Put
Not Your Faith in Nation-States
The Death of the West
By Pat Buchanan
St. Martin’s Press Review
Review
by Ryan McMaken
 Pat
Buchanan’s latest
contribution to the literature of the National Question in America
is a tale of a dying patient. The patient, Western civilization,
is dying of a repeated infusion of self loathing perpetuated by
the purveyors of an anti-Western cultural revolution. Insofar as
Buchanan diagnoses the disease, he appears to be right on the mark.
A question remains, however, about how exactly the disease continues
to find its way into our civilization. The nation-states of the
West are dying demographically and culturally. Their citizens no
longer have enough children to replace themselves, and the Western
elites seem to be glad of it. Buchanan blames all of this on the
decline of the nation-states, yet even he recognizes that
the nation-state has been the primary engine of Western destruction.
The evidence Buchanan presents for the West’s problems is compelling,
but by placing the West’s salvation in the hands of the modern nation-state,
he presents us with a problem that cannot be easily put aside.
Buchanan’s
thesis is simple and direct. Western Civilization has learned to
hate itself, and as a result, it is slowly committing suicide via
a series of fatal procedures. Birth rates are below replacement
levels in most Western nations. The Christian nations of the West
suffer birthrates below 2 children per woman, and in Spain and Italy,
the birthrate is barely above one. The declining birth rates are
due to both medical and cultural developments. Cheap birth control
is available in every Western nation. While abortion is still heavily
restricted in some European nations, contraception is readily available
in all of them. While contraception has contributed to a declining
birthrate, the widespread usage of contraception can be attributed
to major changes in how Westerners view children in general. Compared
to the rest of the world, Westerners have a low opinion of having
children. Many Westerners have become DINKS (double income, no children)
and regard children as little more that bratty obstacles to a long
vacation in Bermuda.
Ironically,
the West, which enjoys the highest average standard of living, is
able to live in greater luxury than any other civilization, declines
to allow children to partake in the bounty, and within the affluent
West, the most affluent have the fewest children. While these people
don’t want to bother with the cost of raising children, they certainly
want someone else to bother with paying for their early retirement
vis-à-vis the welfare system. The result is a downward spiral
in population where affluent populations become old and childless,
and must resort to importing foreigners that speak non-Western languages,
practice non-Western religions, and accept non-Western ideologies.
Mass
Third World immigration is not only a result of an under-financed
welfare state, however. According to the multicultural mind, nations
have no right to control their borders, and must accept anyone from
anywhere as an equal partner in citizenship. Multiculturalism teaches
us that we cannot claim that Western civilization is in any way
preferable or superior to any other civilization, and that any resistance
to immigration as a threat to Western civilization must be regarded
as closed-minded nonsense. As birthrates remain at high levels in
the Third World, and as they plummet in Western nations, there is
increasing pressure to open the floodgates and allow immigrants,
legal and otherwise, to enjoy the fruit that Western civilization
has produced, and that Westerners now take for granted. Since multicultural
ideology tells us that Western civilization must not be taught to
new immigrants, the old idea of the "melting pot" has
been abandoned for the "salad bowl" where various presumably
equal cultures mix and mingle together in a nation with no majority
race or culture and no common public morality, save multiculturalism
itself.
It
is hard to argue with Buchanan’s diagnosis of the problem. Anyone
who’s spent any time at all in a public school or university knows
that the exaltation of immigrants is widespread while the denigration
of Western civilization is central to the "college experience."
Buchanan is correct in attributing most of this sentiment to leftists
who never tire of using Western ideas of liberty and justice to
destroy the very society that produced such ideals. Much of the
anti-Western sentiment is driven by people who cling to the idea
that they are "citizens of the world" and owe allegiance
to nothing other than abstract ideas of "social justice,"
but as Bill Kauffman has noted numerous times, "citizen of
the world" is really just another way of saying "citizen
of nowhere".
It
is these new Westerners who want to see themselves as defenders
of an abstract "humanity" rather than defenders of their
own native cultures who are bringing about the enormous changes
taking place in Western nations. Citizens of the world make no distinction
between children growing up in their own cultures and children growing
up in distant Third World cultures. Within a multicultural ideology,
the two are perfectly interchangeable.
The
problem arises when people who have adopted the multicultural mindset
are allowed to govern those who deny its validity. As we see in
the United States today, most Americans are opposed to current rates
of immigration, yet the American public is constantly being berated
by its own government about how wonderful immigration really is
and why Washington should have a right to force people into accepting
it.
For
Buchanan, the cause of the death of the West is insufficient loyalty
to the nation-state. Buchanan approvingly quotes the historian Jacques
Barzun who credits the nation-state as "the greatest political
creation of the west," and blames recent secession movements
in Europe and North America for the strengthening of multiculturalism
and "world government" sentiments within Western civilization.
Buchanan illustrates his argument with what James George Jatras
called "Rainbow Fascism." Rainbow Fascism is the process
of breaking down nation-states into smaller parts through nationalist
and ethnic secession movements, and then incorporating the smaller
entities into a world government. It is assumed that rage against
the nation-state somehow must necessarily lead to allegiance to
a multicultural world government as an alternative to the nation-state.
The conclusion that Buchanan must come to then, is that the nation-state
is the best possible organization of men under a government and
that the strong, modern nation-state is the only entity that can
resist the multicultural brave new world.
It
is understandable why Buchanan might feel this way, since the most
visible people who tear down the idea of the nation state also happen
to be people like Strobe Talbott who think of people as perfectly
malleable raw materials that can be molded to serve some world-wide
multicultural god. However, no where do we see the multiculturalists
actually defending genuine secession. If the American globalism
of the 20th century has shown us anything, it is that
the nation-state has been an indispensible tool in the hands of
the globalization crowd.
Are
we not constantly being told that American leadership is absolutely
crucial to maintaining the viability of useless international organizations
like NATO? Has not the United States consistently been the driving
force behind United Nations meddling everywhere from Korea to Iraq?
Everywhere we look we find that it has been American Presidents
and their reckless use of American firepower and American money
that have been the primary contributors to the building of international
organizations built to enforce the will of global elites. On the
home front, it has been the federal government that has forced abandonment
of religion and traditional lifestyles down the throat of each and
every American, and it has been federally funded schools and universities
that have been the central engines of multicultural ideologies.
This
has been made possible through the rigorously maintained centralized
standards of government and regulation that is passed down to Americans
through the organs of the nation-state itself. Even China allows
more regional government than the United States, and as Paul
Clark has observed, the European Union doesn’t even come close
to having the level of coercive centralized government that the
United States employs.
Ironically,
Buchanan would have us believe that the central instrument in destroying
American civilization and in building up the international organizations
he distrusts is somehow the instruments that will best serve the
American people in resisting the multiculturalism that the feds
have been promulgating worldwide for the last forty years.
Buchanan’s
solution, amazingly, is to secede culturally and to "give to
Caesar what is Caesar’s." To his credit, Buchanan does recognize
that "the federal government is today the exchequer of the
cultural revolution" and that a "common belief in democracy
is too week a reed to support the solidarity of the West."
He approaches questioning the legitimacy of an American government
that doesn’t allow Americans to control their own borders or to
practice their own religions. Yet, in the end, he backs off and
commands his readers to accept a continued marriage with those who
seek to destroy the West.
These
are amazing remarks from a man who writes with such passion and
alarm, yet comes to the conclusion that no action should be taken
if it ends up endangering the precious nation-state. Buchanan’s
wishy-washy solution takes away from otherwise superb observations
about the destructive nature of America’s foreign policy and its
role in destroying American self-government.
The
American states once demanded local sovereignty and control, yet
they have gradually and happily accepted being turned into little
more than administrative units useful in enacting the federal government’s
non-stop parade of programs. What is to prevent the United States
from doing exactly what it demanded of the states? While the flag-waving
no doubt reflects the values of a defiant American people who still
love their native culture, there is nothing to prevent their blind
faith in America’s leaders from being turned into a useful tool
for further integration into a global superstate.
The
American purveyors of multiculturalism support flag-waving for a
reason and it’s not because flag-waving is an obstacle to
their plans. If the American government has abandoned America, it
is time that American conservatives accept the fact and act accordingly.
Nostalgia will not make America something that it is not. It may
be that the American nation-state in its present form cannot be
saved, but that doesn’t mean that American civilization can’t be.
January
31, 2002
Ryan
McMaken [send him mail]
is editor of the Western
Mercury.
Copyright
2002 LewRockwell.com
Ryan
McMaken Archives
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