After America

by Mark Steyn

  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

  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.

  To answer them, please post your thoughts on our Facebook Page: Facebook.com/RegneryBooks or Tweet us @Regnery and use #AfterAmerica

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

  Click here to tweet us your thoughts (@Regnery, #AfterAmerica)

  Click here to post your thoughts on our Facebook page (Facebook.com/RegneryBooks)

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE NEW ROME

  The Decaying City

  The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled.

  —Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline

  and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789)

  Picture a man of the late nineteenth century, perhaps your own greatgrandfather, 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!

  The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our time-traveler glances through the window: a metal conveyance is coming up the street at an incredible speed—with not a horse in sight. It’s enclosed with doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into

  Oh, very funny. They’ve got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they?

  What marvels! In a mere sixty years!

  But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even farther into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!

  So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.

  And when he dismounts he wonders if he’s made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: the layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone.... Oh, wait. It’s got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem ... larger, and dressed like overgrown children.

  And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection day
s.

  But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.

  Let’s pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: the computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like

  Other arenas aren’t quite as static as the modern American airport, but nor do they move at the same clip they used to. When was the last big medical breakthrough? I mean “big” in the sense of something that takes a crippling worldwide disease man has accepted as a cruel fact of life and so clobbers it that a generation on nobody gives it a thought. That’s what the polio vaccine did in 1955. Why haven’t we done that for Alzheimer’s? Today, we have endless “races for the cure,” and colored ribbons advertising one’s support for said races for the cure, and yet fewer cures. It’s not just pink ribbons for breast cancer, and gray ribbons for brain cancer, and white for bone cancer, but also yellow ribbons for adenosarcoma, light blue for Addison’s Disease, teal for agoraphobia, periwinkle for acid reflux, pink and blue ribbons for amniotic fluid embolisms, and pinstripe ribbons for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons. Yet for all the raised awareness, very few people seem aware of how the whole disease-curing business has ground to a halt.

  Compare the Twenties to the Nineties: in the former, the discovery of insulin and penicillin, plus the first vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, on and on. In the last decade of the twentieth century, what? A vaccine for Hepatitis A, and Viagra. Good for erectile dysfunction, but what about inventile dysfunction? In October 1920, a doctor in London, Ontario, Frederick Banting, had an idea as to how insulin might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes, which in those 1 By August 1922, Elizabeth Hughes, the daughter of America’s Secretary of State and a diabetic near death, was being given an experimental course of the new treatment. By January 1923, Eli Lilly & Company were selling insulin to American druggists. That’s it: a little over two years from concept to patient. Not today: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now adds half a decade to the process by which a treatment makes it to market, and they’re getting slower. Between 1996 and 1999, the FDA approved 157 new drugs. Between 2006 and 2009, the approvals fell by half—to 74.2 What happens during that half-decade? People die, nonstop—as young Elizabeth Hughes would have died under the “protection” of today’s FDA. Because statism has no sense of proportion. You can still find interesting articles about new discoveries that might have implications for, say, Parkinson’s disease. But that’s all you’ll find: articles, in periodicals, lying around your doctor’s waiting room. The chances of the new discovery advancing from the magazine on the coffee table to your prescription are less and less. To begin the government-approval process is to enter what the cynics of the twenty-first-century research biz call the valley of death.

  When America Alone came out, arguing that the current conflict is about demographic decline, globalized psychoses, and civilizational confidence, a lot of folks objected, as well they might: seeing off supple amorphous abstract nouns is not something advanced societies do well. You’re looking at it the wrong way, I was told. Technocratic solutions, new inventions, the old can-do spirit: that’s the American way, and that’s what will see us through.

  Well, okay, so where is it?

  CRESCENT MOON

  Half a century ago, the future felt different. Take 1969, quite a year in the aerospace biz: in one twelve-month period, we saw the test flight of the Boeing 747, the maiden voyage of the Concorde, the RAF’s deployment of the Harrier “jump jet,” and Neil Armstrong’s “giant step for mankind.” 3 Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the “Ode to Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there’s something marvelously American about the first human being to place his feet on the surface of a heavenly sphere standing there with a cassette machine blasting out Frank and the Count Basie band in a swingin’ Quincy Jones arrangement—the insouciant swagger of the American century breaking the bounds of the planet.

  In 1961, before the eyes of the world, President Kennedy had set American ingenuity a very specific challenge—and put a clock on it:This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.4

  That’s it. No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon wouldn’t count, nor an unmanned drone, nor a dune buggy that can’t take off again but transmits grainy footage back to Houston as it rusts up in the crater it came to rest in. The only way to win the bet is with a real-live actual American standing on the surface of the moon planting the Stars and Stripes. Even as it happened, the White House was so cautious that William Safire wrote President Nixon a speech to be delivered in the event of disaster:Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace ...5

  Yet America did it. “Fly Me to the Moon/Let me sing forever more.” What comes after American yearning and achievement? Democratization: “Everybody Gets to Go the Moon.” That all but forgotten Jimmy Webb song from 1969 catches the spirit of the age: Isn’t it a miracle

  That we’re the generation

  That will touch that shiny bauble with our own two hands?

  Whatever happened to that?

  Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that “that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans.”6 That’s a good way to look at it: the political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem, and they solved it—in eight years. Charlton continued:Forty years ago, we could do it—repeatedly—but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

  Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something.... But I am suggesting that all this is BS.... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75—at the time of the Apollo moon landings—and has been declining ever since.

  Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early twenty-first century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn’t it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the twenty-first-century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is.... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a

  So what happened? According to Professor Charlton, in the 1970s “the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy.” The old can-do spirit? Oh, you can try to do it, but they’ll toss every obstacle in your path. Go on, give it a go: invent a new medical device; start a company; go to the airport to fly to D.C. and file a patent. Everything’s longer, slower, more soul-crushing. And the decline in “human capability” will only worsen in the years ahead, thanks not just to excess bureaucracy but insufficient cash.

  “Yes, we can!” droned the dopey Obamatrons of 2008. No, we can’t, says Charlton, not if you mean “land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover breakthrough medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22....”

  Houston, we have a much bigger problem.

  To be sure, there’s still something called “NASA” and it still stands for the “National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” But there’s not a lot of eithe
r aeronautics or space in the in-box of the agency’s head honcho. A few days after Charlton penned his elegy for human capability, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden appeared on al-Jazeera and explained the brief he’d been given by President Obama:One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.7

  Islam: The final frontier! To boldly go where no diversity outreach consultant has gone before! What’s “foremost” for NASA is to make Muslims “feel good” Columbia was God’s punishment “because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam.”8

  It’s easy to laugh at the likes of Abu Hamza, although not as easy as it should be, not in Europe and Canada, where the state is eager to haul you into court for “Islamophobia.” But the laugh’s on us. NASA is the government agency whose acronym was known around the planet, to every child who looked up at the stars and wondered what technological marvels the space age would have produced by the time he was out of short pants. Now the starry-eyed moppets are graying boomers, and the agency that symbolized man’s reach for the skies has transformed itself into a self-esteem boosterism operation. Is there an accompanying book—Muslims Are from Mars, Infidels Are from Venus?