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.

{snip}

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.

{snip}

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.

{snip}

South Africans vote almost exclusively along racial lines. {snip}

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.

{snip}

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.”