After America

by Mark Steyn

  A famous American First Lady wrote a bestseller called It Takes a Village (to raise a child)—an African proverb, supposedly. Why our leaders should have been commending tribal life as a model for advanced societies is a mystery. But even Africans didn’t want to raise their children in an African village. They abandoned them for shanties in what (if you flew over West Africa by night) looked like one giant coastal megalopolis. And, with respect to child-rearing, they left behind most of their traditions, too. We are a planet without a past—or, at any rate, memory. Like the European transnationalists wedded to their Ponzi welfare state, like the American spendaholics burning through trillions as if it was still 1950 and they were the only economic power on earth, like the Singularity post-humans revolving on themselves without repose, reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment. In The Atlantic Monthly a few years back, casting around for a phrase to describe the “citizens” of such “states,” Robert D. Kaplan called them “re-primitivized man.”73 Demographic growth, environmental devastation, accelerated urbanization, and civic decay have reduced them to a far more primitive state than their parents and grandparents. As Andrew McCarthy wrote: “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.”74

  By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Liberia, the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea were all less “civilized” than they had been a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense many of them had made undeniable progress: they had globalized their pathologies. 75

  Sudan? Oh, surely you remember: the other day I found a program for a “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser in the attic. Massachusetts, I think. Perhaps you attended. Someone read out a press release from the activist actor George Clooney, and everyone had a simply marvelous time. Meanwhile, back in Sudan, the killing went on: hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. With machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive.

  But a nuclear Sudan would supposedly be a model of self-restraint?

  The mound of corpses piled up around the world at the turn of the century was not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. Yet the Pansy Left (in George Orwell’s phrase) continued to insist that the problem was technological, a question of nuclear “proliferation.” Even from a post-American world, it seems sad to have to point out that the problem was not that America had nukes and that poor old Sudan had to make do with machetes. It’s that the machete crowd were willing to kill on an industrial scale and the high-tech guys could not muster the will to stop them. To horrified western liberals, nuclear technology was bad in and of itself. But nukes are means. What you do with them depends on your ends. And if, as in the Congo and Sudan, killing is your end, then you will find the means. Perhaps it was only sensitivity to cultural diversity that prevented President Obama taking up a machete non-proliferation initiative.

  There is a fine line between civilization and the abyss. North Korea had friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protected one-man psycho

  As America should have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don’t care who they kill can inflict a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. As one of Nick Berg’s kidnappers explained both to his victim and to the world in the souvenir Islamic snuff video, “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it.”76 Thus, “asymmetric warfare” on a planet divided into civilized states with unusable nuclear arsenals and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever’s to hand. We had moved into a world beyond American order, but in which, as large swathes of the map reprimitivized, the shrinking superpower would remain the most inviting target.

  Many westerners were familiar with Nietzsche’s accurate foretelling of the twentieth century as an age of “wars such as have never happened on earth.”77 This was a remarkable prediction to make from the Europe of the 1880s, a time of peace and prosperity. But too many forget the context in which the philosopher reached his conclusion—that “God is dead.” Nietzsche was an atheist but he was not simply proclaiming his own contempt for faith, as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other bestselling atheists would do in our own century. “God is dead” was not a statement of personal belief, but a news headline—in the author’s words, a “tremendous event.” If, as he saw it, educated people had ceased to believe in the divine, that entailed certain consequences. For God—or at any rate the Judeo-Christian God whose demise he was reporting—had had a civilizing effect during his (evolutionarily speaking) brief reign. Without God, Nietzsche wondered, without “any cardinal distinction between man and animal,” what constraints are there? In the “arena of the future,” the world would be divided into “brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.” That was the purpose of his obituary

  We know he called the twentieth century right. So what did he have to say about the twenty-first? He foresaw a time even worse than the “wars such as have never happened,” wars that were after all still fought according to the remnants, the “mere pittance” of the late God’s moral codes. But after that, what? The next century—our century—would see “the total eclipse of all values.” Man would attempt a “re-evaluation,” as the West surely did through multiculturalism, sexual liberation, eco-fetishization, and various other fancies. But you cannot have an effective moral code, Nietzsche pointed out, without a God who says “Thou shalt not.”

  Thou shalt not what? Eat pygmies? Rip out children’s hearts? Wire up your own infant as a bomb? Express mild disapproval of the cultures that engage in such activities? Multiculturalism was the West’s last belief system. Its final set of values accorded all values equal value. Which is to say that it had no values—for, if all values have equal value, what’s the point? There was still enough of the “mere pittance” of the old values for skanky tweens in hooker chic or burqa-ed women escorting their daughters to the FGM clinic to cause feminists some momentary disquiet. But they could no longer summon up a moral language to object to it. They valued all values, and so relentlessly all values slipped into eclipse—and then a valueless age dawned.

  It’s never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. I remember my last visit to Monte Carlo, to see an old friend who had retired there for tax reasons. Enjoying a café au lait under an awning on a pedestrianized street, we watched the world go by and discussed the demographic death spiral that “alarmist” early-century tracts had played up. And, after chewing over the numbers for Italy, Spain, and so on, my friend had said jokingly, “Well, what about Monaco? Could Monte Carlo spearhead the rebirth of Europe?”

  Alas, no. Monaco had the lowest birth rate on the planet: seven births per thousand people.78 That was because it was a chichi little enclave of wealthy tax exiles, and who wants snot-nosed kids getting underfoot and

  That’s what more and more of Europe felt like, at least outside the surging Muslim enclaves. Much of the western world had made a bet that it could survive as a giant Monte Carlo—rich, plump, happy, and insulated from all the unpleasantness of life. As I said to my friend that day: What’s holding Monte Carlo in place?

  It’s a short sail from impoverished North Africa. What was there to prevent, say, a bunch of Algerians just walking in and taking it?

  The first victims of American retreat were the many parts of the world that had benefited from an unusually benign hegemon. But eventually the consequences of retreat came home, too.

  How quickly the world turns:

  Western Europe is semi-Islamic.

  A resurgent Russia is also Islamizing fast but under a stern petro-czar confident he can control them. He has reestablished Eastern Europe and Central Asia as the bear’s sphere of influence.

  Iran is the dominant power in the Middle East, acti
vely supported by a post-Kemalist Turkey and with the reluctant acquiescence of the Sunni dictatorships. Its missiles can reach western Europe, and its technology is being dispersed to friendly nations and non-state actors alike.

  Pakistan has fallen to the local branch of the Taliban, and India is preoccupied by a nuclear stand-off. North Korea is clinging on as a nuclear Wal-Mart for anyone who wants a No Dong missile at unbeatable prices.

  China is growing old, and is in a hurry. Resource-short as always, it has bought up much of Africa. The least worst parts of the Dark Continent are a de facto Beijing protectorate, while those territories that are too much trouble for China to annex are exporting their people and their problems north.

  Latin America is for sale to whoever’s buying—the Chinese, the Russians, the new Caliphate. Islam has made modest inroads into the continent—not huge but just enough to add a whole new wrinkle to America’s

  Going over the computer footage one morning, the guards see a truck managed to get across during the night. Not a big deal, probably just a couple dozen peasants heading north to join their families.

  Funny thing, though. The truck didn’t stop in the Arizona desert and let out its human cargo. The border guys found out a couple days later it had headed north, picked up Interstate 40 eastbound, all the way through New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee until it hit Greensboro and swung north on I-85.

  Towards Washington.

  They figured it out when they saw it on the news.

  In this chapter, Steyn paints a bleak picture of the world “after America”:

  Western Europe is semi-Islamic, Russia has the monopoly on energy and security, China is the new economic superpower, Iran is a nuclear power, Latin America is for sale to the highest bidder, Japan’s population is part robotic, and cannibalism is standard practice in Africa.

  Could this happen? Is this happening? Or is it just fantastical?

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  EPILOGUE

  THE HOPE OF AUDACITY

  I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.

  —Milton Friedman, Milton Friedman in Australia (1975)

  In February 2009, a few weeks after his inauguration, President Obama went to Congress to deliver America’s first State of the European Union address. It included the following:I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina—a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for 1

  There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (also known as record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American virtues. In fact, the Commander-in-Chief was deftly yoking the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance and entrepreneurial energy like joining the monstrous army of robotic extras droning in unison, “The government needs to do more for me....” The animating principles of the American idea were entirely absent from Obama’s vision—unless by American exceptionalism you mean an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending.

  Consider first the least contentious part:We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen ...

  The doctors are now on track to becoming yet another group of government employees; the lawyers sue the doctors for medical malpractice and, when they’ve made enough dough, like ambulance-chaser par excellence John Edwards, they get elected to Congress. The American Dream, twenty-first-century version? Is there no one in Miss Bethea’s school who’d like to be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a salesman, a generator of wealth? Someone’s got to make the dough the government’s already spent. Maybe Dillon High School’s most famous alumnus, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, could explain it to them.

  As for the train “barreling by their classroom,” the closest the railroad track comes to the school is about 240 yards, or over an eighth of a mile.2 The president was wrong: trains are not barreling by any classroom six times a day. And, even if they were, that’s fewer barrelings per diem than when the school was built in 1912, or the new wing added in 1957. Incidentally, multiple press reports referred to the “113-year old building.” Actually, that’s the building behind the main school—the original structure from 1896, where the School District bureaucracy now has its offices. But if, like so many people, you assume an edifice dating from 1896 or 1912 must ipso facto be uninhabitable, bear in mind that the central portion of the main building was entirely rebuilt in 1983.

  That’s to say, this rotting, dilapidated, mildewed Dotheboys Hall of a Gothic mausoleum dates all the way back to the Cyndi Lauper era.

  Needless to say, the Obama stenographers up in the press gallery were happy to take the Hopeychanger-in-Chief at his word on the facts of the case. But even more striking is how indifferent they were to the bigger question: “She had been told her high school is hopeless,” said the president.

  But surely a school lavishly funded by world and historical standards that needs outside help from the national government for a paint job is, by definition, “hopeless”?

  What of the students’ alleged ambition to “make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world”? Well, why not start closer to home? Instead of “changing the world,” why not try to change your crummy school and your rundown town? Or does that lack the Obamaesque glamour of healing the planet? Come to that, why would the rest of humanity want to have the world changed by someone who can’t organize a paint job?

  In practice, one-worldism conveniently absolves one of doing anything about more localized and less exotic concerns—such as peeling paint and leaking ceilings. And, if a schoolhouse is so afflicted, what’s the best way to fix it? Applying for federal funds and processing the building maintenance through a huge continental bureaucracy? Or doing what my neighbors in

  If that sounds sick-makingly Norman Rockwell, well, take it from me, small town life is hell and having to interact with folksy-type folks in a “tightly knit community” certainly takes its toll, and the commemorative photo montage in the restored tower of gnarled old Yankees in plaid looking colorful while a-hammerin’ and a-shinglin’ doesn’t fully capture many of the project’s arcane yet fractious disputes. Still, forget the cloying small-town sentimentality: it’s the quickest and cheapest way to get the job done. It always is.

  Dillon, South Carolina, is a city of about 6,000 people. Is there really no way they can organize acceptable accommodation for a two-grade Junior High School without petitioning the Sovereign in Barackingham Palace?

  Like many municipalities with a significant black population, Dillon has an absence of men: in a quarter of its households, the only adult is a female; in the town as a whole, there are 80 men for every 100 women. Then again, painting walls does not require a burly old brute, and, with a county employment rate of 15 percent, there are surely residents of Dillon with time available.3 Wouldn’t it have made an inspiring tale if, instead of beseeching King Barack the Two-Coats, the people of Dillon had just got on with it and done it themselves? It’s the sort of thing they’d once have made a heartwarming TV movie about: The Little Ju
nior High That Could.

  Ah, but instead of the can-do spirit we now have the can-do-with-somegovernment-funding spirit. And it’s hard to get an inspirational heartwarmer out of that.

  From The New England Primer to federally disbursed primer: Tocqueville would weep. “It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people.... Without

  Even if the federal behemoth were capable of timely classroom repainting from D.C. to Hawaii, consider the scale of government and the size of bureaucracy that would be required. Once such an apparatus is in place, it won’t content itself with paint jobs. The issue is not the decrepitude of the building but the decrepitude of liberty. Maybe Big Government can spend enough of our children’s money to halt the degradation of infrastructure. But the degradation of citizenship—of the “spirit of liberty”—is harder to reverse.

  As dispiriting as Miss Bethea’s letter was, Obama’s citation of it was even more so. How could any citizen-president of a self-governing republic quote approvingly a plea for remote, centrally regulated, continent-wide dependency?

  Because that’s what he likes about it: the willingness of freeborn citizens to be strapped in to the baby seats of Big Nanny. Ty’Sheoma Bethea’s application for federal dependency justifies the ruling class’ belief in its own indispensability. That’s why it got read out in Congress. Almost two years later, in a strikingly whiney response even by his own standards, Obama pleaded to a liberal interviewer that he was merely the president, not the king.4 Well, how did large numbers of people such as young Miss Bethea get so confused on that point? For both the ruling class and a huge number of its subjects, it is not just routine but (as Obama suggested) somehow admirable to look to central government to supply your needs—shelter, sustenance, clothing, medication, painless sedatives both pharmaceutical and figurative. To Ty’Sheoma Bethea and her school chums, it sounds liberating: if the benevolent state takes care of all your needs, you’re free to concentrate on “changing the world.” In reality, you’ve already changed it—from a state of raw, messy liberty to one on the path to despotic insolvency. What would be the price of a gallon of paint once it’s been routed through a massive centralized education bureaucracy?