The Sequel to ‘Suicide of A Superpower’

Whites will become a minority in 2042 and will fall to 46 percent of the population by 2050, comprising only 38 percent of U.S. population under 18. So writes Patrick J. Buchanan in his formidable new book, “Suicide of A Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

Every immigration worrywart recalls the “astonishing episode” Mr. Buchanan recounts next. In 1998, Bill Clinton brought tidings of “their coming minority status” to a “largely white student body” at Portland State University. “In a little more than 50 years,” rejoiced President Clinton, “there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through a demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.” Taking their cue from their “enthnomasochistic” president, the students erupted in cheers.

“Ethnomasochism,” laments Mr. Buchanan—who is surely one of the great patriots of our time—is “the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group.” It is “a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower.”

In this writer’s latest book, the example of post-apartheid South Africa is used to deconstruct the effects of such a shift in a country’s majority/minority power structure. Granted, the shift underway in the U.S.A. is incremental. But as is clear from the facts unfurled in “Suicide of A Superpower,” the transformation of America will be as detrimental as the almost-overnight shift orchestrated in South Africa.

In 1994, South Africa’s Europeans forfeited control over the state apparatus. They ceded mastery over their destiny, and vested their existential survival in a political dispensation: a liberal democracy. In a needlessly optimistic assumption, whites imagined that blacks too would be bound by the same political abstractions—they expected them to relinquish race as an organizing principle, in favor of a constitutional design.

Instead of political partners, South African whites got masters. They also got a low-grade war, waged by a sinecured criminal class, which grasped that the politically helpless minority was “historical fair game.” “The physical vulnerability of white South Africans flows from having surrendered their political dominance for the promise of non-racial constitutional safeguards.”

South Africa’s political eunuchs are particularly vulnerable within a democratic political dispensation for the very reason the descendants of America’s founders will be fair game: their history on the continent. Remedial historical revisionism notwithstanding, South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the product of the people currently in control. Rather, it was the creation of British and Dutch colonists and their descendants. For what they’ve achieved and acquired—and for the sins of apartheid—South Africa’s pioneering people are the objects of envy and racial enmity.

Unless they fight it, a similar fate awaits the descendants of the (slaveholding) founders of America.

In South Africa, the ratio of voters to taxpayers is now a stupefying 11 to 1, and growing. The equivalent ratio in the U.S. is still approximately 2 to 1. But the numbers of the unproductive are increasing steadily. As Mr. Buchanan notes, almost all the immigrants replacing the host population in the U.S. come from “Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Given America’s preference for welfare-dependent, third-world immigrants, pillage politics will proliferate.

South Africans vote almost exclusively along racial lines. That all the elections since 1994 have had the blessing of every liberal alive doesn’t change the fact that they are determined by “a muscular mobilization of a race-based majority.” As illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” democracy is especially dangerous in ethnically and racially divided societies, where majorities and minorities are rigidly predetermined and politically permanent.

For a prerequisite for a liberal democracy is that majority and minority status be interchangeable and fluid. To wit, a ruling majority party must be as likely to become a minority party as the obverse. Indeed, every democratic theorist worth his salt has urged that the principle of majority rule be severely curtailed “whenever people of different languages, races, religions, or national origins with no firm habits of political co-operation and mutual trust are to unite in a single polity.”

Thirty years on, when the Rubicon is crossed, most Americans will be poorer, less educated, and more welfare-dependent. One party will represent this majority. This party will serve as an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by a politically powerful majority. Like South Africa, America is destined to degenerate into a dominant-party state.

Sadly, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is the sequel to Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Suicide of A Superpower.”