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Patrick Buchanan: American Prophet
By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

ost of those figures history records as prophets ahead of their times in fact were prophets of their times, addressing a people who remained willfully behind those times. Such was Patrick J. Buchanan when he ran for President, significantly but unsuccessfully, in the national campaigns of 1992 and 1996.

I say "unsuccessfully" insofar as he was never inaugurated President of the United States. Otherwise, Buchanan left a significant dent in the American consciousness, one that he has worked strenuously since then to deepen through his literary, rather than by continued political, efforts, with his previous books, including A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; and Where the Right West Wrong. During the early and middle 90s, the times were ripe for Buchanan's message, America still green and hard, almost sourly resistant to it. Today the country itself is ripe, while Pat Buchanan has lost none of his bite and pungency. Thus the publication of his latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, is a political event of itself, in perfect alignment not just with the defining crisis of our time but with the sentiment and just judgment of the American public itself. It is a rare thing in history for a genuine prophet to be greeted by accolades, or even sober nods of assent, rather than by epithets and stones. A prophet, Flannery O'Connor once said, can expect only the worst. The worst, however, is directly proportionate to the time it takes his audience to accept his message. In Buchanan's case, this time around, that message seems to be sinking in like a hard rain at the conclusion of a protracted drought. The United States is ready for Pat Buchanan-at last.

Unfortunately, the prophet who is no longer ahead of his times becomes, almost overnight, the prophet who himself has fallen behind them, as the danger he foretold against accelerates. Even so, Buchanan is not-yet--prepared to concur, in the case of his own country or that of Europe, with Jean Raspail's pessemistic conclusion regarding France. "The deed is done," Raspail wrote in 2004 in Le Figaro, "I am convinced that the fate of France is sealed…." Raspail, the author of The Camp of the Saints-a corruscating novel, published in 1973, about the unresisted invasion of Europe by the "Last Chance Armada," a fleet of a hundred ships set sail from Calcutta-may be forgiven his pessimism, considering that he has spent the 33 years since the book's original publication watching the French politicians dither, equivocate, and cave, just as predicted in the novel. ("My house is their house," President Mitterand proclaimed, while his successor, Jacques Chirac, has spoken of a "Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian.") Buchanan, who has resisted the assault upon his own country for nearly as long, insists that, though the hour is near indeed for the United States, it has not yet struck.

"If we will secure the border, deport the criminals, sanction employers who hire illegals, deny citizenship and social welfare except emergency aid to illegal aliens, in five to ten years our crisis will be at an end. But if we don't do this, the crisis will end America. … If we fail to secure our southern border, if we grant a second amnesty, the tipping point will have been passed. And there will then be no retrieving thcountry we inherited."

As for the greater West, Buchanan argues, "It needs to be said again: If we do not solve our civilizational crisis-a dis integrating culture, dying populations and invasions unresisted-the children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West. In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and the will to do it?"

The results of the forthcoming congressional elections in November should go a long way toward answering that question.

State of Emergency is nothing if not comprehensive. Indeed, it is the most all-embracing work on immigration published over the last decade, since the appearance of Peter Brimelow's classic Alien Nation (and, dare I add, my own The Immigration Mystique: America's False Conscience) in 1995 and 1996 respectively. In 308 pages (including bibliography and index) Buchanan ranges over a broad spectrum of immigration related topics and considerations. The roots of the immigration issue, like those of the English oak, spread widely and penetrate deeply, and Pat Buchanan touches on all, or most of them, in this book.

Deftly and in a spare economical way, Buchanan has his say regarding every major argument that has been made on behalf of mass immigration from the Third World in the past forty years, since the catastrophic Immigration Act of 1965. Refuting the sentimental (and wholly irrelevant) claim that America is, after all, a "nation of immigrants," Buchanan demonstrates how the old immigration differed from the new, in terms of the immigrants' willingness and ability to assimilate to American life; what aplogists call "immigration" is, he asserts, in reality an invasion. Buchanan, assessing demographic trends, puts a face--or faces--on the United States in 2050 that would have appalled the Founding generation in 1787 and will appall the large majority of Old Americans today. A brief history of U.S.-Mexican relations in the first half of the 19th century suggests why the Mexican people consider Americans their enemy-also why, Texas apart, Mexican "ownership" of what is now the American Southwest amounted to an empty claim. Examining the so-called Nation of Aztlan, he shows how the thing is far more than a club, society, or academic exercise. Rather, it amounts to what Buchanan terms "The Aztlan Plot," in which all of Mexico, from the most humble mojado to the President of the Republic, is complicit. (Its aim, Buchanan claims, entails nothing less than "the end of the United States as a sovereign, self-sufficient, independent republic, the passing away of the American nation. They are coming to conquer us.")

What is more, conquest aside, "Mass immigration pushes politics to the left, by increasing political demands for welfare programs and affirmative action policies. As people of Third World origins become an ever larger share of the population, the agenda of America's minorities will become America's agenda. And that is not the agenda of the Reagan Revolution." A corollary to this inevitable leftward tendency is the impending "suicide of the GOP," since "there is an irreconcilable conflict between being a conservative party [dedicated to small government] and being the party of Hispanics. The conflict is pulling the Bush-Rove coalition apart." The President's choice is a simple one, Buchanan thinks. "Either Bush secures the border now, or the Bush Republicans go the way of the Whigs."

Pat Buchanan tackles with brio the much-vexed issue of what constitutes a nation. The neo-conservatives and many liberals assert that the United States is a creedal nation, meaning that it is constructed from a series of defining abstract propositions, a personal devotion to which constitutes patriotism. Buchanan will have none of this. Rather, "Language, faith, culture, and history-and, yes, birth, blood, and soil-produce a people, not an ideology." For him, "Democracy is not enough. If the culture dies, the country dies." In rebutting the related claim that, in effect, the economy (which unlimited immigration is said to benefit) is the country, Buchanan finds confirmation for his own position in the words of the 19th-century French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan, who wrote, "Community of interests makes commercial treaties [only]. There is a sentimental side to nationality; it is at once body and soul; a Zollverein is not a fatherland." One way or the other, Buchanan, drawing on the by now vast economic literature of immigration, denies that immigration strengthens the U.S. economy. "What benefit, then, justifies the risks we are taking with the health and safety of our citizens [importing disease, crime, and revolution] and the social cohesion of our country?" In other words: If America doesn't need immigration, why does it have immigration?

In the spring of 1968, Enoch Powell, the Tory Party's shadow minister of state for defence, delivered one of the most famous (as well as infamous) speeches of the 20th century, in which he warned of the consequences of colored immigration to Great Britain: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding: like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'" A half-hour before, Powell had begun his speech by suggesting that, "The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils….The discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for a politician." With these words, a great and noble British statesman captured the essence of his own career, while adumbrating that of his equally great successor-in-waiting across the Atlantic. Here are the measures Patrick Buchanan proposes as the means to provide against the preventable evils in his own time and country:

Not a particularly daunting agenda, one might think, for the World's Sole Superpower to accomplish, were it not for the fact that the Superpower's leaders, so far from being Supermen themselves, resemble more a cross between Caspar Milquetoast and the former chiseling high-school Class Treasurer elevated to prominent federal office.

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