Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West

How Can We Fix It

“In half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations.” -Pat Buchanan, The Death of the West

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! While today’s article is mostly open for all to read, some of it is behind a paywall. Paid subscribers: thank you so very much for your support and patience; all those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, and read this article in full. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

The Death of the West

It should be no great surprise to hear that the West is dying, if not already dead.

Everywhere one looks, the distinguishing characteristics of the Occident and their conspicuous outgrowths—namely natural social hierarchy, ordered liberty, a cherishing and cultivation of excellence and beauty, and Christian faith as a bedrock of the moral order—are either in a coma or have long been dead and buried.

Our “modern art” and Brutalist architecture could better be described as visual representations of demonic evil and cosmic horrors.

Some selections of cosmic horrors from Paulos’s excellent “Heroes Rise // Monsters Fall”

Our “morality” consists of choking down one’s disgust reflex to cheer perversion, promoting radical egalitarianism, and remaining dedicated to advancing anti-racism.

Championing excellence has been replaced by “disparate impact” diversity, building a noble world has been replaced by anti-colonialism and “deconstruction,” and justice has been replaced by a tolerance of evil. Or, as Pat Buchanan describes it in his The Death of the West:

Millions have begun to feel like strangers in their own land. They recoil from a popular culture that is saturated with raw sex and trumpets hedonistic values. They see old holidays disappear and old heroes degraded. They see the art and artifacts of a glorious past removed from their museums and replaced by the depressing, the ugly, the abstract, the anti-American. They watch as books they cherished disappear from the schools they attended, to be replaced by authors and titles they never heard of. The moral code that they were raised to live by has been overthrown. The culture they grew up with is dying inside the country they grew up in.

The Old Occidental World, that beautiful and refined land of adventure, excellence, and Christianity, has been shunted to the side and replaced. When Buchanan wrote his book in 2002, it was already on life support thanks to the cancer within. In 2025, our day and coincidentally the time he uses to mark the culmination of many dire trends within it, it’s up for debate whether the long-identified cancer is terminal. Perhaps it can be treated, if we act properly and quickly; perhaps not. We are, after all, currently struggling to even arrest the spiritual progeny of John Brown, the murderous terrorist, much less roll back the American Cultural Revolution.

Either way, we are now much where Pat Buchanan, that American hero¹ who first served as a warning bell of a presidential candidate and progenitor of what’s now the youthful new right,² predicted in The Death of the West. Mass migration of warring bands from hostile foreign lands, a collapse in Total Fertility Rate (TFR) amongst Western peoples, and an unwillingness to embrace the faith and culture of our ancestors have left us in a dark place, one that might well mean the death of our civilization. Still, perhaps we can recover—the solutions are a matter of will, not an immutable certainty.

Such is what I’ll cover in this article, first doing my best to summarize Buchanan’s points before delving into what the solutions might be for the dark future he predicts, and what I thought of the book.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan

Why the West Is Dying

Buchanan’s main claim—one that was quite prescient and should have been heeded by the feckless ghouls like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby who ran the GOP machine at the time it was written—is that the fabric of the Western world has been torn assunder, and the changes that have brought us here might well mean our end. As he articulates clearly at the end of the work, there are “four clear and present dangers” that we face:

The first is a dying population. Second is the mass immigration of peoples of different colors, creeds, and cultures, changing the character of the West forever. The third is the rise to dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, which has already sundered the West. The fourth is the breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government whose rise entails the end of nations.

Importantly, all of those problems have been self-inflicted because we allowed them. Like the weak French in The Camp of the Saints allowing the apocalyptic Indian horde to land and destroy the remnants of France, we have—out of some combination of sloth, treachery, greed, and feebleness—allowed all four problems to culminate into a cataclysmic threat to our civilization, one that is already far advanced. As Buchanan notes of the cancer we have let metastasize in our civilizational body, knowing of it but timidly doing nothing about it, “The West does not lack the capacity or power to repel these dangers, but it seems to lack the desire or will to maintain itself as a vital, separate, unique civilization.”

While all four of the Buchanan-identified problems stand out, there were three of them that I thought remain the most timeless and important: the mass migration threat, the continual refusal to reproduce exhibited by those in our world, and the deconstructionist ideology that’s ripping us apart at the seams.

Mass Migration: A World Ender

Describing what was already a problem of consequence then, and one that has grown indescribably worse in the years since—with perhaps 100 million foreigners within America’s borders—Buchanan noted that Americans woke up on 9/11 to find that their regime had, since Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback ended,³ allowed an army of hostile foreigners to flood into our country:

This chasm in our country is not one of income, ideology, or faith, but of ethnicity and loyalty. Suddenly, we awoke to the realization that among our millions of foreign-born, a third are here illegally, tens of thousands are loyal to regimes with which we could be at war, and some are trained terrorists sent here to murder Americans. For the first time since Andrew Jackson drove the British out of Louisiana in 1815, a foreign enemy is inside the gates, and the American people are at risk in their own country. In those days after September 11, many suddenly saw how the face of America had changed in their own lifetimes.

Naturally, the response from the pro-immigration crowd—particularly the thoroughly repugnant Chamber of Commerce Republicans—is that endless hordes of sick and bedraggled foreigners raping and murdering their way into our ancestral homelands is good because they make GDP go up.

For one, that is untrue. Non-European immigrants are a huge net drain on the Treasury. Further, it misses the point: GDP is not the ultimate good, particularly when compared against such concepts as “having a functional country”.

But, of course, the Chamber of Commerce types are quite decided that worshipping the golden calf of GDP—even as the voice of Ba’al within it compels them to offer up their children’s futures to its red-hot arms—is the correct decision. As Buchanan notes:

But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2 or 3 or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people?

Biblically, the result of turning from God and towards an idol was to lose His blessing and be cursed. And so we have reaped the whirlwind the GDP worshippers have sown, and now are living to see the Biblical curse of mass migration and replacement of our progeny by hostile foreigners result. As Buchanan notes:

The Old and New Testaments have many parables of how the first-born, or first chosen, lose their places in their fathers’ houses. A hungry Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a mess of potage. In Matthew 22, Jesus compares heaven to the wedding feast a king prepares for his son. When the invited guests rudely refuse the king’s invitation, he sends his servants out to the highways and byways to bring strangers into his house to celebrate the marriage of his son.

As Western peoples have begun to die, the vacant rooms in the House of the West will not long remain vacant. In America, the places prepared for the forty million unborn lost since Roe v. Wade have been filled by the grateful poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Europeans forgo children, the places prepared for them, too, will be occupied...

The Population Bust Catastrophe

As hordes of hostile foreigners flood over our borders, filling up Germany and France with their execrable presence as they sexually abuse a million little English girls and fundamentally change the American ethnic landscape, the problem of their presence is made yet worse by the fact that the native born refuse to reproduce in such circumstances. Like the zoo pandas that reject their imprisoned state of being by refusing to mate,⁴ we Westerners have responded by refusing to create the next generations:

The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization.

Today, in seventeen European countries, there are more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.

As to why that is happening, Buchanan offers two explanations.

One is that the state has attempted to make the family outmoded, a detriment rather than a benefit to the atomized young and pension-reliant old, and has largely succeeded in that project.

Socialism, the beatific vision of European intellectuals for generations, is one reason. “If everyone has the promise of a state pension, children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age,” argues Dr. John Wallace of Bologna’s Johns Hopkins University: “If women can earn more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies-and this seems to be true now of Catholic Italy as it is of secular Britain—why marry?”

By freeing husbands, wives, and children of family responsibilities, European socialists have eliminated the need for families. Consequently, families have begun to disappear. When they are gone, Europe goes with them. But as Europe is dying, the Third World adds one hundred million people - one new Mexico - every fifteen months.

The other explanation is one to which nearly anyone who has looked at home prices compared against average incomes, a DEI-driven dearth in employment opportunities, or the spectre of world-destroying mass migration can relate: despair. That is not to say such an attitude should be embraced. Despair is a sin,⁵ and is it not better to go down—if one must escape these temporal bonds—in a flame of glory and vigor rather than by slouching towards depressed annihilation? Regardless, despair is certainly prevalent and does seem to impact fertility. As Buchanan notes:

Only once had the U.S. birthrate fallen below population replacement, during the Depression, when the economy shrank by half and a fourth of America’s breadwinners were out of work, many of them out on the streets. Pessimism, a sense of despair that the good times are over and may never come again, can apparently impact national fertility.

And so we are dying, not just figuratively but literally. Our populations, particularly populations of the Heritage stock, are aging, and with age comes death. Yet worse, that trend is not reversing, or even flattening. It is getting worse, and we are staring extinction in the face:

[T]he Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World. Western fertility rates have been falling for decades. Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough babies to replace its population. As years slip by, that birthrate is not stabilizing; it is falling. In a score of countries, the old are already dying off faster than the young are being born. There is no sign of a turnaround. Now the absolute numbers of Europeans have begun to fall.

And as the number of native born falls, the migrant hordes continue to pour in.

The Anti-Americanism Threat, and What It Wrought

The other issue of vast importance is that even many of those who technically qualify as Americans—those who are not foreign-born and have at least some ties to our land and its history—aren’t really Americans in the real sense. They reject the ideals of the Founding, despise the premises of ordered liberty and natural aristocracy on which America’s founding gentlemen built our world, and hate the homogeneity and comfortable social peace captured by the likes of Norman Rockwell.

They have effectively launched a Cultural Revolution and created a new America, one wholly different from the America we think of other than in terms of its general borders (borders they don’t really believe in, it should be said). As Buchanan puts it, “[W]here Lenin’s revolution failed, the one that erupted on the campuses in the sixties succeeded. It put down roots in society, and it created a new America.”

And the roots of that Cultural Revolution set deep. As is shown by the Weather Underground terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn going on to teach the next generations of leftist radicals how to wage war against Heritage America, a point clearly made in Burrough in Days of Rage, America has been remade in the image of those who rejected old America in the 60s. Every facet of the old world, from public religiosity to an understanding of what America is and is for, has been violently defenestrated and replaced with the wretched race communism the New Left loves. As Buchanan notes:

We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for-their country, not ours.
...

The savagery of our politics reflects the depth of the moral divide that separates us as Americans.

What has been created from that—the gangrenous phoenix that lurched out of the ashes of the old world—is a new morality that upends all in which we used to believe. It places “authenticity,” by which it means an intentional paucity of self-restraint, and “acceptance,” by which it means suppressing one’s gag reflex regarding the conduct of others, as the highest gods, and demands you hop into the cannibal’s pot so long as the underprivileged cannibal demands it. Naturally, the “elders,” most of whom are now aged hippies, have encouraged such a rotten neomorality:

Not only did the old sanctions collapse, a new way of measuring morality emerged to justify and even to sanctify “doing one’s own thing.” Under the new code, morality was now to be determined not by who slept with whom or who inhaled what -trivial matters of personal preference - but by who went South for civil rights, who protested apartheid, who had marched against the “dirty, immoral war” in Vietnam. As has often been true in history, a new moral code was crafted to justify the new lifestyle already adopted. As they indulged themselves in sex, drugs, riots, and rock and roll, the young Jacobins had the reassurance of their indulgent and pandering elders

That is a problem not just because it is sad to see the beloved world of old pass away. The leftism that has been forcibly entrenched as what America is, from anti-racism to mass migration, the Cultural Revolution has left us unable to act as we must if we are to reject the destruction of our world.

All are equal, and so no human can be illegal…but borders certainly are. If men wish to sodomize each other or women to reject the duty of motherhood, that is a mere choice that mustn’t be condemned. Familial dysnasties rooted in the land show inequality, so they must be ground out of existence. The talented must be hamstrung so they can be equal to their fellows, with the added weight of caring for the incompetent placed atop their already sore shoulders. On and on it goes. We recline atop the idol of indolence as the pitiful remnants of Rome are burned and looted around us. As Buchanan notes:

[Leftist] ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration. Now that all the Western empires are gone, Western Man, relieved of his duty to civilize and Christianize mankind, reveling in luxury in our age of self-indulgence, seems to have lost his will to live and reconciled himself to his impending death.

We Now Lack a Survival Instinct

All in all, those problems and our willingness to let them develop into potential civilization killers show something Buchanan suggests throughout The Death of the West: we Westerners now lack any instinct for self-preservation, at least on a broad enough scale to matter. This is most visible in the lens of foreign policy and domestic crime enforcement (or the lack thereof).

Take how the New Left—and thus most of those multitude of schoolkids and college grads taught by them—view foreign policy and warmaking. It is not about risk and reward, cost and benefit, or any of the old metrics that would have made sense to men like Caesar and Longshanks. Rather, it is about furthering the revolution. About overthrowing the hierarchical order and replacing it with gay race communism; so the OSS/CIA were wonderful when they supported Ho Chi Minh and helped Mugabe destroy Rhodesia, but evil when used to stop communist regimes from taking over. As Buchanan notes:

President Nixon’s support for General Pinochet’s overthrow of the Castroite Salvador Allende in Chile was an outrage. So, too, was Ronald Reagan’s assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting to recapture their country from the pro-Soviet Sandinistas. As for Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, to rescue that tiny island from the Stalinist thugs who murdered its Marxist ruler, Maurice Bishop-that was American aggression. But Clinton’s invasion of Haiti to restore to power the Marxist defrocked priest, Father Aristide-that was intervention on behalf of democracy and fully justified.

And so long as it is a “good war,” the end justifies the means in the catechism of the revolution. That Mr. Lincoln made himself an absolute dictator, trampled on the Constitution, imprisoned dissidents without trial, and unleashed Generals Sherman and Sheridan to burn the South to ashes was fine. The eradication of slavery justified the means employed, even if fellow Americans suffered.

Similarly, the neo-morality’s insistence upon social equality and anti-racism means that we have left ourselves wholly unable to deal with the crime problem, given that crime in America is almost wholly a black and Hispanic problem,⁶ and whites are generally the victims rather than the perpetrators. Giving a few examples of it, Buchanan notes:

• In 1987, white criminals chose black victims in 3 percent of violent crimes, while black criminals chose white victims fifty percent of the time.
• When the crime was rape, white criminals chose black women in 0 percent of their assaults, while black criminals chose white women in 28 percent of assaults. Of eighty-three thousand cases of rape, Wilbanks could not find any in which the rapist was white and the victim was black.
• White criminals chose black victims in 2 percent of their robberies; but black criminals chose white victims in 73 percent of their robberies.

And how have we dealt with that? Do we hang all criminals connected to violent crimes or property crimes, as our ancestors did and we ought still do? No. Of course not. Lacking a survival instinct or any sense of what must be done for self-preservation, we let criminals out of jail dozens of times so that they might turn our cities into warzones in the name of anti-racism. Like GDP, it’s a false idol, and it’s one our race communist rulers are perfectly happy sacrificing their children and themselves to.

Then there is the matter of where foreign policy and domestic crime policy collide: enforcing immigration law. Naturally, the neo-morality infection, along with the GDP worship and like neuroses, means that the government (except under Trump) refuses to defend the border. That, in turn, means American ranchers along the border have to live in homes as fortified as those in Rhodesia during the Bush War if they are to survive, as every night their lands are crossed by cartels, human traffickers, and the human chattel they have in tow.

Buchanan makes such a point through the lens of Theresa Murray, a woman whose home along the border has been so often attacked by migrants that she lives armed to the teeth, surrounded by a tall, barbed-wire-topped fence and unable to leave her house for fear it’ll be ransacked in her absence. He notes:

[Theresa Murray lives imprisoned] in her own home, in her own country, because her government lacks the moral courage to do its duty and defend the borders of the United States of America.

…

While Theresa Murray lives unfree, in hellish existence, American soldiers defend the borders of Korea, Kuwait, and Kosovo. But nothing is at risk on those borders, half a world away, to compare with what is at risk on our border with Mexico, over which pass the armies of the night as they trudge endlessly northward to the great cities of America. Invading armies go home, immigrant armies do not.

Such a state of things is the natural outgrowth of the previously described trends. An old woman left isolated, unaided by any kids—if indeed she had any—as the regime-allowed gangs of migrants violate her property rights at will, as the military for which her tax dollars pay is used to defend the rights of man (and to defend child rapists) in some hell abroad rather than to secure our own borders. Only a total lack of any national instinct of self-preservation could have landed us in such a position.

Further, it has landed us in a position where the left (and weak conservatives) don’t just allow their own demise, but cheer it, celebrating the fact that their lines will be extinct in a generation or two, replaced by biological refuse from all over the blighted world:

At that Portland State commencement where Mr. Clinton said that in fifty years there would be “no majority race left in America,” students broke out in spontaneous applause. Surely, it is a rarity in history that a people would cheer news that they and their children would soon be dispossessed of their inheritance as the majority in the nation their ancestors built.

This is made yet worse by the fact that even those “conservatives” who understand that GDP isn’t necessarily the highest good and that both crime and mass migration should be stopped have trouble putting things in their proper place. To this residual class of generally right-headed people, the ultimate good is instead—depending on class—either time spent on the golf course or time spent on the couch watching college football.

As a result, though they have a survival instinct, they’ve still ceded far too much ground to those who would do them harm and largely lack the willpower to do what would be necessary to combat such enemies. How many people do you know, for example, who generally agreed with Trump about immigration but still shied away from supporting him because he was “mean” or “rude”? Such people will not survive, for the reason Buchanan emphasizes:

British historian J. E. Fround once wrote that “if ten men believe in something so deeply they are willing to die for it, and twenty men believe in something so deeply they are willing to vote for it, the ten will give the law to the twenty.” As we look at America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, which peoples today show a greater disposition to die for their destiny?

These same types tend to, as is currently being shown by the Virginia GOP’s decision to capitalize on Youngkin’s shocking success by running a buffoonish Jamaican woman with little hope of victory, reach out time and time again to groups like immigrants and blacks who hate white conservatives.⁷ That leads nowhere except perdition, and generally to the GOP alienating its base by doing things like aid and abet the destruction of Confederate monuments, yet it happens repeatedly. As Buchanan tells it:

Whenever critics demand that Republicans reach out to those who have again and again bitten their hand, the party obediently reaches out, and is bitten again —to the undying amusement of its tormentors.

That will never change. “Immigrants gravitate to the party of government,” as Buchanan notes,⁸ and that party is clearly the Democratic one. The same is true of the welfare-dependent blacks. Republicans have no real hope there, and so ought to concentrate on the demographic that could save the country—Heritage Americans—yet instead it wastes its energy on nonsense like the “platinum plan” for blacks and calling Democrats “the real racists,” imbecilic moves that only serve to cement the neo-morality. No sense of self-preservation indeed.

What We Face

Coming to the end of the book, Buchanan notes that we are staring in the face of what we ought have expected: in renouncing God, celebrating all the deadly sins and making them the basis of our culture and neo-morality, and refusing to do what is necessary to exist into the next few generations, we have killed ourselves.

What’s more, in thinking ourselves above all others—in engaging in civilizational hubris even while destroying the bases of our very existence—we have joined those other civilizations that destroyed themselves in much the same way, for much the same set of reasons. Buchanan notes:

These are the statistics of a decadent society and dying civilization, the first fruits of the cultural revolution that is de-Christianizing America. Reading these statistics, one is reminded of Whittaker Chambers in Witness: “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that have become indifferent to God, and died.”

And in our death throes, we are entering a period of struggle. Of fighting between the two sides, one of which has always realized there is no room for long-term compromise, and the other of which, the conservative side, might finally be coming around to that salient fact. Thus, as we face the frightening prospect of Sauron’s army—a vicious and mindless multitude—marching towards the decadent and decayed remnants of our fallen civilization, we must also look within the gates and realize that the two halves in the last city are incompatible with each other and must fight it out as well:

“Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King plaintively asked as the riots raged in LA, after the cops who had thrashed him were acquitted in Simi Valley. If only we could. But the painful truth is:

We cannot “all just get along,” because we are going through a civil war of the soul, a clash over who we are, what we believe, what we stand for as a people. It is an irrepressible conflict, for it is about first things. Those who deny that the culture war is at root a religious war have not dug down to its roots. It is self-delusion to believe that there can be a brokered peace. This revolution will quickly violate any armistice we agree upon, for it is about absolute power, and the annihilation of the old America.

That will be a grating and halting process, as the past half-century has mainly consisted of so-called conservatives backing down on every issue and letting the left push our world toward perdition, rather than fight it out and see if we might win. That must change. We cannot make peace or have peace with those who would kill us, and those “leaders” of ours who say to do so are treacherous cowards:

There are many things that you can refuse to do with a man. You can refuse to work for him, dine with him, or talk to him. But if he wants to fight, you have got to oblige him. Leaders are paroled from combat in the culture war only by exiting the field or raising a white flag. Since the sixties, no president has been able to escape. Eventually, all had to take sides, and all paid a price.

Can We Fix It?

So, we live in a world dominated by race communist ghouls who have murdered God and replaced him with anti-racism as the highest good. The native born aren’t breeding, and the world they’re leaving behind is being swamped by an unwashed multitude of drug dealers, gangbangers, scammers, and retarded cannibals. “The situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage,” as Emperor Hirohito said in August of 1945. But, still, we can probably salvage the situation somewhat, if we make the right decisions from here.