After America

by Mark Steyn

  The best response to 9/11 on the home front—if only to demonstrate that there is a “home front” (which is the nub of al-Qaeda’s critique of a soft and decadent West)—would have been to rebuild the World Trade Center bigger, better, taller—not 150 stories, but 250, a marvel of the age. And, if there

  Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations, is no right-winger but rather a sober, respected, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.”24

  That last is the one to watch: a great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for so long. “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”25 reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral: If you seek my monument, look around. After two-thirds of the City of London was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, Wren designed and rebuilt the capital’s tallest building (St. Paul’s), another fifty churches, and a new skyline for a devastated metropolis. Three centuries later, if you seek our monument, look in the hole.

  It’s not about al-Qaeda. It’s about us.

  CHAPTER TWO

  UNDREAMING AMERICA

  Serfing USA

  Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.

  —Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1845)

  There is a famous passage by Alexis de Tocqueville. Or, rather, it would be famous were he still widely read. For he knows us far better than we know him: “I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world,” he wrote two centuries ago. He and his family had been on the sharp end of France’s violent convulsions and knew what forms despotism could take in Europe. But he considered that, to a democratic republic, there were slyer seductions:I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

  “Small and vulgar pleasures”? I’ve nothing against Dancing with the Stars (which I rather enjoy) or American Idol (not so much), but Tocqueville’s right on the money there. “Revolving on themselves without repose”?

  That’s not a bad description of a populace preoccupied with “social media.” But then he goes on:Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood... it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs....

  The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way... it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own... it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

  Welcome to the twenty-first century.

  The all-pervasive state “does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” It “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so that after a while you don’t even notice ...

  But once in a while even the mellowest hippie emerges from the stupor. In 1969, George Harrison of the Beatles, in the course of a wide-ranging ramble, briefly detoured out of the Hare Krishna chants into some remarks about the Monopolies Commission (the British equivalent of the U.S. government’s Antitrust Division): You know, this is the thing I don’t like. It’s the Monopolies Commission. Now if anybody, you know, Kodak, or somebody is cleaning up the market with film, the Monopolies Commission, the government send them in there, and say you know, you’re not allowed to monopolize. Yet, when the government’s monopolizing, who’s gonna send in, you know, this Commission to sort that one out?1

  Good question. There was an old joke in Britain: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” In fact, it’s an incisive observation on the nature of government. We wouldn’t like it if there were only one automobile company or only one breakfast cereal, but by definition there can be only one government—which is why, “when the government’s monopolizing,” it should do so only in very limited areas. That’s particularly true for national governments when the nation they govern has more than 300 million people dispersed over a continent and halfway across the Pacific.

  These days America’s government is doing a lot of monopolizing. If it were a private company such as Kodak (to use George Harrison’s quaint example), it would be attracting anti-trust suits. By 2008, the governmentsponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a piece of over half the mortgages issued in the United States.2 As a result, a government-mandated form of pseudo-ownership came close to collapsing the world economy. Which the politicians then, naturally, blamed on capitalist greed. Fresh from their success in undermining the property market, the government went on to seek a monopoly in college loans, plus control of the automobile industry and health care.

  In his dissenting opinion on United States vs. Columbia Steel Co. (1948), Justice William Douglas wrote:We have here the problem of bigness.... The Curse Of Bigness [Justice Louis Brandeis’ essay] shows how size can become a menace—both industrial and social. It can be an industrial

  Now who does that sound like? No, not Kodak. The fact that George Harrison’s selection of an all-powerful monopoly rings so sweetly nostalgic just a few decades later is testament to the self-correcting mechanisms of a functioning market. Kodak, which actually invented some of the first digital camera technology in 1975, failed to foresee how fast things were changing, and eventually wound up laying off 60 percent of its workforce.3 Had the statists been in charge of that sector as they now are of so many others, we’d still be snapping with Kodak Instamatics, and it would take you two weeks to get your holiday pics and cost you $800, because the government had intervened to protect the jobs of Instastatistmatic film developers in the unionized Kodacrony lab.

  These days, the Number One example of the Curse of Bigness is government. It doesn’t just create “gross inequalities” against existing or putative competitors, it passes laws and drives them out, as it’s done to everything from genuinely private health-care arrangements to non-state-licensed kids’ lemonade stands. In Justice Marshall’s words, it’s a “social menace” because of its “control of prices.”

  How does it control them? Michael Fleischer, the owner of a small company in New Jersey, explained to readers of the Wall Street Journal that in order to put $44,000 in his employee’s pocket and give her an additional $12,000 worth of benefits he has to pay $74,000: Big Government imposes a 30 percent surcharge on the cost of providing employment to Sally.4 It “controls the price” of hiring Sally, and it massively distorts it. Which is one reason the unemployment rate is stuck where it is.

  How else does it control prices? In 2009, something called the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia decided that studios offering yoga teacher instruction had to be “certified.”5 So what else is new? Everything’s certified these days. Why not yoga? It’s just a $2,500 certification fee, plus 6 Today, it’s one in three. So Big Government “controls the price” of your yoga lesson. Look on it as
a twofer: all the purifying benefits of yoga, now with the dead weights of Big Government.

  Government today has a monopoly of monopoly. If you were to update the board game of the same name to reflect reality, every square you land on would require you to pay a fee to government before you can do anything—occupational license, commercial-use permit, processing fee for a license to permit you to collect sales tax. You’d go straight to jail without passing “Go” for putting up a yoga studio on Atlantic Avenue and being delinquent in your meditation-accreditation application, but the government would let you plea-bargain it down to a $3,000 fine. If you land on “Go,” you’d have to pass a “Go” impact-study inspection before being allowed to go.

  There’s your Curse of Bigness, and the only one beyond the jurisdiction of the Antitrust Division.

  Alas, the monopolizers don’t see it as a curse. Before he became Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner (by his own admission) failed to pay the United States Treasury the taxes he owed because he couldn’t follow the yes/no prompts of elementary TurboTax software. Undaunted, by early 2009, he and President Obama, two men with no business management experience whatsoever, who have never created a nickel of wealth between them, were “managing” more money than any individuals anywhere on the planet have ever done. Fans of Big Government take it for granted that Obama, Geithner, and a handful of other guys can “run” the financial sector, and the auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the property market, and health care, and even the very climate of the planet. The Barackracy assume that a few clever people in Washington can direct trillions of dollars more productively than the companies and individuals from whom they

  In Justice Marshall’s words:Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant.

  In 1948 Marshall was worried about steel. But the dominant industrial power of our time is government. And it is because of the government monopoly that “the fortunes of the people” are dependent on “the whim or caprice” (not to mention “the emotional stability”) of a small number of all too like-minded individuals.

  You can see where power lies in the very landscape: go to a steel town six decades after Marshall’s warning. The burg’s shot to hell. The handsome Victorian homes on the tree-lined avenues are worn and crumbling, with cracked clapboards and sagging porches, and cheaply partitioned into low-rent apartments. The railroad halts that sent the products of American industry across the nation and around the world are dead, their depots converted into laundromats and pizza joints or, worse, “community centers,” with the track removed and its weed-strewn path redesignated as a “heritage trail.” Where do wealth and power gravitate today? In 2009 Reuters reported:Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation’s highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7

  You don’t say! Now I wonder why that would be. Of the fifty counties with the biggest percentage of young high earners, sixteen were in the D.C. area. Of the top ten, only two were not near either Washington or a state capital.8 Reuters filed this revealing analysis in its “lifestyle” section. Which makes sense. The easiest way to a “lifestyle” is a government job. The following year, another survey (from Newsweek) found that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States were in the Washington commuter belt.9 What matters in the America of the twenty-first century is proximity not to industry or to wealth creation but to government.

  As George Harrison warned, “the government’s monopolizing”: it has a monopoly of law, of licensing, of regulation, and when it abuses that monopoly then eventually you can’t move without encountering government at every turn. Even before the Obama spendaholics got to work supersizing the state, all levels of government, federal to local, were already sucking up over 40 cents of every dollar American workers generate.10 (European nations were able to go beyond even that dismal figure only because the United States has relieved them of the responsibility for their own defense.) The assumed rationale for an ever more intrusive superstate is that, thanks to technology and globalization, the world is far more complex and interconnected than in the days when hardscrabble farmers in New England townships could be trusted to run their own affairs. There is little objective evidence to support this argument, but it conveniently bolsters the political class’s belief in its own indispensability. Willie Whitelaw, the genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for many years, once accused the Labour Party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw’s apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy—creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.

  Take health care. Through all the interminable health-care “debates” of Obama’s first year, did you read any of the proposed plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and indigestible. Unless you’re a health-care lobbyist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills ever read ’em; why should you?

  And you can understand why they drag on a bit. If you attempt to devise a health-care “plan” for over 300 million people, it’s bound to get a bit complicated. But a health-care plan for you, Mabel Scroggins of 27 Elm Street, didn’t used to be that complicated, did it? Let’s say you carelessly drop the ObamaCare bill on your foot and it breaks your toe. In the old days, you’d go to your doctor (or, indeed, have him come to you—that’s how insane it was back then), he’d patch you up, and you’d write him a check. That’s the way it was in most of the developed world within living memory.

  When did it get too complicated to leave to individuals? “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System—or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

  Ah, but government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. That’s why the Democrats spent the first year of a brutal recession trying to ram ObamaCare down the throats of a nation that didn’t want it. Because the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again. In most of the rest of the western world, it’s led to a kind of two-party one-party state: right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. All such “technocratic” societies slide left, into statism and stasis.

  Many Americans are happy with the government monopoly. The monarchical urge persists even in a two-and-a-third-century-old republic. 11

  He took her name—Henrietta Hughes—and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be. The audience roared their gratitude. “Yes!” they yelped, and “Amen!” and even “Gracious God, thank you so much!”

  As Bing Crosby said to Bob Hope in The Road to Utopia, “Leave your name with the girl, and we may get to you for some crowd noises.” That’s the citizen’s role on America’s road to Utopia: Lea
ve your name with the girl and, after the background check, you may qualify for the crowd scenes.

  Early in his term, President Obama called in some fellow smarties to test out some slogans. FDR had a “New Deal,” so Obama thought he’d wrap up his domestic innovations under the umbrella title of “New Foundation.” The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cautioned against it. “New Foundation,” she said, sounds like a lady’s girdle.12 Actually, it’s more like a whalebone corset. When the American citizen climbs into the “New Foundation,” the stays get cranked tighter and tighter, but incrementally—so you barely feel it, till you realize the bottom’s dropped out, and you’re coughing up blood, and they’re still cranking.

  THE STATIST QUO

  FDR was the first American president to pass off Big Government as technocracy. He had a so-called “Brains Trust.” As with so many pious The Daily Star of Marion, Ohio, mused: “Since everything else is tending to trusts, why not a brain trust ... ? Our various and sundry supplies of gray matter may as well be controlled by a central syndicate.”13

  That’s how America’s ruling class now regards itself: a central syndicate of gray matter. Which brings us back to George Harrison and the Monopolies Commission. The Big Government “brains trust” is a trust like any other: it exists to monopolize, to prevent free trade, to rig the market. Specifically, it exists to enforce a monopoly of ideas, and squash all alternatives. You’ll recall that, during the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama was revealed, at a private fundraiser in San Francisco, to have belittled his own party’s voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”14 He subsequently “apologized” by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true.”15