He was ready for this day back in 2002.
Yesterday's
news that white people are dying faster than being born was fated to elicit a response from Pat Buchanan.
But rather than his typical racist anger, we got racist melancholy instead, as you can read below the fold.
But the existential crisis of the GOP, from which it has turned its eyes away since George H.W. Bush, is demography.
Yet the matter cannot be avoided now, for it is on page one.
"White Numbers Shrink," was the headline on the lead story in USA Today. "More Whites Dying Than Being Born," blared The Wall Street Journal. What does this mean?
In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before -- not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s -- has this happened.
In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe -- the European tribes of North America -- have begun to die.
He even uses the white supremacist formulation:
The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe.
This, of course, makes Crazy Uncle Pat super sad, because:
Where is America going? What does the GOP future look like?
America is going where it has always gone: forward. The same can't be said about the GOP's future, which is as bleak as the
Canadian tar sands.
Buchanan's solution is to stop comprehensive immigration reform—ALL immigration, actually (including legal immigration) which is downright nonsensical. Those demographic trends deal with native-born Americans. Last year's babies will be voting age in 17 years, and obstructing immigration reform won't change that.
Remember, just SEVEN percent of our nation's population growth in the 2012 fiscal year was white. Crazy, huh? And all seven percent of those were immigrants. In other words, shut down immigration, and the nation's white population would be contracting.
The other 93 percent were Asian, African American and Latino. And that trend won't be changing anytime soon.
So Republicans have two choices—take Pat's advice and continue to obstruct immigration reform, or they can at least get out of the way. The former guarantees their future long-term irrelevance. The latter at least gives them a fighting chance. Kind of maybe.