Pat Buchanan - Suicide of a Superpower

HANNITY: A two-year freeze on all federal salaries and immediate moratorium on new immigration, constitutional amendment making English the official language of the United States. Now, these are just a few of the things that my next guest says we must do if we want to save our country. Otherwise, America as we know it could be dead by the year 2025.

Well, and we'll only have ourselves to blame, he says. In his new book, "Suicide of a Superpower," former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan argues that while pursuing the perfect society of our dreams, we are literally killing the country that we inherited, the best and greatest in the world.

HANNITY: This is -- well, first of all, you wrote this book knowing that this was going to be controversial.

BUCHANAN: Right.

HANNITY: Why?

BUCHANAN: Well, I called it my last political will and testament. Sean, I decided to sit down for a couple years and figure out what happened to the country I grew up in. Why are we in such tremendous trouble not only with the status failing to defend the borders and can't balance its budget and can't end these trade deficits, it can't get manufacturing back. But socially, the country seems to be disintegrating. Why is it and why did it happen? And these are the answers basically I give. Now, you know, some of the solution you recommended or I recommended right at the end of that book, I think they will help solve the budget problem, and some of those problems. But I think some of our problems are so deep and endemic, I'm not sure they can be solved by politics...

HANNITY: Do we get to the point where there's a tipping point, I like Malcolm Gladwell's book, the tipping point being that, you know, half the other country is paying for the other half and the other half that's not paying even wants more and the country collides.

BUCHANAN: One John Sechalhones (ph) predicted this, half of the country basically becomes tax consumers and other half taxpayers. The tax consumers have no incentive if they are not, you know, they are not paying taxes really to get the government any smaller. Why should they?

And so you have got this tremendous conflict in society but it's only one of them, Sean. Take the idea, you know, in the 1950s, I don't care whether if you were for Truman or Eisenhower or what, the country has had a moral consensus. It had a moral unity, a moral code. Basically based in the old and new testament, which people believed in and felt was right and true. Ever since the social cultural revolution of the 1960s, that's completely collapsed. And with it, I think the traditional family has collapsed. And ideas of right and wrong have collapsed. I mean, we have talked about these issues, gay marriage or right to life and abortion and all of these things, promiscuity. One side says, well that's progressive, normal and natural. And the other side says, that's wrong.

HANNITY: How do you reconcile?

BUCHANAN: You don't reconcile. You can't. It's irreconcilable. But that's the source of these culture wars that culturally crop up, is the fundamental beliefs behind them and beneath them are irreconcilable conflict.

HANNITY: And, you know, you gave a famous speech, I think it was 1992.

BUCHANAN: Ninety-two, right.

HANNITY: And it created a big controversy. It's even quoted, I think Pat, to this day which shows the staying power of the Buchanan speech. But in all seriousness, you really are talking about a cultural divide on a major scale. And one thing that interested me in the book, you mentioned this was a desire, the end of Christianity, that many a dictator wanted. You quoted Karl Marx, opiate of the people et cetera, or the masses. And as I was reading this I'm thinking, you know, in many ways probably there's a lot of people celebrating that.

BUCHANAN: Listen, you know, we fought communism in Ronald Reagan's day and George Bush finished that Cold War up. The communism of Mao Tse Tung and Lenin and Stalin, horrible evil as it was, collapsed, it was a failure, it was a great success for a while. But the communism of Antonio Gramsci who argued that, look, he went to the Soviet Union. He said this place is failing, the people hate the place. What we've got to do is we've got to have a long march through the institutions of the west. And that long march to change their thinking and beliefs and basically get people so that they will accept cultural Marxism. They will embrace it as the Russian people rejected the other former -- and that's what happened. It's a trans- valuation as niche said of all values. What was wrong is now right and the reverse....

HANNITY: you talk a lot about balkanization. Balkanization when you look at the former Yugoslavia. The former Soviet Union. And how all these countries have broken up into a divide. I get the sense, your predicting a moral balkanization and economic balkanization of America, is that a good analysis?

BUCHANAN: That is an excellent analysis(...) I mean, the balkanization that's true and as we talked today, I have a chapter in there of 18,000 words, it's called ethno-nationalism and now, it's the triumph of tribalism. And what it is, Arthur Swazenger (ph) and Pat Monahan (ph) predicted at the end of the Cold War that the real conflicts coming up are going to be between peoples and tribes and races and cultures rather than ideologies like communism and capitalism. And I think they are right. All over the world, we see countries breaking down, breaking apart. Sudan just broke in half. Ethiopia broke in half. You see all the troubles in Kenya. You see Iraq.

You know, Sunni versus Shiites. Kurd versus Arab. Muslim versus Christian. The anti-Christian pandemic. The programs in the Middle East and everything. It is frightening but this is what is happening to the world it is all breaking down. Even in Europe, it's more peaceful. Scotland wants out. Catalonia wants out of Spain. Padania, Northern Italy wants out of Italy. Cypress is split in half. You take the Kurds, want out of Turkey. These are the battles I think of the future. This is the future of mankind. That's what makes me so concerned in the next segment about what's happening in our own country.

HANNITY: Well, what I predict will probably be the most controversial and you had to know this going in.

BUCHANAN: Right.