After America

Dubai, a mere sub-jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates, put up the world’s tallest building and built a Busby Berkeley geometric kaleidoscope of offshore artificial islands.²¹ Brazil, an emerging economic power, began diverting the Sao Francisco River to create some 400 miles of canals to irrigate its parched northeast.²²

But the hyperpower can’t put up a building.

Happily, there is one block in Lower Manhattan where ambitious redevelopment is in the air. In 2010, plans were announced to build a 15-story mosque at Ground Zero, on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning.

So, in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.

A couple years after the events of that Tuesday morning, James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, wrote:

If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors.²³

The best response to 9/11 on the home front—if only to demonstrate that there is a “home front” (which is the nub of al-Qaeda’s critique of a soft and decadent West)—would have been to rebuild the World Trade Center bigger, better, taller—not 150 stories, but 250, a marvel of the age. And, if there had to be “the usual muted dolorous abstraction,” the National Healing Circle would have been on the penthouse floor with a clear view all the way to al-Qaeda’s executive latrine in Waziristan.

Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations, is no right-winger but rather a sober, respected, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.”²⁴

That last is the one to watch: a great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for so long. “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”²⁵ reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral: If you seek my monument, look around. After two-thirds of the City of London was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, Wren designed and rebuilt the capital’s tallest building (St. Paul’s), another fifty churches, and a new skyline for a devastated metropolis. Three centuries later, if you seek our monument, look in the hole.

It’s not about al-Qaeda. It’s about us.

CHAPTER TWO UNDREAMING AMERICA Serfing USA

Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.

—Frederic Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1845)

There is a famous passage by Alexis de Tocqueville. Or, rather, it would be famous were he still widely read. For he knows us far better than we know him: “I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world,” he wrote two centuries ago. He and his family had been on the sharp end of France’s violent convulsions and knew what forms despotism could take in Europe. But he considered that, to a democratic republic, there were slyer seductions:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

“Small and vulgar pleasures”? I’ve nothing against Dancing with the Stars (which I rather enjoy) or American Idol (not so much), but Tocqueville’s right on the money there. “Revolving on themselves without repose”?

That’s not a bad description of a populace preoccupied with “social media.”

But then he goes on:

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood… it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs….

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own… it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

The all-pervasive state “does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” It “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so that after a while you don’t even notice… But once in a while even the mellowest hippie emerges from the stupor.

In 1969, George Harrison of the Beatles, in the course of a wide-ranging ramble, briefly detoured out of the Hare Krishna chants into some remarks about the Monopolies Commission (the British equivalent of the U.S. government’s Antitrust Division):

You know, this is the thing I don’t like. It’s the Monopolies Commission. Now if anybody, you know, Kodak, or somebody is cleaning up the market with film, the Monopolies Commission, the government send them in there, and say you know, you’re not allowed to monopolize. Yet, when the government’s monopolizing, who’s gonna send in, you know, this Commission to sort that one out?¹

Good question. There was an old joke in Britain: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” In fact, it’s an incisive observation on the nature of government. We wouldn’t like it if there were only one automobile company or only one breakfast cereal, but by definition there can be only one government—which is why, “when the government’s monopolizing,” it should do so only in very limited areas. That’s particularly true for national governments when the nation they govern has more than 300 million people dispersed over a continent and halfway across the Pacific.

These days America’s government is doing a lot of monopolizing. If it were a private company such as Kodak (to use George Harrison’s quaint example), it would be attracting antitrust suits. By 2008, the government- sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a piece of over half the mortgages issued in the United States.² As a result, a government-mandated form of pseudo-ownership came close to collapsing the world economy. Which the politicians then, naturally, blamed on capitalist greed. Fresh from their success in