The Doomsayer

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, by Patrick J. Buchanan (St. Martin’s Press, 308 pp., $25.95)

THE title of Patrick J. Buchanan’s latest book echoes that of the famous book by NATIONAL REVIEW senior editor James Burnham: Suicide of the West (1964). Burnham began his book by flipping through the pages of a turn-of- the-century atlas, and noting how much of the globe then was painted red, green, and all the other colors of European empires. But at the time he wrote, Africa and Asia had reverted to native rule, while Russia, converted to Communism, had reached into central Europe and Cuba. Burnham argued that, in the most literal sense, the West had shrunk, and that liberalism was the ideology designed to sugarcoat the process.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, by Patrick J. Buchanan (St. Martin’s Press, 308 pp., $25.95)

THE title of Patrick J. Buchanan’s latest book echoes that of the famous book by NATIONAL REVIEW senior editor James Burnham: Suicide of the West (1964). Burnham began his book by flipping through the pages of a turn-of- the-century atlas, and noting how much of the globe then was painted red, green, and all the other colors of European empires. But at the time he wrote, Africa and Asia had reverted to native rule, while Russia, converted to Communism, had reached into central Europe and Cuba. Burnham argued that, in the most literal sense, the West had shrunk, and that liberalism was the ideology designed to sugarcoat the process.