Buchanan - Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

To the Old Right

Acknowledgments

For her perseverance in getting me to complete this book, and for coming to see me in the Reagan White House to persuade me to start writing books, my eternal gratitude goes to Fredi Friedman, editor, counselor, agent, friend. To Tom Dunne, my thanks for going ahead with it. Special thanks to Marcus Epstein for the invaluable assistance and untold hours he devoted to researching ideas, issues, and anecdotes. Also, thanks to Michael Rubin for helping match footnotes to text.

Pat Buchanan, June 2011

Contents

Preface

What happened to the country we grew up in?

Like Death of the West, a decade ago, this book seeks to answer that question. But Suicide of a Superpower is being published in another time in another America. When Death of the West came out on New Years, 2002, the nation was united and resolved. America had just swept to a bloodless victory over the Taliban and a triumphant George W. Bush had the approval of nine in ten of his countrymen. In his State of the Union address that same month, the president informed the axis-of-evil nations we were coming for them, and, in his second inaugural address, he would call Americans to a great crusade to end tyranny in our world. Hubristic times.

This book is published after ten years of war in Afghanistan, eight in Iraq, the worst recession and debt crisis America has faced since the 1930s, with the nation divided and seemingly everywhere in retreat. We have entered an era of austerity and retrenchment unlike any this generation has ever known. But not only is it in the realm of economics and politics that America appears in a downward spiral. Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation.

When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization. Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. And so it is. We are the Prodigal Sons who squandered their inheritance; but, unlike the Prodigal Son, we cant go home again.

Introduction

DISINTEGRATING NATION

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

K AHLIL G IBRAN, 1934

The Garden of the Prophet

I think the country is coming apart

G EORGE K ENNAN, 2000

The centrifugal forces have become dominant.

L EE H AMILTON, 2010

Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? was the title of a 1970 essay by Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik. Forced into exile, Amalrik died in a car crash in Spain in 1980. Few had taken him seriously. Yet, nine years after his death, the Soviet Empire had collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated.

What has this to do with us? More than we might imagine.

As did the Soviet Union, America commands an empire of allies, bases, and troops. America, too, is engaged in a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. America, too, is an ideological nation. America, too, is a land of many races, tribes, cultures, creeds, and languages. America, too, has reached imperial overstretch.

Many will reflexively reject the comparison. Where the Soviet empire was a prison house of nations whose Marxist ideology had been imposed by force and terror, America is a democracy whose allies have freely sought her protection.

Yet the similarities should alarm us.

For ethnonationalism, the force that tore the Soviet Union apart, that relentless drive of peoples to separate that translates into tribalism within a country, is not only pulling our world apart, it is tearing at the seams of American union. And the ideals that once defined us as a peoplefreedom, equality, democracyhave been corrupted into concepts more reminiscent of Marxist revolutions than of the American Revolution.

For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincolns words, by bonds of affection. mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone?

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation?

The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birthrate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America. The Atlantic titled its January/February 2009 cover story The End of White America? Newsweek s 2009 Easter cover was The Decline and Fall of Christian America. The statistics bear these stories out.

And for the United States, as for any nation, the death of its cradle faith brings social disintegration, an end to moral community, and culture war. Meanwhile, globalization dissolves the bonds of economic dependency that held us together as a people, as the cacophony of multiculturalism drowns out the old culture.

Is America coming apart? This books answer is yes.

Our nation is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically. Not only do we not love one another, as Christs teaching commands, we seem to detest each other in ways as deep as Southerners detested a mercantile North and Northerners detested an agrarian slaveholding South.

Half of America views abortion as the killing of the unborn meriting the wrath of God. The other half regards right-to-life as a reactionary movement and repressive ideology. In 2009, George Tiller became the fourth abortionist to be assassinated, while James Pouillon was shot and killed outside Owosso High School in Michigan while staging an anti-abortion protest. Advocates of gay marriage see adversaries as homophobic bigots; opponents see advocates as seeking to elevate unnatural acts to the moral and legal status of sacred matrimony. Where one half of America sees progress, the other half sees decadence. The common moral ground on which we once stood united is gone.

Christmas and Easter, the holy days of Christendom, once united us in joy. Now we fight over whether they may be mentioned in public schools. Half of America regards her history as glorious; the other half reviles it as racist. Old heroes like Columbus and Robert E. Lee may be replaced on calendars by Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, but the old holidays and heroes endure as the new put down only the shallowest of roots in middle America. Mexican Americans may celebrate Cinco de Mayo, but to most Americans that was the date of a skirmish in a war about which they know little and care nothing, that took place in the year of the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil: Antietam.

Our twenty-four-hour cable news networks have chosen sides in the culture and political wars. Even our music seems designed to divide us. Where we once had classical, pop, country and western, and jazz, now we have countless varieties tailored to separate and exclude races, generations, and ethnic groups.

We are seceding from one another not only on matters of morality, politics, and culture, but race. When President Obama was inaugurated, there was talk and hope of a new postracial America. But three weeks into Obamas administration, Attorney General Eric Holder began Black History Month by calling us a nation of cowards for not discussing the subject of race more openly. Conservatives who opposed Justice Sonia Sotomayor and stood with Sergeant James Crowley in his confrontation with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. were denounced as racists. They threw the same ugly word back in the face of their accusers and Barack Obama.