# The Death of the West

## Metadata
- Author: [[Patrick J. Buchanan]]
- Full Title: The Death of the West
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=128))
- If the present fertility rates hold, Europe’s population will decline to 207 million by the end of the twenty-first century, less than 30 percent of today’s. The cradle of Western civilization will have become its grave. Why is this happening? Socialism, the beatific vision of European intellectuals for generations, is one reason. “If everyone has the promise of a state pension, children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age,” argues Dr. John Wallace of Bologna’s Johns Hopkins University: “If women can earn more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies—and this seems to be true now of Catholic Italy as it is of secular Britain—why marry?”6 By freeing husbands, wives, and children of family responsibilities, European socialists have eliminated the need for families. ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=237))
- THE BOOMERS ARRIVED on campus in the fall of 1964. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=485))
- This vision of American free labor was at war with the view being espoused by Marx and his patron and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: “The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry and … this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”13 Is it not a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism’s view of women—as units of production, liberated from husbands, home, and family—conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism? ([Location 585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=585))
- Early feminists had been fiercely antiabortion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the first women’s rights convention in 1848, called abortion “a disgusting and degrading crime.” … And Susan B. Anthony, early crusader for the women’s vote, wrote that “No matter what the motive … the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death.” It was in fact the 19th century feminists who campaigned to pass the laws that criminalized abortion.26 ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=659))
- Back before World War II, when Margaret Sanger, birth mother of Planned Parenthood, wrote that “the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it,” she was a radical socialist far outside the American mainstream.27 But the Sanger animus against big families has since become a central feature of the new American feminism that was mainstreamed in the 1960s and 1970s. ([Location 665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=665))
- Marriage, writes Andrea Dworkin in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, is “an institution [that] developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use but possession of ownership.”28 Pure Marx. And a logical conclusion follows. “The nuclear family must be destroyed,” said the feminist Linda Gordon. “Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests.”29 ([Location 669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FA5QIG&location=669))