The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Hardcover)

by Patrick J. Buchanan (Author) "As a growing population has long been a mark of healthy nations and rising civilizations, falling populations have been a sign of nations and civilizations..." (more)
Key Phrases: old moral order, United States, Supreme Court, Frankfurt School (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Patrick J. Buchanan's contentious premise in The Death of the West is that the United States is no longer a healthy melting pot, but instead a confused, tottering "conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common." Relying on United Nations population statistics, and citing such diverse sources as Yogi Berra and Rhett Butler, Buchanan sees for America four "clear and present dangers": declining birth rates; uncontrolled immigration of peoples of "different colors, creed, and cultures"; a rise of "anti-Western" culture antithetical to established religious, cultural, and moral norms; and a "defection of ruling elites" to the idea of world government. His solutions include higher wages and tax breaks for parents than for singles, a dramatic rollback of immigration quotas, and a National History Bee. Buchanan's volatile, adamant book eschews any middle ground. Readers will either applaud his ideas or be repulsed by them. --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly
"Historians may one day call `the pill' the suicide tablet of the West," writes former presidential candidate Buchanan in this cri de coeur regarding the perils that await Western civilization. And he is correct in his assessment that the advent of artificial contraception brought about huge changes in the ways American and European cultures dealt with sex, children and family. Buchanan, a staunch Roman Catholic and a conservative, feels that these changes were socially and politically disastrous. Worried about the declining birth rate of European-Americans and increased immigration from nonwhite countries, Buchanan predicts that people who are now celebrating diversity "will spend their golden years in a Third World America." Along with shifting racial demographics, Buchanan also frets about the changes in morality "rampant promiscuity and wholesale divorce and tax-payer funding of abortion." Buchanan is equally upfront about his position on homosexuality: "had the killers of Matthew Shepard chosen a sixteen-year-old girl rather than a twenty-one-year-old gay man, her rape-murder would have been to me an even greater evil." Fearful that American is being "de-Christianized," Buchanan argues that "while the prognosis is not good," America must reevaluate itself and reclaim its white, Christian origins; despite the current "coarseness of her manners, the decadence of her culture, or the sickness in her soul," the nation is worth saving. Buchanan's passionately expressed ideology will be too extreme for most readers, and its proud bigotry is unlikely to play well even among most conservatives.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (December 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312285485
• ISBN-13: 978-0312285487
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (407 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #462,462 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's the End of the World as we Know it!, October 15, 2002

By	Dark Mechanicus JSG "Black Ops Teep" (Fortified Bunker, USSA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Paperback)

And Patrick Buchanan doesn't feel fine. The erstwhile presidential candidate, Nixon aide, polemicist, and political commentator is possibly one of the most wilfully misunderstood and maligned political pundits writing in America today, and when I began Death of the West I wasn't certain what to expect.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised, and subsequently riveted; Death of the West escapes the typical political clunkiness and idiosyncracies that plague Buchanan's columns, and delivers a stark, depressing, and alarming portrait of the nation in which all of us will grow old. The Death of the West maintains that demographics is destiny: affluent, decadent, morally relativistic Westerners are not having children and not replacing themselves, while the more fecund but impoverished Third World population is exploding. Buchanan projects that if current population trends continue, America and Europe will be third-world countries with alien cultures by 2050.

Death of the West is not just a dire Malthusian screed; Buchanan spices up his jeremiad by moving from the West's demographics of death to the skirmishes and routs of the American Culture War. Buchanan's treatment of the development of Cultural Marxism and its influence on American liberal thinkers and revolutionaries in the 1960s is scholarly and full of new insight, and highlights the role that grey little scholars like Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno, and Lukacs had on creating the world of political correctness and moral relativism in which we live.

According to Buchanan, while revolutionary Marxism died throughout the world, cultural marxism was inseminated in the American academy by these scholar-revolutionaries, and from the sixties to the present American leftists conducted a successful "long march through the institutions", seizing the cultural high ground from which to shape, change, alter, de-christianize and destroy traditional American culture.

The Death of the West is a solid, gripping read, although it is depressing and melancholy in only the way that a eulogy to a once vital civilization can be. Conservative or traditionalist readers will find it a revolutionary book, while liberals might be surprised by the intellectual taproots of their philosophy.

167 of 195 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why the Left is winning and the West is Losing, June 30, 2002

By	Manuel Alvarez (Miami Lakes, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Those who dismiss Mr. Buchanan based on the liberal smear campaign that was launched against him years ago should make the effort to read this book with an open mind. Unlike most literary endeavors by contemporary politicians, Mr. Buchanan is impressively erudite. In the same chapter, he quotes Orestes Brownson, (an important 19th century American intellectual who has been completely forgotten by the academy) and offers a critique of the Frankfurt School. Not even Al Gore can manage to fit nineteenth century American philosophy and neoMarxist critical theory into one book.

The author's thesis is that secularization (i.e. the pill and abortion) has given rise to a depopulation trend in Europe and North America, such that by 2050 America and Western Europe will be largely inhabited by Third World minorities. He is not making a racist claim, but rather pointing out the likely social impact of this change in the West's ethnic base. Despite the venomous criticisms by other reviewers concerning Mr. Buchanan's views on immigration, he makes a valid point. A country is not just an economy. The nation-state has always been held together by a common language and culture, not merely a belief in certain abstract propositions. There is a historical and qualitative distinction between the European migrations to North America a century ago and the current migrations from the South. Although the Irish experienced prejudice and anti-Catholicism, this did not change the fact that the Irish-Catholic immigrants shared the same European culture, religion and loyalty to their adopted country. This is why Irish-Catholics, German-Lutherans and Italians were able to assimilate and become Americans, rather than balkanized tribes. Under the banner of multiculturalism, many Mexicans, for example, do not immigrate with the intention of assimilation. Instead they intend to reclaim Texas and California for Mexico (there are a number of groups in California and Mexico that have stated this view quite clearly). Moreover, when over one million undocumented Mexicans stream across the border yearly, it is not immigration, it is an invasion. Our linguistic masters, however, refuse to acknowledge it and prefer Newspeak. I fail to understand why the left assumes it is immoral for a nation to control its own borders.

The other aspect of the book is a comprehensive account of the culture war. The left's efforts to de-Christianize America in the name of "tolerance" conceal a darker motive. It is nothing short of the wholesale subversion of capitalism by undermining the culture which sustains it. This strategy was conceived by Georg Lukacs (a Hungarian Marxist) and Antonio Gramsci (an Italian Marxist), both of whom realized that the workers of the West were too content to take up arms in a glorious revolution. This crusade has many fronts: the relativization of moral codes, the destruction of the traditional family, promotion of sexual promiscuity and perversion, denigration of religious belief, political correctness, and re-education by taking control of the campuses. All of this has come to pass. When we lose our history, our culture and our nation we will only have our silence to blame. Like the late Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder, once said, "few are guilty, but everyone is responsible." The public figures who have confronted this issue with honesty have been marginalized and verbally assaulted. Mr. Buchanan is one of the lonely few who is still willing to speak out.

52 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable if harsh look at the future, June 16, 2002

By	Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Buchanan asserts a simple thesis: The West will die not by military conquest, death and destruction. But it might die, in fact there is a good chance that it will die, from within, through high birth rates in poor countries, and through the West's own freedom and excesses. Data, including projections, make the point pretty clear. By being tolerant, generally welcoming of newcomers (those who say we aren't welcoming haven't looked at history, other cultures, or the data), and concerned about individual freedoms, the West is made susceptible to those who like the wealth of the West but who reject its basic values. The irony is that Western values built this wealth.

While western countries see their birth rates decline as their politcal and economic freedoms and fruits increase, less developed, "non-western" countries and cultures have surged, primarily through their much higher birth and survival rates made possible and supported by western medicine, health care, preventive measures, and technology. With almost 1.5 billion Chinese, a billion people in India, and hundreds of millions in Indonesia, the West is most likely simply to be overrun by people leaving these poor countries and making their way to the West.

Unlike what some of the criticisms of "nativism" in the past, this new movement does not bring people who adopt the ways of the West. There is no melting pot. Rather, there is multiculturalism. So western culture dies out by simple attrition. The West has something important to defend. And it's not that the westerners are xenophobic or racist as much as they are committed to maintaining western values and virtues of liberty, freedom, personal initiative and rsponsibility, thrift, family, and protective laws and minimal governments.

Buchanan makes his point by attacking political correctness and those who decry or belittle "traditional" values. That gives the book a shrill, even nasty tone. But his points merit consideration. We ignore them at our peril.