If Pat hasn't written the greatest anti-globalism screed of the 21st century, he's certainly given us one of the greatest arguments in support of economic nationalism ever put to parchment.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X
- Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio (2016)
"Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse."
- Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)
In 2011, former U.S. presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan had a pretty cushy job working for CNBC or MSNBC or one of those other stupid 24-hour cable news networks. And I still recall the hoopla that stemmed from his tome Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Make it to 2025? Indeed, the contents of the book were considered so incendiary that MSNBC/CNBC/Who-the-fuck-ever fired Buchanan shortly after the book was released, fearing some sort of populist backlash and of course, a whole lot of "guilt-by-association" bad publicity.
But no, Suicide of a Superpower didn't become this generation's The Bell Curve. It caused no riots, no protests, no one-sided diatribes and dissections on TV talk shows across America. No one threatened to boycott book stores that sold it ... in fact, it doesn't look like anybody with more liberal ideologies even bothered reading it. So what was it about this book that MSNBC considered so disturbing that they had to shitcan Buchanan as a public relations preemptive strike?
One of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is that "public outcries" aren't exactly based on a disdain for disinformation or even full-fledged lies. People don't raise a fuss over allegations they think are exaggerated or untrue, simply because if a claim is patently, objectively false, surely, anyone with half a brain can dismiss it as bullshit. No, when people protest and bitch and bicker and demand something be banned - and hoo boy, are we seeing a lot of that these days - they're not trying to stifle something untrue, or prevent people from being exposed to something false. Rather, they realize something or someone is saying something glaringly true that runs counter to their own ideology - and mayhap even reveals one of their own ideological tentpoles to be a big, fat, morbidly obese lie.
And that, effectively, is why Pat Buchanan lost his job. The powers-that-be didn't want him outta' the henhouse because he was preachin' nonsense, they wanted him shipped off the plantation because he was spittin' out too much sense, and they knew if enough people heard what he had to say, it might just 'cause 'em to second guess everything THEY'VE been telling them is the guldarn truth.
That's why college kids firebomb their own school when Milo Y. comes a knocking and why public-subsidized shit heads throw stuff at the podium during Charles Murray lectures. These lunk-headed wannabe-dissidents KNOW what the speakers are going to say is going to discredit and dismiss their own dogmas, and they honestly have no reasonable rebuttal to save face. These neo-McCarthyists don't want their ideological foes silenced because they are "offensive," they want them silenced because, for lack of a better term, they're RIGHT, and if their ideas start circulating around in the mass consciousness, they KNOW their own ideological Tao is going to be exposed as phony, hypocritical and/or hilariously detached from reality.
It took me a couple of years to get around to reading Suicide of a Superpower, but I'm kinda' glad I waited, since U.S. society - as evident by the election of Donald Trump - has changed quite a bit since the book's original publication. In a way, this book sorta retroactively outlines why Trump won the election, tapping into the real underlying causes of the dreaded angry white man complex. The funny thing is that there's absolutely nothing revolutionary at all about Buchanan's reactionary traditionalist rancor. Indeed, Suicide of a Superpower pretty much paints anti-globalist, anti-open-border and anti-statist-ideology as the natural, default settings for all healthy societies, with more than enough historical data and sound future projections to back up his assertions that the anti-capitalist, super-duper-multiculturalist welfare dream state isn't just a terrible idea, but a virtually impossible one that has no successful precedent ANYWHERE in human history. Basically, all Buchanan's doing is telling us what's already happened when people tried to push open-trade, open-border and anti-nationalist policies in the past, and the retrudging of their cataclysmic failures is apparently more than enough to get the mainstream media to scramble to hush him up quick.
Reading Suicide of a Superpower now, it seems like an eerily prescient little tome. Not only did it more or less predict the rise of Donald Trump-flavored populism as a reaction to the Bush-Clinton-Obama globalism-uber-alles doctrine, it seems to have predicted the rise of the anti-white SJW voting bloc AND the mass exodus of Muslim immigrants into the European heartland. And as on-the-nose as those predictions were, that certainly makes Pat's predictions concerning the fate of our post-White, post-Western global order all the more intriguing - if not downright alarming.
Dedicating the book to "the old right" and declaring the present (that being, the present of 2011) as "the Indian summer of our civilization," Buchanan wastes no time at all before he declares "centrifugal forces have become dominant" in U.S. culture. He brings up the death of James Pouillon in 2009 and trudges up Roosevelt's warnings about the perils of "hyphenated-Americans." With white deaths expected to eclipse the number of white births in the country by 2020, Buchanan takes a gander at our apparently more multicultural future and asks "today, one see the pluribus; but where's the unum?"
This leads to our first chapter, titled "The Passing of a Superpower." Buchanan notes that the U.S. somehow managed to go from having a surplus in 2000 to running a $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009. During that same timeframe, the IMF says that U.S. GDP fell from 32 percent of the total global product to just 24 percent. As to what caused that to be the case, the author suggests globalism - taking the form of NAFTA and GATT - defeated good old fashioned American economic nationalism, thus allowing China (after devaluing its currency 45 percent and almost doubling the entry price for U.S. goods in 1994) to ring up a $266 billion trade surplus with the States by 2008 - complete with an advanced technology product trade deficit of $95 billion by the time 2010 rolled around.
The numbers, Pat says, get worse. Thus far in the 21st century, the U.S. has lost 42 percent of its semiconductor and electronic component production jobs, 48 percent of its total commercial production jobs and 63 percent of its textile jobs, all while bringing in 10.3 million foreign workers to compete with American employees. And just a year after the U.S. manufacturing trade deficit hit $440 billion in 2008, the federal government issued an additional 1.13 million green cards in 2009 alone.
More damning stats follow. From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, representing roughly a third of all such jobs in the nation. Of the United State's total $6.2 trillion trade deficit, about $3.8 trillion comes in the form of - you guessed it - manufactured goods. Which brings us to the touchy subject of our $2 trillion deficit with China; as it turns out, to finance this debt, the U.S. has since borrowed $1.5 billion from other foreign lenders EVERY DAY for ten years.
At this point, Pat says China is practically America in the 19th century. They're not engaged in any wars, just focused on nation-building. While China's stimulus funds went towards building infrastructure, the U.S. - what else? - used its stimulus money to save preexisting government jobs.
"Welcome to 21st century America," Pat states, "where globalism has become the civil religion of our political and corporate elite." He trudges up how subprime mortgages targeted minorities, pointing out George W. Bush's White House Conference on Increasing Minority Home Ownership in Oct. 2002, in which Dubya said he wanted non-white home owners in the U.S. to increase by 5.5 million by 2010. From there, we get a hail storm of statistics that paint an indisputable path from W.'s racially-tinged social engineering policies to the great housing bust of 2006. Pat explains how all the mortgages for these minority-owned homes were put on Fannie and Freddie's tabs, which were later sold as securities to Wall Street banks as real property holdings. As a result, federal home loan debt exploded $184 billion from 1998 to 2008, with home costs in general skyrocketing 107 percent from 2000 to 2006. With AIG payouts too large, the Federal Reserve had to keep rates dangerously low as home prices continued to surge by 20 percent annually (made worse since Moody's and S&P actually give these super toxic loans AAA ratings.) And that, in a nutshell, is how the Great Recession really started - not with greedy Wall Street bankers trying to fuck over the little man, but with a REPUBLICAN-controlled congress trying to expand economic opportunities for historically marginalized and oppressed peoples.
Then there's David Walker of the Government Accountability Office's statements on the U.S.'s unfunded entitlement liabilities - a sum that comes out to only $62 trillion. While the average private sector worker made $61,000 in total compensation in 2009, Pat wonders aloud why the average federal worker was getting $123,000.
Then Pat gives all of us some real talk on taxes. He trudges up how the much maligned top one percent of earners actually pay 44 percent of ALL U.S. taxes, with the top 10 percent of owners paying 71 percent while the bottom 50 percent of earners are responsible for only 2.89 percent. (Note: please bring this up the next time you engage in conversation with anybody who voted for Bernie Sanders.) Oh, and just for shits and giggles, he hits us with the following numbers on entitlements in these United States:
- From 1985 to 2006, Earned Income Tax Payouts grew from $2.1 billion to $44.4 billion.
- In 2009, 51 percent of all wage earners in the U.S. paid ZERO federal taxes
- In 2011, 44.2 million Americans were on food stamps (costing taxpayers about $77 billion a year.)
Next up, we get a lengthy passage on what "debauched currency" is. Since 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 98 percent of its value. Why? Because of federal inflation, that's why. That puts any political leader in a precarious situation, Pat says, where they have to do as much as possible to stimulate rapid job growth to increase tax revenue and reduce safety net spending, but at the same time, they're STILL going to have to increase taxes and try to whittle down federal spending to keep the nation from going insolvent. Which, naturally (well, not really) provides a perfect segue for the next chapter, "The Death of Christian America."
You know how people always say America ain't "a Christian nation?" Well, Pat rejects that on its face, saying the 1892 Supreme Court decision Church of the Holy Trinity vs. The United States makes it explicit that we are a peoples of the Judeo-Christian God and not nobody else. From here, Pat hits us with all kinds of shit, running the gamut from reminding us that the D.C. City Council won't even submit gay marriage as a referendum issue and that black churchgoers pretty much single-handedly 86'ed gay marriage in California to letting us know that Hitler preferred Islam to Christianity and that one of Stalin's first executive decisions to galvanize the masses at the start of World War II was re-opening Russia's churches and freeing imprisoned bishops.
So, naturally, Buchanan equates the downfall of the American church with the general "decomposition" of American society (the 41 percent illegitimacy rate, the 550 percent increase in violent crime from 1960 to 1992, married families making up just 21. 6 percent of U.S. households in 2006, etc.) As an interesting aside, he brings up a study that found a third of all 11-year-olds in the U.K. have been drunk at least twice already, which yeah, doesn't really surprise me at all, actually.
Buchanan quotes the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who said that Marxism can only succeed by rooting out and replacing Christianity in educational and social institutions. Pat follows that up by citing a study that found that, today, just 20 percent of American youths attend weekly religious services, but they tend to be less fat, less depressed and more educated than their counterparts who do not. And since those youths without religious affiliations aren't finding any kind of core, intrinsic meaning at church, they are instead trying to gain insight and a sense of community from secular ideologies, most significantly racially-tinged identity politics.
But you see, people INHERENTLY want to believe in something transcendent, Pat says and since they turned their back on Christianity, these kids are desperately yet fruitlessly trying to cull the same existential meaning out of stuff like socialism, environmentalism, feminism, consumerism and "occultist pop culture." Thus, he argues that we've gotten to a point where identity politics enclaves like sexuality have kinda sorta become the new wave nationalism. Alas, to quote Belloc, "self worship is not enough," and that's where Pat thinks we might be getting into some serious trouble down the road.
With 1.57 billion adherents in the world (60 percent in Asia alone,) Pat believes "an increasingly Islamic world is inevitable." It's already the predominant religion in 48 countries, which is equal to about a quarter of the United Nations. There are more Muslims in China than Syria, more in Germany than Lebanon and twice as many in India than Iran. With the native European birth rate on a terminal free fall and immigration from Islamic countries already on the upswing in 2011, Buchanan pretty much predicted the takeover of Europe a good three or four years before the big refugee brouhaha came to exist. (He still ain't got shit on the predictive powers of the dude who wrote The Camp of the Saints, though.)
With Europe becoming "re-paganized," Pat says Catholicism (the world's largest religion for the time being) is quickly on a path to irrelevancy. In the U.S. alone, mass attendance is down two-thirds what it was in the 1950s. Half of all Diocesan high schools closed from 1965 to 2002, while parochial schools have dwindled from 4.5 million to just 1.5 million. Pat cites research that predicts, by 2020, Hispanics will make up half of all Catholics in the U.S., which apparently explains why so many Catholics interest groups seem to be so gung-ho about immigrant amnesty. Essentially, Pat boils it down to this: it's only a matter of time until Catholicism has to go toe-to-toe with Islam for all the proverbial marbles, and as things stand now, there ain't no way in Hell the Pope and pals can win.
By 2050, the native Western population (a.k.a, the global "white population") is expected to make up just 10-12 percent of the world populace. Meanwhile, the native African and Latin American population is expected to make up a good third of the planet's inhabitants. "Catholicism," the author says, "is well on the way to becoming a third world religion."
And now we arrive at "The End of White America." Per Pat, white Americans are destined to become a minority by 2041 (representing just 46.3 percent of the total U.S. population) with white Americans under 18 becoming a minority among their age group by 2019. By 2020, the number of whites ages 65 and over are expected to outnumber the total number of whites in the country ages 17 and younger. Meanwhile, 50.2 percent of the Texas public school population is already Hispanic.
"Among our best and brightest, many anticipate with delight the day that white Americans become just another minority in the country their forefathers created 'for ourselves and our prosperity," Pat declares. He follows this up with a quote from Susan Sontag, which more or less capsulizes the modern SJW mindset - "the white race is the cancer of human history."
Buchanan highlights data showing that 57 percent of all jobs lost during the Great Recession belonged to blue collar white men; while 1.2 million native Americans lost their jobs in total, 656,000 foreign-born workers gained new jobs. Portending the emergence of Donald Trump's ethno-identity populism, Pat asks whether this demographical slap in the face will eventually lead to white Americans building their own tribal in-group voting bloc.
The author brings up Schlesinger's "cult of ethnicity" model, describing the deleterious effects of a national ethos in which group rights take precedence over individual rights, ethnic ties trump national identity and ethnic communities are tasked with defining the structure of society and the very meaning of history itself. And to prove his theory that the post white state is more of an ethnoracial apocalypse than a multicultural utopia, Pat turns his peepers towards the Golden State,where Hispanics have just recently eclipsed whites as the predominant statewide racial group. So, what has all that wonderful de-whitening brought California? Pat rattles off the laundry list of accomplishments: the nation's lowest bond rating, a 10 percent state tax with sales taxes almost as high, 12.4 percent unemployment, multiple designations as the worst state in the country to conduct business and unfunded state pensions and health care costs exceeding $500 billion. From 2000 to 2008, 1.4 million Californians left the state while 1.8 million international migrants came marching in. Today, nearly 10 percent of all California jobs are held by illegal immigrants and almost a quarter of the state's adults can't speak English. And then there's all of that glorious black on Hispanic violence going on in the state's inner cities that the national media, for some reason, keeps ignoring. Surely, it's not because the vivid reality of tribal warfare in the slums of Los Angeles paints a bleak picture of what real globalization looks like, is it?
"Tribal politics is not unusual, tribal politics is eternal," Pat writes. "Jim Crow is back. Only the color of the beneficiaries and the color of the victims has been reversed." Pat notes that from 2001 to 2009, Hispanic employment grew by 3.6 million jobs while the number of jobs for non-Hispanics decreased by 1.3 million. "They have seen trillions of dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society," Pat says, "only crime, rising illegitimacy and rising dropout rates."
This leads to a chapter titled "Demographic Winter," which is about as cheery as it sounds. "One day millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere of this plant to burst into the northern one," Pat writes. By 2050, 54 percent of the total U.S. population will be African, Asian or Latino-Americans. He parrots the words of Houari Boumedienne in 1974 - "victory will come to us from the wombs of our women."
But this isn't just happening in the U.S., Pat notes. Birth rates are plummeting in virtually all of the OCED countries. Simply put, there are not enough young workers to fund pensions and health care for the aged in damn near any of the developed countries. The ultimate nightmare scenario is playing out in Japan, where the national populace is expected to decrease from 127 million to 95 million in 2050. If that rate holds steady, about one-in-ten Japanese will be OVER the age of 80; by 2010, Japan's population may be just 20 percent what it is now.
Oh, and the populations are also falling in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. The U.K. birth rate is holding steady, but - surprise, surprise - that's almost solely attributable to its surging Muslim migrant population. Indeed, Brits may be a minority in their own country as early as 2066. Pat brings up the words of Andre Neather, who said the Labor Party literally tried to social engineer "a truly multicultural" society via unfettered mass immigration. Long story short? The Muslim population in the U.K. exploded from 500,000 in 2004 to a whopping 2.4 million in 2008.
And just in case you are wondering? The combined population of the world's largest Muslim countries - Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey and Nigeria - will be about 1.36 billion people in 2050. Y'know - just a reminder.
Pat then turns his attention towards the coming demographical plights of several other countries. It's probably easier to just do this in quick hit form:
Which dovetails into a discussion about wealth transfer. Pat quotes author Amy Chua on the rise of socioeconomic redistribution throughout the third world, who describes such as "an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by opportunistic vote-seeking politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority." It's happening writ large, she says, in places like Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Russia, Venezuela, Malaysia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Rwanda. In Bolivia, for example, Evo Morales tried to craft legislation that legally dispossessed whites, while in South Africa, the mass slaughter of white farmers has become a nearly endemic facet of the culture. In the U.S. Pat says he sees this slowly coming to a boil in the black community, particularly noting African-American resentment of Korean business owners (and boy, who ever thought they'd see the day when Pat freakin' Buchanan quoted an Ice Cube song!)
And that's our segue to the chapter titled "The White Party," which is probably the most interesting/prescient chapter in the whole book. Here, Buchanan reminds us just how fucking racist Democrats have been throughout the 20th century, noting the aggressively anti-black stances of Harry Truman, John Sparkman, James Byrnes, James McReynolds, Hugo Black, John W. Davis and Adlai Stevenson. Indeed, EVERY single signer of the 1956 Southern Manifesto save two were democrats - meanwhile, Pat reminds us that Barry Goldwater, long remembered as one of the most bigoted presidential candidates of all-time, was actually a member of the NAACP and was responsible for desegregating the Phoenix public school system.
The electorate was greatly shifted, Pat says, by civil rights and immigration legislation in the 1960s, as well as the vote being granted to 18-year-olds in the 1970s. Naturally, this decreased the white voter share of the electorate; indeed, by 2020, he says whites will make up 66 percent of the electorate while non-whites will make up 34 percent. Rather than attempt to win over minority voters, Pat suggests it's wiser for Republicans to simply aim for increasing their overall share of the total white vote - an approach that, surprise surprise, was a huge factor in Donald Trump's election. "The Republican road to recapture of the White House lies in increasing white turnout and raising the party's share of that turnout - three fourths of the entire electorate - from McCain's 55 percent closer to the two-thirds won by Nixon and Reagan," Pat writes.
And as for the future of the right, Pat cites a 2010 Harvard University Institute of Politics youth survey. 57 percent of respondents said they were against affirmative action, 34 percent said they thought even legal immigration was harmful and 50 percent said illegal immigrants shouldn't get federal aid at state universities. "Despite the cult of diversity in which they are immersed from day care centers to college dorm," Pat writes, "America's young yet believe in equal justice for all and special privilege for none."
The section on the balkanization of the democratic base is definitely worth reading too. Here, Buchanan describes the liberal coalition of competing special interests groups as "a gathering of warring tribes that have come together in the anticipation of common plunder." He notes that blacks and Hispanics are generally opposed to abortion and gay marriage, while Asians hate the shit out of affirmative action and diversity quota policies that rob them of jobs and educational opportunities. Pat sums up the Democratic gameplan as an effort to "de-Christianize" America, promote multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration and stoke racial politics like a motherfucker.
In "The Long Retreat," Buchanan lists seven causes of America's imperial downfall:
"Tribal politics is not unusual, tribal politics is eternal," Pat writes. "Jim Crow is back. Only the color of the beneficiaries and the color of the victims has been reversed." Pat notes that from 2001 to 2009, Hispanic employment grew by 3.6 million jobs while the number of jobs for non-Hispanics decreased by 1.3 million. "They have seen trillions of dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society," Pat says, "only crime, rising illegitimacy and rising dropout rates."
This leads to a chapter titled "Demographic Winter," which is about as cheery as it sounds. "One day millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere of this plant to burst into the northern one," Pat writes. By 2050, 54 percent of the total U.S. population will be African, Asian or Latino-Americans. He parrots the words of Houari Boumedienne in 1974 - "victory will come to us from the wombs of our women."
But this isn't just happening in the U.S., Pat notes. Birth rates are plummeting in virtually all of the OCED countries. Simply put, there are not enough young workers to fund pensions and health care for the aged in damn near any of the developed countries. The ultimate nightmare scenario is playing out in Japan, where the national populace is expected to decrease from 127 million to 95 million in 2050. If that rate holds steady, about one-in-ten Japanese will be OVER the age of 80; by 2010, Japan's population may be just 20 percent what it is now.
Oh, and the populations are also falling in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. The U.K. birth rate is holding steady, but - surprise, surprise - that's almost solely attributable to its surging Muslim migrant population. Indeed, Brits may be a minority in their own country as early as 2066. Pat brings up the words of Andre Neather, who said the Labor Party literally tried to social engineer "a truly multicultural" society via unfettered mass immigration. Long story short? The Muslim population in the U.K. exploded from 500,000 in 2004 to a whopping 2.4 million in 2008.
And just in case you are wondering? The combined population of the world's largest Muslim countries - Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey and Nigeria - will be about 1.36 billion people in 2050. Y'know - just a reminder.
Pat then turns his attention towards the coming demographical plights of several other countries. It's probably easier to just do this in quick hit form:
- In Israel, the Muslim birthrate is RAPIDLY outpacing the Jewish birthrate, which is leading to the de facto population growth of the Orthodox Jewish community. With the enemy states of Israel swelling in population (Syria and Saudi Arabia, for example, will see their populations explode, respectively, seven-fold and nine-fold from 1967 to 2050), Pat says the Chosen have just three options on the table: annex the West Bank and add another 2.4 million Muslims to the national populace, expel ALL Muslims from the country or try to establish permanent control of Gaza and the West Bank, which almost certainly would require the establishment of a separate, militarized apartheid state.
- From 1991 to 2050, the Russian population will likely fall from 148 million to just 116 million. By 2040, half of the Russian populace will be Muslim. With no young men around to power the national military and economy, would China possibly consider invading the weakened state for its resources?
- By 2040, China will have about 440 million people to take care of who are older than 60 - basically, one fourth of the entire country. Oh, and there aren't enough women around, with about 30 more million child-siring-aged men in the country than there are child-bearing-aged women. "The child-centered society has been succeeded by the self-centered society," Pat writes. "The purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure, not the sacrifices required in the raising of children."
In the chapter "Equality or Freedom?," Pat argues that the Founding Fathers never believed in democracy or diversity, but instead championed the idea of equality of God-given rights. After all, he says, the words "equality" or "democracy" don't show up anywhere in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution as a whole. He trudges up all the shit Lincoln said and did that supported slavery - you know, like that time he said he never wanted blacks to be equal to whites, socially, and that time he proposed shipping all of them back to Africa as a larf - and then he argues that Brown vs. Board of Education was a SCOTUS ruling based on sociology, not a priori law. Then he brings up the Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke ruling and says unemployment and income inequality in the black community has only gotten WORSE since integration. And the educational outcomes of minorities seems to verify his stance. In 2007, just 69 percent of American high school seniors graduated (comparatively, the national graduation rate in 1969 was 77 percent.) The likeliest explanation? As of 2007, 44 percent of Hispanic students and 46 percent of black students couldn't graduate from high school in only four years.
"Freedom produces a hierarchy based on intelligence, talent and perseverance," Pat writes. "For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails, the other dies." Pat then rails against all of the following - bussing, diversity quotas, affirmative action, taxation inequality, hate speech codes, the purging of Christianity from public life, Title IX, women in the military, gender-based unemployment disparities, federal oversight of local laws, Baker vs. Carr, the "publicization" of private schools, LGBT marriage, subprime loans AND the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 - as examples of egalitarianism subverting individual liberty.
And here's the part where Pat starts spitting out the kind of data you're not really supposed to be spitting out. You know, like the data from Herrnstein revealing that equal expenditures on students still results in "hereditary meritocracies," or Robert Weissberg's more than well-thought-out argument in favor of kicking the bottom quarter of 8th grade students out of public schools or ESPECIALLY the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment report, which found that if ONLY white U.S. students were counted, the U.S. would rank no. 3 in global reading scores, while U.S. black and Hispanic students - if counted individually - would rank no. 31 and no. 33 in international reading scores. Pat quotes Razib Khan, who said that "when you remove the environmental variance, the cognitive variance remains." Then the author puts his own spin on the research findings: "if brains and a desire to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter."
And just because I thought they were funny, here's a couple more one-liners from Pat Buchanan on the subject of equality:
- "The family is the incubator of inequality and God its author."
- The reverence to establish equality for all invariably ends up establishing the dictatorship of the few."
- "Sports are too important to America to indulge such myths as the equality of all men."
Hell, I don't know about you, but I'd buy a shirt and bumper sticker with all of those messages scrawled on them. Next up, it's a chapter called "The Diversity Cult," which begins thusly: "the melting pot was about the abolition of diversity and the Americanization of immigrants, which is why our multiculturalists reject it as an instrument of cultural genocide."
Pat rails against colleges and universities, describing them as "madrassas of modernity," where history is taught as nothing more than "a series of crimes against people of color." He notes that black self-segregation is actually intensifying coast-to-coast and tells a great story about his one time Jesse Jackson's car was stolen in Detroit in 2010. Then he turns his attention towards Naval Academy policies as "exhibit A" as to why multicultural policy-making is a load of it. There, Pat lets us know, white students have to have all As or Bs plus SAT scores exceeding 600 to even qualify for a slate of ten applicants from which just one will be chosen. Meanwhile, minorities with Cs and sub-500 SAT scores are DIRECTLY ADMITTED TO ANNAPOLIS, with some minority applicants with Ds and sub-300 SAT scores getting in after a year of taxpayer subsidized remedial school.
And then, there are the admission policies at gay old Harvard, where you know something is up 'cause Asians make up 20 percent of the student body even though they barely make up just 3 percent of the total U.S. populace. Oh, and Jewish students represent anywhere from 25 to a full third of all students, this despite representing just 2.5 percent of the overall U.S. population. Meanwhile, whites - who represent 70 percent of the U.S. populace - make up just 25 percent of the Harvard student body, a statistical under-representation of nearly 300 percent.
Which brings us to the findings from the Espenshade-Radford study from 2009. While Harvard required Asian applicants score 1550 on the SAT to be considered, whites had to only score 1410, while Hispanics only had to score 1230 and blacks only had to score 1100. Which means, effectively, that black students are given the equivalent of 550 free SAT points for just signing their names on the application, while Asian-Americans have 550 SAT points subtracted for simply being Asian-Americans.
Enter Russell K. Nieli, whose work shows that Harvard actively descriminates against poor, rural whites in its application processes. Having the 4H, ROTC or FFA listed on a resume reduces an applicant's chances of being selected 60 percent, with minority students seven to 10 times likelier to be accepted over poor white students with the EXACT same test scores.
And now we come to Pat's take on Robert Putnam's "social capital" theory, which, as you would expect, entails LOTS of parroting of his E Pluribus Unum study that found more diverse neighborhoods have lower levels of trust and cohesion than more homogeneous ones. "Our elites who vacation at beaches and ski resorts and send their children to schools that are predominantly white celebrate a racial diversity that 50 years of white flight, common sense and social science tells us may make and end of their own country," Pat writes. Then he reminds us that the Army knew Fort Hood mass shooter Nidal Hasan was radicalized, but they kept him hired on anyway JUST so they could meet their diversity quotas.
In the chapter "Triumph of Tribalism," Pat makes the argument that ethnonationalism was the underlying catalyst for both World War I and World War II. "The call of socialist solidarity was drowned out by the the calls of tribe and blood," he writes. He argues that Woodrow's calls for "self-determination" actually backfired and put millions of Germans and Hungarians under alien rule, which in turn amped up nationalist furor. Indeed, Pat brings up the long-forgotten fact that Hitler attacked Poland not because he wanted lebensraum, but because the Polish government wouldn't return about 350,000 Danzigers to German rule. Oh, and he also lets us know that 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed at the end of World War II, but shhh ... nobody's really supposed to remember that WWII had victims that didn't wear Star of David patches.
Artificial lines don't create nations, Pat says - rather, what holds people together is language, faith and, yes, racial identity. Sans a dominant ethnocultural core OR an authoritarian regime, he says no multi-racial, multicultural or multilingual society can survive, citing the U.S.S.R. and the Balkans as exhibits A and B.
This leads to a discussion of the nativist resurgence in Europe, which he reckons is a consequence of E.U. leaders being unable to manage the continent's debt and immigrant crises. He notes that Greece tried to build a wall to keep people from hopping over the gate in Turkey and India actually DID build a 2,500 mile fence around Bangladesh - huh - I wonder why nobody ever brings that up in contemporary political discussions about that wall? And that's our cue for a brief round-up of all the ethnoracial hostilities going on in the world. Here's the abridged list provided by Buchanan:
In the chapter "Triumph of Tribalism," Pat makes the argument that ethnonationalism was the underlying catalyst for both World War I and World War II. "The call of socialist solidarity was drowned out by the the calls of tribe and blood," he writes. He argues that Woodrow's calls for "self-determination" actually backfired and put millions of Germans and Hungarians under alien rule, which in turn amped up nationalist furor. Indeed, Pat brings up the long-forgotten fact that Hitler attacked Poland not because he wanted lebensraum, but because the Polish government wouldn't return about 350,000 Danzigers to German rule. Oh, and he also lets us know that 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed at the end of World War II, but shhh ... nobody's really supposed to remember that WWII had victims that didn't wear Star of David patches.
Artificial lines don't create nations, Pat says - rather, what holds people together is language, faith and, yes, racial identity. Sans a dominant ethnocultural core OR an authoritarian regime, he says no multi-racial, multicultural or multilingual society can survive, citing the U.S.S.R. and the Balkans as exhibits A and B.
This leads to a discussion of the nativist resurgence in Europe, which he reckons is a consequence of E.U. leaders being unable to manage the continent's debt and immigrant crises. He notes that Greece tried to build a wall to keep people from hopping over the gate in Turkey and India actually DID build a 2,500 mile fence around Bangladesh - huh - I wonder why nobody ever brings that up in contemporary political discussions about that wall? And that's our cue for a brief round-up of all the ethnoracial hostilities going on in the world. Here's the abridged list provided by Buchanan:
- In Belgium, there's a huge cultural divide between Flanders and Wallonia and it's probably only a matter of time until they split off into two different countries.
- There's a shit-load of unrest in Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region in China. Also, the Chinese government is flooding Han Chinese into Tibet, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia as part of some suspicious social engineering schemes.
- In the Indian Subcontinent, the Tamils, Nagas, Naxalites and Talanganas all want their own country. The Burma government is fighting a three-front war against the Kokang, Wa and Kachin rebels, while Islamic Malay separatists gave killed more than 120,000 people in Mindanao since the 1970s.
- The Baluchs hate the fuck out of the Iranians and probably want their own country ... and so do the Kurds and Pashtuns.
- And hold on to your hats, the shit going on in Africa might take some time. We've got millions dying in the Ibo secession during the Nigerian Civil War, Mugabe's Mashoma killing Matabeles by the truck load in Zimbabwe, Jomo Kenyatta ethnically cleansing the Luo in 2008, Nuers and Dinkas duking it out in Sudan (which has actually turned into a triple threat match between Christians, Muslims and native animists), and Sanhan, Marelo and Jahn separatists trying to gain independence in Yemen (with Marxist separatists in Aden and Houthi rebels in the north).
- Do we really need to even talk about the Middle East? You've got radical insurgents in Saudi Arabia, Arab vs. Druze conflict in Lebanon and Turkey actively trying to shed its secular facade to form a real Islamic nation state. Oh, and Yisrael Beiteinu wants to expel all Muslims from Israel, but that's hardly a surprise at all.
Which dovetails into a discussion about wealth transfer. Pat quotes author Amy Chua on the rise of socioeconomic redistribution throughout the third world, who describes such as "an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by opportunistic vote-seeking politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority." It's happening writ large, she says, in places like Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Russia, Venezuela, Malaysia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Rwanda. In Bolivia, for example, Evo Morales tried to craft legislation that legally dispossessed whites, while in South Africa, the mass slaughter of white farmers has become a nearly endemic facet of the culture. In the U.S. Pat says he sees this slowly coming to a boil in the black community, particularly noting African-American resentment of Korean business owners (and boy, who ever thought they'd see the day when Pat freakin' Buchanan quoted an Ice Cube song!)And that's our segue to the chapter titled "The White Party," which is probably the most interesting/prescient chapter in the whole book. Here, Buchanan reminds us just how fucking racist Democrats have been throughout the 20th century, noting the aggressively anti-black stances of Harry Truman, John Sparkman, James Byrnes, James McReynolds, Hugo Black, John W. Davis and Adlai Stevenson. Indeed, EVERY single signer of the 1956 Southern Manifesto save two were democrats - meanwhile, Pat reminds us that Barry Goldwater, long remembered as one of the most bigoted presidential candidates of all-time, was actually a member of the NAACP and was responsible for desegregating the Phoenix public school system.
The electorate was greatly shifted, Pat says, by civil rights and immigration legislation in the 1960s, as well as the vote being granted to 18-year-olds in the 1970s. Naturally, this decreased the white voter share of the electorate; indeed, by 2020, he says whites will make up 66 percent of the electorate while non-whites will make up 34 percent. Rather than attempt to win over minority voters, Pat suggests it's wiser for Republicans to simply aim for increasing their overall share of the total white vote - an approach that, surprise surprise, was a huge factor in Donald Trump's election. "The Republican road to recapture of the White House lies in increasing white turnout and raising the party's share of that turnout - three fourths of the entire electorate - from McCain's 55 percent closer to the two-thirds won by Nixon and Reagan," Pat writes.
And as for the future of the right, Pat cites a 2010 Harvard University Institute of Politics youth survey. 57 percent of respondents said they were against affirmative action, 34 percent said they thought even legal immigration was harmful and 50 percent said illegal immigrants shouldn't get federal aid at state universities. "Despite the cult of diversity in which they are immersed from day care centers to college dorm," Pat writes, "America's young yet believe in equal justice for all and special privilege for none."
The section on the balkanization of the democratic base is definitely worth reading too. Here, Buchanan describes the liberal coalition of competing special interests groups as "a gathering of warring tribes that have come together in the anticipation of common plunder." He notes that blacks and Hispanics are generally opposed to abortion and gay marriage, while Asians hate the shit out of affirmative action and diversity quota policies that rob them of jobs and educational opportunities. Pat sums up the Democratic gameplan as an effort to "de-Christianize" America, promote multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration and stoke racial politics like a motherfucker.
In "The Long Retreat," Buchanan lists seven causes of America's imperial downfall:
- The War on Terror cost $1 trillion and royally fucked up the Middle East
- Our imperial arrogance has pissed off all our allies and jeopardized our global hegemony
- The financial meltdown, the housing bubble collapse and Wall Street generally being allowed to run around like a bunch of wild, coked-up coyotes
- Our trade policy with China effectively ending our national economic independence
- The broken Mexico border leading to a "poor people's invasion"
- The rise of nationalism abroad
- Our leaders buying into the sham of globalization
Pat calls for the U.S. to immediately suspend the G.W.O.T. "They come to kill us in our country because we will not get out of their countries," he writes. "We will never end terror attacks on this country until we remove our soldiers from those countries." Rather, he says he'd like to see those troops placed where they are really needed - at the U.S./Mexican border, to fight off Central American drug cartels suspected of having 100,000-man strong armies.
Nationalism, in general, Pat says is a natural reaction to the formation of the ICC and the WTO and the Kyoto protocols. "Identity is local," he quotes Jude Daugherty. "It is the characteristic of a people who have inhabited a land over a period of time, who have developed certain collective habits, evident in their manners, their dress, the feasts they collectively enjoy, their religious bonds, the premium they put on education." This is something, Buchanan writes, that no one in their right mind would abandon for some sort of interdependent globalist order.
In the final chapter "The Last Chance," Buchanan comes to terms with the perhaps inevitable shift from the U.S. being a white, Western, Christian republic to being a multicultural egalitarian democracy. He quotes Duncan Williams' Trousered Apes: "No stable society can be built upon a theory which runs counter to reality. The harsh but unavoidable reality is that men are unequal in terms of hereditary abilities. Some are born with a greater degree of intellect, a greater capacity for sympathy, a greater ability to succeed than others."
The old U.S. order, Pat says, was killed by a number of ideological movements. The 1960s sexual revolution destroyed the nation's formative Christian values. Feminism undermined the traditional family structure. The anti-war movement made patriotism unfashionable and the civil rights movement eventually led to the erection of a permanent white guilt state. The egalitarian socialist ideals of LBJ, Buchanan writes, are now "dominant in the culture, the arts, the academy and the media. The Fifth Column of the cultural revolution is entrenched in the courts, where judges and justices routinely discover that the Constitution they are sworn to uphold mandates the revolution they seek to bring about." This over-culture, Pat writes, simply cannot tolerate the legitimacy of white anger. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this better than a quote from Barack Obama himself: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
After namedropping Carl Rowan, author of 1996's The Coming Race War in America, Buchanan warns that multiculturalism isn't going to do much of anything except lead to deeper ethnic enclaves and more pronounced societal withdrawal. He refers to Obama and Palin as antipodes of the culture war, ultimately declaring "ideology was the poison, reason the antidote."
And now's the part where Pat tells all of us what HE thinks ought to happen to fix all this shit. First, he wants a two-year salary freeze for all federal employees, then a two-year suspension of cost-of-living adjustments to all entitlement programs (after that, we can switch to inflation based C.O.L. adjustments for social security.) Speaking of S.S., he wants to raise the age to 64 for early benefits and 68 for full benefits. He don't want no federal bailouts for state governments and absolutely ZERO foreign aid doled out for anything unrelated to national security. Then he wants rate reductions to replace the mortgage interest deduction and taxes on turnaround stocks and commodity trades (which he likens to taxes on gambling.)
America, he argues, has to be re-industrialized. The U.S. lost 6 million manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2010, and notes that manufacturing employees make twice as much money as service workers. "If we do not cure ourselves of this obsession with free trade, the industrial evisceration of the U.S. will continue until we make nothing the world wants but Hollywood movies," he writes. Pat says put tariffs on ALL imports, then use that money to reduce U.S. producer taxes. He proposes a 25 percent tariff on manufactured goods, food and fibers, which he says would generate $600 billion in revenue and allot for the total elimination of the corporate tax rate. The general idea, he says, is to get capital investments to swing from China to the U.S. "Equality and reciprocity, not globalization and free trade, should dictate the terms of trade," Pat writes. If the U.S. lost 100 percent of the world market but regained 100 percent of its OWN market, Pat says the U.S. would be $500 billion richer. "We have nothing to lose," he writes, "but our trade deficits."
Pat says he wants immigration suspended until the national unemployment rate falls below 6 percent, and then we ought to emphasize English-speaking Christians with degrees and technical skills. He don't want no amnesty and no anchor babies, and goddamnit, somebody better start building that wall ASAP. Yeah, a little foreboding in hindsight, ain't it?
And then, there are Pat's parting shots on the culture war, which he seems to accept as at least partially unwinnable. Alas, he floats up a couple of ideas, including restricting the jurisdiction of federal courts "rested and rusted in the seaboard," urging congress to add riders declaring laws are not subject to judicial review and adding Ward Connerly's Califonia Civil Rights Initiative into federal law and maybe even the Constitution. "When judges become dictators," he concludes the tome, "citizens become rebels."
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| What do you mean American society is falling apart? Surely, you have no examples to back up THAT absurd claim, do you? |
I've read plenty of conservative and liberal screeds over the years, and Suicide of a Superpower is definitely one of the best I've picked up from this century, regardless of political ideology. The author makes a very strong, heavily evidence-supported case as to why globalism and multiculturalism will inevitably lead to the U.S. losing its economic independence, and why Republican pandering to the white vote isn't just a sound strategic initiative, it's practically a necessary political survival mechanism. Admittedly, Buchanan's tangents about the culture war tend to drag a bit, but beyond that, it's hard to find any faults with Pat's logic.
Of course, if you're a dyed-in-the-wool conservative you'll eat this shit up, but from my perspective, this is a book that transcends political ideology. Like Robert Michels Political Parties and Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, it connects the dots to a much, much larger picture than simply what's going on concurrently in society. This is a book that sees the unavoidable outcome of blind allegiance to globalism, open borders and open trade. Instead of making us a more interconnected world, Pat surmises all it's really going to do is make us more interdependent, which in turn, will inevitably result in America become indebted and eventually indentured by foreign powers. He also had the foresight to acknowledge economic nationalism as the only safeguard against not only creeping globalism, but ethnoracial identity tribalism. Never in history has a multicultural society succeeded without some sort of overarching ethnic majority in power OR expansive government control. The end of white America, he forewarns, means but the beginning of massive ethnoracial balkanization throughout the United States - or even worse, the emergence of a large scale political behemoth the likes of which America has never experienced before to keep the multilingual masses in check. International economic combat and tribal strife, he reminds us time and time again, sparked two world wars; call me crazy, but there's something about old man Buchanan's ominous declarations that strikes me as eerily, eerily ominous.
Depending on your personal political ideology, you'll either love Suicide or hate it with a fiery passion. Ultimately, however, you're going to be loving it or despising it for the exact same reason: because it lays out some oh-so-palpable truths about human nature and the forgotten lessons of history involving the making - and breaking - of cultural hegemonies.
Depending on your personal political ideology, you'll either love Suicide or hate it with a fiery passion. Ultimately, however, you're going to be loving it or despising it for the exact same reason: because it lays out some oh-so-palpable truths about human nature and the forgotten lessons of history involving the making - and breaking - of cultural hegemonies.
Make no mistake, Suicide is a supremely important book, and one that certainly transcends the meager arch-conservative propaganda label so many people would like to slap on the cover so they can discard it as worthless agitprop. Perhaps one day, 40, 30 or even just 20 years into the future, we're going to be able to look back on Buchanan's work and appreciate it as one of the most accurate works of speculative "fiction" ever penned. As with the works of George Friedman, this is a must-read for anyone who ever wonders what society will be like once they perish from the Earth; and in that, old Patty Boy here may have just penned the greatest "I Told 'Ya So" story any future generation could ever read on the downfall of the America you and me knew.
