The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Conservatives and traditionalists are called racists, fascists, bigots, extremists, homophobes, and Nazis because to the revolution that is who and what we are. The assaults on our history and heroes are not going to end, because to the cultural revolution that is the way to purify America of a hateful legacy and make her a good nation.

  Look at what is being asked of the God-and-country people. Their children are forced to drink from a culture they consider decadent, if not demonic. The government uses their tax dollars to fund what they believe is the slaughter of unborn children. They must send their young to schools they believe imperil their faith. They are told to give up trying to create a godly nation that conforms to biblical law, for that is now forbidden by the Constitution. This is the asking price of peace in the culture war, and, for millions of Christians, the price is too high.

  A society steeped in pornography, where homosexual unions are blessed by clergy, and from which all Christian symbols and celebrations have been purged, is one they no longer wish to live in. To the silent majority, government is losing its legitimacy. They have not resisted violently, for they are not violent people. But they are a putupon people, who have begun to see the government as them, not us, and they are searching for ways to secede from a decadent dominant culture.

  In Gone With the Wind, a bitter Rhett Butler, patience exhausted, takes his final leave of Tara. A shaken Scarlett cries after him, “But what will I do?” Rhett replies, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”30

  Less and less do we Americans seem to give a damn what happens to the other side in the culture war. We just want out of this marriage. We are drifting toward break-point. Has the time come to split the blanket and concede the truth of Dos Passos’s verdict, “All right, we are two nations”?31

  A few years ago, a neoconservative magazine editorialized that you cannot both love your country and loathe its government. But Washington did not hate England when he went to war to overthrow the rule of Parliament and king. Robert E. Lee did not hate the country he had fought for in Mexico; he only wished to be free of its government. Alice Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh loathed FDR, but they loved America and did not want her dragged into another European bloodbath that they believed was not America’s war. A man can love his country and loathe a government led by Mr. Clinton. Millions did.

  IF AMERICA IS ceasing to be the good country we grew up in, what do we owe the government? The answer lies in Matthew XXII, 21: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”32 Traditionalists should emulate Roman converts. The empire still merited their allegiance, but they came to see the culture as decadent. Escape was essential. So they separated themselves from old comrades and customs and created a new Christian culture in their own families and within the fellowship of the converted. They remained loyal to the Roman Empire, but seceded from its pagan culture.

  Secession from this culture can take many forms—from giving up movies and TV, to blacking out channels, to homeschooling, to protesting outside abortion clinics, to moving to a less-polluted environment. The Amish seceded long ago. Orthodox Jews have seceded. Mormons seceded with Brigham Young’s trek to the Great Salt Lake. Catholics in the nineteenth century removed their children from public schools to put them in parish schools. In the 1980s, Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians began to create an alternative culture and parallel institutions—Christian schools, TV shows, magazines, radio stations, networks, bookstores, and publishing houses. Millions of children attend Catholic and Christian schools; over a million are homeschooled. Addressing Catholic traditionalists, Wanderer columnist James K. Fitzpatrick writes, “We will have to adjust to life as a subculture with all that implies … The alternative is making our peace with the new America being shaped by the Hollywood porn merchants … . That surrender is unthinkable.” 33

  Adults can secede from the dominant culture by buying books, tapes, and CDs. The local video store may be pushing “adult films,” but Blockbuster carries the finest films ever made. What Hollywood produced yesterday is not what Hollywood produces today. The films of yesterday celebrated heroism, honor, and patriotism. Gladiator, The Patriot, and Thirteen Days, honored and popular films of 2000, were positive films. When, in 1999, the American Film Institute compiled its list of the one hundred Greatest American Movies, only one movie made after 1982 was in the top fifty.34

  The much-derided 1950s had seven of the top twenty: On the Waterfront, Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Some Like It Hot, All About Eve, and The African Queen.35 Among the other 1950s films in the one hundred greatest: High Noon, Rear Window, Streetcar Named Desire, From Here to Eternity, Rebel Without a Cause, Vertigo, An American in Paris, Shane, Ben-Hur, Giant, A Place in the Sun, and The Searchers.36

  In 1998, the Modern Library board offered its selection of the one hundred best novels of the twentieth century. While the counterculture was represented, the list contained four of Conrad’s works, including Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and Kipling’s Kim.37 The one hundred nonfiction books had a leftward tilt, but T. S. Eliot, H. L. Mencken, Shelby Foote, Tom Wolfe, Winston Churchill, Paul Fussell, and British war historian John Keegan made the cut.38

  It would not be difficult for traditionalists to put together a reading course for high school and college students, plus a film library, that would introduce America’s young to the best that has been written, spoken, and put on the silver screen. If raw sewage is being dumped in the reservoir, buy bottled water. The rule applies to a polluted culture.

  The Internet can put together communities of political and religious belief. Adults can find what they want in biography, history, politics, and news, not only in books but on cable TV. Radio carries trash talk, but also Christian and conservative talk, and classical and popular music, as well as acid rock, hard rock, satanic rock, hip-hop, and gangsta rap.

  For children, escape is far more difficult. Hedonism pervades the music they hear, the movies they see, MTV, and prime-time. It is in the magazines and books they read. There is no way out. Perhaps the best parents can do is to inculcate in their children values by which to live and pray these values see them through the Great Dismal Swamp of American popular culture in the twenty-first century.

  POLITICS

  But if we can secede from the dominant culture, we cannot escape from politics. To do so is to surrender and permit the cultural revolution to have its way with America. So where do we go from here?

  Clearly, the White House wants the cup of culture war to pass away. Mr. Bush said as much when his Florida victory was confirmed:

  I believe things happen for a reason, and I hope the long wait of the last five weeks will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and the partisanship of the recent past. Our nation must rise above a house divided. Americans share hopes and goals and values far more important than any political disagreements. 39

  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” said Jake in the sad final line of The Sun Also Rises.40 But the truth is that America is a house divided, and Americans do not “share hopes and goals and values.” That is what the culture war is all about. As Chilton Williamson, Jr., writes in Chronicles, the revolution is “not willing to live and let live.”41

  The Old America would deny the New America abortion, gay marriage and certain other demands at war with natural law and traditional morality. The New America would deny the Old anything it finds incompatible with the progressive agenda du jour: tobacco, alcohol, fast foods, red meat, keeping caged birds, hunting, rodeos, sport shooting, prayer at football games, hate speech, free speech, freedom of association, four-wheel drive trucks, guns.42

  “Cheyenne, Wyoming, can tolerate the existence of New York City and Los Angeles,” writes Williamson, “but
L.A. and New York City can’t abide knowing that, out there on the steppes and in the mountains of the Great American Desert, the other America is leading an existence that fits its own particular circumstances, customs, and preferences.” 43

  The culture war is not going away, because it is not finished with us yet. Eventually, even Mr. Bush, a reluctant warrior, will be dragged in.

  There are many things that you can refuse to do with a man. You can refuse to work for him, dine with him, or talk to him. But if he wants to fight, you have got to oblige him. leaders are paroled from combat in the culture war only by exiting the field or raising a white flag. Since the sixties, no president has been able to escape. Eventually, all had to take sides, and all paid a price.

  But until Mr. Bush takes up his post, traditionalists need to take stock of the ground lost. As Dorothy said, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”44 This is not Ronald Reagan’s America. A large slice of America has been Clintonized. “There may be more of them than I thought,” said Rush Limbaugh, postelection. Were an election held today between Clinton and Reagan, 90 percent of our cultural elite would forget the pardons and vote for Clinton. Could Reagan carry California today as he did four times? Could a presidential candidate who is pro-life sweep forty-nine states, as Nixon did in 1972 and Reagan did in 1984?

  Politics cannot pull the West out of its crisis, 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. Bush. But politics is not irrelevant. FDR called the presidency “preeminently a place of moral leadership.”45 Steps can be taken to impede the revolution and advance the day when, as with the “evil empire,” rollback begins.

  • The Imperial Judiciary. Reshaping the Supreme Court is crucial to any strategy for victory in the culture war, for the court is the battering ram of revolution. It must be returned to constitutionalism, and the people left alone to create the society they wish to live in and have their children grow up in. If America is still a free land, that is their right. “I have no litmus test” for justices, says President Bush, but conservatives do have a litmus test: no liberal judicial activists need apply. Nominees such as his father’s choice, David Souter, or President Ford’s choice, John Paul Stevens, would be an irredeemable blunder. Eventually, the incorporation doctrine, by which all the restrictions imposed on Congress by the Constitution are imposed, through the Fourteenth Amendment, on the states, must be overturned. From Miranda to Roe v. Wade, this is the authority by which the Court dictates to the nation.

  In November of 1996, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, conducted a symposium, “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” Born out of anger and frustration with recent court rulings, the symposium was based on this proposition:

  The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed … . The question here explored is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.46

  The authors, wrote Father Neuhaus, “examine possible responses to laws that cannot be obeyed by conscientious citizens.” These responses range from “non-compliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”47 Among the contributors was Robert Bork, who wrote, “When the VMI decision came down, my wife said the Justices were behaving like ‘a band of outlaws.’ … An outlaw is a person who coerces others without warrant in law. That is precisely what a majority of the present court does.”48 The former U.S. appellate court judge suggested it may be time that public officials began defying the Supreme Court:

  Perhaps an elected official will one day simply refuse to comply with a Supreme Court decision.

  That suggestion will be regarded as shocking, but it should not be. To the objection that a rejection of a court’s authority would be civil disobedience, the answer is that a Supreme Court that issues orders without authority engages in an equally dangerous form of civil disobedience.49

  Several neoconservatives were shocked by the premise that the U.S. government was a “regime” that had lost its “legitimacy”; they called the symposium “an outburst of anti-Americanism.” A few resigned from the board of First Things. But the symposium proved beneficial. It moved the issue to a discussion of action. Given that the court has assumed dictatorial powers over a democratic republic, what do we do about it, besides deplore it?

  One answer is to support public officials who are willing to ignore court orders and pay the price the court imposes. Alabama’s Judge Roy Moore, for one, said that the United States would have to send troops to remove a plaque with the Ten Commandments from the wall of his courtroom. He would refuse to take it down, no matter who ordered him.

  Another recourse is to demand that members of Congress use their constitutional power to circumscribe the juridiction of the Supreme Court and pass legislation that would enable Americans to recall and fire federal judges by majority vote, as they can in California. Term limits can be imposed on federal judges by legislation. If there is a will, there is no shortage of constitutional ways by which a people can recapture their right to rule themselves.

  • Cashier the Old Generals. During Vietnam, Sen. George Aiken was hailed for his witticism “Let’s declare victory and get out.”50 Aiken was urging us to accept defeat and all that meant for the Vietnamese and Cambodians who had put their lives and trust in us. It was Aiken’s clever way of saying, “Let’s cut and run, and say we won.” The humor escaped some of us. Yet the Aiken approach appears to have found favor today with some neoconservatives in the culture war. “I regret to inform Pat Buchanan that those [the culture] wars are over and the left has won,” said Irving Kristol after my address to the Houston Convention.51 Gertrude Himmelfarb (Mrs. Irving Kristol) wrote in One Nation, Two Cultures:

  let us be content with the knowledge that the two cultures are living together with some degree of tension and dissension but without civil strife or anarchy. America has a long tradition of tolerance … that serves as a mediating force between the two cultures, assuaging tempers and subduing passions, while respecting the very real, very important differences, between them.52

  Pace Mrs. Kristol, should passions be subdued when a million babies are yearly butchered, when infanticide is legal, when Catholic symbols are desecrated, when children are taught the pleasures of perversion in public schools, when our culture is poisoned and our heroes are dragged through the mud? Should we be “content” with such a situation? Are these the kinds of “differences” we should respect?

  After the Nazis marched into Paris without a shot being fired, André Gide wrote: “To come to terms with yesterday’s enemy is not cowardice but wisdom, as well as accepting what is inevitable.” 53 Gide was wrong.

  But if the Kristols take the Aiken line, the neoconservative Norman Podhoretz has sailed for Yalta. In his celebration of himself, My Love Affair with America, Podhoretz sees the culture war dissolving into “an as yet unspoken and unratified accommodation between the two sides … a de facto armistice on the ground.”54 He quotes approvingly one Mark Lilla on the terms of armistice: “Americans … see no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace—the Reaganite dream, the Left nightmare—and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the 60s.”55 But the “moral and cultural universe shaped by the 60s” was a sewer.

  Podhoretz cites as a role model Huw Wheldon, who ran the BBC Television Service and let writers and producers “get away with using obscene language and filming sexual encounters that approached the level of soft porn.”56 How did Wheldon deal with these debasers of the culture? He cautioned them that their shows might “fail to attract or hold a sizable audience.”57 No wonder we are losing. This is capitulationism in a battle for what T. S. Eliot defined as “that which makes life worth l
oving.”58

  Podhoretz echoes Henry Kissinger’s famous line in the final weeks of the Paris negotiations on Vietnam, “Peace is at hand,” a phrase even Henry must surely regret. “As the twentieth century approached its end,” writes Podhoretz, “I had the impression … that some kind of peace was at hand.”59

  Tell it to the Boy Scouts! For such attitudes, neoconservatism has come to be known, in Sam Francis’s phrase, as the “harmless persuasion.” The Kristols and Podhoretzes are the summertime soldiers of the culture war, but America needs men and women of more kidney, spleen, and heart if the struggle for the soul of America is not to be irretrievably lost.

  • Open Defiance of Political Correctness. The right response to the intolerant new orthodoxy is defiance, ridicule, and counterattack. Political adversaries who use terms like Nazi, fascist, anti-Semite, nativist, homophobe, bigot, xenophobe, and extremist have started a fight and should be accommodated. Courage is contagious, and defiance can lead to a recovery of will. Americans love underdogs, rebels, and fighters, and are fed up with being demonized and dictated to. The old admonition—speak truth to power!—will stand us in good stead.

  In 2001, provocative ads were placed in several college newspapers headlined: “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too.”60 Placed by David Horowitz, the ads argued that blacks owe America more than America owes to blacks. At Harvard and Columbia, editors refused the ad. At Brown, students seized the first press run. With a few dollars, the emerging moral shakedown was exposed, and the country got a good look at where the true intolerance in America may be found.