Mark Steyn - America Alone

Could America wind up as just another enervated present-tense Western nation? Well, it’s halfway there. I’ve no wish to be “partisan.” Not because attacking the Democrats is, as the media say, “mean-spirited,” but because the Democrats have chosen to make themselves all but irrelevant to the great questions of the age. You can understand why the Dems miss the nineties. There was nary a word about war. Okay, you’d get the odd million-man genocide in Rwanda, but you tended to hear about it afterward, usually as a late-breaking item in the Clinton teary-apology act. Instead, it was an era of micro-politics, a regulation here, an entitlement there, a bike path and a recycling program everywhere you looked. Venusian Americans assumed they’d entered an age of permanent post-Martian politics, and they resented September 11 as an intrusion on their minimalism. When you’re at an event for the “antiwar” movement, you realize it’s no such thing: it’s an I-don’t-want-to-have-to-hearabout-this-war movement. So they mock Bush, Cheney, Rummy, and Co. as the real terrorists — the ones determined to maintain America in a state of “terror.” Oddly enough, this was how the Left chose to live during the Cold War, when the no-nukes crowd expected Armageddon any minute. If you believe in a two-party system, in the end even the integrity of the dominant party isn’t served by the self-marginalization of the only alternative: the Democratic Party needs to get back in the game. But to do that they’ve got to get over the bike-path micro-politics and back on the unlovely central thruway of geopolitical reality.

Conservatives, on the other hand, embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney ever said was a couple of weeks after September 11: “One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.” Really?

I’d say September 11 vindicated perfectly a decentralized, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big-time, as the vice president would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA, and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the U.S. border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers. Yet, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, Amazon.com would know that he’d bought The A-Z of Infidel Slaying two years earlier and their “We have some suggestions for you!” box would be proffering a 30 percent discount on Suicide Bombing for Dummies. Amazon is a more efficient data miner than U.S. Immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon’s system is very cheap, but it’s in the nature of government to, do things worse, and slower.

Here’s another example of Dick Cheney’s government — the one we “trust and value and have high expectations for” — from the morning of September 11: FAA Command Center: Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters: God, I don’t know.

FAA Command Center: That’s a decision somebody’s going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA Headquarters: You know, everybody just left the room.

Most of what went wrong on September 11 we knew about in the first days after. Generally, it falls into two categories:

1. Government agencies didn’t enforce their own rules (as in the terrorists’ laughably inadequate visa applications).

or

2. The agencies’ rules were out of date-three out of those four planes reached their targets because their crews, passengers, and ground staff all blindly followed the FAA’s 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late, as the terrorists knew they would.

The next time a terrorist gets through and pulls off an attack, it will be for the same reasons: there’ll be a bunch of new post-September 11 regulations, and some bureaucrat somewhere will have neglected to follow them, or some wily Islamist will have rendered them as obsolete as his predecessors made all those thirty-year-old hijack rules. That’s an abiding feature of government: 90 percent of its ever-proliferating agencies just aren’t very good, and if you put your life in their hands, more fool you.

But, on the fourth plane, they didn’t follow the seventies hijack rituals. On Flight 93, they used their cell phones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free men, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private individuals. The first three planes were effectively an airborne European Union, where the rights of the citizens had been appropriated by the FAA’s flying nanny state. Up there where the air is rarified, all your liberties have been regulated away: there’s no smoking, there’s 100 percent gun control, you’re obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you; if the stewardess — whoops, sorry — if the flight attendant’s rude to you, tough; if you’re rude back, you’ll be arrested on landing. For thirty years, passengers surrendered more and more rights for the illusion of security, and, as a result, thousands died. On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer and others reclaimed those rights and demonstrated that they could exercise them more efficiently than government. The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: “Let’s roll!” as Mr. Beamer told his fellow passengers.

By contrast, on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after Mohammed Atta and Marwanal-Shehhi died flying their respective planes into World Trade Center Tower One and Tower Two, their flight school in Florida received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service informing it that Mr. Atta and Mr. al-Shehhi’s student visas had been approved. Even killing thousands of people wasn’t enough to impede Mr. Atta’s smooth progress through a lethargic bureaucracy. And the bureaucrats’ defense — which boiled down to: don’t worry, we’re only issuing visas to famous dead terrorists, not obscure living ones — is one that Americans largely have to take on trust. A furious President Bush insisted that the INS take decisive action against those responsible, which it did, moving Janis Sposato “sideways” to the post of “Assistant Deputy Executive Associate’ Commissioner for Immigration Services.” I don’t know what post she was moved sideways from — possibly Associate Executive Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Happily, since then, the INS has changed its name to some other acronym and ordered up a whole new set of business cards, extra-large if Ms. Sposato’s title is anything to go by.

Given the difficulty of reforming the torpid bureaucratic culture, the best we can hope for is to constrain its size — and leave enough space so that a nimble and innovative citizenry don’t degenerate into mere subjects of an overbearing state. In 2004, Wired magazine ran an interesting featurette about a fellow called Hans Monderman, a highway engineer in northern Holland for the previous three decades. A year or two back, he’d had an epiphany. As Wired’s Tom McNichol puts it: “Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer.” In other words, all the stuff on the streets — signs for everything every five yards, yellow lines, pedestrian crossings, stoplights, crash barriers, bike lanes — all that junk clogging up the highway, by giving you the illusion of security, in fact makes driving more dangerous. The town of Christianfield in Denmark embraced the Monderman philosophy, removed all the traffic signs and signals from its most dangerous intersection, and thereby cut the number of serious accidents down to zero. These days, when you tootle toward the junction, there’s no instructions from the Department of Transportation to tell you what to do. You have to figure it out for yourself, so you approach it cautiously and with an eye on what the other chaps in the vicinity are up to.