After America

Walter Duranty: “What if we could just be China for a day?” he fantasized. “Where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions….”¹²⁶ Ah, yes. “Authorize” the “right” solutions without all that messy multiparty democracy getting in the way: why, in Beijing, where they don’t suffer the disadvantages of free elections, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”¹²⁷

Ooooo-kay. But, pardon my asking, forward to where?

When the New York Times’ most prominent writer comes out in favor of dictatorship, and no one else in the smart set calls him on it, you get a glimpse at the very least of the scale of elite contempt for popular sovereignty and the republic’s animating principles. In breaking faith with the American idea, the political class got everything wrong: they exported millions of low-skilled jobs but imported millions of low- skilled workers; they fund both sides of the war on terror out of a wanton hostility to domestic energy production that leaves us dependent on noxious oil dictatorships that use their profits to wage civilizational warfare. And, having gotten us into this mess, the way to get us out is “China for a day.” This is the logical endpoint of a cocooned conformocracy: Big Government having “imposed” the problems in the first place, only Even Bigger Government can “impose” the solutions.

Never underestimate the totalitarian temptations of the smart set. We’ll hear a lot more of that in the years ahead.

In this chapter, Steyn writes:

“Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet…. Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from Julius Caesar…. Hundreds of leftie websites are so smart that, after the 2011 shootings in Tucson, they all blamed it on Sarah Palin by using the same fake Sinclair Lewis quote from It Can’t Happen Here…. Liberals are so smart they teach a fake book in college (I, Rigoberta Menchu).”

So what’s your best “Liberals are so smart they…” line?

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CHAPTER THREE THE NEW ATHENS The Drowning City

MR DIMPLE: Believe me, Colonel, when you shall have seen the brilliant exhibitions of Europe, you will learn to despise the amusements of this country as much as I do.

COLONEL MANLY: I do not wish to see them, for I can never esteem that knowledge valuable, which tends to give me a distaste for my native country.

—Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1787)

From the Times of London, May 6, 2010: The President of Greece warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens bank where they worked.¹

Almost right. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of fourteen monthly paychecks per annum.² You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere twelve monthly paychecks per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims—a man and two women—were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

Who will pay for it? Not my problem, say the rioters. Maybe those dead bank clerks’ clients will—assuming we didn’t burn them to death, too.

America and Greece are at different stops on the same one-way street, all too familiar to us immigrants. There’s nothing new about Obama: been there, done that. Nothing could be less hopeful, or less of a change. He’s the land where we grew up, with its union bullies and marginal tax rates and government automobiles and general air of decay all re-emerging Brigadoon-like from the mists entirely unspoilt by progress. It’s like docking at Ellis Island in 1883, coming down the gangplank, and finding everyone excited about this pilot program they’ve introduced called “serfdom.”

Greece is at the point in the plot where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is not just drift along with the general current but paddle as fast as it can to catch up with the Greeks.

Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal meltdown); the Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.

The problem facing advanced societies isn’t very difficult to figure out: the twentieth-century welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. When you’re spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Democrat model), you’ve no intention of paying it off, and the rest of the world knows it. In Greece, the arithmetic is even starker, because they’re at the next stage of social-democratic ruin. If America’s problem is that it’s spent tomorrow today, and can never earn enough tomorrow to pay for what we’ve already burned through, nations such as Greece have a more basic problem: they’ve spent tomorrow today, and there isn’t going to be a tomorrow. To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the western world isn’t “printing money” but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. That’s the difference: in America, the improvident, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, there are no kids or grandkids to screw over. In the end the entitlement state disincentives everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. If the problem with socialism, as Mrs. Thatcher famously said, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money,³ the problem with Greece and much of Europe is that they’ve advanced to the next stage: they’ve run out of other people, period. All the downturn has done is brought forward by a couple decades the West’s date with demographic destiny.

The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1—or just over two kids per couple.⁴ Greece, as I pointed out in America Alone, has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet—1.3 children per couple, which places it in the “lowest-low” demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids—in other words, the family tree is upside down.

Hooray, say the liberal progressives. No more overpopulation!

Here’s the problem: Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to fourteen monthly paychecks per annum during their “working” lives, but also fourteen monthly retirement checks per annum till death. Who’s going to be around to pay for that?