While this was a predictable liberal reaction, conservative responses have not differed much either. Jamie Glazov’s review in Front Page Magazine conceded some of Buchanan’s points but questioned whether the book was written with sinister motives. Based on the response to his review (including an exchange in the posted responses with fellow columnist Robert Locke), Glazov wrote a follow-up article rehashing old controversies about Buchanan. That his book has been controversial even among conservative reviewers has surprised some people. After all, while his last two books, The Great Betrayal and A Republic, Not An Empire focused on issues that divide conservatives (free trade versus protectionism and interventionism versus non-interventionism in foreign affairs, respectively), immigration divides conservatives much less: Beltway conservatives tend to support mass immigration, grassroots conservatives overwhelmingly favor restriction. But it is less surprising than many suppose.

Buchanan is a leading conservative commentator, but his presidential politics have engendered bad blood on the right. Some Republicans believe his candidacies contributed to the defeats of George Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. The final straw for many was when he bolted the Republican Party, joined the Reform Party and ran for president in the general election against George W. Bush. While he failed to gain sufficient support to effect the outcome of the election in the way Ralph Nader arguably did, had Buchanan’s votes gone to Bush it would have wiped out more than 80 percent of Al Gore’s popular vote advantage.

Whatever your opinion of Pat Buchanan, and he is seriously misguided on some issues, it is unfortunate that old debates are keeping people from considering what he has to say in The Death of the West. While America’s critical cultural institutions - schools, colleges and universities, the arts, the media, pop culture and entertainment - undermine the traditions, customs and foundational beliefs of this country and their roots in Western civilization, we have experienced substantial immigration from non-Western cultures with different values and beliefs.

This is not a trivial concern or simply a matter of old fogy’s nostalgia. The accomplishments of Western culture are substantial and have produced enormous social and economic benefits. The number of people who wish to immigrate here from other cultures is itself a testimony to this fact - as Thomas Sowell recently noted in a favorable review, "Virtually the whole human race has voted with its feet as to which economic and other benefits they prefer to have."

Yet not all cultures institutionalize the same beliefs nor do they all produce the same behaviors. The United States built a nation out of unlikely elements with some difficulty through a process of "Americanization" whereby the dominant American culture insisted upon the assimilation of immigrants from other nations and cultures. We often forget how hard this could be both for the Americans working to assimilate new immigrants and for the immigrants themselves- describing the painfulness of making the break with the old country, longtime Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz called this assimilation the "brutal bargain."

Today, political correctness makes assimilation much more difficult. First, the belief in the basic similarity or equality of all cultures causes some elites to look askance at the whole notion of assimilation. "Americanization" has been replaced by polices that produce the opposite result, bilingual education and multiculturalism. Second, the attack on traditional American values and institutions by Frankfort School types has expedited the breakdown on the assimilationist ethic by insuring that large numbers of native-born Americans are no longer assimilated into this culture. It would be unfair to blame the politically correct school system of left-wing Marin Country for John Walker Lindh’s decision to join the Taliban, but it is hardly surprising that in such an environment a young person would not have been assimilated into Western culture.

Whereas the Marxists of yesteryear denounced capitalism as a source of exploitation and oppression, today’s cultural Marxists hurl similar charges at Western civilization. No longer is Western culture to be remembered for Shakespeare, Beethoven or the Enlightenment, but for slavery, colonialism and intolerance. Nor is Western culture held to be something that people of all races can assimilate into. Just like David Duke, the Herbert Marcuse generation links Western culture to whites only. In the words of MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient Susan Sontag: "The white race is the cancer of human history."

Another component that helped keep America a melting pot rather than the "salad bowel" Buchanan decries in his new book was the lulls between periods of heavy immigration. Since immigration laws were overhauled in 1965, the United States has had more or less constant mass immigration, admitting a number of legal and illegal immigrants that exceeds the population of Canada.

So if Americans begin to lose connection with their own cultural background and traditions, begin to lose their knowledge of their history and its heroes at the same time huge numbers of immigrants from increasingly diverse cultures are admitted without assimilation, what does that add up to? This is not just happening in the United States. Similar events are occurring in Western Europe and Israel. This is what Buchanan means by his book’s title.

Of the 20 nations with the lowest birth rates, 18 are in Europe. People of European stock have declined from one-quarter of the world’s population in 1960 to one-sixth in 2000, and if present trends continue will be down to one-tenth in 2050. Buchanan’s critics have predictably focused on this as being a fixation on race. But in the absence of assimilation, this could be better understood as a proxy for culture. Neither demography nor the academy currently favors the traditional West. Europeans themselves in some respects are even further down this road than Americans are. The continent that was once synonymous with Christendom has low church attendance rates, for example, and the European Union replaces the rights of Englishmen with a bureaucratic, less democratic vision of governance.

The Death of the West isn’t perfect and many of Buchanan’s solutions strike this writer as impractical, but it does outline something worth serious attention and debate. It would behoove us not to allow the message to get lost in the shouting about the messenger. Perhaps a spokesman for these issues will emerge who lacks Buchanan’s baggage. Hopefully, then Western culture will receive the serious consideration it deserves.

Jim Antle

You can e-mail your comments to Jim at Jimantle@aol.com.

About W. James Antle III.

Copyright © 2002 by W. James Antle III.
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