THE WEST IS the most advanced civilization in history and America the most advanced nation—first in economics, science, technology, and military power. No superpower rival exists. Europe, Japan, and America control two-thirds of the world’s wealth, income, and productive capacity.
But America and the West face four clear and present dangers.
The first is a dying population. Second is the mass immigration of peoples of different colors, creeds, and cultures, changing the character of the West forever. The third is the rise to dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, which has already sundered the West. The fourth is the breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government whose rise entails the end of nations.
The West does not lack the capacity or power to repel these dangers, but it seems to lack the desire or will to maintain itself as a vital, separate, unique civilization. As the ex-Trotskyite and geostrategist James Burnham wrote over a third of a century ago:
I do not know what the cause is of the West’s extraordinarily rapid decline, which is most profoundly shown by the deepening loss, among the leaders of the West, of confidence in themselves and in the unique quality of their own civilization, and by a correlated weakness of the Western will to survive. The cause or causes have something to do, I think, with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury; and, I suppose with getting tired, worn out, as all things temporal do.5
This struggle to preserve the old creeds, cultures, and countries of the West is the new divide between left and Right; this struggle will define what it means to be a conservative. This is the cause of the twenty-first century and the agenda of conservatism for the remainder of our lives.
In considering any strategy for the preservation of our culture and country, an assessment of the balance of forces is needed. Not only have the cultural institutions of the West been captured, so, also, have the major corporate centers of power. And just as globalism is the antithesis of patriotism, the transnational corporation is a natural antagonist of tradition. With its adaptability and amorality, it has no roots; it can operate in any system. With efficiency its ruling principle, it has no loyalty to workers and no allegiance to any nation. With share price and stock options its reasons for being, it will sacrifice everything and everyone on the altar of profit. The global capitalist and the true conservative are Cain and Abel. But the growing power of global capitalism cannot be denied. Measured by GDP, fifty-two of the world’s one hundred most powerful economies are corporations, and forty-eight are countries.6
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is a lost cause in the culture war, and many Republicans are reluctant warriors. If a battle impends and losses are anticipated, they will vanish from camp before sunup. In cultural conflict, a Davos Republican is no match for a San Francisco Democrat.
As the cultural revolution took generations to triumph, it will take generations to roll back. And the great battles will not be political, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual. For the adversary is not another party, but another faith, another way of seeing God and man. And the outcome will be less often decided in Congress than in the schools, the media, and the high court. For the prize contested is the souls of the young. “We’ll get you through your children,” boasted poet Allen Ginsberg in unconscious echo of that other cultural revolutionary, Adolf Hitler: If they do not go with us, it does not matter. We already have their children.7
Needed for victory is not only a conservative spirit, to defend what is right about America and the West, but a counterrevolutionary spirit to recapture lost ground. To preserve their rights, and their right to live as they wished, the Founding Fathers had to become rebels. So shall we.
THE “REVOLUTION,” WROTE Jean-François Revel, “writes the play in which political leaders act much later.”8 That is what this revolution has been about: capturing the culture, and with it the power to write the play in which the political leaders act.
Regimes not rooted in cultures cannot endure. The Stalinist regimes in the captive nations of Eastern Europe never put down roots in the culture. When the threat of Russian tanks was gone, so were the regimes. Republicans today abandon moral terrain they confidently defended in the Reagan era because they sense the culture has turned hostile. And they may be right. There may be “more of them than there are of us.” Thus, conservatives need to make alliances with any who will stand with them. Not every liberal wants to see our civilization end its days in a new Babylonian captivity; not a few “conservatives” have stacked arms in the culture war.
This is the struggle that succeeds the Cold War and will consume the balance of our lives. While none of us may live to see the promised land, ultimately, victory is assured. For we have it on the highest authority that truth crushed to earth shall rise again.
OF THE FOUR clear and present dangers, the population crisis of the West is the most immediate, and most dangerous.
History teaches that the correlation between power and population is not absolute. A few million British conquered a fourth of the world. Tiny Portugal and Holland seized territory and planted colonies in lands far larger and more populous: Brazil, India, China, Africa, the Indies. But population is a component of power. Soldier for soldier, the Confederacy was the equal of the Union, but there were not enough Confederates, and too many Yankees. France’s paranoia over a soaring German population after Versailles proved justified. Hitler’s Wehrmacht may have been the superior in arms of the Red Army, but 80 million Germans ruthlessly organized under Hitler could not defeat 197 million Soviets ruthlessly organized under Stalin. A Soviet Union of 290 million could control a world empire. An aging, shrinking, dying Russia of 145 million will be fortunate to hold what it has. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find in history any example of a family, a tribe, a people, a nation, or a civilization whose population has grown old and whose numbers have begun to shrink that did not have taken from it what it once took from others.
The Death of the West may already be baked in the cake. The baby boom that began in 1946 and ended in 1964 was the largest generation in U.S. history. But it failed to reproduce itself. With its oldest now fifty-five, and its youngest thirty-seven, that generation is about done having children. The eldest have begun to look toward retirement, when families pay down debts, curb spending, and lower consumption.
Japan, where the median age is five years greater than in the United States, hit the wall in 1990. Real estate and equity markets collapsed and have yet to recover. In October 2001, Japanese stocks were 75 percent below their 1989 peak, and Japan’s economy was as dormant as her population growth.
Europe’s populations have already begun to shrink. With fewer children entering the workforce, and the number of seniors and elderly soaring, Europe must raise taxes and retirement ages and cut benefits to seniors—or import new workers. Europe will try both. As Europeans are forced to work longer for less, to support the idle elderly, generational tensions will increase; and as Arabs and Africans pour in, social tensions will rise. The race riots in the Lancashire mill town of Oldham, and in Leeds, Burnley, and Bradford, the fights between Spaniards and Moroccans in El Ejido, the bloody battles between French and Algerian youth in Paris, and skinhead attacks on immigrants and Turks in Germany are harbingers of the “long hot summers” that are coming to Europe. But should Europe reject immigration, and European women refuse to have children, the Continent will soon stare senescence in the face.
AMERICA FACES THE same questions. If tens of millions of American girls and young women are determined not to have children, or to have no more than one, America either accepts mass immigration or the fate of Japan and Europe. But America has time to act. If Americans wish to preserve their civilization and culture, American women must have more children. While there is no guarantee that government incentives can change the mind-set of women, a profamily, pro-child bias can be built back into national policy. For what is more important than the perman
ence of the American nation and people?
• The Civil Rights Act should be amended to allow employers to pay higher wages to parents than to single people, to enable one spouse to stay home with infants and toddlers and to be there when the kids come home from school. This should apply to single dads and single moms.
• Instead of a tax deduction for day care, so mothers can return to work, the federal tax credit for each child should be raised to three thousand dollars. This might eliminate federal income taxes for large families as well as poor families. Give women freedom to choose whether to stay home with their kids—and have more kids. America does not need more workers; America needs more children.
• Employers should be given tax incentives to pay higher wages to parents. We need to revive the idea of the family wage, where a single income is adequate for a secure and comfortable life for a growing family.
• The burden of corporate taxation should be shifted off family businesses and farms onto the larger corporations. As Ronald Reagan used to say, corporations don’t pay taxes, people do. Corporations only collect taxes. Let the Fortune 500 do the collecting.
• “Death taxes” should be abolished immediately for family businesses, family farms, and family estates worth under five million dollars.
• If new revenue is needed to pay for these family tax cuts, it can be obtained through taxes on consumption and duties on imports. If America has a crisis, it is certainly not a lack of imported consumer goods down at the mall.
Today, the values of feminism and the counterculture are built into our social policies and tax code. Conservatives should act to remove them. A free society cannot force women to have children, but a healthy society can reward those who preserve it by doing so.
For two decades, Republicans have touted the “supply-side” benefits of cuts in marginal tax rates. They have been proven right. And tax cuts are a positive good. But what is at stake now is far more important than whether our economy grows at 3 or 4 percent. It is the survival of our civilization, culture, and country.
Yet, easing the economic burden of raising children is no substitute for a revival of religious faith. For strong faith and big families go hand in hand. Among white Americans today, it is no surprise where the highest birthrate may be found—in Utah.
ASSIMILATION
In Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, Gouverneur Morris is quoted as saying: “Every society from a great Nation down to a Club has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted.”9 To stem today’s invasion of the United States and assimilate our thirty-one million foreign-born, America must, without apology, exercise that right.
• Legal immigration should be rolled back to 250,000 each year. Welfare benefits should be restricted to Americans. Immigration laws should be rewritten to end “chain immigration,” where new immigrants are entitled to bring in their extended families. In short, immigration laws should be rewritten, with the emphasis on what is best for America.
• The H-1B program, expanded to benefit Silicon Valley, under which 200,000 professional workers are brought in yearly, should be suspended. In 2000 and 2001, U.S. high-tech workers lost tens of thousands of jobs. College grads cannot find the jobs they thought would be there. To bring in foreign workers to compete with our own jobless citizens is to betray our own workers and their families. We should put Americans first.
• A new amnesty for illegal aliens, as proposed by President Fox, would invite tens of millions more to break America’s immigration laws and break into our country in anticipation of yet another amnesty. It would be tantamount to declaring open borders. Opposition to amnesty is an imperative.
• The United States must summon up the moral courage to deport illegal aliens. If there is no sanction for breaking into the United States, what is the sense of having immigration laws? If we turn a blind eye to what is happening on our borders, a huge slice of the Third World will arrive here in the first decades of the twenty-first century. For the word is out that the candy store is open and the cop no longer walks the beat.
• The horrific atrocities at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the other acts of terrorism that have occurred, should be wake-up calls to this generation of what is at risk in our naive embrace of “open borders.” The world is not as we wish it would be, but a world where some regimes and rulers and renegade terrorists bear a murderous hatred of America. And because of our immigration policies, our enemies are already inside the gates. To preserve the security and freedom of our people, we must run them down and remove them from our midst, and protect our borders far better than we have in recent decades. The survival of a free society depends upon it.
• Immigrant children should be immersed in English from the day they enter an American classroom. Most immigrant parents want it for their children; more important, the nation needs it. And immersion works. As the New York Times reports:
Two years after Californians voted to end bilingual education and force a million Spanish-speaking students to immerse themselves in English as if it were a cold bath, those students are improving in reading and other subjects at often striking rates, according to standardized test scores.10
Ken Noonan, the founder of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, was among the most vociferous opponents of Proposition 227, whose purpose was to end bilingual education. But, two years after his defeat, Noonan was singing the praises of Proposition 227: “I thought it would hurt kids. The exact reverse occurred, totally unexpected by me. The kids began to learn—not pick up, but learn—formal English, oral and written, far more quickly than I thought they could.”11
A Californian whose own Mexican mother never learned English, Noonan went on: “You read the research and they tell you it takes seven years. Here are kids within nine months in the first year, and they literally learned to read.”12
If we are to remain one nation and one people, an end to bilingual education is essential, for two languages means two cultures and eventually two countries. The American people know this. English must become the official language of the American people.
• The Republican party’s drive to make Puerto Rico a state should be defeated. Like Cuba and Costa Rica, Puerto Rico is a separate country with its own language, customs, and culture. Her people’s right to independence and eventual nationhood should not be taken away.
• The U.S. Border Patrol should get the manpower it needs to police our borders, and Americans alone should decide whether and when our national family should be enlarged. If President Fox wants open borders, let him open up his own border with Guatemala.
• Businesses that repeatedly hire illegal aliens to avoid paying the wages and providing the benefits and protections legislated for American workers should be prosecuted.
• Any expansion of NAFTA should be opposed. As the European Economic Community (EEC) inexorably evolved from a customs union into a political union, a U.S.-Mexico economic union is a fatal step toward political union of the United States and Mexico, i.e., the end of true independence and nationhood. If Mr. Bush is not aware of this, President Fox is. The history and culture of Mexico and of our Southwest are inseparable, but we remain separate and distinct nations—neighbors, not brothers. And as that most American of poets, Robert Frost, wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Let us “walk the line / and set the wall between us once again.”13
THE SOVEREIGNTY QUESTION
In its agenda for world community, the Humanist Manifesto of 1973 was almost prophetic. Americans, it declared, must “transcend the limits of national sovereignty and … move toward the building of a world community … . We look to … a world order based on transnational federal government.”14 In words that echo Gramsci and The Greening of America, the manifesto rhapsodized:
The true revolution is occurring … . At the present juncture of history, commitment to all humankind is the highest commitment of which we are capable; it transcends the narrow al
legiances of church, state, party, class, or race in moving toward a wider vision … . What more daring a goal for humankind than for each person to become, in ideal as well as practice, a citizen of the world community.”15
This idea, of an end of nations and the creation of a world government, has been a dream of intellectuals since Kant. Though utopian, it recurs in every generation. It is a Christian heresy. When the philosophes of the Enlightenment repudiated the church, they needed a substitute for the church’s promise and vision of heaven. So, they created a new vision of all mankind laboring together to create heaven here on earth. The trading away of the hereafter for the here-and-now is the bargain Esau bought into when he sold Jacob his birthright for a bowl of potage. And the children of the Enlightenment are now far along with their project. As Christianity dies in the West, the foundation and first floor of a world government are already in place.
The UN is to be its parliament, with the Security Council its upper chamber (the veto is to be abolished), and the General Assembly its lower house. The International Criminal Court, the World Court, and the World Trade Organization would constitute its judicial branches. The IMF is its Federal Reserve. The World Bank and its sister development banks are the foreign aid agencies. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Health Organization are among its welfare agencies. The Kyoto Protocol on global warming creates the global EPA. The model and forerunner is the European Union, the EU. Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s roommate at Oxford and architect of his Russian policy, in a column a decade ago in Time, declared that the twentieth century had “clinch[ed] the case for world government, and described the regime that will rule in the closing decades of the twenty-first century:
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