Listen to Pat

Again, Pat Buchanan is not right about everything. But if you miss the lesson he's teaching in this column--well, it's an important lesson. C'mon, read the whole thing.

Ethnonationalism, that relentless drive of peoples to secede and dwell apart, to establish their own nation-state, where their faith is predominant, their language spoken, their heroes and history revered, and they rule to the exclusion of all others, is rampant.

[snip]

In speaking of the rising tribalism abroad, Schlesinger added, "The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever."

Friends and neighbors, I am the last person to say that ethnic differences cannot be overcome. They can. My own ancestry is largely Irish, but we have Choctaw blood, too. My nephew is part Jewish. My children are part Mexican. Some of the people I like seeing most every week are the Mexican immigrants in the ESL (English as a Second Language) class I teach. The head of the karate system I study, RyuTe, is an Okinawan immigrant. I do believe in the "melting pot" concept.

But (you knew the "but" was coming) for the "melting pot" to work, something has to provide the "heat." There has to be something, some overriding thing in common, that overcomes ethnicity and cultural division. I submit to you that a more-or-less common religious faith--and Christianity was once professed by the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of this country--is the best candidate, followed closely by a burning desire for liberty, liberty having its strongest foundation in the view of man and God to be found in the Scriptures. For many decades, we had a more-or-less homogeneously Christian, government-phobic, liberty-loving population. That is sufficient to make the "melting pot" concept work. But now? Though the majority of Americans profess to be Christian, polling them on the details reveals that most don't quite understand the basics of the Christian faith and fewer and fewer attend church services or show other signs of a living Christian faith. More and more Americans have gradually been lured onto the government teat in one way or another and are loath to give up what they mistakenly perceive as security in exchange for more liberty. We are rapidly losing the very things that made the "melting pot" work, and it seems to me that the day is coming when this nation might very well fragment. It might not be within my lifetime (though it wouldn't shock me if it were), but unless things change soon, I think it is coming.

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?

Great Jefferson Quote

We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

What I fear most of all is that we will see spiraling inflation as a result of trying to print enough worthless money to pay off all the incredible debt we are piling up--and yes, the Bush administration and Republican congress spent way, way too much, but the Obama administration and Democratic congress are succeeding in making even the Bushies look frugal--and the resulting economic and social pressures, added onto the stack of problems trending toward balkanization, will ultimately succeed in breaking the country apart.

No, obviously, I don't expect that to happen next week. But I am concerned that it might happen within my lifetime.

Think it can't happen? I suspect that you have no idea how bad these things can get. At one point before Napoleon took power in France, the situation was so bad that the laundry women were calling for the death penalty for people who sold soap at too high a price. Of course, the escalating prices were driven by an enormous increase in velocity, the speed at which money changes hands, which was driven by France's horrible monetary policies--policies from which the Obama administration and the Democratic Party seem to have learned nothing.

Interested in the concept of velocity? You probably haven't heard of that one before. Most people haven't. Try reading this little book.