"America Alone" Part One

Mark Steyn has writes money quotes in America Alone on what is going on under everyone's nose, but nobody wants to notice because it is themselves and their societal cultures swirling in a downward spiral:

The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population -- i.e. no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 -- you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That's what American has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handouts, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38. Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries -- or, more precisely, these people -- are going out of business.-- P.2

But carpe diem is the motto motto for these geezers-in-the-making, because the secular progressives on the Progressive Left have left out the punchline in their cradle-to-grave schemes that remind you of a quack selling snake oil:

Big government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the US Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you're Spain and you've got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that's going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control, but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There's no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital -- and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems. -- P.3

But, of course, the cure for underpopulation is to import "guest workers," who will quietly toil away and then depart for their native lands grateful and wealthy by the standards of their poorly-run home countries, right? Wrong!

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering its voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under Sharia, but -- as have parts of Nigeria -- they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, thought without a significantly different ending. -- P.38
(T)he secondary impulses are so advanced that many of America's allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like "power." In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that "the EU must not develop unto a military superpower but must become a great power that will not up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests." No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: for many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. They've been supplanted by new measures of power like how smoothly you fit in at the transnational yakfests (EU, UN, ICC, etc.). -- P.44
The Left, for its part, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it's better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens of a community. It's kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. -- P.45
The bullying, intimidating side of Muslim immigration in Europe seems to be largely absent in America, in part at least because the assertiveness of the individual American citizen makes it a riskier undertaking. -- P.46

Remember when that paragon of left-wing virtue said that he would take a rifle and fight for Israel back in 2002, [unlike what he did for the country he was born in]. Well now that's all changed. Billy Jeff checked the latest weather report and is now sorta backing off the pro-Israeli line, now that Hezbollah conned the ultra-left newsies into making their aggression against Israel a paean to their own martyrdom.

We -- the befuddled infidels -- talk airily about "reforming" Islam. But what if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? What if the long percolation through Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution, and contemporary Western-promoted whinging over grievances such as "colonialism" is the reform. -- P.82
When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing Imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments are for and against "gay marriage," there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It's already practiced de factor if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom's pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudo-grievances of each. -- P.84

But one thing is certain. Belgian immigrant Steyn nails the craven cowardly cowering Eurotopians right where it hurts---their colossal urbane insolence. This is a continent that 100 years ago considered the era of wars behind them and a Jugendwanderung of young Europeans hiked across the continent spreading all sorts of idealistic good will---read Hermann Hesse for an afterglow of that era in Siddharta or Steppenwolf. But a couple of summers after the Jugendwanderung, the young men of Europe were literally entrenched across half the continent lobbing shells and grenades and hoping to get a chance to bayonet one another. After two world wars, the continent has been bled white and is ready to succumb to its own indolent devil-may-care character defects. Steyn is right on:

The transatlantic "split" has nothing to do with disagreements over Iraq, and can't be repaired by a more Europhile president in Washington: you can't "mend bridges" when the opposite bank is sinking into the river. If Americans think that the post-bombing 2004 Spanish election result was a disgrace, look down the road to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the United States, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader's 2 or 3 percent in swing states. Think about an election in which 20 percent of the voters are a self-segregating Muslim bloc. If Washington had a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe in 2001 or 2002, you do the math ten or fifteen years hence. -- P.107
About six months after September 11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent's Muslim ghettos and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. -- P.118
The theoretical virtue of "multiculturalism" is that it's a form of mellifluous cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives "the worst of all worlds" the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women -- combined with the worst attributes of Western culture -- license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced, Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England are as much of a product of multiculturalism as the turban wearing Sikh Mountie in the royal escort. Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with old school European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's Identity of choice for the world's disaffected. -- P.120
The jihadists understand that the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn't. And as their numbers grow, it seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle-East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. -- P.121
Four years after September 11 it turned out there really is an explosive "Arab Street," but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois. Since the beginning of the century, French Muslims have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They're losing that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness. -- P.122, 123
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But Europe is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to re-run the Battle of Poitiers. P.123, 124
As President Reagan liked to say, "status quo" is Latin for "the mess we're in." -- P.132

I could go on, but Steyn had the good luck to have Saudi Ambassador to the USA Turki al-Faisal, who those with a memory will recall was fired from his job as Head of Saudi Intelligence two or three days before 9/11, call Mark Steyn "incredibly arrogant," and the Ambassador's words are emblazoned on the cover of America Alone.

To be called "arrogant" by a fellow who ostensibly was fired for having tried to cut a deal with a much more clever Osama bin Laden, and getting bilked out of hundreds of millions by trusting the world's greatest terrorist, that is an encomium Mark Steyn could only have hoped for, and it fell into his lap.