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The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization
Patrick J. Buchanan
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002
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The question, "Who is Pat Buchanan?" has engaged racially conscious conservatives, among others, for years. The quest for an answer reached fever pitch during the Virginian's three failed runs for the presidency between 1992 and 2000. Among many defenders of the white race, patience with Mr. Buchanan ended when he selected a black woman, Ezola Foster, as his running mate soon after he won the presidential nomination of the Reform Party. Despite her seemingly impeccable conservative credentials (at least by contemporary American standards), choosing her as his vice-presidential candidate struck many as an abandonment of his role as the most pro-white of all viable contenders for the presidency. For them he ceased to be a suitable "movement leader."
Yet the notion that Pat Buchanan was ever firmly on the side of white racial consciousness and the political forces that defend it has always rested on less than firm foundations and ignores large parts of his spoken and written record. Other parts of the same record, however, lend themselves to believing that Buchanan is on that side. Indeed, this ambiguity in his thought is not confined to race and racial issues, and, as with many other core assumptions of his philosophy, the truth about his views on race is very hard to unravel.
Mr. Buchanan's most recent book, The Death of the West, has been greeted -- by some foes and some friends -- as explicitly racial. That is hardly the case, but, in order to understand the weaknesses and strengths of this remarkable book, we must first explore some the author's previous writings and statements.
Beyond Left and Right
On the one hand, Pat Buchanan is a man who minces no words, often shocking and angering the establishment media with his frankness. On the principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," it follows that he has said much to evoke sympathy from racially conscious whites as well as from many others on the right whose views are now more or less "underground." Yet on the other hand, Buchanan's written and spoken record is full of contradictions, rhetorical flourishes that are never clarified (for example, his assorted one-liners about Jews, Zionists, and Israel that are pugnacious but often fail to offer any sustained treatment of the Jewish question), and what are often superficial treatments of complex issues, such as the link between race and the dangers of immigration. He is given to frequent romantic idealizations of the 1950s, of his adolescence, and of America (pre-1960s) in general. All these limitations lead him to run into several theoretical road blocks that he apparently is incapable of overcoming or unwilling to overcome.
The Death of the West is Buchanan's sixth book and the fourth that deals with his social and political world view. The first two, The New Majority and Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories, were primarily concerned with political strategies and tactics. In 1988 Buchanan published Right from the Beginning, a personal and political autobiography.
The Great Betrayal (GB), published in 1998, was concerned with Buchanan's protectionist and populist economics in particular and American sovereignty in general. He followed it with a largely historical work, A Republic, Not an Empire (RNE), which offered an "America First" foreign policy as an alternative to the crusading, messianic, democratic internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and their post-World War II (and post-Cold War) successors.
These are important works that both illustrate and help us understand the end of the post-war left/right paradigm. Buchanan has shown that there is nothing particularly moral or politically compelling in the old Buckleyite linking of internationalist militarism and corporate capitalism with a defense of the West as a religious, cultural, and racial entity.
Indeed, for Roman Catholics of an older generation, his communal economic notions are far more in keeping with what used to be called Catholic Social Justice theory. They have been articulated in Rerum Novarum and other late nineteenth century encyclicals of Leo XIII and publicly advocated by political movements ranging from the English Distributist League (of "Chesterbelloc" fame) and Spain's Falange under Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera to our very own Union Party of 1936 (supported by Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and others) and the Catholic Worker Movement (under Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, before being hijacked by leftists). It is no surprise that Buchanan, who, according to all reports, has a sincere empathy for the working man, favors the economics of organic social thinkers over those of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Bill Buckley.
As he wrote in The Great Betrayal, "But re-creation of a just economic order is a prerequisite of the restoration of the moral order." In words long unspoken by a self-described man of the "right" in the United States, the former presidential candidate called for a time "when property and wealth are more equitably shared, when a man can raise a family again on the sweat of his own labor."1
Buchanan's vision of a homogeneous society founded on social justice seems to avoid the theoretical contradiction that has plagued the American right since the Second World War: Why is a sense of organic community -- incarnated in government and written into law -- moral when it comes to religion and culture and somehow wrong in the economic realm? This contradiction is reconciled in many schools of European rightism (in fact, one of the unifying bonds of those varied racialist movements of both the pre- and post- World War II eras has perhaps been their common opposition to internationalist capitalism, consumerism, and unfettered markets).
Yet, while he seems to resolve one question, Buchanan studiously avoids dealing with another -- whether America or, at present, many European countries, comprised of diverse and frequently antagonistic racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, are appropriate places for the organic unity of a just and compassionate economic system. His avoidance of this question is mirrored in his reluctance to grapple with other difficult topics of group identity, as we shall see shortly.
In A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan does question some of the dogmas of contemporary American ethnic taboos. He defends the War for Texas Independence and the Mexican War, both of which enjoy very low ratings among our dominant culture czars. Leaving aside any judgment on the Civil War, he seems to endorse Manifest Destiny and completely ignores a major source of modernist guilt, the "dispossession" of the Indians. In general, he favors those who fought on this continent to "drive aliens and intruders out of land they themselves coveted."2
But it is when America ventures beyond these borders that Buchanan turns critical. "It was under William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson that we would eat the forbidden fruit of imperialism," he writes. It is not only the now unpopular Spanish American War that he criticizes, however. The First World War he condemns as of no benefit to America and "an unrelieved disaster for Western civilization." This is still permissible ground, but it is when he favorably reviewed America First opposition to U.S. entry into the Second World War that his book evoked a shrill rage of denunciation. According to Buchanan, "by 1950 Americans were asking what (the war) had been for." Both wars were in retrospect failures. They were evidence of what happens when "nations go crusading, instead of putting national interest first."3
Lastly, Buchanan questions, in very polite terms, the use of lobbying by "ethnic interests" in Washington when their goals do not have America's best interest at stake. He even goes so far as to posit a seemingly racialist notion that, "Generally ... statesmen do not take their countries to war unless their own kinsmen are the victims."4
Such comments are, obviously, softened attacks on three of the fundamental propositions of the powerful, organized American Jewish lobby: that World War II was a Holy War never to be questioned, that all Americans must forever feel guilt over not doing enough to save European Jewry from Hitler, and that the best interests of Israel and America are, at all times, identical.
Such positions are indeed courageous for one who wishes to enter -- or remain within -- establishment-controlled discourse. But they were fairly common positions in the writings of conservatives during the 1950s. The books published by such houses as Devin Adair, Caxton, Bookmailer, and Regnery and the columns frequently featured in National Review, The Freeman, American Mercury and American Opinion often questioned American involvement in World War II as well as the unilateral guilt of Germany and Japan. They were also not afraid to criticize Zionism and American support for Israel. In fact, it was Devin Adair that, virtually single-handedly, kept in print for years the works of the Jewish anti-Zionists, Rabbi Elmer Berger and Alfred Lilienthal.
Buchanan's willingness to embrace positions long out of favor, provided they were in favor in the fifties, is key to understanding his strengths and weaknesses. To the Reform Party candidate, the post-war era was the high point of American and indeed, it seems, world history. "Neither the world nor the United States will ever again be what we were in the aftermath of the Second World War." So much of what Buchanan writes is a justification of the world view he received from his father and the Catholic schools and churches of 1950's Washington, D.C. What followed the fifties was the beginning of the end. "... my generation, which grew to manhood in the 1950s, was so different from the generation that followed."5
Pat Buchanan also sees himself as a fighter. His "mother and father took fistfights as a part of growing up." "But Pop was right. Sometimes you had to fight." Endless pages of his autobiography are taken up with detailed accounts of the fights of his and his brothers' youth. A victim is beaten so his "face was almost unrecognizable."6 Glasses shatter, blood spurts from noses as the Buchanan boys refuse to back down. They drink, fight, and pursue the girls while remaining robust Catholic conservatives. One is reminded of Hilaire Belloc's praise of his youthful friends for having "kept the Rabelaisian plan/And dignified the dainty cloisters/With Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters." This robust, almost pagan, embrace of life, coupled with Catholic piety, seems to be unique to the Roman Catholic Church while it yet flourished. It is central to understanding Pat Buchanan's self image.
He also sees himself as a loyal man, even when the strings of loyalty are stretched to the point where many might think they would better break.
That someone stood by his friends in trouble [was in Buchanan's childhood] about the highest compliment you could pay; and virtually the worst term that could be used about anyone is that he was 'chicken,' someone who, when fighting started, ran out on his friends.7
Thus, he has not only maintained a life-long loyalty to the now demonized heroes of the fifties right, such as Generalissimo Franco, Senator Joe McCarthy and General MacArthur, but also has found it difficult to abandon his attachments to Richard Nixon in particular and the Republican Party in general. "Whether Nixon was right or wrong was not the relevant issue. Even if they had booted it, he had a right to be defended; and his friends had a duty to be there."8
This passionate unwillingness to abandon old causes and people explains why much of Buchanan's writing is descriptive and exhortatory rather than reflective. This is the way things were. This is the way we (family, friends, Catholics, conservatives) did things. Things were good then. Let's fight to defend or bring back all those things.
But it is the lack of a critical sense in Buchanan that sometimes inclines his writing and thought to superficiality and an unwillingness to dig beneath the surface. This helps explain his tendency to toss out witty, biting quips about matters that he seems unwilling to think about long and hard. And this trait is deeply embedded in his most recent work, The Death of the West and its approach to the West's racial dilemma.
The same trait also helps explain Buchanan's approach to Jewish issues. Repeatedly, he has hinted at various aspects of such issues in a flippant way, for which he has been roundly condemned in the media. Yet, invariably, Buchanan fails to rise to the occasion. After uttering or writing rather sly wisecracks about Jews or Jewish issues, he never proceeds to a thorough statement or analysis of why there are so few Jews in combat, or why John Demjanjuk is hounded forever while tens of thousands of former Communists, clearly guilty of similar or far worse crimes, are allowed to roam forever free, or why Jews constantly seek to break down America's immigration laws and moral/religious standards. Nor does he ever suggest clearly what might be an appropriate response from Christian Americans to Jewish animosity toward their religion and culture.
Simply stated, the answer to Mr. Buchanan's strange behavior seems to be that in 1950s Washington a Catholic could make a joke or nasty comment about Jewish liberalism. However, one didn't think or speak long and hard about the matter. He just does not book fights that weren't on the fifties schedule.
Buchanan and Vatican II
Pat Buchanan, as everyone knows is a Catholic. He is also what is alternatively referred to as a conservative, orthodox, or traditionalist Catholic. (I realize these terms have very specific meanings among believing Catholics. I am using them in a more general way here.)
Buchanan is never shy in denouncing the changes in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council -- or so it seems. In fact, he never engages the question of what these changes might mean for a believing Catholic. If the Church has, for over four decades, abandoned so many of its rituals, replaced so much of its basic dogmas, and essentially abandoned talk of converting those of other faiths, and if it has seen its pope officiate at services together with animists and voodoo doctors -- all of which has happened -- the most Buchanan will ever do is talk about the good old days. Never will he ask how Catholics should relate to a church that seems to have cast aside all it once stood for, that has actually embraced the very indifferentism so denounced by the nineteenth century popes in their encyclicals and syllabi.
As a result of these reforms, Rome itself has created a crisis of massive dimensions inside its own church, with priestly vocations evaporating, church attendance dwindling, and open apostasy preached from the highest pulpits. This crisis has evoked much agonized debate in Catholic circles. What is the status of Vatican II documents, conciliar popes, the sacraments offered by (what would have once been called) modernist priests, and so forth? Resistance takes many forms, but it seems impossible that a believing Catholic does not have to wrestle with these matters. Whether remaining in the loyal opposition or in some way opting out, he must try to confront the post-Vatican II Church by the light of Catholic theology, wrestle with his conscience, and come to some conclusions.
Yet in none of Buchanan's public pronouncements is there any indication that he has ever engaged these vexing topics. What is evident throughout his writings is a constant bemoaning of the "Church now" as opposed to the "Church then."
We, my three closest brothers and I, were 'raised Catholic' in the '40s and '50s in a militant and triumphant Church in the days of the Legion of Decency and Pius XII; we grew up when the Faith was unquestioned and patriotism unconstrained, in a time when flag-burning was unheard of, and Vatican II was only a gleam in the eye of Monsignor Roncalli.9
Leaving aside the easy weaving of American patriotism (which, when viewed by the standards of the political theories of Pius IX and X and pre-Vatican II Catholic social philosophy, would be bathed in religious error) with Catholic dogma, one would think that Buchanan might tell us how binding he views the Council and Pope John Paul XXIII, in whose eyes it "gleamed."
In a lengthy chapter, "Blessed Sacrament,"10 we are treated to a nostalgic view of the old Church. It had "awe- inspiring solemnity, power, and beauty ... which attracted people who were seeking the permanent things of life." Its beliefs were completely true. "Ecumenicism was not what we were about. We were on the road to victory. Why compromise when you have the true faith?"
Today, Buchanan knows this has all been swept away.
The Catholic Church of the 1950s was not taken from without. It was surrendered from within ... Mass attendance is down. Vocations are down ... The old Church, which was always there, unchanged and unchanging, seems to have disappeared ... Outside a sign reads UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT... It was a magnificent institution in a splendid era; but that old Catholic Church, militant and triumphant, lives only in the recesses of memory.11
Yet, after this long dirge, Buchanan refuses to engage the debates among those who have been and are resisting these trends.
That response, or the lack thereof, is symptomatic of Buchanan's thinking on many significant issues. He remembers better times in the Church and in America. Being a Buchanan, he will not surrender to current trends. ("Everyone of us [Buchanans] was opinionated; and we were all taught not to back down. Whatever our positions lost in logic might be made up in invective. If you never quit an argument, presumably you never lost.")12
This approach almost makes it impossible to (a) adjust to changed circumstances, as it would seem believing Catholics, post-Vatican II, must; (b) seek to uncover the philosophical or social bases for the '40s and '50s Catholicism that is Buchanan's personal preference; and (c) apply critical scrutiny to those "good" times.
But, while this approach also leaves Buchanan capable of plenty of "invective" -- witty, clever, or just plain mean -- on the Jewish/Zionist question or Vatican II, it renders him incapable of probing these issues in depth as opposed to exhibiting a combination of nostalgia and unfocused fervor. It is this same bundle of flaws that proves his undoing when he confronts, in his most recent book, the phenomenon that Lothrop Stoddard so aptly termed, over eighty years ago, "the rising tide of color."
The Death of the West
In his latest book, Buchanan marshals a convincing array of evidence to prove his thesis that "the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now."13 The book explores both symptoms and causes. Little in it will come as a surprise to anyone who is reasonably well-read in racial and immigration issues, but The Death of the West is indeed an excellent introduction to the subject of racial, cultural, and religious decadence, a thorough documentation of the painful, infuriating, and, in the end, tragic details of the decline of the West. Yet the book does have flaws, one of which is its casual weaving together of race, culture, and religion. While this is definitely a minus for anyone who knows much about our problems and is now ready for solutions, it may actually be a plus for the beginner to whom the sheer wealth of data may, hopefully, prove unsettling.
Buchanan's prognosis is rooted in the demographic facts of our time. "Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough babies to replace its population ... There is no sign of a turnaround."14 In order to maintain its current population numbers, needed to provide a working tax base for the elderly, by 2050 "Europe will have to bring in 1.4 billion immigrants from Africa and the Middle East."15 Thus, either Europe quietly fades from the world scene or floods itself with immigrants and dies in the self-inflicted deluge.
Buchanan offers several explanations for the unwillingness of whites, unique among the world's races, to have enough babies to reproduce their own numbers. The first is economic -- it is becoming increasingly difficult to support a husband and wife on one salary. Both must work. Hence, children must be postponed or eliminated. In addition, he cites feminist ideology and fears of world over-crowding, among other reasons, as factors leading women away from their traditional role as child bearers.16
In addition, however, there is an element of self-loathing that discourages the men and women of the West from wishing to continue their kind. The West has been taught to hate itself, and this hatred is directed at both Christianity and the white race. Buchanan sees the triumph of self-hate as having "captured a Christian and conservative nation."17
Perhaps the most racially explicit chapter in the book is the sixth, "La Reconquista," which details the steady takeover of large portions of the American Southwest by Mexican immigrants. And, as Buchanan notes, "Invading armies go home, immigrant armies do not."18 He sees this immigration as particularly difficult because
Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are from another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not participants in American society.19
At first glance the author may appear to be coming close to a racialist view of Mexican immigration. Actually, that is a total misunderstanding. When he writes that Germans are "assimilated" and Africans aren't, he is in effect stating that successful assimilation is based on something other than racial identity. His sentence implies that it is difficult for other races to assimilate to this -- whatever-it-might-be -- but they could conceivably achieve it. The Germans did, but they could conceivably have failed. Thus, there is an American identity other than European to which all men on the planet can assimilate, if they do it right.
By chapter's end, Buchanan seems finally to have decided to explore the depths of the issues at hand. He identifies two conceptions of America. One, he calls "the blood and soil idea of a nation," which includes "common ancestry, language, literature, history, heroes, traditions, customs, mores and faith" as its components. This conception, he writes, surely does not describe America today.20
The alternative view is that being an American means believing in the same "ideals." However, this shared belief in an American Creed also is no longer tenable. Today, "Americans no longer agree on values, history or heroes." Thus, Buchanan asks, "Can we really say that we are still one nation and one people?"21
Yet Buchanan never chooses between the two views of nationhood; he never affirms which one is true. It is this inability to confront racial issues thoroughly that proves to be the undoing of his final summation in The Death of the West.
Buchanan against "Racism"
Those looking for a clear statement by Pat Buchanan on racial questions need not spend time deciphering acerbic quips that merely hint at some understanding of racial differences and the preservation of racial identity. In Right from the Beginning, Mr. Buchanan is quite explicit in presenting his views on race:
But the national civil rights movement ... had the moral high ground. They were victorious, ultimately, because America is a good country; and because they deserved to win. They were asking that federal law reflect the New Testament teaching about how a man should treat his brother; and Edmund Burke was no match for that.
According to Buchanan a segregated society is a moral evil of such proportions that the highest levels of government are obligated to destroy that society. Mr. Buchanan himself found some arguments of the civil rights movement convincing.
To me, the most powerful arguments Roy Wilkins and the civil rights community mustered for federal legislation were two: first, when the exercise of individual freedom by millions of whites, not just a bigoted handful, results in denial to a whole class of Americans of their freedom to travel and associate, the federal government had a duty to step in. Second , as many of America's new hotels and motels were booming because of a federal highway system to which the tax dollars of minority Americans had also contributed, the federal government had a right to step in.22
Buchanan's only objection was to the federal government's forcing "Ollie's Barbecue and the corner tavern" to integrate. Here, too, however, his objections were merely legal. "Freedom meant the freedom to choose, even if one chose to be a bigot."23 Poor Ollie, all he wanted was to provide a place for people to socialize with their own race and prevent the easy mingling that inevitably leads to the end of racial identity and survival. For this Buchanan calls him a "bigot." The South, which developed the system of segregation in order to protect white people, particularly women and children, from black behavior patterns and in order to preserve its own culture and very identity, is seen by Buchanan as occupying the moral low ground, in defiance of the New Testament. (We leave aside for the moment that the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, has no problem with slavery. Indeed, "foreign" slaves, unlike Hebrew slaves, released after six years, are to serve "forever." [Compare Leviticus 25:46 with Exodus 21:2])
Buchanan's reasoning here is intriguing. If he thinks segregation was immoral and bigoted, then would he have favored dismantling apartheid and instituting majority rule in South Africa? The answer, however surprising, is: yes. He favored "South Africa mak(ing) the necessary transition from apartheid to a more just society."24 Did he favor integration and majority rule in Rhodesia? It seems that his sole concern in Zimbabwe was the communist background of Robert Mugabe.25 But does Buchanan really believe that an integrated South is safer or better for whites (or for that matter safer and better for blacks) than the segregated South? Does he really prefer black rule and its horrible consequences in South Africa and Rhodesia?
Buchanan's views of race, or lack thereof, are characteristic of the American conservative movement of the 1950s and 60s. Essentially, conservatives of that era tried to avoid the issue of race as much as possible, defending Southern segregation on constitutional and social grounds and South Africa and Rhodesia for anti-communist strategic reasons and mentioning race only occasionally as a mildly interesting theoretical concern. It is in part because of the conservative evasion of the racial issue in the 1960s that race has become as profoundly taboo a subject as it is today. Had conservatives been as vocal on the realities of race in the 1960s as they were on the virtues of free market economics, it might have been Arthur Jensen and William Shockley who won Nobel Prizes in the 1970s rather than Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek.
In the final pages of The Death of the West, Buchanan offers a summing up of his views on the death of our civilization. His arguments are worth following because, although somewhat convoluted, they will throw yet more light on his views of race.
First, he posits that "Christianity gave birth to the West and undergirds its moral and political order." (A skeptic might ask whether Buchanan sees Greece, Rome, or pagan northern Europe as part of the West?)
However, as the book has documented, the "faith" is dying. Thus, "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?"
Perhaps the essence of the West is "racial solidarity." But this possibility Buchanan also rejects because "the past five hundred years have been an endless chronicle of European peoples slaughtering one another." One fears that there is some confusion here between the question of "What is the West?" (to which the answer might well be religion or race) and "What has been in the past and what is today a possible rallying point for Western men?" Buchanan seems to eliminate Christianity because it won't work today and race because it didn't work in the past ("work" in the sense that people believe in religion or race). The theme of pragmatic sociology and religious or racial truth are interwoven.
But more confusion is to come. Race cannot "make the West unique" because "the great enemies of Western culture have come out of the West." But all traitors come from within. Does that invalidate the ties that bind the vast majority together?
The last argument Buchanan offers against race as the basis of Western identity is the most perplexing. "Moreover, America is a multiethnic, multiracial nation today, and the nations of Europe will be tomorrow." And, therefore, apparently race has to go. It had seemed through many of the earlier pages in this book that it was precisely this very transformation of America and Europe that Buchanan mourned and opposed. Now, it is offered as a refutation of Western racial identity.
But, if neither religion nor race can serve as the "unifying principle," Mr. Buchanan suggests that maybe "the mystic chords of memory" do or will unite the West. This, too, he dismisses. "As America and Europeans open their doors to millions from countries and continents once subjugated and colonized, the mystic chords of memory are as likely to divide us as unite us."26
After a brief and quickly rejected flirtation with "democracy" as the essence of the West, Buchanan inexplicably returns to square one. The West is about "faith." (He seems to have forgotten his rejection of this formulation five paragraphs back.) Since the faith is dying, then, it may well be "that the Death of the West is ordained .... the patient is dying and nothing can be done."27
Yet, in the book's final two paragraphs, the author seems to have recovered a bit. Buchanan sees America as "the greatest nation on earth ... the last best hope of earth" and -- citing abolitionist John Brown -- "This is a beautiful country."
Thus, having rejected the religious soul of the West as no longer viable and the significance of race and the "mystic chords of memory," Buchanan still wants us to fight. "We must never stop trying to take her back."28
But at this point the reader is forced to ask -- Back to what?
In Right From the Beginning Pat Buchanan wrote "Country, family and faith, these are the things worth dying for; these are the things worth fighting for ...."29
But if the "country" and the "faith" are actually at war with the beliefs and very identities that they once incarnated, then what?
A Good Man
And yet, this reviewer senses that, despite the confusions in his thought and the occasional misplacement of his loyalties, Pat Buchanan is a good man whose instincts are clearer and better than his words. In the basic way that he was taught certain loyalties as a youth, he has struggled to maintain them throughout his life. As the American Right has abandoned and come to denounce the likes of Senator McCarthy, Franco, and other old heroes, Buchanan has stood firm. Norman Podhoretz and Abe Foxman don't boss "Pop" Buchanan's boy around as they do so many others. You won't find Jesse Jackson summoned to an ageing Pat Buchanan as he begs tearfully for forgiveness. There is something admirable about all this resolve even when it is misapplied to a Nixon or a Dole.
In his heart, Pat Buchanan knows that a Mexican and black America will be a living hell for whites. He knows what South Africa and Rhodesia are today. But, darn it, "Pop" Buchanan and the nuns at Gonzaga never spoke about these matters much, so Pat won't either. And the Jews, well, Pat senses there is some problem here, but in the 1950s there wasn't much talk of the Jewish question, so all we will ever get from Pat are some off-the-cuff outbursts.
To be sure, Pat Buchanan turned out not to be the man who would lead the great American populist, racial counter-revolution. But for a brief time, he was its symbolic leader, flawed but well intentioned. For that he deserves our gratitude. In the future, though, our movement would be better served by stationing Pat Buchanan in the trenches where his warrior spirit would be most welcome. The leadership position, however, is still open.
In the end, one cannot help but think of Pat Buchanan as a more cheerful version of the forever combative Hilaire Belloc. And, as Monsignor Ronald Knox preached at Belloc's Requiem Mass in 1953, so may we say of Patrick J. Buchanan:
No human flattery, no love of ease, no weariness of conflict, shall make him retract the pledge he has given. 'I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have redeemed my pledge.' This is what Hilaire Belloc would wish us to say of him, and there are few of whom it could be said so truly.
Pat Buchanan will always be one of those few. The bad guys don't like him, and he doesn't like them. He's on our team.
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Hugh Perry is an academic who has contributed to all three of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigns.
~~
End notes
1. Buchanan, Pat The Great Betrayal, p. 326.
2. Buchanan, Pat A Republic, Not An Empire, pp. 105-107, pp. 120-23, 141, 53.
3. Ibid, pp. 141, 219, 297, 298.
4. Ibid, p. 344.
5. Buchanan, Pat Right From the Beginning, pp. 16, 30.
6. Ibid, pp. 39, 49, 189.
7. Ibid, p. 186.
8. Ibid, p. 187.
9. Ibid, p. 13.
10. Ibid, pp. 58-79.
11. Ibid, pp. 78, 79.
12. Ibid, p. 145.
13. Buchanan, Pat The Death of the West, p. 23.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid, p. 22.
16. Ibid, pp. 25, 49.
17. Ibid, p. 71.
18. Ibid, p. 134.
19. Ibid, p. 125.
20. Ibid, p. 143.
21. Ibid, p. 144.
22. Buchanan, Pat Right From the Beginning, p. 282.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid, p. 374.
25. Ibid, p. 375.
26. Buchanan, Pat The Death of the West, p. 265.
27. Ibid, p. 266.
28. Ibid, p. 268.
29. Buchanan, Pat Right From the Beginning, p. 384.
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