His insight is remarkable for its prescience at a time when the only Communist country was Bolshevik Russia. Neither it nor China had yet tried to organize the Third World into an anti-Western force. Franz Fanon's simmering The Wretched of the Earth would not erupt for another 30 or 40 years. And India, Africa and the Moslem world, though their burgeoning populations today seethe with anti-Western hate, were not players of any significance on a world stage built by Western powers.

Of the Third World's reaction against the West, Spengler writes: "Such a 'revolution from without' has set itself up against each of the past cultures also. It has arisen invariably among the hopeless downtrodden races of the outer ring - 'savages' or 'barbarians' - who were exploited without means of redress by the unassailable superiority of a group of culture-nations which had reached high maturity in their political, military, economic, and intellectual forms and methods."

The Marxist-driven class war underway in the West in Spengler's time has transformed itself into the ugly cultural Marxism that Buchanan today describes with frightening and exacting detail as the dominant force in our institutions. The descendants of the Left of Spengler's time no longer aspire to lead reluctant workers; instead they prefer the more fertile ground among the hundreds of millions of non-white peoples on the outskirts of Western culture who are now penetrating the West through mass immigration.

Spengler argues that the "position of the present Imperium of the white nations, which embraces the whole globe and includes the colored races, is far more difficult" than the position of previous cultures. He notes that "the ... menace lurks within the field of the white power. It penetrates into and participates in the military and revolutionary agreements and disagreements of the white powers and threatens one day to take matters into its own hands."

Unlike the white workers whom the Left found reluctant to join up in a war against their own countries, immigrants from outside the West come bearing grudges articulated, cultivated, and in some cases contrived by the leaders of the transformed Bolshevik revolution. At its essence, that is the hallmark of the politics of the Left - organized resentment. The sour intellectuals of the West's urban centers are being used by this angry mass army as a battering ram against the intellectuals' own people, own culture. But the Third World's assault very well could win out by sheer numbers alone, for the demographic revolution also consists in the dangerously low birthrates in the Western countries.

Buchanan describes the impending doom (also noted by Spengler): "The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink... The prognosis is grim. Between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than 3 billion to over 9 billion people, but this ... increase in global population will come entirely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European stock vanish from the earth. In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world's population; in 2000 they were one-sixth; in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race."

Buchanan chronicles the decline in fertility and the dwindling of families. Spengler eyed the same problem: "...[T]he decay of the white family, the inevitable outcome of megalopolitan existence, is spreading, and it is devouring the 'race' of nations. The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve..."

Today, of course, it has already dissolved.

Both Buchanan and Spengler attribute the family's decline to the cosmopolitan values of feminism and hedonism. Writes Buchanan: "Only a social counterrevolution or a religious awakening can turn the West around before a falling birthrate closes off the last exit ramp and rings down the curtain on Western man's long-running play... What is going to convert American women to wanting what their mothers wanted and grandmothers prayed for, a good man, a home in the suburbs, and a passel of kids? Sounds almost quaint."

Understanding the crisis we face requires reading this book. But unfortunately, neither Spengler nor Buchanan see much hope for the West. For Spengler, the crisis is merely an historical process through which the West must pass to its eventual death. For Buchanan, however, it is a fate worth struggling against - despite the odds.

"The West does not lack the capacity or power to repel these dangers," he writes, "but it seems to lack the desire and will to maintain itself as a vital, separate, unique civilization."

Ever the fighter, the Buchanan who slugged against immense odds through three presidential elections, sees that the facts point to the need for a new fight, a new division in the political arena of the West and in the U.S.

"This struggle to preserve the old creeds, cultures, and countries of the West is the new divide between Left and Right; this struggle will define what it means to be a conservative. This is the cause of the 21st century and the agenda of conservatism for the remainder of our lives," he wrote.
That's a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of conservative-Republican leaders whose network of lazy beltway think-tanks and limp-wristed magazines still believes the most important political battles are for tax cuts and the defense of corporate profits instead of conserving our people and our culture. That "conservative movement" must now decide: Will it fight to protect the West, or will it join the armies of our enemies?

"Politics cannot pull the West out of its crisis," Buchanan writes, "for it is not a crisis of material things, but a crisis of the soul. The refusal of Western women to have children, the embrace by Western society of hedonism and materialism -- these will not be undone by Tom Delay, Trent Lott, or Mr. [George W.] Bush. But politics is not irrelevant."

The battle lines for the early decades of the 21st century have now been drawn, even if politics alone cannot save us.