The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Census 2000 revealed what many sensed. For the first time since statehood, whites in California are a minority. White flight has begun. In the 1990s, California grew by three million people, but its Anglo population actually “dropped by nearly half a million … surprising many demographers.”61 Los Angeles County lost 480,000 white folks. In the exodus, the Republican bastion of Orange County lost 6 percent of its white population.

AMERICA IS NO longer the biracial society of 1960 that struggled to erase divisions and close gaps in a nation 90 percent white. Today we juggle the rancorous and rival claims of a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural country. Vice President Gore captured the new America in his famous howler, when he translated our national slogan, “E Pluribus Unum,” backward, as “Out of one, many.”

One in every five New Yorkers and Floridians is foreign-born, as is one of every four Californians. With 8.4 million foreign-born, and not one new power plant built in a decade, small wonder California faced power shortages and power outages. With endless immigration, America is going to need an endless expansion of its power sources—hydroelectric power, fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas), and nuclear power. The only alternative is blackouts, brownouts, and endless lines at the pump.

In the 1990s, immigrants and their children were responsible for 100 percent of the population growth of California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts, and over half the population growth of Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Maryland.68 As the United States allots most of its immigrant visas to relatives of new arrivals, it is difficult for Europeans to come, while entire villages from El Salvador are now here.

Consider: • A third of the legal immigrants who come to the United States have not finished high school. Some 22 percent do not even have a ninth-grade education, compared to less than 5 percent of our native born.70 • Over 36 percent of all immigrants, and 57 percent of those from Central America, do not earn twenty thousand dollars a year. Of the immigrants who have come since 1980, 60 percent still do not earn twenty thousand dollars a year.71 • Of immigrant households in the United States, 29 percent are below the poverty line, twice the 14 percent of native born.72 • Immigrant use of food stamps, Supplemental Social Security, and school lunch programs runs from 50 percent to 100 percent higher than use by native born.73 • Mr. Clinton’s Department of Labor estimated that 50 percent of the real-wage losses sustained by low-income Americans is due to immigration.74 • By 1991, foreign nationals accounted for 24 percent of all arrests in Los Angeles and 36 percent of all arrests in Miami.75 • In 1980, federal and state prisons housed nine thousand criminal aliens. By 1995, this had soared to fifty-nine thousand criminal aliens, a figure that does not include aliens who became citizens or the criminals sent over by Castro in the Mariel boat lift.76 • Between 1988 and 1994, the number of illegal aliens in California’s prisons more than tripled from fifty-five hundred to eighteen thousand.

Some define a nation as one people of common ancestry, language, literature, history, heritage, heroes, traditions, customs, mores, and faith who have lived together over time on the same land under the same rulers. This is the blood-and-soil idea of a nation. Among those who pressed this definition were Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who laid down these conditions on immigrants: “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.”80 Theodore Roosevelt, who thundered against “hyphenated-Americanism,” seemed to share Adams’s view. Woodrow Wilson, speaking to newly naturalized Americans in 1915 in Philadelphia, echoed T.R.: “A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has yet to become an American.”

Whether one holds to the blood-and-soil idea of a nation, or to the creedal idea, or both, neither nation is what it was in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s. We live in the same country, we are governed by the same leaders, but can we truly say we are still one nation and one people? It is hard to say yes, harder to believe that over a million immigrants every year, from every country on earth, a third of them breaking in, will reforge the bonds of our disuniting nation. John Stuart Mill warned that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist.”88 We are about to find out if Mill was right.

I can't help but think of India. In many ways, the failure to unite as one ethnic/linguistic group (especially once the caste system was codified around 100 CE) caused most of the problems there today.

In the Middle Ages, Ottoman Turks imposed on Balkan Christians a blood tax—one boy out of every five. Taken from their parents, the boys were raised as strict Muslims to become the fanatic elite soldiers of the sultan, the Janissaries, who were then sent back to occupy and oppress the peoples who had borne them.

Richard Nixon’s New Majority was shattered by Watergate and the resignation of a president and vice president who had carried forty-nine states. The success of Nixon’s enemies in ousting from office a hated adversary became the archetype for the “politics of personal destruction,” the defeat of causes by disgracing their flawed champions. It has become standard operating procedure in American politics.

In our Civil War histories, Lee and Jackson were great soldiers and men of nobility. Sherman’s March to the Sea was a black page in history. Reconstruction was cruel. Southerners were, after all, fellow Americans who had fought bravely and should have been treated with honor. “Dixie” was more popular than “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But Lincoln was the great hero, with a holiday in his honor. He had saved the Union and freed the slaves, only to be assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in one of the great tragedies of American history, for Honest Abe would never have allowed Reconstruction. So we were taught.

In The Disuniting of America, Arthur Schlesinger cites a character out of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

When Italian Americans sought to carry a banner of Columbus in their October 2000 parade in Denver, radicals of the American Indian Movement threatened violence. AIM’s veteran troublemaker Russell Means said that Columbus “makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.” 14 Marching in step with the forces of progress, the University of California at Berkeley hastily changed Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day.

Five of our first seven presidents, excepting only the Adamses, owned slaves.

Hence the Paul Giamatti miniseries.

The New Orleans School Board has taken Washington’s name off an elementary school. Its new policy prohibits honoring “former slave owners or others who did not respect opportunity for all.”31 That rules out Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Taylor, and Grant, as well as Clay, Calhoun, and Robert E. Lee. Should African Americans, tens of thousands of whom carry these great names, go to court to get them changed? Is it Andrew Jackson, the Indian killer, or Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate legend, whose name Jesse Jackson proudly carries?

This is somewhat happening. Black names in younger generations are likely an attempt at a new ethnic identity.

Andrew Jackson, who seized Florida from Spain for the United States, is the target of an American Indian Movement campaign. Calling Jackson a “genocidal maniac” who served as a “Hitler prototype,” AIM wants to prevent America’s seventh president from being honored in the annual Springtime Tallahassee parade.

In San Jose, California, Indian and Hispanic rage prevented a statue of Thomas Fallon, the American adventurer who captured the town in the Mexican War and became its mayor, from being placed in a public park. “The statue is an insult to our ancestors, people who were lynched here,” said Pascual Mendevil of Pueblo Unido, “It’s like a red flag to racists out there that it’s open season on Mexicans.”39 San Jose, however, does boast a new statue of Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent god of the Aztecs, whose empire never came close to reaching San Jose. Perhaps Mexicans and Indians should reconsider Quetzalcoatl. The Aztec emperor Montezuma II was a deeply superstitious fellow, terrified that Quetzalcoatl would return from the east to claim his throne. When his emissaries reported that Cortes and his bearded white men were ashore at Veracruz, the fearless Montezuma and his court went into a panic.

BUT IT IS the South and anything associated with the Lost Cause that is today’s inflamed front of the culture war. In 1898, President McKinley, a veteran of Antietam, could go to Atlanta, stand for the playing of “Dixie,” wave his hat to his old enemies, and recommend the preservation of Confederate graves—a splendid gesture that helped heal a country about to go to war with Spain. Today, McKinley would be charged with giving moral sanction to a racist cause.