'Suicide of a Superpower'
Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan on his controversial new book
This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," October 17, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: A two-year freeze on all federal salaries and immediate moratorium on new immigration, constitutional amendment making English the official language of the United States. Now, these are just a few of the things that my next guest says we must do if we want to save our country. Otherwise, America as we know it could be dead by the year 2025.
Well, and we'll only have ourselves to blame, he says. In his new book, "Suicide of a Superpower," former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan argues that while pursuing the perfect society of our dreams, we are literally killing the country that we inherited, the best and greatest in the world.
Joining me now, New York Times bestselling author, syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan. Patrick J., welcome out of exile, sir.
(LAUGHTER)
Oh, come on. Just a little joke. It's inside.
You know, I have known you a long time.
PAT BUCHANAN, AUTHOR, "SUICIDE OF A SUPERPOWER": Right.
HANNITY: This is -- well, first of all, you wrote this book knowing that this was going to be controversial.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: Why?
BUCHANAN: Well, it's called in my last political will and testament. Sean, I decided to sit down for a couple years and figure out what happened to the country I grew up in. Why are we in such tremendous trouble not only with the status failing to defend the borders and can't balance its budget and can't end these trade deficits, it can't get manufacturing back. But socially, the country seems to be disintegrating. Why is it and why did it happen? And these are the answers basically I give. Now, you know, some of the solution you recommended or I recommended right at the end of that book, I think they will help solve the budget problem, and some of those problems. But I think some of our problems are so deep and endemic, I'm not sure they can be solved by politics.
HANNITY: You talk about a divide in America. And you look at it from a lot of different angles but there is a real divide. Half of the country doesn't pay any federal income taxes.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: We see what's happening on Occupy Wall Street.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: Do we get to the point where there's a tipping point, I like Malcolm Gladwell's book, the tipping point being that, you know, half the other country is paying for the other half and the other half that's not paying even wants more and the country collides.
BUCHANAN: One John Sechalhones (ph) predicted this, half of the country basically becomes tax consumers and other half taxpayers. The tax consumers have no incentive if they are not, you know, they are not paying taxes really to get the government any smaller. Why should they?
And so you have got this tremendous conflict in society but it's only one of them, Sean. Take the idea, you know, in the 1950s, I don't care whether if you were for Truman or Eisenhower or what, the country has had a moral consensus. It had a moral unity, a moral code. Basically based in the old and new testament, which people believed in and felt was right and true. Ever since the social cultural revolution of the 1960s, that's completely collapsed. And with it, I think the traditional family has collapsed. And ideas of right and wrong have collapsed. I mean, we have talked about these issues, gay marriage or right to life and abortion and all of these things, promiscuity. One side says, well that's progressive, normal and natural. And the other side says, that's wrong.
HANNITY: How do you reconcile?
BUCHANAN: You don't reconcile. You can't. It's irreconcilable. But that's the source of these culture wars that culturally crop up, is the fundamental beliefs behind them and beneath them are irreconcilable conflict.
HANNITY: Get two chapters the end of Christian America, the crisis of Catholicism.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: And, you know, you gave a famous speech, I think it was 1992.
BUCHANAN: Ninety-two, right.
HANNITY: And it created a big controversy. It's even quoted, I think Pat, to this day which shows the staying power of the Buchanan speech. But in all seriousness, you really are talking about a cultural divide on a major scale. And one thing that interested me in the book, you mentioned this was a desire, the end of Christianity, that many a dictator wanted. You quoted Karl Marx, opiate of the people et cetera, or the masses. And as I was reading this I'm thinking, you know, in many ways probably there's a lot of people celebrating that.
BUCHANAN: Listen, you know, we fought communism in Ronald Reagan's day and George Bush finished that Cold War up. The communism of Mao Tse Tung and Lenin and Stalin, horrible evil as it was, collapsed, it was a failure, it was a great success for a while. But the communism of Antonio Gramsci who argued that, look, he went to the Soviet Union. He said this place is failing, the people hate the place. What we've got to do is we've got to have a long march through the institutions of the west. And that long march to change their thinking and beliefs and basically get people so that they will accept cultural Marxism. They will embrace it as the Russian people rejected the other former -- and that's what happened. It's a trans- valuation as niche said of all values. What was wrong is now right and the reverse.
HANNITY: You talked about the beginning of the United Nations, I think was at 53 nations they started with or somewhere.
BUCHANAN: Yes. Fifty-two, 53.
HANNITY: Fifty two, 53. And what is it?
BUCHANAN: Hundred and ninety three.
HANNITY: Hundred and ninety three now? And you talk a lot about balkanization. Balkanization when you look at the former Yugoslavia. The former Soviet Union. And how all these countries have broken up into a divide. I get the sense, your predicting a moral balkanization and economic balkanization of America, is that a good analysis?
BUCHANAN: That is an excellent analysis. Let me say also, I predict, and this is where you get into touchy. You've got the chapter on the end of white America. When white America becomes.
HANNITY: I'm saving that for the next segment. You're ruining my flow.
(LAUGHTER)
BUCHANAN: I mean, the balkanization that's true and as we talked today, I have a chapter in there of 18,000 words, it's called ethno-nationalism and now, it's the triumph of tribalism. And what it is, Arthur Swazenger (ph) and Pat Monahan (ph) predicted at the end of the Cold War that the real conflicts coming up are going to be between peoples and tribes and races and cultures rather than ideologies like communism and capitalism. And I think they are right. All over the world, we see countries breaking down, breaking apart. Sudan just broke in half. Ethiopia broke in half. You see all the troubles in Kenya. You see Iraq.
You know, Sunni versus Shiites. Kurd versus Arab. Muslim versus Christian. The anti-Christian pandemic. The programs in the Middle East and everything. It is frightening but this is what is happening to the world it is all breaking down. Even in Europe, it's more peaceful. Scotland wants out. Catalonia wants out of Spain. Padania, Northern Italy wants out of Italy. Cypress is split in half. You take the Kurds, want out of Turkey. These are the battles I think of the future. This is the future of mankind. That's what makes me so concerned in the next segment about what's happening in our own country.
HANNITY: Well, what I predict will probably be the most controversial and you had to know this going in.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: You have the chapter called the end of white America. White Americans are an endangered species you write.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: We'll get with that more with Pat Buchanan as his new book, "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HANNITY: As we continue on "Hannity," and we continue with Patrick J. Buchanan, New York Times best-selling author, former presidential candidate, his new book is called, "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to the Year 2025?"
All right. When you write a chapter in abook called the end of white America and you write in that chapter, white America is an endangered species, and then you talk about the white population will begin to shrink with present birth rates, slowly disappear. You talk about Mexico moving north, et cetera, et cetera. You know what's coming next.
BUCHANAN: Well.
(LAUGHTER)
HANNITY: You know --
BUCHANAN: It's what comes before.
HANNITY: That's true. But I want you to explain it in your words because I think people will interpret it, Pat, is that oh, so white America is going so that means the end of America? You are saying that minorities are bad for the country.
BUCHANAN: No. Not at all. But the title is taken from the title of an article, cover article in Atlantic magazine, exactly, the end of white America. What does it mean for the -- about? What does it mean for the culture? And so, I looked at it from what does it mean for the United States of America when white Americans in 2041 become a minority in the country along with Asian Americans minority, African-Americans and Hispanic Americans. And you try to envisualize what's going to happen and America is going to look very much like California right now. And what does that mean? California is bankrupt. It's bond rating is the lowest of any place. Los Angeles, half the people there don't speak English in their own homes. Five million people.
And you've got all the problems of crimes. You've got a black-brown war among the underclass as one sheriff described, it in the prisons and in the gangs. And people are leaving California. And it's the old tax consumers are coming in. Now, these are not bad or evil people. Even the ones who are legal. They are coming to work many of them. They're coming for a better life. But the truth is they are bankrupting the state of California because of that divide you mentioned between taxpayers and tax consumers. And what happens when all of America is like that, when every American city is like LA? Who said -- David, what's his name from the New York Times"
HANNITY: Which one?
BUCHANAN: Columnist for the The New York Times?
HANNITY: One of your favorites, David Brooks.
BUCHANAN: Brooks. He said, you know, Tom Joad has given up. He went to California. John Judis, the new republic. He said, I don't think California is going to make it. Now, these are -- they're awful lot of liberals and others in there saying look, and what I'm saying is, look, what California is today America is in 2041 if we don't change course.
HANNITY: You -- really the two chapters together, the end of white America, demographic winter which you talk about ,people of European dissent are not only in a relative but real declining. Aging, dying, disappearing and you say, this is a big crisis of the west. Here is my question. We do break down. Now, people forget this. We break down demographically every poll. We break down every election demographically how African-Americans vote, white Americans vote. So, this is common.
BUCHANAN: Right.
HANNITY: I guess the issue or the argument that you are making though is, what? That the value system is different because 90 percent of African-Americans traditionally historically vote Democratic.
BUCHANAN: Ever since, '64, correct.
HANNITY: And the Hispanic vote goes what demographically?
BUCHANAN: It goes -- the Hispanic goes 60 to 70 percent Democratic. Asian-Americans which is a bit of a surprise, 60 to 70 percent. Africans- Americans, 90 to 95 percent. That's what Barack Obama got.
What I'm saying is, if that is half of the country, and Republicans will never win another election. And I mentioned California for this reason. Demographically what California is will tell you also what California is politically. Republic Party, Nixon and Reagan won California nine times, Nixon lost it once. Republican can't win California today. It's not because the people are evil. But they are democratic. They depend on government. They believe in government. And they vote for the party of government. And when Texas goes the same way and whites are a minority in Texas, when it becomes predominantly overwhelmingly Hispanic, it is going to become predominantly Democratic. That's the end of the Republican Party.
HANNITY: What do you say to those people saying there is Pat Buchanan? Well, no, no. What do you say to them, they say, why don't you break it down along belief system rather than racial lines?
BUCHANAN: Well, I agree, I mean, I'll tell you why many African- Americans vote Democratic is because, you know, the federal government stopped, ended slavery, it ended segregation, it supported civil rights, supports affirmative action. But the Feds did that and they tend to believe in the federal government as a good, powerful positive institution, it's on our side. And Hannity and Buchanan and these guys are constantly knocking it, and that's why we are against them. So, that's an understandable position. But what I'm saying is it is a realistic statement to say that that's going to be the future as well.
HANNITY: Right. Because I look at the value system of many of my friends from all backgrounds. Diverse backgrounds, and they think as I do.
BUCHANAN: One quick point on that.
HANNITY: Go ahead.
BUCHANAN: Seventy percent of African-Americans in California voted for Proposition 8 to outlaw gay marriage. Five percent voted for John McCain. So, you are right, the value system in many cases, the African-Americans are the most churched people in America but politically, in politics, trumps values in many places.
HANNITY: Politically can different demographic groups move over to limited government, to lower taxes?
BUCHANAN: Now you are talking. That's why I say, you have a moratorium on immigration. Take all the immigrants that came in, the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Pols. They all voted Democratic. So we shut off immigration in 1924.
By the 1950s, they were moving and when we talked Nixon, we're working, Nixon said, we're going to get an Italian on the Supreme Court, they are ready to break our way. Because these are folks, their kids came up. They're doing well, they got kids in school and they're saying, we are paying taxes. Wait a minute, our taxes are going up. Maybe we ought to take a look at this other party.
But you need time for folks to move out of that poverty and move up into the middle class. Once they move into the middle class into the taxpayer category, Sean, they are available.
HANNITY: All right. Pat Buchanan. Listen, when you're under fire later this week we'll have you back.
BUCHANAN: OK.
HANNITY: All right. Which I'm predicting.
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