THE SEDUCTIONS OF DECLINE

National Review ^ | 2 February 2010 | Mark Steyn

[JLS]

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

[JLS]

Steyn discusses the potential decline of America.

[JLS]

Here is another Steyn ping opportunity.

[GeronL]

bump

[lainde]

Ping!

[goldstategop]

I don't see the American people content with Big Government or with enforced decline. Its not in our national DNA no matter how much the Left and a good chunk of the Right would prefer that we cease being a benign hegemon. We're just too big a target to wash our hands off the world. After 9/11 such a blase course of indifference can no longer be sustained. And the world will rudely blast its way in if we insist on ignoring it. For better or worse, being the greatest country in the world is and remains America's destiny.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus

[Thunder 6]

Brilliant.

Regards,

[BenKenobi]

Amazing. Steyn knocks one out of the park.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

Demographics is destiny.

It’s the culture, stupid.

The trends are strongly in favor of decline.

A secular progressive elite holds a stranglehold on media, academia, the schools, the permanent government bureaucracy and the popular culture.

The government subsidizes its own “mascot class” — a growing aggressive, entitled underclass expanding the very lowest IQ segment of the population, with concomitant criminality, illegitimacy, dependency and racial division.

Tens of millions of low-skilled, low-educated, third world immigrants, are allowed to invade the country and strain our national fabric, not to mention our public services and finances, to the breaking point. The toxic American popular culture emanating from Hollywood like a sewer destroys the traditional culture of these people, resulting in a rerun of the creation of the underclass, with rampant illegitimacy, criminality and dependency.

Our government views ordinary Americans with condescending disdain, and rules by the agenda of a transnational progressive elite, blithely and crudely imposing crippling burdens on ordinary people in the name of dubious environmental and other causes and actively tilting the economic field away from Americans and in favor of countries like China and oil-producing nations. The crushing debt burden created by the progressive elite can only result, at best, in sustained economic decline and at worst, in utter ruin.

American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s?

No, it won’t, it will get very ugly here. There will be a remnant — that minority of the American people who have inherited, and feel personally connected to, the traditions of our nation that brought about the greatest advance in liberty and prosperity in the history of nations — who will not go quietly.

[Rummyfan]

Excellent read thanks for posting.

[Youaskedforit]

Ciao SirJohnBarleycoen,

You say “It’s the culture, stupid”... and I agree with you wholeheartedly... but the problem is, where in Enlightenment created “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” or in the French “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” is there any mention of “culture?”

Listen to the words of the French Minister for Immigration, Integration and National Identity, Eric Besson, spoken in front of an immigrant audience, right in the middle of a Muslim suburb next to Paris:

“France is neither a people, nor a language, nor a territory, nor a religion, it’s a conglomerate of peoples who want to live together. There are no indigenous French, there is only a France made out of miscegenation.”

Such words could have been spoken by an American.

To suggest otherwise, to say that a pervasive change of the racial / cultrual mix of the population will necessarily (and permanently) change a country, is racist and “Fascist” and will get you banned from civil society. Geert Wilders of Holland is on trial for suggesting that Muslims aren’t equal to the Dutch. He’s stating the obvious, but the obvious has become illegal. Muslims have a complete set of different values, they are fatalists, mysogenists (and everything else we know about them). Saying that a massive influx of people might be dangerous to a nation’s core values (all of them culturally / religiously generated) is against the Enlightenment outlook. We are all equal, equal, equal... and that’s that, because we are all (and only) atomized individuals... and to suggest otherwise is oppressive, retrograde and unenlightened. Sounds like a Catch 22 to me.

[Colorado Buckeye]

American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s?

No, it won’t, it will get very ugly here. There will be a remnant — that minority of the American people who have inherited, and feel personally connected to, the traditions of our nation that brought about the greatest advance in liberty and prosperity in the history of nations — who will not go quietly.

Left to decay, we will balkanize and separate, and it will not be painless.

And you are right about the culture.

[Nateman]

There is a new factor here: The Internet. FDR got away with a bunch of the same rotten things Zero is doing today, but unlike FDR he's not getting away with it. The people are rising. While FDR had effective control of the media, Zero faces opposition that can spring up out of nowhere and spread exponentially before he can react.

The rest of the world is subject to change too. Islam , which succeeded in keeping it's victims buried in cultural ignorance can now see first hand the hate the rest of the world has for it's foul religion. In spite of it's infected hoards struggle to suppress the truth, the light continues to shine. (Case in point, this very web site )

[spodefly]

Steyn gets it. Completely.

BTTT

[Shery]

Well, you probably don’t really realize just how much we have taken in and adjusted to. We are in the process of this thing and it didn’t start with Obama. The 20th century saw a huge change in the political scene in America, and even some of our best presidents in that century allowed the slide to statism to continue. The one good thing Obama has done is to be so bold as to try to shove us the rest of the way. That opened a lot of eyes, but some only see us at the beginning, when really, what we are experiencing is way past the middle of the decline of our civilization. The 60s was the kick in the ‘you know what’ that really set the decline on the fast track. We’ve been diverted (intentionally) with the lives of the ‘superstars’, soap-opera stars, American Idol stars, their lives so outrageously perverse, that we are fascinated by their depravity. In the meantime, we’ve come to allow their depravity to become the norm for life in America. Instead of tuning in, we should’ve tuned out and forced the media and movie industry to provide soul-enriching, instead of soul-destroying, products.

Our national DNA is no longer the way it was when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. America has become a hostile environment in large cities, where crime and mafia-like institutions hold sway over government and large swatches of the city. One is not safe from crime or hate in large swatches of the country. Our allowing PC to become government policy has increased incivility, hatred, anti-government activity, and general mistrust.

Some feel that there is no use fighting it, while others think that it’s as simple as removing all the present Congress and electing a new. But it has become our American psyche, and we need to make some fundamental changes in order to overcome this. We have got to go back to the Bible and the natural laws of God to reverse this. Do you really think that most of America will want this much change?

[knews_hound]

Pinging the Mark Steyn Ping List.

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[dennisw]

Read the whole essay by Mark Steyn (excerpt below)
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/2882/26/

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Permanence is an illusion – and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more importantly, national decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ‘em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half-a-century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language, and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. Even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late 20th century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such an alien fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California became the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road To Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

[Huck]

The eventual break up of the United States appears to be inevitable.

I think such an event holds enormous promise and opportunity, if anyone has enough sense to seize on it.

[Huck]

Permanence is an illusion

I learned this lesson when I watched the Twin Towers collapse with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears. Smelled it. There is so much we take as a given that isn't so. Like everything.

[Canedawg]

To paraphrase:

...to a five-year old boy waving his flag as bells rang across the nation as it celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his fortieth birthday, he’d witness the government takeover of General Motors, Black Panthers armed with nightsticks threatening voters in Philadelphia, a Manchurian/Marxist president bent on destroying American exceptionalism, and
the murder of 50 million infants while still in their mother’s womb.