the Democracy Corps report is moronic. I grew-up in Cleveland and lived in georgia. Southerners will never discuss race with outsiders. the South is a fundamentally feudal. Cleveland is atotally different place shaped by communitarian values of new Englanders and later waves of Catholic and Jewish immiganrants. Midwestern conservatives can be dragged kicking and screaming to something new. Southern conservatives need law enforcement and then they go and done sheets.

"America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right."

So was Uncle Pat speaking for Cherokees, Mohegans, Apaches - all the tribes or just a few?

I love all of this post but especially this:

"Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets."

People tend to forget this. Or maybe they don't. But black people loved America even when America didn't love them back.

White people aren't losing America as much as others are finally making their rightful claim to pieces of it. This isn't a zero-sum game. Sad that Buchanan sees it that way.

But it's predictable.

The most ironic thing about Buchanan's statement is that it's probably the exact same sentiment expressed by white Protestants in the 19th century when large numbers of Irish-Catholic immigrants--including Buchanan's ancestors--arrived in the US.

Pat is so Archie Bunker.

Buchanan's right in the sense that "once upon a time", whites (by the varying definitions of that term) controlled the country, and could rest secure in that sense of solidarity as winners -- and that they (we) are now being forced to see that as the delusion it is.

Captcha: cauldron break -- the spell must be broken.

As B.O. himself put it he was as 'black' (or white) BEFORE the election--when a majority of 'whites' voted for him--as he is now. The difference is that the carefully crafted, media-contrived veneer of Hope, Change and Transparency has finally fallen off.

Obama's birthplace really HASN'T been addressed by Mr Transparency. Along with John McCain and (SWP candidate) Roger Calero, the 2008 election was unique, in its slate of candidates of questionable eligibility,

A friend in the progressive media has no time for what he calls, "the irish on the other side." Because they experienced racism, how can they be racists now?"

amen

"the Democracy Corps report is moronic. I grew-up in Cleveland and lived in georgia. Southerners will never discuss race with outsiders."

No one will admit to being racist. You don't ask people "do you dislike black people?" Instead you hire a black person to stand outside a building and a white person to stand across the street and count how many people will give directions to the white guy but not the black guy. The idea that you can just ask people if they are racist is ridiculous.

Haven't you seen the Jon Stewart parody of this.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-11-2009/reform-madness---white-minority
America is changing...for the better! The ability to discriminate against minorities and women is going away. That's a feature not a bug!

There are two issues: "white" and "working class." Whites may have run or still be running the country, but working class? When did the working class run this country? And aren't Blacks, Latinos and Indians a pretty important part of the working class?

While attacking Buchanan is like using a baseball bat on buttermilk pancakes, his opinions are unfortuantely widespread.

The root of it is that many white people simply can't place themselves in a black or hispanic person's shoes. They can't and don't want to identify with their history. They learned that slavery was terrible and discrimination used to be overtly rampant. They don't learn to think about the brave heroes (white and black) who fought slavery and the normal men and women who psychologically adapted and survived despite big and small challenges--a quentessentially American story.

It is not the white working class that is losing America, but the working class in general, the majority of which happens to be of European decent. The biggest losers so far -- victims of our current trade and immigration policies -- are black males, whose labor-force participation rates are in free fall. The real tragedy here is that we are on the road to a racially-stratified class-based society in which the bottom half (the bottom three-quarters actually) is unable to defend itself.

when a majority of 'whites' voted for him

No, they didn't.

Thanks for pointing out that black slaves built Washington DC. I don't think 10% of the adult population is aware of that.

polthereal, if only that were so.

Thanks to the Right-Wing, specifically the Christian Homeschoolers & the Evangelical movement, a certain portion of those being educated in America today are being taught that slavery was not nearly as bad as liberals want to claim it was, and that, likewise, those tales of days when people were discriminated against are vast exaggerations.

Students come into my classroom, where we read Fredrick Douglass, and argue with me about whether slavery was actually like that. They've been reading essays ("Southern Slavery") written by this fellow Douglas Wilson; they've been being taught by their pastors that Jesus is okay with slavery. (It's in the Bible, it must be right.) They've been being told that "most" slave-owners in America treated their slaves decently, that "most" slaves were happy with their condition.

Same thing for pre-Civil Rights Era blacks, women, Asians, so on. People liked the world back then. It's only now, when we've all been poisoned by the PC-crowd, that we're all whining about Rights and feeling aggrieved. That's what I get told by my students. Things were MUCH better back then, when White Men owned the country.

I think a majority of whites in the Northeast and West voted for Obama. Only a small minority of whites in the Deep South (e.g. MS, AL, LA) did so.

delagar -- And don't forget, all of us that you despise so much are OUTBREEDING you and yours over the long run. You're too busy acting like a man to start a family before your eggs turn to toast.

just curious, why do you think none of the great moral leaders of world history have seen fit to denounce slavery? Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aurelius, Cicero, JESUS CHRIST, St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare??

BTW, whose life expectancy was longer in the U.S. in the nineteenth century: freed blacks or unfree blacks?

delagar, Wilson is a local moron from my neck of the woods, I'm afraid. There was a pretty major to-do in the past few years where he had to publicly handwave his way out of that bullshit. The Southern Slavery pamphlet has been thoroughly discredited, and I got the impression that he and his friends were doing their best to pretend like they'd never written it.

"once upon a time", whites (by the varying definitions of that term) controlled the country

Yes, being what isn't what it used to be, back when Italians weren't white, for example. It illustrates what a social contruct "race" is. Barack Obama is Jackie Robinson right now, taking the heat for those who will come after.

What the hell is Uncomfortable Truth talking about? I remember Moses, aka Charleton Heston, specifically saying, "Let my people go!" Isn't that denouncing slavery?

just curious, why do you think none of the great moral leaders of world history have seen fit to denounce slavery? Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aurelius, Cicero, JESUS CHRIST, St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare??

Because they are assholes?

Krishna?

Uncomfortable Truth: maybe a looser pair of boxers would help.

Adam.
What planet have you been living on for the last 2 years? The issue of President Obama and Senator McCain's birth certificates and eligibility to serve as POTUS were resolved long ago.
What do you really want to know about these individuals? What is your motivation, other than the promotion of non-sensical talking points pushed by entertainers masquerading as "reporters" in the media?

Nice post. We (blacks, African Americans, whatever) are in many ways the most existentially American of all.

Cicero was an asshole, who admitted to requiring his freedman to perform services of a rather personal nature. Cicero's great political adversary Publius Clodius, whom he slandered as immoral, made a point of freeing all of his slaves and getting his sisters to do the same, which Cicero spun as coming from a wish to put them on the dole instead of supporting them (untrue if only because the legal obligation remained). The truth is more likely to have been that the gentleman was a Stoic (as was Seneca) because Stoics opposed slavery.

Uncomfortable Truth: Read delegar's post more closely. He's not giving you his opinion - he's reporting the opinions of his students.

My son, who was born in Korea and joined our family through adoption, is in the US Army and currently serving his second deployment in Iraq.

He puts his life on the line for his country every single day, something Buchannan never did. I think my son can clain this country as his.

Well, they may be losing it, but they didn't have it for very long in the first place. The closest the white working class came to running the country was the period 1935-1975...and that due to Democratic Pary reforms.

The idea that the country belonged to the white working class in, say, 1888 is simply ludicrous.

When I hear about people like that whining "I want MY country back!", I have this urge to bring out a 48-star flag, a 46-star flag and a Confederate battle flag and ask, "Which one?"

blackink12 said,

"People tend to forget this. Or maybe they don't. But black people loved America even when America didn't love them back."

Or:
"O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!"
Langston Hughes, Let America Be America

If you don't know the poem, do read the rest.

How many commenting have actually read Buchanan's article, the one Mr.Serwer is sharply criticizing here. Maybe some are simply taking him at his word on the article and what it actually stated, without reading it.

Likely few have ventured to the original article and read it or you would have a very different point of view. I didn't say you would support it, but have a different takeaway compared to this post.

Unfortunately, in this post, Mr. Serwer takes the article so far out of context, serving obvious slants, that it is almost laughable. Actually, very disappointing.

See for yourself. Click on "concludes" in the first paragraph or use this web address: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=113463 to check, then compare to the statements in this post.

Fellow readers, if you do or already have read Buchanan's piece, you will find somewhat of a contrast from what Mr. Serwer has posted.

To "checkyourfacts" comment on Octobr 20th, 5:00pm, you need to check your own facts. Buchanan clearly states the percentage is of a certain segment within the total white voting population, not the total, as you've stated.

If you don't know the poem, do read the rest.

I didn't, and I clicked the link and read. That was amazing. Thank you, Porlock.

Hey Keith,

What fucking contrast?

The "They" Buchanan is referring to is CLEARLY "Traditional Americans" as in the title of the post and more specifically, "white working-class voters."

Why the fuck did I even respond to your bullshit post when you didn't even say WHY Serwer was wrong? God damn it. Fuck you.

[America] was built a slave labor.

Once again, liberals insist on having it both ways: they pitch a fit when someone argues, as economist did years ago, that slavery was a feasible (not necessarily moral) economic system.
Yet, they still argue that the country was built on the backs of slaves.

Slavery was an economic retardant over the long run. The industrialization of the North was a significant factor in its victory during the Civil War. That industrialization would not have occurred if the North had remained reliant on slave labor. If one holds such a belief, it can hardly be argued that the most prosperous country in the world was built on slave labor. Far from it. America became an industrial powerhouse in spite of slavery.

Of course, logic rarely comes between liberals and their platitudes.

No ethnic group will be "out-breeding" any other ethnic group, however, the "Multiracial" group will soon be the majority, while the "Uniracial" groups, pure whites, pure blacks, pure Asians, etc., will be in the distict minority. That's why the Louisiana Judge who wouldn't marry an interracial couple was so wrong; it doesn't matter if the white kids and black kids don't accept the multiracial kids, because the OTHER multiracial kids, who will soon be in the majority, WILL accept them.

tommy: you are an arrogant moron.

Of course we understand that slavery was an economic retardant. But that in no way implies that slave labor didn't actually build much of American infrastructure.

You really have to be an ideological imbecile to not recognize that process A being less inefficient than process B does not imply that therefore B was the process primarily used. Slave and quasi-slave labor built the entire western world, regardless of whether it was the most "efficient" method. The world ain't an efficient market, you fancy-spoken cretin.

Of course, reality rarely comes between an empty ideologue and his ideology.

How about the natives that were here before the white man came and slaughtered them and took their land?

Well said. As an anthropologist I was struck by how Africans (as slaves) built the wealth that is this country. Before cotton was king, rice in the Carolinas was king. This was the original source of wealth in America to name only one thing. Why? Because the African women brought their knowledge of basketmaking, crucial in separating the rice from hull.

Heloise

The Trough

Louis CK addressed this and pretty much summed it up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY

This is just conservative identity politics - just only one identity - rich, white, straight, English-speaking, conservative, Christian men. They think that identity is responsible for everything good in the country and the world and everyone else is an inferior parasitic infection.

amen

Buchanan's "traditional American's" aren't losing their country, they already lost it, a long, long time ago, on April 9, 1865. Buchanan's argument is an old and familiar one, the Klan have been spreading it since Reconstruction -- and the fact that it still enjoys wide currency speaks volumes...

Hey Mr "Uncomfortable Truth.. loved your list of great pro-slavery moral leaders. Mind if I have a go at them, mate? -- Krishna? Never take a man who plays the tambourine seriously. Moses? Well, he certainly lived half his life as a snooty Pharaoh's son till he found out he was a Jew and became a born again prophet. Zoroaster? Don't know much about the man. Didn't he play with fire? Oh and my roommate named his cat after him. Buddha? Certainly not a model of physical fitness... calling Jenny Craig! Confucius? I reckon he thought it was OK for women have their feet bound too. Socrates? Where should I start...didn't well for him did it, matey? Plato? He was gay :) Aristotle? Newton sure showed HIM. Aurelius? He was sexually abused as a child by Hadrian went on to wreck the Pax Romana and began the long decline of the Roman world ending his days as a super-stoic. Fun! Cicero? umm well he gave great speeches..(sound familiar?)
JESUS CHRIST? He was the first hippie socialist/communist. I bet he smoked pot too. St. Paul? the original "Jew for Jesus". Augustine? the Filioque Clause. nuff said. Schism anyone? opened the door to the great Calyphate and Al Quaeda. Plus his home town was called Hippo. :P
Aquinas? Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a bit of a quitter, but not a bad guy I suppose. Luther? Dour, egotistical anti-semite, but at least he liked music. Calvin? He didn't like music. Or, probably, pleasure of any kind. A Total Buzz Kill at parties. Shakespeare? Hardly one of the great moral leaders of world history, but he sure wrote great plays...or DID HE???

-ashton the ausssie-

oops ..forgot the "end" in: it didn't END well..for Cicero.
Sorry. But that sure was fun!

I mean Socrates
time for bed!;)

Middle Amrica's whites had thei country taken from them a long time ago...28 years ago, in fact, by Ronald Reagan, who made it the sole property of folks with 7 dgits or more in their bank accounts. They've ben told to blame the minorities, and many of them do, but the fact is that "their" country is now in the hands of he super wealthy, and it was they who handed it over.

Um, did any of you actually READ Pat Buchanan's article? It is difficult to take issue with his specific points, the main one of which is how intolerant of dissent we have become as a culture now that the past establishment is now the minority dissenters. Where we once rationalized the burning of neighborhoods by people with legitimate beefs, we now cannot tolerate a military man taking an oath to resist an order to round up his fellow citizens. That is all Pat is saying.