I was out hiking on the Big Dry Creek Trail this week with Mark Steyn. Actually, I was listening to his newest book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.
Steyn is a Canadian-born writer, conservative political commentator, cultural critic, and resident of New Hampshire who has written five books including the 2008 bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It in which he predicted the collapse of Europe. Now, he believes America has caught up with Europe on the great rush to self-destruction. So, he has written After America as a scary sequel.
With his trademark wit, Steyn delivers the depressing news with raw and unblinking honesty. What makes him the most entertaining, yet profound, columnist on the planet. In his previous book, America Alone, he promoted America as the last hope for freedom and civil society while showing how Europe and the rest of the world was falling apart. With After America, Steyn claims that America too is bound to the same fate.
Steyn writes in a humorous, provocative and entertaining manner. I agree with his opinions that America is bankrupt, our federal government is too big and too inefficiency; and American morality is declining. Steyn presents a strong case that America has screwed up and is on the same basic path followed by Rome, Athens, and Great Britain.
He presents an alarming and frighteningly convincing prophecy of where we’re headed. He says that America is embracing the same doomed path as the failed European economies, and all this decline and decay is not just about economics or politics. Steyn emphasizes that the root problem here is a decline in faith and a decay of values. He states, "Europe's economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis. What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can't make the math add up." He says the choice is stark, and that we either listen to him and act on his recommendations or face economic and cultural armageddon.
Alarmingly, he says that America’s decline won’t be gradual and won’t be like “an aging Europe sipping espresso at a café until extinction (and the odd Greek or Islamist riot). “ No, America’s decline will be a wrenching affair marked by violence. We can expect riots in the streets and worse.
Steyn claims that America has gone from a nation of producers to a nation of borrowers, as he puts it, "from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers." We have too many takers and not enough makers.
Steyn explains that American federalism worked to preserve liberty by distributing power down toward municipalities and individuals. When something goes wrong, a typical pre-safety net American would simply solve the problem himself or at the lowest possible level. Today, we behave like Europeans and demand to know what the government is going to do about it. The so-called progressive desire for utopia has been destroying liberty one step at a time through an unceasing centralization of power that reduces and eventually eliminates non-government alternatives.
He lays out all the indications of America’s decline. He begins by looking at the teetering American economy and its crippling burden of debt, and he describes how our reckless spending patterns are a recipe for national suicide. As he says, "There's nothing virtuous about caring, compassionate progressives' demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born."
Steyn frequently jabs at Obama's "Audacity of Hope," and refers to "The Stupidity of Broke." But he doesn’t lay all the blame on Obama. He chastises both major parties because neither has shown restraint on spending. He also notes that "Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem." If the president does not value liberty and limited government, this is equally true of the citizens who elected him. He says that the Obama Administration is only a manifestation of a much larger flaw: American citizens no longer value those things which made America so great.
Steyn’s book is a critique of the soft socialism typified by Great Britain and Greece and that is now spreading throughout America. Since FDR at least, the US has been shedding its Jeffersonian principles for a Big Government patterned on those of Europe. This trend has only accelerated as of late, not only under Obama, but also under Bush, the "compassionate conservative" who gave the American people Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind.
Steyn says that Greece and Great Britain are both doomed, and for essentially the same reasons. Government debt is overwhelming demographic reality. Their citizens have also lost the will to perpetuate their civilizations. Both have weak productive sectors and large parasitic class takers. According to Steyn, the real problem is America has followed Europe into the Big Government Syndrome. He says that history tells us this is unsustainable. It simply leads to the loss of liberty, the collapse of the economy, and social disintegration. What we see happening in England and Europe today is a textbook example of this.
He points out how America has been following one stupid idea after another from Europe. He shows that government health care, for example, is not really about health care but more about growing government control. He says that the "governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent leftist progressive political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again.
Steyn then goes on to raise concerns with the unredeemable deficit and debt, the threat of uncontrolled illegal immigration, the rise of China as a military and economic power and the challenge of a growing Islamic supremacist movement that “threatens free institutions and civilization itself." He paints a very depressing picture as he delivers diatribes on over regulation and over taxation with well-sourced references. And don't get him started on government mismanagement and ineptitude. "In one year (2009), Medicare handed out $98 billion in improper or erroneous payments.”
He foresees the extinguishing of liberty, the virtual enslavement of the citizenry, and the utter waste of human resources caused by the disastorous American educational system. He also foresees demographic upheaval: the falling birthrate of native Americans and the flood of illegal aliens who are hostile or indifferent to the American history and culture. He calls out multiculturalism as a disease that destroys our common values and heritage just as it has done in Europe with its Muslim enclaves in many British and French cities.
Steyn also laments what he sees as the loss of strong Judeo-Christian values and the rise of Relativism that he says will be America’s undoing. As Steyn puts it, "the story of the last forty years is the mainstreaming of rock -star morality," not to mention the wreckage of traditional marriage. In the US over 40% of our children are illegitimate. "Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of daughters abused by their mom's latest live-in boyfriend."
I was intrigued by a theme Steyn used in reference to H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine. In that novel, the Time Traveler sees people living increasingly comfortable lives yet disconnected from the world that sustains their comforts. Eventually the Time Traveler discovers the human race evolves into two separate species - the Eloi, a race of child-like adults living in an above-ground paradise, and the Morlocks - an underground working-class race of troglodytes. Steyn warned that we Americans are fast becoming the Eloi with our infantile interests, creature comforts, and lack of fortitude. The Morlocks who hate America will be glad to see us fail and be glad to devour what remains after America.
He describes how Europeans and the American left imagined they could wrench money from the wealthy, or just print money if they had to, and provide endless nanny state happiness. He criticizes government promises and citizens beliefs in free medical care, long vacations, assured jobs with little hard work, bliss and free lunches for all. Steyn focuses on what went wrong in Europe where the socialist paradise worked for a while when there were between seven to ten young adults being taxed for each senior citizen. Then a funny thing happened. The Europeans stopped reproducing. It was as if all of Europe woke up one day having decided to commit suicide. In Germany, for example, one out of every three women is childless. And the women who do have a child frequently only have only one.
To avoid becoming like Europe, Steyn believes that drastic course correction must by made in America by 2015. He provides sound policy recommendations for reclaiming the principles of the American ideal given to us by the nation's founders and the faith in America demonstrated by previous generations. Hhe offers his own prescription for winning America back from the feckless and arrogant federal government that has done its level best to suffocate the world’s last best hope in a miasma of debt, decay, and debility.
Steyn writes that the one hope that America has is that unlike Europe, where citizens are rioting because their state subsidized fantasy world is being reduced, Americans are beginning to see the handwriting on the wall. Steyn mentions movements such as the Tea Party groups in various states that have risen up demanding that the government stop spending and that the citizenry be left alone. Hopefully Americans will start saying enough is enough, and the move to whittle down Big Brother can begin in earnest. But it will be a struggle because bureaucrats and central planners will resist this every step of the way.
Steyn also says that until America and the West regain their Judeo-Christian foundations, the rush to destruction seems all but certain. But Steyn does offer some hope: "Americans face a choice; you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea - limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest - or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline." He goes on to say, "We also need a new trust-busting movement to bust the dominant trust of our time - the Big Government monopoly that monopolizes more and more of life." He is somewhat optimistic because he thinks Big Government types always go too far, "Statists overreach. They did on climate change scare mongering, and the result is that it's over. Hollywood buffoons will continue to lecture us from their mega-mansions that we should toss out our washers and beat our clothes dry on the rocks singing native chants down by the river, but only suckers are listening to them."
Our walk on the trail came to an end, and I told Steyn that he has written an important book, compelling and at times frightening. I hope it will be widely read. I said that I would encourage my friends to read this, and heed it as a warning. So, I'm recommending this book to everyone. You will not read a more thought provoking, more alarming, or even wittier book all year than After America.
