It’s been some years ago since I last watched “The McLaughlin Group” political roundtable on PBS. I recall that one of the regular panelists was Pat Buchanan. I was instinctively put-off by his arrogance and his habit of putting people he had only a superficial knowledge of in tidy little boxes from which there was no escape. Buchanan had written books with decidedly provocative titles, like “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America” and “The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization,” but because he seemed “affable” to his white co-workers, his manifest bigotry was accepted as an “eccentricity.” Even left-wing radio personality Stephanie Miller referred to him as her “daddy.”
But there had to come a point where his liberal and moderate colleagues had to say to themselves that by silently tolerating his thinly-disguised white supremacist leanings, they were now being perceived to be consenting to it. I had thought that Buchanan had finally crossed the line of propriety when one day, completely out of context with what the “Group” was discussing at the moment, he blurted out “Hispanics are out to destroy this country.” His virulent tone was obviously discomfiting; the other panelists seemed unable to formulate a response to this declaration, merely looking on in mute bewilderment.
But Buchanan didn’t get kicked-off "McLaughlin," and somehow he landed another position as a regular “contributor” on the left-leaning MSNBC. Again, Buchanan seemed to receive a free pass from his white colleagues, only occasionally taken to task for his bigoted commentary if in the presence of a token minority. Buchanan’s hate was becoming “mainstream,” and along with his fellow right-wing ideologues over at Fox News, hate speech, paranoia, divisiveness and xenophobia was becoming “acceptable,” part and parcel with a political climate in which civil discourse and compromise was fast becoming an anachronism.
But there had to come a time when people finally realized that Buchanan had can gone too far, his white supremacist rants no longer confined to a sound bite which could be covered up or accused of being "taken out of context," but out there in the open for everyone to digest in his latest book. Although its subject matter and tone was little different from the aforementioned titles, “Suicide of a Superpower” for some reason disturbed a few people. Like Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, Buchanan has proven incapable of putting aside his hate to find some accommodation, even if only as a concept, for the potentiality that the groups he disparages also have the pursuit of the American Dream in mind, and have no desire to disrupt the current institutions. Instead, his notion of white privilege only grows more desperate and paranoid. Like many white supremacists, Buchanan fears that there will be a reckoning for the centuries of the white majority controlling what racial minorities can or cannot do; what he doesn’t understand, and never will, that the future can only be insured if one puts aside hate and decides that one needs to work with the “others” in order to achieve a constructive purpose. The voters in Pearce’s district made one small step in that direction when they decided that they didn’t share his blind hatred for “Mexicans,” and voted to recall him. MSNBC chose to suspend Buchanan indefinitely, before announcing that he was fired a month ago.
Unfortunately for the civilized world, Buchanan’s words survive and thrive in same universe as “The Turner Diaries,” used by Timothy McVeigh as a “guide book” to initiative a race Holocaust. “When the faith dies,” he opines in the preface of “Suicide,” “the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization.” Note the word “north.” Buchanan, who we have already noted believes that Latinos are “out to destroy this country,” suggests here that Latino immigrants possess a "master plan" to effect the conquest of America. But you want to know something? They don't. They are just like everyone else--they just want to live. Nor is Mexico ((technically) a “Third World” country, and its culture is just as dominated by European influences as the United States’. The prevailing “Spanish” culture is also no less “Western” than Italian, Russian and German “culture.” Buchanan’s blind hatred of people “different” from him is such that it is impossible for him to recognize that they have more in common than different.
What exactly is the world that Buchanan believes himself occupying? Buchanan in his paranoid vision believes that Barack Obama is engaged in “a long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square, diminish its presence in our public life, and reduce its role to that of just another religion.” Anyone with a modicum of brain activity should come to conclusion that Obama has not supported or opposed religion in any substantive way, which is his duty under the Constitution’s dictum of separation of church and state—i.e. not promoting one religion over another. What seems to be the real issue with “Christians” like Buchanan is that Obama has not done enough to dispel the on-going myth by many on the paranoid Right that he is not, in fact, a “Muslim.” And of course being a “Muslim” also means that he is an “enemy” of Anglo-America and its Christian “traditions.” Otherwise, Buchanan has absolutely no point whatever.
Buchanan’s principle concern, not surprisingly, is the “specter” of “his” country going over to the “barbarians”—that is to say anyone who doesn’t share his skin color. “The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty.” Buchanan considers “Mexicans” the gravest threat to “domestic tranquility,” despite the fact that it is the anti-immigrant fanatics who have completely ignored the symbiotic relationship that the U.S. has had with Mexican laborers for over a century and have themselves upset the “tranquility” by avoiding discussion of their own refusal to honestly discuss domestic failings, instead using the “Mexicans” as scapegoats. Buchanan fears that “Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally” the country will turn into an extension of Mexico. He muses “Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution…Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?” The only people “imperiling” the union are those who actively endorse discrimination, intolerance and division; these are all actively pursued by the Right, and are the actual cause of this “disunion.” The Right always talks about the need for “assimilation” on their terms, yet everything they say and do suggests that they fear and detest assimilation—because it implies that they must treat those not like themselves as equal partners. Buchanan himself clearly opposes this concept.
Like many of his stripe, Buchanan hypocritically intones the name of Martin Luther King and his “content of character” dictum. The problem is that he again is being, well, a hypocrite; after expressing fear of a non-white America (absurd on its face) and denigrating minorities at every opportunity, he has the absolute gall to criticize racial minorities for making whites aware of their own character flaws. After all, it isn’t racial minorities who have acceptance issues; it is whites who are the ones who have a difficult time with this. Interestingly, Buchanan criticizes the minority journalist organizations for demanding higher representation in the field: “Jim Crow is back. Only the color of the beneficiaries and the color of the victims have been reversed.” What Buchanan and his self-serving ilk are really saying is that they want the white perspective to completely control the message, which of course it has done effectively in regard to the immigration issue—and they want to keep it that way. For Buchanan it is perhaps a bit more personal; he finds it almost impossible to function in an environment where he is forced to converse on equal terms with people he feels “superior” to and has nothing but contempt for their right to call him out on his small-minded bigotry. Buchanan, not surprisingly, derides non-racist whites as fools who will “discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.” Buchanan’s hypocrisy reaches an even more pungent stench when he derides what he calls the “diversity cult”; once more, while he attacks minorities for allegedly not desiring “assimilation,” he fears assimilation and desires to impede it in the hopes to head-off a non-white “takeover.” He is, of course, wrong in his belief that in some distant future minorities will control the course of the country; corporate barons are in de facto control of political discourse now, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.
Buchanan also opined in his execrable tome that the founding fathers did not envision a country where the Constitution and the Bill of Rights applied to every man and woman in this country, regardless of social or economic status. The founding fathers were still living in a time when social mobility was limited to privileged “elites,” where prejudice against “inferiors”—to include non-Anglo Europeans—based largely upon ignorance and chauvinism. We live a different world today, where opportunity has expanded beyond the domain of white men, and the concept of equality has expanded in like fashion. But Buchanan prefers to place himself in a time and place where ignorance and chauvinism is the accepted practice. Even more despicably, what Buchanan chooses not to understand is that the civil rights laws of the 1960s did not impose “new” rights alien to the Constitution; what they did was force states which chose to ignore or deliberately deny the “inalienable rights” of certain groups to respect those rights.
Buchanan is also concerned about crime, mainly minority crime. To help him understand it, he relies on “rational” racists like Heather MacDonald to bolster his idea that minorities are sending this country to a fiery hell. Many commentators seemed to be mesmerized by MacDonald’s data in justifying her fixation on alleged minority criminality. But when one examines New York City crime statistics that are quoted, we find a few interesting tidbits that do not completely follow MacDonald's line. For example, NYPD crime statistical reports show that the arrest rates of Latinos in every crime category had up to a 20 percent higher arrest rate than their actual percentage as crime perpetrators in 2010--meaning that Latinos were targeted more by the police. Latino crime rates overall in fact are no higher than their percentage of the population; while Latinos accounted for 23 percent of shooting suspects, this was actually less than their percentage of the population (27 percent). Although blacks and Latinos account for 90 percent of homicide suspects, they also account for 90 percent of homicide victims—which hardly justifies white fear of being victims. It is useful to note that 54 percent of the population of NYC is black and Latino--which might suggest that this is not as statistically significant if given other factors, such as the median income of blacks in NYC being 60 percent that of whites, while that median income of Latinos is 55 percent that of whites. It might also be suggested that the fact that blacks in NYC have three times the (official) unemployment rate of whites, while Latinos have 2 ½ times the rate currently has fostered some variety of social dysfunction.
The NYPD has also recently been under fire for fudging crime statistics; if this benefited white crime reporting—thus creating an even larger “gap”—it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. MacDonald (who is frequently used as an “expert” by Fox News and CNN), has also suggested that the disproportionate arrest, conviction and incarceration rates of blacks for drug crimes despite similar usage rates by whites is due to “a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them.” In 2001, the Sentencing Project concluded that in regard to drug offenses, black youths were 48 times more likely a than white youths to be imprisoned—despite drug use proportionate with their percentage of the population. MacDonald also promotes the myth of illegal immigrants and violent crime, giving Buchanan the cover to announce “Those promoting open borders and unchecked immigration rate cheap scab labor and ethnic votes over the daily threats of migrant rapists, murderers, child molesters and terrorists.”
One solution to the race “problem” as Buchanan envisions it is for the Republican Party to engage in a strategy to position itself as the “white party.” Of course, many people think it already is, but what Buchanan is talking about is ALL white people, as a "counterbalance" against the "colored" menace that aims rob and plunder once they are allowed to seize power. This is just another example of the hypocrisy of whites who accuse minorities of not wanting to be “American.” People like Buchanan do not regard racial minorities as “real” Americans, but interlopers that must be crushed: “Why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?”
Not everyone in this country, of course, is the "progeny" of the original colonists--and that includes most white Americans. Charles Hirschman, a professor at the University of Washington, observed that since the vast majority of Americans are descended from immigrants who came to the country after the 1800s, “Most Americans have acquired a sense of historical continuity from America’s founding, but this is primarily the result of socialization and education, not descent.” This begs the question as to why it is necessary for Buchanan to make distinctions about who is or isn’t “American” simply based on race. The reason, of course, is that Buchanan is less “American” than he is your typical hooded night-rider. This country prided itself on being a “melting pot”; Buchanan considers this an “audacious experiment” that wishes to “transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth.” Isn’t that what makes this country the greatest on Earth? Not according to this white supremacist: “They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.” To force whites to live by the creeds they allegedly hold so dear only leads to white anger as a “legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people.” This is neo-Nazi propaganda that has no basis in reality, but it feeds into the idea of white “privilege.”
Buchanan, incredibly, finds segregation an “American” institution: “Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.” What??? What Buchanan is really saying is that blacks lived off to the side, not getting in the way of whites occupying every role in the national life. There was no “sharing” of the vital life of the nation, and whites didn’t treat blacks (or anyone else not white) as “part” of “one” nation; they were merely groups to be controlled and marginalized.
Buchanan has other fascinating commentary on his resume, including anti-Semitism. The reality is that Buchanan and others like him are not “Americans” or "patriots," and do not believe in the universality, tolerance and belief in the individual this country stands for. Buchanan believes that no one but white Americans have any “right” to enjoy the “privileges” that this country offers solely on the fact that the founders were white. In effect he does not grant anyone who is not white a shared humanity, as if they are of a different species—even a subhuman species. This is why Buchanan’s time has long been up; why the mainstream media continues to regard him with any credibility is a continuing mystery.
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