The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  In World War I, Japan was an Allied power whose contribution to the war effort was to roll up the kaiser’s colonies in China and the Pacific, defend Europe’s imperial possessions in Asia, and escort the troops of Australia and New Zealand to Gallipoli. Japan also sent a naval squadron to the Mediterranean. But when President Harding and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes pressured London to break its twenty-year alliance with Japan at the Washington Naval Conference, the Japanese felt betrayed, humiliated, isolated. The die was cast. Twenty years later came Pearl Harbor and the total destruction of Japan and an empire constructed over sixty years at an immense cost in blood and treasure.

  But with American assistance and by copying American methods and ideas, postwar Japan became the most dynamic nation on earth. By 1990, her economy was the second largest, half the size of the United States economy, though Japan occupied an area smaller than Montana—an extraordinary achievement of an extraordinary people.

  But something has happened to Japan. She, too, has begun to die. Japan’s birthrate is half what it was in 1950. Her population is projected to crest soon at 127 million, but fall to 104 million by 2050, when there will be fewer than half as many Japanese children as there were in 1950 but eight times as many seniors as in 1950. Her dynamism will be dead, her Asian role diminished, for there will be fifteen Chinese for every single Japanese. Even the Philippines, which had only a fourth of Japan’s population in 1950, will have 25 million more people by 2050.

  The reason for Japan’s baby bust? More than half of all Japanese women now remain single by thirty years of age. Known as “Parasite Singles,” they live at home with their parents and pursue careers, and many have abandoned any idea of marrying and having children.31 “Live for myself and enjoy life” is their motto. With Japan’s elementary schools in 2000 taking in the smallest class in recorded history, Tokyo has raised the child allowance to $2,400 a year per child for six years. Some conservatives want to multiply that tenfold.

  One pioneering Japanese female journalist in her sixties, Mitsuko Shimomura, told the New York Times’s Peggy Orenstein that Japan is getting what it deserves for not granting full equality to women:

  I don’t regret the decline in the birth rate … . I think it’s a good thing. The Parasites have unintentionally created an interesting movement. Politicians now have to beg women to have babies. Unless they create a society where women feel comfortable having children and working, Japan will be destroyed in a matter of 50 or 100 years. And children’s subsidies aren’t going to do it. Only equality is.32

  These women are deciding the fate and future of the Japanese nation.

  Japan’s Asian Empire was smashed in 1945; but something happened more recently to sap her vitality and will to live, grow, and expand and conquer in industry, technology, trade, and finance. Observers call it a loss of what famed economist J. M. Keynes described as “animal spirits.”

  But perhaps there is another, simpler explanation: age. Of the 190 nations on earth, Japan is the oldest, with a median age of forty-one—for Japan was the first modern nation to legalize abortion (1948), and her baby boom ended soon afterward, long before the end of the baby booms in the West.

  Is there a parallel between a dying Christianity in the West and the death of Japan’s prewar and wartime faith? When nations lose their sense of mission, their mandate of heaven, the faith that brought them into this world as unique countries and cultures, is that when they die? Is that when civilizations perish? So it would seem.

  LET US LOOK again at the population projections for 2050, and try to visualize what our world will look like.

  In Africa, there will be 1.5 billion people. From Morocco to the Persian Gulf will be an Arab-Turkic-Islamic sea of 500 million. In South Asia will live 700 million Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, and 1.5 billion Indians. There will be 300 million Indonesians, and China, with 1.5 billion people, will brood over Asia.

  Russia, with a shrinking population of only 114 million, will have largely disappeared from Asia. Almost all Russians will be west of the Urals, back in Europe. Western Man, who dominated Africa and Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, will have disappeared from Africa and Asia by the middle of the twenty-first except perhaps for tiny enclaves in South Africa and Israel. In Australia, a nation of only 19 million, where the white birthrate is now below replacement levels, the European population will have begun to disappear.

  There is a terrible dilemma confronting the First World nations:

  At present birthrates, Europe must bring in 169 million immigrants by 2050 if it wishes to keep its population aged fifteen to sixty-four at today’s level. But if Europe wishes to keep its present ratio of 4.8 workers (fifteen-sixty-four) for every senior, Europe must bring in 1.4 billion emigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Put another way: Either Europe raises taxes and radically downsizes pensions and health benefits for the elderly, or Europe becomes a Third World continent. There is no third way.

  If Europe’s fertility rate does not rise, European children under fifteen will fall by 40 percent to 87 million by 2050, as the number of seniors rises 50 percent to 169 million. The median age of a European will be fifty, the highest in history, nine years older than the present median age in Japan. Writes French demographer Alfred Sauvy, Europe is about to become a continent of “old people in old houses with old ideas.”33

  IS THE DEATH of the West inevitable? Or, like all previous predictions of Western decline and demise, will this cup, too, pass away and expose as fools all who said we must drink it?

  After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not “bury” us. We buried him. Neville Chute’s On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Crash of ‘79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millenium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire or disintegration of the Soviet Union? Is it not possible that today’s most populous nations—China, India, and Indonesia—could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same back shelf as the predictions of “nuclear winter” and “global warming”?

  Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World. Western fertility rates have been falling for decades. Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough babies to replace its population. As years slip by, that birthrate is not stabilizing; it is falling. In a score of countries, the old are already dying off faster than the young are being born. There is no sign of a turnaround. Now the absolute numbers of Europeans have begun to fall.

  This is not a matter of prophecy, but of mathematics. The steeper and longer the dive, the more difficult it is to pull out. The First World has to turn this around, and soon, or it will be overwhelmed by a Third World that is five times as populous and will be ten times as populous in 2050. The ability to pull out of this dive diminishes each year. No end of the birth dearth is in sight, and all the social and cultural indicators show that more and more Western women are converting to the idea of having no children.

  Moreover, there is an arithmetical certitude about some aspects of demography. Italy cannot have more young adults of childbearing age in 2020 than it has teenagers, children, tots, and infants today. No existing population cohort can be added to, except by immigration. Only the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem to have given up—that the good life lies in bearing and raising children and sending them out into the world to continue the family and nation—can p
revent the Death of the West.

  Why are Western women having fewer children than their mothers or none at all? Why have so many enlisted in what Mother Teresa called “the war against the child”?34 Western women have long had access to the methods and means of birth control but chose not to use them to the extent they do today. For thirty years, American women have had easy access to abortion, but, unlike the women of China, they are also free to choose life. No federal judge forces any woman to have an abortion.

  Yet, Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry and an end of their nations. “Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society,” said Joan Ganz Cooney.35 Why are children no longer cherished as they once were? What caused the sea change in the hearts and minds of Western women, and men? And is it reversible? For if it is not, we can begin to write the final chapters of the history of our civilization and the last will and testament of the West.

  TWO

  “WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE?”

  And ye shall be left few in numbers, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldst not obey the voice of the Lord thy God.

  —Deuteronomy XXVIII: 28

  Holy Bible, King James Version

  Why have Europe’s nations and peoples stopped having babies and begun to accept their disappearance from this earth with such seeming indifference? Did the wounds of wars or the loss of empire kill the will to live? From the evidence, neither appears to be the case.

  The Great War left Imperial Germany defeated and dismembered, with two million dead and millions crippled. Yet the German population grew so quickly after 1919 that France, which had been among the victors, was alarmed. After World War II, baby booms exploded among the vanquished Japanese and Germans as well as the victorious Americans. From studying the birth charts, we find that something happened in the mid-1960s, in the midst of the postwar prosperity, that changed the hearts and minds of Western women and killed in them the desire to live as their mothers had. But if the reason Western women stopped having babies remains in dispute, how they did so is not. Contraception halted the population growth of the West, with abortion as the second line of defense against the unwanted child.

  FIRST, A LITTLE history: Only once had the U.S. birthrate fallen below population replacement, during the Depression, when the economy shrank by half and a fourth of America’s breadwinners were out of work, many of them out on the streets. Pessimism, a sense of despair that the good times are over and may never come again, can apparently impact national fertility. The Silent Generation was born in the 1930s, a relatively small cohort and the only generation of the twentieth century never to have produced a president.

  The postwar baby boom began in 1946, peaked in 1957, and fizzled out in 1964. But just as the World War II generation was about done having babies, and the baby boomers themselves were about to begin, a new and more convenient way to prevent pregnancies was discovered.

  Historians may one day call “the pill” the suicide tablet of the West. It was first licensed in 1960. By 1963, 6 percent of American married women were using Dr. Rock’s invention; by 1970, 43 percent were “on the pill.”1 As Catholics furiously debated the morality of contraception and Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae—which declared all artificial birth control to be immoral for Catholics, the pill included—suddenly a graver issue arose.

  Arizona TV personality Sherry Finkbine, a married mother of four who had taken thalidomide, the drug that had caused deformities in babies in Europe, learned that she was pregnant. Mrs. Finkbine did not want a deformed child and confided to friends that she desired an abortion. When the news leaked out, Mrs. Finkbine was subjected to threats from some and offers from others to raise the child if only she would carry it to term. As abortion was still against the law, a blazing national debate ensued. But Mrs. Finkbine mooted the issue by flying to Sweden and having the child aborted.

  By 1966, however, the Finkbine affair was ancient history, for 6,000 abortions were being done every year. By 1970, that figure had leapt to 200,000 as Governors Rockefeller of New York and Reagan of California signed the most liberal abortion laws in America.2 By 1973, 600,000 abortions were being done.3 That year, the Supreme Court, with three of President Nixon’s four nominees concurring, declared that a woman’s right to an abortion was protected by the Constitution. Within a decade, the number of abortions had soared to 1.5 million a year, and abortions had replaced tonsillectomies as the most common surgical procedure in America. Since Justice Blackmun’s decision, 40 million abortions have been performed in the United States. Thirty percent of all pregnancies now end on a tabletop in an abortionist’s clinic.

  In 2000, the Food and Drug Administration approved RU-486, a do-it-yourself abortion drug for use in the first seven weeks of pregnancy. As no U.S. firm wished to be associated with RU-486, a China-based company began quietly to produce the drug. Cynics might characterize China’s role in producing RU-486 for America as an act of assisted suicide for the one nation blocking Beijing’s path to Asian hegemony and world power.

  ROE V. WADE put a constitutional canopy over a woman’s right to an abortion. Yet that decision does not of itself explain the sea change in the attitudes of American and Western women. What was it that made them so hostile to the idea of pregnancy and motherhood that they would prefer to have an abortion, an act their own grandparents would have considered a monstrous offense against God and man? In the 1950s, abortion was not only a crime, but a shameful act. There was no national clamor for its legalization. Yet, fifteen years later, a Supreme Court decision declaring abortion a constitutional right was hailed as a milestone of social progress. A revolutionary transformation had taken place in the beliefs of tens of millions of Americans. One of two things had happened: Either the sixties drove a moral wedge between us, or the sixties exposed a moral fracture that had existed, but that we had failed to recognize. I believe the former is true. In that pivotal decade of the last century, a large slice of young America was converted to a new way of thinking, believing, and living.

  FROM 1945 TO 1965, America passed through what sociologists call “the golden age of marriage,” when the average age of first marriages fell to record lows for both men and women, and the proportion of adults who were married reached an astronomical 95 percent. The America of Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy was a vibrant, dynamic nation. But, as Allan Carlson, president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, writes:

  All the indicators of family well-being abruptly turned in these places [Western nations] during the short 1963—1965 period. Fertility resumed its fall, tumbling well below zero-growth levels; a massive retreat from marriage commenced; and Western societies seemed to lose all sense of inherited family order.4

  Dutch demographer Dirk van de Kaa traces the phenomenon to four transformations: (A) A shift from the golden age of marriage to the dawn of a new age of cohabitation. (B) A shift from a time of “king-child” with parents to that of king-parents with one child. (C) A shift from preventive contraception, to benefit early children, to self-fulfilling contraception, to benefit parents. (D) A shift from a uniform family system to a pluralistic system of families and households, including single-parent families.5

  As the drop-off in the birthrate began in the mid-1960s, this is the site to excavate to discover the causes of this tectonic shift in attitude of American and Western women away from having children. What ideas did the boomers bring to maturity? What ideas did they absorb in college?

  THE BOOMERS ARRIVED on campus in the fall of 1964. They were the first American generation with the freedom and the means to choose how they wanted to live their lives. In the 1930s, college had been a privilege only a few could afford. Family decisions were imposed by family hardships. If the breadwinner lost his job, sons and daughters could forget about college; they had to quit school and find work. Tens of millions still lived in small towns in
rural America, where the Depression had hit the farms long before the 1929 Crash hit Wall Street. After Pearl Harbor, the war and war economy made the career decisions for America’s young. The Silent Generation of the fifties grew up with parents, teachers, and clergy still as authority figures. Not until 1957 did Professor Galbraith discover that we were all living in The Affluent Society.

  But the parents who had gone through the Depression and the war were determined that “my kid’s not going to have it as rough as I did.” So the baby boomers were raised differently, spending almost as many hours in front of a television as in school. By the mid-1950s, parents had a serious rival for their children’s attention, and youngsters had an entertaining and witty ally, and a privileged sanctuary to retreat to, in the age-old struggle against parents. The message that came from TV, especially the ads, was instant gratification.

  By 1964, the year of Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, when the first wave of boomers hit the campuses, never having known hardship or war, it was ready to rock. And though the student riots and rebellions were blamed on LBJ, Nixon, Agnew, and Vietnam, this will not do. For student rebellions were not confined to America. They broke out across Europe and even in Japan. As the 1968 Days of Rage tore apart the Democratic party in the streets of Chicago, Czech students who made the Prague Spring were facing Russian tanks, Mexican students were being shot down in the streets of the capital, and French students almost seized Paris from President de Gaulle.