Day of reckoning: American elder statesman Pat Buchanan warns in his new book that America faces an uncertain future unless we take action soon to protect the country.(Book review)

Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart, by Patrick Buchanan, New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2007, 294 pages, hardcover, $25.95. (The book will be available on or about January 25 from www.aobs-store.com; click on "New Products.")

There seems to be a growing consensus that America faces a rough road ahead. Even among optimists the warning signs are apparent. With concern for his legacy and his role as chief executive of the United States, the president has a powerful motive for displaying an optimistic attitude to the American people. But even he seems to sense that trouble lies ahead. Speaking to a gathering of business leaders at a Rotary Club meeting in December, the president argued that the economy was sound and that its "underpinning is good." But he wasn't convincing. He also admitted, "There's definitely some storm clouds and concern."

President Bush may be the most optimistic man in America, but even he sees that problems face the nation. A more sober view of the future, though, comes from one of America's most important and insightful elder statesmen: Patrick J. Buchanan. A trenchant and experienced observer of America and its place in the world, Buchanan thinks that America faces a "day of reckoning" in the near future when the nation will face the results of the policies it has followed in recent years. In his new book, aptly entitled Day of Reckoning, he lays out the evidence that "hubris, ideology, and greed" are indeed "tearing America apart."

Staring Into the Abyss

For those who love America and believe in her greatness, this is not an easy book to read, but it is a necessary book. If America is to remain great, then an honest diagnosis of her ills is essential. And that diagnosis is frightful.

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There has always been a belief, ever since the days of the colonies, that America is a special place. We have believed, with our forefathers, that America is indeed that shining city on a hill, an example to all other nations. But even as a cancer debases and undermines the good tissues of the body and twists them into misbegotten agglomerations that threaten to destroy, so too, at times, has pride in America's unique heritage of liberty and independence been transmuted by a civic alchemy into a messianic view that America should be a "crusader state" imposing her will on the unwashed barbarism of the rest of the world. True, John Quincy Adams once observed that America at her best "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." But at times, enamored with our own power, we have done just that.