It’s hard to take an article posted on the World Net Daily seriously but the fact that its author is Pat Buchanan lends it a measure of importance. After all, Pat Buchanan is a two-time Presidential candidate and now the self-appointed spokesman for the increasingly besieged white American. I won’t dispute the fact that many white Americans feel their lifestyle under siege. They do feel that way and it is, but not for the reasons the right would have us believe nor is it limited to white Americans as Pat would have us believe.
The Christian faith purged charge is disingenuous because Pat knows that there is separation of Church and State in this country. What he is objecting to is the teaching of evolution, or the fact that we won’t allow creationism disguised as science to be taught in public schools, and that apparently threatens their world. But most of Pat’s complaints are economic in nature, though he does so effortlessly descend into a noxious xenophobia. He complains about “factories shuttered,” “jobs outsourced,” “bank bailouts,” “unbalanced books” and “trillions to Fortune 500 companies.”
Pity that Pat Buchanan doesn’t realize that he voted for that agenda when he voted for Ronald Reagan. Because his litany of complaints, at least on the economic front, are all traceable to policies enacted by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
But Pat’s rant is actually quite a race card throwback to the 1970s. It was sinister then and it is sinister now. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson back in 2006 published a seminal work entitled Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. In it, Dr. Jacobson described how the then nascent conservative movement played on white fears through attacks on the social aspects of Great Society programs such as affirmative action. Pat plays that card and follows with the free healthcare and education for illegal aliens, the favorite term of the right for undocumented workers.
And funny how illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates are all generally higher in red state America than they are in blue state America. The states with the highest born out-of-wedlock are the District of Columbia (technically not a state), New Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. Drug use is a mix bag and harder to measure but Rhode Island (closely followed by Alaska and Arizona) has the highest percentage of regular illicit drug users and Iowa the lowest. The highest high school drop out rates are in Louisiana, Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, the lowest drop rates are in New Jersey, Connecticut, North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin. The problems Pat complains about while national are deeper in the red states.
