Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

228 Pages·2012·1.07 MB·English

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

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
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Disintegrating Nation
1. The Passing of a Superpower
2. The Death of Christian America
3. The Crisis of Catholicism
4. The End of White America
5. Demographic Winter
6. Equality or Freedom?
7. The Diversity Cult
8. The Triumph of Tribalism
9. “The White Party”
10. The Long Retreat
11. The Last Chance
Notes
Index
Also by Patrick J. Buchanan
About the Author
Copyright Page
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 Year’s, 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 can’t go
home again.
5
DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER
Russia is disappearing. So is Japan. Europe is next to go.1
—JOHN FEFFER, 2010
Epoch Times
Within a hundred years.… God will come down to earth with his big ring of keys, and will say to
humanity: “Gentlemen, it is closing time.”2
—PIERRE EUGÈNE MARCELLIN BERTHELOT (1827–1907),
French statesman
Demography is destiny.
Auguste Comte, the philosopher and mathematician known as the father of
sociology, is said to have coined the cliché. Yet there is truth in it. Europeans
crossing the Atlantic in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
sealed the fate of Native Americans. That a defeated Germany’s population was
surging while that of France was stagnant was a justifiable cause of grave
apprehension in a Quay d’Orsay that had pushed the Allies into imposing the
vindictive peace of Versailles, that dishonored, dismembered, and divided the
defeated Germany of November 1918.
Yet demography is not always destiny, for all human capital is not created
equal. In making history it has often been the quality of a people that mattered
most. Consider what a handful of Greeks in fifth-century Athens created, what
three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae prevented, what a Galilean carpenter’s
son and a dozen disciples gave the world. Consider what a few score men in
Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 achieved. By 1815, an island of eight million off
the coast of Europe had seen off Napoleon, gained mastery of the world’s
oceans, and created an empire that would encompass a fourth of mankind.
Consider what a dozen Bolshevik gunmen began when they stormed the Winter
Palace and ran off a panicked ruling council.
But demography has taken on even greater importance in our time. Why?
First, because democracy is the religion of the West. In the American creed,
political legitimacy comes solely from the consent of the governed, each of
whom has the same single vote. Democracy is a force multiplier of demography.
Numbers eventually equal power.
Second, with the surge of ethnonationalism worldwide, and of identity
politics in America, demography will increasingly dictate the division and
distribution of society’s wealth and rewards. A third and related reason is
egalitarianism, the ideology that holds that all ethnic groups are equal and where
inequality exists institutional racism is the probable cause.
As the West worships at the altar of democracy, is deeply egalitarian, and has
thrown open its doors to a Third World in which ethnonationalism is embedded,
it is the West whose destiny will ultimately be determined by demography. What
is that destiny? Consider the latest statistics from the Population Division of the
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs:
Between now and 2050,
• One in every six East Europeans, 50 million people, will vanish.
• Germany, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine will lose 53 million
people.
• Where, at liberation in 1990 Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had 8
million people, 2.3 million of them will have disappeared by 2050.
• Between liberation in 1990 and 2050, the former captive nations of
Romania and Bulgaria will have lost between them 10 million
people.
• Europeans and North Americans who accounted for 28 percent of
world population in 1950 will have fallen to 12 percent in 2050 and
be among the oldest people on earth with a median age close to 50.
Not one nation of Europe or North America, save Iceland, has a birth rate
sufficient to replace its population. All have been below zero population growth
(2.1 children per woman) for decades. Who inherits the Western estate? Between
now and 2050, Africa’s population will double to 2 billion, and Latin America
and Asia will add another 1.25 billion people. By 2050, the populations of
Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau,
Liberia, and Uganda will have tripled since Y2K, with Niger’s population
quintupling from 11 million to 58 million.3
In a 2010 essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Population Bomb: The Four
Megatrends That Will Change the World,” Jack Goldstone documents how
Western peoples, whose empires ruled mankind on the eve of the Great War, are
aging, dying, and sinking toward insignificance:
In 1913, Europe had more people than China, and the proportion of
the world’s population living in Europe and the former European
colonies of North America had risen to over 33 percent.…
By 2003, the combined populations of Europe, the United States,
and Canada accounted for just 17 percent of the global population. In
2050, this figure is expected to be just 12 percent—far less than it was
in 1700.4
Our own and our parents’ generations have witnessed an epochal event: the
fall of Christendom. From the close of the Edwardian era, with the death of
Edward VII in 1910, in a single century, it all happened. The great European
powers fought two great wars. All lost their empires. All saw their armies and
navies melt away. All lost their Christian faith. All saw their birth rates plummet.
All have seen their populations begin to age and shrink. All are undergoing
invasions from formerly subject peoples coming to the mother country to
dispossess their grandchildren. All of their welfare states face retrenchment even
as they face tribal decline and death.
Reflecting on the fate of Rome, Charles Darwin’s grandson bemoaned
a pattern he saw through history: “Must civilization always lead to the
limitation of families and consequent decay and then replacement from
barbaric sources, which in turn will go through the same experience?”5
So wrote Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle. And who will replace
the unborn children of the West? We are witness to the unfolding of a brazen