The trends leading to our doom, and how we should respond to them

Patrick Buchanan sums up the worsening national condition of the GOP, focusing on the 18 states which voted Democratic in the past five presidential elections, in all of which the 2008 Republican nominee lost by more than ten points, and in which Republicans now hold only three of 36 Senate seats and fewer than one in three House seats. Meanwhile, there are 13 states that have gone Republican in each of the last five elections. But they have only 93 electoral votes, fewer than a third of the number in the 18 solid blue states. Buchanan continues:

Demographically, the GOP is a party of white Americans, who in 1972 were perhaps 90 percent of the national vote. Nixon and Reagan rolled up almost two-thirds of that vote in 1972 and 1984. But because of abortion and aging, the white vote is shrinking as a share of the national vote and the population.

The minorities that are growing most rapidly, Hispanics and Asians, cast 60 to 70 percent of their presidential votes for the Democratic Party. Black Americans vote 9-1 for national Democrats. In 2008, they went 30-1.

Put succinctly, the red pool of voters is aging, shrinking and dying, while the blue pool, fed by high immigration and a high birth rate among immigrants, is steadily expanding.

Philosophically, too, the country is turning away from the GOP creed of small government and low taxes. Why?

Nearly 90 percent of immigrants, legal and illegal, are Third World poor or working-class and believe in and rely on government for help with health and housing, education and welfare. Second, tax cuts have dropped nearly 40 percent of wage earners from the tax rolls.

If one pays no federal income tax but reaps a cornucopia of benefits, it makes no sense to vote for the party of less government.

The GOP is overrepresented among the taxpaying class, while the Democratic Party is overrepresented among tax consumers. And the latter are growing at a faster rate than the former.

Lastly, Democrats are capturing a rising share of the young and college-educated, who are emerging from schools and colleges where the values of the counterculture on issues from abortion to same-sex marriage to affirmative action have become the new orthodoxy.

The Republican “lock” on the presidency, crafted by Nixon, and patented by Reagan, has been picked. The only lingering question is whether an era of inexorable Republican decline has set in.

That last sentence is stunningly anti-climactic, given that Buchanan has presented, not a lingering question, but the absolute certainty of inexorable Republican decline and indeed of the end of the U.S. as we know it.

Since his Death of the West in 2002, I have had a problem with the way Buchanan talks about changing racial demographics. Instead of being embattled and energized by the threat to our country and civilization, he lingers on imagery of irreversible doom. Consider the quintessentially Buchananite phrase, “the red pool of voters is aging, shrinking and dying.” This is defeatist bathos. All people age and die, and the white population is not shrinking, it is being steadily outnumbered by nonwhite immigration. Why does Buchanan make things seem even worse than they are? I think it’s because he gets pleasure from predicting the end of America. I think it’s because, like the paleocons, he has come to dislike America so much that he looks on the prospect of its destruction with feelings of Schadenfreude.

What does Buchanan leave out of the picture? There is a 200 million strong white population in America,—when this country was founded, it had three million whites—and lots of life and even more potential life in it. A principled rejection of the suicidal ideology of liberalism and the rebirth of genuine conservatism within the country’s white majority could lead to a new national majority and a complete reversal of the trends Buchanan bemoans or savors. This reversal would include: the cessation of mass non-European immigration; the removal by enforcement and attrition of perhaps 20 million illegal aliens; the adoption of Islamic-unfriendly policies leading to the departure of virtually all Muslims; the dismantling of the Provider State on which nonwhites are disproporationately dependent, the dismantling of all racial preferences for nonwhites; the dismantlement of “government by judiciary” and of the regime of coercive equality it has built; the reassertion of traditional American identity; the voluntary departure of many Third-World legal resident aliens and even legal immigrants in the face of an America that has ceased to be a candy store without a lock; the restoration of traditional moral values among whites; and an increase in the white birth rate as whites regain confidence in their future as a people in this land.

Buchanan’s demographic analyses are not telling us anything new. We already are aware of the present trends. We already know that if those trends continue, our world, our America, the West itself, is doomed. I’ve known it since the early 1980s. Buchanan has known it since he read The Path to National Suicide in 1991. To keep lovingly invoking the specter of white shrinkage and death, as Buchanan does, is demoralizing and wrong. Patriots who are serious about the trends Buchanan identifies should be thinking about ways to reverse them. And if, after doing do, they come to the conclusion that a reversal is impossible, then they need to lay out a different path for the survival of the historical American people. In any event, whatever the future brings, we must do everything we can to resist the forces that are leading to our destruction, not throw up our hands at them and encourage others to do likewise. We must never, never surrender.

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Bruce B. writes:

If your take on Buchanan is correct, then one might say to him “stop writing political commentary. It serves no purpose and there’s no point to it.”

LA replies:

Well, I was speaking about his hopeless doom pandering on the demographics issue, not about everything he says.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Interesting omission here by Buchanan. Pre-marital sex and pregnancy aren’t just the values of the counter-culture anymore, not in the age of Sarah Palin. They’re conservative values now.

Lastly, Democrats are capturing a rising share of the young and college-educated, who are emerging from schools and colleges where the values of the counterculture on issues from abortion to same-sex marriage to affirmative action have become the new orthodoxy.

LA replies:

That’s a typically nominalist statement from our leftist commenter Ken Hechtman. The fact that individuals, even lots of individuals, who are called “conservative” are having children out of wedlock does not make that behavior conservative. Instead of saying, “Pre-marital sex and pregnancy are conservative values now,” Mr. Hechtman should have said, “Lot of conservatives are not behaving like conservatives.”

Ken Hechtman replies:

OK, maybe I should have said so.

But Pat Buchanan should have said so too, and upholding conservative standards is much more his job than it is mine.

LA replies:

Hah! Fair enough.

QR writes:

I share Buchanan’s pessimism most of the time. However, today in the midst of my gloom, some of the things my conservative friends are saying made me think there might be some hope yet.

Basically, they were telling me my pessimism is excessive, that things aren’t nearly as bad as I think they are, etc. They’re wrong, of course, but this made me realize that this country has a tremendous unmobilized conservative population. It’s still possible that they can wake up and put a stop to the destruction of this country. The only question is, how much worse do things have to get before they wake up.

Bruce B. writes:

Regarding paleo-jeremiads, I’m not always sure what to think of this. On one hand, any honest assessment of ourselves and our situation isn’t going to be flattering. On the other hand what’s the point of it all if we’re doomed? Recently I saw Pat’s chilling article on the UN (?) report about Europeans being a single digit percentage of the world’s population in 2050(?), the population explosion in Africa and the implications for us. Very gloom-and-doom but nothing about what to do or even a suggestion that we could do anything at all. Sam Francis at least said we could do something about our situation. Is there a limit to what Pat can say because he’s a Roman Catholic? I guess “end abortion” is the only action that could be inferred from the article you quoted today.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2009 02:04 PM | Send