Day of Reckoning

It seems as though America is coming apart at the seams. Forces foreign and domestic seek an end to U.S. sovereignty and independence and the prospect of an America breaking up along the lines of race, ethnicity, class and culture looms. In Day of Reckoning, Patrick Buchanan reveals his interpretation of the nation's existential crisis and shows how President Bush’s post-9/11 conversion to an ideology of  “democratism" may have led us to the precipice of strategic disaster abroad and savage division at home.

Ideology, writes Buchanan, is a Golden Calf, a false god, a secular religion that seeks vainly, like Marxism, to create a paradise on earth. While free enterprise is good, he likens the worship of a “free trade” that is destroying the dollar, de-industrializing America, and ending our economic independence, to cult madness. While America must stand for freedom and self-determination, he believes that the use of U.S. troops to police the planet or serve as advance guard against “world democratic revolution” is, as Iraq shows, imperial folly that will bring ruin to the republic. While America should speak out for human rights, he writes that it is morally arrogant to confront Russia and hand out moral report cards to other nations. While we have benefited from immigration and the melting pot has worked with millions of Europeans, Buchanan finds absurd the idea we can import millions of aliens, legal and illegal, from every culture, clime, creed, and continent, and still remain a country.

To save America, according to Buchanan, the first imperative is to remove from power the ideologues of both parties who have put the country in jeopardy. In his final chapter, Buchanan lays out ideas to prevent the end of America. He calls for a bottom-up review of all of America’s Cold War commitments, a ten-point program to secure America’s borders, ideas to halt the erosion of our national sovereignty and restore our manufacturing preeminence and economic independence, and a formula for finding the way to a cold peace in the culture wars. Buchanan offers a radical program, for neither party is addressing the real crisis of America—whether we survive as one nation and people, or disintegrate into what Theodore Roosevelt called a “tangle of squabbling nationalities” and not a nation at all.