The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  To recapture the nation’s attention, new demands had to be invented, and when they were met, still newer demands. Desegregation was now no longer enough. Affirmative action, quotas, set-asides, equality of result in jobs, pay, and income, and legislative and congressional districts redrawn to guarantee a “fair” share of the seats of power were demanded. Racial balance had to be achieved in classrooms, even if it meant forced busing of white children into dangerous inner-city schools. The old battle cry of freedom gave way to the new “nonnegotiable demands” for Black Power.

  In 1971, the Supreme Court heard a case in which a white law student was protesting his failure to be admitted to the Arizona bar though he had a higher score on the bar exam than black students who had been admitted. During court discussion, Justice Thurgood Marshall turned to his colleague William Douglas and said, “You guys have been discriminating for years. Now it is our turn.”37

  The civil rights movement melded with the cultural revolution, and militant leaders had even newer demands. Songs like “Dixie” must never again be publicly sung. Robert E. Lee must no longer be honored. As Washington was a slave owner, his name and the names of all former slave owners should be removed from schools that black children attend. Mark Twain’s books contain racial slurs; get them out. The Confederate battle flag is a symbol of racism. Replicas must be removed from all state flags, or boycotts will be imposed. Immigration laws must put Third World peoples first in line to increase “diversity.” We also need new hate crimes laws that single out for special punishment and reeducation whites who attack blacks. And now we would like to sit down and discuss reparations for slavery.

  “Every successful revolution puts on in time the robe of the tyrant it has deposed,” said Barbara Tuchman.38 Every political cause, added Eric Hoffer, eventually becomes a business and then degenerates into a racket. Civil rights has become a racket. All Americans of goodwill would offer a hand to alleviate the social catastrophe in black America. For, after all, African Americans are children of the same God and citizens of the same republic. But the Jacksons, Sharptons, and Bonds do not want our help. They want to bait us, provoke us, and demonize us, for that is how they keep the pot boiling, the TV producers calling, and the federal and foundation grants rolling in. If Theodore Bilbo and Bull Connor are dead and gone, new white racists must be found, even if they have to be invented, like John Ashcroft and George W. Bush. Booker T. Washington warned America to be wary of these race racketeers:

  There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.39

  Right down the smokestack, Dr. Washington.

  When an argument revolves around issues of race, Republicans go limp. They seem intimidated to the point of paralysis. Why?

  As fair-minded and mostly Christian folks, they concede that there is truth in the indictment of America’s past. Our fathers did participate in slavery. We did practice segregation. Our treatment of the Indians was not what one should have expected of people to whom the Sermon on the Mount was divine command. But, having internalized a guilt that gnaws at their souls, these Republicans, in their lifelong quest for absolution, are easy prey for confidence men like Jackson and Sharpton who run the Big Sting.

  The truth? In the story of slavery and the slave trade, Western Man was among the many villains, but Western Man was also the only hero. For the West did not invent slavery, but it alone abolished slavery. Had it not been for the West, African rulers would still be trafficking in the flesh of their kinsmen. Slaves, after all, were the leading cash crop of the friends of Mansa Musa. In Mauritania and Sudan today, slavery has returned, to the deafening silence of intellectuals who have built careers on the moral shakedown of America and the West. America was a segregated society, but in no other nation do people enjoy greater freedom, opportunity, and prosperity than here in the United States.

  The time for apologies is past. But if Middle America believes that capitulations and reparations will buy peace in our time, it deludes itself. If there were no more demands, the race racketeers would have to find a new line of work. But as long as the silent majority keeps acceding to their demands, they will keep on making them. Time to just say no.

  THE DEGRADATION OF civil rights and the merger of that movement with the cultural revolution compounds the risks of the balkanization of America. For, where FDR’s New Deal coalition was based on economics, the haves versus the have-nots, the new Democratic coalition is based on bloc voting and ethnic politics.

  If the party loses its lock on black America, no Democratic lock on the presidency is possible. That is a political fact of life. Thus, Democrats have an immense stake in sustaining the fear and loathing of Republicans among African Americans. In every election of the 1990s, the race card was played, by stoking the fear that either black churches would be burned or black voters disfranchised. In the 2000 election, Mr. Gore went to a black church in Pittsburgh to offer these reflections on his rival:

  When my opponent, Governor Bush, says that he will appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, I often think of the strictly constructionist meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written and how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being.40

  Mr. Gore was implying that Mr. Bush had no real problem with slavery. Divisive? Yes. But it paid off. African Americans turned out in record numbers in many states and voted eleven to one for Albert Gore. With the White House the prize, why would Democrats give up a race card that is the ace of trumps in urban America? What would A1 Sharpton and Jesse Jackson do in a high-stakes poker game where the race card has been dropped from the deck?

  The more interesting questions: Why do Republicans continue, election after election, to devote such energy and effort trying to crack the most solid voting bloc the Democratic party has? Why do they not “go hunting where the ducks are”? The Republicans’ largest and most loyal voting bloc is America’s majority. In 1972, Mr. Nixon won 67 percent of the white vote; in 1984, Mr. Reagan won 64 percent. Mr. Bush won 54 percent, but 60 percent of white males. As whites still cast 82 percent of the ballots, if Republicans can raise their share of that vote from 54 to 60 percent, almost no other votes are needed.

  White males are the victims of quotas, affirmative action, set-asides, and reverse discrimination. They are the preferred targets of abuse by academics, journalists, and feminists, as well as the Jacksons, Sharptons, and Bonds. Yet, none of their attackers are beloved of Middle America. If the GOP would come out for an end to racial preferences and a moratorium on immigration, and appeal to the great silent majority, as Democrats appeal to minorities, the party’s chances in national elections could not but improve.

  One recalls that the first President Bush won the White House by draping the weekend pass Michael Dukakis gave murderer Willie Horton, and his ACLU membership card, around Dukakis’s neck. And the first President Bush lost the White House by raising taxes and signing a quota bill—to “reach out” to dissidents who invariably pay Republicans back with a wet mitten across the face.

  THE TWO AMERICAS

  When you come to a fork in the road, take it, said Yogi Berra.

  The Republican party is at a fork in the road. And the decision it takes will be as fateful as the one it took at the San Francisco Cow Palace in 1964, when the party chose Barry Goldwater in that time when “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / To be young very heaven.”41

  As commentators Left and Right are discovering, race and culture are becoming decisive in presidential politics. Blacks, Hispanics, and Jewish Americans voted in landslides for Gore, but his 60 percent vote among white males made Mr. Bush president. A county
-by-county electoral map shows America becoming two nations. Al Gore swept the coastal counties of Washington, Oregon, and California, but carried barely a single county east of the coast. Of some 230 counties in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas, Gore carried three. Gore did well coming up the Mississippi River Valley from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Memphis, St. Louis, the Quad Cites, and St. Paul. But beyond the river cities and their suburbs, Gore was crushed in these mid-American states. As historian Ralph Raico wrote, you can drive across America by almost any route without going through a single county carried by Gore.42 But it is almost impossible to drive through any state, except Rhode Island, without crossing counties that went for Bush.

  What defines the new politics of the twenty-first century? According to the Washington Post, it is morality and culture:

  Battles over abortion, gun control and other cultural values are dramatically reshaping the voting behavior of the American electorate, turning long-time working-class white Democrats into Republicans and moving many affluent whites from the GOP to the party of Roosevelt … . Racial issues such as busing and affirmative action have pushed blue-collar voters into the GOP, at the same time that cultural issues, especially abortion rights, have built Democratic allegiance among white professionals. 43

  Among Americans who earn fifty thousand dollars a year or more, once-solid Republican voters, Bush’s margin was cut to 7 percent. The American Bar Association and American Medical Association were once Republican bastions. No longer. Now they are considered hostile fiefdoms. Of the media, that has long since been true. On election night, writes analyst Terry Teachout, “CNN staffers had to be warned … not to cheer when the network’s anchors announced that Gore had been declared the winner of a state, lest their cheers be heard by viewers.”44

  But if professional elites are moving left, poor whites are moving to the right. An exchange of electorates is taking place. The Post’s Tom Edsall discovered that “in nine out of the ten poorest counties in Kentucky … places where the Democratic Party of Harry S. Truman ran roughshod over Republican adversaries, George W. Bush won, frequently by margins the mirror image of Gore’s in the richest and best educated counties.”45

  Gore lost every income segment of white America, except for those earning under fifteen thousand dollars a year, and he split this vote with Bush forty-nine to forty-six, an astonishing loss of loyalty among poor whites for the party of the people. “The only three issues in my district,” an Oklahoman congressman told this writer a few years back, are “God, gays, and guns!”

  Race aside, frequency of church attendance has become almost the best indicator of how a person will vote. Those who go to church weekly and more often vote Republican by landslides. Those who attend church rarely or never vote Democratic. Yes, Virginia, we are two countries.

  In the 2000 election, the Republican ticket ran away from the issues of race, culture, and life, assuming, correctly, that the hostility to and even detestation of Clinton and Gore would bring social conservatives home. They were right. But the Gore-plus-Nader three-million-vote margin over Bush-Cheney may be the last wake-up call the Republican party will receive.

  If Mr. Bush and his White House do not champion the cause of life, of a color-blind society, and of traditional values, those causes will be lost. And if the Republican party refuses, once in power, to offer leadership to moral and cultural conservatives, as well as to economic conservatives, many will give up on the party, and politics as well. For Mr. Bush, the litmus test is the Supreme Court. Nomination of a pro-choice justice would dishearten and demoralize the Right. If the president lets the next seat go to the Souter-Stevens-Ginsberg-Breyer wing of the court, the only argument left for the GOP is that it is the lesser of two evils, and that is not enough. What Joe Louis said of his light heavyweight challenger Billy Conn is true for the president in the culture wars: “He can run, but he can’t hide.”

  NO MATTER WHAT “compassionate conservatives” may wish, the culture war and racial conflict are not going away. Too many have a vested interest. African Americans and Hispanics are a fourth of our population. Both vote increasingly as blocs in presidential elections. Our media, too, have a stake in racial conflict. Ratings and the ad dollars that flow from them require conflict, and no conflict—save war itself—is more riveting than racial conflict. The O.J. trial may have divided and polarized America, but it guaranteed a successful year at CNN.

  The ballooning budgets of federal agencies—the EEOC, the Civil Rights Commission, the civil rights divisions of Justice, Education, and HHS—require a steady supply of fresh “victims” of racism. The more money these agencies receive, the more violators and victims they must find. By Parkinson’s Law, the work expands to fill the time allotted.

  Civil rights has also attracted the trial lawyers. A news report that a black customer has been sassed, or a black diner denied service, is a winning lottery ticket. For being slow to serve six black Secret Service agents in Annapolis, Denny’s parent company had to pay $54 million to 295,000 plaintiffs and their lawyers, and to sign an agreement with the NAACP to hire more African Americans and patronize more minority-owned suppliers.46

  Reverend Jackson’s 1980s boycott of Anheuser-Busch was resolved so amicably that, by 2000, his sons Yusef and Jonathan were running the largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that after Jackson “threatened protests” against mergers of GTE and Bell Atlantic, AT&T and CTI, he “changed his tune” when they “donated” to Jackson-led groups and “agreed to [Jackson’s] demands by giving contracts to minority business owners—at least some of whom Jackson introduced to the corporate chiefs.”47 Countless are the ways to keep hope alive.

  Black employees of the Christian Coalition, who claim they were not invited to a Christmas party and had to serve at an Inaugural dinner rather than sit with other employees, have sued for the damage done their psyches and self-esteem. The sum demanded—$621 million. 48

  Racial racketeering is not going away; indeed, it is going global. In Durban, South Africa, in September 2000, the United Nations hosted a World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. Purpose: Extract a formal U.S. apology for “transatlantic slavery” and a commitment to tens of billions in “reparations” to African Americans for this nation’s historic “crime against humanity.”

  Reverend Jackson and his Black Caucus allies had hoped to have Colin Powell on hand to ensure worldwide coverage, as his country was indicted, convicted, denounced, and ordered to make restitution to all descendants of African slaves. The Bush Administration, however, refused its assigned role, Secretary Powell begged off going, and the conference blew up after Arab nations hijacked it and converted it into a drumhead court-martial of Israel for “racism” and “apartheid.” The low-level U.S. delegation walked out, but this is not the last Americans will hear of “reparations” for slavery, for the would-be beneficiaries have too large a stake in running the scam.

  With the media, the Democratic party, the federal bureaucracy, the trial lawyers, the UN, and the Third World all having huge investments in racial politics, we will endure it until Western nations decide they have had enough and walk away from the game. But that may be too much to expect of an intimidated people.

  TEN

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  “This used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”1

  —Jack Nicholson, 1969

  Easy Rider

  The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.2

  —Ernest Hemingway, 1940

  For Whom the Bell Tolls

  Civilizations, nations, and states can die many ways. They can be invaded and put to the sword, as Constantinople was in 1453. They can be absorbed by empires, as the Greek city-states were by Rome and the German principalities were by Prussia. Nations can disunite, dissolve, break apart, as Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia did, though many contend t
hat these were always artificial nations.

  Countries and civilizations can undergo conversions that create a new people, as happened to Ireland with St. Patrick, to Arabia with Muhammad. In “Humanism and the New Order,” historian Christopher Dawson, seven decades ago, saw this happening to the West:

  For centuries a civilisation will follow the same path, worshipping the same gods, cherishing the same ideas, acknowledging the same moral and intellectual standards. And then all at once a change will come, the springs of the old life run dry, and men suddenly awake to a new world, in which the ruling principles of the former age seem to lose their validity and to become inapplicable or meaningless … . We seem to be experiencing something of the kind in Europe to-day.3

  Civilizations can also fail to reproduce and be overwhelmed by immigrants indifferent to their culture. “Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without,” wrote Will Durant, “but by barbarian multiplication from within … . The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand the classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding Orientals were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility.”4