For two decades now, Pat Buchanan has been warning us of the dangers our country faces.  When he first started sounding the alarm, at the end of the Cold War, those dangers were hard to perceive.  Now, they are hard to ignore.

 

  Pointless wars in the Mideast have resulted in thousands of American casualties and the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars.  Our trade policies have led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and 50,000 factories and an increasing dependence on foreign nations, which both provide us with goods we no longer make and own our debt.  Uncontrolled immigration has driven down wages and driven Americans out of the job market in some areas and is poised to radically transform the country.  The great American middle class is reeling, in part because of the downward pressure on wages caused by free trade and mass immigration.  Unregulated finance has brought the nation to the brink of economic ruin, and the loss of a common faith and common culture threatens our national unity.  All the while, the federal government has continued to grow and grow, constantly assuming duties it does not have while failing to exercise those it does.   Pat Buchanan was called many names for raising these issues, but he has been right and his critics have been wrong.

Now Buchanan has written a new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?  This book continues to raise many of the issues Buchanan has long stressed and shows where we are likely to end up, if we do not change course.  It is well-written, well researched, and highly persuasive.  It will likely be of interest to most Chronicles readers.  (Indeed, Chronicles is quoted more often than any other journal of opinion).  The book also challenges, head on, the regnant ideology of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

Although the book is likely to end up on the New York Times bestseller list, its reception is also illustrating one of Buchanan’s themes.  “Diversity” has become a religion, the new religion of our elites, and it is “an ideology not terribly tolerant of dissent.”  On October 24, 2011, the political website TPM ran a piece entitled “Twelve Pretty Racist or Just Crazy Quotes from Pat Buchanan’s New Book.”  Most of these statements are either purely factual or conclusions drawn from and supported by facts.  Among the “pretty racist and just crazy” things Buchanan says is that “The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty….Mexico is moving north” and that  “If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities.”  Which raises the question:  is it “pretty racist” to notice reality, or “just crazy?”

Not to be outdone, the Color of Change, a group founded by Marxist ideologue and former official in the Obama Administration Van Jones, has demanded that MSNBC fire Buchannan.  The first charge against Buchanan is that he has has “just published a book which says that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the ‘End of White America,’” quoting the TPM article I just discussed.  Apparently, anyone expressing trepidation about the fact that the Census Bureau projects that by 2042 whites will, for the first time in history, no longer be a majority in the United States should be excluded from public life.

The second charge is that one of the hundred or so radio shows Buchanan has been on to discuss the book is hosted by James Edwards, whom The Huffington Post quotes as describing himself as being “pro-white.”  The Color of Change, on its website, states that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice. Our goal is to empower our members—Black Americans and our allies—to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone.”  In the political world Color of Change wants to create, allowing yourself to be interviewed by someone who describes himself as “pro-white” should be enough to get you fired, but wanting to “strengthen Black America’s political voice” is okay.

Other groups are also trying to get MSNBC to fire Buchanan.  In an interview about the book on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, Buchanan described homosexual conduct as “unnatural and immoral.”  In response, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual activist group, has stated that “MSNBC should sanction Mr. Buchanan, as his extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LGBT people around the world.”  No word yet from the Human Rights Campaign on how long people should be allowed to read the “extremist ideas” of St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom expressed the same view of homosexuality that Buchanan did.

For all the hue and cry over Buchanan’s supposed “hate,” the emotion that runs through Suicide of a Superpower is not hate, but love.  Buchanan sees the country he grew up in and loved passing away, and he wants to raise his voice in its defense.  As Buchanan writes, in one of the twelve “pretty racist or just crazy” statements highlighted by TPM, “Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared?  What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?”

These are all fair questions.  Buchanan does not advocate legal privilege for whites or discrimination against non-whites, even though those calling for him to lose his job do advocate discrimination against whites by means of affirmative action, a form of discrimination that is apparently meant to continue even after whites become a minority in America   Buchanan merely opposes an immigration policy that, by favoring non-European immigrants, is bringing about a radical transformation of America. It is hard to see why white Americans should welcome their own displacement as America’s majority, even though the message being sent by those calling for Buchanan to lose his job is that white Americans must welcome their own displacement.

It should also be noted that, if those voting on the Immigration Act of 1965 had realized what the act would achieve, it would never have become law.  Indeed, Teddy Kennedy, one of the act’s principal supporters, felt the need to declare that, under the act, “the present level of immigration remains substantially the same” and “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”   Today, those who want the level of immigration to be what it was in 1965, or who want the majority of America’s population to be what it was in 1965, risk organized campaigns to strip them of their jobs.

What the hysterical reaction to Buchanan’s book suggests is not just the intolerance of the advocates of “diversity” but also the brittleness of the intellectual foundation of their creed.  After all, anyone who believes that “diversity is our greatest strength” must face the facts of American history.  Most of America’s greatest achievements occurred before anyone thought diversity was our greatest strength, or indeed before America became “diverse” by today’s standards.   As a friend of mine quipped, the Apollo program was diverse only if you define diverse as meaning “white guys with crew cuts and white guys without crew cuts.”  The same could be said, with allowances made for hairstyles of the period, about almost every significant event in American history before the 1960s.  The advocates of “diversity” must also face the fact that ethnic diversity is most often a source of national division and even national disintegration and that, as The Financial Times summarized the research of sociologist Robert Putnam, “the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone—from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.”  Buchanan’s book is a formidable dissent from the cult of “diversity,” which is why its adherents are so eager to prevent us from hearing what he has to say.