Pat Buchanan wonders: “Will America survive to 2025?”

Posted by D.E. Paine on Friday, October 14, 2011 · Leave a Comment

“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.” –Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan warns that the end of the United States of America is at hand, in a 400-plus page book titled Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?.

Judging from an exclusive posted at Drudge Report, Buchanan believes that it’s not a matter of “if,” but simply a matter of when. Drudge writes that “the book reads as if its been written to be left behind in the ruins, only to be found by a future civilization.” To put it lightly, Buchanan is feeling less-than-optimistic about the future of America.

Loss Of Faith

The preface, viewable via Amazon, reads: “When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression.” No doubt there’s not much faith today in the U.S. as an institution. One way to gauge faith the United States is to look at the faith citizens have in the governing body.

In February of 2010, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey found that 56% of people questioned said they “think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”

September 26, 2011, Gallup released similar findings in their own poll. In the release, titled Americans Express Historic Negativity Toward the U.S. Government, they found that “49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” They immediately add that in 2003, “less than a third (30%) believed this.”

Change is Scary

Buchanan spends 10 chapters detailing what, in his opinion, are problems contributing to the death of America. Among the things he takes issue with: diversity at the expense of unity, equality at the expense of freedom, and the weakening of once robust religious institutions — notably the Catholic Church in America. (On Catholicism, he writes: “How can Notre Dame credibly teach that all innocent life is sacred, and then honor a president committed to ensuring that a woman’s right to end the life of her innocent child remains sacrosanct?”)

Politically, Buchanan is a staunch conservative who’s become almost as critical of the Republican Party as he is of the Democrat Party. He is said to pull no punches in this book; and it’s going to gain some criticism, with chapters detailing “the end of white America,” and “the end of Christian America.”

While I don’t believe he’s racist, and I am sure (though I haven’t read the book) that his observations are sound; I do believe that Pat Buchanan is frightened for our future. I know that change is damn scary. And we are clearly in the midst of some major social and political change — it’s impacting the West with all the noise and bombastic fury of a menstruating Rosanne Barr.

What I find most interesting is that Pat Buchanan seems to be joining a steadily growing list patriotic people and intelligence groups predicting the end of America. Although, what sets Buchanan apart from most other “America is doomed” predictors is that Buchanan takes a cultural approach.

Paul Craig Roberts, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, expressed worry that America is “dissolving” in an essay written in July 2010. In September of last year, Professor Glenn Hubbard, who served as chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, wrote of his concern that the U.S. had reached an economic “tipping point.”

Even more interesting, the year 2025 comes up pretty often in warnings and predictions. ‘Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed,’ produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in late 2008, predicted the end of U.S. dominance. In December of 2010, Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also wrote about an “American collapse,” and agreed that such a collapse would occur by 2025.

Change is necessary.

While not all things change for the better, change is necessary. And I am optimistic enough to believe that life and liberty will always win out in the end.

Here are my personal thoughts on this. Up until immigrants came over from Ireland and eastern European countries, Catholics were in the minority in the United States. So did that period mark the “end of protestant America?” And when “democracy” stopped being a dirty word shortly after 1900, it was surely the “end of republican America.” …yet America is still here.

This is not the same America as it was in 1900. And the America of 1900 wasn’t the same as 1776. Gosh, I am not the same person I was a decade ago; or even yesterday.

Maybe Western civilization can be best defined by its ability to embrace change. The West, as a whole, has gone through more demographic, cultural, and technological change in the past 500 years than can be covered in a single book. And it’s seen several different kinds of governments come and go — some of them simply sucked, some were murderous regimes, and some served a good purpose at one time and then became obsolete. (I think our current government might fit that last description.)

While change is scary, it’s also a very good thing. Maybe a good example of a country that tended to resist change is soviet-era Russia. I am suddenly reminded of a rather snarky obituary that ran in The Economist when Leonoid Brezhnev died. They wrote that his death “was the only major innovation he ever introduced into Soviet political history. In life, he stood for the status quo — as firmly as a man can when he is in fact walking slowly backward on a conveyor belt that is slowly moving forward beneath his feet.”

(The only copy I could find of the hilarious obit at the moment is in a college textbook HERE. It’s at the bottom left.)

“Progressivism” can be damaging when people think that the agent of change and progress needs to be the State. Unlike the Market, the State doesn’t really produce anything, and it doesn’t offer much of a choice. It only levels demands, threatens to use violence, and often follows through on those threats.

But conservatism can be crippling when it’s focused on a romantic ideal of the past. It can make people too frightened to move forward. America is in the midst of a lot of change, and even a little chaos. I tend to think that times like these actually save a civilization from being like a man “walking slowly backward on a conveyor belt that is slowly moving forward beneath his feet.”

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below, especially if you think I am way off the mark.

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