National Unity

Pat Buchanan on National Unity

by Ryan McMaken

Recently
by Ryan McMaken: Edward
Snowden: Master of Realpolitik

Pat Buchanan
is again sounding the alarm about how immigration to the United
States is leading to “balkanization” and will result
in the United States being split into “two countries.”

In an
interview with talk radio host Andrea Tantaros, Buchanan complained
that new immigrants are not being sufficiently assimilated, and
Buchanan and Tantaros agreed that people aren’t being taught
the right kind of American history:

“If
you indoctrinate or teach kids different views about their country
and how it began,” Buchanan said, “what you get is a
growing disintegration of the country, a fragmentation into different
parts.”

Apparently,
Buchanan’s position is that we need to “indoctrinate
or teach” kids all the same views about the country and how
it began. This should be done in the name of unity.

Buchanan
received some support in this thesis of his from Barack Obama
last week when Obama complained
that different groups in Irish society send their children to
different schools:

In other
words, if we’re not all culturally united and believing the
same thing. That’s a bad thing.

It’s
hard to see a significant difference between Buchanan’s lament
about too much variety in instruction producing disunity, and
Obama’s condemnation of diverse schooling for encouraging
“division.”

This should
not surprise us. Pat Buchanan, while he often has many insightful
observations about the state of political affairs in the country,
is nonetheless a lifelong beltway political operative, politician,
and a Nixon acolyte.

This is a
man who believes that the modern nation-state should micromanage
demographics and cultural affairs, invade
foreign countries that don’t do what The U.S. government
says, and that the nation-state itself serves a hugely beneficial
role in human society. In his 2001 book The
Death of the West (which I reviewed here),
Buchanan approvingly quotes Jacque Barzun’s claim that the
nation-state is “the greatest political creation of the west,”
and that most of cultural crises in the Western world today stem
from insufficient loyalty to states. Buchanan then goes on to
criticize secession and various kinds of political decentralization.

Buchanan
points to the 1960s as his benchmark for the high point of American
“unity.” Buchanan notes that the 1960s came as a high
point for the legitimacy of the American state. Following the
New Deal, years of WWII propaganda, and the Cold War, Americans
were primed by 1960 to provide the American state with virtually
unquestioning allegiance and loyalty. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
version of history was the only version of history being
taught in public schools, and even in most private schools. For
middle-class white people, like Pat Buchanan growing up in northern
Virginia in the 1950s, it probably did seem like the United
States was culturally united.

But even
in the 1960s, Americans were not quite as unified as Buchanan
imagines. It was during 1960 after all, that Americans were openly
debating if a Catholic should be elected president, lest he enthrone
the Pope on Capitol Hill. Where was that “one religion in
common” Buchanan likes to refer to?

This cultural
unity, to the extent that that it did exist in the 1960s, and
which Buchanan so fondly remembers, was an aberration in America
history, and depended on relentless pro-government propaganda
through media, schools, and even religious institutions during
the mid-twentieth century. The central government, through the
FCC, essentially controlled broadcasting, and through its funding
and regulation of educational institutions, created a uniform
political ideology among formally-educated people which outlined
the acceptable parameters of political debate and ideology.

In the 19th
century, before mass media and widespread public schooling and
public universities, one’s ideology was shaped by one’s
wealth, race, ethnicity, religion and private formal instruction.
Regional experiences and local institutions could produce wide
variations in what ideologies dominated locally from place to
place.

Political
institutions by necessity were varied and local in the face of
deep ethnic, economic and ideological divisions.

The Golden
Age came at last (for people like Buchanan and Obama), when the
federal government became skilled at using nation-wide media and
public schooling as a means to “teach” the citizenry
to be loyal to the local nation-state and to accept its laws,
edicts, abuses, and lies. What the people learned in school was
then reinforced in the evening news.

Thus Americans
began to think that loyalty to the American state was better than
loyalty to one’s local government, or community, or family,
or religious group. The old divisions were downplayed, eliminated,
and ridiculed.

There was
no way to fight it, as there was no other easy means of obtaining
information outside of the approved channels. Knowledge was controlled
by the regulated media and by the approved educational institutions.
Everything else was firmly within crackpot territory, according
to those with respectable opinions.

Today, however,
with the proliferation of homeschooling in all its forms, the
web, and the rise of alternative media, the days of “unity”
are thankfully coming to an end.

While I’m
not one who believes that the internet will by itself cause libertarianism
to sweep the globe, it does appear that the variety of information
offered by the web and by the home education movement will lead
to division and dissent and variety where it has not existed in
decades.

Buchanan
looks upon this with horror. For the nationalists, widespread
unity, uniformity and obedience are to be desired for that is
what allows a vast nation-state like the United States to function.
The suppression of cultural minorities by the cultural majority,
along lines desired by the cultural elites, made the American
leviathan state of the 20th and 21st century possible.

The conservative
culture warriors who now complain about secularist left-wing control
of schools and other cultural institutions are only suffering
at the hands of a beast they created. The forces of conservatism
created the public schools to teach watered-down American Protestantism,
to beat the foreign languages out of students, and to above all,
“assimilate.” They got their assimilation machine, but
now the shoe is on the other foot, and when we look at the speech
codes, and the P.C. wars and propaganda coming out of the public
schools, we should all thank the right-wing guardians of American
culture who made it all possible.

That age
of assimilation, however, whether to right-wing or left wing ideals,
is coming to an end. The future is likely to look much different.
The future will bring cultural division, and with it, political
division, just as Buchanan predicts.

It had always
been unnatural for the American central government to hammer into
one polity the people of New Mexico and the people of Massachusetts,
for example. To tell 300 million people of such diverse origin
that they’re all part of one giant nation-state, was always
nonsensical except in only the loosest confederation. Centralization
made assimilation to a centrally-determined ideal necessary, and
by 1960, we got it. And it made Pat Buchanan happy.

The future
divisions that come, on the other hand, will simply be a matter
of recognizing the cultural, economic, and ideological divisions
which had always been there, but had been covered over by state
“education.” Immigration will contribute to this, but
that factor is by no means the only one.

Unfortunately,
there is a great downside to this as well. In the wake of political
disintegration, the American nation-state will leave behind a
huge government apparatus: the remnants of a federally-funded
and militarized police forces, its subsidized agricultural systems,
its military bases, and a political culture devoted to seizing
power and control whenever possible. The destruction of the family
as a central economic institution, and the hobbling of the market
itself will all lead to impoverishment and a desire by different
and disgruntled groups to control the machinery of power that
the centralized nation-state will leave as it recedes.

With this
will come conflict, unrest, and violence along economic, ethnic
and racial lines. It will just be part of the legacy of the American
nation-state which the nationalists still trumpet as our savior.

Buchanan
thinks the best thing to do is to keep up the façade; to paper
over the deep divisions with flag-waving American history classes
for the indoctrination of the young into embracing “unity.”

That’s
an idea for an age long past, and the time has come to abandon
that failed experiment that is the centralized American state.
But, as usual, we’ll be left with cleaning up the messes
the state will leave behind.