After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (4 page)

What might prompt the threat of a little economic blackmail? American action against North Korea? Washington’s support for Taiwan? China is dangerous not (as many argue) because of its strength but because of its weakness. As I wrote in
America Alone
, the People’s Republic has a crude structural flaw: thanks to its disastrous one-child policy, it will get old before it gets rich, and, unless it’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, the millions of surplus young men whom the government’s One-Child Policy has deprived of female companionship is a recipe either for wrenching social convulsions at home—or for war abroad, the traditional surplus inventory-clearance method of great powers. That’s actually worse news than if China was cruising to uncontested global hegemony—because it means that Beijing’s calculations on how the Sino-American relationship evolves are even less likely to align with ours. China has to maximize its power before demographic decay sets in. In other words, it has strong incentives to be bold and to push, hard and fast. And, when it happens, Washington will be taken by surprise by something that was entirely inevitable.

Faced with a choice between unsustainable entitlements and maintain-ing armed forces of global reach, the United States, as Europe did, will abandon military capability and toss the savings into the great sucking maw of social spending. That, in turn, will make for not only a more dangerous 20

after america

world but a more vulnerable America that, to modify President Bush, will wind up having to fight them over here because we no longer have the capacity to fight them over there.

For Americans, the best-case scenario is that Washington’s ruling klep-tocracy sleepwalks its subjects into smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller lives, and soft despotism so beguilingly they don’t notice it’s over until late in the day. A more likely prospect is a catastrophically convulsed America that descends into Balkanized ruin and social collapse on a planet with no global order in which the former hyperpower still makes the most inviting target.

What? You wanted a happy ending? Well, you’re going to have to make that happen—because, without fundamental course correction, there is only the certainty of disaster, and a step-by-step descent deeper into the abyss:
A is for ADDICTION

We spend too much, borrowing from the future to such an extent it’s no longer clear we’ve got one.

R is for REDISTRIBUTION

Day by day, an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the productive class to the obstructive class is delivering a self-governing republic into rule by regulators, bureaucrats, and social engineers.

M is for MONOPOLY

Old ruling class: “We the People.” New ruling class: “We the People who know better than you frightful people. . . . ” America is ruled not by a meritocracy but by a cartel of conformicrats imposing a sterile monopoly of outmoded ideas.

A is for ARTERIOSCLEROSIS

“Yes, we can”? No, we can’t! By comparison with the past, America is already seizing up.

the Stupidity of Broke 21

G is for GLOBAL RETREAT

As Britain and other great powers quickly learned, the price of Big Government at home is an ever smaller presence abroad. An America turned inward will make for a more dangerous world.

E is for ENGINEERING

“Celebrate Diversity”? The ideological homogeneity and social engineering of the nation’s schools would be regarded as child abuse in any other age. Aside from its other defects, it diverts too many Americans into frivolous unproductive activity, while our competitors get on with the real work.

D is for DECAY

Mired in dependency and decline, much of the United States will be on a fast track to the Third World. And, no matter how refined the upscale communities the elites retrench to, it will prove increasingly impossible to insulate yourself from the pathologies a decadent liberalism has loosed to rampage Godzilla-sized across the land.

D is for DISINTEGRATION

We are becoming the highly singular United State of America.

No advanced society has ever tried hyper-regulatory direct rule for 350 million people. Will it work? Or is it more likely that increasingly incompatible jurisdictions and social groups will conclude that the price for keeping fifty stars in the flag is too high? Without the American idea, there will be insufficient glue to hold the United States together.

O is for OPEN SEASON

Do you find it hard to imagine a world without America? The Russians, the Chinese, and the would-be New Caliphate don’t.

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after america

And on a planet where rich passive nations are defenseless while every failed state from North Korea to Sudan is butching up, it’s not hard to figure out what comes next.

N is for NUKES AWAY!

Addiction, Redistribution, Monopoly, Arteriosclerosis, Global retreat, social Engineering, Decay, Disintegration, Open season, Nukes away. Put them all together, they spell . . . ?

From Big Government to busted government, from federally regulated school bake sales to Armageddon—in nothing flat.

Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the
favelas
of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.

“After America”? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called the “United States,” but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to “unite” it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.

On the other hand:

The United States is still different. In the wake of the economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly “students” in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful, and pointless “university” costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry the Stupidity of Broke 23

mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar pork-athons, and just stay the hell out of my life and my pocket.

That’s the America that has a fighting chance—a nation that stands for economic dynamism, not the stagnant “managed capitalism” of France; for the First Amendment and the free-est, widest, rudest bruiting of ideas, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. But when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America’s animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we’ve already gone. Live free—or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.

Like I said, if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you.

Your call, America.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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ChaPter

one

the new rome

the decaying city

The form was still the same, but the animating
health and vigor were fled.

—Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline

and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–1789)
picture a man of the late nineteenth century, perhaps your own great-grandfather, sitting in an ordinary American home of 1890. And now pitch him forward in an H. G. Wells machine, not to our time but about halfway—to that same ordinary American home, circa 1950.

Why, the poor gentleman of 1890 would be astonished. His old home is full of mechanical contraptions. There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of food and keeping the milk fresh and cold! There is another shiny device whirring away and seemingly washing milady’s bloomers with no human assistance whatsoever! Even more amazingly, there is a full orchestra playing somewhere within his very house. No, wait, it’s coming from a tiny box on the countertop!

The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our time-traveler glances through the window: a metal conveyance is coming up the street at an incredible speed—with not a horse in sight. It’s enclosed with doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into 25

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the yard, and the doors open all at once, and two grown-ups and four children all get out—just like that, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world!

He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a

“telephone”? He’d heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country—and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she’ll see him tomorrow!

Oh, very funny. They’ve got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they?

What marvels! In a mere sixty years!

But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even farther into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!

So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.

And when he dismounts he wonders if he’s made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: the layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone. . . . Oh, wait.

It’s got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem . . . larger, and dressed like overgrown children.

And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.

But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.

Let’s pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: the computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like the new rome 27

thing in the corner, as one would in 1950, you can now watch Uncle Miltie on YouTube clips from your iPhone. But be honest, aside from that, what’s new? Your horseless carriage operates on the same principles it did a century ago. It’s added a CD player and a few cup holders, but you can’t go any faster than you could fifty years back. As for that great metal bird in the sky, commercial flight hasn’t advanced since the introduction of the 707 in the 1950s.

Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to bi-planes to flying boats to jetlin-ers in its first half-century, and then for the next half-century it just sat there, like a commuter twin-prop parked at Gate 27B at LaGuardia waiting for the mysteriously absent gate agent to turn up and unlock the jetway.

Other arenas aren’t quite as static as the modern American airport, but nor do they move at the same clip they used to. When was the last big medical breakthrough? I mean “big” in the sense of something that takes a crippling worldwide disease man has accepted as a cruel fact of life and so clobbers it that a generation on nobody gives it a thought. That’s what the polio vaccine did in 1955. Why haven’t we done that for Alzheimer’s? Today, we have endless “races for the cure,” and colored ribbons advertising one’s support for said races for the cure, and yet fewer cures. It’s not just pink ribbons for breast cancer, and gray ribbons for brain cancer, and white for bone cancer, but also yellow ribbons for adenosarcoma, light blue for Addison’s Disease, teal for agoraphobia, periwinkle for acid reflux, pink and blue ribbons for amniotic fluid embolisms, and pinstripe ribbons for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons. Yet for all the raised awareness, very few people seem aware of how the whole disease-curing business has ground to a halt.