Buchanan's Bestseller, Post-9/11

Most men would have hibernated a bit after an exhausting and unsuccessful effort to establish a populist conservative party. Pat Buchanan wrote an important and surprising bestseller.

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization has been in bookstores for about a month. Guaranteed hostility from both conservative and liberal establishments, the work's prospects hardly seemed propitious. Two of its major themes?a call to resist the anti-Western cultural assaults waged under the banners of diversity and multiculturalism, and pessimism over the prospect of effectively assimilating a large and growing stream of new immigrants?had generated little traction in Buchanan's last presidential campaign. Why should they now?

And yet something in the post-9/11 culture?a new sense of seriousness and vulnerability perhaps?served to create an opening for a conservative argument grounded in something deeper than talk about tax cuts, school vouchers and the right to invest one's Social Security pension money in the stock market.

The work's ominous title underscores a web of facts long known by political demographers and ethnic activists of various hues, which had not yet resonated in the larger population: without a sharp reversal in the trend toward sinking birth rates, the peoples of the West will approach marginal demographic status in a century or so. The average fertility rate in Europe has fallen to 1.4 births per woman, a figure that means that Europe's population (barring, say, a massive migration from the Islamic world and Africa, which would obviously totally transform the civilization) will decline from its present 728 million to 207 million by the end of the next century. As Buchanan pungently notes, "The cradle of Western civilization will become its grave." Because fewer births translate into an older population, if NATO still exists, it will be "defending a vast Leisure World."

Rising affluence and the advent of the social welfare state have reduced dependence on the family for economic security, but when families disappear the cultural glue they provide goes with them. Buchanan contrasts the European continent's demographic death march with Islam, where the population is exploding. There, nations have failed politically and technologically, yet "retain something that the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, culture, family and faith."

While Europe steers toward Leisure World, the United States hurtles toward a contentious and Balkanized future. As the traditional white majority consigns itself to minority status (expected to occur around 2050) the clash of ethnic agendas looms as an expanding backdrop to virtually every social and political question. How dire this will be depends on America's success at assimilating large new immigrations from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Results heretofore have been mixed, but are beginning to go badly. In any event, it is clear that the cultural patterns that most Americans alive today grew up with will be gone before long.

While the demographic projections are unimpeachable, Buchanan gives them a fresh twist by marrying them to their root, with a coruscating analysis of the secular, individualistic and tragically selfish new cultural norms that underlie the West's plunging birthrates. He holds up for examination the words of one young female advertising executive?"thanking God" she has no children to disrupt her sleep and Saturday morning brunch plans. And he lays out a series of pro-natalist and pro-family social policies, which would go far to attenuate the terminal malady he diagnoses.

Despite few favorable reviews (ritual denunciation of Buchanan may now be mandated as a condition of employment in most of the conservative establishment's house organs?though Thomas Sowell in his syndicated column, Tony Blankley in The Washington Times and John Zmirak in David Horowitz's webzine frontpagemag.com have been notable exceptions), the book has made its way astonishingly well, fueled by word of mouth and the author's tv appearances. Now in its fourth printing, it broke onto The New York Times bestseller list three weeks ago, where it resides at number 5. To read the Times' supposedly neutral capsule summary of the work is to witness as much repressed loathing as any paper can likely muster into one sentence.

The Buchanan phenomenon of breaking though elite hostility to achieve popular success has some rough parallel to the case of Enoch Powell, the top-ranking Tory politician who gave a prescient warning about immigration in 1968 and was immediately declared persona non grata by his party's leadership?while thousands of British workers rallied to his banner. Thirty years later, as race riots wrack England's cities and local Muslim clerics back fatwahs against authors they don't care for, there is now grudging recognition among that same British establishment that Powell, who died three years ago, had actually been right after all. Neither he nor Buchanan would find any consolation about being lonely and correct in forecasting the demise of their own cultures.