After America

by Mark Steyn

  There is already an almost surreal disconnect between the emaciated sirens of popular culture and those who gather in the dark to watch small stars on the big screen. The largest people on the planet outside the hearty trenchermen of Western Samoa pay ten bucks to watch all-American stories set in all-American towns featuring increasingly un-American boys and girls who bear less and less resemblance to them. It seems likely that trend will continue, and a vast mass of vast mass will sink to the bottom while an ever more cadaverous elite gets all the best jobs. It also seems inevitable that, in response, Big Nanny will decide that she’s the one who needs to get bigger and bigger, and to micro-regulate her 350 to 400 million charges ever more coercively. It’s not such a leap to imagine the GAUNT Act (Government Assistance for Universal Nutritional Transformation) passing Congress circa 2020 to lessen strains on health-care costs. It won’t work. You can’t reduce the citizen’s waist through government waste—not absent anything this side of a nationwide famine. But it won’t stop the statists trying.

  The landscape will adjust to accommodate: there will be more class action suits, and your local multiplex and car manufacturers and discount airlines will change their seat configurations every ten, five, two years. This is a cultural phenomenon arising from socio-economic changes that would be difficult to reverse even if our elites accepted the legitimacy of attempting to reverse them.

  DEPENDISTAN

  From the English-language edition of Pravda:Family Becomes Extinct, To Be Replaced with Feminism and Gender Equality38

  Year on year, there are fewer Russian weddings and, for those that do take place, in regions from Kirov to Krasnoyarsk some three-quarters end in divorce. As the reporter put it, “It is not ruled out that the institute of marriage will vanish in the near future.” That’s the way to bet—and not just in post-Soviet dystopias. More and more children are raised by single mothers.

  Well, huff the elites, what’s wrong with that? Are you stigmatizing these women? Are you saying they shouldn’t have the rewards of a fulfilling career?

  Whether or not juggling (as many of my North Country neighbors do) three minimum wage jobs—a checkout clerk, some part-time waitressing, a bit of off-the-books house cleaning—is every woman’s idea of a fulfilling career, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for hands-on parenting. Yet instead of trying to correct the structural flaws we will increase dependency—because single women are the most reliable voters for Big Government, even as it turns them into junkies for the state pusher and ensures their kids will reach their adulthood pre-crippled.

  When America was hit by economic depression in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson was fascinated by how the struggling republic’s energy was visible even on the fringes of society: “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of the household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not?—of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet....”39

  In the disease-ridden Dependistans of the new America, there are fewer signs of currents in the extremities. Western societies already face an explosion in health costs. From a report on Canada in The Economist: “Health spending, which is administered by the provinces, has increased from nearly 35 percent of their budgets in 1999 to 46 percent today. In Ontario, the most populous province, it is set to reach 80 percent by 2030, leaving pennies for everything else the government does.”40

  Eighty percent, huh? Add Chinese debt interest payments and that would be the entirety of U.S. government revenues spoken for. Beleaguered

  For a peek at the future, wander ’round the public housing in any American city: look at the number of wheelchairs, and the predominantly black men and women with missing limbs. And then look in their faces, and see how young they are. In ten years’ time, there will be more, and they will be younger, and they will be wheeling in from the projects and the derelict husks of post-industrial cities, and a familiar sight almost everywhere in the United States.

  The unhealthiness of Dependistan underlines the real problem with the modern welfare state: it’s not that it’s a waste of money but that it’s a waste of people. There is a phrase you hear a lot in Canada, Britain, and Europe to describe the collection of positive “rights” (to “free” health care, unemployment benefits, subsidized public transit) to which the citizens of western democracies have become addicted: the “social safety net.” It always struck me as an odd term. Obviously, it derives from the circus. But life isn’t really a high-wire act, is it? Or at least it didn’t use to be. If you put the average chap—or even Barack Obama or Barney Frank—in spangled leotard and tights and on a unicycle and shove him out across the wire, he’s likely to fall off. But put the average chap in spangled leotard and tights out into the world and tell him to get a job, find accommodation, raise a family, take responsibility, and he can do it. Or he used to be able to, until the government decided he was “vulnerable” and needed a “safety net.”

  When did human life become impossible without a “safety net”? My neighbor’s family came to my corner of New Hampshire in the winter of 1767–68 when her great-great-great-whatever dragged his huge millstones up the frozen river from Connecticut to build the first gristmill on a swiftrunning brook in the middle of uncleared forest in a four-year-old township comprising a dozen families. And he did it without first applying for a federal business development grant. No big deal. Her family’s nothing

  In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Paul Rahe writes, “Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”41 But today the state cocoons “one’s own affairs” so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge.

  The welfare state is less a social safety net than a kind of cage—a large cage but a cage nonetheless. And its occupants are not a trapeze act but more like an expensive zoo animal. Think of a panda. He’s the most expensive item in any zoo’s budget: those American institutions lucky enough to host a big cuddly panda spend some three million per annum on the cute l’il feller. They feed him, they protect him, they give him everything he could possibly want—except a purpose. Eventually, like Europeans, he can’t even be bothered to breed. You put the comeliest lady panda you can find in the cage with him, and he’s not interested. He just lies around all day. To reprise Charles Murray’s line, Big Government “drains too much of the life from life.”

  Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”—by definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how allembracing the government nanny.

  THE KINGDOM OF THE BONOBO

  A few years ago, Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics wrote that ours is the age of “the new Epicureans” in which the “freedom to choose” trumps all.42

  A childless couple can choose to conceive.

  A female couple can choose to conceive.

  A male couple can choose to conceive. Barrie and Tony from Chelmsford, England, had been trying for a child for ages but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because they’re both men. So they advertised for an egg donor on the Internet and then found a Californian woman with a nine-month opening in her womb. A court in the Golden State agreed to register both men as the fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had “co-mingled” their sperm before FedExing it to their Fallopian timeshare and her turkey baster, but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony “self-identify” and it would be cruel to deny the
m. The mother did not rate a credit on the birth certificate. Nor did the turkey baster. This would seem to be in defiance of reality, but what price biology when measured against self-esteem?43

  A woman in Bend, Oregon, can choose to become a man, and then a “pregnant man.”44

  A man can choose to become a woman, get halfway there, and then decide it’s more fun to “live in the grey area,” like “award-winning Canadian writer” Ivan E. Coyote, who prefers to be addressed as he/she and self-identifies as a “very masculine reading estrogen-based organism,” and resents the way the hicks at U.S. Customs and Border Protection don’t have a check box for that.45 In 2009 Mr./Ms. Coyote was detained by CBP along with an American friend, “a tall, feminine woman with a heavy moustache.”

  Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the “pregnant man” is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in “the grey area” is in reality black or white—at least according to what we used to call “the facts of life.” But issuers of passports, drivers’ licenses, and birth certificates increasingly defer to the principle of “self-identification.”

  In terms of sexual identity, we’re freer than almost any society in human history, at least in terms of official validation of our choice to “redefine”

  As for the sex, for niche identities and boutique demographics like Mr./ Ms. Coyote and Oregon’s pregnant man, things seem to be working out swimmingly. But, among the masses, it’s harder to avoid the sheer mountain of human debris being piled up. The story of the last forty years is the mainstreaming of rock-star morality: instant gratification, do your own thing, whatever’s your bag. Jodie Foster and her turkey baster are rich enough to weather any unintended consequences of their fling, but the evidence suggests that, for the general populace, defining celebrity down is more problematic. “Oops! I Did It Again” is easy for Britney to say. Less so for Kaylee at the hair salon.

  The new school soldiers on, arguing that chastity, fidelity, monogamy, etc., are mere social constructs: we’ve been indoctrinated into them by repressed cultural hierarchies. Sexual promiscuity is part of our nature: you should be getting it on with that hot chick at Number 27. And her husband. And get your wife in to video it. Screwing whatever you want whenever you want in whatever combination you want is as natural as wearing a mammoth pelt and sitting round the cave rubbing two sticks together. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá wrote a rather laborious book on the subject, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, that demonstrates by frequent recourse to biology, anthropology, ethnography, and primatology that the idea of lifelong heterosexual marriage is a crock imposed on the world by party poopers.46 Your hunter-gatherer was the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP.

  At this point in the argument, it’s customary to bring up bonobos. No, not the bloke from U2. He loves Africa, too, but not in that way. The bonobo is some kind of chimp that lives south of the Congo River, and is apparently the closest extant relative to humans. And, like us, he’s a bi-guy who can’t get enough casual sex. So, if he’s hip to it, why have we got so many hang-ups?

  That’s easy, say the anthropologists: agriculture. Man stopped hunting and gathering and started farming. Bummer, man: families, monogamy, way less action. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris Hilton? Agriculture was not merely an ecological “catastrophe” (as the author Jared Diamond sees it), but also a sexual one.47 Sure, these pre-agricultural societies may have had a lot of rape, incest, and female genital mutilation, but at least they knew how to party.

  Let us take this argument on its face—that moving from primitive hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture not only introduced to the world concepts of property, autonomy, civil society, and markets but also deeply repressed our libido. In other words, sexual propriety is a function of civilization. The question then arises: Is it possible to restore man’s unbounded license without also de-civilizing us? And, if so, what else are we losing with our inhibitions? In a state of nature, without a legal code or even social norms, you’re free to pursue all your desires. Then again, so’s the guy in the next tree. And, if he’s bigger and stronger and if what he happens to desire is you, you may not enjoy it so much when it’s you on the receiving end. That’s another consequence of the liberation from responsibility: some of us lie around the well-appointed Big Government cage like listless, lethargic pandas and polar bears; others are more like those tigers that, after years of somnolence, wake up one morning and devour their devoted keeper.

  The wreckage is impressive. The Sexual Revolution was well-named: it was a revolt not just against sexual norms but against the institutions and values they supported; it was part of an assault against any alternatives to government, civic or moral. Utopianism, writes the philosopher Roger 48 Who needs families, or marriage, or morality? Who needs nations, especially nations with borders? We’ll take a jackhammer to the foundations of functioning society and proclaim paradise in the ruins.

  “Moderate” Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they’re fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism. As Congressman Mike Pence put it, “To those who say we should simply focus on fiscal issues, I say you would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses.”49

  But the collapse of the traditional family is already well advanced—and as part of a conscious Big Government strategy. Big Daddy sings a siren song: a kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but statism is a girl’s best friend. So it is in government’s interest to diminish those men old-fashioned enough to marry women and thereby woo them away from the Big Stash of Big Daddy Statist. Big Government’s bias against marriage and family isn’t an unforeseen quirk of the tax code. It’s in logical, strategic support of its mission—to expand government and diminish everything else. How’s it going? Well, 40 percent of American children are now born out of wedlock. 50 A majority of Hispanic babies are born to unmarried mothers. So are 70 percent of black children. And so are 70 percent of the offspring of non-Hispanic white women with a high school education and an income under $20,000. 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. Congressman Pence’s doomsday scenario is already here: millions and millions of American children are raised in transient households and moral vacuums that make not just social mobility but even elemental character formation all but impossible. In an America of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease, and growing ethnocultural resentments, the shattering of the indispensable social building block will have catastrophic consequences.

  SPLITSVILLE

  What prevents the “state popular” from declining into a “state despotic”? As Tocqueville saw it, what mattered was the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. In France, the revolution abolished everything, and subordinated all institutions to the rule of central authority. The New World was more fortunate: “The principle and lifeblood of American liberty” was, according to Tocqueville, municipal independence.

  Does that distinction still hold? In the twentieth century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent pillars: church, civic associations, the family. After the diminution of every intervening institution, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why the latter now assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life and why Henrietta Hughes in Fort Myers, Florida, thinks it entirely normal to beseech the Wizard in the far-off Emerald City, where the streets are paved with borrowed green, to do something about her bathroom.

  In its debased contemporary sense, liberalism is a universalist creed. It’s why the left dislikes federalism. Federalism means borders, and b
orders mean there’s always somewhere else to go: the next town, the next county, the next state. I’m pro-choice and I vote—with my feet. Universal liberalism would rather deny you that choice. America has dramatically expanded not just government generally, but nowhere-else-to-go government in particular. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1979:From the founding of the Republic to 1929, spending by governments at all levels, federal, state, and local, never exceeded 12 percent of the national income except in time of major war, and two-thirds of that was state and local spending. Federal spending typically amounted to 3 percent or less of the national income. Since 1933 government spending has never 51

  The object is to reduce and eventually eliminate alternatives—to subsume everything within the Big Government monopoly. Statists prefer national one-size-fits-all—and ultimately planet-wide one-size-fits-all. Borders create the nearest thing to a free market in government—as the elite well understand when they seek to avoid the burdens they impose on you. John Kerry, a Big Tax senator from a Big Tax state, preferred to register his yacht in Rhode Island to avoid half-a-million bucks in cockamamie Massachusetts “boat sales and use” tax.52 This is federalism at work: states compete, and, when they get as rapacious as the Bay State, even their own pro-tax princelings start looking for the workarounds.

  Bazillionaire senators will always have workarounds—for their land, for their yachts, for their health care. You won’t. Meanwhile, they’re relaxed about cities and states going broke—because it’s a great pretext for propelling government ever upward. When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large: the feckless must have their irresponsibility rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington accelerates the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminates any advantage to voting with your feet. It will be as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.