Mark Steyn - After America

What is the message of this cartoon? That America has always been a land of immigrants? Or that the tide of illegal settlement is going to work out as well for the United States as it did for the Algonquin nation? Is Richards’ cartoon just the cheap triumphalism of a self-loathing Anglo’s cultural relativism? Or is it actually a portent of the future? The latter isn’t so hard to imagine: a largely impoverished Hispanic Southwest, with a few tony Anglo gated communities—or, if you prefer, “reservations.”

The Conformicrats live off the fruits of the productive class and they need to keep them in a state of quiescence. They achieve this with their allies in the dependent class by a kind of pincer movement. From above, the ideological aristocracy can inflict any amount of pain through its administrative enforcers. From below, there is the seething dysfunctional jungle of the underclass. You can measure civilized societies by how easy it is to insulate yourself from the predators, and in America it is still easier than in Britain. But, lurking in the Conformicrats’ coercion of the beleaguered productive class is the implicit threat of a good cop/bad cop routine—or good statist/dysfunctional statist: if you don’t give us what we want—more money for more agencies and more bureaucrats—we may not be able to hold the underclass in check, and you’re within easier reach of ’em than we are. It is a worthless guarantee: given the human wreckage piled up by half-a-century of diseducation, welfarism, sexual self-destruction, and much else, the Eloi aristocracy cannot hold a Morlock dependent class in check.

“We have not yet seen what man can make of man,” wrote the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. 93Well, we’re about to.

Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks, some of the ruled class have workarounds (gated communities, offshore accounts), but others among the ruled class just get unruly.

What will the statists do? We are already watching municipalities drown in the pensions liabilities of their bureaucracies. Do they fix the problem or do they cut core services? The latter’s the way to bet: you don’t fire the police officers, but you reassign them to desk jobs where they’ll get out less and thus require fewer vehicles, less gas, less equipment, less ammunition.

It’s already happening in the poorer cities, but, like rot in the boarded-up houses, the signs of decay will creep further up. A lot of cities will take on the character of Third World swamps the colonial authorities are resigned to losing: the police hole up in well fortified headquarters venturing out in heavily armored vehicles ever more rarely. Think St. Louis, Missouri, or Gary, Indiana, with a Green Zone, and your house is twelve blocks outside the perimeter. When the neighborhood’s up for grabs, all that expensive law enforcement of the Security State won’t be there for you. Get yourself a gun, while you’re still allowed to.

Picture an American airport on the Friday afternoon before a big public holiday—the long, slow trudge to gain admission to the secure area. The “secure area” won’t be just for airports anymore. More and more of America will seek to be “secured” in the interests of constraining the forces on the other side of the fence. Think of those decapitated heads in Mexico and hope the cartels don’t decide to learn incompetent transit terror from the jihad—because, inevitably, Big Government will respond with big, bloated, manpower-intensive, ever more intrusive bureaucratic overreach. A citizenry that shrugged when government bureaucrats took to themselves the power to poke around with no probable cause in the nooks and crannies of its genitalia will discover that such extraordinary powers will not remain penned up in Terminal Three, but will spread—to bus stations, and key Interstate ramps, and eventually random Main Streets. As the Shoe Bomber led to the shoeless shuffle and the Panty Bomber led to the federally mandated scrotal grope, so the first Suppository Bomber will lead to complimentary federal prostate exams from LAX to JFK.

Then factor in the end of the dollar as global currency. Oil heads up past five, six, seven bucks a gallon, and everything else follows. That inflation-proofed schoolmarm in Yonkers isn’t going to want to stay at Number 27 when everybody else in the street is poor and hates her. Nobody travels very much anymore—who can afford it?—but the lines are as long as ever: the Security State barely bothers to pretend it’s for anything other than domestic crowd control. As the armed forces shrink with the dollar, hundreds of thousands of American troops are demobbed and come home to find that, whether or not it’s over over there, it’s certainly over over here. A statist America won’t be a large Sweden—unimportant but prosperous—but something closer to the Third World. As a dead-end economy drives its surplus manpower deeper into poverty, addiction, and crime, parts of the country will take on post-Soviet Russian characteristics, with a gangster class manipulating social disintegration for its own ends. What’s left will be Latin America, corrupt and chaotic, broke and brutish—for all but a privileged few.

What to do? Where to go? In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham began working on his famous “Panopticon”—a radial prison in which a central “inspector” could see all the prisoners, but they could never see him. In the computer age, we now have not merely panopticon buildings, but panopticon societies, like modern London, with its wall-to-wall CCTV cameras. Soon perhaps, excepting a few redoubts such as Waziristan and the livelier precincts of the Horn of Africa, we will have a panopticon planet.

Yet high-tech statism still needs an overarching narrative. The “security state” is a tough sell: if you tell people the government is compiling data on them for national security purposes, the left instinctively recoils. But, if you explain that you’re doing it to save the planet by monitoring carbon footprints and emissions compliance and mandatory recycling, starry-eyed coeds across the land will twitter their approval, and the middle-class masochists of the developed world will whimper in orgasmic ecstasy as you tighten the screws, pausing only to demand that you do it to them harder and faster. Consider a recent British plan for each citizen to be given an official travel allowance. 94If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—all in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and his county-sized carbon footprint. The Soviets restricted freedom of movement through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British favor the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes: the movement’s still free; it’s just that there’ll be a government processing fee of £412.95. And, in a revealing glimpse of the universal belief in enviro-statism, this proposal came not from the Labour Party but from the allegedly Conservative Party. At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler, and Mao are kicking themselves: “‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?”

You remember how President Bush used to talk about illegal immigration—about how we needed to help all those undocumented people “living in the shadows”? Doesn’t that sound kinda nice—and restful? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork. By comparison, those of us in the blazing klieg lights of the nanny state are shadowed everywhere we go: government numbers for this, government cards for that, a life of barcodes and retinal scans, the TSA Obergropinführers at the airport…. You’d almost think that, compared to the 15 or 30 or however many million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community are out there, the 300 or so million in the overdocumented segment of the population get a lousy deal.