In a recent column Buchanan urges us to consider what the U.S. will be like in less than forty years:
Perhaps the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight Eisenhower and JFK. Yet there are reasons to worry.There's much more at the link and very much more in his new book Suicide of a Superpower. Meanwhile, Republicrats party on as if it were all someone else's problem. Their insoucience reminds me of a story in Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah where Bork recounts watching the sordid spectacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings on television and going to a friend's office to lament that "Television is showing the end of Western civilization in living color." His friend replied, facetiously, that "Of course, it's coming to an end, but don't worry. It takes a long time, and in the meantime it's possible to live well."
First, the great American Melting Pot has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a multiculturalism that is failing in Europe.
Second, what we are attempting has no precedent in human history. We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.
We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.
What, then, will hold us together? A Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?
Consider the contrasts between the old and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the “Great Wave” from 1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.
In 1924, the United States declared a timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965, there has been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year.
Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.
The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050?
We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.
This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV channels and in our political discourse.
Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?
Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.
The world’s largest religion now, with 1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and militancy, even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria to Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.
Is it wise to bring millions more into our country at such a time? Will that advance national unity and social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the banlieues of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?
If Buchanan is right we have about forty years to live well.