Buchanan really irritates the heck out of me. I cut my conservative teeth on his writings in the old St. Louis Globe Democrat. Now he has metamorphosed into a sort of populist demagogue. I disagree strongly with Buchanan on some critical issues, particularly his stance on Israel and his obdurate refusal to recognize the threat posed by Islam. Last week I actually heard him refer to Islam as "one of the world's great religions" thereby tacitly elevating this political cult to a status equal to that of Christianity and ignoring Islam's 1400 year history of violence and barbarism. But in this book Buchanan manages once again to get it right and raises the level of his game to that which he enjoyed as a young firebrand at the St. Louis Globe Democrat. The "business as usual" and "all that counts is the economy" Republicans and "anything for a vote" Democrats are selling our country's sovereignty down the road albeit for different reasons.Buchanan says, "From Gibbon to Spengler to Toynbee and the Durants, the symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: The death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. but the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population and foreign invasions no longer resisted. . . . With the Immigration Act of 1965, the nation began to import another electorate. . . . Third World immigration is drowning the Republican base. . . . Mass immigration pushes politics to the left. . . Democrats will never secure the border. They may play the patriot card against Bush, but they are running a bluff. . . . America is being invaded, and if this is not stopped, it will mean the end of the United States."In his chapter on the "Roots of Paralysis" Buchanan does an excellent job of examining the motivations behind the reluctance of the Democrats or Republicans to tackle an issue whose solution the Constitution, the law, politics and duty overwhelmingly support. Buchanan's answer: Political correctness, political cowardice, political opportunism, a sense of guilt for America's sins and the twin ideologies of "economism" and international liberalism.Scholar John Attarian gave a name to the cult that has captured the party of Goldwater and Reagan: "economism." To the "economite," the true believer in economism, sovereignty, independence, industrial primacy, the values of community and country, must be sacrificed, should the gods of globalism so command. What's the dominant religion of the past 100 years? Not Christianity! It's the idea of economic growth, the Church of GDP. The belief that EVERYTHING should be subordinated to our economic interests. And of course the Democratic Party sees immigrants, legal and illegal, as future voters who will bury the Nixon-Reagan coalition.Ours is a nation and culture steeped in and paralyzed by guilt. Prior to the '60s we did not feel the need to apologize for America's past, but took pride in all she had accomplished. That there were sins in our past, no one denied. But Americans did not obsess over wrongs done by previous generations, for compared with all other nations and cultures, America'a history was relatively benign and merited the gratitude of mankind. For the first one hundred and fifty years of her history, America represented one end of the continuum of liberty. We were that "shining city on a hill." Our forefather's kept that light burning brightly but we have failed to be good stewards of our sacred legacy. Worse, we have failed to even understand much less appreciate that legacy. The gradient of values leading to liberty were unambiguously evident to the whole world as long as Americans remained true to their traditions and values. But we have stumbled and succumbed to the false promises of the left. Leftist verisimilitude and deceit has been substituted for that which is authentic and good. Meretricious nonsense masquerades as legitimate thought. And America's beacon of light becomes dimmer and dimmer. Confusion abounds where once there was confidence and certainty. A culture marinated in guilt and self doubt cannot inspire its own people much less the world.Paradoxically, an America bent to ends of the multicultural Utopians will ultimately be of no good to those who are storming our borders. For the America that they inherit will not longer possess that essence which made our country great to begin with. The relativists and multiculturalists have grossly misunderstood that which made and continues to make America great. For at their core they are materialists and are unable to appreciate any value or tradition more sublime than counterfeit wealth. They have never understood that real wealth inheres not in the superficial manifestations of material well being, but in the wellspring of American values and traditions.And so these leftist materialists as well as the so called conservative "economites" having stumbled across the greatest wealth ever devised by man, our American constitutional form of government, have failed to recognize this majestic gift and now have set about to destroy it.This book tells a gut wrenching horror story that will leave many of those who rarely venture from their protective enclaves in disbelief. This is not a pretty story. Many of the facts are unpleasant and fly in the face of political correctness. But our liberties, culture and very lives are at stake. It appears that we are willing to fritter away, in just one generation, the greatest legacy ever confered on a population - all in the name of political correctness. Fortunately, Pat Buchanan is not willing to bow and scrape before the gods of political correctness. I have no doubt that such books as his will in short order become illegal to publish in the USA just as they are now illegal to publish in Europe.