Book Report: The Death of the West by Patrick J. Buchanan
A few weeks ago, Pansy came across a blurb for this book in a catalog and blogged on her impression. (At this writing, the archive for that week – and only that week – is missing, so I can’t link to the original discussion.) I had the opportunity to read the book over the last week, and am keeping my promise to bring up the book again. (I call this a book report rather than a review because this blog is going to have more in common with a schoolchild’s hastily written summary of a hastily read book than with a review written by an expert.)
In this book, Buchanan takes a look at demographic forecasts for Europe, the USA, and other Westernized countries versus Asia and Africa. He discusses in detail the implications of Europe and Japan’s baby bust and resulting population crash:
“If one hundred Spanish young people marry today, they can expect to have fifty-eight children, thirty-three grandchildren, but only nineteen great-grandchildren.” (p. 17)
“At present birthrates, Europe must bring in 169 million immigrants by 2050 if it wishes to keep its population aged fifteen to sixty-four at today’s level. But if Europe wishes to keep its present ration of 4.8 workers (fifteen-sixty-four) for every senior, Europe must bring in 1.4 billion emigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Put another way: Either Europe raises taxes and radically downsizes pensions and health benefits for the elderly, or Europe becomes a Third World continent. There is no third way.” (p. 22)
“Societies organized to ensure the maximum pleasure, freedon, and happiness for all their members are, at the same time, advancing the date of their own funerals. Fate may compensate the Chinese, Islamic, and Latin people for their hardships and poverty in this century with the domination of the earth in the next.” (p. 34)
Buchanan discusses the roots of the baby bust: contraception; abortion; the contemporary economic pressures on families; a culture that prizes self-gratification over self-donation and sacrifice, that teaches that women must abandon their fertility to be fulfilled, that looks on children as a burden. He devotes several chapters to analyzing the prevailing secularist culture and its ideological origins. Buchanan traces the spread of “political correctness,” the sexual revolution, and other anti-traditional, anti-Western ideas to the Marxist intellectuals of “The Frankfurt School,” who realized that Marxism would only prevail by destroying Christianity and the family, thus capturing the culture. He also discusses the “everything the U.S.A. ever did is wrong” school of teaching US history.
Buchanan is probably most controversial because of his views on immigration. After his discussion of the problems resulting from large numbers of immigrants into Europe, he moves on to immigration in the US, in a chapter titled, “La Reconquista.” He singles out Mexican immigration as a special issue because of the sheer numbers of immigrants from Mexico, their concentration in the Southwest, the number of illegal immigrants, and what he sees as difficulty assimilating them:
“Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not full participants in American society….Millions [of Mexicans] have no desire to learn English or to become citizens. America is not their home; Mexico is; and they wish to remain proud Mexicans. They have come here to work…With their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines, the Mexican Americans are creating an Hispanic culture separate and apart form America’s larger culture. They are becoming a nation within a nation.” (p. 125-126)
Buchanan contends that Mexico still dreams about recapturing the territory she lost to the US, and that this attitude may be shared by recent Mexican immigrants who come to America to work, not to become Americans. “Why should nationalistic and patriotic Mexicans not dream of a reconquista?” (p. 130) He cites the agenda and actions of MEChA, a radical Chicano student group, and other radical Hispanic groups, as further examples of this threat.
Buchanan discusses other Western nations that have had problems with groups desiring secession, including Canada, and suggests that “California could become another Quebec, with demands for formal recognition of its separate and unique Hispanic culture and identity….” (p 140)
So what are we to do about all this? Buchanan suggests adopting pro-natal, pro-family policies: allowing (not requiring) employers to pay higher wages to parents than to single people and giving them tax incentives to do so; increasing the federal tax credit for each child instead of giving a tax deduction for day care (“America does not need more workers; America needs more children”); shifting the corporate tax burden to larger corporations; abolishing the estate tax for family business and estates worth less that five million dollars; making up lost revenue for these pro-family tax policies by increasing taxes on consumption and duties on imports. “If America has a crisis, it is certainly not a lack of imported consumer goods down at the mall.”
As for immigration, Buchanan suggests rolling back legal immigration to 250,000 each year and restricting welfare benefits to citizens; eliminating the H-1B program for high-tech workers (I believe it grants them special work visas); not having any more amnesties for illegal aliens; deporting illegal aliens that are already here; prosecuting companies who repeatedly flout US immigration law and hire illegal aliens; providing English immersion education for immigrant children who cannot speak English and making English the official language of the US.
Buchanan also puts in suggestions for fighting and winning the culture war: defiance of political correctness, focused citizen boycotts, initiatives and referenda, defunding offensive art, teaching history….
So what do you really think, Peony?
Basically, I see his argument as boiling down to:
The secularist counterculture has broken down family life and is discouraging people from having children. We also are not teaching history and teaching what children we do have from loving their country and their culture. We don’t love our culture ourselves, so we aren’t insisting that immigrants share in it. And if we don’t love our culture enough to have children and pass it on to them, and to insist that immigrants share in it, we’re going to lose our culture.
I can buy that. But I do have some quibbles with his vision.
To me, the most interesting parts of the book were the sections on demographics. I think that people who don’t know history may be prone to assume that everything will stay the way it is now, and ‘tain’t necessarily so! If you put off having a family because you like having lots of money and getting to sleep late on Sundays, what’s going to happen when you retire? Are you still going to have lots of money? Will there be any one to care for you? If you like being a European, what are you doing to make sure you can keep the life you love? Buchanan makes a good point in that Muslim immigrants to Europe may want to shape Europe in their image instead of letting Europe shape them; he cites an anecdote in which Muslim immigrants in Denmark wanted to reshape Danish law to conform more closely to Muslim law. Buchanan does not discuss AIDS at length, but AIDS is the wild card.
As for Buchanan’s vision for America, I’m not sure I share the same dream of an idyllic America in the ‘fifties. When Buchanan discusses “traditional American culture”, it’s sometimes right next to discussion of the birth rate of whites. I simply don’t think it’s accurate to think of American history as being “mostly whites with a few Negroes in there.” And who are these Africans and Asians who aren’t assimilating? Certainly not my Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese schoolmates, many of whom were not born in this county. When he discusses the attack on American history (the “Columbus Day should be a day of mourning” attitude), the majority of his examples are of attacks on the use of the Confederate battle flag and of honoring Confederate war heroes such as Robert E. Lee. Buchanan’s sympathies clearly seem with the South:
“To our new cultural elite, America’s Civil War was a revolt of slave owners and traitors to destroy the Union to preserve their odious institution, and the Lost Cause was ignoble and dishonorable. Hence, the Confederate flag should be as repulsive as a Nazi swastika….” (p. 159)
I’m not interested in starting a big discussion of the War Between the States, but didn’t preservation of the Union – and, ultimately, slavery -- have something to do with this? It’s not just members of the counterculture who question the ultimate morality of the Southern cause, and questioning that morality does not have to mean demonizing Southerners. And by the way, if it was okay for the South to secede, isn’t it okay for California to secede?
As for the question of racial identity as part of national identity, I think this question is much different for Americans than it is for Europeans. America has shown that it can expand its idea of who can be an American. Didn’t many people believe for a long time that Catholics – including Irish Catholics -- could never be real Americans?
Buchanan seems to blame the attack on the family on ‘sixties intellectuals that corrupted the youth of the baby boom: “Either the sixties drove a moral wedge between us, or the sixties exposed a moral fracture that had existed, but that we had failed to recognize. I believe the former is true. “(p. 27) I’m not so sure that the latter isn’t true. There were home-grown intellectuals in the West promoting contraception and free love back in the thirties and even earlier – you know all those people G.K. Chesterton was warning us about. But Shaw became the big literary legend, not Chesterton. Add to that the immense social changes resulting from the Second World War – women entering the work force and liking it; people moving all around the country, far from their homes and parents; the influence of new technologies, including baby formula and television, on child-rearing and family life…. So many people have such nostalgia for Catholic life in the fifties, but how much of it was based on conformism and not on a living relationship with Jesus Christ? (not a rhetorical question; as a child of the 70’s I sincerely don’t know...) It’s easy to blame the baby boomers, but were they even equipped to resist? We certainly didn’t need a revolution, but did we need reform?
But I agree with Buchanan that we need to carefully consider what does make us Americans – that a mere abstract belief in Democracy is not enough. We need to pay more attention to the things that we hold in common – our language, our history, and our customs – and teach them to our children and to those who come to our country. I appreciate his rebuke of conservatism’s excessive focus on the economy; some things really are more important than the GNP.
Finally, Buchanan discusses this from a secular perspective; Christianity is mostly discussed as the source of traditional values and national identity. Ultimately, if whites become a minority in Europe and the US, does that necessarily mean the end of Western culture? Is a Western culture that has rejected Christ so completely worth preserving? Can we seize these changes and turn them into an opportunity for evangelism?
Some more links on the book:
Deal Hudson: Postmodern Buchanan
James Fitzpatrick: Our Disuniting Nation and Catholics and the Nation-State.
Here's a review by Cara Camden.
Some other good reads: The Abolition of Britian by Peter Hitchens and The Next Christianity by Philip Jenkins
