Posted on 02/04/2002 9:52:14 PM PST by ouroboros
Through a syndicated column, a long career as a CNN pundit and three quixotic presidential campaigns, the former Republican presidential aide Patrick J. Buchanan has established himself as the country's most prominent foe of immigration. In his tirade ''The Death of the West,'' he makes clear that he sees newcomers as only part of the problem. Braiding two separate complaints, he argues, first, that plummeting birthrates will make white people a minority in much of the West; and, second, that an intolerant liberal elite has transformed America's culture, wrecking its most precious traditions -- which happen to be its bulwark against getting swamped by foreigners.
Buchanan's demographic alarum marks the re-emergence of a genre of racial-doom books not seen (for reasons that are obvious enough) since before World War II. In 1960 a quarter of humanity was of European descent, Buchanan notes; today whites make up just a sixth of the human race, and they're aging. The American birthrate is below replacement level for the first time since the Depression. Of the 22 countries with the world's lowest birthrates, 20 are in Europe, and Spain's median age will be 55 in a few decades. Barbarians will soon be at the gates. Only 8 million Russians will be living in the mineral- and oil-rich lands east of the Urals, irresistible lebensraum for a Chinese population rising toward 1.5 billion. Europe's generous welfare states, viable in a society that has 5 workers per retiree, will buckle once that ratio falls to 2. Short on labor, Europe must choose either penury for its elderly or a huge immigration from Africa and a ''second great Islamic wave.''
Buchanan's explanation of what sent our own country to hell in a handbasket is the standard-issue cultural-conservative one. Abortion, pornography, euthanasia, gun control and political correctness are the crimes; feminists, liberal judges and Marxisant scholars are the perpetrators. Americans of different stripes will agree with at least some of Buchanan's assertions: that racial activism has taken on aspects of a religion in the hands of the hard left, that international prosecutors pursue rightists like Augusto Pinochet with far more zeal than leftists like Fidel Castro, that the ideology of ''human rights'' was put to the service of imperialism in Kosovo, that ''hate crimes'' legislation has less to do with justice than with ideological special pleading, that political correctness -- the punctiliousness that Americans bring to matters of race, gender and sexual orientation -- maintains a tenacious hold on public life, chilling free discussion. Future historians will snicker at it, as we do at Victorian prudery; but they will also shudder, as we do at McCarthyite persecution.
Still, just as there were real perverts in Victoria's day and real Stalinists in McCarthy's, there are real segregationists in our own. Buchanan focuses to the point of obsession on the crusade against symbols of the Confederacy, from Virginia's abolition of Confederate History Month to the vandalism of a statue in Selma of the Confederate general and Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest. While claiming to reject ''the blood-and-soil idea of a nation,'' he does not recognize a difference between ''civilization'' on the one hand and race on the other. You can tell this by the way he flings around the term ''third world'' as a synonym for ''nonwhite.'' California, he says, ''is on its way to becoming a predominantly third world state'' (which will surely be news to the English biochemists and French stockbrokers queued up to enter it).
Much of this provocation is surely ladled out just to rile the bien-pensants. Buchanan loves ideological dust-ups (''The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution'') and purple oratory (''Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry''). His signal debating trick is a cheap one, ever beloved of rabble-rousers -- to take a broad historical trend and find someone to scapegoat for it. Thus, Republicans are fleeing social issues not because they cost votes but because ''the media have whispered in Republican ears.'' The 20 years after World War II were a ''golden age of marriage,'' but this superb modus vivendi ''fell apart in the 1960's, when feminists managed to add 'sex' to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964.'' And Americans, in his reading, were duped out of their ancestral faiths by a few wily atheistic savants from the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse chief among them.
Buchanan is now reflexively hostile to any evidence that the United States retains any strong points at all. He deplores the fact that no top college has an American history requirement. But clearly universities are doing something right, for in what other country does the biography of a hitherto little-studied 18th-century politician spend months on the best-seller list, as David McCullough's ''John Adams'' has done? Buchanan also detects, quoting James Burnham, a ''deepening loss, among the leaders of the West, of confidence in themselves and in the unique quality of their own civilization.'' This is a bizarre complaint from one who rails at the International Monetary Fund and at the ''braggadocio'' of those who declare the United States the world's only superpower. Western leaders, in fact, are self-confident as never before -- and the central pillar of that self-confidence is their belief that, to some extent, all cultures are becoming Western ones.
In 1992, Buchanan electrified the Republican National Convention with a declaration that Americans were locked in a ''religious war'' and a ''cultural war'' for the nation's soul. What distinguishes ''The Death of the West'' from his lament then is that today he considers that war decisively lost. ''A new generation has now grown up,'' he writes, ''for whom the cultural revolution is not a revolution at all, but the culture they were born into and have known all their lives.'' Far from coming to an accommodation with this new order, he is past even wishing the country well: cultural revolutionaries ''have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for -- their country, not ours.'' Having spent years fighting what he took to be a dangerous faction in American life, Pat Buchanan has come to realize that what he has been fighting is America itself. He has decided he prefers the fight to the country.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
It is interesting and curious despite its frequency. It is merely another manifestation of denying responsibility for one's own actions (choices).
BTW, have you stoppped beating your wife yet?
They just think that only PC friendly types like them with their open-border policies can say these sorts of things.
And it's so stupid! Yes, they and the racial socialists are both open borders types. Big, bloody deal! Their reasons are diametrically opposed. And the racial socialists barely tolerate the existence of neocons. Whenever the racial socialists have the opportunity (e.g., academia, the schools), they do away with anyone right of Clinton. But he got his New York Times credit, so now he can die happy. Hey, I wouldn't mind getting published on the Times' op-ed page either, but I wouldn't stoop to Caldwell's level to do it.
First of all, within the guidelines of the forum, I can can do whatever the hell I want. Second, I do not call everyone who disagrees with Pat a neocon. While I might cast a wider net than some in calling folks "neocons", I do not throw the term around willy-nilly. The term is very specific.
Do you even know the meaning of the word ? Do YOU even have the faintest idea, who this author is , and his background ?
Yes, I do. Do you? I know exactly who the author is. I have seen him on CNN and I have read him in the New York Press and the Weakly Standard. I think any objective observer would classify him as neocon. In fact, I doubt very seriously that Caldwell himself would reject the label.
How does one best-seller prove that "clearly universities are doing something right"? Does Caldwell know the ages of the people buying this book? Does he know whether they went to "top universities"? Does he know why they're buying the book? How does Caldwell extrapolate his conclusion?
You don't have to be a fan of Pat Buchanan to agree with him on the American history requirement, and also think Christopher Caldwell's argument here is incredibly weak.
Re the logically fallacious connection between the quality of our universities, and the success of a non-academic biography: You could, with equal logical validity, claim that the bestseller status of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, 15 years ago, was a vindication of the very universities Bloom attacked.
(Caldwell's style also apes that of racial socialists. A few years ago, I read a piece by a bean-counting, tenured feminist, who was complaining about the number of times an 'obscure, 18th century white male biographer' showed up in syllabi. She was referring to James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.)
I think it is too considering some of the bestsellers a century or more ago and the fact that some of those reading them were self taught(read uneducated by the left) farmers and thier families. He assumes that it is college graduates who have read the biography of John Adams. Of course, I'm no stranger to the reactions of teachers and the elite when they meet an articulate and thoughtful drop out. It's unimaginable to them that anyone can be self taught. Look at the railing against homeschooling.
Here's a great essay by Gatto regarding how his mother taught him to read and the sheer number of books that were sold amongst the "illiterate" and home educated farmers that even today's college professors couldn't read with interest.
http://www.primenet.com/~afhe/gatto3.htm
This is a good catch-all. Though I'm no Protestant, I think we lost more "good" in its decline than we lost that was "bad" (or maybe I should have said "gained good.")
But, as you say, that doesn't explain all of it either, and I don't claim to understand it. I would be surprised to find that the nature of the public school curriculum for the last 20+ years hasn't played a large role.
When you overuse / misuse a word, it fails to have any meaning. You did do this with your use of " neo-con."
I too have heard and read Mr. Caldwell, and I highly doubt that he would take on the mantle, of neoconism.
Items like VCRs and multiple electronic gadgets around the home are additional costs by choice. But frequently these are one time purchases, not reoccuring. Cell phones and car payments are.
With two incomes being needed to support the family, a second car frequently becomes necessary. The cell phone, which might look like a extra people could do without, is frequently needed since the adults are having to react to a more harried pace that parents a generation ago did. Mom or dad leaves work heading to pick up the kids when the other spouse lets them know of a change in arrangements. Or perhaps there's a need to pick up something on the way home.
I realize that this is still somewhat of a avoidable service, but at the same time it's hard to dismiss it as purely an option.
I am willing to buy off on some of the extras that we chose to purchase. Cable seems a service we could do without. But then children almost have to have access to cable if they are going to avoid being that one kid that doesn't know what the heck other kids are refering to at school. Without this exposure, the kid can be judged to be a wierdo. Of course that can be prevented by home schooling, but sometimes that isn't an option.
Perhaps I'm going overboard to make the case for some of the expenses we pass off as option choices, but I do think some of these items are not as optional as one might suspect.
Still, I'm not willing to dimiss your comments because I do think there is some merit to your arguement as well.
Wake me when it's over.
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