Mark Steyn - America Alone

We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman writes: So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism — a new Dark Ages.

Mr. Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To agitate about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race; it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60 percent, or 50, or 45 percent. Which is why that question lies at the heart of almost any big international news story of recent years — the French riots, the attacks on Danish embassies and consulates over the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Turkey’s membership in the European Union, Pakistani riots over Newsweek’s Koran-down-thetoilet story. Whenever I make that point, lefties always respond, “Oh, well, that’s typical right-wing racism.” In fact, it ought to be the Left’s issue. I’m a “social conservative.” When the mullahs take over, I’ll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple extra wives, and keep my head down. It’s the feminists and gays who’ll have a tougher time. If, say, three of the five judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court are Muslim, what are the chances of them approving “gay marriage”? That’s the scenario Europe’s looking at a few years down the road.

The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the “war on terror” for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But in Europe it’s a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as “a faraway country of which we know little.” This time around, for much of Western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.

As for America, Shelby Steele sees the tentativeness of our performance in Iraq as a geopolitical version of “white guilt,” a “secular penitence” for the sins of the past. Even while waging war, our culture has internalized the morbid syndromes of the age: who are we to liberate the Iraqis? We represent imperialism and all the other evils. On that point, I wish we did represent imperialism, at least to this extent: there’s a lot to be said for a great nation that understands its greatness is not an accident and that therefore it should spread the secrets of its success around; conversely, there’s not much to be said for a great nation that chooses to hobble itself by pretending it’s merely one vote among coequals on international bodies manned by Cuba and Sudan-the transnational version of “affirmative action,” to extend Shelby Steele’s thought. As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive warwealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. Everything else it requires it can pick up at Radio Shack: cell phones and laptops, which, along with ATM cards and some dime-store box-cutters, were all it took to pull off September 11. For this to be an existential struggle, as the Cold War was, the question is: are they a credible enemy to us?

For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: are we a credible enemy to them?

You may recall a pertinent detail during the bogus controversy over the “torture” of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: U.S. guards at Gitmo are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean.” But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them — and, by doing so, to validate their bigotry. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London. It’s not just unbecoming to buy in to Muslim psychoses; in the end, it’s selfdefeating. And our self-defeat is their surest shot at victory. Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs — our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower — their strengths. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western Civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, the jihadists figure: hey, why not us?

The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it’s a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By “demographic,” I mean the Muslim world’s high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By “economic,” I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable with their post-Christian birth rates. By “geopolitical,” I mean that if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

I said above that there is one difference between me and the other doom-mongers. For AI Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it’s global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizen to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. Not only does this not solve the problem, it is, in fact, a symptom of the real problem: the torpor of the West derives in part from the annexation by government of most of the core functions of adulthood. Even in America, too many Democrats take it as read that the natural destination of an advanced Western democracy is Scandinavia. If it is, we’re all doomed. Every successful society is a balancing act between the private and the public, but in Europe and Canada the balance is way out of whack. When the foreign policy panjandrums talk about our enemies, they distinguish between “rogue states” like Iran and North Korea and “non-state actors” like al Qaeda and Hezbollah. But those distinctions apply on the home front too. Big governments are “rogue states,” out of control and lacking the wit and agility to see off the threats to our freedom. Citizens willing to be “non-state actors” are just as important and, as we saw on Flight 93, a decisive part of our defense, nimbler and more efficient than the federal behemoth. The free world’s citizenry could use more non-state actors.