by Mark Steyn
This hardly seems the time to open up yet more unbridgeable cultural divides between the Old World and the New. The British TV historian Simon Schama defined the Bush/Kerry divide as “Godly America” and “Worldly America,” hailing the latter as “pragmatic, practical, rational, and skeptical”—which is, naturally, exactly the wrong way around: it’s the Christian fundamentalists, Holy Rollers, born-again Bible Belters, and Jesus freaks of Godly America who are rational and skeptical, especially of Euro-delusions. It’s secular Europe that’s living on faith. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshriveled in its birth rates, redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet.
THE PASTEURIZATION IS PROLOGUE
Lest you think this is veering close to the jingoistic xenophobia deplored by America’s East Coast media, let me do a bit of America-bashing. The softening and feminization of the Western world isn’t merely a matter of gun confiscation. I’ve never been one of those Americans who’s just plain old anti-foreigner—mainly because I’m not an American, I’m a foreigner. And so I’m quite partial to foreigners, apart from myself. I blush to say it but I like French food, I like French coffee, I like French women. To be honest, I’d rather see some interminable French movie where Isabelle Adjani or Isabelle Huppert or pretty much any other Isabelle sits naked on the end of the bed smoking a cigarette and discussing with her husband how each of their affairs are going than watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator XII. Please don’t throw the book away in disgust until after you’ve paid for it. I’ve never subscribed to that whole “cheese-eating surrender-monkey” sneer promoted by my National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg. As a neocon warmonger, I yield to no one in my contempt for the French, but that said, cheese-wise I feel they have the edge.
When I’m at the lunch counter in America and I order a cheeseburger and the waitress says, “American, Swiss, or cheddar?” I can’t tell the difference. They all taste of nothing. The only difference is that the slice of alleged Swiss is full of holes, so you’re getting less nothing for your buck. Then again, the holes also taste of nothing, and they’re less fattening. But either way, cheese is not the battleground on which to demonstrate the superiority of the American way. In America, unpasteurized un-aged raw cheese that would be standard in any Continental fromagerie is banned. Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are happy to roll over for the nanny state when it comes to the cheese board.
Personally, I want it all: assault weapons and Camembert, guns and butter and all the other dairy products that U.S. big-government federal regulation has destroyed the taste of. The French may be surrender monkeys on the battlefield, but they don’t throw their hands up and flee in terror just because the Brie’s a bit ripe. It’s the Americans who are the cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys, who insist that the only way to deal with this sliver of Roquefort is to set up a rigorous ongoing Hans Blix–type inspections regime. France, for all its faults, has genuinely federalized food: a distinctive cheese every twenty miles down the road. In America, meanwhile, the food nannies are lobbying to pass something called the National Uniformity for Food Act. There’s way too much of that already.
The federalization of food may seem peripheral to national security issues, and the taste of American milk—compared with its French or English or even Quebecois equivalents—may seem a small loss. But take almost any area of American life: what’s the more common approach nowadays? The excessive government regulation exemplified by American cheese or the spirit of self-reliance embodied in the Second Amendment? On a whole raft of issues from health care to education the United States is trending in an alarmingly fromage-like direction. As they almost say in New Hampshire, live Brie or die. Americans should understand that the softening of a state happens incrementally. You can reach the same point as the Europeans by routes other than gun confiscation.
Could America wind up as just another enervated present-tense Western nation? Well, it’s halfway there. I’ve no wish to be “partisan.” Not because attacking the Democrats is, as the media say, “mean-spirited,” but because the Democrats have chosen to make themselves all but irrelevant to the great questions of the age. You can understand why the Dems miss the nineties. There was nary a word about war. Okay, you’d get the odd million-man genocide in Rwanda, but you tended to hear about it afterward, usually as a late-breaking item in the Clinton teary-apology act. Instead, it was an era of micro-politics, a regulation here, an entitlement there, a bike path and a recycling program everywhere you looked. Venusian Americans assumed they’d entered an age of permanent post-Martian politics, and they resented September 11 as an intrusion on their minimalism. When you’re at an event for the “antiwar” movement, you realize it’s no such thing: it’s an I-don’t-want-to-have-to-hear-about-this-war movement. So they mock Bush, Cheney, Rummy, and Co. as the real terrorists—the ones determined to maintain America in a state of “terror.” Oddly enough, this was how the Left chose to live during the Cold War, when the no-nukes crowd expected Armageddon any minute. If you believe in a two-party system, in the end even the integrity of the dominant party isn’t served by the self-marginalization of the only alternative: the Democratic Party needs to get back in the game. But to do that they’ve got to get over the bike-path micro-politics and back on the unlovely central thruway of geopolitical reality.
MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY
Conservatives, on the other hand, embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney ever said was a couple of weeks after September 11: “One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government—big shift—and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.” Really? I’d say September 11 vindicated perfectly a decentralized, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government—the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped—big-time, as the vice president would say—was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA, and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the U.S. border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers. Yet, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, Amazon.com would know that he’d bought The A-Z of Infidel Slaying two years earlier and their “We have some suggestions for you!” box would be proffering a 30 percent discount on Suicide Bombing for Dummies. Amazon is a more efficient data miner than U.S. Immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon’s system is very cheap, but it’s in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower.
Here’s another example of Dick Cheney’s government—the one we “trust and value and have high expectations for”—from the morning of September 11:
FAA Command Center: Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?
FAA Headquarters: God, I don’t know.
FAA Command Center: That’s a decision somebody’s going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes.
FAA Headquarters: You know, everybody just left the room.
Most of what went wrong on September 11 we knew about in the first days after. Generally, it falls into two categories:
1. Government agencies didn’t enforce their own rules (as in the terrorists’ laughably inadequate visa applications).
or
2. The agencies’ rules were out of date—three out of those four planes reached their targets because their crews, passengers, and ground staff all blindly followed the FAA’s 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late, as the terrorists knew they would.
The next time a terrorist gets through and pulls off an attack, it will be for the same reasons: there’ll be a
bunch of new post–September 11 regulations, and some bureaucrat somewhere will have neglected to follow them, or some wily Islamist will have rendered them as obsolete as his predecessors made all those thirty-year-old hijack rules. That’s an abiding feature of government: 90 percent of its ever-proliferating agencies just aren’t very good, and if you put your life in their hands, more fool you.
But, on the fourth plane, they didn’t follow the seventies hijack rituals. On Flight 93, they used their cell phones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free men, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private individuals. The first three planes were effectively an airborne European Union, where the rights of the citizens had been appropriated by the FAA’s flying nanny state. Up there where the air is rarified, all your liberties have been regulated away: there’s no smoking, there’s 100 percent gun control, you’re obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you; if the stewardess—whoops, sorry—if the flight attendant’s rude to you, tough; if you’re rude back, you’ll be arrested on landing. For thirty years, passengers surrendered more and more rights for the illusion of security, and, as a result, thousands died. On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer and others reclaimed those rights and demonstrated that they could exercise them more efficiently than government. The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: “Let’s roll!” as Mr. Beamer told his fellow passengers.
By contrast, on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi died flying their respective planes into World Trade Center Tower One and Tower Two, their flight school in Florida received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service informing it that Mr. Atta and Mr. al-Shehhi’s student visas had been approved. Even killing thousands of people wasn’t enough to impede Mr. Atta’s smooth progress through a lethargic bureaucracy. And the bureaucrats’ defense—which boiled down to: don’t worry, we’re only issuing visas to famous dead terrorists, not obscure living ones—is one that Americans largely have to take on trust. A furious President Bush insisted that the INS take decisive action against those responsible, which it did, moving Janis Sposato “sideways” to the post of “Assistant Deputy Executive Associate Commissioner for Immigration Services.” I don’t know what post she was moved sideways from—possibly Associate Executive Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Happily, since then, the INS has changed its name to some other acronym and ordered up a whole new set of business cards, extra-large if Ms. Sposato’s title is anything to go by.
Given the difficulty of reforming the torpid bureaucratic culture, the best we can hope for is to constrain its size—and leave enough space so that a nimble and innovative citizenry don’t degenerate into mere subjects of an overbearing state. In 2004, Wired magazine ran an interesting featurette about a fellow called Hans Monderman, a highway engineer in northern Holland for the previous three decades. A year or two back, he’d had an epiphany. As Wired’s Tom McNichol puts it: “Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer.”
In other words, all the stuff on the streets—signs for everything every five yards, yellow lines, pedestrian crossings, stoplights, crash barriers, bike lanes—all that junk clogging up the highway, by giving you the illusion of security, in fact makes driving more dangerous. The town of Christianfield in Denmark embraced the Monderman philosophy, removed all the traffic signs and signals from its most dangerous intersection, and thereby cut the number of serious accidents down to zero. These days, when you tootle toward the junction, there’s no instructions from the Department of Transportation to tell you what to do. You have to figure it out for yourself, so you approach it cautiously and with an eye on what the other chaps in the vicinity are up to.
Mr. Monderman’s thesis feels right to me—that by creating the illusion of security you relieve the citizen of the need to make his own judgments. Howard Zinn, in his introduction to Cindy Sheehan’s book Dear President Bush, pens this paean to the plucky underdog: “A box-cutter can bring down a tower. A poem can build up a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution.”
But the only reason “a box-cutter can bring down a tower” is because on September 11 our defenses against such a threat were exclusively the province of the state. If nineteen punks with box-cutters had tried to pull some stunt in the parking lot of a sports bar, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. The airline cabin, however, is the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of the wildest dreams of big government; it’s Massachusetts in cloud-cuckoo land. So on September 11 on those first three flights the cabin crews followed all those Federal Aviation Administration guidelines from the seventies. By the time the fourth plane got into trouble, the passengers knew the government wasn’t up there with them. And, within ninety minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93 had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it.
That’s been my basic rule of thumb since September 11: anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror but for the national character in a more general sense. Charles Clarke, formerly Britain’s home secretary, gave a revealing glimpse into the big-government mentality in a column for the Times defending the latest allegedly necessary security measure: “ID cards will potentially make a difference to any area of everyday life where you already have to prove your identity—such as opening a bank account, going abroad on holiday, claiming a benefit, buying goods on credit and renting a video.”
“Renting a video”? That sounds about right. When you go to Blockbuster, you’ll need your national ID card. But if you’re an Algerian terrorist cell coming in on the Eurostar from Paris to blow up Big Ben, you won’t. And its requirement for the routine transactions of daily life—“opening a bank account…buying goods on credit”—will have the same impact as all those street signs and traffic lights at that Danish intersection: it will relieve bank managers and store clerks of the need to use their own judgment in assessing the situation. You’d have to have an awful lot of faith in government to think that’s a good thing.
Britain’s religious “hate crimes” law is another example of excessive street signage applied to the byways of society. It attempts to supplant human judgment with government management: the multicultural state is working out so well that we can no longer be trusted to regulate our own interactions with our neighbors. Islam, unlike Anglicanism, is an explicitly political project: sharia is a legal system, but, unlike English Common Law or the Napoleonic Code, for the purposes of public debate it will henceforth enjoy the special protection of Her Majesty’s Government. Given that the emerging Muslim lobby groups are already the McDonald’s coffee plaintiff of ethno-cultural grievance-mongers, you can be certain they’ll make full use of any new law. Political debate in Europe is already hedged in by excessive squeamishness: Holland’s “immigration problem” is a Muslim problem, France’s “youth problem” is a Muslim problem, the “terrorism threat” that necessitates those British ID cards is in reality an Islamic threat. How is preventing honest discussion of the issue going to make citizens any safer? The term “nanny state” hardly covers a society where you need retinal-scan ID in order to rent Mary Poppins but you’re liable for prosecution if you express your feelings too strongly after the next bombing.
CRADLE TO GRAVE
Restoring the balance between the state and the citizen is most urgent when it comes to reversing the biggest structural defect of the developed world. You’ll recall that during the Iraq war, we heard a lot of talk about ancient Mesopotamia—the land of the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Hittites—being “the cradle of civilization.” That’s a very pertinent formulation: without a cradle, it’s hard to sustain a civilization. De
mography is not necessarily destiny: today’s high Muslim birth rates will fall, and probably fall dramatically, as the Catholic birth rates in Italy and Quebec have. But it’s no consolation that Muslim birth rates will be as bad as yours in 2050 if yours are off the cliff right now. The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in, and right now the last people around Europe will be Muslim.
For many nations, it’s already too late. As Romania and other Communist countries belatedly discovered, even a repressive dictatorship has a hard job coercing the populace into breeding once they’ve lost the habit. When I’ve mentioned the birth dearth in newspaper columns on abortion, pro-“choice” readers have insisted it’s due to other factors—the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg—or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of forty-eight. Whether or not Russia, Japan, and Europe’s fertility woes derive from abortion, what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is posited—as an issue of personal choice—is in and of itself symptomatic of the existential crisis of the dying West. In a traditional society—a seventeenth-century farming village, say—children are an advantage, not just economically but in more general social ways. We’re not doing a lot of seventeenth-century farming these days, so we need to find a way to restore advantage to parenthood in the context of a modern society.