The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  The moral rot is even more widespread in Europe. Nations that in the twentieth century fielded million-man armies today lack the will to raise sufficient troops to provide for their own defense. They prefer to let the Americans do it. Europe’s populations are shrinking, and its nations are breaking apart, but few seem to care. Full of guilt, the Germans seem to want to lose themselves inside the warm cocoon of a united Europe. Other nations, too, seem weary of striving to be independent and free, as they prepare to accept the dictates of a European superstate. “Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God’s design,” said Solzhenitzyn. “The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all the peoples were made alike, with one character, one face.”11 Yet the nations of Europe seem reconciled to the reality that their time on this earth may be coming to an end.

  LEADERS WHO WISH to preserve their unique national identity and character are branded as racists and xenophobes. In Denmark, interior minister Karen Jespersen, a 1960s radical, ignited a storm of indignation by suggesting that refugees with criminal records be put on a “deserted island.” She did “not wish to live,” said Jespersen, in a multicultural nation “where the cultures were considered equal.”12

  Denmark has become a haven for political refugees, but Danish hospitality is being exploited by criminal gangs from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Ukraine. Jespersen’s comment about preferring her own culture followed a series of gang rapes by Middle Eastern immigrants of Danish women and demands that Danish law be made to conform to Islamic law, with new restrictions on women, return of the death penalty, and mutilations as punishments for theft.

  Europe was aghast—at Ms. Jespersen. Reactions “were fast and furious,” wrote Henrik Bering in Policy Review.13 The European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia was instantly on her case. But, as 33 percent of Denmark’s social budget goes for that 4 percent of the nation’s population that consists of non-Western immigrants, Danes are starting to tune out Europe and tune in Karen.

  Something vital has gone out of Europe. In The Suicide of the West, written in 1964, Cold War strategist James Burnham detected a mind-set that reconciles Western peoples to the death of their empires and the eclipse of their civilization. Burnham called it an “ideology of Western suicide.”14 The disease now appears to have become an epidemic.

  Why have conservatives not acted more decisively to roll back a revolution that threatens their civilization and culture? There are several reasons.

  FIRST, THE FOLLOWERS of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were drawn into politics by the conviction that America was losing the Cold War. Their movement was unprepared, unequipped, untrained for a culture war. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the great cause that had united them was gone.

  Moreover, many conservatives in politics, journalism, and broadcasting are far better versed in economics and foreign policy than in history, philosophy, or theology. As one wit has observed, “Republicans were put on this earth to cut taxes.” At times, it seems that is the only reason they were put on this earth. Unschooled in matters of morality and culture, many are uncomfortable with such issues, have no interest in them, and don’t believe they belong in politics. The late Richard Weaver had these conservatives in mind when he wrote that “many traditional positions in our world have suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness and intellectual sloth of those who … are presumed to have their defense in charge.”15

  Confronted with moral, social, or cultural issues, these conservatives move swiftly off them and onto taxes and defense, where they feel on terra firma. But despite an ardent Republican wish that this culture war would just pass away, it will not pass away. For, as Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”16

  Second, by capturing the institutions where the young spend most of their waking hours—MTV and prime-time, movies and magazines, schools and colleges—the revolution is able to shape the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the young. Artists, actors, playwrights, songwriters, and popular singers are almost all on the other side. Op-ed page commentators and radio and TV talk show hosts cannot match this cultural firepower. The arsenals are unequal. Moreover, the entertainment that the cultural revolution has on offer is far more attractive and alluring; thus, many of the children of traditionalists defect. Through, as they grow older, many prodigal sons and daughters do ruefully return to their father’s house.

  Half a century ago, literary critic Lionel Trilling could write, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” 17 Though an exaggeration even then, Trilling’s line yet contains a core of truth. And since the sixties, there has been a population explosion among the creators of culture and shapers of thought—intellectuals, social critics, teachers, journalists, writers, bureaucrats, and artists. Suddenly, conservatives were not just outnumbered, they were overwhelmed.

  Crane Brinton, in his Anatomy of Revolution, writes that one sign of a “markedly unstable society” is the sudden appearance of a great host of intellectuals:

  bitterly attacking existing institutions, and desirous of a considerable alteration in society, business and government. Purely metaphorically, we may compare intellectuals of this sort to the white corpuscles, guardians of the bloodstream; but there can be an excess of white corpuscles, and when this happens you have a diseased condition.18

  By Brinton’s definition, America would appear to be close to that “diseased condition.”

  Third, unlike normal politics, where a middle ground can usually be found and a compromise reached, culture war is a zero-sum game. One side’s gain is the other’s loss. Abortion, assisted suicide, and gay marriage are moral questions that call for a yes or no from politicians who prefer to split the difference and meet in the moderate middle. Republicans, most of whom do not consider politics a blood sport, are unprepared for the no-quarter combat that Critical Theory entails, with its savage rhetoric and attack politics.

  In the old politics, incumbents “pointed with pride” and challengers “viewed with alarm.” In a culture war, the revolution is always on the attack, and traditionalists are always on the defensive. “Strength lies not in defense but in attack,” wrote a budding cultural revolutionary by the name of Adolf Hitler.19

  Consider the thirty-years war for control of the command post of the culture war, the Supreme Court. Two of Mr. Nixon’s nominees, federal judges Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell, were scourged and rejected. Two of Ronald Reagan’s nominees, federal judges Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg, were savaged and rejected, the latter for marijuana indiscretions as a law professor. Bork’s name became a verb, to Bork, meaning to shred a nominee’s reputation before casting him aside. George Bush’s nominee, Clarence Thomas, had to run an Iroquois gauntlet.

  Contrast this back-alley butchery of conservative jurists to the high tea treatment accorded Clinton nominees Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Each was introduced with respect and easily confirmed. The core constituencies of the Democratic party understand culture war, while many Republicans seem blissfully unaware there even is a war.

  “Politics stops at the water’s edge” and “partisanship ends when the sun goes down” are the clichés of yesterday. A culture war is what Mao called “a permanent revolution.” If the Confederate battle flag comes down in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the front moves to Mississippi. When all the flags are down, the statues and portraits go next, then the school names, until all public homage paid to Dixie’s heroes is forever abolished.

  Fourth, thirty years of pounding have pulverized Christian morale. Unlike the era of The Bells of St. Mary’s and The Song of
Bernadette, priests and preachers are now, as often as not, portrayed in movies and on TV as hypocritical and lecherous or intolerant and backward. Who wants to stand up for family values when the price is public ridicule? Like every institution, the churches have been under constant fire and exhibit signs of battle fatigue. Beset by schisms over abortion and homosexuality, plagued by scandals from womanizing televangelists to pedophile priests, to enabling bishops they are not the churches of yesterday. Like muscle tissue, moral authority unexercised atrophies and dies. To watch Catholic senators, without sanction by their bishops, sustain Bill Clinton’s veto of a ban on partial-birth abortion—“infanticide,” to Senator Moynihan—is to see how far downhill the old church has slipped and stumbled since the confident years of Pius XII.

  Constant charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry have taken a toll on traditionalist morale. The cost of continuing to fight seems intolerably high. Many have given in to defeatism and despair and whine like Hollywood stars and starlets who threaten to leave the country rather than live in George Bush’s America. So, Christians save their protest for the privacy of the voting booth, but those they elect often have no more stomach for this battle than they do.

  Justice Clarence Thomas spoke of the price of resistance at the American Enterprise Institute dinner in 2001. “Active citizens are often subjected to truly vile attacks, they are branded as meanspirited, racist, Uncle Tom, homophobic, sexist,” said the justice.20 Under such assaults, he added, “We censor ourselves. This is not civility. It is cowardice.”21 As a federal official, Thomas had questioned the wisdom of affirmative action and busing for racial balance. Black leaders charged him with “treason” to his people. The purpose, said Thomas, was “intimidation,”22

  The intimidators failed with Clarence Thomas but succeeded with some conservatives who, like defeated peoples, no longer make demands. They just want to get along. But, in a culture war, where the other side is always making demands, and the other side is always ready to fight, this translates into endless retreats and eventual defeat.

  Fifth, God-and-country people are raised to respect and obey their rulers. Judicial revolutionaries like Warren, Douglas, and Brennan relied on the innate conservatism of the silent majority when they imposed their radical agenda. Many Americans were enraged, but felt they must obey. After all, this was the Supreme Court. As long as Americans believe that their government is acting constitutionally, they will obey. By definition, conservatives are not rebels. But neither were the Founding Fathers until pushed to the wall.

  Finally, a new generation has now grown up for whom the cultural revolution is not a revolution at all, but the culture they were born into and have known all their lives. Public homosexuality, pornography, abortion, trash talk on TV and in movies, and filthy lyrics in popular music have all been around since before they can remember. No big deal. Many have come to accept the axioms of modernity about how wicked the old America was. It is the traditional culture they find odd. They have passed through schools and universities, consumed the fare, and come to believe what they were taught about the country’s old heroes and history. “We will steal your children!” the sixties radicals howled at Middle America. They did.

  And with an intolerant new cultural elite now ascendant, a failing of conservatives is that they are conservatives. In the 1770s, there came a time when conservative men like Washington and John Hancock realized they, too, must become rebels like Patrick Henry and Sam Adams. When the French Revolution was on the march in the persons of Robespierre and Bonaparte, it was good to have Edmund Burke, but one also needed Nelson and the Iron Duke. “The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a culture war,” said Dr. Sam Francis, the syndicated columnist and author of Revolution from the Middle, “is that we are not fighting to ‘conserve’ something, we are fighting to overthrow something.”23

  We must understand clearly and firmly that the dominant authorities in … the major foundations, the media, the schools, the universities, and most of the system of organized culture, including the arts and entertainment—not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life, but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival. If our culture is going to be conserved, then we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.24

  We traditionalists who love the culture and country we grew up in are going to have to deal with this question: Do we simply conserve the remnant, or do we try to take the culture back? Are we conservatives, or must we also become counterrevolutionaries and overthrow the dominant culture?

  Americans who look on this cultural revolution as politics-as-usual do not understand it. It means to make an end of the country we love. It cannot be appeased. Its relentless, reckless use of terms like extremist, sexist, racist, homophobe, nativist, xenophobe, fascist, and Nazi testifies to how seriously it takes the struggle and how it views those who resist. To true believers in the revolution, the Right is not just wrong; the Right is evil.

  Here is Jesse Jackson, premier voice of black America, after the 1994 GOP victory: “Hate and hurt are on a roll in America. If what was happening here was happening in South Africa, it’d be called racist apartheid. If it was happening in Germany, we’d call it Nazism. And in Italy, we’d call it fascism. Here we call it conservatism.”25 As Mr. Bush’s team was winning the Florida recount battle, Jackson reverted: “If George Bush wins, it’ll be by Nazi tactics … . We’ll take to the streets right now. We’ll delegitimize Bush, discredit him, do whatever it takes but never accept him.”26

  To Julian Bond, critics of affirmative action are “neo-fascists.”27 To Atlanta’s ex-mayor Maynard Jackson, the Confederate battle flag is a “swastika.”28 To Cong. Maxine Waters, John Ashcroft is a “racist.”29 Missouri congressman William Clay said of Mr. Bush’s decision to name Ashcroft, this is the “way the Ku Klux Klan members worked to improve race relations—they too reached out to blacks with nooses and burning crosses.”30

  Equating conservatives with Nazis and Klansmen dates at least as far hack as Dr. King, who professed to see in the Goldwater campaign the “danger signs of Hitlerism.”31 The slander is now common, because the cost is free. Few journalists will call black leaders to account, for some share their animus against conservatives, while others agree with Marcuse, who advocated intolerance toward conservatives to delegitimize the Right as beyond the pale of acceptable politics.

  Calling opponents Nazis, fascists, and Klansmen, when it carries no penalty, can be rewarding. It places an opponent outside the company of decent men, discredits in advance what he says, and forces him to defend his character rather than his positions. And there are psychic rewards. After all, if one is standing up to Nazis or night riders, that is surely more heroic than standing up to Denny Hastert or Dick Armey. The more one demonizes an enemy, the more one “heroizes” oneself.

  In the demonization of the Right there is also fantasizing by the Left. Mr. Clinton spoke grimly of black churches being burned by racists in the Arkansas of his boyhood, but it never happened. Mr. Gore can break into tears relating how he vowed to fight Big Tobacco to the last ditch as he watched his beloved sister die of lung cancer. Only later did we learn that Mr. Gore was still bundling with Big Tobacco long after his sister’s death. This Walter Mitty fantasizing explains how Al Gore invented the Internet, discovered Love Canal, and saw his steamy romance with Tipper inspire the writing of Love Story. In Gore’s mind, it may just have happened that way. And when Jesse Jackson compares a Florida legal battle to Selma, he not only casts Republican lawyers as the club-wielding troopers of “Bull” Connor with their attack dogs—but himself as the Hero of Selma Bridge.

  “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” laments T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock.32 So, too, have our cultural elites. But in their minds they daily heave a cutlass against Nazis, fascists, and Klansmen who would otherwise fall upon defenseless and persecuted minorities. Why shouldn’t one feel good about
oneself? For today’s progressive, The West Wing of Pres. Josiah Bartlett is the real world.

  The politics of posture entails no pain. Consider again Ms. Sontag’s “the white race is the cancer of human history … the white race and it alone … eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.”33

  Rewrite that sentence with “Jewish race” in place of “white race” and the passage would fit nicely into Mein Kampf. Had Sontag so savaged the Jewish people, her career would have ended there. But her diatribe against the “white race” no more diminished her standing than her 1968 visit to Hanoi, when the North Vietnamese were torturing American POWs. Sontag subsequently won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, and one recent survey found her the most respected intellectual of our time. Yet, as Tom Wolfe, of Radical Chic and Bonfire of the Vanities fame, asked about Sontag:

  Who was this woman? Who and what? … a Max Weber … an Arnold Toynbee. Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium, encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.34

  Sontag, said Wolfe, seemed “hellbent on illustrating” the truth of McLuhan’s observation that “moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”35

  ULTIMATELY IT IS the dream of every victim to exchange places with his oppressor,” wrote Franz Fanon, the revolutionary.36 Fanon’s insight helps to explain the transformation of the civil rights movement from a social movement in the American tradition of women’s suffrage and the labor movement into an arm of the revolution.

  In the 1950s, African Americans could still be described as socially conservative, patriotic, proudly Christian. What they wanted, demanded, was to be full and equal members of our national family, to which they and their people had contributed all their lives. America said yes. Black and white together, America went out and buried Jim Crow. We seemed on the way to a more united country. But when the valid grievances had been redressed and the legitimate demands for equal rights under law had been met, America’s attention moved elsewhere. Civil rights became yesterday’s story.