Crisis of Decadence
A society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance for only so long.
By mark Steyn
As America sinks into a multi-trillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to
listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the
Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are
spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly
wasted. Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to
keep it within budget: London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal
dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight,
was the least worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These
days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office
of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as
at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with
less.
As I said,
these are more or less conventional symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great
powers still go through the motions but increasingly ineffectually. But what
the Council on Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the
street, decline can be very pleasant. In Britain, France, Spain, and the
Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of
Empire. Today’s Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, have better health, and
take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline,
but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility. Americans could be forgiven
for concluding that, if this is “decline,” bring it on.
But it’s not
going to be like that for the United States: Unlike Europe, geopolitical
decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand. Indeed, they’re
already underway. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing
“bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the
1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not
permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only
industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to
rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented preeminence would last forever: We
would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and
spend anything and we would still be Number One. That was the thinking of
Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions.
The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a
functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes,
Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then
wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.
Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.
Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.
One
sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way
through college” — because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a
year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is
not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a
crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the
former are far easier to solve.
My colleague
Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families testifying on
the “We are the 99%” websites have real problems. However, the “Occupy”
movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more
regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university
with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.
Indeed, for all their youthful mien, the protestors are as mired in America’s
post-war moment as their grandparents: One of their demands is for a trillion
dollars in “environmental restoration.” Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.
Beneath the
allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal
permanence. The agitators for “American Autumn” think that such demands are
reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in
America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever
expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the
accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And in that
sense this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for
the sclerotic status quo.
Middle-class
America is dying before our eyes: The job market is flatlined, the college fees
soar ever upward, the property market is underwater, and Obamacare is already
making medical provision both more expensive and more restrictive. That doesn’t
leave much else — although no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the
statists will fix that, too. As more and more middle Americans are beginning to
notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their
blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college “education”
and health “benefits.” For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer,
augmented by ever grimmer statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes, and much
else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift devastating downward slide,
far beyond what post-war Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist
Argentina on a Roman scale.
It would be
heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is
a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims
of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence.
No comments:
Post a Comment