Pat Buchanan's latest book, "Suicide of a Superpower,"
raises the question whether America will survive to 2025. The question might
strike some readers as unduly pessimistic and others as optimistic. It is
unclear whether the US, as we have known it, will survive its next presidential
election.
Consider the candidates. Liberal law professor
Jonathan Turley, who was likely to have been an early Obama supporter, now
wonders if Obama is "the most disastrous president in our history." Despite
Obama's failure, the Republicans can't come up with anyone any better. One
Republican candidate admires Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman who
gave us financial deregulation and the financial crisis. Another is ready for a
preemptive strike on Iran. Yet another thinks the Soviet Union is a grave threat
to the United States. None of these clueless dopes are capable of presiding over
a government.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the
"superpower" is over-extended financially and militarily. The US is currently
involved in six conflicts with Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Pakistan on the waiting
list for full fledged military attacks and perhaps invasions. Russia is being
encircled with missile bases, and war plans are being drawn up for
China.
Where is the money going to come from when the
country's debt is bursting at the seams, the economy is in decline, and
unemployment on the rise?
Washington thinks that the money can simply be
printed. However, enough has already been printed that the rest of the world is
already suspicious of the dollar and its role as reserve currency.
As John Williams has said, the world could begin
dumping dollar assets at any time.
I don't think we can dismiss Buchanan's concern as
pessimistic.
Buchanan documents his concern across a wide front. For example, the combination of mass immigration and its consequent demographics,
together with the "diversity cult," means the end of "white America" and the
transformation of what once was the dominant population into a disadvantaged
underclass.
Buchanan cites a Wall Street Journal article by Ron
Unz published 12 years ago. Unz found that white American gentiles who would be
considered Christian are dramatically under-represented in America's elite
universities, which provide the elites who dominate government, business, and
the professions.
Unz reported that white Americans who comprised 70%
of the US population made up only 25% of Harvard's enrollment and that the
composition of the student bodies at Yale Princeton Columbia, Berkeley, and
Stanford was much the same.
Asians who comprised 3% of the US population
comprised one-fifth of Harvard's enrollment, and Jews, who comprised 2.5% of the
population comprised between one-fourth and one-third of Harvard's student body.
As Buchanan puts it, the country's native-born
majority has relegated its own progeny to the trash bin of history.
Buchanan doesn't address the question whether the
rest of the world will miss white America. Considering the endless wars and
astounding hypocrisy and immorality associated with white America since the
collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago, the world is likely to cheer when
power slips from the hands of what Leonard Jeffries termed the "ice people,"
that is, people without souls or feelings for others. Americans are so wrapped
up in the
myth of their "exceptionalism" that they are oblivious to the world's
opinion. American soft power, once a foundation of US influence, has been squandered,
another reason the "superpower" status is crumbling.
Financial deregulation and the consequent financial
crisis, collapse of the real estate market, and evictions of millions of
Americans from their homes have greatly dimmed America's economic prospects.
However, as Buchanan points out, the offshoring of US jobs and industry under
the guise of "free trade" has damaged the middle class, halted the growth in
consumer purchasing power and left many college graduates without
careers.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the
Bush/Cheney years, America lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. During
this decade, Michigan lost 48% of its manufacturing jobs, New Jersey lost 39%,
and New York and Ohio lost 38%.
During this decade, the US incurred trade deficits
totaling $6.2 trillion, of which $3.8 trillion is in manufactured goods. In
other words, imports of manufactured goods are a larger cause of the trade
deficit than oil imports. Early in the decade the US lost its trade surplus in
advanced technology products. In recent years the US has run up $300 billion in
trade deficits in advanced technology products with China alone. As Macy Block's
site, Economy in Crisis, documents, foreigners have used their huge dollar
earnings to buy up American companies, with the consequence that foreign
earnings on US investments now exceed US earnings abroad, thus worsening the
current account deficit.
Although Buchanan makes many points, this is not his
best book. He becomes lost in old arguments that no longer make sense, such as
the claim that the poor vote away the property of the rich, and he ignores the
destruction of the US Constitution in the name of "the war on terror," which has
transformed the US into a police state.
Conservatives are stuck in the canard that democracy
is a tool used by the poor to provide themselves with benefits at the expense of
the rich. Buchanan cites statistics of those on welfare, food stamps, Medicaid,
and so on as evidence that the rich are being plundered. Yet, the facts are the
opposite. The distribution of income has completely reversed since the
1960s.
In the 1960s, the top 1 percent received 11% of the
income gains, and the bottom 90% received 65%, leaving 24% of income gains for the 9% of richest Americans just below the top 1%. In the first decade of the 21st century, these figures have reversed. The top 1% receive 65% of the income gains and the bottom 90% receive 12%, leaving 23% for
those rich Americans in the 91-99 percentile.
If recent history (Yugoslavia, Soviet Empire) is a
guide, Buchanan is probably correct that a country whose population consists of
diverse ethnic and racial groups is less likely to share a common interest and
enjoy political stability. However real this threat, it is not comparable to
the threat to American identity of a destroyed Constitution.
The Bush/Cheney/Obama regimes have shredded the
constitutional protections that gave American citizens their liberty. By
dictate alone, the executive branch has acquired the power, prohibited by the
Constitution, to incarcerate citizens indefinitely without presenting evidence
and obtaining conviction. According to the US government, a secret executive
branch panel now exists that has acquired from somewhere the unaccountable power
to put citizens on a list to be assassinated without due process of law merely
on the basis of an unproven government assertion. How does this differ from
Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany?
The transformation of the US into a police state has
been achieved quickly and with scant protest. Congress and the courts are
silent. The media is silent, as are the law schools and bar associations. Out of
535 US Senators and Representatives, only Ron Paul has protested the destruction
of liberty.
Buchanan is concerned that America might not survive
until 2025. Instead, shouldn't we be concerned that the American police state
could last that long? Shouldn't we be worried that the police state will
survive yet another presidential election, or even one more day?