Mark Steyn - After America

Unlike the French and the Russians, the British Revolution happened overseas, in their American colonies, when British subjects decided they wanted to take English ideas of liberty further than the metropolis wanted to go. You can measure the gap in the animating principles between the rebellious half of British North America and the half that stayed loyal to the Crown: the United States is committed to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Canada to “peace, order and good government.” Britain has always been a more paternalistic society, with a different sense of the balance between “liberty” and “order.” That’s what comes with being an imperialist.

The old British elite took it for granted that they had a planet-wide civilizing mission. As the empire waned, a new elite decided to embark on a new civilizing mission closer to home. It turned out to be a de-civilizing mission.

There is less and less liberty and opportunity to pursue happiness in the new Britain, and little evidence of order and good government.

Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? For many Americans, it will be a closer model of decline than Greece. It’s not so hard to picture a paternalist technocrat of the Michael Bloomberg school covering New York in CCTV less for terrorism than to monitor your transfats. Britain is a land with more education bureaucrats than teachers, more health-care administrators than doctors, a land of declining literacy, a threadbare social fabric, and an ever more wretched underclass systemically denied the possibility of leading lives of purpose and dignity in order to provide an unending pool of living corpses for the government laboratory. A people mired in dependency turning into snarling Calibans as the national security state devotes ever more of its resources to monitoring its own citizenry.

You cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without grave consequence. We are approaching the end of the Anglo-American moment, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for it but, by some measures, the world’s, even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system and unsustainable entitlements, even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they’re insulated from the consequences. There, too, are lessons from the old country. Cecil Rhodes distilled the assumptions of generations when he said that to be born a British subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. On the eve of the Great War, in his play Heartbreak House , Bernard Shaw turned the thought around to taunt a ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”

In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.

As disastrous as the squandering of America’s money has been, the squandering of its human capital has been worse. While our over-refined Eloi pass the years until their mid-twenties in desultory sham education in hopes of securing a place in professions that are ever more removed from genuine wealth creation, too many of the rest, by the time they emerge from their own schooling, have learned nothing that will equip them for productive employment. Already, much of what’s left of agricultural labor is done by the undocumented; manufacturing has gone to China and elsewhere; and so 40 percent of Americans now work in low-paying service jobs. 1What happens when more supermarkets move to computerized checkouts with R2D2 cash registers? Which fast-food chain will be the first to introduce automated service for drive-thru? Once upon a time, millions of Americans worked on farms. Then, as agriculture declined, they moved into the factories. When manufacturing was outsourced, they settled into low-paying service jobs or better-paying cubicle jobs—so-called “professional services” often deriving from the ever swelling accounting and legal administration that now attends almost any activity in America. What comes next?

Or, more to the point, what if there is no “next”?

Jobs rarely “come back.” When they go, they go for good. Something else takes their place. After the recession of the early Nineties, America lost some three million jobs in manufacturing but gained a little under the same number in construction. 2Then the subprime hit the fan, and America now has more housing stock than it will need for a generation. So what replaces those three million lost construction jobs? What are all those carpenters, plasterers, excavators going to be doing? Not to mention the realtors, home-loan bankers, contract lawyers, rental-income accountants, and other “professional service” cube people whose business also relies to one degree or another on a soaraway property market.

What if we’ve run out of “next”? When the factories closed, Americans moved into cubicles and checkout registers. What happens when the checkouts automate and the cubicles go the way of the typing pool?

At America’s founding, 90 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture. 3Today, fewer than 3 percent do. Food is more plentiful than ever, and American farms export some $75 billion worth of their produce. But they don’t need the manpower anymore. 4

So the labor force moved to the mills and factories. And they don’t need the manpower anymore. Manufacturing produces the same amount with about a third of the labor that it took in 1950. 5By 2010, the U.S. economy had restored pre-recession levels of output but without restoring pre-recession levels of employment: it turned out there was no reason to hire back laid off workers, and a lot of reasons not to, once you factor in the taxes, insurance, and the other burdens the state imposes on you for putting even modest sums in the pocket of employees you don’t really need.

In H.G. Wells’ bifurcated future, the Eloi lounged around all day while the Morlocks did manual labor underground. In our dystopia, the Eloi face a subtly different bifurcation: there’s nothing for the Morlocks to do. A society with tens of millions of people for whom there is no work, augmented by tens of millions of low-skilled peasantry from outside its borders, is unlikely to be placid.

The first year of the Obama era and its failed “stimulus” pushed the national unemployment numbers up to almost 10 percent—officially. 6But if you were one of his core supporters—black or young or both—then the unemployment rate was at least half as much again, and higher than that in many other places. In the summer of 2010, as Barack was golfing and Michelle was having public beaches closed on the Costa del Sol to accommodate her sunbathing needs, the black unemployment rate in America climbed to just under 16 percent, as opposed to a general figure of 9.5 percent. That’s two-thirds higher—again, officially. That year, the number of young people (16 to 24) in summer employment hit a record low. Big Government is a jobs killer. 7Big Government augmented by a terrible education system and a tide of mass immigration is a life killer. So if—when—the United States’ AAA credit rating is downgraded and the economy starts to contract, what happens? An increase in the unemployment rate to 30 percent, higher in the decaying cities. Core government services cut. Basic shortages and deteriorating infrastructure for delivery. Civil unrest. Most of those go without saying: if you lay off a bunch of sixtysomethings a couple of years before retirement, they sit at home and fester. If you fire—or never even hire—younger, fitter groups, they tend to express their dissatisfactions more directly.