The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  • Countering Hate Crimes Propaganda with Truth. Rather than just oppose hate crimes laws designed to demonize white males, conservatives should insist that the Justice Department report annually on all interracial violent crimes, including gang assaults and gang rapes, by race and victim, and break down all sex crimes against children into the heterosexual and homosexual. If it is true that white males commit a disproportionate share of interracial crimes, we ought to know. If it is untrue, let us find out who does. Justice should also report on all violent assaults against immigrants and all violent assaults by immigrants. News reports seem to emphasize the former and ignore the latter. Again, let’s learn the truth and, as Al Smith said, let’s get it out in the open, because “nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”

  • Pro-Life Laws. Only 17 to 19 percent of Americans favor outlawing all abortions.61 But the number of those who claim to be “pro-life” has risen from 33 to 43 percent in five years, and 51 percent believe there should be at least some restrictions.62 This is enough support to have Congress vote both to outlaw partial-birth abortion and to ban all abortions of babies who can live outside the womb. Such a bill could rally the churches that still consider “life” the paramount issue. Catholic bishops could be pressed to demand the support of Catholic legislators, including Senators Dodd, Leahy, Harkin, Daschle, and Kennedy, who need to be reminded of the words of Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubi (On Christian Marriage):

  Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority … to defend the lives of the innocent … among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother’s womb. And if the public magistrates … do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors and others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cries from earth to heaven.63

  The late pope’s words could be read from the pulpit at Sunday mass the week of the vote.

  Since the Supreme Court overturned a Missouri ban on partial-birth abortions, Congress has been reluctant to enact a federal ban. But the time has come for Congress and the president to exercise their rights under the Constitution, and to lead the Court back into the narrow stall set aside for it in the Constitution.

  • Citizen Boycotts. The Montgomery bus boycott marked the birth of the modern civil rights movement. An NAACP boycott caused business leaders to plead for the Confederate battle flag to be removed from atop the capitol in South Carolina. Boycotts can also be used to punish those who assault traditional values and serve as recruitment vehicles for a traditionalist coalition. The Baptist boycott of Disney failed only for a lack of focus. It was a declaration of economic war on a vast and disparate media empire that includes ESPN, ABC, Disney World, the History Channel, and the Anaheim Angels. But this legitimate democratic weapon of consumer boycott can be used to good effect if good folks will focus on a single product of a single advertiser. When Ronald Reagan began the rollback of the Soviet Empire, he did not send NATO’s armies crashing into Central Europe; rather, he overran tiny Grenada. A Grenada strategy can work. I low? The same way Cesar Chavez won recognition for California farm workers by leading a boycott of table grapes. If traditionalists and Republicans would unite, select a single product being advertised on one particularly offensive TV show with weak ratings, and everyone would boycott that one product, they could force the advertiser to pull his ads. Then follow up on the next product, until no one is willing to pay the cost of advertising on a TV show offensive to so many. If the weapon worked for Cesar Chavez and the NAACP, there is no reason it cannot work for traditionalists.

  • Initiatives and Referenda. Soon after South Carolina took down the battle flag and Georgia abolished the state flag containing the St. Andrew’s Cross came Mississippi’s turn. After fumbling the hot potato for months, Mississippi legislators tossed it to the people to decide in a referendum: did they wish to keep the Magnolia State flag with its replica of the Confederate battle flag or reject and replace it? The governor, editorial pages, and business community lined up for abolition of the old flag and Republican senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran maintained a discreet silence. On April 17, 2001, the people of Mississippi voted sixty-five to thirty-five to keep their 104-year-old flag.64 The call of tradition defeated the command of money. Even a few minority counties bravely voted for the old flag. The message: On matters of culture and morality, traditionalists should take decisions away from elected officials and return them to the people. The last best hope of preserving and reviving a Judeo-Christian culture rests with citizens immune to the power of money and unconcerned with media disapproval.

  The author of our Constitution believed in the people’s right to rule themselves. “As the people are the only legitimate fountain of power,” wrote Madison, “it seems strictly consonant to the republican theory to recur to the same original authority whenever it may be necessary to enlarge, diminish or new-model the power of government.”65

  Not all decisions can be taken by popular vote. Not all decisions by the people are going to be warmly received by traditionalists. After all, the adversary culture has made deep inroads. But a referendum is at least a court of final appeal from dictatorial judges and craven legislators.

  • Defunding the Cultural Revolution. If Republicans could be convinced they had no choice but to fight a cultural war imposed upon them, they could wreak havoc on their tormenters. For the federal government is today the exchequer of the cultural revolution. If a Republican Congress would identify and terminate all discretionary federal funds to organizations like Planned Parenthood and the NAACP, and close down agencies like the Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Department of Education, and the Civil Rights Commission, they could demobilize whole armies of their adversaries. Unfortunately, Republicans are fearful of being branded as “divisive.” Nevertheless, some courageous researcher should produce a listing of all institutions with an arm in the federal trough, and the White House and Congress should be asked to defund all of those, Left or Right, that play politics with tax dollars. As Jefferson wrote, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

  • Congress should abolish Presidents’ Day and restore Washington’s Birthday to honor the Father of our Country.

  • The California Civil Rights Initiative, which voters passed sixty to forty, outlawed racial discrimination or favoritism by the state government. A congressman should be found to put the language of the CCRI, written by Ward Connerly of the Board of Regents of the University of California, into legislation, and have Congress vote it up or down as the Civil Rights Act of 2003. The wording is clear:

  The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group, on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.66

  Asked his view of this statement, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Mr. Gore’s vice presidential nominee, responded, “I can’t see how I can be opposed to it … . It is basically a statement of American values … and says we shouldn’t discriminate in favor of somebody based on the group they represent.”67 Indeed, the words define a color-blind society. If Congress cannot accept this language, which is in the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we need a new Congress.

  • Devolution. In Britain, devolution meant the transfer of power from the Parliament in London to Scotland, Wales, and Ulster. And devolution may be the salvation of traditionalism. Among the historic victories of secular humanism was the Supreme Court’s expulsion of all vestiges of Christianity from the public schools. As the near-monopoly over the education of America’s children by public schools no longer serves America’s majority, that monopoly should be broken up. School boards, principals, and teachers should be granted independence and freedom to decide what children are taught, what boo
ks are used, what holidays are observed, what the character of the school shall be. Parents should be allowed to direct the tax dollars for their children’s education to schools, public or private, secular or religious, of their own choosing. Tax credits are preferable to vouchers that can serve as the camel’s nose of intrusive government in religious schools. Let the public schools reflect the diversity of our people, which would mean all boys’ schools, all girls’ schools, and co-ed schools that mirror the religious and cultural values of the parents whose children attend them.

  If one school wishes to celebrate Hanukkah, another Christmas, another Kwanzaa, let freedom ring and conformity disappear. Let the local community decide, by democratic vote. We are a disparate people who disagree on almost everything. Let those differences be reflected in our schools. Cracking the education monopoly is far more vital to the health of our society than breaking up any monopoly Bill Gates ever had on computer software.

  Regrettably, both parties are moving toward nationalization. When Mr. Clinton is calling for school uniforms, and Mr. Bush talks about how to raise the test scores of third graders, we are going the wrong way.

  • Censorship. In Slouching Toward Gomorrah, Robert Bork raises an issue whose time has come, given the squalid, degraded “art” being pushed in the face of the American people. Must we tolerate this filth in the name of the First Amendment? Writes Bork:

  We seem too timid to state that Mapplethorpe’s and Serrano’s pictures should not be shown in public, whoever pays for them. We are going to have to overcome that timidity if our culture is not to decline further still … . The photographs would be just as offensive if their display were financed by a scatterbrained billionaire. 68

  Where state censorship is not permitted, the moral censorship of a community is imperative. The nation needs a Supreme Court that understands that the Constitution permits states and communities to establish and enforce standards of decency. It is absurd, writes Jacques Barzun, that nations “deplore violence and sexual promiscuity among the young, but pornography and violence in films and books, shops and clubs, on television and the Internet, and in the lyrics of pop music cannot be suppressed, in the interests of the ‘free market of ideas.’”69

  “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent,” the historian adds.70 Detoxification of America’s culture is far more important than any absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment.

  • Teaching History. America’s young have an astonishing ignorance of American history. Tests confirm it. This is both a tragedy and a danger. If the Supreme Court will not permit the immersion of children in their religious faith in public schools, it cannot forbid the immersion of children in their country’s past. Parents and teachers should ensure that American history is taught every school year, and every book from which it is taught should be read by parents to ensure it includes the best of what Americans have said and done through the centuries. No nation has a history to rival ours. Peoples all over the world know this; so should Americans. Almost any child who is steeped in American history will emerge a patriot. A White House Conference on American history should be called by President Bush to honor and hear our finest historians. Purpose: To call national attention to the scandalous history deficit among America’s young, and to encourage the reading and teaching of American history in every school year and throughout a lifetime. The History Project should have the urgency of President Eisenhower’s call for a new emphasis on science and physical fitness after the Soviets woke up our generation with Sputnik.

  A National History Bee on the lines of our National Spelling Bee could draw scores of thousands of children into a deeper study of their nation’s past. The more a child learns of American history, the better he or she will be able to give the lie to those who make war on America’s past. As important, the door to the past can be opened to these children for a lifetime. It is a magnificent and marvelous world to visit and explore.

  AFTER THE BRITISH defeat at Saratoga, a friend wrote to Adam Smith that the loss of the American colonies must devastate Britain. Smith wrote back, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”71 What Smith meant was that great nations endure defeats, even amputations, and go on. Many of her finest hours, from Trafalgar and Waterloo to Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, lay ahead of Britain and her empire in 1777.

  But what are the prospects for a renaissance of the West?

  Candor compels one to admit the prognosis is not good. Western Man may be living out the final act of a tragedy that began five centuries ago. Then, Christendom, though split by a schism between the Orthodox and Roman churches, and shattered by the Reformation, burst out of Europe to conquer the world. But with the eighteenth century came a far more radical challenge from within, not only to the authority of Rome, but to Christianity itself and the cultural and political order to which it had given birth. “Ecrasez l’infame!” Voltaire signed off his letters: “Wipe out the infamous thing!”—the church.72 “Mankind will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” declared Diderot.73 “Mankind was born free but everywhere he is in chains,” said Rousseau.74

  France rose up and followed the scribblers. The monarchy came crashing down. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the aristocrats went to the guillotine. The church was dispossessed and looted. Reason triumphed over faith and produced the September massacres, the Terror, Robespierre and the dictatorship, Bonaparte and the empire, and a quarter century of European wars from which France never recovered her unity or primacy.

  Then came Darwin to explain that we are all products of evolution, not creation, Marx to declare religion the “opium of the people,” and Nietzsche with the courage to take the thread of the argument to its logical end: “God is dead … and we have killed him.”75 And if God is dead, said Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, all things are permissible. And if God is dead, logic leads us to another conclusion: Christianity is a fraud to empower a class of clerical parasites and merits swift eradication for its centuries of deceit and crimes against human dignity and progress. Then, once Christianity is abolished, we can follow science and reason and create the best of all possible worlds here on earth, the only world we shall ever know.

  But if Christianity gave birth to the West and undergirds its moral and political order, can the West survive the death of Christianity? Will Durant could find “no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”76 In Belloc’s epigram: “The Faith is Europe. Europe is the Faith.”77 But if that faith is dying, what is the belief system, what is the unifying principle, what is the source of moral authority that holds the West together? What makes the West unique? What are the ties that bind?

  Some say racial solidarity. But the past five hundred years have been an endless chronicle of European peoples slaughtering one another, with World Wars I and II as climax to the horrors. And during that past half-millennium, the great enemies of Western faith, culture, and civilization have come out of the West. Moreover, America is a multiethnic, multiracial nation today, and the nations of Europe will be tomorrow.

  Lincoln spoke of a people held together by the “mystic chords of memory.”78 But ask English, French, or Poles if they share “mystic chords of memory” with Germans and Russians. When Americans recall their history, some find it glorious; others find it villainous and shameful. And as America and Europe open their doors to millions from countries and continents Americans and Europeans once subjugated and colonized, the mystic chords of memory are as likely to divide us as to unite us.

  Democracy appears to be the great unifying idea agreed upon. Democracy, free markets, American values—this is what we stand for and will fight for. But this will not do. Most Americans could not care less how other nations govern themselves. A common belief in democracy is too weak a reed to support the solidarity of the West. It is an intellectual concept that does not engage the heart. Men
will fight for family, friends, faith, freedom, and country—but democracy? When George Bush said that, while floating off a Japanese island, after being shot down and losing his copilot, his thoughts turned to “the separation of church and state,” people howled. If, tomorrow, the government of India, France, Italy, or Brazil fell to a military coup, how many Americans would think it was a matter worth rectifying at the cost of thousands of American lives?

  Democracy is not enough. Yeats was right: once faith goes, “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold.”79 So it may be that the time of the West has come, as it does for every civilization, that the Death of the West is ordained, and that there is no sense prescribing new drugs or recommending painful new treatments, for the patient is dying and nothing can be done. Absent a revival of faith or a great awakening, Western men and women may simply live out their lives until they are so few they do not matter.

  GROWING UP, ONE knew the Cold War could be won. While few realized how weak the other side was, how the ruthlessness of its rulers masked the hollowness of its system, and even fewer anticipated the sudden and total crash that came in 1989, still, we believed we could win, if we had the will, the perseverance, and the leadership to endure.

  But the cultural revolutionaries are succeeding where the Leninists failed. Communism ceased making converts in the West two generations before it fell. The cultural revolution is making converts even now. And democracy alone cannot defeat it, for democracy is defenseless against an ideology that has as its end the transformation of democracy by a new elite, a new faith, and a new order. Indeed, democracy facilitates the revolution, as its exploiters and enemies like Marcuse realized. Hitler showed what pathetic resistance democracy offers to True Believers who can convert the masses to be rid of it. This is what Eliot meant when he wrote in 1939: