Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  America was herself a product of ethnonationalism, the awakening consciousness of the colonists that while we were the children of Europeans we were also a new people, unique, separate, and identifiable: Americans.

  Ethnonationalism was behind the pogroms of Europe but created the nation of Israel. Ethnonationalism led to the exodus of six hundred thousand Arabs from their homes in Palestine, the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, but it also birthed in the refugee camps and two intifadas a new people. Palestinians will, God willing, soon have a nation of their own.

  If ethnonationalism has been behind terrible crimes, have not great crimes been committed in the name of religion? Do we therefore decry all religions? “Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors, and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention,” said Solzhenitsyn.142

  We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it.

  Religion, race, culture, and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse. But let us give the last word to Professor Jerry Muller: “Americans … find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture.… But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away.”143

  9

  “THE WHITE PARTY”

  The face of America is changing. It’s not Joe the Plumber.1

  —SOLEDAD O’BRIEN, NOV. 4, 2008

  CNN Anchor

  The Republican Party is becoming the monochromatic party.2

  —GLORIA BORGER, NOV. 4, 2008

  CNN Commentator

  If you look at folks of color … they’re more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white, excuse me, in the Republican Party.3

  —HOWARD DEAN, AUGUST 2008

  Democratic Party Chairman

  A gaffe, said Michael Kinsley, is when a politician blurts out an impermissible truth, then hastily recants lest he cripple his career.

  In the quotation above, Howard Dean committed a gaffe. He told an inconvenient truth. For the Republican Party may be fairly described as the white party, though this was not always true. Before the New Deal, the Democrats were the white party, as they had almost zero black support, having been the party of secession and segregation while Republicans were the party of Lincoln and emancipation. In the Depression year of 1932, a majority of black Americans voted for Hoover and against FDR.

  Franklin Roosevelt swiftly ended that tradition in the North, where his New Deal drew support from black voters, even as his Dixiecrat allies continued to deny African Americans the right to vote in the eleven states of the old Confederacy.

  How did presidential nominees like Al Smith and FDR of New York and Adlai Stevenson of Illinois sustain the alliance of northern liberals and Southern segregationists? By balancing progressive candidates with Southern or border-state segregationists on every national ticket between 1928 and 1960, except 1940. Those vice presidential nominees were Joe Robinson, of Arkansas, in 1928; John Nance Garner, of Texas, in 1932 and 1936; Harry Truman, of Missouri, who had flirted with the Klan, in 1944; Alben Barkley, of Kentucky, in 1948; John Sparkman, of Alabama, in 1952, who would sign the Southern Manifesto denouncing the Brown decision; and Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee, in 1956.

  Before offering the vice presidency to Henry Wallace in 1940 as a replacement for “Cactus Jack” Garner, FDR sounded out Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina. “Jimmy” Byrnes, a protégé of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, was a white supremacist. “This is a white man’s country and will always remain a white man’s country,” he once declared.4

  Byrnes, regarded as a Southern moderate, had led the Senate battle against the anti-lynching law and helped filibuster it to death in 1938. Offered the vice presidency in 1940, he turned it down, fearing his record on race would hurt FDR in the North. Had Byrnes accepted the vice presidency, he would almost surely have become president when FDR died in 1945, giving America a white supremacist to lead her into a postcolonial era.5 On his accession to the presidency, Truman, who also admired Byrnes, named him secretary of state.

  Democratic presidents also rewarded their segregationist allies with Supreme Court seats. Wilson named the anti-Semite James C. McReynolds to the Court in 1914. The 1924 official photograph of the Court was never taken, as McReynolds refused to sit beside Jewish Justice Louis Brandeis.6

  FDR named former Klansman Hugo Black of Alabama to the Court in 1937. As a lawyer, Black had won an acquittal for a Methodist pastor and Klansman who admitted to murdering the Catholic priest who presided at his daughter’s wedding to a Puerto Rican.7 Black’s law partner was a Cyclops of the Birmingham Klavern. His senate campaign manager was the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan. After election to the Senate, Black, who had marched and spoken in robes, hood, and mask, accepted a lifetime membership in the Klan. As Black tells it, FDR was fully aware of his Klan associations.8

  When McReynolds stepped down in 1941, FDR replaced him with Byrnes. Despite NAACP protests, Byrnes was confirmed by a Democratic Senate, eight minutes after his nomination was submitted. This is the buried past of the Democratic Party of which Bruce Bartlett has written.

  For almost a century, since Roger Taney, there had been a tradition of one Catholic Justice on the court. When Justice Frank Murphy died in 1949, Truman terminated that tradition. Eisenhower restored it with William Brennan.

  In the two presidential campaigns of Wilson and the four of FDR, Democrats swept every Confederate state all six times. The Democratic candidate in 1924, John W. Davis, carried every Confederate state and, with the exception of Oklahoma, only Confederate states. Truman took seven Southern states to Strom Thurmond’s four. Dewey got none. In 1952 and 1956 most of the electoral votes Adlai Stevenson got came from the most segregated states of the South. Only when Nixon swept the South in his forty-nine-state landslide of 1972 did a “Southern Strategy” become the mark of the beast.

  Among the two dozen senators to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which urged resistance to the Brown decision, were such grandees as John Sparkman, Walter George, Richard Russell, John Stennis, Sam Ervin, Strom Thurmond, Harry Byrd, John McClellan, Russell Long, Jim Eastland, J. William Fulbright, and George Smathers, a carousing buddy of JFK. All were Democrats. House Democrats who signed the manifesto and would play major roles in national politics included Wilbur Mills, Carl Vinson, Hale Boggs, and Mendel Rivers. In all, ninety-nine Democrats signed the Dixie Manifesto, but only two Republicans.

  With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the nomination of conservative Barry Goldwater, black allegiance to the party of Lincoln ended. Although a majority of votes against the bill were cast by Southern Democrats, Goldwater voted with them. He had been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had contributed to its campaign to desegregate Phoenix schools, and had desegregated his own department store and the Arizona Air National Guard when he was chief of staff. But Goldwater was a constitutionalist who believed desegregating public accommodations was a state, not a federal, responsibility.

  Nevertheless, perceived as hostile to black aspirations, Goldwater lost the African American vote to Lyndon Johnson by sixteen to one, and Republicans have never since found the favor with African Americans that they had in national elections for the century after Lincoln.

  Half a century ago, however, the black vote was not as significant as today. Blacks could not vote in any numbers in the South. Democrats ruled Dixie as a fiefdom and used a variety of ruses to prevent African Americans from going to the polls. Northern blacks did not register or vote to the same extent as whites. And when they did, they gave the party of Lincoln one vote for every two they delivered to the party of FDR. Eisenhower got 39 percent of the black vote in 1956. Running against Joh
n F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon won 32 percent. Goldwater’s share of the African American vote was only 6 percent.9

  With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the mass registration of African Americans began. And with the Immigration Act of 1965, which led to tens of millions coming from the Third World, the ethnic and racial composition of the American electorate was changed forever.

  THE GOP’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

  America is a different country from the one many of us grew up in. In thirty years, Americans of European descent, whose forebears founded the republic and restricted citizenship to “free white persons” of “high moral character,” will be a minority. Hispanics will outnumber blacks two to one. America will have become a nation unrecognizable to our parents. Consider how dramatic the change has been.

  In 1960, whites comprised 89 percent of a population of 160 million. They now comprise 64 percent of a population of 310 million. In 2041, they will represent less than 50 percent of a population of 438 million and a much smaller share of the young. No nation has undergone so radical a transformation in so short a time. And these numbers portend an existential crisis for the GOP.

  Three political events have contributed to the crisis. The first was the ratification, in March 1961, of the Twenty-third Amendment, granting Washingtonians the right to vote and the District of Columbia the same three votes in the Electoral College as Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Delaware, and Vermont. The District of Columbia is not a state, has no senators, and is one-twentieth of the size of Rhode Island. By population (600,000), D.C. is outranked by twenty-six other U.S. cities. By land area, D.C.’s sixty-eight square miles is exceeded by that of 150 other U.S. cities.

  With this amendment the Democratic Congress elected in 1958 added three electoral votes to their party’s total in every future presidential contest, for D.C. has never voted Republican. Also, in treating D.C. like a state, Congress opened the door to the possibility of statehood and electoral votes for Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. The drive to make Puerto Rico the fifty-first state, which would add six new members to the House and two U.S. senators and would make America a bilingual nation, is steadily advancing, with Republican support.

  Washington, D.C., votes for the Democrats in every election, municipal or national, as Washington depends on government for survival. And as more Americans come to depend on government for their health, education, and incomes, more and more will vote for that same Party of Government.

  The second event was the Immigration Act of 1965, which brought in scores of millions from the Third World to break a Republican lock on the presidency that Nixon and Reagan had given the party for a quarter century. Third was the decision of a Democratic Congress and President Nixon to impose the eighteen-year-old vote on the states.

  In extending the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Congress in 1970 added a rider declaring that eighteen-year-olds had the right to vote in federal elections. This was blatantly unconstitutional, as it had required one constitutional amendment, the fifteenth, to guarantee former slaves the right to vote, and another, the nineteenth, to guarantee women the right to vote.

  As a special assistant, this writer urged President Nixon to veto the bill. For presidents take an oath to defend the Constitution, and Nixon himself believed the eighteen-year-old vote could not be accomplished by statute. As Nixon wrote:

  As passed, the bill contained a “rider” which I believe to be unconstitutional: a provision lowering the voting age to 18 in Federal, State and local elections. Although I strongly favor the 18-year-old vote, I believe—along with most of the Nation’s leading constitutional scholars—that Congress has no power to enact it by simple statute, but rather it requires a constitutional amendment.10

  Nixon should have vetoed the bill. Instead, declaring that he had “misgivings,” he signed it and directed Attorney General John Mitchell to seek an expedited review. The Supreme Court ruled swiftly. The rider was unconstitutional. But by now state legislators and governors, assuming the eighteen-year-old vote was inevitable with Nixon backing it, rushed to support a constitutional amendment so as not to offend the young people likely to vote in 1972. Thus was the Twenty-sixth Amendment approved by the requisite thirty-eight states in July 1971, adding millions of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds to the electorate forever.

  To understand the existential crisis of the GOP, brought on by these reforms, let us look back to the voting results of the 2008 presidential election.

  A CORONER’S REPORT ON THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN

  To study the exit polls from the McCain-Obama race is to see stark and clear what a coroner might declare to be the cause of death of the Grand Old Party.

  An April 2009 analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center reveals that white voters made up 76 percent of the electorate in 2008. (In 1960, they had comprised 94 percent.)11 African Americans comprised 12 percent of all voters in 2008; Hispanics, 7.4 percent; and Asians, 2.5 percent.

  According to the exit polls from November, McCain got 55 percent of the white vote, 31 percent of the Hispanic vote, and 4 percent of the black vote, the same share of the black vote David Duke got when he ran for governor of Louisiana.

  But if black America has become a bloc vote in presidential years, white America is a house divided. In Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, McCain won 85 percent of the white vote. In Washington, D.C., McCain lost 85 percent of the white vote. In August 2008, 8 percent of white voters said race was the most important factor in the upcoming election, and 13 percent cited race as one of several important factors. More than one-third of the whites who said the race of the candidate was important said they were voting for Obama.12 Obama almost surely got millions of white votes because he is African American.

  As for the black vote in 2008, the New Yorker writes:

  Judging from exit polls, black voters made up about 1.1 per cent of the McCain electorate, which is lower than the historical average, but not by much. (In 1984, when President Reagan was reelected in a landslide, black voters accounted for only about 1.5 per cent of his total.) American politics has been segregated for decades; the election of a black President only made that segregation more obvious.13

  By religious affiliation, Protestants accounted for 54 percent of the electorate; Catholics, 27 percent; and Jews, 2 percent. McCain won 54 percent of the Protestant vote, 45 percent of the Catholic vote, and 21 percent of the Jewish vote. Using basic arithmetic, one finds that 64 percent of McCain’s voters were Protestant and 27 percent Catholic. Thus, 91 percent of McCain voters were Christian, and 91 percent were white. White Christians are the Republican base.

  Black Americans made up 1 percent of McCain’s vote, Jews less than 1 percent. Although few senators have been more pro-Israel than McCain, who wanted to put Senator Joe Lieberman, a Jewish independent Democrat, on his ticket, he lost the Jewish vote by a staggering 57 points. Norman Podhoretz explains:

  [F]or most American Jews.… liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.14

  Republican courtship of the Jewish vote has failed. And given its shrinking share of the national vote, this seems barren terrain, though the Obama collisions with Netanyahu and his Likud party suggest the GOP should not write off the Jewish vote (critical in Florida) in 2012. But so long as Obama is the voice and face of his party, the African American vote, six to seven times as large as the Jewish vote, is gone. This is not an argument for writing off any voters. But it does tell Republicans where the fish are not biting.

  Consider younger voters. McCain lost voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine by a margin of 66 to 32 percent. George W. Bush also lost this age g
roup twice, but by smaller margins. Yet, for the third straight presidential election, the GOP lost young voters. What makes this worrisome for the party is that lifetime voting habits are formed in a voter’s first few elections.

  Nor can one ignore the ethnic and religious factors among the young. As Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser write, in How Barack Obama Won:

  Young voters are more diverse racially and ethnically than older voters and are growing more so over time. Just 62% of voters under 30 are white, while 18% are black and 14% Hispanic. Four years ago, this age group was 68% white; in 2000, nearly three-quarters, 74%, were white. They are also more secular in their religious orientation and fewer report regular attendance at worship services, and secular voters tend to vote Democratic.15

  One thus returns to the criticality of the white vote to the GOP, and the approaching and perhaps terminal crisis caused by its support for an open-borders immigration policy that is shrinking the party’s base into America’s newest minority. As Thomas Edsall writes, in the Huffington Post,

  The trend is striking. In 1976, 89 percent of the electorate was white. That number fell … to 88 percent in 1980, 86 percent in 1984, 85 percent in 1988, 83 percent in 1996, 81 percent in 2000, 77 percent in 2004, and 74 percent last year. The only exception was 1992, when the presence of independent candidate Ross Perot drove the white percentage of the electorate up to 87 percent.16