- Steyn, Mark.
After America.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-59698-100-3.
-
If John Derbyshire's We Are Doomed (October 2009)
wasn't gloomy enough for you, this book will have you laughing all way from
the event horizon to the central singularity toward which what remains of
Western civilisation is free falling. In the author's view, the West now
faces a perfect storm of demographic collapse (discussed in detail in
his earlier America Alone [November 2006]);
financial cataclysm due to unsustainable debt and “entitlement”
commitments made by the welfare state; a culture crash after two generations
have been indoctrinated in dependency, multiculturalism, and not just
ignorance but a counterfactual fantasy view of history; and a political
and cultural élite which has become so distinct and disconnected
from the shrinking productive classes it almost seems to be evolving
into a separate species.
Steyn uses H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
as his guide to the future, arguing that Wells got the details right
but that bifurcation of mankind into the effete Eloi
and the productive but menacing Morlocks is not in the remote future,
but has already happened
in Western society in every sense but the biological, and even that
is effectively the case as the two castes increasingly rarely come
into contact with one another, no less interbreed. The Eloi,
what Angelo Codevilla called
The Ruling Class (October 2010),
are the product of top-ranked universities and law schools
and dominate government, academia, and the media. Many of them
have been supported by taxpayers their entire lives and have
never actually done anything productive in their careers.
The Obama administration, which is almost devoid of individuals
with any private sector experience at the cabinet level, might be
deemed the first all-Eloi government in the U.S. As Wells's Time
Traveller discovered, the whole Eloi/Morlock thing ended badly, and
that's what Steyn envisions happening in the West, not in the distant
future or even by mid-century, but within this decade, absent
radical and painful course changes which are difficult to
imagine being implemented by the feckless political classes of
Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
In a chilling chapter, Steyn invokes the time machine once again to
deliver a letter from the middle of our century to a reader
in the America of 1950. In a way the world he describes would
be as alien to its Truman administration reader as any dystopian
vision of Wells, Orwell, or Huxley, and it is particularly disturbing
to note that most of the changes he forecasts have already taken
place or their precipitating events already underway in trends which
are either impossible or extremely difficult to reverse. A final
chapter, which I'll bet was added at the insistence of the publisher,
provides a list of things which might be done to rescue the West from
its imminent demise. They all make perfect sense, are easily understood,
and would doubtless improve the situation even if inadequate to
entirely avoid the coming calamity. And there is precisely zero chance of
any of them being implemented in a country where 52.9% of the
population voted for Barack Obama in 2008, at the
tipping point
where a majority dependent on the state and state employees who
tend to them outvote a minority of productive taxpayers.
Regular readers of Steyn's columns will find much of this material
familiar—I suspect there was more than a little cut and
paste in assembling this manuscript. The tone of the argument is
more the full-tilt irony, mockery, and word play one expects in
a column than the more laid back voice customary in a book. You
might want to read a chapter every few days rather than ploughing
right through to the end to avoid getting numbed. But then the
writing is so good it's difficult to put down.
In the Kindle edition, end notes are properly linked
to the text and in notes which cite a document on the Web, the URL is linked
to the on-line document. The index, however, is simply a useless list of
terms without links to references in the text.
August 2011 