Solid scholarship undergirds Buchanan's sober predictions

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 11, 2002 | by Paul Gottfried

Critics of Pat Buchanan in the national press have turned a blind eye toward what has caused his book, The Death of the West (see "Predicting the West's Decline," March 4), to rise on the bestseller lists, having now reached almost 200,000 units in sales. Not only has the volume done well, it has succeeded in spite of nasty comments placed in leading newspapers and without any puff pieces from the left or the neo-conservative establishment. The book also has helped turn its author once again into a highly visible presence on TV talk shows, with a more plausible claim to being there than the one provided by his recent fumbling race for the presidency.

Adding to Buchanan's credibility as a political commentator are his exhaustive research, particularly in the first two chapters, about declining Euro-American birthrates; and the stated, documentable reasons he gives for this pattern. Buchanan attempts to link the demographic drain to a moral and cultural crisis that he assumes lots of people are beginning to feel in their bones. His talk about a Third World invasion since the Immigration Act of 1965 builds on an impressive body of scholarship (including the works of Peter Brimelow, George Borjas and Roy Beck) that suggests the economic benefits of mass Third World (mostly Latino) migration have been slight or nonexistent, while the social costs, particularly increased welfare and crime, have more than offset those material benefits.

Moreover, the social experiment of transferring culturally different and materially impoverished groups into the United States and Western Europe no longer is a discussable issue for the media or the two major parties. In much of Western Europe even raising the question of whether Western peoples should be able to decide through open discussion what kind of culture they wish to live in can result in the instigator being jailed for a "crime of opinion." What Buchanan emphasizes, especially in his chapter "The Intimidated Majority," is that politically enforced sensitivity is about the eradication of self-government and the end of intellectual freedom. Quoting a phrase from my tome, After Liberalism, about the "dehumanization of [insensitive] dissent," Buchanan observes that the suppression of discussion about immigration points to a culture of intimidation now being packaged as "multiculturalism." And the inroads of that culture--which has captured the state, the media, the universities and many churches -- can only be explained by looking at various interlocking causes, from Western self-hate and self-indulgence and the loss of traditional religious faith to the influence of well-placed intellectuals, such as members of the German-refugee Frankfurt School, who created a theory for "pathologizing" middle-class decency.

Contrary to what his critics suggest, Buchanan does not go after his targets from a far-out rightist position. The impression he creates is that American life and politics were highly satisfactory in the fifties, except for the Soviet threat and the lingering problem of anti-black discrimination. This latter problem would be addressed in the late fifties and early sixties, when African-Americans who could still be described as socially conservative, patriotic, proudly Christian," asked to become "full and equal members of our national family, to which they and their families had contributed all their lives. America said yes. Black and white together."

He seems equally positive about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though believing it later was distorted to mandate quotas and that it should be amended to allow employers to discriminate financially in favor of parents living on a single wage. Unlike in his earlier books, he never mentions Joe McCarthy as an iconic figure, but extols Dwight Eisenhower and treats the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. respectfully.

Immigration enters his discussion as, among other things, a tactic of cultural war. It is a policy for displacing Western core populations by groups that are culturally different and, in some cases, openly antagonistic -- a displacement widely defended by the self-identified despisers of traditional Western civilization. Enforcing this defense, Buchanan argues with ample evidence, are the neoconservatives who have grabbed the American right-center and combine their advocacy of large-scale Third World immigration with attacks on anti-immigrationists and warnings to the right not to pay too much attention to cultural struggles.

But despite the mutual animosity between him and this last group, Buchanan has followed them in one critical respect. He has avoided attacking the entitlement state and calls on big government to help us win the demographic and cultural battles he describes. Although Buchanan mocks the Weekly Standard for identifying American patriotism with affection for the federal government, he himself takes what might be called a non-hostile position on this object of idolatry. He thereby is exhibiting a survival instinct and forestalling a public perception of him as a nutty extremist who opposes our political way of life. Those who are big-government conservatives necessarily have captured the right and public attention because Americans and other Westerners want the state to look after them and their by-now-dwindling families.