Posted under Foreign affairs & Free Trade & Immigration & Political Correctness
Book review of Patrick J. Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
The Mob vs. the Statesman
Tom Piatak, Chronicles Magazine, Oct. 31, 2011
For two decades now, Pat Buchanan has been warning us of the dangers our country faces. When he first started sounding the alarm, at the end of the Cold War, those dangers were hard to perceive. Now, they are hard to ignore. Pointless wars in the Mideast have resulted in thousands of American casualties and the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. Our trade policies have led to the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and 50,000 factories and an increasing dependence on foreign nations, which both provide us with goods we no longer make and own our debt. Uncontrolled immigration has driven down wages and driven Americans out of the job market in some areas and is poised to radically transform the country. The great American middle class is reeling, in part because of the downward pressure on wages caused by free trade and mass immigration. Unregulated finance has brought the nation to the brink of economic ruin, and the loss of a common faith and common culture threatens our national unity. All the while, the federal government has continued to grow and grow, constantly assuming duties it does not have while failing to exercise those it does. Pat Buchanan was called many names for raising these issues, but he has been right and his critics have been wrong.
[Continue reading at Chronicles.]
Aaron on 02 Nov 2011 at 7:06 pm #
Some of Piatak’s quotations from TPM were misleading. Piatak sometimes quoted only parts of TPM’s own quotes from the book to make it look as if TPM were complaining about the facts, when actually TPM also quoted Buchanan’s rhetoric along with his facts. (I don’t know if you could parse that sentence, but hopefully you get the idea.) And of course the conclusions TPM objected to were “drawn from and supported by facts.” Everybody’s conclusions are drawn from and supported by facts.
And Buchanan’s rhetoric is often way over the top. I agree with him on every position that TPM quoted him on, but his rhetoric makes me wince. I think if he said some of the same things without all the hyperbole, he’d get a more receptive hearing. Just purely in terms of the writing itself, Buchanan is one of the worst political writers on the paleo right. I consider myself a Buchananite, but as I’ve said before, it’s a misfortune that Buchananism was represented by Pat Buchanan.
But check out those comments at TPM! It’s a reminder of how the liberals and the left view our own positions. For these people, someone like David Brooks is an ultra-reactionary right-winger. Positions like ours are just off the map. Then again, these people aren’t Buchanan’s audience. His audience is mainstream conservatives and Republicans, and I’m hopeful he might convince some of them. If elements of Buchanan’s program do get implemented, it won’t be by paleoconservatives, it’ll be by mainstream Republicans and maybe even Democrats.