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By Steve Sailer
 | Buchanan's
book
is certainly a worthy competitor in the Big Picture
Sweepstakes along with Francis Fukuyama's
End of
History
and Samuel Huntington's
Clash Of Civilizations (One
of these days, I'm going to write my own entry in the
Deep-Think-About-the-21st-Century genre, which I've
tentatively entitled The Age of Resentment. Hey,
you publishers offering six-figure advances - please
stop jostling and form an orderly line!). It's obvious
that the reduction of peoples of European-origin from
one-fourth of the world's population in 1960 to a U.N.
projected one-tenth in 2050 is an event of
world-historical importance. Susan "The white race is
the cancer of human history" Sontag must be pleased. But
others might greet the news with trepidation. |
| There's
an ironic paradox here that no one has noticed. Buchanan
is more respectful of Third World peoples than are his
numerous critics, who tend to be tacitly condescending
toward non-Westerners. Buchanan presumes that Muslims,
for instance, like being Muslims and would prefer to
bring their culture with them as they move into
historically-Christian lands. In contrast, most white
liberal intellectuals assume - consciously or not - that
population shifts don't matter because what the rest of
the world really wants to be is a white liberal
intellectual. Similarly, Buchanan asserts that when the
ratio of Third Worlders to Westerners climbs
dramatically, the current Western domination of the
world will be threatened. In contrast, his
neoconservative and neoliberal critics, who weekly call
for the military to go punch out some Third World nation
that has aroused their ire, assume that Western
superiority is so overwhelming and eternal that raw
numbers will never matter. To paraphrase Hillaire
Belloc's acid tribute to the Maxim Gun as the foundation
of the British Empire, the neos presume, "Whatever
happens/ We have got / Stealth technology / And they do
not." |
| I would
have liked to have seen Buchanan include more chapters
exploring demographic trends in even greater detail. For
example, birthrates in much of the 3rd World are going
down (the Arabian peninsula being a notable exception).
This is often said to negate Buchanan's worries.
However, "demographic
momentum" means these countries will keep growing
for decades even after they hit 2.1 children per woman.
Unfortunately, "demographic momentum" is a difficult
concept to grasp, and it's unfortunate that a superb
explainer like Buchanan skipped over it. After 2050, or
so, the Third World may also be shrinking rapidly, but
that's a long way into the future to forecast.
Buchanan's forecasts, which mostly come from the U.N.,
are fairly certain for the next quarter century. |
| Demographers' forecasts generally assume that in the
long run, every group's fertility will converge at the
replacement level of 2.1 babies per woman. They believe
this for the scientific reason that, well, uh … well, it
would be nice if that turned out to be true.
Unfortunately, as physicist turned evolutionary theorist
Gregory M. Cochran keeps pointing out, there's no
particular reason to assume that post-modern cultures
will ever get back to replacement-level
reproduction. That doesn't mean the human race will go
extinct. As Jim Chapin of UPI has pointed out,
post-modern cultures might well be eventually pushed
aside by whichever groups of religious fundamentalists -
Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Wahhabi Islamists - best succeed
in motivating their followers to have lots of children.
This suggests an especially amusing irony. In this
fundamentalist future, Buchanan would be looked back
upon not as a reactionary, but as a liberal relic who
offered some suggestions for raising the birthrate in an
attempt to defend the old non-fundamentalist world. |
| Buchanan
focuses mainly on Europe. (My column on how to raise the
European birthrate is here.) The birthrate trends in the U.S. are less
dire. According to
data released today, in the economic boom year of
2000, the total fertility of women residing in America
(2.13 babies per woman) exceeded the replacement rate
for the first time since 1971. The fertility rate of
women who were American citizens, however, was below
replacement. Non-Hispanic white fertility stood at a
recent high of 1.88 - much better than the European
average, but still below replacement. Hispanic women in
general averaged 3.11 (the highest figure seen since at
least the 1980s) and women of Mexican descent 3.27. (The
fertility of women of Mexican descent is higher in the
U.S. than in Mexico, and shows no clear signs of
declining any time soon.) That's 74% higher than the
non-Hispanic white rate, but the effective difference is
even larger because women of Mexican origin tend to give
birth at younger ages, so their generation length is
shorter. |
| Buchanan
suggests that below-replacement birthrates are a result
of the culture war that began in the 1960s. He uses this
theory to justify his positions on a host of issues -
such as Southern state flags - that seem at first glance
(and sometimes at second) only tenuously related to
birthrates. One could caricature Buchanan as not so much
a man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a
nail, but more as a man with a lot of pre-existing nails
who has found in birthrates what he hopes is the
all-purpose hammer. Still, he makes a decent case that
cultural demoralization plays a big role in this trend.
He could have strengthened it by comparing birthrates
among Americans on different sides of the culture war:
for example, as I pointed out a couple of years ago, the white
conservative state of Utah has a dramatically higher
birth rate (2.76 per woman across all races in 2000)
than the white liberal state of Vermont (1.57). |
| I had
forgotten that Buchanan is such a master of polemical
prose. For example, compare his three paragraphs on GOP
electoral strategy on pp. 221-222 to the
VDARE columns of mine that he's obviously
condensing. I worked hard on
my essays (such as
this one). Yet, Buchanan's rewrite not only reads
better, it can be understood by readers farther to
the left on the IQ Bell Curve. You have to be
awfully smart to write as simply as Buchanan. |
| In an
age of identity politics, it's hard to criticize
Buchanan for speaking out for the white working class.
It's certainly courageous - not just the "white" part,
but also the "working class" part. God knows there are
plenty of pundits promoting the economic and cultural
interests of the white upper-middle class. Further, no
one has ever explained to me a universal moral principle
under which it's hugely admirable to be, say, a black or
Jewish spokesman, but execrable to speak out for the
white working class. Still,
I've long argued that the proper way to evaluate
policies is not by focusing on race but on the legal
category of American citizenship - does, say, our
current immigration system optimally promote the general
welfare of American citizens? (When phrased in those
terms, the answer is obvious: No.) |
| Unfortunately, I fear that Buchanan's Death of the
West is one of those books - like Herrnstein &
Murray's
The Bell Curve
and Brimelow's
Alien Nation - that are too powerfully argued
for the good of the cause they espouse. You'll notice
that in the wake of The Bell Curve, it has become
practically illegal to mention the social effects of IQ.
That's not because the book was refuted. Precisely the
opposite has happened. It made such an overwhelming case
that the entire topic had to be driven out of public
discourse. |
In Buchanan’s case,
see Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard's
curious review in the New York Times. Caldwell makes
clear that he doesn't want to be associated with
Buchanan. But he has almost nothing to say about the
vast demographic change Buchanan has called to his
attention, other than that it is "broad historical
trend." (Thanks, Chris; never would have figured that
out without your help!)
Within a year, I
suspect, anyone who dares to mention global demographic
changes will be shouted down as a "Buchananite."
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]
February 12, 2002 |
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