Patrick Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower is a depressing, race obsessed socioeconomic call to arms, Save Jerseyans.
Buchanan’s mastery of rhetoric and statistics are hard to match in today’s world. But completely unmatched amongst mainstream political commentators is his obsession with White Christian identity.
While filled with solid facts on our economic masochism, imperial over reach, de facto open border immigration policy, and the complete emasculation of assertive Americanism, all of Buchanan’s substantive points are obscured by his racial obsession and sometimes inconsistent logic…
Buchanan contrasts contemporary cultural balkanization with the Jim Crow era: “Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were American.” His longingly structured prose almost glorify a time when government actively discriminated against its citizens and, by way of semi-apology, he posits that at least back then we were all culturally on the same page.
Buchanan even implies that the downward spiral of Western civilization began with the “sundering of Christiandom during the Reformation.” As a Jew, I have no favorites in the market place of Christian faith that is the post-Reformation Christian world, but the assertion that the West’s downward spiral can trace its origins to Martin Luther is patently ridiculous. Then again, much of the rest of Buchanan’s well-research arguments are illogical.
For example, Buchanan celebrates the anti-democratic impulse of our founding fathers. That they did not want a directly democratic system, no one can doubt. That they specifically sought a Republican system which distilled the momentary fads of the masses and empowered removed but accountable elites to act in the publics’ best interest is certain. Yet while Buchanan celebrates the historical fact that our founding fathers where not egalitarian majoritarians, he also appeals to the dwindling White Christian majority. One can not uphold as a virtue our founding fathers political elitism but balk when elites, so enfranchised, lead the nation against majoritarian will. Elitism and populism are juxtaposed not complementary.
Buchanan continues his twisted illogical trip away from the strong economic, values, and foreign policy arguments and periodically revisits race. Early on he dismisses Republican efforts to court the Hispanic vote as a pipe dream and posits both that they quickly become assimilated into our permissive culture and that their true loyalties lie elsewhere. Yet in making the case that immigration and border control is a winning issue, Buchanan returns to the Hispanic demographic. Highlighting that 47% of Hispanics in Arizona supported cutting off social services to illegal immigrants in 2004, that according to Zogby 71% percent of Hispanics think English should be the official language of the United States, and that “immigration was listed as the sixth most important issue by Hispanic voters,” he attempts to bolster his case that immigration control is a winner yet simultaneously contradicts his argument about writing off Hispanics.
To be fair, Suicide of a Superpower contains many solid points that are unfortunately muddled by the peculiar White Christian obsession of its author Patrick Buchanan. Fundamentally, Buchanan is correct in his critique that neo-liberal free trade isn’t free, that tax tariffs are not protectionist but such clear common sense that even our otherwise befuddled European cousins use them, that we need a strong military that should be us more sparingly, and that we have enshrined educational failure as the new backwards benchmark of success.
He is fundamentally wrong, however, in the implication that America’s strength is related to race.
Courtesy of the nice people at Macmillan Audio below is a clip of Suicide of a Superpower read by Buchanan himself. Click here to listen. It covers some of his non-race based socioeconomic points.
