Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

The Trendline Argument for American Collapse

Published in 2011 with the subtitle "Will America Survive to 2025?", Patrick J. Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower lays out the case that the United States is following the trajectory of every multiethnic empire that has preceded it. The argument is built on demographics, economics, culture, and religion: a declining white majority, unsustainable entitlement spending, the collapse of a shared civic religion, and the rise of identity politics as a replacement for national cohesion. Buchanan wrote it as a warning. The reader encounters it now as something closer to a post-mortem.

The Core Thesis

Buchanan draws on data from the Census Bureau, CBO projections, and the cultural history of empires from Rome to Britain. His central claim is that no nation in history has survived the combination of mass immigration, loss of a common language and faith, fiscal insolvency, and military overextension. Each chapter takes one of these threads and follows it to its logical conclusion. The chapters on religion are particularly striking: Buchanan argues that the de-Christianization of America has removed the only force capable of binding a diverse population into a single people. Without it, the country fragments along lines of race, class, and ideology.

Reception and Relevance

The book was immediately controversial. MSNBC suspended Buchanan from his contributor role after its publication. Critics called it alarmist, nativist, and racially inflammatory. Buchanan, a three-time presidential candidate and former Nixon speechwriter, had been making versions of this argument since the 1990s. Suicide of a Superpower is the fullest and most data-driven statement of it. Readers will find the subtitle's question, posed in 2011, has only become more urgent.

About This Edition

Author: Patrick J. Buchanan
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781250004116