Why are there bilingual ballots?  Why isn't a knowledge of English a requirement for voting?  And how can we ever possibly hope to assimilate millions of Spanish-speakers if we don't require them to learn English in order to participate in civic life?

Now Buchanan has written a new book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?  This book continues to raise many of the issues Buchanan has long stressed and shows where we are likely to end up, if we do not change course.  It is well-written, well researched, and highly persuasive.  It will likely be of interest to most Chronicles readers.  (Indeed, Chronicles is quoted more often than any other journal of opinion).  The book also challenges, head on, the regnant ideology of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

Although the book is likely to end up on the New York Times bestseller list, its reception is also illustrating one of Buchanan’s themes.  “Diversity” has become a religion, the new religion of our elites, and it is “an ideology not terribly tolerant of dissent.”  On October 24, 2011, the political website TPM ran a piece entitled “Twelve Pretty Racist or Just Crazy Quotes from Pat Buchanan’s New Book.”  Most of these statements are either purely factual or conclusions drawn from and supported by facts.  Among the “pretty racist and just crazy” things Buchanan says is that “The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty….Mexico is moving north” and that  “If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities.”  Which raises the question:  is it “pretty racist” to notice reality, or “just crazy?”

Not to be outdone, the Color of Change, a group founded by Marxist ideologue and former official in the Obama Administration Van Jones, has demanded that MSNBC fire Buchannan.  The first charge against Buchanan is that he has has “just published a book which says that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the ‘End of White America,’” quoting the TPM article I just discussed.  Apparently, anyone expressing trepidation about the fact that the Census Bureau projects that by 2042 whites will, for the first time in history, no longer be a majority in the United States should be excluded from public life.

The second charge is that one of the hundred or so radio shows Buchanan has been on to discuss the book is hosted by James Edwards, whom The Huffington Post quotes as describing himself as being “pro-white.”  The Color of Change, on its website, states that it “exists to strengthen Black America's political voice. Our goal is to empower our members—Black Americans and our allies—to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone.”  In the political world Color of Change wants to create, allowing yourself to be interviewed by someone who describes himself as “pro-white” should be enough to get you fired, but wanting to “strengthen Black America’s political voice” is okay.

Other groups are also trying to get MSNBC to fire Buchanan.  In an interview about the book on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, Buchanan described homosexual conduct as “unnatural and immoral.”  In response, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual activist group, has stated that “MSNBC should sanction Mr. Buchanan, as his extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LGBT people around the world.”  No word yet from the Human Rights Campaign on how long people should be allowed to read the “extremist ideas” of St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom expressed the same view of homosexuality that Buchanan did.

For all the hue and cry over Buchanan’s supposed “hate,” the emotion that runs through Suicide of a Superpower is not hate, but love.  Buchanan sees the country he grew up in and loved passing away, and he wants to raise his voice in its defense.  As Buchanan writes, in one of the twelve “pretty racist or just crazy” statements highlighted by TPM, “Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared?  What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?”

These are all fair questions.  Buchanan does not advocate legal privilege for whites or discrimination against non-whites, even though those calling for him to lose his job do advocate discrimination against whites by means of affirmative action, a form of discrimination that is apparently meant to continue even after whites become a minority in America   Buchanan merely opposes an immigration policy that, by favoring non-European immigrants, is bringing about a radical transformation of America. It is hard to see why white Americans should welcome their own displacement as America’s majority, even though the message being sent by those calling for Buchanan to lose his job is that white Americans must welcome their own displacement.

It should also be noted that, if those voting on the Immigration Act of 1965 had realized what the act would achieve, it would never have become law.  Indeed, Teddy Kennedy, one of the act’s principal supporters, felt the need to declare that, under the act, “the present level of immigration remains substantially the same” and “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”   Today, those who want the level of immigration to be what it was in 1965, or who want the majority of America’s population to be what it was in 1965, risk organized campaigns to strip them of their jobs.

What the hysterical reaction to Buchanan’s book suggests is not just the intolerance of the advocates of “diversity” but also the brittleness of the intellectual foundation of their creed.  After all, anyone who believes that “diversity is our greatest strength” must face the facts of American history.  Most of America’s greatest achievements occurred before anyone thought diversity was our greatest strength, or indeed before America became “diverse” by today’s standards.   As a friend of mine quipped, the Apollo program was diverse only if you define diverse as meaning “white guys with crew cuts and white guys without crew cuts.”  The same could be said, with allowances made for hairstyles of the period, about almost every significant event in American history before the 1960s.  The advocates of “diversity” must also face the fact that ethnic diversity is most often a source of national division and even national disintegration and that, as The Financial Times summarized the research of sociologist Robert Putnam, “the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone—from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.”  Buchanan’s book is a formidable dissent from the cult of “diversity,” which is why its adherents are so eager to prevent us from hearing what he has to say.

Obama's comments would be bad enough at a time of economic prosperity. They are little short of astonishing now, at a time when millions of American cannot find work. As VDARE.com's Ed Rubenstein has long documented, immigrants are displacing Americans in the workplace and driving down wages. And it turns out that just as the jobs our trade policy creates are largely overseas, the jobs our immigration policy creates are largely among immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies recently reported that, despite all of Rick Perry's bravado over job creation in Texas, 81% of all jobs created in Texas since 2007 were filled by immigrants, both legal and illegal. A government serious about reducing unemployment would be introducing legislation to curtail immigration, not expand it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his faults, never suggested in the depths of the Depression that America needed to bring more foreigners into the country, to compete with Americans for the remaining jobs and to drive down the wages for those jobs. If he had, Roosevelt would have faced a firestorm of controversy, because Americans then thought of their country as a real country, where the economic interests of Americans came first. Today, most of our elites have come to think of America as little more than a shopping mall with a flag, and decades of globalist propaganda has convinced millions of Americans that they are right. So, at a time of deep and painful unemployment, both parties continue to pursue immigration and trade policies that destroy American jobs and drive down American wages, with relatively little controversy.

The article also notes one of the causes: "Corporations have cut costs by moving manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work out of the country." But the article, like all the presidential candidates, treats this massive outsourcing as a force of nature, akin to the tides, about which nothing can be done. Actually, something can be done about outsourcing, and was done for most of American history. That something was the tariff. And we are not going to see sustained improvement in jobs and wages until we begin to remember what earlier generations of Americans knew about protecting American industry and American jobs.

Today's rich are different. Yesterday, there was a news item describing how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos "would be funding the 'Clock of the Long Now.' The clock is designed to keep ticking for 10,000 years, and will be built in a mountain in west Texas." Bezos' gift seems motivated by a desire to emulate bad science fiction; it certainly has nothing to do with helping Bezos' community or advancing high culture.

Stranger still is the cause PayPal founder Peter Thiel has chosen to advance. Thiel is "a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil-rig platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place." As a friend wrote me about this article: "Someone should write a novel about humans living on an island cut off from culture, religion, family and tradition. Oh yeah, William Golding already did. It's called Lord of the Flies."

This morning's Cleveland Plain Dealer carried a sad headline: Borders, the nation's second largest bookstore, was liquidating, and its 10700 employees will be unemployed by the end of September.

I first became familiar with Borders in law school, when there were only two of them: the first Borders in Ann Arbor, and one other store in suburban Detroit. I had never seen a bookstore like that Borders in Ann Arbor, one filled with serious, even scholarly books, a place where browsing was encouraged and where customers could spend hours perusing the collection. It soon became one of my favorite places in Ann Arbor, a place I went to relax and to forget about the stress of law school.

One particular incident stands out. I was admiring Norman Davies' magisterial history of Poland, God's Playground, when a stranger came up and asked why I was looking at that book. Thinking he was an Ann Arbor crank, I rather brusquely asked why he cared. "Because I wrote it," came the reply. There followed an enjoyable conversation, in which I learned that Davies was in Ann Arbor for a lecture to a Polish-American group. The lecture, too, was enjoyable: a scathing speech on the perfidy of Soviet Communism.

Of course, the Borders bookstores that spread across America as a chain never matched the original Borders in Ann Arbor. And, in some communities, I fear that Borders did contribute to the demise of quality independent bookstores. But, in many other communities, those Borders bookstores brought a wide selection of books that simply had not been there before, and they did offer a place where people could come and browse and get lost in the world of books for a time. All good things, I think. And now, all gone.

I hope that other bookstores fare better than Borders did, because the experience of spending time in a good bookstore can never be replaced by the impersonal world of shopping for books online, just as the experience of holding a good book in your hands and of building a good library at home can never be replaced by a "Kindle." But I fear the grim reaper of cyberspace is just getting warmed up.

This latest surrender of the conservative movement to the forces of "progress" should come as no surprise, since it is the logical outcome of a movement that has as its chosen ideology "fusionism," the marriage of libertarian economics and traditionalism outside the economic sphere championed by Frank Meyer in the early days of National Review.  As some traditionalists noted early on, a movement defined by libertarian economics was unlikely to provide any real support for tradition.

This point was brought home by the New York Times' excited behind the scenes look at the passage of its latest favorite legislation.  As the Times reports, wealthy Republican donors were instrumental in securing the bill's passage: "the billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, joined by the hedge fund managers Cliff Asness and Daniel Loeb—had the influence and the money to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure. And they were inclined to see the issue as one of personal freedom, consistent with their more libertarian views."  This passage helps explain why the conservative movement has been relatively successful in defending the economic interests of Wall Street billionaires, but an abject failure in conserving much of anything, including a definition of marriage that reflected not only the wisdom of millennia of human thought but what until only recently had been the overwhelming moral consensus of Americans.

The less farsighted are beginning to catch up. Recently, David Frum published a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on his website, which was then picked up by Yahoo News. The chart shows that labor's share of U. S. national income has been plummeting since 2001 and is now at an all-time low. The chart is hardly a surprise: both globalization and mass immigration drive down wages, and our leaders have stubbornly clung to both, even as tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed or underemployed.  The question is: how bad do things have to get before our elites notice that globalization, as represented by both free trade and mass immigration, has failed?