Death of the West Patrick Buchanan ISBN 0-312-28548-5 $25.95 $38.95 Can. --- Inside sleeve --- THE WEST IS I DYING. Collapsing birth rates in Europe and the United States, coupled with population explosions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are set to cause cataclysmic shifts in world power, as unchecked immigration swamps and polarizes every Western society and nation. Drawing on U.N. population projections, recent U.S. census figures, and expert policy studies, prominent conservative Pat Buchanan takes a cold, hard look at the future decay of Europe and America and the decline of Western culture. In The Death of the West, Buchanan contends that the United States now harbors a "nation within a nation," that Europe will be inundated by an IslamicArab-African invasion, and that most First World nations, including Japan, have begun slowly to vanish from the earth. And aside from a rapidly aging population, Buchanan argues that the counterculture of the 1960s has now become America's dominant ethos and is systematically demolishing America's history and heritage. Bold, powerful, and persuasive, The Death of the West details how a civilization, culture, and moral order are passing away and foresees a new world that has terrifying implications for our freedom, our faith, and the preeminence of Amercan democracy. ---- T H E D E AT H 0 F T H E W E S T Also by Patrick J. Buchanan The New Majority Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories Right from the Beginning The Great Betrayal A Republic, Not an Empire • PATRICK J. BUCHANAN • THE DEATH OF THE WEST HOW DYING POPULATIONS AND IMMIGRANT INVASIONS IMPERIL OUR COUNTRY AND CIVILIZATION Thomas Dunne Books ST. MARTIN'S PRESS NEW YORK 11117\I \S 1711\\I BOOKS. Thomas Dunne Books an imprint of St. Martin's Press. THE DEATH OF THE WEST. Copyright 2002 by Patrick J. Buchanan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com Production Editor: David Stanford Burr I Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buchanan, Patrick 1. The death of the West : how dying populations and immigrant invasions imperil our and country and civilization / Patrick J. Buchanan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-312-28548-5 1. Civilazation, Western-- Forcasting. 2. Social prediction--United States. 3. Social prediction--Europe. 4. United States--Social conditions--Forecasting. 5. Europe--Social conditions--Forecasting 6.United States--Population--Forecasting. 7. Europe--Population--Forecasting. 8. United States--Expansion and immigration--Social aspects. 9. Europe--Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. 1. Title. CB245 .B83 2002 306'.0973'01-dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 One / ENDANGERED SPECIES 11 Two / "WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GINE?" 25 Three / CATECHISM OF A REVOLUTION 51 Four / FOUR WHO MADE A REVOLUTION 73 Five / THE COMING GREAT MIGRATIONS 97 Six / LA RECONQUISTA 123 Seven / THE WAR AGAINST THE PAST 147 Eight / DE-CHRISTIANIZING AMERICA 179 Nine / INTIMIDATED MAJORITY 205 Ten / A HOUSE DIVIDED 227 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 269 NOTES 271 INDEX 297 This is the way the World ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not With a bang; but a whimper. T.S. Eliot, "The Follow Men" Some withered nerve in her brain twitched slightly, she softened, smiled, mid told him a story about her grandfather who had been a page at Queen Victoria's coronation. "That was another World," he slid. "Another civilasation," she corrected him, "the one I was born into. It has died. I say: died, not vanished, because it was a living organism. A civilisation based on the family. What has taken its place is not alive; an atomised society, without security, without warmth, a chaos of fragmented mechanical relationships. O, know as well as you do, that in my world all was not well, there was ignorance and poverty. But the right way was not to tear that world down and replace it by anarchy. The family base should have been extended, cherished, encouraged." --- Storm Jameson, I966, The Early Life of Stephen Nind THE DEATH OF THE WEST INTRODUCTION "Pat, we're losing the country we grew up in." Again and again in the endless campaign of 2000 I heard that lament from men and women across America. But what did they mean by it? WHY SHOULD SADNESS or melancholy--as though one's father were dying and there were nothing to be done--have crept into the hearts of Americans on the cusp of the "Second American Century"? Were these not, as Mr. Clinton constantly reminded us, the best of times in America, with the lowest unemployment and inflation in thirty years, crime rates falling, and incomes soaring? Are we not, as Madeleine Albright never ceased to boast, "the indispensable nation"? Was this not, as Mr. Bush trumpeted, our time "of unrivaled military power, economic promise, and cultural influence"?-1 We had won the Cold War. Our ideas were winning all over the world. What were they talking about? What was their problem? It is this: America has undergone a cultural and social revolution. We are not the same country that we were in 1970 or even 1980. We are not the same people. After the 2000 election, pollster William McInturf told the Washington Post: "We have two massive colliding forces. One is rural, Christian, religiously conservative. [The other] is socially tolerant, pro-choice, secular, living in New England and the Pacific Coast... "-2 Disraeli said Victorian England was "two nations," rich and poor.-3 Novelist John Dos Passos wrote after the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, "All right, we are two nations. "-4 As I listened to the Inaugural address, a line struck home. President Bush seemed to have heard what I had heard and found what I had found. "And sometimes," he said, "our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country."-5 While the awful events of September 11 created a national unity unseen since Pearl Harbor--behind President Bush and his resolve to punish the perpetrators of the massacres of 5,000 Americans--they also exposed a new divide. This chasm in our country is not one of income, ideology, or faith, but of ethnicity and loyalty. Suddenly, we awoke to the realization that among our millions of foreign-born, a third are here illegally, tens of thousands are loyal to regimes with which we could be at war, and some are trained terrorists sent here to murder Americans. For the first time since Andrew Jackson drove the British out of Louisiana in 1815, a foreign enemy is inside the gates, and the American people are at risk in their own country. In those days after September 11, many suddenly saw how the face of America had changed in their own lifetimes. When Richard Nixon took his oath of office in 1969, there were 9 million foreign-born in the United States. When President Bush raised his hand, the number was nearing 30 million. Almost a million immigrants enter every year; half a million illegal aliens come in with them. The adjusted census of 2000 puts the number of illegals in the United States at 9 million. Northeastern University estimates 11 million, as many illegal aliens as there are people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.-6 There are more foreign-born in California--8.4 million--than people in New Jersey, more foreign-born in New York State than people in South Carolina. Even the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 was nothing like this. "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming," wrote Israel Zangwill, the Russian-Jewish playwright, in his famous 1908 play The Melting Pot.-7 But the immigration tsunami rolling over America is not coming from "all the races of Europe." The largest population transfer in history is coming from all the races of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they are not "melting and reforming." In 1960, only sixteen million Americans did not trace their ancestors to Europe. Today, the number is eighty million. No nation has ever undergone so rapid and radical a transformation. At Portland State in 1998, Mr. Clinton rhapsodized to a cheering student audience about a day when Americans of European descent will be a minority. Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than fifty years there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.-8 Correction: no nation in history has gone through a demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time, and remained the same nation. Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true "diversity." Well, those students are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America. Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common--not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons. "The strongest tendency of the late [twentieth century]," writes Jacques Barzun in his history of the West, _From Dawn to Decadence_, "was Separatism.... It affected all forms of unity .... The ideal of Pluralism had disintegrated and Separatism took its place; as one partisan of the new goal put it, 'Salad Bowl is better than melting pot.'"-9 The great nations of Europe have begun to break apart. Writes Barzun: "If one surveyed the Occident... one could see that the greatest political creation of the West, the nation-state, was stricken. In Great Britain the former kingdoms of Scotland and Wales won autonomous parliaments; in France the Bretons, Basques, and Alsatians cried out for regional power. Corsica wanted independence and a language of its own, Italy harbored a League that would cut off the North from the South, and Venice produced a small party wanting their city a separate state...'-10 As people return their allegiance to the lands whence they came, transnational elites pull us in the opposite direction. The final surrender of national sovereignty to world government is now openly advocated. From Walter Cronkite to Strobe Talbott, from the World Federalist Association to the UN Millennium Summit, the chorus swells. At Maastricht in 1991, fifteen European nations, including France, Italy, Germany, and Great Britain, decided to begin converting their free-trade zone into a political union and transferring their sovereign powers to a socialist superstate. In 2000, the president-elect of Mexico came here to propose a North American Union of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Though the erasure of our borders would mean the end of our nation, Vicente Fox was hailed in the U.S. media as a visionary, and President Clinton expressed his regret that he might not be around to see it happen: "I think over the long run, our countries will become more interdependent .... It will be the way of the world .... I regret that I won't be around for a lot of it. But I think it's a good thing."-11 Nor is America immune to the forces of separatism. A sense that America, too, is pulling apart along the seams of ethnicity and race is spreading. Moreover, America has just undergone a cultural revolution, with a new elite now occupying the commanding heights. Through its capture of the institutions that shape and transmit ideas, opinions, beliefs, and values--TV, the arts, entertainment, education--this elite is creating a new people. Not only ethnically and racially, but culturally and morally, we are no longer one people or "one nation under God." Millions have begun to feel like strangers in their own land. They recoil from a popular culture that is saturated with raw sex and trumpets hedonistic values. They see old holidays disappear and old heroes degraded. They see the art and artifacts of a glorious past removed from their museums and replaced by the depressing, the ugly, the abstract, the anti-American. They watch as books they cherished disappear from the schools they attended, to be replaced by authors and titles they never heard of. The moral code that they were raised to live by has been overthrown. The culture they grew up with is dying inside the country they grew up in. In half a lifetime, many Americans have seen their God dethroned, their heroes defiled, their culture polluted, their values assaulted, their country invaded, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans have held for generations. "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely," said Burke.-12 In too many ways America is no longer lovely. Though she remains a great country, many wonder if she is still a good country. Some feel that she is no longer their country. We did not leave America, they say, she left us. As Euripides wrote, "There is no greater sorrow on earth, than the loss of one's native land."-13 When Cornwallis's army marched out of Yorktown, the fife and drums played "The World Turned Upside Down." Now our world has been turned upside down. What was right and true yesterday is wrong and false today. What was immoral and shameful--promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide--has become progressive and praiseworthy. Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues. Every few years, a storm erupts when some public figure blurts out, "America is a Christian nation!" She was once, and a majority yet call themselves Christians. But our dominant culture should more accurately be called post-Christian, or anti-Christian, for the values it celebrates are the antithesis of what it used to mean to be a Christian. "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before me" was the the first commandment Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. But the new culture rejects the God of the Old Testament and burns its incense at the altars of the global economy. Kipling's "Gods of the Market Place" have shouldered aside the God of the Gospels. Sex, fame, money, power--those are what our new America is all about. We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for--their country, not ours. In the election of 2000, the political differences between the Beltway parties were inconsequential. Mr. Bush wanted a larger tax cut than Mr. Gore, who wanted to spend more for prescription drugs. Why then the bile and bitterness of the Florida recount? Writes Terry Teachout in his postelection assessment of a polarized America, "The rancorous intensity with which the Bush and Gore camps disputed the outcome of the 2000 election all too clearly reflected the magnitude of their culture differences, and it may be that the tone of that dispute will characterize American politics for the foreseeable future."-14 Exactly. The savagery of our politics reflects the depth of the moral divide that separates us as Americans. A hundred times in the campaign of 2000, a voter would come up and say that he or she believed in me and agreed with me, but could not vote for me. These people had to vote for Bush, because only Bush could keep Gore out of the White House, and, "We must stop Gore!" It was not that they disagreed with Clinton and Gore. They detested them. The cultural revolution has poisoned American politics, and we have not begun to see the worst of it. In the hours after that awful morning of September 11, Americans did come together again--in grief and sorrow over our terrible losses, in admiration and awe of the heroic firemen who ran into the World Trade Center as others ran out to safety, in our rage and resolution to do justice to those who did this to our countrymen. But by October, that unity had begun to fade. It will not long survive our first victories in the war on terror, anymore than the first President Bush's 90-percent support survived his victory in Desert Storm. For our divisions are rooted in our deepest beliefs, and upon those beliefs Americans are almost as divided as we were when General Beauregard gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter. Once again, we are seceding from one another; only this time, it is a secession of the heart. In one of the more controversial addresses of the twentieth century, I told the 1992 Republican National Convention at Houston: My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, it is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And, so, we have to come home--and stand beside him." The words ignited a firestorm that blazed on through 1992 and has not yet burnt itself out. My words were called divisive and hateful. They were not. They were divisive and truthful. Let others judge, after eight years, whether I spoke the truth about Bill and Hillary Clinton. But Mr. Clinton was rescued from certain impeachment because he personified the other side of that culture war, and his removal would have imperiled the gains of a decade. That not a single Democrat voted to convict Mr. Clinton testifies to the success of the revolution in overthrowing the old moral order and its objective standards of truth, morality, and justice. To the new elite, what advances the revolution is moral, and what threatens it is immoral. Between Senate Democrats and the O.J. jury there is a moral equivalence: truth, justice, and morality triumphed in both cases, because our side won and our man got off. THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION that began with the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 died with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The dream of its true believers was to create a new socialist man. But police terror, the camps of the Gulag, and seventy years of indoctrinating children in hatred of the West and the moral superiority of Marx and Lenin did not work. Communism was The God That Failed. When the mighty structure built on a foundation of lies came crashing down, the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia threw the statues of Stalin and Lenin and the books of Marx and Engels onto the landfill of history without looking back. But where Lenin's revolution failed, the one that erupted on the campuses in the sixties succeeded. It put down roots in society, and it created a new America. By 2000, the adversary culture of the sixties had become our dominant culture, its victory conceded when the political base camp of traditionalism raised a white flag in Philadelphia. On the moral and social issues--the fight for the sanctity of human life and the return of God to the public square of this land we used to call "God's Country"--the Republican party raised its gloves and pleaded, "No mas." In The Death of the West I hope to describe this revolution--what it stands for, where it came from, how it went about dethroning our God, vandalizing our temples, altering our beliefs, and capturing the young, and what its triumph portends. For this revolution is not unique to us; it has captured all the nations of the West. A civilization, a culture, a faith, and a moral order rooted in that faith are passing away and are being replaced by a new civilization, culture, faith, and moral order. But the title of this book is The Death of the West. And though our culture war has divided us, and mass immigration risks the balkanization of America, a graver, more immediate, crisis is at hand. The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization. Today, in seventeen European countries, there are more burials than births, more coffins than cradles. The countries are Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Russia.-16 Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox--all the Christian faiths are represented in the great death march of the West. The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end? A century ago, Gustave Le Bon wrote in his classic The Crowd: The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples .... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought .... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.-17 Le Bon was speaking of his own time, the end of the nineteenth century, but what he wrote is truer of ours. For it is this cultural revolution that has led to just such a "profound modification in the ideas" of peoples. And those ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration. Now that all the Western empires are gone, Western Man, relieved of his duty to civilize and Christianize mankind, reveling in luxury in our age of self-indulgence, seems to have lost his will to live and reconciled himself to his impending death. Are we in the twilight of the West? Is the Death of the West irreversible? Let us review the pathologist's report. O N E ENDANGERED SPECIES Europeans are a vanishing species.-1 -London Times The most important single new certainty--if only because there is no precedent for it in all of history--is the collapsing birthrate in the developed world.-2 -Peter F. Drucker As a growing population has long been a mark of healthy nations and rising civilizations, falling populations have been a sign of nations and civilizations in decline. If that holds true, Western civilization, power and wealth aside, is in critical condition. For, like the Cheshire Cat, the people of the West have begun to fade away. As late as 1960, European people, including Americans, Australians, and Canadians, numbered 750 million, one-fourth of the 3 billion people alive. Western nations were in the baby boom of the century. Shorn of their empires, the wounds of war healed, they seemed alive with vitality. Indeed, neo-Malthusians were bewailing the population explosion, warning darkly that the earth's resources and land were running out. They were laughed at. By 2000, however, no one was laughing. While world population had doubled to six billion in forty years, the European peoples had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall. Of Europe's forty-seven nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely. Europe had begun to die. The prognosis is grim. Between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion to over nine billion people, but this 50 percent increase in global population will come entirely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European stock vanish from the earth. In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world's population; in 2000, they were one-sixth; in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race. A growing awareness of what they portend has induced a sense of foreboding, even panic, in Europe. EUROPE In 2000, the total population of Europe, from Iceland to Russia, was 728 million. At present birthrates, however, without new immigration, her population will crash to 600 million by 2050. That is the projection of _World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision Highlights_ released by the authoritative UN Population Division on February 28, 2001. Another study has Europe's population plummeting to 556 million by midcentury.3 The last time Europe's population showed a drop of this magnitude was during the Black Plague of 1347-52. Economics professor Jacqueline Kasun of Humboldt State University in California, author of War Against Population, considers today's birth dearth an even graver crisis: With a plague like the [fourteenth-century] Black Death, maybe a third of Europe died, but it took the elderly as well as the young .... But this plunging fertility takes only the young. A couple still has parents and grandparents to support, directly or through their taxes. Since they've got fewer or no siblings to share that burden, having children seems even more unaffordable. So how do you dig your way out of a hole like a shrinking population ?4 Excellent question, and if Europe does not find the answer soon, Europe dies. How bleak is the situation? Of the twenty nations with the lowest birthrates in the world, eighteen are in Europe. The average fertility rate of a European woman has fallen to 1.4 children, with 2.1 needed just to replace the existing population. Says columnist Ben Wattenberg: This does not mean ZPG (Zero Population Growth), this means ZP-Zero Population.' Americans in NATO will soon be defending a vast Leisure World. If the present fertility rates hold, Europe's population will decline to 207 million by the end of the twenty-first century, less than 30 percent of today's. The cradle of Western civilization will have become its grave. Why is this happening? Socialism, the beatific vision of European intellectuals for generations, is one reason. "If everyone has the promise of a state pension, children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age," argues Dr. John Wallace of Bologna's Johns Hopkins University: "If women can earn more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies--and this seems to be true now of Catholic Italy as it is of secular Britain--why marry? "6 By freeing husbands, wives, and children of family responsibilities, European socialists have eliminated the need for families. Consequently, families have begun to disappear. When they are gone, Europe goes with them. But as Europe is dying, the Third World adds one hundred million people--one new Mexico--every fifteen months. Forty new Mexicos in the Third World by 2050, while Europe will have lost the equivalent of the entire population of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway--and Germany! Absent divine intervention, or a sudden desire on the part of Western women to begin having the same-size families as their grandmothers, the future belongs to the Third World. As T. S. Eliot wrote in "The Hollow Men": "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."' CLEMENCEAU'S REVENGE "There are twenty million Germans too many!" muttered Georges Clemenceau, the "Tiger of France" and the statesman most responsible for the Versailles Treaty, which stripped Germany of her colonies, a tenth of her land, and an eighth of her people. Clemenceau's hatred is understandable. As Alistair Horne writes in his history of the fall of the Third Republic, "Clemenceau had been one of the deputies to protest against the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, and had narrowly escaped being lynched in the civil war that followed with the Commune."9 He had witnessed the dethronement of his emperor and seen a German kaiser crowned at Versailles. In the Great War, he had seen his beloved France ravaged by the armies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff which had left behind the bodies of 1.5 million Frenchmen when they marched home to the Reich. In fifty years, the Tiger will have his revenge, for German women are refusing to have children. For ten years, Germany's birthrate has stood at 1.3 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to replace the present population. Here is the future that is now hard upon the German nation. By 2050: • Twenty-three million Germans will have disappeared. • Germany's eighty-two million people will have fallen to fifty-nine million. • The number of German children under fifteen will have dropped to 7.3 million. • A third of Germany's population will be over sixty-five. These seniors will outnumber German children more than two to one. • Germany's total population will be two-thirds of 1 percent of the world's population, and only 1 of every 150 people on earth will be a German. And Germans will be among the oldest people on earth. At the request of the author, Joseph Chamie, director of the UN's Population Division, projected the population of several European nations out to 2100. If the present German birthrate is sustained and immigration is zero, Germany's population will fall from 82 million to 38.5 million by century's end, a drop of 53 percent.'' The Bavarian conservative and potential chancellor Edmund Stoiber considers Germany's birthrate a "ticking time bomb."" He urges a tripling of the child allowance for the first three years of life. Today, Germany pays monthly subsidies of $140 a child for the first two, more for a third. Stoiber's idea is called radical today; it will not be tomorrow. "My reason for not having kids is that I like to sleep. I read a lot, and I can sleep throughout the night," says Gabrielle Thanheiser, thirty-four, a banker in Berlin vacationing in Rome with her live-in boyfriend.12 "We are DINKS," confirmed Andreas Gerhmann, thirtyseven, using the acronym popular even in Germany for "double income, no kids" couples." In the long run, the selfindulgence of DINKS like Gerhmann and Thanheiser may prove more fateful for the German people than the Third Reich. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl sought to reunify his country after forty-five years of Cold War division. In Britain, Russia, France, even in the United States, were heard anguished cries that the world could not trust a united Germany. Twice, Germany had tried to conquer Europe, it was protested. What guarantee have we that a united Germany will not march again on Europe? This is one worry the West can lay to rest. With the German people aging and dying, with five million fewer German children expected in 2050 than are alive in 2000, Germany, like the old soldier of General MacArthur's ballad, is about to "just slowly fade away." ITALY, A THEME PARK Prospects for the Italian race, which gave us Rome and all its glory, St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel, Dante and Michelangelo, Columbus and Galileo, are even more dire. Italy's birthrate has been below replacement levels for twentyfive years and is down to 1 s2 children per woman. At this rate, Italy's fiftyseven million people will fall to forty-one million by 2050. Writes population researcher Nicholas Eberstadt of American Enterprise Institute: "Barely 2 percent of the [Italian] population in 2050 would be under five years old, but more than 40 percent would be 65 or older."14 The birthrate in "that most Catholic and romantic of nations," adds New Republic's Greg Easterbrook, "means that Italy will be a theme park in a few generations."15 A recent survey in the popular "semifeminist" magazine _Noi Donne_ found that 52 percent of Italian women between sixteen and twentyfour planned to have no children.16 "Career" was their principal reason for not wanting any kids. University of Rome demographer Antonio Golini says that the nation is already dependent upon immigrants to bear the load of its deeply indebted pension system. But now Italian culture is at risk. Golini believes, "Italy will no longer be Italian .... It will be the end of society as we know it."17 Golini was called a "demographic terrorist" twenty years ago, when he first warned of Italy's impending population crisis.18 He is called that no longer, though Dr. Golini remains deeply pessimistic about his country: "In an increasingly globalized labor market, Italy must compete with France, with the United States, with India. How can we, with such an aged society and so few young people?"19 Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna has called on Rome to restrict immigration to Catholics to "save the nation's identity," raising eyebrows with his remark that Muslims have "different food, festivals, and family morals."20 But where does His Eminence propose to find these Catholics? Certainly not in Spain, where in the days of the Caudillo, Gen. Francisco Franco, big families were sacred and received medals and gifts from the state. The Spanish birthrate is the lowest in all Europe, lower than that of Italy, the Czech Republic, or Romania, all of which have fallen to 1.2 children per woman. In Spain, the birthrate is down to 1.07 children per woman, and the population is projected to fall by 25 percent in fifty years as the number of Spaniards over sixty-five soars by 117 percent. "In one generation we have gone from a society in which families of eight or even 12 children were not unusual to one in which childless couples are common, or people think long and hard about having a second child," says Madrid sociologist Victor Perez Diaz .21 By 2050, the median age in Italy will be fifty-four and in Spain fifty-five, fourteen years above the median age of Japan, the oldest nation on earth today. "Prosperity has strangled us," says Dr. Pierpaolo Donati, a leading Catholic intellectual and professor of sociology at the University of Bologna. "Comfort is now the only thing anybody believes in. The ethic of sacrifice for a family--one of the basic ideas of human societies--has become a historical notion. It is astonishing. "22 In 1950, Spain had three times as many people as Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar. By 2050, Morocco's population will be 50 percent larger. If one hundred Spanish young people marry today, they can expect to have fifty-eight children, thirty-three grandchildren, but only nineteen great-grandchildren. RUSSIA What of the late command post of a Soviet Empire that shook the world for seventy years? With a birthrate of 1.35 children per woman, Russia's 147 million people will fall to 114 million by 2050, a greater loss than the 30 million dead attributed to Stalin. The number of children in Russia under fifteen will have fallen from 26 to 16 million, while today's 18 million seniors will have grown to 28 million. In December 2000, however, more ominous news came in. Russia's birthrate had already plummeted to 1.17 children, below Italy's. Its population had fallen to 145 million; one estimate had it headed to 123 million by 2015. "If you believe the forecasts made by serious people who have devoted their whole lives to studying this question," warns President Putin, "in 15 years' time there will be 22 million fewer Russians. Just think about that figure-it's a seventh of [Russia's] population. "21 A loss of 22 million Russians in fifteen years would be greater than all the Soviet Union's losses in the Hitler-Stalin war. Putin went on to add ominously, "If the present tendency continues, there will be a threat to the survival of the nation." Life expectancy for Russian men is now fifty-nine, and two of every three pregnancies in Russia are terminated before birth. Russian women average 2.5 to 4 abortions each, and Russia's death rate is now 70 percent higher than the birthrate .24 Even the return of millions of Russians from the former Soviet republics cannot offset the dying. Most ominous for the largest nation on earth, the population of vast, vacant Siberia is in a steep decline as China's enormous population swells inexorably. When the deputy speaker of the state duma, the rabid nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, advanced such ideas as polygamy, allowing every Russian male to have five wives, plus a ten-year ban on abortion and a prohibition on Russian women traveling abroad, his ideas were ridiculed and his population bills hooted down .25 But the life crisis of Russia cannot be dismissed, and the geostrategic implications for America are ominous. Mr. Chamie projected Russia's population, at present birthrates with zero immigration, out to the century's end, and came up with fewer than eighty million Russians in 2100, roughly the population of the United States when Theodore Roosevelt left office in 1909.11 GREAT BRITAIN What does the future hold for the cousins? "Demographers have calculated that by the end of this century the English people will be a minority in their homeland. The English are not having enough children to reproduce themselves," writes the syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts.27 This is the first time in history, says the London Observer, "that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease. "28 The Observer is mistaken. The honor of being the first nation to voluntarily turn its majority indigenous population into a minority will go to the United States. President Clinton predicted it would happen by 2050, half a century before Great Britain. But the British are clearly heading in the same direction. Ethnic minorities already constitute 40 percent of London's population, and, as Lee Jasper, the race relations adviser to the mayor of London, states, "The demographics show that white people in London will become a minority by 2010."29 Among the reasons is the steadily falling birthrate among nativeborn British. In 2000, there were 17,400 fewer births in England and Wales than in 1999, a drop of almost 3 percent, and the fertility rate fell to 1.66 births per woman, the lowest since statistics began to be kept in 1924.30 JAPAN Of the twenty-two nations with the lowest birthrates, only two are outside Europe--Armenia and Japan, the first Asian nation to enter the modern era. Not until 1868 did Japan break out of her isolation. But within thirty years this dynamic nation was a rival of the Western powers. Japan had defeated China, colonized Taiwan, and in 1900 sent her soldiers to march beside Europeans and Americans to relieve the diplomatic legations in Peking besieged by the Chinese rebels known as "the Boxers." The Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) was the first in which an Asian people defeated a great Western power. Begun with a surprise attack on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur, the war ended in one of the most decisive battles in history, the sinking of the czar's Baltic fleet in the Straits of Tsushima in thirty-six hours by Admiral Togo. In World War 1, Japan was an Allied power whose contribution to the war effort was to roll up the kaiser's colonies in China and the Pacific, defend Europe's imperial possessions in Asia, and escort the troops of Australia and New Zealand to Gallipoli. Japan also sent a naval squadron to the Mediterranean. But when President Harding and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes pressured London to break its twenty-year alliance with Japan at the Washington Naval Conference, the Japanese felt betrayed, humiliated, isolated. The die was cast. Twenty years later came Pearl Harbor and the total destruction of Japan and an empire constructed over sixty years at an immense cost in blood and treasure. But with American assistance and by copying American methods and ideas, postwar Japan became the most dynamic nation on earth. By 1990, her economy was the second largest, half the size of the United States economy, though Japan occupied an area smaller than Montana--an extraordinary achievement of an extraordinary people. But something has happened to Japan. She, too, has begun to die. Japan's birthrate is half what it was in 1950. Her population is projected to crest soon at 127 million, but fall to 104 million by 2050, when there will be fewer than half as many Japanese children as there were in 1950 but eight times as many seniors as in 1950. Her dynamism will be dead, her Asian role diminished, for there will be fifteen Chinese for every single Japanese. Even the Philippines, which had only a fourth of Japan's population in 1950, will have 25 million more people by 2050. The reason for Japan's baby bust? More than half of all Japanese women now remain single by thirty years of age. Known as "Parasite Singles," they live at home with their parents and pursue careers, and many have abandoned any idea of marrying and having children.31 "Live for myself and enjoy life" is their motto. With Japan's elementary schools in 2000 taking in the smallest class in recorded history, Tokyo has raised the child allowance to $2,400 a year per child for six years. Some conservatives want to multiply that tenfold. One pioneering Japanese female journalist in her sixties, Mitsuko Shimomura, told the New York Times's Peggy Orenstein that Japan is getting what it deserves for not granting full equality to women: I don't regret the decline in the birth rate .... I think it's a good thing. The Parasites have unintentionally created an interesting movement. Politicians now have to beg women to have babies. Unless they create a society where women feel comfortable having children and working, Japan will be destroyed in a matter of 50 or 100 years. And children's subsidies aren't going to do it. Only equality is.32 These women are deciding the fate and future of the Japanese nation. Japan's Asian Empire was smashed in 1945; but something happened more recently to sap her vitality and will to live, grow, and expand and conquer in industry, technology, trade, and finance. Observers call it a loss of what famed economist J. M. Keynes described as "animal spirits." But perhaps there is another, simpler explanation: age. Of the 190 nations on earth, Japan is the oldest, with a median age of forty-one for Japan was the first modern nation to legalize abortion (1948), and her baby boom ended soon afterward, long before the end of the baby booms in the West. Is there a parallel between a dying Christianity in the West and the death of Japan's prewar and wartime faith? When nations lose their sense of mission, their mandate of heaven, the faith that brought them into this world as unique countries and cultures, is that when they die? Is that when civilizations perish? So it would seem. LET US LOOK again at the population projections for 2050, and try to visualize what our world will look like. In Africa, there will be 1.5 billion people. From Morocco to the Persian Gulf will be an Arab-Turkic-Islamic sea of 500 million. In South Asia will live 700 million Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, and 1.5 billion Indians. There will be 300 million Indonesians, and China, with 1.5 billion people, will brood over Asia. Russia, with a shrinking population of only 114 million, will have largely disappeared from Asia. Almost all Russians will be west of the Urals, back in Europe. Western Man, who dominated Africa and Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, will have disappeared from Africa and Asia by the middle of the twenty-first except perhaps for tiny enclaves in South Africa and Israel. In Australia, a nation of only 19 million, where the white birthrate is now below replacement levels, the European population will have begun to disappear. There is a terrible dilemma confronting the First World nations: At present birthrates, Europe must bring in 169 million immigrants by 2050 if it wishes to keep its population aged fifteen to sixty-four at today's level. But if Europe wishes to keep its present ratio of 4.8 workers (fifteen-sixty-four) for every senior, Europe must bring in 1.4 billion emigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Put another way: Either Europe raises taxes and radically downsizes pensions and health benefits for the elderly, or Europe becomes a Third World continent. There is no third way. If Europe's fertility rate does not rise, European children under fifteen will fall by 40 percent to 87 million by 2050, as the number of seniors rises 50 percent to 169 million. The median age of a European will be fifty, the highest in history, nine years older than the present median age in Japan. Writes French demographer Alfred Sauvy, Europe is about to become a continent of "old people in old houses with old ideas."33 IS THE DEATH of the West inevitable? Or, like all previous predictions of Western decline and demise, will this cup, too, pass away and expose as fools all who said we must drink it? After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not "bury" us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Crash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millenium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire or disintegration of the Soviet Union? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations--China, India, and Indonesia--could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same back shelf as the predictions of "nuclear winter" and "global warming"? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World. Western fertility rates have been falling for decades. Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough babies to replace its population. As years slip by, that birthrate is not stabilizing; it is falling. In a score of countries, the old are already dying off faster than the young are being born. There is no sign of a turnaround. Now the absolute numbers of Europeans have begun to fall. This is not a matter of prophecy, but of mathematics. The steeper and longer the dive, the more difficult it is to pull out. The First World has to turn this around, and soon, or it will be overwhelmed by a Third World that is five times as populous and will be ten times as populous in 2050. The ability to pull out of this dive diminishes each year. No end of the birth dearth is in sight, and all the social and cultural indicators show that more and more Western Women are converting to the idea of having no children. Moreover, there is an arithmetical certitude about some aspects of demography. Italy cannot have more young adults of childbearing age in 2020 than it has teenagers, children, tots, and infants today. No existing population cohort can be added to, except by immigration. Only the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem to have given up--that the good life lies in bearing and raising children and sending them out into the world to continue the family and nation--can prevent the Death of the West. Why are Western women having fewer children than their mothers or none at all? Why have so many enlisted in what Mother Teresa called "the war against the child"?14 Western women have long had access to the methods and means of birth control but chose not to use them to the extent they do today. For thirty years, American women have had easy access to abortion, but, unlike the women of China, they are also free to choose life. No federal judge forces any woman to have an abortion. Yet, Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry and an end of their nations. "Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society," said Joan Ganz Cooney." Why are children no longer cherished as they once were? What caused the sea change in the hearts and minds of Western women, and men? And is it reversible? For if it is not, we can begin to write the final chapters of the history of our civilization and the last will and testament of the West. T W O "WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE?" And ye shall be left few in numbers, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldst not obey the voice of the Lord thy God. -Deuteronomy XXVIII: 28 Holy Bible, King James Version Why have Europe's nations and peoples stopped having babies and begun to accept their disappearance from this earth with such seeming indifference? Did the wounds of wars or the loss of empire kill the will to live? From the evidence, neither appears to be the case. The Great War left Imperial Germany defeated and dismembered, with two million dead and millions crippled. Yet the German population grew so quickly after 1919 that France, which had been among the victors, was alarmed. After World War II, baby booms exploded among the vanquished Japanese and Germans as well as the victorious Americans. From studying the birth charts, we find that something happened in the mid-1960s, in the midst of the postwar prosperity, that changed the hearts and minds of Western women and killed in them the desire to live as their mothers had. But if the reason Western women stopped having babies remains in dispute, how they did so is not. Contraception halted the population growth of the West, with abortion as the second line of defense against the unwanted child. FIRST , A LITTLE history: Only once had the U.S. birthrate fallen below population replacement, during the Depression, when the economy shrank by half and a fourth of America's breadwinners were out of work, many of them out on the streets. Pessimism, a sense of despair that the good times are over and may never come again, can apparently impact national fertility. The Silent Generation was born in the 1930s, a relatively small cohort and the only generation of the twentieth century never to have produced a president. The postwar baby boom began in 1946, peaked in 1957, and fizzled out in 1964. But just as the World War II generation was about done having babies, and the baby boomers themselves were about to begin, a new and more convenient way to prevent pregnancies was discovered. Historians may one day call "the pill" the suicide tablet of the West. It was first licensed in 1960. By 1963, 6 percent of American married women were using Dr. Rock's invention; by 1970, 43 percent were "on the pill."1 As Catholics furiously debated the morality of contraception and Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical _Humanae Vitae_--which declared all artificial birth control to be immoral for Catholics, the pill included--suddenly a graver issue arose. Arizona TV personality Sherry Finkbine, a married mother of four who had taken thalidomide, the drug that had caused deformities in babies in Europe, learned that she was pregnant. Mrs. Finkbine did not want a deformed child and confided to friends that she desired an abortion. When the news leaked out, Mrs. Finkbine was subjected to threats from some and offers from others to raise the child if only she would carry it to term. As abortion was still against the law, a blazing national debate ensued. But Mrs. Finkbine mooted the issue by flying to Sweden and having the child aborted. By 1966, however, the Finkbine affair was ancient history, for 6,000 abortions were being done every year. By 1970, that figure had leapt to 200,000 as Governors Rockefeller of New York and Reagan of California signed the most liberal abortion laws in America.2 By 1973, 600,000 abortions were being done.3 That year, the Supreme Court, with three of President Nixon's four nominees concurring, declared that a woman's right to an abortion was protected by the Constitution. Within a decade, the number of abortions had soared to 1.5 million a year, and abortions had replaced tonsillectomies as the most common surgical procedure in America. Since justice Blackmun's decision, 40 million abortions have been performed in the United States. Thirty percent of all pregnancies now end on a tabletop in an abortionist's clinic. In 2000, the Food and Drug Administration approved RU-486, a do-it-yourself abortion drug for use in the first seven weeks of pregnancy. As no U.S. firm wished to be associated with RU-486, a China-based company began quietly to produce the drug. Cynics might characterize China's role in producing RU-486 for America as an act of assisted suicide for the one nation blocking Beijing's path to Asian hegemony and world power. ROE v. WADE put a constitutional canopy over a woman's right to an abortion. Yet that decision does not of itself explain the sea change in the attitudes of American and Western women. What was it that made them so hostile to the idea of pregnancy and motherhood that they would prefer to have an abortion, an act their own grandparents would have considered a monstrous offense against God and man? In the 1950s, abortion was not only a crime, but a shameful act. There was no national clamor for its legalization. Yet, fifteen years later, a Supreme Court decision declaring abortion a constitutional right was hailed as a milestone of social progress. A revolutionary transformation had taken place in the beliefs of tens of millions of Americans. One of two things had happened: Either the sixties drove a moral wedge between us, or the sixties exposed a moral fracture that had existed, but that we had failed to recognize. I believe the former is true. In that pivotal decade of the last century, a large slice of young America was converted to a new way of thinking, believing, and living. FROM 1945 to 1965, America passed through what sociologists call "the golden age of marriage," when the average age of first marriages fell to record lows for both men and women, and the proportion of adults who were married reached an astronomical 95 percent. The America of Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy was a vibrant, dynamic nation. But, as Allan Carlson, president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, writes: All the indicators of family well-being abruptly turned in these places [Western nations] during the short 1963-1965 period. Fertility resumed its fall, tumbling well below zero-growth levels; a massive retreat from marriage commenced; and Western societies seemed to lose all sense of inherited family order.4 Dutch demographer Dirk van de Kaa traces the phenomenon to four transformations: (A) A shift from the golden age of marriage to the dawn of a new age of cohabitation. (B) A shift from a time of "king-child" with parents to that of king-parents with one child. (C) A shift from preventive contraception, to benefit early children, to self-fulfilling contraception, to benefit parents. (D) A shift from a uniform family system to a pluralistic system of families and households, including single-parent families.5 As the drop-off in the birthrate began in the mid-1960s, this is the site to excavate to discover the causes of this tectonic shift in attitude of American and Western women away from having children. What ideas did the boomers bring to maturity? What ideas did they absorb in college? THE BOOMERS ARRIVED on campus in the fall of 1964. They were the first American generation with the freedom to choose how they wanted to live their lives. In the 1930s, college had been a privilege only a few could afford. Family decisions were imposed by family hardships. If the breadwinner lost his job, sons and daughters could forget about college; they had to quit school and find work. Tens of millions still lived in small towns in rural America, where the Depression had hit the farms long before the 1929 Crash hit Wall Street. After Pearl Harbor, the war and war economy made the career decisions for America's young. The Silent Generation of the fifties grew up with parents, teachers, and clergy still as authority figures. Not until 1957 did Professor Galbraith discover that we were all living in The Affluent Society. But the parents who had gone through the Depression and the war were determined that "my kid's not going to have it as rough as I did." So the baby boomers were raised differently, spending almost as many hours in front of a television as in school. By the mid-1950s, parents had a serious rival for their children's attention, and youngsters had an entertaining and witty ally, and a privileged sanctuary to retreat to, in the age-old struggle against parents. The message that came from TV, especially the ads, was instant gratification. By 1964, the year of Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, when the first wave of boomers hit the campuses, never having known hardship or war, it was ready to rock. And though the student riots and rebellions were blamed on LBJ, Nixon, Agnew, and Vietnam, this will not do. For student rebellions were not confined to America. They broke out across Europe and even in Japan. As the 1968 Days of Rage tore apart the Democratic party in the streets of Chicago, Czech students who made the Prague Spring were facing Russian tanks, Mexican students were being shot down in the streets of the capital, and French students almost seized Paris from President de Gaulle. What baby boomers had in common with contemporaries abroad was not Vietnam, but their numbers, affluence, security, and freedom, and the televised example of their peers all over the world. In childhood, they had all had the same baby-sitter, TV--a baby-sitter more entertaining than the parents. Its incessant ad message was the same: "Kids! You need this--now!" WITH MILLIONS OF young women "liberated" from parents, teachers, and preachers, with money to burn, and with the in loco parentis authority of dons and deans crumbling, the revolutions rolled over the campuses: the antiwar movement ("Hey, hey, LBJ, / How many kids did you kill today?" and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is going to Win!"); the drug revolution ("turn on, tune in, and drop out"); and the sexual revolution ("make love, not war"). Then came the women's movement, modeled on the civil rights movement; it won converts even in Middle America. As blacks had demanded equal rights with whites, women demanded the same rights as men. Nothing less than full equality. If the boys can sow their wild oats in frat houses and singles bars and with one-night stands, why not us? But as nature did not design the sexes that way, and the consequences of promiscuity are unequally borne by women, in the form of babies, solutions had to be found. The magic of the marketplace did the rest. If you forgot to take the pill, or the contraceptive didn't work, the local abortionist would not fail. The old sanctions against promiscuity collapsed. Nature's sanctions--unwanted pregnancy and fear of disease--were taken care of by the pill, available abortion, and the new miracle drugs. No need for shotgun marriages. One teary-eyed trip to the Center for Reproductive Rights gets the job done. The fear of social stigma--loss of reputation--was lifted by a popular culture that celebrated the sexual revolution and applauded as "swingers" girls who in the 1940s and 1950s might have been called less attractive names. The moral sanctions--the sense of shame and sin, of violating God's law, of risking one's immortal soul--were eased by a new breed of "Are-You-Running-with-Me-Jesus?" priests and pastors who won huge popularity by explaining that He (or She) was just not that kind of "judgmental" God and, hey, "Hell is only a metaphor!" Not only did the old sanctions collapse, a new way of measuring morality emerged to justify and even to sanctify "doing one's own thing." Under the new code, morality was now to be determined not by who slept with whom or who inhaled what--trivial matters of personal preference--but by who went South for civil rights, who protested apartheid, who had marched against the "dirty, immoral war" in Vietnam. As has often been true in history, a new moral code was crafted to justify the new lifestyle already adopted. As they indulged themselves in sex, drugs, riots, and rock and roll, the young Jacobins had the reassurance of their indulgent and pandering elders that, yes, indeed, "This is the finest young generation we have ever produced." Has it not ever been so with revolutions? "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young, very heaven!" burbled the great Wordsworth of an earlier revolution that turned out rather badly. IN THE 1960s, both a student rebellion and a cultural revolution rolled over the campuses. When the rebels graduated, got jobs, and got married, they ceased to be rebels, taking their place in the country of their parents and voting for Ronald Reagan; though it took some--our president comes to mind--perhaps longer than others to "break away. " The sixties' rebels, however, were not the revolutionaries. Converts to the revolution came to college thinking and believing one way and left thinking and believing an entirely different way that changed their whole lives. Hillary Rodham, the Goldwater Girl who came to Wellesley in 1965 and left as a social radical in 1969, with new values, a new moral code, and a steely resolve to change the corrupt society in which she had been raised, is as good an example of the revolutionary as Mr. Bush is of the rebel. The cultural revolution that swept America's campuses was a true revolution. In a third of a century the Judeo-Christian moral order it defied has been rejected by millions. Its hostility to Ozzie-and-Harriet America has been internalized by our cultural elites, and through their domination of our opinion- and value-shaping institutions--film, TV, the theater, magazines, music--these evangelists of revolution have spread their gospel all over the world and converted scores of millions. We are two Americas: Mother Angelica and the Sunday sermon compete with Ally McBeal and Sex and the City. And the message the dominant culture emits, day and night, reacts with mocking laughter to the old idea that the good life for a woman means a husband and a houseful of kids. And there are now powerful collateral forces in society that are also pulling American women away from the maternity ward forever. (A) The New Economy. In an agricultural economy, the workplace was the home where husband and wife labored together and lived together. In the industrial economy, the man left the home to work in a factory, while his wife stayed home to look after the children. The agricultural economy gave us the extended family; the industrial economy, the nuclear family. But in the postindustrial economy, husband and wife both work at the office, and no one stays home with the children. Indeed, there may be no children. As political science professor James Kurth of Swarthmore writes: The greatest movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was the movement of men from farm to the factory .... The greatest movement of the second half of the twentieth century has been the movement of women from the home to the office .... [This] movement separates the parents from the children, as well as enabling the wife to separate herself from her husband. By splitting the nuclear family, it is helping to bring about the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-family.6 As men's jobs in manufacturing, mining, farming, and fishing are no longer needed, or are shipped overseas, the skills and talents of women are now more desirable. There are also opportunities in government, education, and the professions open to women today that their mothers and grandmothers never had. Businesses, large and small, offer packages of pay and benefits to lure talented women out of the home and keep them out of the maternity ward, where they are "no good to the company." It is working. In the scores of millions, American women have left the home for the office to work beside and compete with men. By the tens of millions, women college graduates have put off marriage, many forever. "You can have it all!" the modern woman is told--baby and a career. With nannies, courtesy of open borders, with equal-pay-for-equal-work, maternity leave, and daycare, courtesy of government and the company, the lure is not a lie. What you can't have is a brood of kids back home while keeping pace with the competition at the office. Forced to choose, women are choosing career, or career and the joy of motherhood, once. The Global Economy works hand in hand with the New Economy, transferring manufacturing jobs from high-wage Western nations to the low-wage, newly industrializing nations of Asia and Latin America. With Working America's yellow brick road to the middle class down to one lane, wives must work to keep up with the Joneses next door. So children are put off, sometimes for good. In 1950, 88 percent of women with children under six stayed home, where they often had more kids. Today, 64 percent of American women with children under six are in the labor force.7 "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" was said of the World War I soldiers who went off to Europe. Well, how you gonna get 'em back in the 'burbs, after they've seen D.C., one might ask of the talented women lawyers, journalists, PR specialists, and political aides who have enjoyed the great game in an exciting city. Writing in the Spectator, Eleanor Mills is an authentic voice of her generation: "The fact is that girls like me--i.e., healthy, hearty, middle-class women in their 20s--are just not breeding."8 Why not? Because, she writes, "my generation's twin preoccupations are, unfortunately, looks and money."9 She quotes one of her many childless contemporaries: "If I had a kid," said Jane, an advertising executive, thoughtfully, "I wouldn't be able to do half the things I take for granted. Every Saturday at 10:30 A.M. when we are still in bed, my husband and I look at each other and just say, 'Thank God we weren't up at 5 A.M. caring for a brat. We have such a great time just the two of us; who knows if it would work if we introduced another person into the equation?"10 "The rich are different than you and I," said F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money." But the rich also have fewer children. Using Occam's razor--the simplest explanation is usually the right one--the best explanation for the sinking birthrate in the West may be the simplest. As America's poor enter the middle class, and the middle class becomes affluent, and the affluent become rich, each adopts the style of the class they have lately entered. All begin to downsize their families; all begin to have fewer children. A corollary follows: The richer a nation becomes, the fewer its children, and the sooner it begins to die. Societies organized to ensure the maximum pleasure, freedom, and happiness for all their members are, at the same time, advancing the date of their own funerals. Fate may compensate the Chinese, Islamic, and Latin peoples for their hardships and poverty in this century with the domination of the earth in the next. Indeed, do we not have it on high authority that "Blessed are the meek . . . they shall inherit the earth"? (B) End of the "Family Wage." In the 1830s, as America's industrial revolution was about to begin, the Philadelphia Trade Union warned its members about the hidden agenda of what it called "cormorant capital": Oppose [employment of our women folks] with all your minds and with all your strength for it will prove our ruin. We must strive to obtain sufficient remuneration for our labor to keep the wives and daughters and sisters of our people at home .... That cormorant capital will have every man, woman, and child to toil; but let us exert our families to oppose its designs." In 1848, the year of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, the labor publication Ten Hour Advocate editorialized: "We hope the day is not distant when the husband will be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending [the wife] to endure the drudgery of a cotton mill."12 This vision of American free labor was at war with the view being espoused by Marx and his patron and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: "The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry and . . . this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society."13 Is it not a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism's view of women--as units of production, liberated from husbands, home, and family--conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism? As Allan Carlson, who also publishes The Family in America, writes, there was a consensus in America, not so long ago, that employers should pay fathers a "family wage" sufficient to support their wives and children in dignity without their having to leave the home to go to work.14 That was considered one of the defining characteristics of a good society. The idea is enshrined in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical _Rerum Novarum_. In books such as A Living Wage, Catholic social critic Fr. John Ryan championed the idea and stressed the need to "moralize" the wage contract to protect the home. "The State has both the right and the duty to compel all employers to pay a living wage," wrote Father Ryan.15 This idea was widely accepted. Carlson notes that the "wage gap" between men and women actually widened after World War II. In 1939, women earned 59.3 percent of men's pay; by 1966, that had fallen to 53.6 percent.16 In the 1940s and 1950s, the culture, with a good conscience, separated men and women in the workplace. In newspapers, the "Men Wanted" ads were run separate from the "Women Wanted" ads. Only rarely could working women be found outside such occupations as clerk-typist, secretary, nurse, schoolteacher, or salesgirl. Carlson writes: To an observer from the Year 2000, the most amazing thing about this system was that it was both understood by the average people and popularly supported. In opinion polls, large majorities of Americans (85 percent or more), women and men, agreed that fathers deserved an income that would support their wives and children at home and that the labor of mothers was secondary or supplemental. This was seen as simple justice." This system fell apart in the 1960s, when feminists managed to add "sex" to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had been written to protect the rights of African Americans. This turned the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into a siege gun against the family wage. "Men Wanted" ads were declared discriminatory and outlawed. Gender equality replaced "moral contract." The rights of individuals took precedence over the requirements of family. Women's pay soared, and as women began moving into occupations that had been largely restricted to men--medicine, law, the media, the academy, the upper bureaucracy, and business--families began to crumble. Between 1973 and 1996, writes Dr. Carlson, "the [real] median income of men, aged 15 and above, working full-time, fell 24 percent, from $37,200 to $30,000."'.. Marching under feminist banners--equal pay for equal work, and equal pay for comparable work--women moved into direct competition with men. Millions succeeded, shouldering men aside with superior performance. Their pay rose steadily, and the absolute and relative pay of married men stagnated or fell. With their families under pressure, married men began to yield to wives' insistence that they "go back to work." Young men found they no longer earned enough in their late teens or early twenties to start a family, even if that had been their hope and dream. Stripped of the duties of fatherhood and family, many of these young men wound up in trouble--and even in prison. America's young women found they could achieve independence on their own. They need not get married, certainly not yet. More and more did not marry. In 1970, only 36 percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four were unmarried. By 1995, 68 percent were in the "never married" category. Among women twenty-five to twenty-nine, the "never marrieds" had soared from 10 percent to 35 percent.19 The young family with a batch of kids is now an endangered species. Only the young rich can afford that "lifestyle" and they are uninterested. With the Democratic party so beholden to feminism that it cannot even oppose partial birth abortions, and the GOP in thrall to libertarian ideology and controlled by corporate interests, the call of the gods of the marketplace for more women workers prevails over the command of the God of Genesis: "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth." Many conservatives have succumbed to the heresy of Economism, a mirror-Marxism that holds that man is an economic animal, that free trade and free markets are the path to peace, prosperity, and happiness, that if we can only get the marginal tax rates right and the capital gains tax abolished, Paradise--Dow 36,000!--is at hand. But when the income tax rate for the wealthiest was above 90 percent in the 1950s, America, by every moral and social indicator, was a better country. The reformed radical and Christian convert Orestes Brownson saw this new idolatry of "Mammon worship" rising in the America of the nineteenth century: "Mammonism has become the religion of Saxondom, and God is not in all our thoughts. We have lost our faith in the noble, the beautiful and the just. "20 A century later, another convert from a failed materialistic faith would remind us again. Wrote Whittaker Chambers, "Economics is not the central problem of our age, faith is. "21 (C) The "Population Bomb" Hysteria. Then there was the antipeople movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the elite's backlash against the baby boom. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, was its guru, and his bestseller, The Population Bomb, did for population control what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had done for environmentalism. Ehrlich was a twentieth-century reincarnation of Thomas Robert Malthus, the British demographer whose prediction of world starvation proved so spectacularly wrong in the nineteenth century. Malthus had written: "It may be safely asserted . . . that population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical progression of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years."22 As the world's food production could not double every twenty-five years, said the gloomy parson, mass starvation was dead ahead. Malthus proved as wrong about food production as Ehrlich did about the world's resources, which he assured us were running out. Today, the six billion on earth live in far greater freedom and prosperity than did the three billion in 1960, the two billion in 1927, or the one billion in 1830. Political incompetence and criminality, foolish ideas and insane ideologies, are the causes of starvation and misery, not people. Published by the Sierra Club, Ehrlich's book became required reading in many high schools. By 1977, former secretary of defense and World Bank president Robert McNamara was playing Henny Penny to Ehrlich's Chicken Little, warning that "continued population growth would cause `poverty, hunger, stress, crowding, and frustra- tion,' that would threaten social, economic and military stability."" In 1978, a congressional select committee on population announced that the "major biological systems that humanity depends upon . . . are being strained by rapid population growth . . . [and] in some cases, they are . . . losing productive capacity. "24 As Jacqueline Kasun, author of The War Against Population, writes, about this time the Smithsonian Institution created a "traveling exhibit for schoolchildren called `Population: The Problem Is Us,' [that] featured a picture of a dead rat on a dinner plate as an example of `future food sources.' "Z5 As a result of this antipopulation propaganda from America's elite institutions of politics and ideas, the public funding for population control here and abroad exploded. But though the message was taken to heart by the First World wealthy and middle class, it was largely ignored by the Third World poor, at whom it had been targeted. We can see the results today: a birth dearth among the affluent nations, and baby booms across the Third World. (D) Feminism. To be "pro-choice" on abortion is today almost a defining mark of the "modern woman." To many feminists, the phrase "women's liberation" means liberation from the traditional and, in their view, narrow and constricting roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. But among the founding mothers of feminism it was not always so. Writing on the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in The New Oxford Review, Catholic columnist Joseph Collison observed: Early feminists had been fiercely antiabortion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the first women's rights convention in 1848, called abortion "a disgusting and degrading crime." . . . And Susan B. Anthony, early crusader for the women's vote, wrote that "No matter what the motive . . . the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death." It was in fact the 19th century feminists who campaigned to pass the laws that criminalized abortion.26 Collision adds that in early editions of The Feminist Mystique, Betty Friedan's seminal work, abortion went unmentioned. It was not a feminist issue in the early 1960s. Back before World War II, when Margaret Sanger, birth mother of Planned Parenthood, wrote that "the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it," she was a radical socialist far outside the American mainstream." But the Sanger animus against big families has since become a central feature of the new American feminism that was mainstreamed in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the perception that marriage is human bondage has become a hallmark of movement militants. Marriage, writes Andrea Dworkin in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, is "an institution [that] developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use but possession of ownership. "28 Pure Marx. And a logical conclusion follows. "The nuclear family must be destroyed," said the feminist Linda Gordon. "Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests. "29 In 1970, Robin Morgan, now the nanny of Gloria Steinem's love child, Ms. magazine, called marriage "a slavery-like practice. We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."30 That same year, Ms. Morgan edited Sisterhood Is Powerful, containing an essay by Valerie Solanis, president of the Society for Cutting Up Men. "It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males . . . and to produce only females," wrote Ms. Solanis. "We must begin immediately to do so. The male is a biological accident .... The male has made the world a shitpile."31 Not a lady to be trifled with, Ms. Solanis established her bona fides by going out and shooting Andy Warhol. By late 1973, Nancy Lehmann and Helen Sullinger had circulated a new manifesto of the movement they titled Declaration of Feminism, which was broadly reproduced and widely praised: Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women .... We must work to destroy it .... The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men .... All of history must be rewritten in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft.32 Among feminists, the slavery simile competes with the prostitution metaphor. "Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession," wrote Vivian Gornick, Penn State professor and author, in 1980. "The choice to serve and be protected and plan toward being a family-member is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that."33 "I can't mate in captivity," Gloria Steinem told a Newsweek reporter in 1984.34 In a 1991 Wall Street Journal piece, Christina Sommers quotes legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon as saying: "Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage and sexual harassment."" To the militant feminist, marriage is prostitution, and the family is at best a failed institution and at worst a prison or slave quarters. A decade ago, novelist Toni Morrison told Time, "The little nuclear family is a paradigm that doesn't work."36 In 1994, the Chicago Tribune quoted Judith Stacey: "The belief that married-couple families are superior is probably the most pervasive prejudice in the Western world.";' In the Jewish World Review in February 2000, in a piece titled "NOW: ProFatherhood Funding Is Unconstitutional," Sheila Cronin was quoted: "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage. "38 Now, most American women do not harbor so bitter and hostile a view of marriage and family. If they did, there would be even fewer children and the Death of the West would be imminent. But millions are influenced by feminist ideology and its equation of marriage with prostitution and slavery, and that ideology has persuaded many to put off marriage and not to have children. If the preservation of peoples of European ancestry, and of the Western civilization they have created, were up to the feminists, Western Man would have no future. Ideas Have Consequences is the title of the late conservative Richard Weaver's famous little book, and the success of feminist ides has had consequences for our country. They may be seen in the 1,000 percent increase in the number of unmarried couples living together in the United States, from 523,000 in 1970 to 5.5 million today.39 The 2000 census also reports that, for the first time in our history, nuclear families account for fewer than one in four households, while single Americans who live alone are now 26 percent of all households .411 Marriage is out of fashion. Back in 1990, Katarina Runske, an author far less famous than the American feminists, published in Britain a book called Empty Hearts and Empty Homes, in which she addressed the inevitable result of all this antimale, antimarriage rhetoric. Feminism, she said, is a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.41 In short, the rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West. Oddly, that most politically incorrect of poets, Rudyard Kipling, saw it all coming back in 1919: On the first Feminian Sandstones, we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. "42 (E) The Popular Culture, in its hierarchy of values, puts the joys of sex far above the happiness of motherhood. The women's magazines, the soaps, romance novels, and prime-time TV all celebrate career, sex, and the single woman. "Taking care of baby" is for Grandma. Marriage and monogamy are about as exciting as a mashedpotato sandwich. That old triumvirate "the world, the flesh, and the devil," not only has all the best tunes, but all the best ad agencies. How many TV shows today tout motherhood? How long ago did The Brady Bunch go off the air? Paul Anka's signature song, "You're Having My Baby," is now "We're Having Our Baby," but "I Am Woman" is still around. It is a sign of the times that Ozzie and Harriet is not just behind the times. Like Amos 'n' Andy, it has become a metaphor for what was wrong with the times. "Any human society," wrote anthropologist J. D. Unwin, "is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom. The evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation. "43 What is now called the Greatest Generation came of age in the Depression and World War II. It displayed great energy and gave America a position of unrivaled preeminence. The baby boomers and Gen-Xers, by and large, opted for "sexual freedom." Soon we shall see if Unwin was right. The early returns suggest that he was, that the West will not survive its experiment in sexual liberation in recognizable form. As the conservative columnist Jenkin Lloyd Jones observed, "Great civilizations and animal standards of behavior coexist only for short periods."44 (F) The Collapse of the Moral Order. What people truly believe about right and wrong can better be determined by how they live their lives than by what they tell the pollsters. If so, the old moral order is dying. As late as the 1950s, divorce was a scandal, "shacking up" was how "white trash" lived, abortion was an abomination, and homosexuality the "love that dare not speak its name." Today, half of all marriages end in divorce, "relationships" are what life is about, and "the love that dare not speak its name" will not shut up. The collapse of marriage and marital fertility, says Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, is due to a long-term "shift in the Western ideational system" away from values affirmed by Christianity--sacrifice, altruism, the sanctity of commitment--and toward a militant "secular individualism" focused on the self.45 When, in 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical against contraception, _Humanae Vitae_, the almost universal hostility with which it was received, even among many Catholics, bore witness to the sea change in society. Yet the late pope has proved prophetic. As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver writes, in _Humanae Vitae_ Pope Paul predicted four consequences of man's embrace of a contraceptive mind-set: (1) Widespread "conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality." (2) Women would no longer be man's "respected and beloved companion," but serve as a "mere instrument of selfish enjoyment." (3) It would "put a dangerous weapon in the hands of public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies." (4) The treatment of men and women as objects, and unborn children as a disease to be prevented, would result in the dehumanization of the species." With rampant promiscuity and wholesale divorce, the explosion of pornography and the mainstreaming of the Playboy philosophy, taxpayer funding of abortion, and a day in America when we can read about teenage girls throwing newborn infants into Dumpsters and leaving them out in the snow, the world Paul VI predicted is upon us. Indeed, the new world takes on the aspect of the old world of pagan Rome, where unwanted babies were left on hillsides to die of exposure. Life is no longer respected as it was by the Greatest Generation, which came home after seeing how life had been so disrespected in a world at war. As the pope predicted, the beneficiaries of contraception and abortion have turned out to be selfish men who use women and toss them away like Kleenex. Nowhere is the overthrow of the old moral order more evident than in how homosexuality is seen today, and yesterday. In World War II, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who wore the "old school tie" of FDR, was forced out of office for propositioning a sleeping car porter. LBJ feared that the arrest of aide Walter Jenkins, caught in a police sting in a men's room at the YMCA, might cost him millions of votes. Rising GOP star Bob Bauman lost his House seat when caught soliciting teenagers in the tenderloin district of D.C. That was then; now is now. The turning point came when Gerry Studds, who seduced a sixteen-year-old male page, defied House sanctions and was reelected in Massachusetts, a Catholic state. Barney Frank easily survived House chastisement for fixing parking tickets for a live-in male lover who was running a full-service whorehouse out of Barney's basement, and, in the Clinton era, he began to bring his boyfriend to White House socials. In 2001, John Ashcroft was lacerated during his confirmation hearings by former Senate colleagues for having opposed the nomination of homosexual James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel, broadcasting the San Francisco gay pride parade, had laughingly welcomed the transvestite "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence," who mock the pope and Catholic nuns. Truly, the world is turned upside down. When America's most public lesbian couple, actresses Anne Heche and Ellen DeGeneres, broke up, the president of the United States called to offer his sympathy. Hillary Clinton became the first First Lady to march in the New York City gay pride parade. Did the New York Times, the good Gray Lady of Forty-third Street, editorially question the wisdom of America's First Lady parading with drag queens and men in thongs? Not at all. As Times national political correspondent Richard Berke told colleagues at the tenth-anniversary reception of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, "Three quarters of the people who decide what goes on the front page [of the Times] are `not-so-closeted' homosexuals. "47 Nine months after marching for gay pride, Mrs. Clinton refused to march in the 240th St. Patrick's Day parade, once a must for all New York City politicians. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, the fraternal Roman Catholic group that runs the parade, does not permit the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization to march as a unit; and Mrs. Clinton had been chastised by gay rights groups for marching on St. Patrick's Day in 2000. That Senator Clinton would appease the homosexuals, even if it meant affronting Irish Catholics, testifies to the new balance of power in the Democratic party and the new correlation of forces in the culture war. Were she a real rather than a fictional character, Hawthorne's Nester Prynne, instead of being up on that scaffold having a scarlet "A" pinned to her blouse, would be on Rosie, exposing Dimmesdale as a deadbeat dad and telling a cheering audience what Dr. Laura could do with her advice. Even the children of Middle America now do tours of duty in the sexual revolution. "Do your own thing!" is now a moral norm. Every American woman of childbearing age has had abortion as a fallback, and millions will not give it up. They want it there for themselves and their daughters and will vote against any politician or party that threatens to take it away. Euthanasia has come to Europe and is coming to America. Upon what moral ground do we any longer stand to stop it? Dr. Kevorkian, a ghoul in an earlier age, some of whose victims were just depressed, not dying, gets a sympathetic profile on Sixty Minutes. In the Age of the Individual, people believe in this life, not the next; in the quality of life, not the sanctity of life; and no one wants to be told how he should live his life. "Americans are not going to lead 21st-century lives based on 18th- and 19th-century moral ideals," writes sociologist and public intellectual Alan Wolfe: "Any form of higher authority has to tailor its demands to the needs of real people. "48 After a millennium and a half, paganism is the "comeback kid." THE AMERICA MANY of us grew up in is gone. The cultural revolution has triumphed in the minds of millions and is beyond the power of politicians to overturn, even had they the courage to try. Half a nation has converted. The party of working-class Catholics is almost 100 percent "pro-choice" and pro-gay rights. The party of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition has thrown in the towel on the social issues--to go out and do the Lord's work growing the Department of Education. Young people are not concerned about their souls; they're worried about the Nasdaq. Most of the intellectual and media elite are fighting allies of the revolution or fellow travelers, and many conservatives are trolling for the terms of armistice. What a tiny band of secular humanists declared in a manifesto in 1973 has become the moral compass of America and is becoming the law of the land. Americans have listened, absorbed, and embraced the values of a revolution that scandalized their parents and grandparents, calling to mind the insight of Alexander Pope: Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace .49 Only a social counterrevolution or a religious awakening can turn the West around before a falling birthrate closes off the last exit ramp and rings down the curtain on Western Man's long-running play. But not a sign of either can be seen on the horizon. What force can resist the siren's song of a hedonistic culture that is so alluring and appealing and is promoted by almost all who speak to the young--Hollywood, MTV, the soaps, prime-time TV, the hot mags and the hot music, romance novels and bestsellers? How do parents compete when even teachers and preachers are handing out condoms? What is going to convert American women to wanting what their mothers wanted and grandmothers prayed for: a good man, a home in the suburbs, and a passel of kids? Sounds almost quaint. In _Caesar and Christ_, Book III of his Story of Civilization, historian Will Durant argues that "biological factors" were "fundamental" to the fall of the Roman Empire: A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian .... A law of Septimus Severus speaks of a _penuria hominum_--a shortage of men. In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time [250 A.D.] been halved. He mourned to see "the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away." Only the barbarians and Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.50 How did Rome reduce its population? "Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished .... Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect."51 Adds Durant: "Perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion and infanticide . . . had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect. The ablest men married latest, bred least and died soonest. "52 Christians were having children, the pagans were not: "Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents to murder; in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund. Irony of ironies. Today, an aging, dying Christian West is pressing the Third World and the Islamic world to accept contraception, abortion, and sterilization as the West has done. But why should they enter a suicide pact with us when they stand to inherit the earth when we are gone? WHEN SURRENDER OF his forces was demanded at Waterloo, General Cambronne replied, "The Old Guard dies; but it does not surrender. "54 A splendid motto for those holed up in our own Corregidor of the culture war. Yet a cold appraisal of the battlefield--who has the big guns? who holds the high ground?--suggests that the Old Guard is going to die. For the decisions women are making today will determine if Western nations will even be around in a century, and Western women are voting no. But where did this revolution come from that so swiftly captured so vast a slice of the most Christianized and "churched" people of the West? And what are its dogmas and doctrines? T H R E E CATECHISM OF A REVOLUTION When the Round Table is broken every man must follow Galahad or Modred: middle things are gone.1 -C. S. Lewis What does this new religion, this new faith that came on the wings of the revolution, hold and teach? How does it differ from the old? First, this new faith is of, by, and for this world alone. It refuses to recognize any higher moral order or moral authority. As for the next world, it will happily yield that to Christianity and traditional faiths, so long as they stay out of the public square and public schools. As for the old biblical stories of creation, Adam and Eve, the serpent in the garden, original sin, the expulsion from Eden, Moses on Mount Sinai, and the Ten Commandments being written in stone and binding on all men--believe all that if you wish, but it is never again to be taught as truth. For the truth, as discovered by Darwin and confirmed by science, is that our species and world are the remarkable results of eons of evolution. "Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces," declares the second Humanist Manifesto, written in 1973.2 That picture on the wall in biology class of the apes walking on four legs, then on two, then evolving into Homo erectus--that is how it happened. The new gospel has as its governing axioms: there is no God; there are no absolute values in the universe; the supernatural is superstition. All life begins here and ends here; its object is human happiness in this, the only world we shall ever know. Each society establishes its own moral code for its own time, and each man and woman has a right to do the same. As happiness is life's end and we are rational beings, we have a right to decide when the pain of living outweighs the pleasure of living and to end this life, either by ourselves or with the assistance of family and doctors. In the moral realm the first commandment is "All lifestyles are equal." Love and its natural concomitant, sex, are healthy and good. All voluntary sexual relations are permissible, and all are morally equal--no one's business but one's own, and certainly not the business of the state to prohibit. This principle--all lifestyles are equal--is to be written into law, and those who refuse to respect the new laws are to be punished. To disrespect an alternative lifestyle marks one as a bigot. Discrimination against those who adopt an alternative lifestyle is a crime. Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the evil that must be eradicated. "Thou shalt not be judgmental" is the second commandment. But the revolution is not only judgmental; it is severe on those who violate its first commandment. How defend this apparent double standard? According to the catechism of the revolution, the old Christian moral code that condemned sex outside of marriage and held homosexuality to be unnatural and immoral was rooted in prejudice, biblical bigotry, religious dogma, and barbaric tradition. That repressive and cruel Christian code was an impediment to human fulfillment and happiness and responsible for the ruin of countless lives, especially those of gay men and women. The new moral code is based on enlightened reason and respect for all. When the state wrote the Christian moral code into law, it codified bigotry. But when we write our moral code into law, we advance the frontiers of freedom and protect the rights of persecuted minorities. A corollary to the new moral code that enshrines sexual freedom logically follows: As condoms and abortion are necessary to prevent the unwanted and undesirable consequences of free love--from herpes to HIV to pregnancy--these must be made available to anyone who is sexually active, down to the fifth grade if need be. UNDER THE NEW catechism, the use of public schools to indoctrinate children in Judeo-Christian beliefs is strictly forbidden. But public schools can and should be used to indoctrinate children in a tolerance of all lifestyles, an appreciation of reproductive freedom, respect for all cultures, and the desirability of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. In the new schools, the holy days of Easter Week, commemorating the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ, are out as holidays. Earth Day, where the children are taught to love, preserve, and protect Mother Earth, is our day of atonement and reflection, from which no child is exempt. Environmentalism, wrote the conservative scholar Robert Nisbet, is "well on its way to being the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism."3 The cultural revolution is not about creating a level playing field for all faiths; it is about a new moral hegemony. After all the Bibles, books, symbols, pictures, commandments, and holidays have been purged from the public schools, these schools shall be converted into learning centers of the new religion. Here is John Dunphy writing with refreshing candor in 1983 in _The Humanist_ about the new role of America's public schools: The battle for humankind's future must be fought and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith, a religion of humanity .... These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach .... The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of "love they neighbor" will be finally achieved .4 The new secularism is no milk-and-water faith. IN POLITICS, THE new faith is globalist and skeptical of patriotism, for an excessive love of country too often leads to suspicion of neighbors and thence to war. The history of nations is a history of wars, and the new faith intends an end of nations. Support for the UN, foreign aid, treaties to ban land mines, abolish nuclear weapons, punish war crimes, and forgive the debts of poor nations are the marks of progressive men and women. Whenever a new supranational institution is formed--the World Trade Organization, the Kyoto Protocol to prevent global warming, the new UN International Criminal Court--the revolution will support the transfer of authority and sovereignty from nations to the new institutions of global governance. Shelley once called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."5 In modern times, songwriters have replaced poets in the consciousness of the young, and in the 1960s, the Beatles were the most famous, with John Lennon the poet laureate to a generation. In his song "Imagine," Lennon lays out in a few stanzas the heaven on earth that is envisioned in the post-Christian dispensation: Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the pople living for today. Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace.6 A self-described "instinctive socialist," Lennon went on to imagine a world of "no possessions," where everyone shares everything. Yet, on his death, at forty, the world would learn that Lennon had coolly managed to acquire $275 million worth of possessions, making him one of the richest men on earth.7 And though the world of John Lennon's imagination, and that of fellow Beatle Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, was utopian, that did not diminish its attraction for the young. For these songwriters offered a new faith to believe in, with its own beatific vision of life here on earth, to replace the Christian faith that had shriveled in their souls. As David Noebel, author of _The Legacy of John Lennon_, wrote, the poet-songwriter knew exactly what he was about. In a statement that stunned the America of the mid-I960s, Lennon predicted: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and will be proven right. We're more popular than Jesus now."8 "THE CANCER OF HUMAN HISTORY" But a religion needs devils as well as angels. And much of what the new faith teaches stems from a hatred of what it views as a shameful, wicked, criminal past. To the revolution, Western history is a catalog of crimes--slavery, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, atrocities, massacres--committed by nations that professed to be Christian. "The white race is the cancer of human history," wrote Susan Sontag, a birth mother of the revolution, in 1967. "The white race and it alone . . . eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads. "9 America was founded on a genocide .... This is a passionately racist country .... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.10 Like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, our elites have come to accept Sontag's indictment of their civilization and have volunteered, pro bono, to assist the prosecution in making its case. If many Americans look back on their history with disgust, who can blame them? For, as Myron Magnet writes in _The Dream and the Nightmare_: Campus after campus [has] jettisoned traditional Western civilization great books and great ideas courses as obsolete .... An alternative canon, supposed to be adequate to the new reality, emerged: Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, later even the lyrics of Bob Dylan, shouldered aside Plato and Montaigne. The relevant message was Western Society's oppressiveness, stifling the instinctual satisfactions for the privileged and tyrannically exploiting the poor and nonwhite at home and in the Third World.11 What was novelist James Baldwin's view of his country at the end of his life? There is not in American history, he wrote, "nor is there now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution." 12 In her text _Progressive Constitutionalism_, Robin West adds, "The political history of the United States... is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexual devaluation of women...."13 Deconstructionalist Jonathan Culler says that the Bible must be understood "not as poetry or narrative but as a powerfully influential racist and sexist text."14 Such sentiments are no longer rarities, but more and more the rule in higher education in the United States. In 1990, Tulane announced a new program, "Initiatives for the Race and Gender Enrichment of Tulane University." University president Eamon Kelly explained the urgency: "Racism and sexism are pervasive in America and are fundamentally present in all American institutions.... We are all the progeny of a racist and sexist America. "15 A recent New York State Regents Report on curriculum reform underscores the need for a fresh look at American history: "African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been victims of a cultural oppression and stereotyping that has characterized institutions ... of the European American world for centuries."16 This is the message children receive in college and even in high school: Europeans and Americans are guilty of genocide against the native peoples of this continent. Our ancestors transported millions of Africans in death ships to the New World, enslaved them to do the hard labor that our forefathers would not do, and maimed and killed millions. Europe's nations imposed racist regimes on peoples of color, especially in Africa, and robbed them of their wealth. Christianity coexisted with and condoned slavery, imperialism, racism, and sexism for four hundred years. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" asks the old man in Eliot's "Gerontion."17 "We are used to hearing the Founders charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests," wrote Allan Bloom in _The Closing of the American Mind_; these slanders are "weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes."18 Indeed they are, for that is their purpose. Before the bar of history, America and the West have been indicted on the Nuremberg charge of "crimes against humanity." And all too often Western intellectuals, who should be conducting the defense of the greatest and most beneficent civilization in history, are aiding the prosecution or entering a plea of _nolo contendere_. Too many can only offer the stammering defense of the "good Germans"--"But we did not know." In moving this indictment, the revolution has complementary goals: to deepen a sense of guilt, to morally disarm and paralyze the West, and to extract endless apologies and reparations until the wealth of the West is transferred to its accusers. It is moral extortion of epic proportions, the shakedown of the millennium. If the West permits its enemies to pull this off, we deserve to be robbed of our inheritance. Why are so many Western leaders unable to refute the accusations? Because in their hearts, Clinton, Jospin, and Schroeder believe the charges are true, and that the West is guilty. Why else would Mr. Clinton have traveled to Africa to apologize for slavery to the heirs of the tribal chiefs who captured and sold the slaves? Slavery existed, even before Arkansas. And the West did not invent slavery; the West ended slavery. IN THE CHATECHISM of the revolution, why did the West perpetrate history's greatest horrors? Because Western nations believed that their civilization and culture were superior and that they had the right to impose their rule on "inferior" civilizations, cultures, and peoples. This is the _radix malorum_, the root of all evil, the belief that one culture is superior to another, which leads to the murder of the other. Eradication of the idea of superior cultures and civilizations is thus a first order of business of the revolution. Equality is the first principle. Who sins against equality is _extra ecclesiam_, outside the church. In the new dispensation, no religion is superior, no culture is superior, no civilization is superior. All are equal. It is "diversity," the representation in society of all creeds, colors, and cultures in the multiethnic, multicultural nation that we should aspire to and, prayerfully, are headed for. Logically it follows that any candidate who would rally a constituency on the idea that Western civilization and culture are superior and Christianity is the one true faith is a heretic and a menace. How crucial is this conviction to our new cultural establishment? IN 1994 , THE culture war came to Lake County, Florida, when the school board voted three to two to require that children be taught that America's heritage and culture were "superior to other foreign or historic cultures."19 Board chair Pat Hart, a self-described patriot and a Christian, said the idea was adopted in response to Florida's multicultural education policy. It is fine, said Mrs. Hart, for students to learn about other nations and cultures, but they should be taught that America's is "unquestionably superior."20 A stunned teachers' union called the proposal jingoistic. "People don't understand the purpose and point of this," Keith Mullins of _People for Mainstream Values_ told the New York Times." Nonsense. The blazing controversy that ensued showed that people knew exactly what "the purpose and point" were. School board member Judy Pearson made it clear: "We need to reinforce that we should be teaching America first."22 Otherwise, said Ms. Pearson, young people, "if they felt our land was inferior or equal to others, would have no motivation to go to war and defend our society."23 One dissenter charged the school board majority with "undermining our school system."24 The Associated Press reported, "Some teachers and parents say what's really being taught is bigotry."25 The spokesman for the national School Boards Association, Jay Butler, warned that "'values' in education ... is something we hear more about with the rise of the religious right wing. "26 The local teachers' union president, Gail Burry, accused the board of violating the First Amendment: "The board's majority wants to start from a conclusion--that America is superior to all other nations--and then work backwards from it .... That's not education. That's indoctrination. "27 But isn't starting from the conclusion that America is simply equal to all other nations also "indoctrination"? At the heart of the dispute is Pilate's question "What is truth?" To the revolution, Lake County was contradicting the truth, i.e., all cultures are equal; none is superior. By claiming America's culture was superior, Mrs. Hart's board had committed heresy. The revolution could not permit open defiance of a core dogma to be taught as truth to children in Lake County. So it went to battle stations. In the fall election, in a huge turnout, all supporters of the "America first" policy were defeated. "The people turned out the extremists," said Mr. Mullins .28 The episode exposes the true character of our new dominant culture. About its core beliefs, it is deeply intolerant and will not abide challenge or contradiction. Anyone who would teach children that America's culture is superior is an "extremist" teaching a lie, who has no business in the public schools of the new America. AS EQUALITY IS its core principle, the cultural revolution teaches that the real heroes of history are not the conquerors, soldiers, and statesmen who built the Western nations and created the great empires, but those who advanced the higher cause--the equality of peoples. Thus, the end of segregation in the South and of apartheid in South Africa are triumphs greater than the defeat of communism, and Mandela and Gandhi are the true moral heroes of the twentieth century. Thus, Martin Luther King stands tallest in the American pantheon, and any state that refuses to set aside a holiday to celebrate his birth is to be boycotted. As for George Washington, if his name is removed from schools, so be it. Was he not an owner of slaves? Did he not participate in America's most egregious violation of human equality? As equality is a first principle, one-person, one-vote democracy is the highest form of government and the only truly legitimate form. It alone may be imposed by force, as it was upon Germany and Japan, and should have been upon Iraq. Military intervention for national interests is selfish and ignoble, but moral intervention that sheds blood in the cause of democracy, as in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans--nothing is more pure. By this standard, the revolution judges the morality of America's wars. The War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Indian wars, and the Spanish-American War may have secured a continent at a tiny cost in lives, but these wars are forever sullied by the annexationist and chauvinist spirit of the America that fought them. And though Korea and Vietnam were fought to save small nations from murderous Asian communism, they were unwise or unjust wars. For we were allied with corrupt regimes and fought to keep those countries in our camp in a Cold War that never had the moral clarity of the war against fascism. President Nixon's support for General Pinochet's overthrow of the Castroite Salvador Allende in Chile was an outrage. So, too, was Ronald Reagan's assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting to recapture their country from the pro-Soviet Sandinistas. As for Reagan's invasion of Grenada, to rescue that tiny island from the Stalinist thugs who murdered its Marxist ruler, Maurice Bishop--that was American aggression. But Clinton's invasion of Haiti to restore to power the Marxist defrocked priest, Father Aristide--that was intervention on behalf of democracy and fully justified. And so long as it is a "good war," the end justifies the means in the catechism of the revolution. That Mr. Lincoln made himself an absolute dictator, trampled on the Constitution, imprisoned dissidents without trial, and unleashed Generals Sherman and Sheridan to burn the South to ashes was fine. The eradication of slavery justified the means employed, even if fellow Americans suffered terribly. As for "the Good War," World War II, allying ourselves with the mass murderer Stalin and firebombing cities like Nagasaki, killing scores of thousands of women and children in hours, were acceptable, because our hearts were pure and our enemy was evil. Richard Nixon is denounced for the "murder bombing" of Hanoi to free our POWs, bombing that North Vietnam said killed 1,900 people over thirteen days. Yet, Harry Truman is forever a hero even though he ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 140,000 civilians, and sent 2 million Russian prisoners of war back to be tortured and murdered by Stalin in Operation Keelhaul. FOR THE CULTURAL revolution the enemy is always on the Right, and the revolution does not forgive or forget. Compare the remorseless pursuit to his grave of General Pinochet, the dictator who crushed Castroism in Chile, with the expressions of sorrow at the deaths of Mao's partners in murder, Chou En-lai and Deng Xiaoping. Byron De La Beckwith, charged with assassinating NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963, is tried, retried, and tried a third time, thirty years later, and dies in prison, as the revolution demands, even as it pleads for clemency for Leonard Peltier, who murdered two wounded FBI agents after a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation. The latest cultural icon is Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for murdering a policeman in Philadelphia in 1981 by emptying his gun into the wounded officer, who lay bleeding. One hundred academic historians have urged that Mumia be given a new trial and that the killing of that policeman be "viewed in the light of history."29 As Peltier is an Indian and Mumia is black, they qualify as members of a victim class. But two dead FBI agents and a dead cop--three white males--do not. THE EQUALITY THE revolution preaches is a corruption of Jefferson's idea "All men are created equal." Jefferson meant that all were endowed by their Creator with the same right to life, liberty, and property, and all must be equal under the law. He rejected egalitarianism. As he wrote John Adams in 1813: "I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent."30 Measured by virtues and talents, it is more true to say that "no two men were ever created equal." What America is about is not equality of condition or equality of result, but freedom, so a "natural aristocracy" of ability, achievement, virtue, and excellence--from athletics to the arts to the academy--can rise to lead, inspire, and set an example for us all to follow and a mark for us all to aim at. Hierarchies are as natural as they are essential. Consider the American institutions of excellence, from Microsoft to the New York Yankees, from the U.S. Marine Corps to the Mayo Clinic. How many are run on a one-person, one-vote principle? As history demonstrates, all peoples, cultures, and civilizations are not equal. Some have achieved greatness often, others never. All lifestyles are not equal. All religions are not equal. All ideas are not equal. Indeed, what is true martyrdom but that most eloquent and compelling of all testimonies that all ideas are not equal. While all ideas have a right to be heard, none has an automatic right to be respected. The First Amendment requires that we tolerate the false as well as the true, the foolish as well as the wise; but nations and societies advance by separating the wheat from the chaff, and discarding the chaff. The revolution's idea of equality is ideological, utopian, absurd, and ultimately ruinous. Only a society adrift would award the black berets of rangers, who have volunteered to take the gravest risks and gone through the most arduous training, to every clerk, cook, and bottle-washer in the army. Was it not Lord Acton who said that if democracy dies it is always equality that kills it? THIS DEBASED FORM of equality traces its paternity to the French, not the American, Revolution; to nineteenth-century socialists, not to the eighteenth-century American patriots. Indeed, as all men are endowed differently with gifts, talents, and virtues, the only way to achieve equality of result is tyranny. And that is not America. Those who endlessly revise scholastic aptitude tests, because the results collide with their preconceptions, then give extra points to students based on ethnicity, then throw the tests out because they still do not yield the desired results, are hopeless ideologues whose false ideas about human nature will never survive their first collision with reality. The equality the revolution teaches may be found in the final results of the "Caucus race" in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. After all the participants had all run around in circles for half an hour, they asked, "But who has won?" And the Dodo said, "Everybody has won and all shall have prizes."31 MERE TOLERANCE, SAID G. K. Chesterton, "is the virtue of men who no longer believe in anything." But our new faith is tolerant only about what it considers inconsequential: sex, pornography, filthy language, boorish manners, slovenly dress, and obscene art. It has no tolerance for those who defy its secularist dogmas. In the new dispensation you can make a movie depicting Jesus Christ as a wimp who lusts after Mary Magdalene, as in The Last Temptation of Christ. But suggest a link between heredity and intelligence, as Charles Murray did in The Bell Curve, and you will learn what it means to cross the revolution. A local druggist may sell condoms to thirteen-year-olds, but sell cigarettes to the same kids and you will be prosecuted for endangering their health and imperiling their morals. Books that proclaim that "God is dead," or that St. Paul was a homosexual, or that celibacy is crippling, or that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope" will attract warm reviews for "boldness," "creativity," and "irreverence." But slip and use a racial slur, as Senator Byrd did, or a vulgarism about homosexuals, as Rep. Dick Armey famously did in his malapropism "Barney Fag," and you will not escape the whipping post. In the nineteenth century, blasphemy was a crime in many states. Today, blasphemy, vulgarity, and obscenities are acceptable, even on prime time, but ethnic humor is "hate speech" that must be punished severely. We can "save the Baptists," says Darwinist David Dennett, but "not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world." 12 Dennett warns Creationists: "You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public nuisance .... Those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strains of their heritage alive, we shall be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm." 13 There is the militant spirit of the modernist orthodoxy. HATE CRIMES Like any religion, the new dispensation has its own catalog of moral crimes. The most odious are "hate crimes," assaults motivated by hatred of a victim's color, creed, national origin, or sexual orientation. Now, clearly, the murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard were cowardly and contemptible acts that merit the maximum punishment. But why were these two murders, of the fifteen thousand committed each year, made a cause of special denunciation by our political and cultural elites? After all, the killers were nobodies. In the case of Byrd, ex-cons high on drugs; in the case of Shepard, thugs, nonentities. True, the killing of Byrd, tied to a truck and dragged to his death, was particularly gruesome, but that did not qualify it as a hate crime. It was a hate crime because Byrd was black and his killers chose him because he was black. Shepard was beaten unconscious and chained to a fence in a freezing countryside after he made sexual advances to one of two thugs, who then decided to rob and kill him. His murder was a hate crime because Shepard was homosexual and his killers were white heterosexuals, enraged that one of them had been propositioned. Had Shepard been murdered in the same brutal fashion by ex-lovers, his killing would not have qualified as a hate crime, nor would his death have gotten presidential notice. All of us have biases, so let the author concede his. Had the killers of Matthew Shepard chosen a sixteen-year-old girl rather than a twenty-one-year-old gay man, her rape-murder would have been to me an even greater evil. But the killers in both cases should suffer the same penalty. And if the killers of James Byrd had been black, or Byrd white, his dragging-death would have been an equally vicious atrocity, justifying the same penalty. Why were these two cruel murders singled out by the president and the press? Because they fit the profile perfectly. In the catechism of the revolution, the murder of homosexuals because they are gay, and of blacks because they are black, are the worst of crimes, worse even than the rapemurder of a child. How do we know? Less than a year after Shepard's murder, two men in Arkansas were charged in the murder of thirteen-year-old Jesse Dirkhising. Here are the details, as reported by the Associated Press: According to police, Davis Carpenter Jr., 38, and Joshua Brown, 22, drugged and blindfolded Jesse Dirkhising, gagged him with underwear, and strapped him to a mattress face down with duct tape and belts. Then the boy was repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects before he suffocated because of the position he was in, investigators said. At the apartment the police found handwritten instructions and a diagram of how to position the boy. Other notes described apparently unfulfilled fantasies of molesting other children . . . On the night of Jesse's death, Brown repeatedly raped the boy while Carpenter watched, police said. Brown took a break to eat a sandwich and noticed the boy had stopped breathing. 34 Carpenter and Brown were lovers, and the former masturbated as Brown raped the boy. Yet this torture-rape-murder got almost no national press. Why? Because this was a "sex crime," not a "hate crime," and because to show homosexuals in acts of sadistic barbarism does not fit the villain-victim script of our cultural elite. To spotlight the brutality of Carpenter and Brown would have set back the cause. Writes media critic Brent Bozell: Had Jesse Dirkhising been shot inside his Arkansas school he would have been an immediate national story. Had he been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks. But no liberal media outlet would dare to be the first to tell a grisly murder story which has as its villains two gay men." When Brown's trial was held, the Washington Times, almost alone among national newspapers, reported the proceedings. "The discrepancy [in national coverage of the Shepard and Dirkhising murders] isn't just real," wrote Andrew Sullivan, a homosexual and columnist for the New Republic, "it's staggering."36 Sullivan found three thousand stories on Shepard's murder in a search of the Nexis database the first month after the killing, but only forty-six stories on the slaying of Jesse Dirkhising. FOX NEWS was the only network to report on Brown's murder trial and conviction. The Big Media have been converted into a communications arm of the revolution. SOON AFTER BYRD'S dragging death, six-year-old Jake Robel died the same horrible way. As his mother Christy went into a take-out sandwich shop in Independence, Missouri, Jake was left strapped in his seat belt in the back of her Chevy Blazer. Christy left the keys in the ignition. Kim Davis, thirty-four, just out of jail, watched her go into the sandwich shop and jumped in the driver's seat. Christy Robel ran to rescue her son, opening the back door to pull him out. Davis shoved the boy out, still tied to his seat belt. Christy Robel screamed hysterically for him to stop. Davis looked into the backseat, then into the rearview mirror, and sped off, dragging the boy five miles until stopped by motorists who spotted the boy's body being dragged along the highway. Why did this crime not get national attention? Because Jake Robel was white and Davis is black. Hate crimes are the cultural elite's way of racially pro