Mark Steyn - After America

For Americans, the best-case scenario is that Washington’s ruling kleptocracy sleepwalks its subjects into smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller lives, and soft despotism so beguilingly they don’t notice it’s over until late in the day. A more likely prospect is a catastrophically convulsed America that descends into Balkanized ruin and social collapse on a planet with no global order in which the former hyperpower still makes the most inviting target.

What? You wanted a happy ending? Well, you’re going to have to make that happen—because, without fundamental course correction, there is only the certainty of disaster, and a step-by-step descent deeper into the abyss:

A is for ADDICTION

We spend too much, borrowing from the future to such an extent it’s no longer clear we’ve got one.

R is for REDISTRIBUTION

Day by day, an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the productive class to the obstructive class is delivering a self-governing republic into rule by regulators, bureaucrats, and social engineers.

M is for MONOPOLY

Old ruling class: “We the People.” New ruling class: “We the People who know better than you frightful people….” America is ruled not by a meritocracy but by a cartel of conformicrats imposing a sterile monopoly of outmoded ideas.

A is for ARTERIOSCLEROSIS

“Yes, we can”? No, we can’t! By comparison with the past, America is already seizing up.

G is for GLOBAL RETREAT

As Britain and other great powers quickly learned, the price of Big Government at home is an ever smaller presence abroad. An America turned inward will make for a more dangerous world.

E is for ENGINEERING

“Celebrate Diversity”? The ideological homogeneity and social engineering of the nation’s schools would be regarded as child abuse in any other age. Aside from its other defects, it diverts too many Americans into frivolous unproductive activity, while our competitors get on with the real work.

D is for DECAY

Mired in dependency and decline, much of the United States will be on a fast track to the Third World. And, no matter how refined the upscale communities the elites retrench to, it will prove increasingly impossible to insulate yourself from the pathologies a decadent liberalism has loosed to rampage Godzilla-sized across the land.

D is for DISINTEGRATION

We are becoming the highly singular United State of America.

No advanced society has ever tried hyper-regulatory direct rule for 350 million people. Will it work? Or is it more likely that increasingly incompatible jurisdictions and social groups will conclude that the price for keeping fifty stars in the flag is too high? Without the American idea, there will be insufficient glue to hold the United States together.

O is for OPEN SEASON

Do you find it hard to imagine a world without America? The Russians, the Chinese, and the would-be New Caliphate don’t.

And on a planet where rich passive nations are defenseless while every failed state from North Korea to Sudan is butching up, it’s not hard to figure out what comes next.

N is for NUKES AWAY!

Addiction, Redistribution, Monopoly, Arteriosclerosis, Global retreat, social Engineering, Decay, Disintegration, Open season, Nukes away. Put them all together, they spell…?

From Big Government to busted government, from federally regulated school bake sales to Armageddon—in nothing flat.

Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.

“After America”? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called the “United States,” but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to “unite” it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.

On the other hand:

The United States is still different. In the wake of the economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly “students” in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful, and pointless “university” costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry the mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar porkathons, and just stay the hell out of my life and my pocket.

That’s the America that has a fighting chance—a nation that stands for economic dynamism, not the stagnant “managed capitalism” of France; for the First Amendment and the free-est, widest, rudest bruiting of ideas, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. But when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America’s animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we’ve already gone. Live free—or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.

Like I said, if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you.

Your call, America.

Throughout this book, there will be questions at the end of some of the chapters, included by the publisher to promote dialogue about the issues addressed.

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So what do you think? Is America headed towards Armageddon?

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Picture a man of the late nineteenth century, perhaps your own great-grandfather, sitting in an ordinary American home of 1890. And now pitch him forward in an H.G. Wells machine, not to our time but about halfway—to that same ordinary American home, circa 1950.

Why, the poor gentleman of 1890 would be astonished. His old home is full of mechanical contraptions. There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of food and keeping the milk fresh and cold! There is another shiny device whirring away and seemingly washing milady’s bloomers with no human assistance whatsoever! Even more amazingly, there is a full orchestra playing somewhere within his very house. No, wait, it’s coming from a tiny box on the countertop!