http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2493: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
By Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Middle American News
The truth that sets us free in the long term is almost never the truth that appeals to us in the short one. Perhaps one of Pat Buchanan’s greatest liabilities as a two-time presidential candidate in the 1990s was that what George Bush I would have called his “vision thing” was far too pessimistic for a majority of the American public to stomach. Robert Louis Stevenson associated pessimism with “Young gentlemen with private means [who look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world.” Stevenson’s pessimist clearly has nothing in common with Buchanan, who is surely among the grown and hearty men himself.
But there are times and occasions when reality is such that truth-telling is taken inevitably for negativity and fear-mongering, and the truth-teller himself ridiculed as a crank and attacked as a sapper of social morale. Neither of the two truth-tellers in the current presidential campaign, Representatives Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul, has so far succeeded in gaining the influence he deserves, a failure some commentators have ascribed to their refusal to compromise their relatively dire vision of what the United States has already become, and where it is headed from here. http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2583’s compatriot and contemporary, who managed to balance a full-blooded relish for European culture against a poignant awareness of its historical fragility.
Though the day of reckoning of which Buchanan warns impends for the whole of the Western world, the fate of the United States of America is his particular concern here. The nation he describes is at once the victim of a virulent megalomania and a corruptive self-contempt amounting to self-hate. In the United States today, the federal government is glorified by its operative elite almost to the point of divinization; the same elite denigrates the society it directs to the extent that denigration becomes indistinguishable from demonization. The impulse behind the one is imperialism, behind the other, multiculturalism. The fatal active connection between them is the globalist free trade cult, which has learned how to synthesize the two with itself for its own unlimited profit and power. The result is the “ideology” to which Buchanan refers in his subtitle, an evil mixture of imperialism, free trade, anti-Westernism, and economic irresponsibility that has already transformed and is in process of destroying America.