"Suicide of a Superpower", by Pat Buchanan

When I got done with law school 48 years ago and went out into the adult world to practce law, the thing that shocked and upset me the most was the blatant racism exhibited by judges and fellow lawyers I came into contact with. I expected it among my blue collar clients, becuase they didn't know any better, but not among other professionals. How could people with 19 years of education still be so racist? It made no sense to me.

Living and working in this hostile world was a source of continuing disappointment to me. I always felt like a reluctant visitor to an alien environment. I was a stranger in a strange land.

In the reading and studying I have done in my retirement, I have come to understand that racism is a natural part of the human condition, which is to say that we are a tribal species. This is the central theme of Pat Buchanan's 2011 book, "Suicide of a Superpower". Buchanan gives numerous examples from all around the world of the emergence of tribalism as the dominant force in the world today. The more general, and probably more accurate, term he uses is "ethnonationalism".

Concerning the United States, the superpower which Buchanan correctly diagnoses as dying, he says this: "Eisenhower's America was a nation of 160 million with a European-Christian core and culture all it own. We were a people then. And when, in 2050, we have become a stew of 435 million, of every creed, culture and color, fron every country on earth, what will hold us together".

Buchanan's general point is that countries based on ideology do not survive. Considered in that light, the miracle is not that the United States republic is dying, as it surely is, but that it has lasted this long. The Soviet Union's ideology-based country lasted only 74 years; ours has lasted an amazing 247 years and counting.

Buchanan's idea that we are a tribal species has received strong support in recent years from a perceptive article in "National Affais" by Jonathan Rauch. Rauch notes that "tribalism has been the prevalent mode of social organization for all but approximately the most recent 2% of years that humans have lived on the planet". He concludes that "the more parties weaken as institutions whose members are united by loyalty to their organization, the more they strengthen as tribes whose members are united by hostility to their enemy". So, the rancor today among different political and ethnic groups, so condemned by most of us, is really quite natural in human history.