Mark Steyn - America Alone

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 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.

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.

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 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!).