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Buchanan and His Critics
May 28, 2002
by
John
O'Sullivan
In its relatively short life, Patrick J. Buchanan’s The Death of the West has had a highly volatile career. It became a bestseller even before it was officially published, reaching number four on the Amazon.com list and staying there for several weeks. Buchanan’s argument was disseminated in advance via the Internet and web-loggers to literate conservatives who promptly ordered the book. That itself is a story. It might help explain the phenomenon, noted by a worried Michael Kinsley, that almost all the New York Times bestsellers are written by conservatives. In publishing as in journalism, the Internet enables conservatives to leap over the liberal middleman on the review pages and to reach their target audience directly.
Yet many of the initial reviews were favorable, too. Thomas Sowell, who is notoriously hard to please, described Buchanan as “a man of many dimensions and insights—very knowledgeable about our times and about history, and an incredibly good writer on top of it all.” Even the early reviewers who disliked Buchanan’s broad argument praised the book for raising vital, timely questions others were avoiding. Shortly afterward, it was in its fourth reprinting.
If Buchanan’s book struck a chord, it is not hard to understand why. It is a strongly argued and clearly written polemic on matters such as immigration and the clash of civilizations that, after September 11, suddenly graduated from elite to popular concerns in the American mind. It also blends the familiar and the unexpected. Buchanan’s extensive citation of United Nations (UN) population statistics to demonstrate that Western nations are shrinking demographically while the Third World burgeons almost certainly came as news to most of his readers. Ben Wattenberg’s “birth dearth” has been debated by demographers for a decade, but this was its breakthrough to Crossfire territory. At the same time, most of Buchanan’s explanations for the West’s declining population echoed standard conservative arguments on the decline of religion, the debasement of American culture, the forthcoming demographic crisis of entitlements, and the decreasing government support, moral and fiscal, for the traditional family. And Buchanan’s extrapolation of these trends into a future in which Chinese millions gradually absorb a thinly populated Siberia, and Mexico retakes the American southwest in a new Reconquista gave the book the flesh-tingling excitement of a science-fiction fantasy like Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints—while also being “true,” or at least not just a made-up story.
All in all, a natural conservative bestseller.
Which makes it fascinating that when an adverse reaction set in, it was among conservatives. Writers such as Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard (reviewing the book for the New York Times), Jonah Goldberg in the online version of National Review, Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, and Ben Wattenberg everywhere, all took aim at Buchanan as a racist and/or xenophobe in light disguise who had the prudence to couch his arguments in ambiguous code words. Their reviews were largely exercises in deconstructing Buchanan’s rhetorical formulae to reveal the ugly opinions they half-concealed and half-advertised. Taken together—which may be an unfair thing to do—these reviews had the feel of a “Stop Buchanan” campaign, as if he were a political candidate hoping to ride an issue into office.
In that point at least, they seriously misread the book. For one of its strongest and (given Buchanan’s pugnacious reputation) most surprising features is its elegiac and regretful tone. The Death of the West is the very opposite of a campaign book. It might almost have been written by some modern Thucydides, reflecting in old age and exile on the collapse of the civilization for which he had once fought but which he now sees as all but unsalvageable. Occasionally he ventures into proposing solutions, as we shall see. But he does so apparently without any firm hope that they will be adopted or that they would succeed if they were. Some of his critics grasped this but promptly concluded that such pessimism reflected a deep vein of anti-Americanism in Buchananite thought because no true patriot would lose faith in America’s recuperative powers.
If this summary of the hostile conservative reviews suggests that they overindulged in nitpicking, that is because at times they did. Let me justify this complaint with examples:
1. Christopher Caldwell cites as an example of Buchanan’s loss of faith in America his deploring that “no top college has an American history requirement,” and ripostes that the universities must be “doing something right” because David McCullough’s biography of John Adams has spent months on the bestseller list. But surely that is like citing remedial English classes in college as evidence that high schools must be doing something right. In fact, both institutions have left a hunger for someone else to satisfy. That is “something,” to be sure, but few people would judge it “right.”
2. Jonah Goldberg establishes that contra Buchanan, the West is not literally dying and, juggling some clever paradoxes, points out that it is “dying” metaphorically because its people live longer, while the Third World is flourishing because it has a high death rate. Insofar as Goldberg’s critique undermines the use of this metaphor to describe the view that the combination of the West’s low birthrate with its low death rate will gradually create a declining population of disproportionately elderly people while the Third World’s opposite blend is expanding its population of largely young people, it is spot on. But the reality that is imperfectly conveyed by the metaphor remains exactly the same. As Louis MacNeice wrote in reference to a barometer, “The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,/But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.”
3. Ben Wattenberg chides Buchanan for treating Mexican immigrants as non-Western when, as every schoolboy knows, they speak Spanish, a well-known European language. Buchanan is thus alleged to be writing about race when he pretends to be writing about culture. Insofar as Wattenberg has scored a hit here, however, he has wounded Buchanan much less deeply than he has hit the entire multicultural establishment that treats Hispanics as rebels against Eurocentrism. Against the multiculturalists Wattenberg’s point has real force—it undermines their entire system of ethno-cultural categorization. Against Buchanan, however, it splinters on impact. For the Wattenberg argument confuses culture and civilization in the way that Buchanan is accused of confusing race and civilization. English culture and Hispanic culture are both part of Western civilization; so are the Russian and Lithuanian cultures. But the Lithuanians reasonably felt that they were being oppressed in general and culturally dispossessed in particular when, after World War II, the Soviet Union sought to “Russify” their country by importing large numbers of Russian speakers and making Russian an official language. Similarly, Anglo and black Californians who have to speak Spanish to get service in supermarkets may not be enjoying a non-Western experience, but they are certainly being exposed to a foreign one. Indeed, culture may well erect between different peoples a barrier at least as obstructive as the wider and more diffuse concept of civilization. On the basis of common observation, I would suggest that English-speaking Indians from the Hindu civilization assimilate into American society more readily than non-English-speaking Europeans and Latin Americans. Strictly speaking, therefore, though Arizonans who oppose official bilingualism are experiencing a sense of cultural dispossession while Russians who fear Muslim and Chinese infiltration are facing a clash of civilizations, they both feel pretty much the same emotions. The only comfort Wattenberg can offer the Arizonans and Californians is that they are being dispossessed by Westerners. And even that cold comfort may turn out to be a false one if the “Westerners” feel (or are persuaded by the multiculturalists), as Amerindians very well might be, that they are victims of the West rather than its heirs. After all, as the very notion of assimilation implies, cultural identities are fluid.
When intelligent and reasonable people pick nits, however, that indicates something interesting is happening. And what is happening here is that Buchanan’s critics are exaggerating the extent of their disagreement with him to conceal the degree to which they concede his case.
They point out, for instance, that many non-Western countries are also embarking on a long-run decline in population. That is true, but it in no way damages Buchanan’s argument. As columnist Steven Sailer observes, the phenomenon of “demographic momentum” means that even these populations will continue growing for decades even after they hit the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, whereas Western populations are already declining. Buchanan’s statistics, supplied by the generally well-regarded UN statisticians, take demographic momentum into account. And they still show Western populations declining to about 6 percent of total world population by 2050 or thereabouts. They could be subsequently falsified by billions of private decisions in the world’s bedrooms, admittedly, but for the moment these are the best estimates we have. Behind the smoke screen of peripheral objections, the conservative critics accept this central point.
Similarly, though they are plainly uneasy about Buchanan’s division of the world into “us” and “them” even when the division is a well-recognized one of civilization or culture, they do not reject such an argument out of hand. They are painfully aware that such divisions exist in the form of cultural, religious, national, civilizational, and ethnic differences. Hence they attempt to prove that Buchanan is really writing (disreputably) about race when he pretends to be writing (respectably) about culture.
It must be said that Buchanan makes their task easier by dragging in points that are highly controversial while also being unnecessary to his main thesis. An example is his defense of Southern culture and Confederate history against the attacks of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He is largely right on the merits of the case. The Confederacy cannot reasonably be equated with the genocidal evil of Nazism; if any state with a history of slavery is to be treated as proto-Nazi, then those condemned would include not only the United States but also the states of West Africa that descend from slave empires, and the NAACP would logically have to abstain from any pride in African culture and history. But because his cultural argument—that the decline in historical memory erodes a nation’s willingness to defend itself—could be supported with examples drawn from silly textbooks on the history of the United States, he weakens that argument when he cites examples that evoke suspicions rather than agreement.
Yet, however embellished, his argument that there are important divisions between “the West and rest”—divisions with racial overtones—is hard to deny. Take the recent UN World Conference in Durban, South Africa, on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. On that occasion the Rest put the West in the dock over the international slave trade. Was that indictment leveled against a civilization, namely the Western one; or against a culture such as the Anglophone, Hispanic, or Lusitanian culture; or against individual Western nations such as Denmark; or against a race, namely the white race? Because nations that had never participated in the slave trade were included in the indictment, and because nonwhite citizens of Western civilization and its member cultures are intended to benefit from any slavery reparations, the indictment was evidently leveled against whites in general. Such racially tinged attacks are confined to certain issues such as aid, immigration, and decolonization, to be sure, and most non-Muslim Asian nations have held aloof from them in recent years. But both racial solidarity and antiwhite racism are recurring elements in international politics—a recent example is the reluctance of African governments to condemn Robert Mugabe’s human rights abuses. Race, culture, and civilization cannot be analysed in entirely separate compartments if governments and international agencies persist in mixing them up. And it is unreasonable, even neurotic, to denounce someone who points that out rather than the governments that do the mixing.
Against this background, such developments as the relative decline in the West’s population, the surge in migration from the Third World to the West, and the erosion of borders such as those between Siberia and China or the United States and Mexico become highly charged political questions.
Among Buchanan’s critics, Ben Wattenberg is the only one to accept these points explicitly—indeed, he wrote a book on the consequences of the “birth dearth” almost a decade ago. Ingeniously, however, he turns them against Buchanan, and Buchanan weakens his own case by not subjecting Wattenberg’s argument to a sufficiently skeptical critique. In a world in which people are power, Wattenberg argues, America needs to increase its population both to sustain its economy and, in particular, entitlement programs like Social Security, and to remain a competitive superpower in a world of large populations. And the only way to do this, he further argues, is to maintain high levels of immigration, because the birthrate among native-born Americans fell to replacement levels a few years ago. This is a serious argument, but it bristles with problems. Do Americans really want to accept a more crowded country and greater environmental pressures in order to maintain international clout? Will not technological superiority enable the United States to remain the dominant superpower even with a stable population? And regarding a point to which we shall return, if a larger population is the goal, why not just design a public policy to induce a raise in the birthrate among native-born Americans?
But the main difficulty with Wattenberg’s argument is that a larger population will weaken America rather than strengthen it if the “new Americans” are hostile or indifferent to their new nation—or if they have loyalties that conflict with the national interest. And this may now be a real danger for a complex of reasons. Far from encouraging assimilation to an American identity, official U.S. policy now gives incentives to immigrants to retain the language and culture of their original homeland. When assimilation does occur, it is usually not “patriotic assimilation,” as citizenship scholar John Fonte points out, but adaptation to the very different values of the underclass, popular culture, or ethnic pressure groups. High levels of immigration help to sustain linguistic ghettoes and make policies such as multiculturalism, bilingual education, and ethnic preferences seem necessary adjustments to a diverse society. Cheap air travel enables immigrants to return “home” at frequent intervals and makes it easier for them to live psychologically in their prior culture. The overall impact of these various developments is to foster the growth of ethnic diasporas in the United States, which, at worst, feel disaffected from American society and, at best, may be torn by conflicting loyalties.
We see signs of this already: some American Muslims sympathized with the September 11 attackers either explicitly or by issuing only qualified condemnations; the Mexican government is currently seeking to organize Mexican Americans into a pro-Mexico pressure group in U.S. politics, and grants them dual nationality to this end; and any number of radical academics reject the United States as an artificial hegemony to which ethnic minorities owe no allegiance. In each case, the number of seriously disaffected people may be a small percentage of their entire ethnic group, but as September 11 demonstrated, numbers are not the most vital consideration. A much more fundamental question is how America can make sure of its citizens’ loyalty—including its new citizens.
And here Buchanan makes a serious mistake. He accepts the Weekly Standard (and his critics’) view that America’s choice is between being a “blood and soil” ethnic nation or a “creedal” nation based on certain liberal political principles in the Declaration of Independence, notably liberty and political equality. Once he has done that, he has lost an argument vital to his larger case. For America, being composed of immigrants from all over the world like the other great settler nations, Canada and Australia, is plainly not an ethnic nation rooted in blood and soil. Given enough time, enough intermarriage, and much lower levels of immigration, it might eventually become such a nation. But it is plainly not one now. That being so, America must be a “creedal” nation. And such a nation can assimilate an infinite number of immigrants provided that they can readily assent to the creed.
As the history of religion shows, however, creedal assent does not mean that someone is prepared for martyrdom. Otherwise, intellectuals would be renowned as the most fearless of warriors. If patriotism is to be able to inspire mass self-sacrifice—as it may need to do—it must rest upon deeper and more powerful loyalties than political opinion. A creedal nation that forgets that fact risks blithely admitting millions of potential traitors (or at least disinterested onlookers) without making any serious attempt to convert them into patriots.
Buchanan could have avoided being driven to this possibility if he had realized that there is a third national choice: that America is neither ethnic nor creedal but a cultural nation that transforms people, whether babies or immigrants, into Americans by virtue of their living in America and naturally developing over time the dense network of loyalties, affections, attitudes, principles, habits, and memories that constitute American patriotism. Such patriotic sentiments are less likely to develop when millions of new arrivals constantly reinforce the cultural enclaves that compete with America for people’s allegiance. And the nation may therefore be weakened rather than strengthened. But by being maneuvered into accepting a theory of American nationality that reduces allegiance to the recital of an oath, Buchanan has opened the door to the indefinite mass immigration that he deplores, with all its potential for national division and lingering disloyalty.
Buchanan further weakens his case against high immigration by too readily accepting Wattenberg’s argument that immigration—whatever its other drawbacks—would help solve or ameliorate the domestic and fiscal problems that supposedly follow from population decline. Because the age profile of immigrants is only slightly younger than the existing U.S. and European populations, immigration improves the ratio of providers to dependents in entitlement programs only slightly. To cancel out the effects of an aging population altogether, it would have to rise to levels that amount to what the UN calls “replacement migration.” As David Coleman, reader in demography at Oxford University, noted about the UN report for Europe, “To keep the support ratio constant will require 13 million immigrants a year (almost half the population of Canada) or 701 million people by 2050, by which time 75 percent of the European Union (EU) population would be of post-1995 immigrant descent.” This would amount to the replacement of historic nations such as France and Germany with entirely different cultural and ethnic populations in the same territory. Moreover, this gigantic social experiment would be fiscally pointless because, by the same logic, when the children of these immigrants were reaching pensionable age, still more millions of immigrants would be needed to keep the “support ratio” constant yet again. Eventually, the rest of the world would run out of people—and presumably we would then have to import aliens from outer space.
In addition to being impracticable, a policy of replacement migration is also unnecessary. The economics of a stationary or declining population need be no more painful than those of an expanding one. To put it briefly, they would necessitate a transfer of investment resources from education and physical infrastructure projects to social insurance and labor-saving capital industries. Official policy can also help nations adjust to population decline, which has, after all, now been going on in Europe for about a century. If all the European nations had the same work patterns as Denmark, Coleman points out, that would effectively add thirty million people to the EU’s workforce. And a pro-natalist policy could raise the U.S. and European birthrates substantially by changing work, tax, and welfare arrangements to enable women to have more than one child without making an undue sacrifice in their career choices and work lives. Buchanan fails to make the first point about the possibility of adjusting effectively to population decline, and though he calls for a policy to hike the birthrate, he seems to doubt its likely effectiveness. He may be caught between his desire to increase the population and a cultural conservatism that raises doubts about making the workplace more “gender-sensitive.”
These points are not quibbles, but they are not damning either. And although they weaken Buchanan’s general argument, they demonstrate that he shares many of the concerns of his conservative critics—as they share some of his, beneath the polemics. Why, then, the fierce conservative opposition to it? A possible clue to this mystery is in Jonah Goldberg’s Los Angeles Times op-ed in which he regrets that skepticism about immigration has been hijacked by nativist ideologues such as Buchanan and Peter Brimelow of the vdare.com website from more mainstream conservatives. One reason for this hijacking, of course, is that the immigration-skeptic train was standing in the station for some years without any sign from Mr. Goldberg and most other conservatives that they wanted to drive it anywhere soon. (I write as a slightly aggrieved third-class passenger with an unused season ticket.) That lack of interest was a very firm one with deep roots. Conservatism had tainted itself in the 1950s and ’60s by its sympathy for Southern segregationism. And conservatives, reflecting on the experience, decided to hold aloof from any politics that seem to flirt with the same sort of exclusionary and race-conscious policies. Admirable determination became distorted over the years into a belief that any interest in questions involving race, including immigration, was the start of a slippery slope back to segregationism or its contemporary equivalents.
Hence, “nativists” were denounced even when they could not be defined, and enforcement of this position led to a great deal of bitterness between those accused of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance and those making the accusations. After September 11, however, it is clear to all that culture, religion, race, nationality, immigration, and related questions are vital political questions, and that America’s security and future cannot be sensibly discussed without considering them.
The rules of politics hold that if a heretic’s arguments turn out to be valid, then the process of adopting them should prudently include burning the heretic first. Mr. Buchanan has already been given a light singe by his critics. At this point, maybe a simple truce would serve everyone better.
Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 320 pages, $25.95
This review appears in the current issue of American Outlook magazine.
Yet many of the initial reviews were favorable, too. Thomas Sowell, who is notoriously hard to please, described Buchanan as “a man of many dimensions and insights—very knowledgeable about our times and about history, and an incredibly good writer on top of it all.” Even the early reviewers who disliked Buchanan’s broad argument praised the book for raising vital, timely questions others were avoiding. Shortly afterward, it was in its fourth reprinting.
If Buchanan’s book struck a chord, it is not hard to understand why. It is a strongly argued and clearly written polemic on matters such as immigration and the clash of civilizations that, after September 11, suddenly graduated from elite to popular concerns in the American mind. It also blends the familiar and the unexpected. Buchanan’s extensive citation of United Nations (UN) population statistics to demonstrate that Western nations are shrinking demographically while the Third World burgeons almost certainly came as news to most of his readers. Ben Wattenberg’s “birth dearth” has been debated by demographers for a decade, but this was its breakthrough to Crossfire territory. At the same time, most of Buchanan’s explanations for the West’s declining population echoed standard conservative arguments on the decline of religion, the debasement of American culture, the forthcoming demographic crisis of entitlements, and the decreasing government support, moral and fiscal, for the traditional family. And Buchanan’s extrapolation of these trends into a future in which Chinese millions gradually absorb a thinly populated Siberia, and Mexico retakes the American southwest in a new Reconquista gave the book the flesh-tingling excitement of a science-fiction fantasy like Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints—while also being “true,” or at least not just a made-up story.
All in all, a natural conservative bestseller.
Which makes it fascinating that when an adverse reaction set in, it was among conservatives. Writers such as Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard (reviewing the book for the New York Times), Jonah Goldberg in the online version of National Review, Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, and Ben Wattenberg everywhere, all took aim at Buchanan as a racist and/or xenophobe in light disguise who had the prudence to couch his arguments in ambiguous code words. Their reviews were largely exercises in deconstructing Buchanan’s rhetorical formulae to reveal the ugly opinions they half-concealed and half-advertised. Taken together—which may be an unfair thing to do—these reviews had the feel of a “Stop Buchanan” campaign, as if he were a political candidate hoping to ride an issue into office.
In that point at least, they seriously misread the book. For one of its strongest and (given Buchanan’s pugnacious reputation) most surprising features is its elegiac and regretful tone. The Death of the West is the very opposite of a campaign book. It might almost have been written by some modern Thucydides, reflecting in old age and exile on the collapse of the civilization for which he had once fought but which he now sees as all but unsalvageable. Occasionally he ventures into proposing solutions, as we shall see. But he does so apparently without any firm hope that they will be adopted or that they would succeed if they were. Some of his critics grasped this but promptly concluded that such pessimism reflected a deep vein of anti-Americanism in Buchananite thought because no true patriot would lose faith in America’s recuperative powers.
If this summary of the hostile conservative reviews suggests that they overindulged in nitpicking, that is because at times they did. Let me justify this complaint with examples:
1. Christopher Caldwell cites as an example of Buchanan’s loss of faith in America his deploring that “no top college has an American history requirement,” and ripostes that the universities must be “doing something right” because David McCullough’s biography of John Adams has spent months on the bestseller list. But surely that is like citing remedial English classes in college as evidence that high schools must be doing something right. In fact, both institutions have left a hunger for someone else to satisfy. That is “something,” to be sure, but few people would judge it “right.”
2. Jonah Goldberg establishes that contra Buchanan, the West is not literally dying and, juggling some clever paradoxes, points out that it is “dying” metaphorically because its people live longer, while the Third World is flourishing because it has a high death rate. Insofar as Goldberg’s critique undermines the use of this metaphor to describe the view that the combination of the West’s low birthrate with its low death rate will gradually create a declining population of disproportionately elderly people while the Third World’s opposite blend is expanding its population of largely young people, it is spot on. But the reality that is imperfectly conveyed by the metaphor remains exactly the same. As Louis MacNeice wrote in reference to a barometer, “The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,/But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.”
3. Ben Wattenberg chides Buchanan for treating Mexican immigrants as non-Western when, as every schoolboy knows, they speak Spanish, a well-known European language. Buchanan is thus alleged to be writing about race when he pretends to be writing about culture. Insofar as Wattenberg has scored a hit here, however, he has wounded Buchanan much less deeply than he has hit the entire multicultural establishment that treats Hispanics as rebels against Eurocentrism. Against the multiculturalists Wattenberg’s point has real force—it undermines their entire system of ethno-cultural categorization. Against Buchanan, however, it splinters on impact. For the Wattenberg argument confuses culture and civilization in the way that Buchanan is accused of confusing race and civilization. English culture and Hispanic culture are both part of Western civilization; so are the Russian and Lithuanian cultures. But the Lithuanians reasonably felt that they were being oppressed in general and culturally dispossessed in particular when, after World War II, the Soviet Union sought to “Russify” their country by importing large numbers of Russian speakers and making Russian an official language. Similarly, Anglo and black Californians who have to speak Spanish to get service in supermarkets may not be enjoying a non-Western experience, but they are certainly being exposed to a foreign one. Indeed, culture may well erect between different peoples a barrier at least as obstructive as the wider and more diffuse concept of civilization. On the basis of common observation, I would suggest that English-speaking Indians from the Hindu civilization assimilate into American society more readily than non-English-speaking Europeans and Latin Americans. Strictly speaking, therefore, though Arizonans who oppose official bilingualism are experiencing a sense of cultural dispossession while Russians who fear Muslim and Chinese infiltration are facing a clash of civilizations, they both feel pretty much the same emotions. The only comfort Wattenberg can offer the Arizonans and Californians is that they are being dispossessed by Westerners. And even that cold comfort may turn out to be a false one if the “Westerners” feel (or are persuaded by the multiculturalists), as Amerindians very well might be, that they are victims of the West rather than its heirs. After all, as the very notion of assimilation implies, cultural identities are fluid.
When intelligent and reasonable people pick nits, however, that indicates something interesting is happening. And what is happening here is that Buchanan’s critics are exaggerating the extent of their disagreement with him to conceal the degree to which they concede his case.
They point out, for instance, that many non-Western countries are also embarking on a long-run decline in population. That is true, but it in no way damages Buchanan’s argument. As columnist Steven Sailer observes, the phenomenon of “demographic momentum” means that even these populations will continue growing for decades even after they hit the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, whereas Western populations are already declining. Buchanan’s statistics, supplied by the generally well-regarded UN statisticians, take demographic momentum into account. And they still show Western populations declining to about 6 percent of total world population by 2050 or thereabouts. They could be subsequently falsified by billions of private decisions in the world’s bedrooms, admittedly, but for the moment these are the best estimates we have. Behind the smoke screen of peripheral objections, the conservative critics accept this central point.
Similarly, though they are plainly uneasy about Buchanan’s division of the world into “us” and “them” even when the division is a well-recognized one of civilization or culture, they do not reject such an argument out of hand. They are painfully aware that such divisions exist in the form of cultural, religious, national, civilizational, and ethnic differences. Hence they attempt to prove that Buchanan is really writing (disreputably) about race when he pretends to be writing (respectably) about culture.
It must be said that Buchanan makes their task easier by dragging in points that are highly controversial while also being unnecessary to his main thesis. An example is his defense of Southern culture and Confederate history against the attacks of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He is largely right on the merits of the case. The Confederacy cannot reasonably be equated with the genocidal evil of Nazism; if any state with a history of slavery is to be treated as proto-Nazi, then those condemned would include not only the United States but also the states of West Africa that descend from slave empires, and the NAACP would logically have to abstain from any pride in African culture and history. But because his cultural argument—that the decline in historical memory erodes a nation’s willingness to defend itself—could be supported with examples drawn from silly textbooks on the history of the United States, he weakens that argument when he cites examples that evoke suspicions rather than agreement.
Yet, however embellished, his argument that there are important divisions between “the West and rest”—divisions with racial overtones—is hard to deny. Take the recent UN World Conference in Durban, South Africa, on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. On that occasion the Rest put the West in the dock over the international slave trade. Was that indictment leveled against a civilization, namely the Western one; or against a culture such as the Anglophone, Hispanic, or Lusitanian culture; or against individual Western nations such as Denmark; or against a race, namely the white race? Because nations that had never participated in the slave trade were included in the indictment, and because nonwhite citizens of Western civilization and its member cultures are intended to benefit from any slavery reparations, the indictment was evidently leveled against whites in general. Such racially tinged attacks are confined to certain issues such as aid, immigration, and decolonization, to be sure, and most non-Muslim Asian nations have held aloof from them in recent years. But both racial solidarity and antiwhite racism are recurring elements in international politics—a recent example is the reluctance of African governments to condemn Robert Mugabe’s human rights abuses. Race, culture, and civilization cannot be analysed in entirely separate compartments if governments and international agencies persist in mixing them up. And it is unreasonable, even neurotic, to denounce someone who points that out rather than the governments that do the mixing.
Against this background, such developments as the relative decline in the West’s population, the surge in migration from the Third World to the West, and the erosion of borders such as those between Siberia and China or the United States and Mexico become highly charged political questions.
Among Buchanan’s critics, Ben Wattenberg is the only one to accept these points explicitly—indeed, he wrote a book on the consequences of the “birth dearth” almost a decade ago. Ingeniously, however, he turns them against Buchanan, and Buchanan weakens his own case by not subjecting Wattenberg’s argument to a sufficiently skeptical critique. In a world in which people are power, Wattenberg argues, America needs to increase its population both to sustain its economy and, in particular, entitlement programs like Social Security, and to remain a competitive superpower in a world of large populations. And the only way to do this, he further argues, is to maintain high levels of immigration, because the birthrate among native-born Americans fell to replacement levels a few years ago. This is a serious argument, but it bristles with problems. Do Americans really want to accept a more crowded country and greater environmental pressures in order to maintain international clout? Will not technological superiority enable the United States to remain the dominant superpower even with a stable population? And regarding a point to which we shall return, if a larger population is the goal, why not just design a public policy to induce a raise in the birthrate among native-born Americans?
But the main difficulty with Wattenberg’s argument is that a larger population will weaken America rather than strengthen it if the “new Americans” are hostile or indifferent to their new nation—or if they have loyalties that conflict with the national interest. And this may now be a real danger for a complex of reasons. Far from encouraging assimilation to an American identity, official U.S. policy now gives incentives to immigrants to retain the language and culture of their original homeland. When assimilation does occur, it is usually not “patriotic assimilation,” as citizenship scholar John Fonte points out, but adaptation to the very different values of the underclass, popular culture, or ethnic pressure groups. High levels of immigration help to sustain linguistic ghettoes and make policies such as multiculturalism, bilingual education, and ethnic preferences seem necessary adjustments to a diverse society. Cheap air travel enables immigrants to return “home” at frequent intervals and makes it easier for them to live psychologically in their prior culture. The overall impact of these various developments is to foster the growth of ethnic diasporas in the United States, which, at worst, feel disaffected from American society and, at best, may be torn by conflicting loyalties.
We see signs of this already: some American Muslims sympathized with the September 11 attackers either explicitly or by issuing only qualified condemnations; the Mexican government is currently seeking to organize Mexican Americans into a pro-Mexico pressure group in U.S. politics, and grants them dual nationality to this end; and any number of radical academics reject the United States as an artificial hegemony to which ethnic minorities owe no allegiance. In each case, the number of seriously disaffected people may be a small percentage of their entire ethnic group, but as September 11 demonstrated, numbers are not the most vital consideration. A much more fundamental question is how America can make sure of its citizens’ loyalty—including its new citizens.
And here Buchanan makes a serious mistake. He accepts the Weekly Standard (and his critics’) view that America’s choice is between being a “blood and soil” ethnic nation or a “creedal” nation based on certain liberal political principles in the Declaration of Independence, notably liberty and political equality. Once he has done that, he has lost an argument vital to his larger case. For America, being composed of immigrants from all over the world like the other great settler nations, Canada and Australia, is plainly not an ethnic nation rooted in blood and soil. Given enough time, enough intermarriage, and much lower levels of immigration, it might eventually become such a nation. But it is plainly not one now. That being so, America must be a “creedal” nation. And such a nation can assimilate an infinite number of immigrants provided that they can readily assent to the creed.
As the history of religion shows, however, creedal assent does not mean that someone is prepared for martyrdom. Otherwise, intellectuals would be renowned as the most fearless of warriors. If patriotism is to be able to inspire mass self-sacrifice—as it may need to do—it must rest upon deeper and more powerful loyalties than political opinion. A creedal nation that forgets that fact risks blithely admitting millions of potential traitors (or at least disinterested onlookers) without making any serious attempt to convert them into patriots.
Buchanan could have avoided being driven to this possibility if he had realized that there is a third national choice: that America is neither ethnic nor creedal but a cultural nation that transforms people, whether babies or immigrants, into Americans by virtue of their living in America and naturally developing over time the dense network of loyalties, affections, attitudes, principles, habits, and memories that constitute American patriotism. Such patriotic sentiments are less likely to develop when millions of new arrivals constantly reinforce the cultural enclaves that compete with America for people’s allegiance. And the nation may therefore be weakened rather than strengthened. But by being maneuvered into accepting a theory of American nationality that reduces allegiance to the recital of an oath, Buchanan has opened the door to the indefinite mass immigration that he deplores, with all its potential for national division and lingering disloyalty.
Buchanan further weakens his case against high immigration by too readily accepting Wattenberg’s argument that immigration—whatever its other drawbacks—would help solve or ameliorate the domestic and fiscal problems that supposedly follow from population decline. Because the age profile of immigrants is only slightly younger than the existing U.S. and European populations, immigration improves the ratio of providers to dependents in entitlement programs only slightly. To cancel out the effects of an aging population altogether, it would have to rise to levels that amount to what the UN calls “replacement migration.” As David Coleman, reader in demography at Oxford University, noted about the UN report for Europe, “To keep the support ratio constant will require 13 million immigrants a year (almost half the population of Canada) or 701 million people by 2050, by which time 75 percent of the European Union (EU) population would be of post-1995 immigrant descent.” This would amount to the replacement of historic nations such as France and Germany with entirely different cultural and ethnic populations in the same territory. Moreover, this gigantic social experiment would be fiscally pointless because, by the same logic, when the children of these immigrants were reaching pensionable age, still more millions of immigrants would be needed to keep the “support ratio” constant yet again. Eventually, the rest of the world would run out of people—and presumably we would then have to import aliens from outer space.
In addition to being impracticable, a policy of replacement migration is also unnecessary. The economics of a stationary or declining population need be no more painful than those of an expanding one. To put it briefly, they would necessitate a transfer of investment resources from education and physical infrastructure projects to social insurance and labor-saving capital industries. Official policy can also help nations adjust to population decline, which has, after all, now been going on in Europe for about a century. If all the European nations had the same work patterns as Denmark, Coleman points out, that would effectively add thirty million people to the EU’s workforce. And a pro-natalist policy could raise the U.S. and European birthrates substantially by changing work, tax, and welfare arrangements to enable women to have more than one child without making an undue sacrifice in their career choices and work lives. Buchanan fails to make the first point about the possibility of adjusting effectively to population decline, and though he calls for a policy to hike the birthrate, he seems to doubt its likely effectiveness. He may be caught between his desire to increase the population and a cultural conservatism that raises doubts about making the workplace more “gender-sensitive.”
These points are not quibbles, but they are not damning either. And although they weaken Buchanan’s general argument, they demonstrate that he shares many of the concerns of his conservative critics—as they share some of his, beneath the polemics. Why, then, the fierce conservative opposition to it? A possible clue to this mystery is in Jonah Goldberg’s Los Angeles Times op-ed in which he regrets that skepticism about immigration has been hijacked by nativist ideologues such as Buchanan and Peter Brimelow of the vdare.com website from more mainstream conservatives. One reason for this hijacking, of course, is that the immigration-skeptic train was standing in the station for some years without any sign from Mr. Goldberg and most other conservatives that they wanted to drive it anywhere soon. (I write as a slightly aggrieved third-class passenger with an unused season ticket.) That lack of interest was a very firm one with deep roots. Conservatism had tainted itself in the 1950s and ’60s by its sympathy for Southern segregationism. And conservatives, reflecting on the experience, decided to hold aloof from any politics that seem to flirt with the same sort of exclusionary and race-conscious policies. Admirable determination became distorted over the years into a belief that any interest in questions involving race, including immigration, was the start of a slippery slope back to segregationism or its contemporary equivalents.
Hence, “nativists” were denounced even when they could not be defined, and enforcement of this position led to a great deal of bitterness between those accused of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance and those making the accusations. After September 11, however, it is clear to all that culture, religion, race, nationality, immigration, and related questions are vital political questions, and that America’s security and future cannot be sensibly discussed without considering them.
The rules of politics hold that if a heretic’s arguments turn out to be valid, then the process of adopting them should prudently include burning the heretic first. Mr. Buchanan has already been given a light singe by his critics. At this point, maybe a simple truce would serve everyone better.
Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 320 pages, $25.95
This review appears in the current issue of American Outlook magazine.
John O'Sullivan is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and editor-at-large of National Review.
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