After America

by Mark Steyn

  The advantage of life in the self-flattering conformicrat cocoon is that you never have to address anybody’s arguments. All those tea parties and town halls with ordinary citizens protesting governmentalized health care? Oh, don’t be so naïve. As the New York Times assured its readers, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care.”45 “It’s merely a handy excuse,” Frank Rich explained. “The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964....”

  Ah, in the Democratic Party it’s always 1964 and Selma, Alabama. Except that now it’s not the Democrats who are the redneck racists, it’s you—yes, you. As Frank Rich explains:If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House—topped off by a wise Latina on the

  So you may think you object to ObamaCare because you’re very concerned about what you’ve heard about two-year wait times for MRIs in Canada, but it’s really because you’re itchin’ to get your sheet on and string up that uppity Negro.

  You may think you object to ObamaCare because it will lead to a massive shortage of primary care physicians as has already happened in Massachusetts, 46 but it’s really because you’d like to slap around that Nancy Pelosi the way Bogey does Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon ’cause that’s the only language these lippy broads understand.

  You may think you object to ObamaCare because the Federal Government forcing you to make health-care arrangements that meet the approval of the state commissars is unconstitutional, but it’s really because you think that that wise Latina on the Supreme Court should be turning down your hotel bed and leaving a complimentary hazelnut truffle on your pillow.47

  You may think you object to ObamaCare because its absurd bureaucratic insistence that you need a doctor’s prescription in order to pay for your Tylenol from a health savings account will waste untold hours of doctors’, patients’, and pharmacists’ time, but it’s really because Barney Frank reminds you that you’ve always been slightly confused about your own sexuality and at the back of the desk drawer you’ve still got the phone number of that guy who wrote back when you put the “Bi-Curious Male Seeks Similar” ad in the classifieds, and to be honest when Congressman Frank gets butch and beats up on those bank executives it kinda turns you on.

  I can’t speak for the rest of you racists, sexists, and homophobes, but I’ve opposed government health care in Canada, the United Kingdom,

  Yet, if you write for the New York Times or teach race and gender studies at American colleges for long enough, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that a difference of opinion over health-care policy is being driven by nostalgia for segregated lunch counters. Invited by National Public Radio to expound on the use of “racial code words” in “the current opposition to health care reform,” Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton, informed her listeners that “language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.”48

  “Personal responsibility” is racial code language? Phew, thank goodness America is belatedly joining Europe in all but abolishing the concept.

  “Code language” is code language for “total bollocks.” “Code word” is a code word for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me.” “Small government”? Racist code words! “Non-confiscatory taxes”? Likewise. “Individual liberty”? Don’t even go there! With interpreters like Professor Harris-Lacewell on the prowl, I’m confident 95 percent of Webster’s will eventually be ruled “code language.”

  Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their “Don’t tread on me” T-shirts and sneer, “The peasants are revolting.”You oppose illegal immigration? You’re a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamophobe. If that’s the choice, I’d rather be damned as racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization 49 That’s the polite version of dismissing him as just another one of those “fucking Nascar retards,” the elegant formulation Eric Alterman (Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism) used on the in-house “JournoList” to describe those Americans who disagree with him and his fellow media professionals.50 Juan Williams seems an unlikely Nascar retard. He is not only liberal but black. Had a conservative hinted that an eminent African-American Democrat had mental health issues, he’d be the one headed for the funny farm. But, of course, in briefly wandering off liberalism’s ideological plantation, Mr. Williams had behaved so irrationally that, as in the Soviet Union, only a medical condition could explain it. Don’t worry about it, Juan. Just let the men in white coats get the straps around you, and shoot the needle into your arm, and you’ll soon be feeling much better, and thinking just the same as everybody else.

  On most of these issues, from illegal immigration to the Ground Zero mosque, the Conformicrats are losing the battle for public opinion by as much as 70/30. Yet even that isn’t enough to persuade them to mount an argument. So much liberal debate boils down to Ring Lardner’s great line: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

  Fewer people know the line that precedes it (in Lardner’s story, The Young Immigrunts): a kid asking, “Are you lost, daddy?” The rulers think we’re kids, they’re the daddy, and it takes a village to raise a fuckin’ Nascar retard child. The ruled think we’re lost, and being driven farther and farther off the map.

  But the disparagement of dissenters as racists, sexists, homophobes, and retards is not entirely an act of misdirection. It reflects the so-called technocracy’s priorities: for Big Government bent on social micromanagement, ideological enforcement takes priority over any other

  New Orleans?

  Gulfport?

  No, to Atlanta—for diversity and sexual-harassment training.51

  Which most of them had already undergone back home. But you can’t be too careful: Heaven forbid that a waterlogged granny should be rescued by an insufficiently non-homophobic fireman.

  FEMA is supposed to be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Fairyland Equality Makework Agency. But so it goes. Government agencies created to demonstrate the laser-sharp problem-solving skills of the elite technocracy in the end mostly just enforce conformity with the state ideology. Thus, the “enhanced patdowns” of U.S. airport security are less about preventing terrorism than about preventing the acknowledgment of inconvenient truths at odds with the diversity cult. Contemporary Big Government is like a widget factory that no longer makes widgets but holds sensitivity training sessions all day long. And, if you’re a nonagenarian spinster at LaGuardia with a TSA agent’s paws roaming ’round your bloomers while the Yemeni madrassah alumnus sails through the express check-in, the involuntary sensitivity training isn’t all that sensitive.

  TWO SOLITUDES

  If it were just Good King Barack and Henrietta Hughes, rulers and subjects, all would be well. But America still has a citizenry: the productive class—the ones whose labors have to fund both the swollen state bureaucracy and its dependents. It’s tough if you happen to fall into this third category. Most of the time, such as at that town hall meeting in Fort Myers, you’re not even part of the national conversation: you live in the Flownover Country. In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote a novel set in Montreal whose Two Solitudes. They live in the same nation, sometimes in the same town, sometimes share the same workspace. But they inhabit different psychologies. In 2008, David Warren, a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen, argued that the concept has headed south:In the United States, especially in the present election, we get glimpses of two political solitudes that have been created not by any plausible socio-economic division within society, nor by any deep division between different ethnic tribes, but tautological
ly by the notion of “two solitudes” itself. The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations.52

  John Edwards, yesterday’s coming man, had an oft retailed stump speech about “the two Americas,” a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the mawkish drool of a Depression-era sob-sister: one America was a wasteland of shuttered mills and shivering “coatless girls,” while in the other America Dick Cheney and his Halliburton fat cats were sitting’round the pool swigging crude straight from the well and toasting their war profits all day long.53 Edwards was right about the “two Americas,” but not about the division: in one America, those who subscribe to the ruling ideology can access a world of tenured security lubricated by government and without creating a dime of wealth for the overall economy; in the other America, millions of people go to work every day to try to support their families and build up businesses and improve themselves, and the harder they work the more they’re penalized to support the government class in its privileges. Traditionally, he who paid the piper called the tune. But not anymore. Flownover Country pays the piper, very generously, in salaries, benefits, pensions, and perks. But Conformicrat America calls the tune, the same unending single-note dirge. David Warren regards these as 54

  Increasingly, America’s divide is about the nature of the state itself—about the American idea. And in that case why go on sharing the same real estate? As someone once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The Flownover Country’s champion ought, in theory, to be the Republican Party. But, even in less fractious times, this is a loveless marriage. Much of the GOP establishment is either seduced by the Conformicrats or terrified by them, to the point where they insist on allowing the liberals to set the parameters of the debate—on health care, immigration, education, Social Security—and then wonder why elections are always fought on the Democrats’ terms. If you let the left make the rules, the right winds up being represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to prevent Big Government driving America off a cliff, it’s insufficient.

  The Conformicrats need Flownover Country to fund them. It’s less clear why Flownover Country needs the Conformicrats—and a house divided against itself cannot stand without the guy who keeps up the mortgage payments.

  According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households paid no federal income tax.55 Obviously, many of them paid other kinds of taxes—state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense, or interest payments on the debt, or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why).56 Furthermore, if you pay local tax but no federal income tax, you’re more easily seduced by the most malign of Big Government’s distortions: its insistence that more and more aspects of life have to be regulated by a centralized regime in Washington rather than by varieties of state, county, and municipal bodies. As a

  In 2009, Ken Rogulski of WJR Detroit reported on a federal aid “giveaway” at the city’s Cobo Center:WJR: Why are you here?

  WOMAN #1: To get some money.

  WJR: What kind of money?

  WOMAN #1: Obama money.

  WJR: Where’s it coming from?

  WOMAN #1: Obama.

  WJR: And where did Obama get it?

  WOMAN #1: I don’t know. His stash. I don’t know. [She laughs.] I

  don’t know where he got it from, but he’s giving it to us, to help us.

  WOMAN #2: And we love him.

  WOMAN #1: We love him. That’s why we voted for him!

  WOMEN (chanting): Obama! Obama! Obama! [They laugh.]

  WJR: ... and where did Obama get the funds?

  WOMAN #2: Ummm, I have no idea, to tell you the truth. He’s

  the President.57

  Well, he got it from me, and from you. Every dollar in Obama’s “stash” comes from me, you, or the Chinese Politburo. And redistributing it on the grounds above only inflates these ladies’ blithe assumptions. But so what? If the object is to increase government, and expand the power of those in government, then the “Obama’s stash” route works just fine.

  By contrast, if you fall into the taxation category and you’re stuck with the tab for Obama’s stash, you’re not only paying for groups that get a better hearing in Washington, but ensuring that the socioeconomic conditions of the republic will trend, mercilessly, against you. The small business class—men and women in unglamorous lines of work that keep the

  United States income tax is becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “jizya”—the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens. In return for funding the Caliphate, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

  In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Muslim expansion. Once Araby had been secured for Islam, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels to mug. I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting America’s Big Government shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and those on the receiving end long ago figured out all the angles: in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late forties collect disability benefits.58 In the United Kingdom, five million people—a tenth of the adult population—have not done a day’s work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.59

  America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s heading there. As Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out, 60 As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or for lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from the feds, be to such a pitch?

  But for the productive class, the ongoing government shakedown leads to demoralization and disincentivization. In 2002, 61 percent of Americans believed their children would enjoy higher living standards. By 2009, that was down to 45 percent. This is a hole in America’s soul, and it’s growing bigger every day.61

  In the Nineties, the “culture wars” were over “God, guns and gays.” The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows what’s best for its subjects? In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition against gay marriage, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the people’s representatives vote to uphold the people’s laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washington’s behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

  Some schlub in Fresno might wonder why a gay judge who seemed a more militant advocate for gay marriage than the plaintiffs were didn’t recuse himself from the case. But that just shows how lit
tle they know: it’s the voters of California who should have recused themselves. Their bigotry makes them unqualified to pronounce on the subject. They should be grateful Judge Walker didn’t mandate re-education camp.

  It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As the (Democrat) pollster Pat Cadell pointed out, the logic of that is “pre- revolutionary.”62

  Once you’ve secured the other levers of power, elective politics becomes a kind of sham combat to distract from the real battlegrounds. There are degrees of dissembling: the presidential candidate running as a “fiscally responsible post-partisan healer” provides the cover for an agenda crafted by far more explicitly left-wing legislators, such as Pelosi and Frank. Behind the legislators are the judges, behind the judges the regulatory bureaucracy, and behind the bureaucracy the union muscle: left, lefter, leftest.

  FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS MONEY

  Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite:We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.63

  He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democratcontrolled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: across post-Communist Europe, from Slovenia to Bulgaria to Lithuania, governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments.

  Today, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation.

  In the eighteen months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the number of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 percent to 19 percent.64 An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn,” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.65 In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus,” the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000.66 Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures