February 12, 2002

The ‘pluralism versus assimilation’ debate has raged in the US for nearly 200 years. In his new book The death of the West: how dying populations and immigrant invasions imperil our country and civilization Pat Buchanan, therefore, gives much old news. However, there is a particular spin in this book. Buchanan wages his fundamentalist cultural crusade as a demographic threat to the white race in Europe and the United States from third world immigrants.

A staunch Roman Catholic and a conservative syndicated commentator, Buchanan, ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for president in 1992 and 1996 and was the Reform Party’s presidential candidate in 2000, where he failed miserably.

In The death of the West, Buchanan asserts that the West is facing four “clear and present dangers”. Aside from a rapidly aging population, declining birth rates in Europe and the US, coupled with a population explosion in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the West now faces an apocalyptic threat. “Not since the Black Death in the fourteenth century,” he writes, “has there been a greater threat to Western civilization.” He predicts that by 2050 only 10 per cent of the world population will be white. He adds: “Historians may one day call ‘the pill’ the suicide tablet of the West.”

Secondly, he contends that the “melting pot” no longer works in the US since we harbour millions of Mexican immigrants who constitute a “nation within a nation”. Similarly, Europe is being inundated by an “Islamic-Arab-African invasion”. These demographic changes in Europe and America are set to cause cataclysmic shifts in world power and result in balkanization of the United States.

Thirdly, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ended with the fall of the Berlin wall but the counter-culture revolution started in the college campuses of America in the sixties has succeeded in de-Christianizing America, “dethroning our God, vandalizing our temples and capturing our young”. In a section called “Return of the Prophet”, he states that “now the signs are everywhere that Islam is rising again....In Europe, Christian congregations are dying, churches are emptying out and the mosques are filling up”.

Fourth, the ruling elite in the West have given up on nationalism and instead embraced the idea of globalization and world government. He quotes Strobe Talbott (former President Clinton’s roommate at Oxford) who said: “The term citizens of the world will assume real meaning in the 21st century.”

It is true that the West is facing a breakdown of the nuclear family and witnessing a decline in birth rates but to compare it to Black Death is balderdash. The 1968 book The population bomb by Paul Ehrlich made similar gloom and doom prophecies where exploding populations were going to exhaust the earth’s resources well before the end of the twentieth century. If you read that book today it is outrageous in its unintended hilarity. In short, it is simply very difficult to predict the future.

Besides, even if Buchanan’s whistling-in-the-wind prediction was true, so what? There are millions of other equally good human beings to fill up this imagined shortage of the white people in this world. But wait. There’s the rub. Are those third world people of brown and black skin colour not good enough to replace the master white race? The hidden premise of this book, never explicitly stated, is that none of the non-European people migrating to America or Europe are competent to maintain the ways of life that make America and Europe the First World. But no where is this point argued openly.

Regarding the question of immigration and balkanization, Buchanan’s book displays a gross ignorance of the complex process of acculturation and assimilation in American society. His book actually brings to mind the Nativist American crusades of the 1850s and 1920s when Buchanan’s own Irish Catholic ancestors were called “white niggers” and told to go home. To talk of balkanization of America because of diversity belies historic and contemporary reality.

Repeatedly this myth of “nation within a nation” was successfully challenged by the Boston Irish, the New York Jews, the Chicago Italians and the Atlanta African-Americans. Add to that the recent immigrants, namely the Catholic Mexican-American or the Muslim Pakistani-American. They too are turning out to be the usual Americans in a multicultural society.

Not only is the metaphor of the “melting pot” erroneous, but Israel Zangwill (whom Buchanan quotes with great flourish) who invented that famous term in 1908, in his later years returned to be a virulent Zionist. The fact of the matter is that the USA has never been a monolithic, homogenized society. The false Eurocentric version of American history has already been discarded by eminent social historians like Nathan Galzer and Werner Sollers. Americans are now writing a more inclusive and accurate history of all the peoples who migrated to this continent starting with the Native Americans between about 14,000 and 35,000 years ago.

This objective American history clearly shows that America has always been a pluralistic society, receiving wave after wave of immigrants with different racial, cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds from different parts of the globe. These diverse people did not melt into one supposed bland conformity nor indeed did this country break apart in some phantom balkanization. As Nathan Glazer has rightly pointed out, it is not accurate to call America a ‘nation of nations’. Rather one pluralistic nation was created here made up of many races, cultures and religions.

Turning to Buchanan’s other “present dangers”, his tirade against the liberal counter-culture is a contradiction in terms. According to him, if current trends in immigration and reproduction continue, white America will no longer be the First World. Yet it is the same white Americans of European descent who have debased America “with out-of-wedlock children, homosexuality and militant paganism!” Similarly, there is an incoherently argued case against globalization in favour of nationalism and a closed door policy.

In short, Buchanan’s adamant book has no middle ground. He has failed to construct a sensible convincing case on the demise of the West. Frankly, this is the work of an alarmist politician who sees the world only in Manichean terms.

The death of the West
By Patrick J. Buchanan
St Martin’s
ISBN 0312285485
320pp. $25.95

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