Book Reviews

The Death of the West, by Patrick J. Buchanan. St. Martin’s Press, 2002, 308 pp., $29.95.

Patrick Buchanan continues to write what are arguably the most thoughtful and informative books appearing today on culture, ideology and policy-and they certainly rank among the best ever written by an American political figure.

Their importance is derived in part from his subjects, which are central to the survival of the United States in particular and the West in general: In A Republic, Not an Empire, he discussed the dangers of America’s well-intended intervention into problems all across the globe, a process that makes “everybody’s business our business.” Those dangers were brought home with startling clarity on September 11.

Now, in The Death of the West, Buchanan describes how Western civilization is allowing itself to die and, as it dies, to be suffused by a Third World civilization that is arising within the very corpus of the older society. His earlier four books, on politics and economics, all show the quality of a mind that is penetrating, independent and refreshingly original.

In this book, Buchanan points to four “clear and present dangers” for peoples of European origin. The first is the reduction of the existing population everywhere throughout the West (except in Muslim Albania) through aging, dying, and a far-below replacement birthrate. The second is the massive influx of Third World immigration, which at an historically surprising pace is changing the face of the culture, the way of life, the types of people, and even the core beliefs and loyalties. Third, he speaks of the continuing attacks upon national sovereignty as existing nations come under attack both from a centralizing “global order’’ and a secessionist fragmentation.

Fourth, he devotes much attention to the “adversary culture” that for many years has sought with considerable success to make the traditional culture in all Western countries loathsome and to replace it with a new ideology of “multiculturalism.” This ideology is backed by emerging demographic realities. Contrary to the past, it does not seek the assimilation of newcomers, precisely because its intention is to replace, and not simply to add to, the existing culture.

Although in this book Buchanan doesn’t make a point out of a fifth danger, he could just as well cite the unspeakable risks he emphasized so well in his recent A Republic, Not an Empire. There is no question but that hatreds building around the world in response to American interventions, which presuppose that Americans have a legitimate role in problems all over the world, constitute a “clear and present danger” to the United States. This is especially true in an age of potential biological, chemical, nuclear, cyber and other “asymmetrical” warfare.

On all of these subjects, his discussion is cogently reasoned and supported by abundant statistics and factual detail. His examination of the intellectual roots of the adversary culture gives the clearest treatment I have seen of the role of the Frankfurt School-Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and their followers-in fashioning the “march through the institutions” that has occurred in recent decades as the Left has come to occupy virtually all the opinion-forming high ground in the United States and Europe.

That “march” is no accident; it has long been an ideological goal of the Left, and in fact goes back far earlier than the Frankfurt School and the 1920s. It is traceable to Rousseau and his tens of thousands of followers in the intellectual community since the eighteenth century, whose alienated critique of “bourgeois culture” has provided the steady drumbeat of modern art, literature, and ideology.

While Marxist-Leninism and much early socialist thought placed the “proletariat” at the center of revolution, it became apparent quite early to many on the left that the alienated intelligentsia should seek allies in any unassimilated or disaffected group. The alienation and ally-seeking has determined the content of and set the tone for the adversary culture.

Buchanan’s facts about the loss of population among peoples of European origin are startling. Demographers say that an average of 2.1 children per woman is necessary simply to hold a population steady. Western fertility rates have, however, been falling for many years. Here are some of those rates, as given by Buchanan: Britain, 1.66; Spain, 1.07; Italy, 1.2; Germany, 1.3; Russia, 1.35. The result? “Of Europe’s 47 nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely.” The population of Europe in 2000 “from Iceland to Russia, was 728 million.” Without immigration, this is expected to fall to 600 million within fifty years.

Buchanan sees this as ominous in itself, but we can note that the 600 million will still be much larger than Europe’s population historically. What makes the decline threatening so far as the survival of Europe’s unique civilization is concerned would seem to be the decline’s combination with the second danger-that of demographic swamping. The West has for several years been allowing a wave of Third World immigration.

“In 2000, England took in 185,000 immigrants, a record. In 1999, 500,000 illegal aliens slipped into the European Union, a tenfold increase from 1993.” In the United States, the effect is that the burgeoning Hispanic population is becoming “a nation within a nation.” Buchanan gives a short history of the relations between the United States and Mexico, and rightly observes that “Mexico has an historic grievance against the United States that is felt deeply by her people.” It is no surprise that the new immigrants are often strongly assertive of their own ethnic prerogatives. There is even a movement spoken of as “the reconquista’’ that calls for a “mestizo nation.”

The Death of the West doesn’t limit itself to discussing the issues I have mentioned. Buchanan ponders, too, for example, why the opposition has been so feeble. His critique of the Republican Party, in which he was prominent for so many years, is worth noticing; he sees the GOP as “in thrall to libertarian ideology and controlled by corporate interests.” He says the party “has thrown in the towel on the social issues,’’ choosing to focus instead on cutting marginal tax rates and removing the capital gains tax. This is equivalent to fiddling while Rome burns.

He refers to the notion held widely among many on the Right that the defining characteristic of America is a commonly held creed that can exist without a shared origin. Buchanan sees that this is an article of faith that quite precariously counts on the efficacy of ideas without roots.

Because of Buchanan and commentators like him, it is clear that if the West is transformed and supplanted by the forces he discusses, it will not be because the public in the mainstream society was not warned and provided the necessary facts and analysis. The alarm has been sounded for many years.

The reason the threatening trends are so intractable is that so few people within the West’s mainstream population (i.e., its majority population of European origin) are paying, or are even willing to pay, the slightest attention. Exhortations don’t work with them

They are busy people preoccupied by the concerns of daily life: for the most part, after leaving college they don’t read serious books (no doubt a commentary on their education); they don’t want to be disturbed in the niche, often very dynamic and productive, each has carved out in life; and they even have a strong predisposition toward not taking a “larger view” of anything if that is going to turn it into an issue with which they will have to deal. They feel little motivation to react to anything that doesn’t impinge upon their immediate interests. Since it involves no sacrifice, requires little thinking on their parts, and is in fact self-protective, many are willing to hold and sometimes even to act upon attitudes that are “politically correct” (i.e., that are respectable within the worldview of the opinion-makers, who overwhelmingly belong to the adversary culture).

Is there anyone among the readers of The St. Croix Review for whom this description does not match the great run of the contemporaries with whom he deals every day?

In some contexts, it could be thought that this passivity is caused by the majority’s being intimidated. After all, the core culture has for many years been under slashing attack and its members made to feel guilty.

But in this reviewer’s opinion, intimidation isn’t fully explanatory. No one forces a couple, say, to attend the many films that now flaunt the four-letter words that were first insisted upon by Mario Savio’s “Free Speech Movement” at Berkeley. Middle class women often emerge from theaters muttering about “all that foul language,” but that’s the sum total of their reaction. And when a movie is loaded with propaganda, most people are defensive in support of it, finding it profoundly uncomfortable to see beyond the story. In like manner, no one forces a family to travel to Disney World to enjoy the amusements despite the Disney organization’s open sponsorship of “homosexual days,” even though most people find that offensive in itself. We can conclude that it is indifference and a desire not to be disturbed that is even more explanatory than intimidation.

This passivity may be endemic to a commercial civilization, and it is sometimes a strength, creating an immunity to social infection. An interesting fact that goes back a long way is that this same passivity was the reason Marx a century and a half ago excoriated all forms of socialist thought that counted on exhortation as the way to change society. In place of that, he claimed to understand the “objective conditions” that were impelling society toward socialism. This, to him, was “scientific socialism,” while all else was impotent blather.

Those who champion Western civilization indulge in no such pretensions. This makes them fall back on saying “here’s what can be done-if only people will become alert to the dangers and do it.” Buchanan, as one of them, gives many suggestions about how the dangers can be reversed. But inevitably he runs up against the question of whether Americans and others within the West will even read his book, much less act upon it. Every such thinker will draw some satisfaction from knowing that “I, at least, did my best”; but there will be little satisfaction later in saying “I told you so.”

Did the shock of September 11 change any of this, revitalizing the public consciousness? That remains to be seen.

-Dwight D. Murphey

Detoxifying the Culture, by John A. Howard, America House, 2001, 188 pages, $19.95.

John Howard represents an all-too-rare breed: the “thinking man’s college president.” He began his presidency at Rockford College in 1960 with an Opening Convocation that actually discussed ideas, rather than being a laundry list of administrative and budgetary concerns. No doubt he had to deal with the latter in his role as the chief executive officer of the college, but that side of him never shows in his speeches and essays.

Detoxifying the Culture is a compilation of selected speeches given by Howard between 1963 and 2000. A brief preface is written by Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute. It is perhaps to be regretted that there is nothing after September 11, 2001, to give Howard’s insights into the current situation. There is value, though, in remaining aware of the issues as they were seen before that catastrophe.

What the book does do is to provide a running commentary on the cultural and intellectual issues of the final third of the twentieth century. Howard’s subject is often the decadence of contemporary Western culture; and, in a voice that is interesting and reasoned rather than strident, he sets off against that decadence a memory of the gentility and striving for excellence that moved Americans a century ago. His model, however, is found not so much in a given point in America’s past as it is in the ideal of a free society founded on Christian religious belief, fixed principles and a virtuous populace. It should be apparent from this how greatly his mixture of classical liberalism and conservatism differs from the “do your own thing” understanding of freedom held by so many libertarians on both the Right and the Left.

The Philadelphia Society was established in 1964 as arguably the preeminent intellectual society on the American Right. It is composed of writers, editors, think tank scholars, academics and other individuals of a scholarly bent, although it must be acknowledged that several highly articulate and thoughtful conservatives remain outside its fold. John Howard is among the thirteen members (six of them still living) who have been elected to “Distinguished Member” status in the Society. It is relevant to a review of his compiled speeches that he ranks alongside Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, F. A. Hayek and Eric Voegelin, say, in the esteem of his peers.

He began earning that esteem early in life when he participated in D-Day at Normandy as a member of a tank battalion in the First Infantry Division, where he was awarded two silver stars to go with his two purple hearts.

The twenty-four essays (which is what his speeches are) cover a great many subjects. One that this reviewer found particularly interesting was Howard’s elaboration of his own belief system, especially as it pertains to the prerequisites for a free society. He cites Montesquieu to the effect that a free society requires a virtuous populace. Oddly, this insight is out of place today, when the prevailing assumption is that the society can get along perfectly well, thank you, if the policy wonks just do their jobs as they should, despite quite an evident lack of virtue from top to bottom. That assumption underlay William Clinton’s acquittal on the impeachment charges.

Why is virtue a precondition to freedom? Howard says “in a free society, the characteristic means of achieving cooperation is the voluntary observance, not of laws, but of informal codes of conduct.” It is only when those informal codes break down that people call more and more upon government, hoping to find a solution to the untoward reality that people don’t act and work together as they should. Today, when “dishonesty, corruption, vandalism, violence, crime, deceit and maliciousness have eaten into all aspects of American reality,” the primary cause is to be found in the fact that “an ethos [has been accepted] that rejects private virtue as a public good.”

It is arguable that, as a theory of a free society, this insight expresses the classical liberal vision at its best, trumping the unfortunate intellectual tradition of looking almost exclusively to economic and political issues. Howard reminds us that a philosophy of individual freedom needs to be a complete philosophy that takes into account all aspects of the human experience. Culture, aesthetics and morals are every bit as important as a cut in the capital gains tax rate.

Howard’s book isn’t the systematic, almost textbook-like, treatment of the West’s cultural decadence that Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West is, but it will take its place as a leading contribution to the literature on that vastly important subject.

-Dwight D. Murphey