10/30/2011
Re: Pat Buchanan's column The Conquest of the West
From: Mark Mallarde ( e-mail him)
Being a reader and admirer of Pat Buchanan since my teens, it pains me to read his pro-population growth analysis. Mr. Buchanan writes as though we are in the age of the Crusades and that an insufficient number of able-bodied men can only mean that we will lose in battle to an invading army of hostile foreigners.
To the contrary, the “Death of the West” is the choice we sadly make as a nation. The invaders come by invitation — not by force. Even before 1965, enough foreigners that wanted to emigrate here existed so that this catastrophe could have occurred. Birth rates have nothing to do with it.
Does Mr. Buchanan really believe that without the mass invasion of foreigners that Americans would slowly die off? Would 250 million people not be enough for America to endure? Would our nuclear arsenal not keep enemy Muslims at bay with their navies that do not exist? Or would our armies be insufficient to stop millions of unarmed peasant Mexicans from continuing to cross our deserts in the Southwest?
Of course, we could survive and prosper with 250 million or 200 million or even 150 million citizens. Witness Australia — a vast country with a relatively tiny population. Its greatest threat lies not in its small population but the risk that its politicians might crack open the floodgates to a tsunami of people from Asia. So long as Australia prohibits mass immigration, its people will enjoy a continent with an endless coastline that resembles California in its halcyon days.
In contrast to Australia, witness the rising China which for decades has struggle to lower — not increase — its population.
Also, Mr. Buchanan fails to recognize that much of our national characters derives from our open spaces. High population density endangers our way of life. It inherently requires more regulation of human activity — and less freedom.
See previous letters from Mark Mallarde.
By James Fulford writes: I’ve written previously that it would not be a demographic disaster if America’s population dropped numerically, due to a low birthrate — if they were all Americans! I said at the time that “Many people thought America was a pretty good country when it only had 140 million people,” and obviously Pat Buchanan is one of those people, and is familiar with these issue.
But American demographic are starting to become worrisome — it sometimes seems that there is demographic problem in that there practically won’t be a next generation. The more civilized parts of China are experiencing the same thing. John Derbyshire reports that young professional women in China don’t want to have even “one child.”
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