I received a catalogue in the mail from
some bookseller specializing in new, hard to sell tomes at a fraction of their
original list price. One of them was Pat
Buchanan’s latest racial paranoia treatise, Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? He probably doesn’t realize
this, but people have been asking the same thing for as long as this country
has been in existence (Benjamin Franklin thought German immigrants were an
“alien” race with an “alien” culture).
On his various television commentating appearances, Buchanan has been
able to disguise his racist impulses rather well, although I remember one
incident where he left his fellow panelists in shocked silence when he blurted
out “Hispanics are out to destroy America,” completely out of context with what
was being discussed. This Klan-style
bigot’s acceptance in the mainstream media is such that even “liberal” radio
personality Stephanie Miller refers to him as her “daddy.”
The description provided for the aforementioned book is as
follows:
Bemoaning a
multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has
no successful precedent in history, Buchanan
traces the disintegration of America in three historic changes:
America’s loss of her cradle faith, the moral, social, and cultural collapse
that has followed from that loss, and the slow death spiral of the people who
created and ruled the nation.
Publisher’s price: $27.99. Fire sale price: $6.99, although
you probably can get this worthless trash for pennies on Amazon.
It is clear that all the “multis” share a common racist
theme that misplaces blame. We still live in a racist society that deliberately
limits the opportunities of racial minorities to advance. The state of
Washington’s I-200 initiative was just one of example of this. We still live in
a society where appearance is closely equated with intelligence and
employability. We still live in an insular society where apparently being
multilingual is considered threatening to American “exceptionalism.”
We live in a society where simply being “different” from the
Anglo-Saxon/Nordic majority is equated with having different—and
threatening—cultural values. For example, Latino immigrants are accused of
importing an “alien” and menacing “culture.” Yet any close examination of this
claim is undercut by the fact that their “culture” is based on the same Western
European principles as the United States is, with only minor exceptions that
are essentially meaningless in context.
One of the most laughable aspects of Buchanan’s
philosophical meandering is that white hegemony in this country is under
“threat.” There has never been more Caucasians in this country than there is
now, although it is true that their percent of the population has decreased.
They will still constitute the economic and social “elite.” They will still
keep most of the best jobs for themselves. They will not be prevented from
“solving” the problems of resources and environmental degradation that they are
primarily responsible for in this country. They must decide if hoarding all
wealth for themselves is conducive to the health and wellbeing of the nation in
the long run.
And even if somehow whites became the voting minority—a
perhaps “optimistic” assumption—the only thing that would cause the kind of
block voting among all minority groups that one sees among black voters is if
whites are seen to be entrenching in an apartheid-style economic and social
unit. Whether the country survives or not depends on everyone in this country
having the same vision of what this country means. Whites--and I do include white women, who despite their protestations and claims of victimization are just as racist as white men--must choose between
being having an expansive or insular vision for the country. So far, the
generality has provided little indication of the former.
People like Buchanan are dangerous because all they see are
threats to white hegemony. They view themselves as a Nazi-style “master race”
that is defiled by the presence of non-whites. They fear that this country will
fall into Third World territory, without seeking ways to avoid that, short of
metaphorical genocide of non-white groups. Non-whites want to be productive
members of a country they view as just as much theirs as whites do. But whites (in
general, if not always in the particular) have created the atmosphere in which
the racial “outsider” exists, if not necessarily the physical conditions in
which they exist. Such an insular vision of the country will be the cause of
any future “collapse,” which is still highly unlikely in the foreseeable
future, save in the eyes of right-wing extremists who are driven mad by any
sign of “color” in the pallid landscape.
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