The End of the American Dream?

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

Note: an additional Fjordman post on this topic can be found here.


In March 2005, US President Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vicente Fox announced the establishment of the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.” This was meant to implement a common border-facilitation strategy to improve the “flow of people and cargo at our shared borders.”

As next steps were mentioned: “We will establish Ministerial-led working groups that will consult with stakeholders in our respective countries. These working groups will respond to the priorities of our people and our businesses, and will set specific, measurable, and achievable goals. They will identify concrete steps that our governments can take to meet these goals, and set implementation dates that will permit a rolling harvest of accomplishments. (…) Because the Partnership will be an ongoing process of cooperation, new items will be added to the work agenda by mutual agreement as circumstances warrant.”

I had just read about the workings of the European Union, and was struck by some similarities with this North American “partnership.” It involves a sustained, ongoing process of ever-closer cooperation, back-room deals by ministers where important decisions are taken outside of the public view and hidden behind a cloud of bureaucratic wording. I was accused of paranoia by some Americans when I pointed this out, but as I later discovered, Mexican President Vicente Fox in 2002 in a speech in Madrid made his goals with and his inspirations for this North American cooperation quite clear:

“Eventually, our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes as important as the future prosperity of North America, and the freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and persons. (…) The new framework we wish to construct is inspired in the example of the European Union (…) We have to confront … what I dare to call the Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the establishment of supra-national organizations.”

In a panel discussion at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Enrique Berruga, Mexico’s ambassador to the UN said a North American Union is needed, and provided a deadline. Republican Senator Tom Tancredo, too, believes a North American Union is a real issue that is supported by President Bush: “The president of the United States is an internationalist. He is going to do what he can to create a place where the idea of America is just that - it’s an idea. It’s not an actual place defined by borders.”

In a speech in the year 2000, Mr. Bush stated that the future of the United States cannot be separated from the future of Latin America, the ultimate goal of which should be “free trade from northernmost Canada to the tip of Cape Horn,” and that he desired a “special relationship” with Mexico: “Should I become president, I will look South, not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental commitment of my presidency.” He kept that promise.

The Bush administration has moved ahead, despite congressional opposition, with the creation of a massive superhighway running from Canada to Mexican ports, with Mexican trucks driving across the US in vast numbers and a Mexican customs office in Kansas City. There has been relatively sparse coverage of this in US media. As Dymphna of the Gates of Vienna blog says: “We’re headed there the same way Europe went — by stealth, by bureaucratic fiat, and by citizen inattention. They didn’t know what the elites had in mind for them, but with their current plight, we do have the horrible adumbration of what is to come.”

There are indeed some parallels between the USA and Europe. Mass immigration to the US is aided by an unholy alliance of corrupt political elites, Big Business supporters and anti-Western Leftists. There is little doubt in my mind that some members of the political elites in North America are envious of how their counterparts in Europe through administrative decisions have managed to fool their electorates and quietly bypassed the democratic process, gradually abandoning border controls in favor of a regional block.

Left-wingers support this for the same reasons as left-wingers in Europe: They desire Third World immigrants because they tend to vote for left-wing parties and support expanded welfare states. Some left-wingers also see it as a goal to erase the Western cultural heritage and the white majority, again, just like in Europe. Some Big Business supporters tend to see immigrants as cheap labor and a new servant class. Of course, unlike some other countries, they get citizenship in the US, which means that the “servants” will eventually end up owning the country.

Lastly, there is a desire by the political elites to get more “reliable” political clients by importing political corruption from Mexico and sideline the democratic process with behind-the-scenes decisions and bureaucratic feudalism, similar to EU. This serves to bypass the restraints so unfairly imposed on them by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the other US Founding Fathers.

According to Fredo Arias King, who has worked with US-Mexico relations, “A sociological study conducted throughout the region found that Latin Americans are indeed highly susceptible to clientelismo, or partaking in patron-client relations, and that Mexico was high even by regional standards.” It is conceivable that these higher levels of political corruption will be imported to the US through Latin American immigration. And maybe some members of the political elites desire this?
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Americans have the largest military arsenal in human history, yet are seemingly unable to protect their borders from millions of illegal immigrants. Why? Because their authorities don’t want to enforce their border. There really is no other way to explain this. The corrupt Mexican elites use the USA as a safety valve to divert attention from their own failures. The only reason this works is because American elites don’t care about the US as a country and because Americans in general are suckers from Political Correctness. While the United States is planning to colonize the Moon, Mexico is colonizing the United States.

I almost start to question the entire democratic system when I look at this. Our democracies are based on nation states. But what happens if our elites no longer care about upholding and defending these nation states? On both sides of the Atlantic, Western nations seem to have trouble upholding their borders, and I suspect this is partly because most of the political, cultural and financial elites don’t want to uphold them. Maybe in the old days, the interests of the elites largely coincided with those of their nation states, which were used as a vehicle for gaining as much power and influence as possible. Now, increasing segments of these elites no longer feel any emotional attachment to their nations, and desire larger entities to enhance their personal power and prestige. This is why they are building regional economic blocks in both Europe and North America.

This process has gone further in the smaller nation states in Europe, where post-national elites have even usurped legislative powers which override national constitutions and parliaments, but still, the developments are related. There never was a debate in the United States on whether to merge the country demographically and economically with Mexico, the elites just quietly implemented it. Likewise, there has never been any debate in Europe about merging the continent with the Arab world. Since the people probably wouldn’t have agreed to this, they simply weren’t asked.

The problem is, it is actually possible to do this in the 21st century, because wealthy nations will face constant pressures from migration that are unrivaled in human history. Powerful elite groups can thus permanently change the demographic make-up of their countries by simply abstaining from upholding their territorial integrity.

According to Singapore’s long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew, it is demography, not democracy, that will be the critical factor in shaping the 21st century. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it’s true that countries that cannot control their demographic future will not be able to control their democratic future, either. Maybe our democratic system will break down because our elites no longer are interested in supporting the nation states it is based upon. Not a nice thought, but it needs to be asked.

The US is engaged in “a silent war” conducted by illegal immigrants, according to Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project for border controls. “Since 9/11 alone, about 45,000 U.S. residents have been killed in action via homicide or manslaughter at the hands of illegal aliens, and about another quarter of a million to 300,000 have been wounded.”

In 2005, more people left California for other states than arrived. This situation is unprecedented during the past 150 years. “Illegals push you off the sidewalks, ram your cars, and speed through red lights and stop signs while honking their horns like they did in Mexico, and refuse to even entertain the notion of ever learning English. Welcome to Los Angeles,” read one Californian’s online posting. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is concerned that an increasing number of Latino gangs are targeting African Americans in campaigns to drive blacks from some neighborhoods. A Californian friend sent me a link which showed that some of the large film studios have considered leaving Hollywood because Los Angeles is becoming a Third World city, with little glamour left. If it remains true that trends start in California and spread to the rest of the country, the USA is in trouble.

Meanwhile, Karl Rove, the influential political adviser to President Bush, explained the rationale behind the president’s amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: “I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.” Parts of California, which since the 19th century has been an economic engine of the United States, are collapsing. Meanwhile, the president’s administration worries about American tomatoes.

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity was revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam. “In the presence of diversity, we hunker down. (…) The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.” Trust was lowest in Los Angeles, “the most diverse human habitation in human history.” The more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions.”

Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his findings until he could develop suggested solutions to compensate for diversity, saying it would have been irresponsible to publish before this. “In my lifetime, Americans have deconstructed religion as a basis for making decisions. Why can’t we do the same thing with other types of diversity?” He added that “We should construct a new us.”

This means that Multiculturalism is a form of cultural and genetic Communism, where the goal is to create a new people by erasing all kinds of historic differences. It is somewhat ironic that a generation after the United States helped bringing down the Soviet Union, ideas that are in some ways related to those of the latter are spreading in the US. Americans should be careful with this. Culture matters. Will the United States remain recognizable if it is no longer defined by the Anglo-Protestant culture that it was founded upon?

Mexicans do not share these illusions. They see themselves as Mexicans and Hispanics, and desire more power for their tribe, not for the US nation as a whole. Sooner or later, the white majority will start seeing themselves as just another tribe and act accordingly- what happens then? What happens if there is a serious economic recession in the US caused by booming debts and Asian competition? Americans seem to have this near-religious belief that once you set foot on US soil, all the religious, cultural racial and ethnic tensions found in the rest of the world will disappear.

Since the slogan in the United States is “strength through diversity,” does that mean that the world’s last remaining superpower consists of increasingly diverse ethnic groups with no common culture, only tied together by an ideological lie? The last superpower that was in this situation disintegrated. The Soviet Union failed because its economic model was flawed. US capitalism is much more robust, although still vulnerable to large budget deficits. But the Soviet Union also failed because it envisioned itself as a universal nation that had left cultural differences behind. Could the USA be about to make the same mistake?

The writer John Derbyshire fears so: “There are too many fault lines, and the cracks are widening. We are separating out, drifting apart from each other, withdrawing into gated communities, both literal and metaphorical. Much of the damage, however, has been willfully self-inflicted. We did not have to swallow the multiculturalist suicide pill; we did not have to open our borders to the Third World flood; we did not have to delegitimize patriotism and abandon the assimilationist model of immigration. (…) Why did we do those foolish things? From overconfidence, I think. It has been said that a nation can survive anything but success. Success is the one true lethal disaster.”

Many observers are forecasting a new superpower race between China an the USA in the 21st century. It is true that China has problems of its own. Its huge population base is both a blessing and a curse, and the country suffers from environmental problems and an ageing population. I am a firm believer in the idea that freedom of speech has long-term economic consequences. China certainly has the potential to lead the world, but I’m not convinced she will until she undergoes significant political reforms.

However, China has one huge advantage over the US: It is much more culturally and ethnically homogeneous. I’m not sure China will dominate the world at the end of this century, but I’m pretty sure it will still exist. I cannot say the same thing with confidence about the Unites States. Current American policies are based on the assumption that the USA will basically remain the same when European Americans constitute a minority as when they constituted 90 percent of the population. That’s a leap of faith.

Maybe I’m biased sine I’m European myself, but accepting immigrants from a limited pool of nations on the same continent with similar cultural background isn’t the same thing as accepting immigrants from every single cultural racial and religious group from 200-odd nations across the planet. Just because you can pull off number one does not necessarily mean that you can pull off number two. It’s a classic case of ideological overstretch.

In my view, the roots of the current Islamic Jihad against the West can be traced back at least to the 1970s. It started perhaps with European appeasement of Palestinian Jihad terrorism a la Arafat and the establishment of the Eurabian networks to appease Arab OPEC countries following the 1973 oil crisis.

Then we had the Iranian revolution in 1979, when many Western leaders, both Europeans and US President Jimmy Carter, contributed to the success of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic takeover. We should also mention the appeasement a decade later when the same regime declared its death sentence over author Salman Rushdie. Even British conservative PM Margaret Thatcher was rather weak in her response to Islamic aggression at home and abroad at that time.

Finally, we had the disastrous 1990s, with the Oslo Process in the Middle East and the NATO backing of Muslims in the Balkans. Both contributed greatly to Muslims viewing the West as weak and indecisive, and both were passionately backed by President Bill Clinton. US General Wesley Clark, who led NATO’s bombing of the Serbs on behalf of Muslims in Kosovo, stated flatly: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multiethnic states.”

So basically, the US-led war was for establishing Multiculturalism as the unchallenged doctrine in the West? President Clinton said during the campaign in 1999 that “if your children are wearing the uniform of our armed services, I don’t want them to have to fight a war because we didn’t nip in the bud a cancer that can never sweep across Europe again.”

But a cancer is sweeping across Europe right now, a cancer of Islamic Jihad, and Mr. Clinton helped giving it optimal growth conditions. Muslims, backed by Saudi oil money, have been building up the Balkans as a launching pad for Jihad against the West. Instead of a Westernization of the Balkans, we risk getting a Balkanization of the West.

In April 2007, Congressman Tom Lantos of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair said about Kosovo: “This should be noted by both responsible leaders of Islamic governments, such as Indonesia, and also for jihadists of all color and hue. The United States’ principles are universal, and in this instance, the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.”

The Serbs consider Kosovo their Jerusalem, the cradle of their nation, littered with churches and monasteries that are now being desecrated by Albanian Muslims. Do the Americans believe Muslims will be less eager to gain control over the Jerusalem of the Middle East if the Americans hand over the Jerusalem of Europe on a silver platter? And do they think sacrificing other non-Muslims to ethnic cleansing will make them respected by Muslims?

During the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the United States did great service to humanity by helping to bring down the Soviet Union.. Even Reagan wasn’t perfect, especially in dealing with Muslims, but for the most part I have no problem with saying that the USA then acted as a champion of human liberty. Under Clinton in the 1990s, however, they acted as the global enforcers of Multiculturalism and Political Correctness. And therein lies the rub: They contain within them the seeds for both.

Americans are currently under the spell of a massively dysfunctional ideology. If the United States remains wedded to Multiculturalism, it will eventually implode as a superpower, perhaps physically fall apart in a Second American Civil War. In the meantime, precisely because they are so economically powerful and culturally influential, they will export a dysfunctional ideology to other nations. It’s a bit like having a schizophrenic patient armed with a bazooka, hurting real people while hunting for imaginary trolls.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has become a “universal nation,” which is a nice way of saying a country of nothingness. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the superpower that was declared the winner of the Cold War collapsed only decades after the superpower that lost the Cold War, and for some of the same reasons? I’m not saying that this is inevitable. It’s not, not yet, but it’s a possibility that increases in likelihood day by day. What happens if not just the minorities, but the white majority, too, start seeing themselves as a tribal group? Multiculturalism could cause the downfall of the United States and the end of the American dream. That would be sad, for it was a good dream, but maybe it was a dream after all.

Will the USA in the coming years act as the champion of liberty or of Multiculturalism? Much depends upon the answer.