To Answer Mr. Buchanan's Question

Well, actually, I'm pretty sure that he knows the answer, but here's the question:

There is no American Melting Pot anymore. It was discarded by our elites as an instrument of cultural genocide. Now we celebrate America as the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural country on earth, the Universal Nation of Ben Wattenberg's warblings.

And, yet, we are surprised by ethnic espionage in our midst, the cursing of America from mosques in our cities, the news that Somali immigrants are going home to fight our Somali allies, and that illegal aliens march under Mexican flags to demand American citizenship.

Eisenhower's America was a nation of 160 million with a Euro-Christian core and a culture all its own. We were a people then. And when we have become, in 2050, a stew of 435 millions, of every creed, culture, color and country of Earth, what holds us together then?

The answer is, of course, an idea. I, at least, think of it as the idea fundamental to America, though it was not born in America. You can quite easily trace elements of it back--at least in terms of formal political statements--to Rutherford's Lex, Rex. It is the idea that men are created in the image of God, that they have, as part of their nature and as gifts of God, certain rights that, having not been given by men or their institutions, cannot be legitimately denied by men or their institutions, and that the role of government is to protect those rights. The idea is that law is king, not that the king (government) is law.

Government's role is not to serve as an instrument of plunder, but to protect its citizens from being plundered. Government may not legitimately do whatsoever those who hold the reigns of power wish it to do. It is kept within bounds by its obligation to protect man's God-given rights.

It is, of course, an idea that follows inexorably from the pages of the Bible. It is a Christian, or at the very least, a Judeo-Christian idea. It is a very powerful idea, so powerful that I am quite sure (partly on the basis of personal experience) that it can unify a country made up of people from diverse backgrounds.

Of course, we don't teach it anymore. The worldview on which it is based is widely disparaged and ridiculed, and we attempt, now, to talk about having "rights" without having any sort of basis for them other than the authority of the majority--that is, we now act on the idea that man has the rights that society says he has, which is, ultimately, a recipe for either dictatorship or mob rule.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard perfectly well-meaning people say, in effect, "Hey, this is America! Majority rules, right?"

Wrong. The whole point of being a republic instead of a democracy is to avoid being at the mercy of the majority, to avoid having one's inalienable rights being subject to the will of the mob. When we lose this concept, the question rapidly becomes: just how long, under those circumstances, will it take America to balkanize?