Paleoconservative Pat Buchanan is a racist. There’s no way out of that classification, and his latest screed makes that fact all the more clear.
For those who aren’t big followers of Buchanan some quick background.
After presidential candidate Barack Obama’s now-famous 2008 pre-election speech on race, Buchanan offered this:
“America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.â€
And in 2006, Pat Buchanan “claimed that illegal immigration threatens to reduce America to ‘a polyglot boarding house for the world, a tangle of squabbling minorities,'” as Media Matters reported.
Media Matters adds that Buchanan calls immigration an “invasion of the United States of America.”
Buchanan isn’t exactly fond of Black people, or brown people, (or gays, but that’s another story.) This morning, Buchanan penned an op-ed in Town Hall, one of the old conservative homes of hate, and lamented the “depressing news,” the “existential crisis of the GOP,” that the “demographic winter of white America is at hand.”
Claiming that “nearly 90 percent of all Republican votes in presidential elections are provided by Americans of European descent,” Buchanan writes:
In 1960 white folks were close to 90 percent of the entire U.S. population and 95 percent of the electorate. Nixon’s New Majority was created by pulling Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern conservative Protestants, white folks all, out of the Roosevelt coalition and bringing them into a new alliance that would give Nixon a 49-state landslide in 1972, which Reagan would replicate in 1984.
But since that New Majority gave the Republicans five victories in six presidential elections, four of them 40-state landslides, the political world has turned upside down, and demography is the cause.
Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, a 3-to-2 victory over Obama among America’s majority. In any year before 1980, that would have meant victory. But in 2012 whites were only 74 percent of those who went to the polls.
Thus, Obama’s sweep of 80 percent of the African-American, Asian and Hispanic vote, one-fourth of the electorate and rising, enabled him to coast to a second term.
Between 2008 and 2012, the Hispanic vote rose 1.4 million, the black vote by 1.7 million, and the white vote fell by 2 million.
Where is America going? What does the GOP future look like?
America’s white majority, 64 percent of the population and 74 percent of the electorate, still declining in relative terms, has begun to decline in real terms. Deaths outnumber births. Among all U.S. births in 2012, white babies were outnumbered by babies of color.
If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”
Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.
So what are the Republicans doing?
Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.
One final quick note on Buchanan and his homophobia, again via Media Matters:
“At the onset of AIDS, when it seemed mostly a gay malady, some right-wingers could barely contain their glee. Columnist Pat Buchanan wrote in 1983: ‘The poor homosexuals — they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.’â€