Is America Disenigrating?

Is America Disenigrating?

Pat Buchanan
Creators Syndicate
Oct. 21, 2011

In Federalist 2, John Jay looks out at a nation of a common blood, faith, language, history, customs and culture.

"Providence," he writes, "has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion ... very similar in their manners and customs ..."

Are we still that "one united people" today? Or has America become what Klemens von Metternich called Italy: "a mere geographical expression"?

In "Suicide of a Superpower," out this week, I argue that the America we grew up in is disintegrating, breaking apart along the fault lines of politics, race, ethnicity, culture and faith; that the centrifugal forces in society have now become the dominant forces.

Our politics are as poisonous as they have been in our lifetimes.

Sarah Palin was maligned as morally complicit in the murder attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Terms like "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" are routinely used on Tea Party members who one congressman said want to see blacks "hanging on a tree."

Half a century after the civil rights revolution triumphed, the terms "racist" and "racism" are in daily use. We remain, said Eric Holder in calling us a "nation of cowards," as socially segregated as ever.

"Outside the workplace, the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America ... does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago."

He is not altogether wrong in that. In California's prisons and among her proliferating ethnic gangs, a black-brown civil war has broken out.

Yet, by 2042, there will be 66 million black folks and 135 million Hispanics here, the latter concentrated in the states bordering Mexico.

What holds us together, then?

We are not now and will not then be "descended from common ancestors." We will consist of all the races, cultures, tribes and creeds of Earth -- a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual stew of a nation that has never before existed, or survived. The parallels that come to mind are the Habsburg Empire that flew apart after World War I, and the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that disintegrated after the Cold War.

No more will we all speak the same language. We will be bilingual and bi-national. Spanish radio and TV stations are already the fastest growing. In Los Angeles, half the people speak a language other than English in their own homes.

As for "professing the same religion," where 85 percent of Americans were Christians in 1990, that is down to 75 percent and plummeting. The old Christian churches -- Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran and especially Episcopalian -- are splitting, shrinking and dying.

Where three in four Catholics attended Sunday Mass in 1960, it is now one in four. One in three cradle Catholics has lost the faith. The numbers of priests and nuns are plummeting; religious orders are dying; Catholics schools are closing.

The moral consensus and moral code Christianity gave to us has collapsed. Since the great cultural-social revolution of the 1960s, there has occurred what Nietzsche called the "transvaluation of all values."

What was morally repellent -- promiscuity, homosexuality, abortion -- is now seen by perhaps half the nation as natural, normal, healthy and progressive.

Socially, too, America is breaking down.

Where out-of-wedlock births in the 1950s were rare, today, 41 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent; among blacks, 71 percent. And the correlation between the illegitimacy rate, the drug rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate is absolute.

This helps to explain the four decades of plunging test scores of American children and the quadrupling of the prison population. (<-----------------Are you reading this, Bubblebliss????????????)

And while all this is happening, the state is failing.

We cannot control our borders, win our wars or balance our budgets. In three consecutive national elections -- 2006, 2008 and 2010 -- the incumbents have been repudiated. Confidence in politics, politicians and the future of the country has never been so low in our lifetimes.

There was a time not so long ago when the nation was united on a common faith, morality, history, heroes, holidays, holy days, language and literature. Now we fight over them all.

Neocons says not to worry, the Constitution holds us together.

Does it? Do we all agree on what the First Amendment says about the freedom to pray in school and celebrate Christmas and Easter? How can we be the "one nation, under God" of the Pledge of Allegiance, or the people "endowed by their Creator" with inalienable rights, if we cannot even identify or discuss or mention that God and that Creator in the schools of America?

Do we agree on what the Ninth Amendment says about right to life? What about what the 14th Amendment says about affirmative action? What the Second Amendment says about the right to carry a concealed gun?

The new secession that is coming, Rick Perry notwithstanding, is not like the secession of 1861. It is a secession of the heart from one another.

TexasBlue wrote:(<-----------------Are you reading this, Bubblebliss????????????)

Didn't think so.

What about it?

What's your opinion (the bolded red)?

My opinion is that something serious should have been down about this problem 20-30 years ago. Certain areas of the US aren't disenigrading, they're already disenigrated.

BubbleBliss wrote:
My opinion is that something serious should have been down about this problem 20-30 years ago. Certain areas of the US aren't disenigrading, they're already disenigrated.

I'd say that it's more than "certain" areas.

There was a study done in my town. We're pretty low on the state test scores here. Someone took all the Hispanic student scores out and we would be near the top of the list otherwise. This is a town of 3,000!

It's never as clear cut as one thinks. That's my point.

TexasBlue wrote:

BubbleBliss wrote:
My opinion is that something serious should have been down about this problem 20-30 years ago. Certain areas of the US aren't disenigrading, they're already disenigrated.

I'd say that it's more than "certain" areas.

There was a study done in my town. We're pretty low on the state test scores here. Someone took all the Hispanic student scores out and we would be near the top of the list otherwise. This is a town of 3,000!

It's never as clear cut as one thinks. That's my point.

Seems like the US has bigger problems than Europe with non-integration of certain immigrant groups.

BubbleBliss wrote:Seems like the US has bigger problems than Europe with non-integration of certain immigrant groups.

I would think so. You guys have the Turks and other Muslims and we have a large Hispanic population that isn't integrating very well. Minnesota has a Somali population that's integrated somewhat but still remains outside the realm of getting on with other folks.

It all depends on the area these people move to. A lot of Africans, Asians, Muslims, etc. move into German neighborhoods or smaller towns and they integrate just fine. Those are the kind of people nobody notices, because they behave normally.
Yet those that move into problem areas or areas where it's 90% Muslim, they tend not to integrate very well. Sure, you always feel more comfortable with your own kind but you also have to get along and adjust with the native people, so to say.

Pretty much right on there. I don't have a problem with (legal) immigrants at all. I actually like asking them questions about their homeland because I find those stories interesting.

The ones I don't like are the ones who blatantly act as if I owe them something or act as if they don't like me without even getting to know me. Xenophobia goes both ways in this regard.

Are we as a nation disintegrating?

Well, if we are, it's because we are such quick learners. I mean, we've been steadily taught that those we don't agree with, are our enemies. The politics comes in as the worst offender because if you were to buy into even 1% of what is said about politicals from both sides, you'd have to assume that every single elected official in every office in the land... as well as those who ran and lost, were horrid criminals, if not absolute traitors.

It's sometime's called 'select negative enforcement'. For those of us who are more than 18 years old, we know that translates into English as, character assassination though lies.

These are the people we elect to lead us so... what do we really expect? That it would not rub off on the rest of us or teach us to behave the same way on subjects that aren't necessarily always political? We're a classroom of some 300+ million students who absorb trends and popular culture like a dry sponge. If our political idols talk trash about their opponents, we make like a WWE smackdown and verbally dropkick the guy next door if he voted for the wrong person.

Hey, we're just a chip off the old block, that's all.

Just an opinion but I think our elected leaders need to clean up their acts. Someday... though it is highly improbable, we might get tired of all the BS campaigning from both sides and unelect every incumbent in Washington... and reclaim our country.

Another key to what you said is that we have a rampant flood of political correctness. I absolutely hate that shit. One, it stops people from saying what they really want to say. Two, the character assassination will follow you to the end of the earth if you remotely criticize a minority... whatever the minority: gays, blacks, browns, Asian, etc.

Hate speech is one thing and criticizing a group of people is another. It ultimately boils down to thought control.

TexasBlue wrote:Another key to what you said is that we have a rampant flood of political correctness. I absolutely hate that shit. One, it stops people from saying what they really want to say. Two, the character assassination will follow you to the end of the earth if you remotely criticize a minority... whatever the minority: gays, blacks, browns, Asian, etc.

Hate speech is one thing and criticizing a group of people is another. It ultimately boils down to thought control.

Agreed, 10,000%

PC is one of those things that I purposely avoid respecting... every chance I get, lol.

I think the PC thing began with the Clinton administration. It does NOTHING but silence the ability of people to talk about subjects that need to be discussed openly, and honestly.

Remember that old Cleavon Little movie called Blazing Saddles? What a hoot! But you couldn't make that today. My gawd, the PC people would s**t and fall back in it!

Also... the word 'hate' is horribly abused today, especially in politics. Most people will never know what true hate really is. True hate is the opposite of true love and we all know what a rare critter that is.

Don't get me started on the abuse of the language. That always tips me over. Call me a PC-phobic, lol.

Actually, the first time I heard the word PC was back in the Reagan administration. But I think it gained footing during the Clinton years.