The Catholic New World - Interview

Patrick J. Buchanan: “The major problem with the West is a cultural civil war going on inside our society. CNS

Buchanan mans the ramparts in ‘cultural war’

	THE INTERVIEW a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

Michelle Martin talks with Patrick J. Buchanan.

Three-time presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan will speak about “The Death of the West,” (St. Martin’s Press, 2001) the topic of his current best-seller, when he receives the 2002 Freedom Award at the annual conference of the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation April 20 in Oakbrook Terrace. The foundation, a worldwide organization devoted to providing “reliable information on the secular attacks on faith and family values,” is named in honor of a Hungarian prelate who was imprisoned for 26 years because of his opposition to fascism and communism.

Buchanan, 63, argues that the West is dying because of steeply declining birthrates among Europeans and Americans and because of ongoing attacks on traditional Western culture from within Western societies. He has been married to Shelley for 32 years. He spoke with The Catholic New World by telephone from his home in McLean, Va.

The Catholic New World: How would the world be different if Catholics the world over had heeded the anti-contraception message of “Humanae Vitae?”

Patrick J. Buchanan: The Catholic population would I think be stronger and more vibrant. Within the Catholic population, their practices regarding birth control have become virtually the same as the population at large. I think the Catholic community was clearly ready to embrace the secular appeal of birth control.

TCNW: What can the church do to reverse the trend?

PJB: After the second Vatican Council, we need a second Council of Trent to reinvigorate and reassert traditional doctrine and dogma, even if it means it will be rejected by great numbers of people. I think the Catholic Church could use an Athanasius about now.

TCNW: So you might get a stronger and more vibrant Catholic Church albeit a smaller one?

PJB: I think you might get a stronger one. And I think the truth is that people today, especially the post-Baby Boom generation, are looking for hard truths rather than accommodation. I think it’s the faiths that are much more demanding that seem to be doing extremely well right now, whereas it’s the accomodationist faiths, especially the Protestant churches, the traditional, mainstream churches, that seem to be in a state of disrepair and decline. The Epsicopal Church is the advance guard. ...

St. Mary’s has the traditional Latin Mass in Washington where I go on Sundays. We started out down there in the inner city of Washington with a 9 a.m. Latin Mass—it’s the only one allowed in the city—with just a handful of people. Now the church is full, and at times like Easter, I think you’ll have a hard time finding a pew.

TCNW: In “The Death of the West,” you repeatedly describe the current situation as one of “cultural warfare,” a zero-sum game in which immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America will overrun Europe and the United States unless we stop them. How do you reconcile that with Christianity’s call to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger?

PJB: We need to separate several things out. The cultural war is the war inside the West, and the enemies of the West are inside the West—predominantly. There are some clearly in the Islamic world. But the major problem with the West is a cultural civil war going on inside our society. … This cultural revolution or cultural Marxism is becoming the dominant culture of the society, and I believe it’s a carcinogenic and is responsible for the decline and death of the West.

What is happening is that into the places set aside for native born Europeans and Americans are coming millions and tens of millions of people from cultures which have never been fully assimilated into a First World, English-speaking country and First World, Western culture. This is a very difficult and long-term process to achieve. We have to worry about the preservation of our national unity. And I think the folks who are pouring in here, many of them illegally—we need time to assimilate and inculturate and Americanize these folks, just as we did with the Irish and the Germans and the other immigrants of a long time ago.

So there are two separate things. We should certainly welcome folks, but as Solzenitsyn said, God has made the face of each nation unique, and he wants it to be preserved. I think if you read Aquinas and the others, they’ve got a faithfulness and a loyalty to the “patriate,” to the fatherland, to preserve it. I think if you allow your country to be overrun by strangers, you’re not being faithful to your obligations to your own country. Clearly, the obligations for charity for folks who are poor can be dealt with by sending money rather than by having folks settle on your estate.

TCNW: Are you calling for a halt to immigration?

PJB: I think we need a time out or a moratorium, where we have about 250,000 folks, maybe 300,000, coming in each year—which is more generous than any other country. At the same time, you stop illegal immigration and you teach the children of the newcomers the English language from kindergarten on, and you teach them American history just as our ancestors were [taught]. I think the American experiment has much to commend it, and we ought not lose its traditions.

Many of the immigrants who come here clearly want to become Americans, and they understand that English is the language of the United States and they want their children to learn it just as earlier immigrants demanded they did, and our earlier cultural elites demanded that this happen. In many cases now, there’s real resistance, especially among Mexican and Hispanic militants, who are demanding that their children be taught in Spanish, and this is a real conflict. If we’re going to remain one nation, one people, then we’ve got to have one language.

TCNW: I gather from what you wrote that we need a common version of history being taught.

PJB: Well, I do think we need a positive version of American history and Western history taught to children if they’re going to preserve our country and civilization, if they’re going to become young patriots. You learn to love your country through stories and anecdotes that tell you we’re all members of one national family now, and we all have a unique history and heritage which ought to be preserved and handed down to future generations.

TCNW: There are obviously episodes in American history that aren’t particularly positive. Do you think those need to be taught at all?

PJB: There’s no need to teach about the massacre at Sand Creek to first graders, or Wounded Knee, although that’s a very disputed event as far as I’m concerned. You can learn about the explorers and Washington and all the rest at the lower grades, and the heroes of American history ought to be emphasized. Every civilization and every country has crimes and sins, but if you want to create patriots, the way to do it is not to say that what we came for is dreadful.

In truth, of all the civilizations in history, the West has done more to elevate mankind than any other, and I think the United States of America is clearly the greatest and freest republic in all of history, and tens of millions of people worldwide want to come here. They’re not going to other countries; they’re coming to the United States, and there are reasons for that.

That’s not to deny that there were things that were done wrong. I think this recent emphasis on the negative about America—I think the American people ought not to have to pay for that kind of thing to be taught to their children in public schools.

TCNW: You were talking about how tens of millions of people want to come here, and it’s not because of what we did wrong. Could those people be the hope of preserving our culture?

PJB: Many of them will be, I think. But they come here not knowing a great deal about it, and then their children go to schools where they’re taught to despise and hate and revile the leaders. So I think we have a two-part process. First, we have tremendous numbers of people who have already come here. They have to be assimilated and inculturated and Americanized, and introduced to our language, our history, our heroes, our traditions, our mores. It is very difficult to absorb into a First World, Western country—a predominantly white country still—folks of different colors and ethnic groups and backgrounds and civilizations. It can be done by the melting pot here in America, which has worked before with European people. But my point is this takes time. Someone predicted that by the middle of the century, you’ll have 100 million Hispanics in America, mostly in the American Southwest. Then who will assimilate to whom? Already Anglos are leaving California at the rate of 100,000 a year, and if it becomes a gigantic Hispanic enclave, the question is whether you’re going to lose that part of America just like the Serbs lost Kosovo when it became overwhelmingly Albanian. The point is we have to think about these things if we want to preserve our national unity.

My fear has been that nobody has been thinking about it, and everybody has been celebrating a myth, which is a wonderful myth, but may not be relevant to the present different and massive illegal immigration.

TCBW: The myth of?

PJB: This wonderful myth of how we were assimilated. But it wasn’t all that smooth. If you go back to the history of the Irish in the 19th and early 20th century, people who were apprehensive were not just xenophobes. There were real problems attendant to it. My Irish forebears tried to get this country involved in a war with Great Britain by invading Canada. We would prefer that they not do that.

TCNW: You’ve run three presidential campaigns now, two for the Republican nomination and one for the Reform Party. What have you learned from those campaigns?

PJB: I’ve been in politics since 1966 when I joined up with Richard Nixon. I knew there was very little chance of taking the nomination away from a sitting president when I ran in 1992. In 1996, you almost succeeded. There were some tactical errors, but mainly we did the best we could and I don’t think I could have beaten Clinton in 1996. In 2000, we learned that we cannot do it outside the Republican Party without enormous amounts of money. To create a new party and to create a new traditionalist, conservative, America-first party, which we tried to do—we failed. We did the best we could. I’m glad we made the effort; in the end, we did not succeed.

So you try to move your message out and get your ideas out through books—this book has been extremely successful. So I’m going to try to work that way for a while.

TCNW: Did your involvement in presidential politics help spread your message?

PJB: We did succeed in very much helping to write two Republican platforms and bringing the issue of the decline in standards and the alienation of the working American into the mainstream. I think we kept the Republican Party strongly pro-life. We raised the issue of the new “America first” foreign policy which keeps us out of wars which are none of America’s business. There’s no doubt we had a hand in raising the immigration issue to national attention even before 9/11. I’m constantly called on television now and called a “prophet without honor in his own country.” When “Buchananism” is becoming a noun in the American lexicon, the message has gotten through. Whether it’s warmly received by the establishment or not is an entirely different question.

To get more information about or register for the Cardinal Mindszenty Conference, call Kevin Haney at (630) 589-7079 or Sallie Kruml at (630) 858-5612.

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