Patrick J.

Buchanan The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. Social reproduction, freed of its Marxian connotations, is the process by which a society recruits its next generation of members. It has a demographic elementprovision of the organic human material through birth or immigrationand, no less important, a cultural and cognitive element acculturation of those entrants into responsible citizenship and their acquisition of the knowledge and skills needed for a productive life. In the contemporary argot, this is the hardware and software of generational succession. For political debate, the subject is almost too all-encompassing. Certainly it does not fit readily into American-style political campaigns, conducted in a largely vacant policy space dominated by a few themes that canny operatives engineer into salience. It would instead belong in the category described by a recent US president as the vision thing. Vision in this sense is a luxury left to a subset of fringe candidates, not serious contenders for office. In the 2000 US presidential race one such candidate illustrates the case: Patrick Buchanan, standing for the Reform Party. In electoral terms, Buchanan was conspicuously unsuccessful. The Reform Party had attracted 19 percent of the popular vote for its presidential candidate, Ross Perot, in 1992 and 8 percent in 1996; under Buchanan in 2000, it received less than 1 percent. But Buchanan's appraisal of American societal ills and his proposals for remedy, whatever can be said against them (which is much), did display a broad vision. In the year following the election Buchanan transformed his campaign rhetoric into the present book. Part jeremiad, part rant (but as rants go, an erudite rant), it nonetheless treats issues that matter and that were and are notably missing in mainstream political discourse in the United States. Not least, as the subtitle indicates, it bears on demographic change. Readers of this journal will not find any novelty in the sketching of demographic facts, on which Buchanan is well enough informed and even cites demographers (Borjas, Chamie, Eberstadt, Frey, Lesthaeghe, van de Kaa). Birth rates in Western countries are low, immigration rates high. In many of these countries populations are set either to wither away or, in the UN's loaded term, to be "replaced" by entrants from poor countries. But there are exceptions: principally, of course, the United States. US fertility, thus far keeping close to a two-child average, is nearly the highest among Western countries40 percent above the current European level. And far from withering, the US population, in the Census Bureau's medium forecast, will increase by more than 100 million by 2050. As in Europe, however, migration will play a major role in its generational succession, with migrants and their children making up a large proportion of the younger generation. This is the demographic fodder on which Buchanan ruminates, concerned both to set out the cultural consequences and to explain why the United States and other Western societies seem content to tolerate them. In the face of "the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of an anti-Western multiculturalism," what is at stake, he asserts, is no less than "the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself" (p.96). Both Europe and America face cultural transformations, "mass migrations from the Islamic world" in the first case, Hispanicization in the second. The pace and scale of the change works against assimilation: in prospect is a shift in national identities. For Europe, absent an implausible fertility revival, that is the only alternative to radical depopulation, to becoming a vast Leisure World (p.13). For the

United States, immigration at its current level, although often seen as an entrenched pattern, has no comparable demographic rationale. Buchanan's case against it is similar to the one argued in Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation. Brimelow was roundly excoriated in these pages by Aristide Zolberg (PDR 21(3), December 1995); but expressions of regret for what is being lost can also be drawn from such solidly establishment figures as George F. Kennan (Around the Cragged Hill) and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America). Why are societies willing to accept such transformations? Buchanan has an array of explanations. The birth rate decline he attributes to the spread of modern contraception and legal abortion, the economic security afforded by the welfare state, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the hedonism and sexual equality it brought, and the "collapse of the moral order"manifested, for example, in gay liberation. (The discussion of Clinton-era decay becomes a parade of the author's menagerie of btes noirs.) In an eccentric detour seeking to assign a deeper level of blame for all this, Buchanan propounds a whiggish theory of American cultural development in which leading roles in influencing the direction of change are given to the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt SchoolLukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcusewhose radical theories spread miasma-like across college campuses, infecting the 1960s generation and thereby many of today's political and academic leaders. Buchanan detects a partisan strategy in those who support high rates of immigrationone that has ensured a Democratic majority in California and presages one in Texas. "A rising tide of immigration naturally shifts politics and power to the Left, by increasing the demands on government" (p.138-9). Republicans are then given no choice but to compete for the same new voters, hence tipping policy still further in the direction of high migration. But also contributing to this demographic outcome are the economic interests of the Republican rightwhose ambition, in the author's view, has narrowed down to low taxes and strong defense and who put victory on the economic battlefield ahead of any social agenda. Thus low fertility and the social and cultural conditions that have given rise to it are of no momentpeople's childbearing decisions are anyway none of the government's business. Aggregate demographic recruitment matters for the economy, but not the balance between births and migrants. Migration, seemingly irrespective of skill levels, is deemed a contribution to national prosperity. (That many migrants do not have legal residency status is an affront, but a minor, bureaucratic one.) Advocacy of open borders might go too farespecially since newfound terrorist threats require more careful scrutiny of entrantsbut the prospect is not to be dismissed out of hand. Only slightly caricatured, this is the stance of the laissez-faire individualist, to be found on the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages and in upper ranks of the current Bush Administration. Buchanan, whose conservatism is social rather than economic, treats it contemptuously. It is elitist and blinkered: elitist because its supporters are the affluent classes who can retire behind the walls, actual or metaphorical, of their gated communities, with the financial means to escape social irritants; blinkered because it ignores the cultural implications of such a future. What then should be done? Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon Administration, is no policy novice but his program has not had to pass the tests of economic and political feasibility that would be required of a major party platform. His proposals call for restoring a "profamily, pro-child bias" (p.232) to national social policy and a rollback in immigration, with the broad aim of raising the native-born share of demographic recruitment. He favors reintroduction of a family wage (by giving employers tax incentives to pay higher wages to parents) and tax relief for family corporations, and substantial child tax credits ($3000 per childdwarfing the value of present arrangements, an income tax deduction for dependents and modest support for child daycare).

The necessary revenues for such changes would come from increased taxes on large corporations, consumption taxes, and import duties. Immigrant numbers would fall to 250,000 per year, less than half the current (legal) number; the skilled-worker visa (H1-B) program would be suspended; and serious efforts would be made to curtail illegal migration, including opposition to a further amnesty and deportation of overstayers. Even if it could be enacted, the efficacy of such a program may be doubted. The parallel problem, of course, is to repair the hedonistic values and moral decadence that Buchanan sees as afflicting and surrounding the native-born, to restore the America that was. (That most migrants may have grown up less subject to these influencesindeed, often perhaps in the very kind of religion-steeped environment he favors, is a point he ignores.) Reversing the cultural revolution sounds an overweening ambition, but progress might be made through a gradual advance on many fronts. The suggested measures range from reshaping the Supreme Court to defunding Planned Parenthood and the National Endowment for the Arts. While the prospects for cultural engineering may be slight, a spontaneous restoration of values is by no means inconceivable. That, broadly, was the theme of Francis Fukuyamas The Great Disruption, reviewed here in Volume 25, no. 4. Fukuyama equally decried the breakdown of social norms that began in the 1960s but saw this as a cyclical process (unlike the more unidirectional nature of political and economic history) with signs of a reassertion of family values already discernible. The emergence of a disciplined and sober working class after the initial disarray of the industrial revolution was an instructive model of how the reordering of society might come about. Neither policy intervention nor spontaneous restoration offers hope enough to overcome Buchanan's pessimism. What some would view as milestones of the Enlightenment he regards as markers in the tragedy of Western Man, now in its final act. His title, of course, echoes Oswald Spengler's vastly longer and more florid tract from over 80 years ago. Here is Spengler (The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p.106) presenting his "Faustian picture" of human history, seen as "a boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks":
Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative Power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, lessen again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

That is rant on a grand scale. Geoffrey McNicoll Population Council