Fans of Liberal Fascism, unite!
Earlier this month, before dropping over $30 for the debut of Jonah Goldberg's (so far, wildly popular) Liberal Fascism, for $5 at a used bookstore I picked up for the first time ever a Pat Buchanan title, The Death of the West (2000).
I'm glad I did. It's a summary of the cultural, demographic, and economic trends that are the downfall of Western Civilization. It makes no particular case against militant Islam, although it does identify some of the harm it had already caused American interests; hence it cannot be accused of being particularly "Islamophobic" nor "isolationist." It identifies a culture war within American society, unappeasable and unavoidable -- very much as others, post-9/11, have acknowledged the jihad with Islam.
Rarely, however, do I notice Pat mentioned by name by post-9/11 counter-jihad pundit-authors. To pick a few, Mark Steyn in America Alone, Melanie Philips in Londonistan, or Claire Berlinski in Menace in Europe. Yet several of his basic observations and ideas pop up in their work -- declining Western birth rates, for example, or plummeting church attendance in Europe. If a schism exists between Pat and the rest, it seems to me everyone involved would benefit from a spirited debate that identifies just what are their (our) common interests. (In LF Goldberg devotes a few pages to him, btw.)
With an indecisive GOP primary season afoot (uncertain, weary, and chaotic all at once; "the party's falling apart," says Dick Morris) someone's got to ask: Where is American conservatism headed? How well (or poorly) is the Republican Party its "home"? And since the November election will be, in part, a second referendum on "The Bush Doctrine": Of the flagrantly liberal aspects of Bush's record -- nation-building abroad, government expansion at home -- which are worth keeping, amending -- or dismissing?
In The Death of the West Pat is neither grim nor optimistic, just diagnostic. For all the pitched partisanship and great American romance that make up a presidential election, it would be good also to administer a dose of Pat's "DoW-ism" to the Republican and national discussions already underway.
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A pleasant surprise of DoW is its more than occasional literary references. In a way that in no way relies on the academiklatura (something which would surprise and annoy them, would any deign to read it) Pat clearly is well-read in American letters. He quotes from novels and essays only to illustrate his political points, but also -- mirabile lectu -- Pat believes that Western literature should be read (and written) to bolster, not undermine, the West. History -- not "the text" -- is literature's proper reference. In today's culture war that's radical. (That also helps to explain why so much contemporary scribbling may be many things, but certainly not literature.)
One of Pat's sources is James Burnham's The Suicide of the West (1964). It's out of print, but not impossible to track down in used form. So after finishing The Death of the West, I ordered a used copy of The Suicide of the West. It does not disappoint.
A heartening passage about modern literature runs as follows:
It is also ironic that liberalism -- so prevalent among modern intellectuals and so widely regarded as the truly creative outlook in modern society -- has failed to attract any of the major creative writers of our century. Professor Lionel Trilling [described by a former student here] who seldom deviates from the liberal line on specific political or social issues though he is mildly heterodox in theory, discussed this little remarked
but surely significant fact in an article published in 1962 by the magazine Commentary. He pointed out that none of the major writers has been a liberal and that most of them have been anti-liberal; and that there is no great twentieth-century literary work infused with the liberal ideology as De Rerum Naturae, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, and War and Peace were infused with other ideologies. In the twentieth century, Professor Trilling declares, there has been "no literary figure of the very first rank . . . who, in his work, makes use of or gives credence to liberal or radical ideas." Many secondary writers and a substantial majority of critics have been and are liberals; but Henry James, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot -- all of whom the liberals so much admire, so frequently imitate and so endlessly comment on -- have all been, often explicitly and scornfully, anti-liberal. (pp.135-136)
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