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The Changing Face of America State of Emergency. The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America Patrick J. Buchanan St. Martin's Press, 2006
If the middle class, college-educated public in the United States did not have the aversion it has to reading serious books, no matter how readably written, Patrick J. Buchanan would enjoy a reputation as perhaps its preeminent intellectual leader and spokesman. He is one of those intellectuals who are irresistibly attracted only to issues of central importance - in his case, issues relating to the long-term survival of the West, including his own United States. This is his eighth book, and none of them deals with less than a major issue. His A Republic, Not an Empire, for example, reminds Americans of their pre-1898 willingness to let the rest of the world's peoples live as best they can. His message there is that Americans ought not to continue their more recent inclination to incur the mortal dangers and moral presumptuousness of meddling, even for what they think are the most benevolent of reasons, in what are essentially other peoples' own affairs. Never afraid to take on the conventional wisdom when he thinks it wrong, Buchanan took issue with the twin dragons of globalization and free trade in The Great Betrayal, warning how they were deindustrializing America and creating a chasm between rich and poor as the middle class and the poor were placed in direct competition with low-pay workers everywhere. These are issues that are enormously practical and at the same time demanding of high intellect.
The Death of the West dealt with still another life-and-death issue for Western society, and is a more profound book than the one presently being reviewed. As its title suggests, its discussion is not limited to the United States. He sees the West as committing suicide demographically, in effect, by its peoples' non-replacement birthrate and its permitting an influx of tens of millions of strangers from the Third World. The most recent book, State of Emergency, is content simply to review the threat to American identity from the mass immigration, both legal and illegal, that the United States has permitted since 1965. It is worth noting that although this can be said to be not as...