James Edwards Interviews Pat Buchanan on the Death of the West

What follows is a transcript of an interview conducted by talk radio host James Edwards with Patrick J. Buchanan upon the initial release of his book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?  We revisit this conversation because the year in question has now arrived, and many of the concerns raised during the discussion still remain. This transcript has never before appeared online and has been edited for brevity.

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James Edwards: Pat, thanks for being back with me again, and congratulations on the early success of your latest title. Writing a book is like printing money. Everybody loves you!

Patrick J. Buchanan: No, James. They give me an advance and then I go out and try to sell as many as I can to help the publisher get it back.

Edwards: I saw someone buying it at Target last night, of all places. Maybe you should run for president.

Buchanan: Been there, done that!

Edwards: Well, let’s jump right into the thick of it. Do we currently have front-row seats to the end of Western Civilization and culture as we know it?

Buchanan: I believe the answer is yes, from a variety of standpoints. In one chapter, I discuss the “Demographic Winter” of the West. Currently, no Western country has a birth rate among its native-born population that is sufficient for it to sustain itself in any recognizable form by the end of this century.

It is my argument that when Christianity, which was the faith that created the West, when the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and then the people die. And I think that’s true down through history. And we certainly see that in Europe, for example, which is well advanced ahead of us, where something like one in ten people go to church in Great Britain, I believe. More people attend Muslim mosques on holy days of the week than go to Anglican churches.

So, I think the West was created by this great religion, and that created the magnificent culture of the Middle Ages, out of which came all these great countries, which really dominated the world through the twentieth century, with empires basically dominating every country on earth almost, except for Japan. And now look at where they are. I think you see a civilization basically in retreat. As Toynbee said, “Civilizations die by suicide, not by murder.”

Edwards: I’m glad you brought up our faith in your book. It is dying in America and that precedes the death of a nation. In Russia, however, there seems to be at least somewhat of a revival of Christianity. I have read reports that the Russian government has even tried to encourage its citizens to have more children. Is Russia coming to its senses in a way that we in the West are not?

Buchanan: Well, I think the Russians went through hell for 70 years under Bolshevism.  They were a deeply religious and patriotic people who were Orthodox Christians. And when Lenin and Stalin came in, the church was literally murdered. I was over there in 1971, I guess, and we went down to this museum of Atheism in Leningrad, which was a gigantic cathedral. They turned it into that, and everything had been emptied out.

So, they went through 70 years of hell. And it’s very true that when they were liberated from Bolshevism and Communism, many returned to the faith. But frankly, James, if you look at the numbers there, Russia’s current birthrate may lead to a loss of approximately 25 million people by 2050. I have the statistics in my book.

Suicide of a Superpower also deals with what’s happening in Russia and these other countries. They’ve already lost 8 million in the last two decades ever since they became free, and the women are not having children. I think the median death age of Russian men is now something like 60. It has not only to do with the lack of births but apparently, the health system is terrible. There’s alcoholism. I think the average woman has seven abortions. I’ve had that in an earlier book.

Edwards: I once said during an appearance on CNN that you can’t have a first-world nation with a third-world population. Moving on to another aspect of your excellent new book, which I have a review copy of right here on my desk, you write that “White America is an endangered species.”  Pat, what is America going to look like if Whites go extinct?

Buchanan: I don’t think Whites are going to go extinct — I mean, certainly not in the near future.  But what is happening, as you see in California, is that Americans of European descent are already a minority, and that is true in Texas, and it is true, I believe, in New Mexico and Hawaii.  And in this decade, I think six more states will pass the tipping point where Whites become a minority. I think the best way to understand what America will look like is to look at California today. The Hispanic population will be immense, 135,000,000, according to the Census Bureau of Statistics.

California was once the Golden Land. Everybody went there. It was paradise. The soldiers who went out to the Pacific came home and then made their homes there.

But what is happening out there, James, is that the bond rating is the lowest in the country. The taxes are enormously heavy on the well-to-do and the successful, and these folks are leaving the state while one-third of poor, illegal immigrants head for California. You’ve got a Black/brown war of the underclass going on in Los Angeles, according to Sheriff Lee Baca, in the gangs and in the prisons. The welfare state is bankrupting California, and they have some of the highest taxes in the nation.

So, I think this is what the country is going to look like. And I quote the famous Harvard sociologist, Robert Putnam. He did a study of all the major cities of the United States and some others throughout the world. He found that social capital, that disposition of people to work together and live together and join together for common causes and good causes and political and social causes, is at its lowest in the city of Los Angeles.  He said he had never seen social capital so low anywhere and that diversity brings about people moving into their own enclaves, segregating themselves, separating themselves, and really cooperating in very little.

Edwards: Pat, we were talking about the demographic decline of European stock around the world and here in America. As you know, every minority group in this country has numerous organizations and representatives seeking to protect and advance their unique group interests. I find that to be quite natural and healthy, and, of course, it’s not only allowed when they do it; it is encouraged and applauded.  You discuss this tribalism in Suicide of a Superpower. Clearly, tribalism has empowered minorities in America and Europe. What happened to the tribal instincts of European Americans?

Buchanan: Frankly, it’s almost impermissible for folks of European descent to organize around their race. But you have a point, and in the book, I do talk about the Black caucus in Congress, which organizes and operates on Capitol Hill on government property, and it does not admit White members and several Whites who’ve tried to get in — Jonathan Bingham, I believe, and Pete Stark — have been denied admission because they were not African American.  And then there was your congressman in Memphis, they basically slammed the door in Steve Cohen’s face.

Edwards: It is one of the greatest hypocrisies that exists. African Americans voted 95 plus percent for Barack Obama, and people just shrug and say, “Well, of course they did. Why wouldn’t they?”  You have the Black congressional caucus, as you just mentioned. You have organizations like the NAACP. However, if White people express similar ethnocentric tendencies, they face harsh denunciations and condemnation.

Buchanan: That’s right. The African American community voted 95 to 4, which is 24 to 1, for Barack Obama, which is astounding.  Even prominent Republicans like General Powell turned against his fellow Vietnam vet to vote for Obama and Powell admitted that race had something to do with it, even though Obama ran denouncing the war that Powell sold to the country.

But you know, 85 percent of White folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama voted against Obama. There is this fellow for the New Yorker who wrote that he sees a new people emerging in the White community and that people who are constantly under attack and discriminated against by affirmative action will eventually unite around what it is that is being attacked and what they have in their own identity.

And frankly, this is something that somewhat concerns me. If you have no ethno-national poor in a country, such as they didn’t have in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, as soon as they lifted off that repression, those things flew apart into something like 24 or 25 countries, whereas Poland stayed together, and Germany reunited on ethnic grounds.

And so, I feel that this power of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism is really the coming force in the world and you can see these things tearing countries apart.

Edwards: This is a follow-up to my previous question. It seems to me that many White politicians in Washington often work against their own group interests, which stands in stark contrast to the actions of their minority counterparts. Your chapter titled “The Diversity Cult,” begs me to ask this question: Why do so many Whites remain entranced by diversity when the social and cultural effects of diversity are almost entirely negative for themselves and their children and grandchildren?

Buchanan: I’ve been asked by people why it won’t be a really good thing when Whites become a minority nationwide. I mean, real problems are attendant to this.

If you go with the average American, let’s take the fellow who does the anti-affirmative action and civil rights initiative things. He conducted those ballot initiatives that abolished affirmative action in Michigan by referendum, in California by referendum, and in Washington by referendum, in three states that normally vote Democratic.

So, there is a growing majority of American people, even among the young, who feel that racial preferences and affirmative action are simply unjust. There’s a great belief that everybody should have a shot at getting on the team or getting in the band, or whatever. But the prize should go to those who are the best and work the hardest. And the idea that people should be discriminated against because of the color of their skin or where their ancestors come from, I think they find that profoundly offensive.

I think the further we go down the road with this affirmative action, especially now when you have women who qualify for affirmative action, Hispanics do, although there was no slavery of Hispanics. African Americans do. Then you’ve got 30 percent of the country, White males, who are really the ones who are the victims of affirmative action, not the beneficiaries. White males are 30 percent of the country, but they’re 75 percent of the dead and wounded coming back from Afghanistan. That’s not a formula for social peace.

Edwards: No, it’s not. But if these disenfranchised White males tried to come together politically to assert themselves, they would be shouted down as racists, supremacists, and so on and so forth.

Buchanan: Well, you know Shelby Steele wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal several years ago.  He’s an African American intellectual and scholar. And he said this type of racial identity politics is simply denied to Whites. I don’t know if he was saying this was a good thing or not. But clearly, if this type of organization took place it would be denounced. But I remember several years ago they had a meeting over in Leesburg of the Asian American caucus, the African American caucus, and the Hispanic caucus to decide how they can get more benefits out of the Congress for their own communities.  And you would say, “Wait a minute. At whose expense are these going to come?” I think, regrettably, that’s where America is headed.

Edwards: Let’s talk about the end game. Where do all the liberal, multi-racial, multi-cultural utopian fantasies that are destroying American pride and prosperity end?  You have written that we don’t share the same heroes, faith, or even the same language anymore.

Buchanan: Well, this is it. What are the basics of a nation?  It is a common language, common borders, a common faith, moral consensus, and moral code. Certainly, a common history, heroes, holidays, and literature are things that make up the culture. But you’re right. When I grew up in Washington DC, even though we were a segregated town, Blacks and Whites shared a lot of those things in common, and now we have very little in common that we share. And in addition to that, our politics and ideology are dividing us. If all these things go and we no longer have something like the Cold War to unite us where we could all stand together against Communism, then what do we have left?

Edwards: So where are we twenty years from now?

Buchanan: James, what I believe is that the United States will be a legal and political entity in 2041 when there is no majority anymore, and we’re all minorities. But I’m afraid the things that hold us together seem to be weakening, and the centrifugal force that is pulling us apart, as Lee Hamilton said, is strengthening. I think we will be a legal nation, but I don’t think we will be one nation under God, indivisible, and one people again. We will be a Balkanized country, sort of a tower of Babel, and we will be at war with each other over our differences in culture, language, politics, ideology, and religion.

We already see it happening now. I mean, the atmosphere, especially up here in Washington, is just poisonous. And I hear the term “racist” thrown out there. It’s a constant on cable television these days. Just disagreeing with somebody and calling them a racist. Those were horrendous terms 50 years ago, even when you had the civil rights struggle going on.

Edwards: I love God. I love my family, Pat. I want to see our destiny and traditional cultural heritage reclaimed for the benefit of all Americans. I don’t want that to come at the expense of anyone, but I also don’t want to be forced to trade down.

Buchanan: James, my hope is certainly that we’re going to be free to do that. But what I think is going to happen is the folks who believe as you do are going to basically, I think, retreat into enclaves of their own kind.

You know, all over the world, as I write in the chapter, “The Triumph of Tribalism,” ethnonationalism, and religious beliefs are driving peoples to separate from each other and to set up their own small nation-states where their own religion is predominant, and their own culture is predominant, and they themselves rule to the exclusion of all others.

Arthur Schlesinger and Pat Moynihan, both of whom I knew and who came to be my friends, wrote in the 1990s that these are the forces that will shape the future. It will not be Democracy versus Communism, Democracy versus Fascism, or ideology at all.  But these fundamental forces.

Edwards: We know a lot of the problems, but what can we do?  I don’t think it’s ever going to be 1950 again, though that certainly looks like an oasis by comparison.

Buchanan: You were born in 1980. I go back a long way before that. But you know, I’ve talked about the 1960s transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy. And the 1950s were really a wonderful time in America. I thought we were one people. We had won the World War. We were united. Ike was in charge. We were challenging the Soviet Union. The young president was coming in. He was going to the moon. And you know, I just don’t know if we’re ever going to be anything like that again. I think we are going to be utterly different than that in the future.

And I saw a review of my book that quoted Russell Kirk asking what a conservative’s duty is. And Kirk had said it is to preserve a particular people in a particular place at a particular time. And I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do with little success, and we have to look at things realistically. We can preserve this, but it’s not going to be dominant in the country anymore as it was. It’s not going to be the view of all. It will be the view of some, and others will have ideas, beliefs, and cultures that are in utter conflict.

And so, I see, as I said, sort of a Balkanization and a separation of peoples coming in this country over these most fundamental beliefs.

When not interviewing newsmakers, James Edwards has often found himself in the spotlight as a commentator, including many national television appearances. Over the past 20 years, his radio work has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide. Media Matters has listed Edwards as a “right-wing media fixture” and Hillary Clinton personally named him as an “extremist” who would shape our country. For more information, please visit www.thepoliticalcesspool.org.