America Alone (10 page)

As with state gun control, so with state God control. A hyper-rationalist can dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of applesauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judeo-Christian culture. As the bumper sticker says, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. Likewise, if (as Europe has done) you marginalize religion, only the marginalized will have religion. That's why France's impoverished Muslim ghettos display more cultural confidence than the wealthiest enclaves of the capital.
MORAL HEALTH

In this long twilight struggle brought into focus by September 11, the hard cultures will survive and the soft won't. In Europe, the soft culture is so pervasive--state pensions, protected jobs, six weeks of paid vacation, lavish unemployment benefits if the thirty-fivehour work week sounds too grueling--that the citizen is little more than a junkie on the state narcotic. Faced with the perfect storm of swollen pension liabilities and collapsed birth rates, even Continental politicians recognize the need to wean their citizenry off some of these entitlements. But the citizens don't. What do they care if their country will be bankrupt in twenty years and extinct in seventy? Not my problem, man. Call me when I get back from the beach.

In 2006, the Economist reported on the growing tendency of the state to use its power to direct your life in socially beneficial ways--to coerce you into not smoking, eating healthily, etc.--and concluded: "Its champions will say that soft paternalism should only be used for ends that are unarguably good: on the side of sobriety, prudence, and restraint. But
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private virtues such as these are as likely to wither as to flourish when public bodies take charge of them."

That's correct. The ends may be "unarguably good" but they lead to other ends that are unarguably bad. It's the case that in a general population some people will neglect their elderly parents and leave their children alone at home while they go off gallivanting. However, by making the government the guarantor of a comfortable old age and supervised day care, you don't end such fecklessness. Rather, by relieving the individual of the need to have "private virtues," you'll ensure that they wither away to the edges of society. Modern social-democratic states are so corrosive of their citizens' wills and so enervating in elevating secondary priorities over primary ones that most of them would not survive even without the Islamists. That's a remarkable thought: Europe doesn't need an enemy; it's losing to its own torpor. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have, starting with your sense of self-reliance. There is one (partial) exception to the softening of the West: a nation that still breeds, still puts in a full work week, still maintains a vigorous military. And what's the reaction of the rest of the developed world (plus the Democratic Party, the mainstream American media, and the "international law" groupies on the Supreme Court)? It demands America quit monkeying around and sign up to the suicide pact with the rest of 'em. Take Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer, former Great Thinker to the prewar Tony Blair, and one of the great gasbags of the new Europe. I hasten to add I say that not as a cheap ad hominem insult--or anyway not merely as a cheap ad hominem insult--but because Mr. Hutton is the master of the dead language of statism that differentiates the modern Europhile from most Americans.

In his 2003 book A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World, Mr. Hutton is at pains to establish how much he loves the country: "I enjoy Sheryl Crow and Clint Eastwood alike, delight in Woody Allen .... " I'd wager he's faking at least two of these enthusiasms, and the third, Mr. Allen, is the man the French government hired when they needed a beloved American celebrity to restore their nation's image in America. Only the French government could think an endorsement by Woody Allen would improve their standing with the American people. But, having brandished his credentials, Mr. Hutton says that it's his "affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself." Many Americans of Left and Right could write a book like that, but, as things transpire, the great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. This becomes explicit when he compares the American Revolution with the French Revolution of 1789, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism (boo!) of the thirteen colonies the French promoted "a new social contract" (hurrah!).

Well, you never know. It may be the defects of America's Founders that help explain why the United States has lagged so far behind France in technological innovation, economic growth, military performance, standard of living, etc. Mr. Hutton insists that "all western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist." Given that New Hampshire, for example, has been a continuous democracy for two centuries longer than Germany, this seems a dubious postulation. It would be more accurate to say that almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Hutton has it,

"the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society."
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Precisely. And it's the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Hutton calls "the primacy of society" that's blighted the Continent for over a century: statism--or "the primacy of society"--is what Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the European Union all have in common. The curse of the Continent is big ideas, each wacky notion a response to the last flop: the prewar German middle classes put their hopes in Hitler as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks; likewise, the postwar German middle classes decided European integration was their bulwark against a resurgence of Nazism.

True, after Fascism and Communism, the European Union seems comparatively innocent--not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European directives that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government. Europeans never feel obliged to defend their mystical belief in statism: though they claim to be post-Christian rationalists, it's mostly a matter of blind faith. That's why Will Hutton feels almost physically insecure when he's in one of the few spots on the planet where the virtues of the state religion are questioned. "In a world that is wholly private," he says of America, "we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us." He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (i.e., the typical discussion panel on the Continent is comprised of representatives of the center-left, the far left, and the loony left). "Europe," he explains, "acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria."

"Public interest criteria ": keep that bland phrase in your head when you need to know everything that's wrong with Europe. It's code-speak for a kind of easy-listening tyranny.

"Public interest criteria" doesn't mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite--via various appointed bodies decide what the public's interest is for them. Which is why there are no Rush Limbaughs or James Dobsons on European radio. But you do hear a lot of Will Hutton.

The real issue, though, is not whether you like Euro-statism.

Regardless of how you feel about it, it's kaput. The un-American activities in which Europe has invested its identity are deeply self-destructive. Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable--who wouldn't want to live in a world where the burning political priorities are government-subsidized day care, the celebration of one's sexual appetites, and whether mandatory paid vacation should be six or eight weeks? But they're agreeable only for the generation or two that they last. And, as we're about to see in demographically barren, economically ossified Europe, for good or ill it's the primal impulses that count. Europe's belief that you can smooth off the rough edges of Anglo-American capitalism and still remain wealthy has trapped it in societal structures predicated on false arithmetic whose disastrous consequences can't be postponed much longer. Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the freeborn citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government. What then would happen if America were to follow Mr. Hutton's advice and "join the world"? Well, those "40 million Americans without health insurance" would enjoy the benefit of a new government health care system and, like their 250 million neighbors, would discover the charms of the health care "waiting list"--the one year, two years, or more Britons and others wait in pain for even routine operations; the six, twelve, eighteen months Canadians wait for an MRI scan, there being more such scanners in the city of Philadelphia
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than in the entire Great White North. They're now pioneering the ultimate expression of government health care: the ten-month waiting list for the maternity ward. In 2004, Debrah Cornthwaite gave birth to twin boys at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton. That's in Alberta. Mrs. Cornthwaite had begun the big day by going to her local maternity ward at Langley Memorial Hospital. That's in British Columbia. They told her, yes, your contractions are coming every four minutes, but sorry, we don't have any beds. And, after they'd checked with the bed-availability help line "BC Bedline," they brought her the further good news that there was not a hospital anywhere in the province in which she could deliver her babies. There followed seven hours of red tape and paperwork. Then, late in the evening, she was driven to the airport and put on a chartered twin-prop to Edmonton. In the course of the flight, the contractions increased to every two and a half minutes--and most Lamaze classes don't teach timing your breathing to turbulence over the Rockies. How many Americans would want to do that on delivery day? You pack your bag and head to your local hospital in Oakland, and they say: Not to worry, we've got a bed for you in Denver.

Euro-Canadian socialized health care is, in essence, subsidized by American taxpayers: since the end of World War Two, Washington has assumed the defense costs of its allies, thereby freeing up those countries to spend their tax revenues on lavish social programs. But, if America follows the Hutton plan and "joins the world," it will reduce its defense expenditures to Euro-Canadian levels. So the next time a tsunami hits Sri Lanka or Indonesia there will be no carrier groups to divert and save lives. So more people will die, waiting the weeks and weeks it took the sleepy time gals at the United Nations to arrive. Were America to "join the world," it would have to reduce its funding of the UN and other world bodies to European levels. And it might have to scale back its domestic agencies so that they're no longer able to serve in effect as international ones. Which will be tough when some kid in some village on the other side of the world comes down with some weird illness no one's seen before and they want to FedEx the test tube to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to figure out what's going on. Indeed, even relatively advanced societies admired by the likes of Will Hutton take it as routine that the CDC is a kind of Health Ministry of last resort. When SARS leapt from China to infect Toronto's hospitals in 2003, the principal contribution of the WHO (World Health Organization) was to issue a travel advisory warning visitors to steer clear of Ontario, leaving it to the CDC to provide advanced and practical analysis of the problem. Toronto's mayor, Mel Lastman, had a hard time keeping track of all the acronyms, and in one press conference launched into a bitter attack on the damaging effects of the travel advisory issued by the CDC.

The doctor next to him tried to correct him: "Who," she said.

"The CDC," he repeated.

"Who," she said.

"The CDC," he repeated, wondering why she hadn't heard his answer to the question the first time. This diseased version of the Abbott and Costello routine went on a while longer, before the doc realized she had to spell it out: W-H-O, the World Health Organization.

"Oh, yeah. Them, too," said Hizzoner.

Yet under the who's-on-first shtick lay an important truth: if an infection shows up in an Atlanta hospital, no American doctor looks for guidance from a Canadian government agency. But if it shows up in a Toronto hospital, the Ontario health system takes it for
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granted that the best minds of the CDC in Atlanta will be staying late at the office trying to work out what's going on.

The answer to that Canadian doctor's vaudeville feed--"Who's on first?"--is America. When something goes awry, in a Sri Lankan beach resort or a Toronto hospital, it's the hyper power who shows up. America doesn't need to "join the world": it already provides a lot of the world's infrastructure. What Hutton means is that he wants the United States to stop being an exception and make like Europe. What would that mean? Well, it would mean more government, less religion, and a collapsed birth rate.

One should be cautious seeking correlations between social structures and fertility rates. They're falling around the world and no expert knows how to reverse them. Is it lack of religion? Whoa, steady: in Europe, the highest levels of church attendance are in those Mediterranean countries with the most wholly kaput birth rates, while Scandinavian nations with all but undetectable levels of religious observance have some of the healthiest--or, at any rate, least unhealthy--fertility rates on the Continent: 1.64 births per couple in Sweden versus 1.15 in Spain.

Likewise, of the fiercely Islamist nations causing the world so much woe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have birth rates of 5.08 and 4.53, while Iran's has plummeted since its long war with Iraq to 2.33.