Steyn writes in the November, 2011 Commentary magazine as part of a symposium of 41 writers answering the question, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America's future?" Steyn is pessimistic. I am too. Absent a turnabout of mind and heart not yet visible on the horizon, Steyn's expectations strike me as the most sane and sober -- unhappy, unwelcome, and depressing though they be.
[...] There were three great citadels of Western civilization: Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. It took a fourth, London, Washington’s immediate predecessor as the dominant power, to disseminate the ideas of Athenian democracy and Roman law and the Hebrew Bible to the farthest corners of the earth. America has signs of decline that follow the examples of all four.
Rome once built aqueducts, and then it stopped building aqueducts, and then the aqueducts it had built started to decay. At the dawn of big government, in the 1930s, we built the Hoover Dam. Then we stopped building dams. In September, in the town of Port Angeles in the state of Washington, there commenced the destruction of two century-old dams in order to “liberate” the Elwha River . So now we’re dismantling dams.
You can see this at work—or rather, not at work—every time you’re on the isle of Manhattan. The Empire State Building was put up in one year and 45 days in the middle of a depression. Ground Zero is still a building site after a decade. 9/11 is something America’s enemies did to us. The 10-year hole in the ground is something we did to ourselves.
Now consider the people who went rampaging through the streets this summer in London. These are the children of dependency, people who have been marinated in stimulus within an inch of their lives, and they’re good for nothing but lobbing concrete through store windows so they can steal the latest models of electronic toys. They tore apart a city that, within living memory, governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialist on that scale, you make a lot of mistakes. But nothing the British did to any of their subject peoples in far-flung corners of the globe compares with what they did post-imperially to their own population.
These are the great-grandchildren of a tiny island that stood alone against the Germans during the Blitz in that terrible year after the fall of France. If those Britons of mid-century were to come back, they would assume they had landed in some bizarro alternative universe—until, like Charlton Heston rounding the corner and seeing the shattered Statue of Liberty poking up out of the sands, they realize that the Planet of the Apes is their own. The evil of big government is not that it is a waste of money, but that it lays waste to people. . . .
. . . In 2008, the U.S. electorate also voted for normaliut. Americans voted to repudiate the previous years, dominated by terror attacks and Code Orange alerts and anthrax scares, and thankless semicolonial soldiering in corners of the map no one cared about. They were under the sway of a desperate hope that wars can simply come to an end when one side decides it’s all a bit of a bore. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan wanted to vote itself off the island.
But as Israel understands by now, sometimes who you are is more important than anything you do. And sometimes who you are is an offense to those indifferent to anything you might or might not do. America will discover, as Israel did, that a one-way urge for normaliut will lead to a more dangerous world.
When you have government on the scale Europe enjoys and America has moved toward, there are hard choices to be made: as postwar Britain came to understand, you can have Scandinavian-style entitlements or a military of global reach, but you can’t have both. The current “supercommittee” or the next will find it easier to cut military commitments for which the public has little appetite than to shrink in any meaningful sense an ever more deeply ingrained transgenerational dependency culture.
And without a military or global reach, we will find the spaces in the Pax Americana left unoccupied like an underwater house in a Nevada real-estate development quickly filled by anti-American menaces. Last year, Die Welt reported that on a recent visit to Tehran, Hugo Chavez had signed an agreement to place Iranian missiles at a jointly operated military base in his satrapy, Venezuela. That’s how it begins. In the years ahead, distant enemies of this country will seed new proxies in Latin America as Iran did to Israel with Hamas and Hezbollah.
It starts with the money, but it doesn’t stop there: as all dominant nations learn, when money drains, power drains.
Nowhere can we see the effects of that truth better than in East Asia. China is already the world’s biggest manufacturer. It is already the world’s biggest exporter. It is the postcolonial patron of resource-rich Africa. It is the post-downturn patron of cash-strapped Mediterranean Europe. It is the biggest trading partner of India, Brazil, and other emerging powers. We should not be surprised that in such a world, getting on with America will matter less and less.
There have been moments, without question, when this has proved to be unexpectedly good news for us. Washington and its geriatric EU allies wanted the Copenhagen climate change deal in 2009, the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism ever mounted, an embryo exercise in global government. Brazil and India joined with China to block it. It’s a mark of the perversity of the age that it takes the Politburo to save global capitalism.
Sometimes, though, it’s not so good. In 2010, the Royal Australian Navy participated in its first naval exercises with Beijing. A few weeks later, Britain and Germany declined to support the United States in its efforts to get China to increase the value of its currency. Why would they? Even for America’s closest allies, the dominance of both the Pentagon and the almighty dollar has become conditional.
We will not like this post-American world, which will not even bring us normaliut. America will discover, as Britain has in twilight, that, long after imperial grandeur has faded, imperial resentments linger. We will not be left alone to fade into second-rate status. We will be taunted and humiliated and haunted and chased on the way down.
And yet, even in my deepest and most pessimistic vision, I can see a different future for the United States. For as the past few years have taught us, the great thing about the United States is that it is not Europe. When the economy headed south in 2008 and 2009, everywhere around the planet, people besieged their parliaments, asking them, “Why didn’t you, the government, do more for us?” They did it in Iceland. They did it in Bulgaria. They did it in Lithuania. They did it in Greece. They did it in the United Kingdom. They did it in France.
The United States is the only country in the world where a mass movement took to the streets in 2009 to say we could do just fine if you, the government, stayed the hell out of our pockets and the hell out of our lives. That fact, that populist refusal to be Europeanized, represents the best hope for this country. Those now-caricatured, much-maligned Tea Partiers moved the meter of public discourse significantly back in the direction of sanity. And that includes Barack Obama.
In 1975, Milton Friedman said this: “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.”
Just so. Every time Barack Obama stands at his teleprompter and is forced to pretend that he’s interested in deficit reduction, we have taken a step toward that Milton Friedman reality. You have to create the conditions, as the Tea Party and the town hall meetings did, whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things.
One cannot wait for the great leader to descend from the heavens to do the work for us. Every glamour boy, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney to Rick Perry, proves to have feet of clay. It’s more important that tens of millions of ordinary citizens move the meter on public discourse and force the wrong people to do the right things.
But we don’t have much time to force them. If we don’t turn this thing around by mid-decade, if we let China become the dominant economic power in a world where the Iranians are nuclearizing and where Russia is making whatever mischief it can, we will see something new in world history. Something terrifying. This will not be like the transition from Britain to America, from a crucible of liberty to its greatest exponent. This will be the greatest step backwards for the civilization that built the modern world and spread its blessings across the map. There will be no new world order. There will be no world order.
The only way to prevent it is to act, and act quickly. Otherwise, it’s over. In 1969, in a poem about the end of the British empire called “Homage to a Government,” Philip Larkin wrote: “Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home/For lack of money…/We want the money for ourselves at home/Instead of working.” The narrator keeps saying that “this is all right,” but he concludes with this: “The statues will be standing in the same/Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same./Our children will not know it’s a different country./All we can hope to leave them now is money.”
We Americans can’t even hope that. And our children will know their reduced America was not the America that should have been theirs by right.
Update: Steyn announced that rather than be pegged as totally pessimistic, "In fairness, I see myself as more of a the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full type." In the course of his most recent comments, however, he explains another reason for pessimism.
In 2011, the United States Government took in $2.17 trillion but blew through $3.82 trillion – and that’s before Entitlement Armageddon shows up down the road. If you’re spending $4 trillion but only raising $2 trillion, you need to be cutting government in half or you’re not serious. Washington is not serious. Indeed, it’s far more frivolous than Athens.
The world has begun to figure out that the US political class is institutionally incapable of changing its ways, and cannot be diverted from the most expensive suicide in global history . . . [my bolding]