America Alone (9 page)

In 1903, in The Riddle of the Sands, the first great English spy novel, Erskine Childers has his yachtsman, Davies, try to persuade the Foreign Office wallah Carruthers to take seriously the possibility of German naval marauders in the Fresian Islands: Follow the parallel of a war on land. People your mountains with a daring and resourceful race, who possess an intimate knowledge of every track and bridlepath, who operate in small bands, travel light, and move rapidly. See what an immense advantage such guerrillas possess over an enemy which clings to beaten tracks, moves in large bodies, slowly, and does not "know the country." Davies wants Carruthers to apply the old principles to new forms of warfare. The Islamists are doing that. Their most effective guerrillas aren't in the Hindu Kush, where it's the work of moments to drop a daisy cutter on the mighty Pashtun warrior. They're traveling light on the bridle paths of Europe--the small cells, the opportunist imams, the ambitious lobby groups that operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society--while politicians cling to the beaten tracks of old ideas, multicultural pieties, and a general hope that things will turn out for the best.

"We're the ones who will change you," Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."

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Chapter Three

Men Are from Venus

V S . S E C O N D A R Y I M P U L S E S

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics .... For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

POLYBIUS, THE HISTORIES. BOOK XXXVI (CIRCA 150 BC)

How did today's demographic disaster happen? How did the wealthiest civilization in human history, the engine of global progress, opt for self-liquidation in favor of the modern world's most technologically impoverished and backward culture? Today, the typical advanced society trumpets its defects as virtues. Immigration certainly has its blessings; the provincial restaurant scene in England would be a lot duller without curry houses, etc. But it's very silly to boast about it as proof of one's moral superiority. A dependence on immigration from very limited and particular sources is not a strength but a weakness. The Continent's imams can certainly see that: they understand that Europe is the colony now. John O'Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once observed that postwar Canadian history is summed up by an old Monty Python song. "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay" begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods--as the intro goes, "Leaping from tree to tree! As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia!"--but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some sort of transvestite pick-up who sings that he likes to "wear high heels, suspenders, and a bra" and

"dress in women's clothing and hang around in bars."

I know what he means. In 2005 I chanced to see a selection of images from the Miss Shemale World celebrations outside Toronto's City Hall. And what struck me was not that

"shemales" should want to have a big ol' parade showing off their outsized implants--each to her own, even if in this case her own were purchased from Dow Corning. No, what seemed more pertinent was that the local government should think Miss Shemale World is an event that requires municipal approval. Of course, if they hadn't approved, they would have been guilty of being "non-inclusive." John O'Sullivan isn't saying Canadian men are literally crossdressers--certainly no more than 35, 40 percent, and me only on weekends--but nonetheless a once manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological makeover. In 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the third-largest surface fleet in the world; the Royal Canadian Air Force was one of the most effective air forces in the world; Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were
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transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes the secondary impulses of society--rights and entitlements from cradle to grave--over all the primary ones. In that, Canada's not alone. If the O'Sullivan thesis is flawed, it's only because the Lumberjack Song could also stand as the postwar history of almost the entire developed world. To understand why the West seems so weak in the face of a laughably primitive enemy it's necessary to examine the wholesale transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two. Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health care (which America is slouching toward, incrementally but remorselessly), government day care (which was supposedly the most important issue in the 2006 Canadian election), government paternity leave (which Britain has introduced). We've elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. If you don't "go forth and multiply" you can't afford all those secondary-impulse programs, like lifelong welfare, whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad category of self-gratification issues: we want the state to take our elderly relatives off our hands not so much because it's better for them, but because otherwise the old coots would cut seriously into our own time. Fair enough. But once you decide you can do without grandparents, it's not such a stretch to decide you can do without grandchildren.

I've always loved Lincoln's allusion to the "mystic chords of memory" because it conveys beautifully the layers of a healthy society: the top notes--the melody line, the tune--are the present, but the underlying harmony is critical, too; it places the present in the context of history and eternal truths, and thereby binds us not just to the past but commits us to the future, too. Yet since 1945, throughout the West, a variety of government interventions-state pensions, subsidized higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything--has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that Continentals now exist almost entirely in a present-tense culture of complete self-absorption. In the end, the primal impulses are the ones that count. Robert Kagan's observation that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus doesn't quite cover it. The Lumberjack Song and the Shemale World get closer: we're Martians who think we can cross-dress as Venusians and everything will be all right. And like some of the hotter-looking transsexuals on display at Toronto's City Hall, the modern Western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect except its ability to reproduce.

Americans don't always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest of the developed world is: in Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is now somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don't think Donald Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion to be moved to Health and Human Services. Yet the secondary impulses are so advanced that most of America's allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like "power." In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that "the EU

must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests." No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: for many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. They've been supplanted by new measures of power, like how smoothly you fit in at the transnational yakfests (EU, UN, ICC, etc.). Yet in the long run this redefinition of the state is killing them. As Gerald Ford used to say when trying to ingratiate
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himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: a government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back.

That's the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP in the United States. In Greece, the figure is 25 percent--i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.

This is the paradox of "social democracy." When you demand lower taxes and less government, you're damned by the Left as "selfish." And, to be honest, in my case that's true. I'm glad to find a town road at the bottom of my driveway in the morning, and I'm happy to pay for the Army and a new fire truck for a volunteer fire department every now and then, but, other than that, I'd like to keep everything I earn and spend it on my priorities.

The Left, for its part, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it's better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens as a community. It's kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. To modify Polybius, it's "avarice" dressed up with

"pretentiousness." And it leads, in Europe and elsewhere, to societal "indolence." Somewhere along the way these countries redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And once you've done that, it's very hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he's happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.

The problem with this is not only fiscal but moral. Canada, according to its former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, wields enormous "soft power," in contrast to America with its anachronistic "hard power." If you say so. But it seems to me the real distinction is more profound--between hard culture and soft culture. That shrewd analyst of demographic and political trends Michael Barone published a book called Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future. It's hard to imagine anyone writing a book called Hard Canada, Soft Canada or Hard Europe, Soft Europe; that question got settled a generation ago. No Japanese soldier has been killed in combat since World War Two. That sounds very nice: they beat their swords into karaoke microphones and sang

"Give Peace a Chance." And, as a result, their country faces a graver existential crisis than it could ever suffer in battle.

"Soft power" is wielded by soft cultures, usually because they lack the will to maintain hard power. Can you remain a soft power for long? Maybe a generation or two. But a soft culture will, by its very nature, be unlikely to find the strength to stand up to a sustained
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assault by blunter, cruder forces--like, say, those youths on the Antwerp bus, or the Muslim gang-rapists in France with their preferred rite of passage, the tournante or "take your turn." On the night of September 11 Muslim youths in northern England rampaged through the streets cheering Islam's glorious victory over the Great Satan. They pounded on the hoods-or, to use the quaintly bucolic locution of British English, the "bonnets"--of the cars, hammered the doors and demanded the drivers join them in their chants of "Osama bin Laden is a great man."

Try that in Texas, and the guy will reach into his glove box and blow your head off. Even in Vermont it's an ill-advised tactic. But in Britain you're not allowed to own a gun or even (to all intents and purposes) resist assault. So the unfortunate burghers of Bradford went home cowed and terrified, and the Muslim gangs went swaggering off with their selfesteem enormously enhanced. The bullying, intimidating side of Muslim immigration in Europe seems to be largely absent in America, in part at least because the assertiveness of the individual American citizen makes it a riskier undertaking.

New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don't have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don't. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you'd have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist's pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who'll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his seventydollar TV. A North Country non-gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non-gun owner just like him: Washington, D.C., say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and security cameras.