown open its doors to a Third World in which ethnonationalism is embedded, it is the West whose destiny will ultimately be determined by demography. What is that destiny? Consider the latest statistics from the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs:

  Between now and 2050,

  • One in every six East Europeans, 50 million people, will vanish.

  • Germany, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine will lose 53 million people.

  • Where, at liberation in 1990 Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had 8 million people, 2.3 million of them will have disappeared by 2050.

  • Between liberation in 1990 and 2050, the former captive nations of Romania and Bulgaria will have lost between them 10 million people.

  • Europeans and North Americans who accounted for 28 percent of world population in 1950 will have fallen to 12 percent in 2050 and be among the oldest people on earth with a median age close to 50.

  Not one nation of Europe or North America, save Iceland, has a birth rate sufficient to replace its population. All have been below zero population growth (2.1 children per woman) for decades. Who inherits the Western estate? Between now and 2050, Africa’s population will double to 2 billion, and Latin America and Asia will add another 1.25 billion people. By 2050, the populations of Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Uganda will have tripled since Y2K, with Niger’s population quintupling from 11 million to 58 million.3

  In a 2010 essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World,” Jack Goldstone documents how Western peoples, whose empires ruled mankind on the eve of the Great War, are aging, dying, and sinking toward insignificance:

  In 1913, Europe had more people than China, and the proportion of the world’s population living in Europe and the former European colonies of North America had risen to over 33 percent.…

  By 2003, the combined populations of Europe, the United States, and Canada accounted for just 17 percent of the global population. In 2050, this figure is expected to be just 12 percent—far less than it was in 1700.4

  Our own and our parents’ generations have witnessed an epochal event: the fall of Christendom. From the close of the Edwardian era, with the death of Edward VII in 1910, in a single century, it all happened. The great European powers fought two great wars. All lost their empires. All saw their armies and navies melt away. All lost their Christian faith. All saw their birth rates plummet. All have seen their populations begin to age and shrink. All are undergoing invasions from formerly subject peoples coming to the mother country to dispossess their grandchildren. All of their welfare states face retrenchment even as they face tribal decline and death.

  Reflecting on the fate of Rome, Charles Darwin’s grandson bemoaned a pattern he saw through history: “Must civilization always lead to the limitation of families and consequent decay and then replacement from barbaric sources, which in turn will go through the same experience?”5

  So wrote Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle. And who will replace the unborn children of the West? We are witness to the unfolding of a brazen prophecy of Algerian president Houari Boumedienne before the United Nations in 1974.

  One day millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.6

  The conquest of Europe by peoples of color from the old colonies is well advanced. The numbers of those lined up waiting to come, and of those lined up behind them, stagger the mind.

  By midcentury, the ten most populous nations will be, in order: India, China, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia.7 Five are in Asia, three in sub-Saharan Africa, and one in Latin America. The United States will be the only First World nation on the list. But, by 2050, America will be more of a Third World than a Western nation, as 54 percent of the 435 million people in the United States, according to the UN’s 2006 Population Prospects, will trace their roots to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

  Incontrovertible realities emerge from the thousand pages of text and numbers in that UN report.

  Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West. And among the peoples of color who will replace them, the poorest in the least developed nations are reproducing fastest. For the most productive peoples in Asia, too, like the Japanese and South Koreans, are also beginning to age and die.

  In 2007, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes the major economic powers, voiced alarm at the sinking birth rates in the most advanced nations.

  Birth rates have declined sharply in most OECD countries, to just 1.6 children per woman—well below the average of 2.1 children per woman needed just to maintain current population levels.

  The most direct consequence of low birth rates is a “vicious circle” of decreasing population: fewer children today imply fewer women of childbearing age twenty years from now, so the cumulative momentum of current low birth rates will be dif
ficult to reverse.

  The effect on society is significant. There will be fewer young adults to care for elderly family members, pensions and healthcare will take up an increasing share of public spending, the workforce will be older and less adaptable, and domestic savings may shrink.8

  “Today, close to half of all children in most OECD countries grow up without siblings.”9 The OECD said birthrates had fallen in Japan and some Eastern and Southern European countries to 1.3 children per woman. This is not two-thirds of what is needed to replace an existing population. The brief concludes ominously: “In purely biological terms, it may still be possible to return to previous levels [of births] but the pace of such a recovery would be unprecedented in human history.”10

  The OECD is saying the death of Europe appears irreversible and imminent.

  Already, in Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain deficits and national debt far in excess of EU limits threaten to sink the European monetary union. These deficits are traceable to fewer and fewer young workers available to carry the load of pensions and health care for retiring and retired seniors. The riots that tore through Greece, France, and the UK in 2010 are rooted in the demographic crisis of the West and are harbingers of what is to come.

  AGING TIGERS, SETTING SUN

  Not only do the nations of Europe and North America have birth rates that portend extinction of the native born, two of the most dynamic nations of Asia are on the path to national suicide. Japan, its population peaking at 128 million in 2010, will lose 25 million people by 2050.11 A fifth of her population will disappear and one in six Japanese will be over 80. Japan’s median age will rise from 45 to 55. And these projections assume a rise in the fertility of Japanese women that is nowhere in sight.

  In March 2010 came more grim news. Marketwatch reported the birth rate in Tokyo had fallen to 1.09 children per woman and if “current trends continued, Japan’s population will fall to 95 million by 2050, from about 127 million now,” a loss of 32 million people. At this rate, a fourth of the nation will vanish in four decades.12 “With as much as 40 percent of its population over 65 years of age,” wrote Joel Kotkin, of Forbes, “no matter how innovative the workforce, Dai Nippon will simply be too old to compete.”13