America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  All we know is that the modern social-democratic state is not the answer. The EU figures it needs another fifty million immigrants in the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the lavish social programs its vast retired army of baby boomers expects to enjoy. And the only available sources of immigrants are North Africa and the Middle East. Whether these are the chaps to keep Pierre and Gerhard in the style to which they’ve become accustomed is highly doubtful: according to some Scandinavian statistics, 40 percent of those on welfare are immigrants. Elsewhere, the picture is similar: welfare regimes work a lot better for their Islamist beneficiaries than for native Continental ones.

  When one contemplates the demographic catastrophe, it’s easy to say, well, maybe we should reduce the tax burden on young fertile adults, make it easier for them to afford to buy a home and start a family. But the economic argument is, in the larger scheme, marginal. In traditional rural societies, children were a necessary insurance for one’s old age: by the time you were too stooped and worn to plough the field and hunt for dinner, Junior would do it for you. Today, when you’re stooped and worn (and, in fact, long before that point), the state steps in to take care of you. Reconnecting nanny-state populations with cross-generational solidarity requires much more than the marginal tax breaks the Portuguese government announced or the nine thousand bucks the Russian state is now offering for second children. The most important action in reacquainting individuals with a larger sense of life is the one that governments recoil from: shrink the state.

  They could at least reorient as many benefits as possible toward children: In America, a lot of welfare is inadvertently natalist (albeit in not always helpful ways, like single motherhood) in the sense that for most of the big-time benefit gravy you need babies. But those nations farther down the death spiral will need to embrace serious uber-natalism: for example, if you’ve got four dependents, your taxable income ought to be divided by five; an employed man with a stay-at-home wife and three children pays a fifth of what an employed single man does. If they both earn $50,000, the swingin’ bachelor pays tax on $50,000, which still leaves enough for him to hit the singles bars; the married stiff pays tax on $10,000, which makes a family affordable.

  Another constraint on family size is available housing. Acre for acre, America is the cheapest developed country in which to buy a big home with plenty of space for plenty of kids. That helps explain why Canada’s fertility rate is so European: partly for reasons of climate but partly because of more recent Trudeaupian social developments and immigration trends, the Northern Dominion’s population is more concentrated than America’s—i.e., more urban. If you were designing a “master plan” for Canada, you’d want to provide some way of encouraging still fecund young couples to move from their poky Toronto and Vancouver apartments to the great outdoors. In Western Europe, the cost of housing is extraordinarily high. Whenever I read about the ever-larger number of Italians in early middle age still living with mom and dad, I’m reminded of an old Benny Hill sketch in which he and his dolly bird are bikers who can’t get public housing. The BBC interviewer says, “Why don’t you move back in with your parents?” Benny grunts, “We would do, but they’ve moved back in with theirs.”

  That gets closer to the nub of the matter. It’s not just a question of tax breaks and affordable housing. The chief characteristic of our age is “deferred adulthood.” All over North America and Europe there are millions of people going to college for no good reason. Certainly, there’s no reason why the sum of knowledge the average American has accumulated by the time he’s completed a bachelor’s degree should take twenty years to inculcate. We need to redirect the system to telescope education into a much shorter period. Instead, we’ve implicitly accepted that our bodies mature much earlier than our great-grandparents’ but that our minds don’t. We enter adolescence much sooner and leave it much later—in some cases, not until middle age. We’ve created a world where a thirty-one-year-old European male can stroll into a nightclub, tell the babes he lives at his mom and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in diapers—and he can still walk out with a hot-looking date. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.

  The state and its citizens would be better off if we gave students a terrific high school education and then let ’em get on with earning money so they can afford to have two or three kids in their twenties instead of one fertility-treatment special delivery in late middle age. It won’t be easy to do that, particularly in America, where schools are a bastion of over-unionization dedicated to expanding their privileges and protections at the expense of their pupils. But our refusal to rein in deferred adulthood is one reason why developed societies are ever more dependent on unsustainable levels of immigration. That includes the United States, where the Hispanicization of large parts of the country is setting up America for the most destabilizing aspects of bicultural and bilingual societies.

  By 2015, almost every viable political party in the West will be natalist, and the cannier ones will be supporting policies—like a flat tax—that help restore the societal architecture vandalized by careless governmental social engineering. As much as Europe and Islamism, social and fiscal policy are now a matter of national survival. In the end, it’s not about cash: after all, materialism and self-gratification are why Eutopians gave up on the future in the first place. The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.

  Because, if we don’t, the unthinkable solutions are the only ones left.

  In his final book, the distinguished British commentator Anthony Sampson claimed that after September 11 “the fear of terrorism strengthened the hands of all governments.” It certainly shouldn’t have. In Hans Monderman’s Netherlands, they show some signs of acknowledging that the multiculti pieties of the last thirty years were a dangerous fantasy; in the rest of the developed world, they’re still larding it on. If America is to avoid the Continent’s fate, she needs to talk up self-reliance and individual innovation instead of being sheepish (as Democrats often sound) that their Neanderthal citizenry aren’t more enlightened and European. Free citizens have a shot at winning this existential struggle; nanny-state charges don’t. The road ahead will be difficult enough; cluttering it up with “no parking” signs isn’t going to make it any safer.

  Chapter Ten

  The Falling Camel

  LAST LEGS

  Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON, SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE (1870)

  This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

  India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really do believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. But if you think
you genuinely believe that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

  The rest of us—the ones who think you can make judgments about competing cultures on liberty, religious freedom, the rule of law—need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated.

  Instead, as his first reaction to the controversy over those Danish cartoons, the EU’s justice and security commissioner, Franco Frattini, said that Europe would set up a “media code” to encourage “prudence” in the way they cover, um, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, “The press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression…. We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”

  “Prudence”? “Self-regulate our free expression”? No, I’m afraid that’s just giving the Muslim world the message: you’ve won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.

  But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his novel Prayers for the Assassin, “A falling camel attracts many knives.” In Denmark and France, the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.

  Or as Simeon Howard said in a sermon preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston in 1773:

  An incautious people may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them; especially if they are persisted in. And, with respect to such injuries, we should ever act upon that ancient maxim of prudence; obsta principiis. The first unjust demands of an encroaching power should be firmly withstood, when there appears a disposition to repeat and encrease such demands. And oftentimes it may be both the right and duty of a people to engage in war, rather than give up to the demands of such a power, what they could, without any incoveniency, spare in the way of charity. War, though a great evil, is ever preferable to such concessions, as are likely to be fatal to public liberty.

  After the Madrid bombing, the Spectator, the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language, ran an editorial headlined “We Are Not at War.” They wished to assure Britons that the jihad would not be taking possession of Buckingham Palace: “Osama bin Laden is no more likely to march triumphantly down the Mall than is a little green man from Mars. Al Qaeda has means but no end.”

  Well, no, Osama won’t be going down the Mall and through the Palace gates, unless it’s his surviving granules of DNA on a gun carriage. But it doesn’t have to be that dramatic: the al Qaeda air force won’t be having dogfights with the RAF over the White Cliffs of Dover before the Queen signs the instrument of abdication in the presence of the Acting First Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Britain. Yet you can reach the same point of surrender very gradually, almost imperceptibly. In that respect, the editors of the Spectator have it exactly backward: al Qaeda haven’t the means, but their end—the Islamification of the West—is shared by millions of law-abiding Muslims. Recall one of the most famous images of terror, from Joseph Conrad’s great novel The Secret Agent (1907) and its signature scene of the lone terrorist padding the streets of London with a bomb strapped to his chest:

  He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

  The power of the image lies in the bomber’s isolation from the tide of Londoners all around him, all blissfully unaware. But, as became clear very quickly after the 2005 Tube bombings, that’s not quite the world we live in. It’s not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there’s a lot of murky shades of gray in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young male co-religionists gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of “moderates” who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting treason against the state, and around them another mesh of religious and community leaders who serve as apologists for the inciters, and around them a network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of elite opinion in the media and elsewhere too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a few new laws and a bit of community outreach.

  It’s these insulating circles of gray—the imams, lobby groups, media, bishops, politicians—that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force. And way out at the end of this chain of shades of gray is the general population. And sometimes enough of them bleed into the gray blur of passivity and defeatism, as in Spain. Sometimes they don’t, yet, as in America. And sometimes, as in the United Kingdom, they talk about defiance and the old Blitz spirit, but they make a thousand trivial concessions day by day. That’s how great nations die—not by war or conquest, but bit by bit, until one day you wake up and you don’t need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal over the last ten years.

  So, unlike Conrad’s lone bomber, this enemy is able to hide in plain sight—a pest in a street full of pests, in an America where half the political establishment wants to upgrade enemies into defendants with their day in court and full legal rights, in a Europe paralyzed by fear of its own immigrant populations, in a Western world whose media dignify our killers as “militants,” “activists,” and “insurgents.” “Why do they hate us?” was never the right question. “Why do they despise us?” is a better one.

  After the carnage in Spain, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed told Lisbon’s Publica magazine that a group of London Islamists were “ready to launch a big operation” on British soil. “We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents,” he said, clarifying the ground rules. “Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value.” The cleric added he expected to see the banner of Islam flying in Downing Street. “I believe one day that is going to happen. Because this is my country, I like living here,” he said. “If they believe in democracy, who are they afraid of? Let Omar Bakri benefit from democracy!”

  You think that sounds ridiculous? The Islamic crescent flying over 10 Downing Street? You’d be surprised how quickly the question of what flag should fly over government buildings can become an issue. In 2005, Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, banned the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and so is offensive to Muslims. The Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency has also banned the English flag from its offices. So has Heathrow Airport.

  So Britain’s already crept a little way toward the Spectator’s allegedly as-kooky-as-men-from-Mars scenario: the old flag’s unflyable, de facto if not quite de jure, and it’s just a matter of what new and appropriate multicultural swatch is selected to fly in its place.

  If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier: even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there’s an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don’t attack him head on, don’t brutalize him: pain and tortu
re can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he’ll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons.

  Fast-moving demographic changes provide immense challenges for any society. In the wake of the No Mexican Left Behind illegal-immigration come-on-down bonanza passed by the Senate and cheered by the president in 2006, National Review’s John Derbyshire noted the enrolment statistics for his school district on suburban Long Island, 1,400 miles from the southern border:

  High school: 17 percent Hispanic

  Intermediate: 28 percent Hispanic

  Elementary: 31 percent Hispanic

  There’s no jihad, no honor killings, no polygamy issues with Latinos. But transformative demographic trends at the very minimum impose huge costs even for quiet communities far from the political front lines. Derbyshire’s numbers suggest that at some point every school board in America will have to factor in ever-swelling bilingual and other related education programs. That’s aside from the bigger cultural shifts less easy to quantify in budgetary line items.

  You might say, as “open borders” advocates do, oh well, the American idea is so strong that all those 31 percent grade school Hispanics will be perfectly assimilated by the time they’re in high school. Maybe. To put it at its mildest, that requires taking a very optimistic view of the assimilationist power of contemporary multiculturalism. Now put yourself in Europe’s shoes, up against a surging demographic more self-segregating and more explicitly opposed to the Continent’s cultural and political inheritance. Will plus demography is a potent combination: it’s why you can’t dismiss Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed as a fringe nutcake—because he can command just enough support from just enough people to put just enough of what he wants just within the realm of political possibility.