After America

by Mark Steyn

  England is a sad case study because it managed to spare itself all the most obviously toxic infections of the age, beginning with Fascism and Communism. But, after Big Government, after global retreat, after the loss of liberty there is only pitiless civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The number of indictable offenses per thousand people was 2.4 in 1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to 109.4 by 1992.45 And that official increase understates the reality: many crimes have been decriminalized, and most crime goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved crime merits derisory punishment.

  Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. In Anthony Burgess’ famous novel A Clockwork Orange, the precocious psychopathic teen narrator at one point offers his dad some (stolen) money so his parents can enjoy a drink down the pub. “Thanks, son,” says his father.

  Burgess published his book in 1962, when, on drab streets of cramped row houses, working-class men kept pigeons and tended vegetable allotments. The notion that the old and not so old would surrender some of the most peaceable thoroughfares in the world to young thugs was the stuff of lurid fantasy. Yet it happened in little more than a generation.

  “We time-shift,” a very prominent Englishman told me a few years ago.

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  “We time-shift,” he repeated. At certain hours, the lanes of the leafy and expensive village where he lives are almost as pleasant as they look in the realtors’ brochures. But then the yobs come to from the previous night’s revelries and swagger forth for another bout of “nightlife”—drinking, swearing, shagging, vomiting, stabbing. “So we time our walks for before they wake up,” my friend told me. “It’s so peaceful and beautiful at six in the morning.” This is some of the most valuable real estate in the world, and yet wealthy families live under curfews imposed by England’s violent, feral youth—just as Alex’s parents do in Burgess’ novel, a work as prophetic as Orwell’s or Huxley’s.

  “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But viewed from 2010, England the day before yesterday is an alternative universe—or a lost civilization. In 2009, the “Secretary of State for Children” (an office both Orwellian and Huxleyite) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their homes. As the Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.”46 Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.

  Montesquieu’s prediction that “the last sigh of liberty will be heaved by an Englishman” seemed self-evident after the totalitarian enthusiasms of the Continent in the mid-twentieth century. Today? The last sigh will be heaved by England’s progeny, in the United States. Is its heaving inevitable?

  THE LOTTERY OF LIFE

  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

  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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FALL

  Beyond the Green Zone

  Gaius Gracchus proposed his grain law. It delighted the people for it provided an abundance of food free of toil. The good men, by contrast, fought against it because they reckoned that the masses would be seduced from the ways of hard work and become slothful, and they saw that the treasury would be drained dry.

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero, Speech on Behalf

  of Publius Sestius (55 BC)

  As disastrous as the squandering of America’s money has been, the squandering of its human capital has been worse. While our overrefined 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.1 What 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

  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.2 Then 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, homeloan 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 fact
ories 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. 3 Today, 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 1950.5 By 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.

  The first year of the Obama era and its failed “stimulus” pushed the national unemployment numbers up to almost 10 percent—officially.6 But 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.7 Big 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.

  As farm work and factory shifts and service jobs fade, what occupations are on the rise? An America comprised of therapeutic statists, regulatory enforcers, multigenerational dependents, identity-group rent-seekers, undocumented menials, stimulus grantwriting liaison coordinators, six-figure community organizers, millionaire diversity-outreach consultants, billionaire carbon-offset traders, an electronic-leisure “knowledge sector,” John Edwards’

  THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  The ruling class divides its subjects into Representation and Taxation categories. Favored groups are those that will expand the dependent class and, therefore, the dependent-administration class. Single women vote 60-something percent for Big Government, in part because, for unwed mothers, government is an absentee father you can always rely on to mail the check.8 About 20 percent of U.S. households are unmanned. Thirty percent of rural women living alone exist below the poverty line.9 One-third of all female-headed households live in poverty.10 Which suits government just fine, because then you’re more willing to serve as a pliant, dependent subject of the benign Sovereign. These worsening statistics do not demonstrate a need for Big Government. They are a consequence of Big Government.

  But how pliant will you be when the money runs out and the programs get cut? The “austerity” riots in Greece, France, and the United Kingdom suggest the answer to that.

  As for the taxation class, when the statists confiscate more of your dwindling earnings to prop up the wages and pensions of the government workforce and the benefit checks of the dependent class, what do you get in return? The security of the Nanny State? You’ve still got a job, you’ve still got a home, and all that does is make your property and place of employment a target for those who don’t.

  Remember our gentleman from 1890 taking a whirl on the time-machine. First we shunted him forward to 1950: wow, was he astonished! Then we pushed him ahead another six decades: this time, not so much. The TV’s flatter, the fridge has an ice-dispenser in the door, but there is no

  His old home still stands, but as he gets his bearings he notices everything seems a little shabbier; even the electronic toys are dinged and scratched, as if the owners have foregone the new models. He looks out back through the bay window: strung across the grass is a sagging clothes line, which he can’t recall seeing back in 2011. But, compared to a washer, it’s “environmentally friendly,” right? So was the hedge, but that’s gone, and the fence is topped with barbed wire. He turns ’round. The front window has bars on it. Outside the car is small and old, and has more color-coded government permits down the driver’s side of the windshield than ever before. But the yard is a mess, as if passers-by are tossing trash in it. And the house across the road—the old Alden place, back in his day—is boarded up.

  He steps outside. He’s never seen the street like this. In 1890, it was a pleasant residential neighborhood, never wealthy but neat and maintained. Now half the homes look abandoned. There are “For Sale” and “Foreclosure” signs everywhere, but they’re leaning and hanging and faded, as if not even the realtor’s placards are maintained. One in four homes is shuttered and dead. Another one in four looks like a carcass picked clean by predators: window holes like eyeless sockets, roof shingles stripped, exterior fixtures gone. The rest appear to be lived in, but half have missing panes patched with board and other signs of decay. He moseys down the street, past a gaggle of sullen youths slumped against the wall and eyeing him appreciatively. He crosses over, past another kid, in a wheelchair. No, not a kid. Maybe late forties, but dressed like a child. Our visitor from 1890 has noticed a lot of that since he moved on from 1950. He has one of those T-shirts with an in-your-face attitudinal slogan. But his face doesn’t have much attitude or energy in it, and his legs are missing below the knees. Along the sidewalk are some parched saplings with a few browning leaves, each tree bearing a sign saying, “This Community Improvement Project

  Our time-traveler asks the present owner of his old home what happened. But nothing really “happened”: it just turned out this way. It was never luxurious, but it was a nice neighborhood, and you knew who your neighbors were. The tough times were a few blocks away, with the repossessed homes and the abandoned cars on bricks in the yard. But then the couple three houses down got foreclosed on, and the bank put their property up for sale, and nobody bought. So now the boarded up homes aren’t a few streets away, but next door. And the night is full of sounds: the word gets round that Number 23 and Number 29 are empty, and people break in for copper wiring or anything else there’s a market or a need for. And sometimes they bust in just because they’re up to something and require a place where they know they won’t be disturbed. So the drug dealers creep a little closer, and then the shootings.

  On Wall Street, recessions are “cyclical.” Out in the hinterland, the cycle settles in, and it’s vicious: abandoned homes lead to more crime lead to more abandoned homes lead to even more crime lead to even more abandoned homes.... A lifetime’s labor has gone to pay the mortgage on a house that will never be worth in real terms what you paid for it and that now stands in a neighborhood the old you—the young you, the one with modest dreams of a better life earned through effort—would never want to live in.

  So our time-traveler listens to the present owner of his old home explain that, yes, they could rent out the upstairs, but, even though the Bureau of Compliance at the city Department of Furnished Accommodation approved their fire retardant cushions, the state Agency of Access & Equality says they need a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator. And, even if they could afford that, the only place they could put it is where that ugly old poplar is, and taking that down requires permission from the Board of Environmental Impact, which has a three-year backlog of tree-removal cases. They could just cut it down, and gamble that no
one would check, but Ken and Ron down the

  The gentleman from 1890 suddenly realizes that for the last ten minutes he has had absolutely no idea what this lady is talking about, but he has an overwhelming desire to get back on his time-machine before the youths sitting on the wall opposite strip it for parts and he winds up stuck forever in...well, whatever country this is. “America” doesn’t seem quite the word.

  SEE THE U.S.A. IN YOUR CHEVROLET

  You don’t have to engage in H. G. Wells speculations about the near future. Put a time-traveler from 1950 in Detroit sixty years later. He, too, would doubt he’d landed in the same country. For decades, Americans watched the decline of a great city and told themselves it was an outlier. It didn’t used to be: “When General Motors sneezes, America catches a cold.” When Detroit gets the ebola virus, America is surely in line to catch something—unless you’re entirely convinced that its contagion can be quarantined. Half-a-century ago, the city was the powerhouse of the world. Now it’s a wasteland. It’s a motor city with no motor, a byword for industrial decline and civic collapse that Big Government liberals seem determined to make their template. To residents of the mid-twentieth century it would have seemed incredible that one day the president of the United States would fire the CEO of General Motors and personally call the mayor of Detroit to assure him he had no plans to move the company’s head office out of the city. By the time it actually happened, it provoked barely a murmur.11