Middle American News

BOOK REVIEW
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
New York; Thomas Dunne Books; October 2011; 496 pages; $27.99

“If We Do Not Act Now.”

by Peter B. Gemma

Those are the last six words of Pat Buchanan’s new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? The phrase answers many questions he poses between the two covers, and challenge the reader to respond too.

As with his other books, such as The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002) and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (2006), Buchanan gets right to the heart of the matter—even with the title.

In Suicide of a Superpower, he succinctly defines his premise:

“Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth.”

Then he pushes back—hard—maintaining we are: “a people of common ancestry, culture, and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heros, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, [and who] share the same music, poetry, art, and literature.”

And Buchanan asserts that the elitist agenda:

“is failing and will continue to fail. For it is based on ... an ideology whose tenets are at war with the laws of nature. Like Marxists who were going to create a new man and a new society, our establishment is attempting the impossible.”

However Buchanan believes the fight between middle America and the elites will go down to the wire. As he points out in the ominous chapter “Demographic Winter:”

“As the West worships at the altar of democracy, is deeply egalitarian, and has thrown open its doors to a Third World in which ethnonationalism is embedded, it is the West whose destiny will ultimately be determined by demography.”

Buchanan cites UN findings, US Census Bureau studies, research papers, and news investigations to conclude: “Peoples of European descent are ... aging, dying, disappearing … among the peoples of color who will replace them, the poorest and least developed nations are reproducing fastest.” He writes that by 2050 only one of the ten most populous nations will be a First World country—the United States. Others on the list will include Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia.

Buchanan notes that in 1950, 28% of the world’s population came from Europe and North America. By 2050, that number is expected to be 12%. Today, among First World countries the birth rate is as low as 1.3 children per woman—well under the 2.1 level necessary just to maintain current population levels. Meanwhile, Africa’s population will double to two billion by 2050—under-achieving nations such as Niger will quintuple its population; Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, and Burundi will triple theirs.

Stateside, in the chapter entitled “The End of White America,” Buchanan warns that white Americans will be a minority by 2042 ... white teens under 18 will be a minority by 2019. He says, “Mexico is moving north,” stressing:

“Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the [boundary-setting] verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation-within-a-nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to ‘insure domestic tranquility’ and ‘make us a more perfect union?’ Or has our passivity in the face of invasion imperiled our union?”

As detailed in Suicide of a Superpower, more than 15% of America’s workers were foreign born in 2010. In California, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, illegal aliens constitute 10% of the workforce. The Washington Post reported that during the period from 2009-2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs while white—and black—construction workers lost 511,000 jobs.

As an aside, The Washington Post has conceded that Pat Buchanan “is adept at linking history, statistics, and the writings of philosophers and economists to proffer forceful arguments.”

Forceful indeed. He favors no amnesty, a return of illegal aliens to the homelands, and radically reforming immigration laws:

“to give preference to those from countries that have historically provided most of our immigrants, who share our values, speak English, have college or advanced degrees, bring special skills, and can be easily assimilated. We need more taxpayers and fewer tax consumers.”

Buchanan cautions that: “If America is not to disintegrate, if she is to regain the ‘out of many, one,’ unity we knew in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, the first imperative is to re-adopt the immigration policy that produced that era of good feeling, so that the melting pot, fractured though it is, can begin again to do its work.” As a solution, he declares the US must cut “new immigration until unemployment falls to 6 percent. To bring in foreign workers when 23 million Americans are still underemployed or out of work is to put corporate profits ahead of country.”

He advocates reversing discrimination by having Congress enact into law activist Ward Connerly’s “Civil Rights Initiative, which has won the support of the electorate in every state but one where it has been on the ballot.” The Connerly statement is simple but effective:“The state shall not grant preferential treatment to or discriminate against any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

Those “three dozen words, written into the Constitution or federal law,” Buchanan advises, “would bring down the evil empire of reverse discrimination.”

Buchanan’s views on international affairs and American foreign policy are striking too. In Suicide of a Superpower he cautions that, “our imperial arrogance caused nations to unite to resist our hegemony, and we deliberately antagonized nations like Russia that had wanted to associate with us. People treated like untrustworthy friends and potential enemies often end up becoming so.”

“It is absurd,” he writes, “that the United States, stumbling toward a debt default, must borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from Europe to defend Europe, and borrow from the Persian Gulf to defend the Persian Gulf.” Buchanan wants a cost-cutting, policy-reviewing process to address, “an archipelago of 700 to 1,000 bases in 130 countries, our imperial embassies, foreign aid, the military-industrial complex at home, and the hidden billions spread through the government for intelligence work and nuclear weapons.”

Finally, Buchanan sums up the reason suicide may be America’s choice: “the crises that afflict us— culture wars, race division, record deficits, unpayable debt, waves of immigration, legal and illegal, of peoples never before assimilated, gridlock in the capital and possible defeat in war— may prove too much for our democracy to cope with.”

Perhaps, but only “if we do not act now.”

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Peter Gemma is a columnist for Middle American News and has written for a variety of publications including USA Today and Military History magazine.