Path to National Suicide

Patrick J. Buchanan
Monday May 21, 2007

“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?

“I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

So said Abe Lincoln to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Observing the Senate last week, and looking over the latest figures from the Census Bureau, America is now risking national suicide.

Last week, senators meeting in secret produced a bill to legalize our 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens. If a path to citizenship becomes law, nothing will stop the next invasion. As President Bush acknowledges, 6 million tried to breach our southern border in his first five years. One in 12 – 500,000 – had a criminal record.

According to the Census Bureau, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, the U.S. minority population rose 2.4 million, to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Their total number has soared 25 percent since 2000 alone. The Asian population has also grown by 25 percent since 2000.

The number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent, however. Half the children 5 and younger in the United States are now minorities.

What is happening to us? An immigrant invasion of the United States from the Third World, as America’s white majority is no longer even reproducing itself. Since Roe v. Wade, America has aborted 45 million of her children. And Asia, Africa and Latin America have sent 45 million of their children to inherit the estate the aborted American children never saw. God is not mocked.

And white America is in flight.

In the 1990s, for the first time since the Spanish came, whites left California. Two million departed. From July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, 100,000 more packed up and headed back whence their fathers came. The “Anglo” population of the Golden State is down to 43 percent and falling fast. White folks are now a minority in Texas and New Mexico. In Arizona, Hispanics account for over half the population under 20.

The future is not in doubt. Why ought this be of concern?

First, while the black and Hispanic population combined is now 85 million – five times what it was in 1960 – half of all black and Hispanic kids drop out of high school. And the average math and reading scores of the half who graduate are at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels.

And the future is not so sanguine as it seemed 50 years ago. As I write in “State of Emergency”:

“In 1960, 18 million black Americans, 10 percent of the nation, were not fully integrated into society, but they had been assimilated into our culture. They worshiped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, watched the same TV shows on the same four channels, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same newspapers and went to schools where, even when segregated, we learned the same history and literature and shared the same holidays: Christmas, New Year’s, Washington’s Birthday, Easter, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Columbus Day. Segregation existed, but black folks were as American as apple pie, having lived in this land longer than almost every other group save the Native Americans.

“That cultural unity, that sense that we were one people, is gone.”

Today’s immigrants exceed in number anything any nation has ever known. They now come from cultures and countries whose people have never before been assimilated by any First World country. Not only is the Melting Pot broken, it is rejected by our elites. Minorities are urged to hold onto their own language, customs, traditions. Identity politics is in. And the largest cohort, Mexicans, comes from a country with a historic grievance and a claim on the territory they are entering.

Moreover, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, we have been fighting one another over issues of race and ethnicity, history, heroes and holidays, morality and religion, right and wrong.

All over the Western world, multiethnic, multicultural countries are coming apart over language, ethnicity, history. The Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, Yugoslavia into half a dozen. Czechs and Slovaks divorced. Scots want separation from England. Catalans and Basques seek independence. Corsicans and Bretons want out of France. Northern Italians want to secede. Only immigrants who prefer Ottawa prevent Quebecois from breaking free of Canada.

As we see from the election battles in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico, race and ethnicity are not receding as issues, but rising. In South Central Los Angeles, black and Hispanic gangs are at war over race and turf.

Addressing the Knights of Columbus in 1915, Theodore Roosevelt warned, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

In every way possible, Americans have said they do not want to take this risk with their country. Why, then, are our elites taking it?