The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  In a third of a century, what was denounced as the counterculture has become the dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become, in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s phrase, a “dissident culture.”30 America has become an ideological state, a “soft tyranny,” where the new orthodoxy is enforced, not by police agents, but by inquisitors of the popular culture. We see it in the mandatory requirement for “sensitivity training” in the military, in business, and in government. Turn on the TV and observe. The values of the revolution dominate the medium. Political correctness rules. Defiance of our new orthodoxy qualifies as “hate speech,” disrespect for its dogmas as a sign of mental sickness. “Get John Rocker to a psychiatrist!” A few years back, a wag described America’s universities as “islands of totalitarianism in a sea of freedom.” Now even the sea has become inhospitable. Emily Dickinson spoke to our time as well as to her own:

  Assent—and you are sane—

  Demur—you’re straightway dangerous

  And handled with a Chain.31

  Political correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance. By classifying its adversaries as haters, or mentally ill, writes journalist Peter Hitchens in his lament for his country, The Abolition of Britain, the new regime imitates the methods of the Soviet Union’s Serbsky Institute, which used to classify political dissidents like Natan Sharansky as insane before locking them up in a psychiatric hospital.32 What Americans describe with the “casual phrase … political correctness,” says Hitchens, is “the most intolerant system of thought to dominate the British Isles since the Reformation.”33 As it is in the United States.

  To oppose affirmative action qualifies one as a racist. To insist there are roles in society unfit for women, such as Navy carrier pilot, is to be branded a sexist. If you believe immigration is far too high for our social cohesion, you are a nativist or a xenophobe. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association was bullied by gay rights militants into delisting homosexuality as a disorder. Now anyone who considers it a disorder suffers himself from a sickness of the soul called homophobia.

  “Homosexual acts are against nature’s law,” said Pope John Paul II as thousands marched on international gay pride day in Rome.34 “The church cannot silence the truth, because this … would not help discern what is good from evil.”35 This restatement of Catholic moral teaching marks the Holy Father, and all who accept that teaching as true, as homophobic. Scholar and author Paul Gottfried calls it “the dehumanization of dissent.”36

  Words are weapons, said Orwell. Traditionalists have yet to discover effective countermeasures. By calling an enemy a racist or fascist, you no longer need answer his arguments. He must defend his character. In a court of law, the accused is innocent until proven guilty. But if the charge is racism, homophobia, or sexism, there is today the presumption of guilt. Innocence must be proven by the accused beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Orwell heard the word “fascist” used so often he assumed that, if Jones called Smith a fascist, Jones meant, “I hate Smith!” But if Jones had said, “I hate Smith,” he would be confessing to unchristian hatred. By calling Smith a fascist, he need not explain why he hates Smith or cannot best Smith in debate; he has forced Smith to prove that he is not a closet admirer of Adolf Hitler. Huey Long was right. When fascism comes to America, it will come in the name of antifascism.37

  THAT LUKACS GRAMASCI, Adorno, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School had immense influence on America’s cultural and intellectual history is undeniable. But, unlike the Bolsheviks, they did not storm a Winter Palace, they did not seize power, and they did not impose their ideas by force and terror; they were not giants, like Marx, to whom men paid homage. Few Americans even know who they were. Not one, not even Marcuse, was a St. Paul, a Luther, or a Wesley. They were intellectual renegades and moral misfits, yes, but they were also men who thought “outside the box” and put into circulation the ideas of how a successful revolution might be launched in the West, against the West. And their ideas have triumphed. America’s elites, who may not even know today who the Frankfurt thinkers were, have taken to their ideas like catnip.

  Americans who today accept these ideas cannot know that they were hatched in a Marxist nursery in Weimar Germany or thought out in a fascist prison in Mussolini’s Italy, or that their purpose was to subvert our culture and overturn our civilization. But that begs the question: Why was the America of the 1960s, if still a country immersed in its Judeo-Christian heritage, history, traditions, and beliefs, receptive to so revolutionary an agenda?

  True, a small slice of America’s elite, before and during the Great Depression, became complicit in what French author Julien Benda called The Treason of the Intellectuals.38 They despised the Christian capitalist America in which they lived. But why did the ideas of cultural traitors take root in Middle America? Why did they attract a following among children of the Greatest Generation, which had defeated Hitler? Why do so many of the young still buy in? Was America morally adrift in the sixties, searching for something new to believe in, a new way to live? Were the timbers of the old house rotten? Was a revolution inevitable? Were the young, and many of their teachers, simply weary of the demands of the old moral order and looking for a way to say good-bye to all that? Did they all just climb aboard the first train that came through town?

  Certainly, the Frankfurt School was not alone in dreaming of and devising a social revolution. In the 1930s, many intellectuals were thinking along the same lines and coming to the same conclusions. Here is a passage from the 1937 Yearbook of the National Education Association:

  The present capitalist and nationalist school system has been supplanted in but one place—Russia—and that change was effected by revolution. Hence the verdict of history would seem to indicate that we are likely to have to depend upon revolution for social change of an important and far-reaching character.39

  Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a more famous radical than any of the Frankfurt School, and she had anticipated their ideas: “Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than capitalism.”40

  Would the 1960s revolution have swept America had Gramsci never written Prison Notebooks and had Adorno and Marcuse never gotten out of Germany? Were Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcuse indispensable men? Probably not, but they did devise the strategy and the tactics of a successful Marxist revolution in the West, and the culture they set out to destroy is no longer the dominant culture in America or the West. They began their lives as outcasts and may end on the winning side of history.

  WHY DID THEY succeed? Four elements came together in the sixties to create the critical mass that exploded like Dr. Oppenheimer’s device in the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo.

  First was “the message in a bottle,” as the men of the Frankfurt School called their ideas. And as their ideas were germinating, other Americans, alienated from a Christian and capitalist culture, were working independently on similar strategies and ideas to undermine the culture and abolish the old America they had come to detest. Nurtured for decades, these ideas began to flower in the 1960s.

  Second, there arrived on campus, beginning in 1964, a huge cohort of youth who had known neither hardship nor war. The cultural revolution now had a huge, captive, and receptive audience. Spoiled and affluent, carefree, confident, liberated, and bored, these young people were ready for rebellion. And swallowing goldfish was not what they had in mind.

  As conservative scholar Robert Nisbet reminds us, bordeom “is one of the most insistent and universal [of the] forces that have shaped human behavior,” and the “range of cures or terminations of boredom is a wide one.”41 High among them are sex, narcotics, and revolution. In the 1960s, what Arnold Toynbee called an “internal proletariat” of students
, bored with their studies, encountered graduate instructors, bored with their subjects and unexciting lives—a a combustible mixture.

  Third, 1960s television could convey the tactics and triumphs of campus radicals and urban revolutionaries instantly to their peers. And the medium, now matured, no longer the fifties fiefdom of Howdy Doody and Matt Dillon, could not only transmit the new ideas, it could reinforce them by creating new visual realities.

  The fourth indispensable element was Vietnam. If the war meant sacrifice, bloodshed, perhaps death, the Woodstock generation wanted no part of it. What Marcuse offered was intellectual cover for cowardice, a moral argument for malingering, a way to dodge the draft while feeling superior to those who went. The “real heroes” of this war, said Senator Fulbright and New York mayor John Lindsay, are in Canada. The message fell upon receptive ears in the Ivy League and not only there.

  Finally, the old American establishment was broken on the wheel of Vietnam—the war that liberalism launched and could not win— and its moral authority was shattered in the eyes of the young. The path to power was thus opened to the political vessel of the counterculture, the McGovern campaign of 1972, among whose most enthusiastic workers was young Bill Clinton, the pride and paragon of the Woodstock generation.

  BUT ALL THIS raises a greater question: Is the death of a religious-based culture inevitable once a society reaches general affluence? When a nation has overcome the hardships of its infancy and the struggles of its adolescence and manhood, and begins to produce a life of ease and luxury, does it naturally succumb to a disease of the soul that leads to decadence, decline, and death? “America is the only country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between,” said Oscar Wilde.42 Did the man have a point?

  Jacques Barzun suggests that the sixties generation simply picked up where the twenties generation left off. The era of sex, booze, and jazz led naturally to the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Only the degeneration was briefly interrupted by the intrusive reality of Depression, World War, and Cold War. Once the 1950s were finished, a new generation took up where the Roaring Twenties crowd had left off when the market crashed in 1929.

  But if the hedonism of the sixties flowed from the hedonism of the Prohibition Era, there is this difference: that 1920s generation did not hate America. A few “Lost Generation” writers fled the country, but the social rebels of the 1920s were not revolutionaries. After all, they elected Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the greatest Republican landslides in history. The sixties intelligentsia was different. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.”43

  AFTER THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Empire, Time magazine asked, “Can the Right Survive Success?”44 Time quoted a conservative scholar as saying, “It is a sign of enormous triumph that there are no galvanizing issues for conservatives today.”45

  “Nothing could be further from the truth,” responded James Cooper, the editor of American Arts Quarterly. “A major galvanizing issue for conservatives, indeed, for all Americans … the great unfinished task that President Reagan alluded to in his farewell speech to the nation … is to recapture the culture from the Left … .”46

  While most conservatives had been fighting the Cold War, a small band had been holding down the forgotten front, the culture war. Cooper pleaded with conservatives to take up the culture war as their new cause and spoke of the territory already lost:

  Seventy years ago, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) wrote the most important mission for Socialism was to “capture the culture.” By the end of World War II, the liberal Left had managed to capture not only the arts, theater, literature, music, and ballet, but also motion pictures, photography, education and the media.

  Through its control of the culture, the Left dictates not only the answers, but the questions asked. In short, it controls the cosmological apparatus by which most American[s] comprehend the meaning of events.

  This cosmology is based on two great axioms: the first is there are no absolute values in the universe, no standards of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. The second axiom is-in a Goddess universe—the Left holds moral superiority as the final arbiter of man’s activities.47

  Conservatives ignored Cooper’s cry. Instead, they fought against national health insurance and for NAFTA and the WTO. “The Right voted with their feet,” said Samuel Lipman, publisher of the New Criterion.48 Added Cooper: “Conservatives returned to money-making and Cold War strategies, straightened out their George Stubbs engravings of English Thoroughbred horses on their office walls, and forgot about the whole matter. After all, they reasoned, how important is culture anyway?”49.

  “Where a man’s purse is, there his heart will be also.” The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax. Good causes to be sure. But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2 or 3 or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people? With the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of an anti-Western multiculturalism, that is what is at issue today—the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself—and too many conservatives have gone AWOL in the last great fight of our lives.

  So, let us consider what the death march of the West will mean, not just in future centuries, but in this century, and not just to our children’s children, but to the generation growing up today.

  FIVE

  THE COMING GREAT MIGRATIONS

  The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.1

  —Mark Twain

  The Old and New Testaments have many parables of how the firstborn, or first chosen, lose their places in their fathers’ houses. A hungry Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a mess of potage. In Matthew 22, Jesus compares heaven to the wedding feast a king prepares for his son. When the invited guests rudely refuse the king’s invitation, he sends his servants out to the highways and byways to bring strangers into his house to celebrate the marriage of his son.

  As Western peoples have begun to die, the vacant rooms in the House of the West will not long remain vacant. In America, the places prepared for the forty million unborn lost since Roe v. Wade have been filled by the grateful poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Europeans forgo children, the places prepared for them, too, will be occupied by strangers.

  Let us revisit the UN statistics on the depopulation of Europe. In 2000, there were 494 million Europeans aged fifteen to sixty-five. That will plunge to 365 million by 2050. But the 107 million Europeans over sixty-five today will soar to 172 million. In fifty years, the ratio of European young and middle-aged to seniors and elderly will fall from five to one to two to one.2 With Europe’s welfare states already buckling under the weight of social programs, who will pay for the health, welfare, and pensions of the elderly? Who will care for the old people in the retirement centers and nursing homes? With the number of children falling even faster than those of working age, who will mow the lawns, clean the buildings, wash the dishes, prepare and serve the food in the restaurants of Europe? Where will the nannies come from? With a working population 25 percent smaller and an elderly population 90 percent larger, where will the new nurses and doctors come from to care for these seniors?

  By 2050, a third of Europe’s people will be over sixty. In the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, one in ten will be over eighty!3 The median age of a European will be fifty, nine years above the median age of the oldest nation on earth today, Japan. In Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America and the World, former commerce secretary Pete Peterson writes:

  Within the next thirty years, the official projections suggest that governments in most developed countries will have to spend at least an extra 9 to 16 percent of GDP ann
ually simply to meet their old age benefit promises. To pay these costs through increased taxation would raise the total tax burden by an unthinkable extra 25 to 40 percent of every worker’s taxable wages—in countries where total payroll tax rates often already exceed 40 percent. Or, if we resort to deficit spending, we would have to consume all the savings and more of the entire developed world. 4

  This is the fiscal equivalent of nuclear winter. If Europe wishes to maintain its social safety net, there are three options: trillions of dollars in new tax revenues must be found; European women must begin bearing two and three times as many babies; or Europe must import millions of workers each year. These are the stark choices the Old Continent faces.

  Yet, as Joseph Chamie of the UN Population Agency notes, “No demographers believe birth rates will rebound. How much will it take to convince a woman to have four children? People are concerned about their appearances, their education, their careers.”5 Europe’s birthrate has been falling for decades. It is no fluke. A birthrate below replacement levels is common to every nation in Europe but Albania, which is Muslim.

  This is not a matter of conspiracy but of consensus, of free choice. European women have decided they want one or two children, or none, and they have the means—contraception, sterilization, and abortion—to effect these choices. And European women consider these personal desires to be far more compelling than demographic studies describing what Europe will look like when they are seventy or eighty, or gone.

  A “huge decision” confronts Europe, writes Jonathan Steele of the Guardian. “If living standards are not to fall, EU countries may have to allow a 60-fold increase in immigration, feeding rightwing protests and causing additional damage to the region’s fragile race relations. This is the considered view of demographic experts as they examine the reality of Europe’s aging population.”6