Death of the West

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 29, 2002 | by Rex Roberts

Conservatives who feel slighted by what they consider a liberal tilt to almost all aspects of American society -- but in particular, to the media -- will find succor in three books that address this issue: Patrick J. Buchanan's Death of the West (Thomas Dunne, $25.95, 308 pp), Bernard Goldberg's Bias ($27.95, 232 pp) and Matthew Robinson's Mobocracy (Prima, $24.95, 378 pp). Buchanan's analysis of the cultural revolution that swept the United States in the second half of the 20th century, and his antidotes for its attendant ills, examines everything from education to global economics, but he pays special attention to the entertainment and information industries. Goldberg and Robinson focus specifically on journalism and its handmaiden, public-opinion polling, arguing that reporters, editors and producers, as well as pollsters and political consultants, have conspired to distort the news, alter elections and undermine democracy.

"America has just undergone a cultural revolution, with a new elite now occupying the commanding heights," writes Buchanan in the introduction to his eminently readable, undeniably controversial essay on the demise of Western civilization. "Through its capture of the institutions that shape and transmit ideas, opinions, beliefs, and values -- TV, the arts, entertainment, education--this elite is creating a new people."

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are feeling left behind, "strangers in their own land." Never one to mince words, Buchanan makes his point crystal clear: "In half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations."

How did this happen? When Marx and his henchmen, Stalin, Lenin and Mao, failed to convince the workers of the world to embrace communism, their successors redirected their efforts. European intellectuals such as Georg Lukfics, Antonio Gramsci and Erich Fromm began to attack more vulnerable Western institutions such as Christianity, nationalism and patriarchy.

"The old Marxist vision of workers rising up to overthrow their capitalist rulers was yesterday" Buchanan writes. In the new struggle, countercultural critics, some of them campus idols like Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization), others best-selling authors like Charles Reich (The Greening of America), rallied the disaffected, the marginalized, the disgruntled -- that is, feminists, homosexuals and black militants, as well as radicalized middle-class baby boomers eager to find fault with their parents' values, morals and conventions. The nuclear family, marriage and motherhood were declared hopelessly out of date; individualism, self-actualization and hedonism became the paradigms for modern living.

"America has become an ideological state, a `soft tyranny,' where the new orthodoxy is enforced, not by police agents, but by inquisitors of the popular culture" Buchanan writes. Nonconformity elicits stern retribution. "Political correctness is cultural Marxism, a regeime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy."

Buchanan means for his readers to take his warnings about the death of the West literally. Ideas have consequences, he reminds us, and the triumph of liberalism, combined with the availability of birth control and abortion, are reducing populations dramatically in every Western nation (expect for Muslim Albania) as well as in Japan. Europe's aging citizenry increasingly depends on immigrant labor (not only to work, but to supply government coffers with taxes). The United States, too, is undergoing demographic upheaval as Hispanics pour across its southern border.

"Only a social counterrevolution or a religious awakening can turn the West around before a falling birthrate closes off the last exit ramp and rings clown the curtain on Western Man's long-running play" Buchanan laments. "But not a sign of either can be seen on the horizon." And while he ponders the reasons that women in the West have stopped having children, Goldberg wonders why the media aren't reporting on this and related stories, including "the terrible things" happening to children in the United States.

"As more and more mothers have opted for work outside the house over taking care of their children at home -- and not always for economic reasons -- the results have been disastrous" writes Goldberg, a former CBS News reporter and producer who believes the networks have ignored the alarming increase in drug use, sexually transmitted diseases and other maladies affecting the children of working couples. "It's not that there's been a television news blackout on all the bad things happening to our kids; we do get a story here about teen suicide and one there about test scores. It's just that the elite journalists in network television have no desire to connect the dots. They don't report the really big story arguably one of the biggest stories of our time -- that this absence of mothers from American homes is without any historical precedent" and that millions of American children have been left to fend for themselves in a "pit of emptiness and alienation"