The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie

THERE IS AT LEAST A SMALL WAY IN which every person who read Patrick Buchanan's memoir Right From the Start, regardless of political persuasion, regrets that Buchanan has never become president. In that book, Buchanan, with oblivious candor, proudly explains how he brawled his way through his Catholic Washington, D.C., boyhood, up to and including duking it out (unprofitably) with police officers while in college. The pure entertainment value of having a quick-fisted chief executive who could greet an impertinent question from Helen Thomas or a sadly sighed critique from Dick Gephardt with two jabs and a snappy right cross would more than compensate for the ensuing hullabaloo.

Alas, young men mature, and find higher purposes for their energy. Buchanan has channeled his fondness for fisticuffs into writing, and as a result, he possesses an almost perfectly pugilistic writing style. This does endow his prose with a certain power. At the same time, reading more than three pages of him at any one stretch leaves one feeling sore, exhausted, and aggrieved, rather like one who has attended a child's birthday party in the role of pinata.

Buchanan's new book, The Death of the West--no namby-pamby Spenglerian "Decline" for Pat, he's talking lights out--is essentially his familiar Trouble Right Here In River City spiel, attached this time to a mass of demographic data about the aging populations of Europe and North America. These are not new findings; anyone who's read Peter Peterson's Gray Dawn, for example, is well acquainted with the chilly, immutable facts about the large, aging Baby Boom cohort and the declining birthrate. This `Pig in the Middle' phenomenon --demographers describe watching the bulging Baby Boom bunch moving through their demographic charts as like watching a pig move down the gullet of a python--is going to confront us with the problem of too many unproductive old people sopping up the resources of too few workers.

Peterson and other commentators have presented this as primarily an economic problem. Buchanan portrays it as a cultural crisis. He sees America and the other Western nations as erasing themselves from the face of the earth by a failure to multiply, leaving the planet under the control of fecund, illiberal, anti-American Third Worlders. Buchanan believes that these people are coming to America and Europe, and, while ostensibly serving our interests by managing our 7-11s and writing our computer game code, are actually...