http://www.nationalreview.com/node/429203/print The Rise of the Doomsday Conservatives
By Jim Geraghty — January 4, 2016
The American Right is divided between those who think our country has serious problems and those who think it is teetering on the edge of collapse. Donald Trump’s rise has been fueled by the latter group, which sees itself as Cassandra, accurately surveying and desperately trying to revive a “crippled America,” as Trump titled his book.
The edge-of-extinction crowd hasn’t just failed to persuade the rest of the Right; they’ve failed to persuade the mass of voters. Americans tell pollsters the country is headed in the wrong direction, but they’re not apocalyptic about it. To everyone else, the Doomsayers come across as paranoid, race-obsessed hysterics.
Conservative columnist Diana West, arguing that it’s time for “American Patriots” to rally around Trump, offers a concise summary of the apocalyptic vision that has taken hold among quite a few self-identified conservatives:
If, say, a President Cruz were to ensure that Planned Parenthood was defunded, Obamacare ended, government trimmed, and amnesty once again staved off for another election cycle — we would all rejoice. However, the Constitution, the Republic, would be no more secure. On the contrary, they would still teeter on the edge of extinction, lost in a demographic, political, and cultural transformation that our fathers, founding and otherwise, would find inconceivable — and particularly if they ever found out that the crisis took hold when We the People lost our nerve even to talk about immigration and Islam.
There’s a lot to unpack here. West’s first point on the path to extinction is a “demographic transformation.” The United States is 77 percent white, 13 percent African American, about 17 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian. Those numbers will change in a generation; staid demographers and rhetorical firebrands alike refer to it as the “browning of America.” West and others assert that a majority-minority United States will be a lesser country — less free, less prosperous, less safe. At heart, they believe that what gives America its unique strengths is a population that is predominantly European in heritage.
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