Middle American News

January 2008

Will America Survive the
End of Its Empire?

he truth that sets us free in the long term is almost never the truth that appeals to us in the short one. Perhaps one of Pat Buchanan's greatest liabilities as a two-time presidential candidate in the 1990s was that what George Bush I would have called his "vision thing" was far too pessimistic for a majority of the American public to stomach. Robert Louis Stevenson associated pessimism with "Young gentlemen with private means [who] look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world." Stevenson's pessimist clearly has nothing in common with Buchanan, who is surely among the grown and hearty men himself. But there are times and occasions when reality is such that truth-telling is taken inevitably for negativity and fear-mongering, and the truth-teller himself ridiculed as a crank and attacked as a sapper of social morale. Neither of the two truth-tellers in the current presidential campaign, Representatives Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul, has so far succeeded in gaining the influence he deserves, a failure some commentators have ascribed to their refusal to compromise their relatively dire vision of what the United States has already become, and where it is headed from here.

Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart (St. Martin's Press, 2007) is, as its title suggests, arguably Buchanan's bleakest book so far. Yet it embodies all the heartiness, strength, and joie de vivre its author displayed as a candidate on the campaign trail a decade and more ago. The explanation for Buchanan's irrepressibility is, I believe, threefold. The first is his Catholic faith, which tells him that history has an end, and that that end is for the good. The second is his developed sense of history (Pat Buchanan knows a lot of it), which allows him to adopt, when he needs it, an olympian perspective on the world. The third is his zest for life, including very much life in its combative aspect, on which he thrives and at which he excels. In all these respects, Buchanan resembles an intellectual mentor of his whom he mentions twice in this book. Joe Sobran has been compared to one of his mentors-at-a-distance, the English author G.K. Chesterton. Similarly, one might compare Pat Buchanan to Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton's compatriot and contemporary, who managed to balance a full-blooded relish for European culture against a poignant awareness of its historical fragility.

Though the day of reckoning of which Buchanan warns impends for the whole of the Western world, the fate of the United States of America is his particular concern here. The nation he describes is at once the victim of a virulent megalomania and a corruptive self-contempt amounting to self-hate. In the United States today, the federal government is glorified by its operative elite almost to the point of divinization; the same elite denigrates the society it directs to the extent that denigration becomes indistinguishable from demonization. The impulse behind the one is imperialism, behind the other, multiculturalism. The fatal active connection between them is the globalist free trade cult, which has learned how to synthesize the two with itself for its own unlimited profit and power. The result is the "ideology" to which Buchanan refers in his subtitle, an evil mixture of imperialism, free trade, anti-Westernism, and economic irresponsibility that has already transformed and is in process of destroying America.

Yet this brave new America, creation of the worst elements in its makeup, is not working, having over-reached, over-built, and over-extended itself in every way. For one thing, the government of the United States was not designed for empire, but for a republican political system. For another, Americans, who for better than two centuries have been pleased to think of their nation as God's country, have lacked nevertheless the haughty self-confidence and sense of racial, cultural, and class superiority that allowed the European nation-states (Great Britain especially) to succeed at creating and managing their empires from early modern times until 1945. And nowadays, they lack it more than ever. What the would-be masters of American empire fail to comprehend is that their multicultural agenda works to undermine the cultural self-confidence that their imperial agenda requires for its successful realization. As a substitute, they offer the capitalist-democratism that is supposed to explain and justify American imperialism while giving the American people a new ideological confidence to replace their by now discredited cultural assurance. But democratism is a poor substitute for patriotism. Indeed, it is no substitute at all. After a couple of generations of relentless ideological reeducation by the schools and by the media, the great majority of Americans continue to take pride in who they are, not what political abstractions they believe in-or believe they believe in. Moreover (Buchanan emphasizes the point), not even the British Empire, which at the height of its influence and extent ruled one-quarter of the globe, came close to matching the United States's imperial ambitions in the age of Bush II, which are nothing less than the creation of a monopolar international system in perpetuity, the forcible conversion of the entire world to democratic capitalist principles, and the overthrow of tyranny and the imposition of "freedom" on peoples everywhere.

Here we come to the third reason why this newly-realized (but not for long) America is unsuccessful. That reason is "free trade." And, once again, this element of the imperial ideology in fact works against the empire, by bleeding it to death. Buchanan includes a marvelous section on the intellectual history of the free trade movement, from the early nineteenth century in England and France down to the present time: from John Cobden and Frédéric Bastiat, through John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman. Under the protective tariff system, the United States rose to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world-as Great Britain before her had done. After converting in 1846 (with the repeal of the Corn Laws) to free trade, Britain slid rapidly in the opposite direction. As Buchanan makes clear, the doctrine of free trade has from its inception been a cult, not respectable economic theory. ("I believe," Cobden declared, "that the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle.… I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe-drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.") And while many cults do no particular harm to anyone or anything, the cult of free trade destroys whatever nation embraces it. In regard to free trade, Buchanan's chapter "Colony of the World" further develops many of his recent newspaper columns, both summarizing and detailing the horrendous damage free trade has inflicted on the United States in this age of economic globalization, when the U.S.-and the U.S. alone-adheres to free trade principles in its economic relations with protectionist trading partners. For months if not years now, Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts (to mention only two writers) have warned that, willy-nilly, the Bush administration (or its successor, as now appears more likely) will have to end the Iraq War for the simple and insurmountable reason that the weakened American economy will no longer be able to prosecute it. And there will be plenty more Washington will be unable to support, the American empire included. For the successful promotion of empire, all foundational policies must agree. In the case of the American empire, these contradict and oppose each other in fundamental ways.

Pat Buchanan cares nothing for the fate of American empire. Rather, he argues for its speedy dismantlement. His real and wholly justifiable fear is for the future of what remains of the republic the empire has half-suffocated under a golden pillow and is hoping to bury alive, without honors or even notice, some fine day soon. The danger is that, in destroying itself, the empire will wreck the republic and consign it to oblivion. And no way better to accomplish this than through the mass immigration the national government has encouraged and abetted these past forty years. Here is one imperial policy that really does dovetail neatly with the empire's globalist plan. The one thing more dangerous to republican government in America than the anti-democratic machinations of a transnational elite is the presence here of scores of millions of semi-savages from poverty-stricken, authoritarian cultures where self-government is as little practiced or valued as self-help and self-restraint. "Does it make sense," Buchanan asks, "that 30,000 U.S. troops are defending a border in Korea, when a Third World invasion is pouring across our own border with Mexico? What will it profit us if we win in Iraq and lose the Southwest?"

This election cycle, the United States is not lacking in would-be presidential candidates who are entirely comfortable (or trying hard to appear so) in evangelical circles where such concepts as the Day of Judgment are de rigueur. What the country needs are ambitious politicians equally at their ease in discussing the Day of Reckoning Pat Buchanan warns against in his new book.