Patrick Buchanan loves to shake things up, and the charismatic and prolific author’s new book Suicide of a Superpower will indeed send the left into apoplexy.

Buchanan’s thesis is not new for him but it takes on a particular poignancy in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, the massive stimulus bailouts, the spending, and the stagnation they produced. “Debt is surging to 100 percent of GDP portending an eventual run on the dollar, a default or a Weimar-like inflation. The greatest creditor nation in history is now the greatest debtor.” If we don’t get the financial situation under control, “we’re Greece,” he says quoting former Senator Judd Gregg.

America’s declining share of world production and its disastrous involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a decline “without precedent” in a shorter time period than any modern European power, he insists. America produces little and depends upon the world for what it consumes. Zero new jobs have been created. We did it to ourselves by embracing globalization beginning with NAFTA and GATT, relying on the teachings of free trade “dreamers” who also were responsible for the decline of Great Britain before the U.S. “shouldered [the mother country] aside.”

While political and economic matters dominate Buchanan’s thinking, he introduces a second cause of the decline, that America is no longer “ruled by the same ideas.”  Freedom “takes a back seat to equality” and “one nation under God, indivisible” has become an “antique concept” as U.S. leaders have rejected the God and the moral order of their ancestors.

They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.

“America has ceased to be a Christian country,” primarily with the decline of mainstream Protestantism and with Catholicism “well on its way to becoming a third world religion.”

This idea of different “worlds” is really the third and center of the book – the argument that is designed to produce the fireworks. For Buchanan, what he calls ethnonationalism is the world’s future. The post WWII era worked because the victors so rearranged populations that they created ethnically pure nations, removing Germans from Poland and France and so forth so that nations did not have “internal enemies.” There were only three exceptions to this unification, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Today the three have broken into separate national states so that all now are ethnically homogeneous.

The remaining exception is the U.S., which has become a multiethnic country. It has evolved into a “triumph of tribalism.” Whites are fast becoming a mere plurality and with their low birth rate do not have the energy to reproduce themselves, when they will shrink to only one among many tribes. Christianity provides no center given its decline and any growth as in Catholicism is all of the third world variety. The “last chance” is for the majority of Americans who never accepted multiculturalism – the idea that “all religions and lifestyles are equal” – to take control and reestablish one nation under God undivided.

Still, something is wrong with this diversion into religion. Buchanan does clearly say “When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression.” But then he says, “And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate.” Yet, Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds in the Third World. Clearly Christianity by itself is not enough for him, as shown by his concern about European decent and in his remark about Catholicism becoming a non-Western religion.

Is it religion or ethnicity? As he says in the chapter, “The End of White America”:

The white population will begin to shrink and, should present birth rates persist, slowly disappear. Hispanics already comprise 42 percent of New Mexico’s population, 37 percent of California’s, 38 percent of Texas’s, and over half the population of Arizona under the age of twenty. ……. Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to “insure domestic tranquility” and “make us a more perfect union”? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?

It is merely a question but he continues: “Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared? What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?”

He introduces a strategy of sorts but curiously it is offered in the middle rather at the conclusion of the book and it is hedged.

What the above points to is a strategy from which Republicans will recoil, a strategy to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority. If the GOP is not the party of New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci and Cambridge cop James Crowley, it has no future. And although Howard Dean disparages the Republicans as the “white party,” why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?

He adds the curious note that “For the Left to concede that white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people would be to concede that the Left is guilty of the very sin of which it accuses the right.”

Perhaps some of us misremember the past. But the racial, religious, cultural, social, political, and economic divides today seem greater than they seemed even in the segregation cities some of us grew up in. Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.

This sounds like a return to de Tocqueville’s idea that America’s national government was in peoples’ hearts rather than in the nationalism and welfare of today’s bloated U.S. Government. Yet, Buchanan needs a powerful national state to readdress what he considers the evils of free trade especially that it has led to the decline of manufacturing. But here he does not get the facts right. Yes, there is a decline in employment but he implies there is a decline in manufacturing per se by such phrases as emphasizing 50,000 factories closing and a relative manufacturing loss to service employment since 2000. In fact, U.S manufacturing is number one in the world with 21 percent of world value added and China is second with 15 percent, with the U.S. wealthier by one-fifth since 2000, from $1.5 to $1.8 trillion. China and the rest do the menial work in the total value of a product while the U.S. reaps the major rewards in both sales returns and higher wages.

Manufacturing jobs have decreased but due to two government failures, not because of free trade. As Apple’s Steve Jobs told President Obama personally just before he died, he would move hundreds of thousand of manufacturing jobs from overseas to the U.S. if regulations were moderated and U.S. high schools and colleges either produced the engineers he needed to supervise employees or we keep the foreigners who earn the majority of the engineering degrees in the U.S. today rather than forcing them home. Presumably Buchanan cannot accept this because it conflicts with his immigration views even if keeping foreign engineers would produce more jobs for blue collar Americans. It would indeed take a powerful regulatory state to control millions of immigrants and to protect inefficient domestic employment in the absence of Steve Jobs’ reforms.

How did the U.S. “shoulder” Britain aside, anyway? It was not us but they themselves. It was not free trade that ruined Britain but the welfare state. The English empire and its relative economic productivity were still comparatively high in 1945 but the welfare state roared back under the (manufacturing) Labor Party when free trade died until revived by the union bête noir Margaret Thatcher. At the time of Britain’s decline and the U.S. rise, we were the free traders and they were not. Buchanan’s version is fine drama but poor history and worse economics.

Mr. Buchanan’s book will clearly send the left into righteous swoon but the right unfortunately will get no clear answer here to the most fundamental questions he raises.

Donald Devine was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under President Ronald Reagan and is the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online.