He begins with the legacy of two totalitarianisms. Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed in a top-down manner,"so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures." As a result, the establishment has "come to regard the electorate as children."
Second, the Soviet menace during the Cold War prompted American leaders, impatient with Europe's (and Canada's) weak responses, effectively to take over their defense. This benign and far-sighted policy led to victory by 1991, but it also had the unintended and less salutary side effect of freeing up Europe's funds to build a welfare state. This welfare state had several malign implications.
The nanny state infantilized Europeans, making them worry about such pseudo-issues as climate change while feminizing the males.
It also neutered them, annexing "most of the core functions of adulthood," starting with the instinct to breed. From about 1980, birth rates plummeted, leaving an inadequate base for today's workers to receive their pensions.
Structured on a pay-as-you-go basis, it amounted to an intergenerational Ponzi scheme under which today's workers depend on their children for their pensions.
The demographic collapse meant that the indigenous peoples of countries like Russia, Italy, and Spain are at the start of a population death spiral.
It led to a collapse of confidence that in turn bred "civilizational exhaustion," leaving Europeans unprepared to fight for their ways.
To keep the economic machine running meant accepting foreign workers. Rather than execute a long-term plan to prepare for the many millions of immigrants needed, Europe's elites punted, welcoming almost anyone who turned up. By virtue of geographic proximity, demographic overdrive, and a crisis-prone environment, "Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans," Mr. Steyn writes.
Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe: "Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare." Put differently, "Premodern Islam beats post-modern Christianity." Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." With even more drama, he adds, "It's the end of the world as we know it."
Let's begin at the beginning, with the word "infantalize." I have used this word on more than one occasion myself, in describing the effects of modern consumerism on Western popular culture. This is hardly an original observation - observers left, right, and center have been pointing this out for most of the post-war era (One of the more powerful arguments in which this plays a role - though not a central one - occurs in Herbert Marcuse's later works. In fact, it seems that the most interesting of Steyn's ideas via Pipes, i.e., those pertaining to the relationship of Fascism to post-war socialism in the West, and the tendency of both to "infantalize", are lifted wholly from Marcuse and other New Left philosophers, sans the critique of paternalism, sans the critique of capitalism, sans the pro-liberation agenda, sans the intricate examination of the relationship between industrialism and social conformity, in short, sans everything that would put these potent notions in their proper context. But this would be far from the first time the chosen philosophy of the Right has been little more than a sophomoric appropriation of choice tidbits from the Left. Many of the godfather neo-cons were Trotskyites back in the day.) However, only from the modern American Right will you find this variant; that European culture has suffered from this trait far more greatly than have we Americans, and that the European Welfare State is wholly to blame.
That the European is more spoiled, less self-sufficient, less personally responsible, more reckless, more promiscuous, and less an adult than the American is a very popular part of the American mythology - it is one of the ways we are meant to feel better about ourselves. That the European comes by these weaknesses though the smothering security of their "Nanny State" is considered a matter of settled science in the American Right and Center - the notion perpetually infects all of our pubic discussions on how to deal with our own issues of poverty, welfare, health care, education, and pretty much any other public expenditure you could care to name. And yet it is, in a way that is almost painfully obvious to any American who has even been to Europe, the exact opposite of the truth.
Take the most obvious surface detail of the European welfare state, namely, the fact that it provides welfare. Europeans can usually count on being housed and provided an indefinite, liveable income while unemployed, can receive a quality university education for a minimal charge, and make use of low-cost or free health care when needed. This safety-net, so the argument goes, leads to weakness of character, fraught with lazy and over-consumptive habits, selfishness, and infertility.
This is not a totally irrational argument. In the abstract, at least, one may reasonably engage it. When used in comparison to American habits, however, it crumbles to dust. Those who bemoan the European welfare-dependant sucking at the national teat conveniently forget that State-side, we have our own, much larger and more infantilizing boob-rack. It's called the credit-card. Oh, yes - funny how we overlook that, isn't it? While the average European owes about $3,000 in credit card debt, the average American owes over $9,000. (This is also more than triple the amount for Americans in the early 1990's. Surprise! It looks like Newt Gingrich's Contract with America merely played a zero-sum game of shifting dependency to the private sector, where the lending-class can make a good buck off of it). Even in the best of times, Americans have been notorious debtors when compared to their European counterparts - many of whom use their credit cards for the sole purpose of making automatic payment on utility bills. And this nasty (but apparently very adult) habit of ours extends beyond the simple credit card, and into our mortgages and car loans. In fact, you may recall that within the past year or so, we Americans passed a certain milestone when the amount of our collective personal debt actually exceeded our collective personal savings. Whoa.
Consider, now the European - who may live their entire life without owning a car (being able to travel extensively without one) even if they earn a very tidy middle-class income and can afford one, who will likely buy something small and efficient if they do, who uses only a fraction of the oil in the form of transport, plastic packaging, and home heating and lighting when compared to the American, who more often than not lives at home, with family, throughout college and grad school, and even until marriage (which usually occurs earlier than in the U.S.), who spends a full year or so in military or community service in their youth, who while young is many multitudes less likely to become pregnant out of wedlock, or have an abortion, or spread an STD, who in every conceivable, quantifiable measure (economic, environmental, social) is less of a burden to his neighbors, his country, and the world than is the American, and ask again: what, pray tell, is the problem with the welfare state?
Do you know what American credit card companies, in their private lingo, call people who pay their monthly bills on time? Deadbeats.
Who's infantalizing whom here?
It is in America, not Europe, where the goal of every industry - including the U.S govt. - is to have legions of debtors at their ankles. It is in America where one is constantly badgered about one's smoking and eating habits (and yet to no avail!). It is in American where we must be warned with giant plastic signs and hazard cones every time someone mops the tiles at the local mall, because every time we slip or stub a toe, someone else is to blame and lawyers must be consulted. It is in America, not Europe, that we so crave the cleanliness of the hospital in all aspects of our lives that we can't bear the sight of fish-heads, must irradiate every food product until it looses all traces of living matter, where adults are taught to live in fear of daily, mundane risks with a constant barrage of television undercover-scoops (send more lawyers please!), where every headache and bodily irregularity is a thing to be medicated, where a child may no longer ride a bicycle without a helmet without his parents getting arrested for criminal neglect, where sexuality is feared and obsessed over like a form of insidious witchcraft, where we maintain an antiquated system of measuring length and distance long unused by the rest of the world because the effort of conversion proved too taxing for us, where we can't be bothered to understand the affairs of other countries until Our Leader orders us to invade one, where college students know less history and hold their liquor more poorly than European counterparts five years their junior, where popular entertainments only a few scintilla less barbaric than some post-apocalyptic Thunderdome tournament flourish as multi-million dollar industries, where one can shoot live, caged animals over the internet and where police entrapment of would-be sex offenders makes for suitable prime-time programming, where teenagers are either terrified of having any sex or terrified of not having it (for no moderation is possible in the face of mortal fear), where presidential blow-jobs - a staple of men in power since the dawn of man and present in every high office in western history - is regarded by the public as a fatal rift in the heavens though which slag and locusts come pouring, where the momentary appearance of a black woman's tit during halftime provokes another national crisis (Children should not see breasts, you see, because breasts are actually for...oh, wait, that's ironic, isn't it?), where we eat ourselves into a diabetic stupor, driving up the cost of health care and blaming everyone but ourselves.
And yet it's those Europeans - who spend cautiously, who eat better without being hounded to do so, who mind their own business (to their neighbors both local and international), who grow up and learn moderate habits at an earlier age, who feel a responsibility to know other languages, who don't produce more children than they can support and raise in stability, who learn to be happy with less luxury and comfort when the circumstances of the world require it of them and don't complain...those Europeans are the real infants, aren't they?
Good. I'm glad you have it straight. Because, iffin' I didn't know better, it seems to me that becoming "infantilized" is more the result of rampant American capitalism than socialism.
Along those same lines, let's consider how, as Pipes puts it via Steyn, European males have been "feminized." It's a little difficult for me to imagine what he (or anyone else) means by this, though I hear it rather often. I suspect that such men (and it is always men and the occasional Ann Coulter) have never walked as or with a women through the streets of Italy - where testosterone speaks freely, unimpeded by speech centers or mental restraint, every moment a woman passes by. They have never encountered the machismo of the Germans, the French, the bullfighting Spanish. Because, frankly we American males are far, far more girly than European males.
Perhaps there's some connection in the neo-con mind to "feminization" and "letting the Muslims in." That does, indeed, seem to be the argument at hand. These neutered, girly European males suffer from a special kind of impotence called "civilization exhaustion," in which they fail to plough enough furrows for White Christian babies, meaning that Muslim immigrants will overpopulate and outnumber the Europeans and give rise to the culture of "Eurabia." To wit:
Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe. "Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare." Put differently, "Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity." Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." With even more drama, he adds that "it's the end of the world as we know it."
How can America avoid their fate?
First, avoid the "bloated European welfare systems," declare them no less than a national security threat, shrink the state, and emphasize the virtues of self-reliance and individual innovation. Second, avoid "imperial understretch," don't "hunker down in Fortress America" but destroy the ideology of radical Islam, help reform Islam, and expand Western civilization to new places. Only if Americans "can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world" will they have enough company to soldier on. Failing that, expect a "new Dark Ages … a planet on which much of the map is re-primitivized."
Here's my question...are these guys trying to be funny? Given that the rise in the European Muslim population has more or less coincided with the Neo-conlib wet dream known as the European Union, in which all the plebes were duly informed that this change is inevitable, inescapable, and will require the "sacrifice" of many long-cherished aspects of the welfare state, it hardly seems to follow that the solution to a supposed cultural crisis which is directly caused by market liberalization is...more market liberalization.
Let's reflect, for a moment, on the welfare state, and consider why it might be popular with the modern European. For the neo-con, democratic socialism is a kind of middle-class collectivism, or communism-lite, originally proffered as a form of appeasement to keep the restless natives from succumbing to full-blown Stalinism. It stifles innovation, individualism, the ethics of self-reliance, and leads to cultural stagnation and unemployment.
Virtually all of these claims, however, are easily falsified. Innovation? Many of the most successful companies(Nokia, Volvo, Saab, Toyota, Lego, Honda, Sony...need I go on?) in the world are based in Scandanavia and Japan, whose wealthiest CEO's earn only a small fraction of their American counterparts. Yes, their "most productive" members are paid less and often taxed to the hilt, yet they often still design and build far better products than the filthy-rich folks in charge here in the U.S. Technologically, these countries exist several years ahead of the U.S. - their most advanced products are commonplace in their homelands before even being introduced here. Self-reliance? As already noted, it is the American who is most likely to seek redress for perceived wrongs through frivolous lawsuits and the public, talk-show-psycho-drama of "vicitmization", who is more likely (whether wealthy or poor) to recklessly spend beyond his means. Unemployment? Neo-cons love to cite such examples as France (currently 8.8%) and Germany (8.2%), and then proudly point to the U.S (4.5%), declaring our system vindicated. Those critics are notably silent on such countries as Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Austria, all of which have unemployment figures equal to or less than the U.S. Denmark and The Netherlands are both below 4%. (The overall average for the European Union is, indeed, around 8%, but this is largely to due to economically depressed areas in the East still recovering from the birth-pangs of the post-Soviet era).
As to the question of individualism, we need to take a slightly more philosophical approach. Are we to define a free, individualistic society as one in which every member can make their own choices, and are limited only by their willingness to strive and their natural predispositions? Is it a society free of coercion? In purely economic terms, American society lags behind the welfare state on both counts. We have less social mobility than the welfare states, not more. Our Golden Age of cultural and technological advancement - the 1940's thru the 1960's - occurred during the post-war ww2 era, in which wealth was heavily re-distributed (income taxes reaching as high as 90%). Removing this anomaly from the debate because it was a "post-wartime" economy misses the point - a wartime or post-wartime economy succeeds in those respects precisly because it is managed, and wealth is re-distributed according to need above all else.
Okay, my point here is not to condemn America and write a love-letter to European socialism. At best, our question here is: which is the lesser of two evils? Or, more accurately, given the premisis set forth by those who bemoan the status of the modern West in the light of perceived threat of incursions by a non-democratic East (itself a set of assumptions requiring another essay), which of the two cultures - American or European - is most willing to stand "against" Islam and defend its own cultural values? The neo-con line (not just in the above quotes, but elsewhere) is that America is the nation most willing to combat "pre-modern Islam." Again, for better or for worse, they are exactly wrong.
As to how Europe should best deal with its influx of Muslims, that is a topic for yet another essay. But as far as for standing for its own values (which the neo-cons accuse it of failing to do), let us note that it is Europe, not America, which has put its foot down and said: "those who come here to live and work must accept our values. We are a secular society, we believe in sexual equality - not the veil. Your sacred cows are not ours. We do not wish to tiptoe around your sensibilities when it comes to the cartoons in our papers, our films, and our institutions of public education." We might argue, perhaps correctly, that America is more tolerant of Muslims than Europe (as least urban American), or more likely to worry about offending them. But the neo-cons (who are the ones on trial in this essay) charge that Europe cares less about preserving their culture - whatever they correctly or incorrectly perceive that to be - is clearly wrong. They have a firm sense of who they are, while we do not.
To conclude, the extent to which Europe feels "exhausted" and apprehensive in the midst of their growing Muslim population, it is not the welfare state that is to blame. Quite the contrary, it is the very attempt to systematically dismantle it that is causing the crisis. As neo-con-lib reforms cut deeply into the way of life that Europeans have cherished for more than six decades, and which, for those who lived through the war, speaks to a realization of the dream of a peaceful and equitable - yet also culturally diverse - European society, those elements still tainted by racism have made note of the wound, and perceive that the Middle East is bleeding through it. I humbly submit that they have not "managed" this influx properly because the market liberalization responsible for it was crammed down their throats - by the international corporate class which has peddled these reforms as "inevitable".
Islam is not a thing to be feared. In this respect, the neo-cons and the European Right share the same incorrect conclusion (though they come at it from different directions). Both groups need to realize that the cause of their social disquietude is the selling out of the social contract between European citizens and their political representatives. It is in the interest of the business class to foment social conflict, cleaved according to race and religion, for that will take the heat off their own accountability to the people. Thus has it been done for centuries; the "other" supplies an all-too-effective boogeyman. If the neo-cons were truly consistent in their beliefs about self-reliance and individualism, they would cast aside their fears of Islamic integration and welcome those immigrants with "the youth and the will" into the West. By evoking the dreaded clash of civilizations, the neos are creating the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings for reactionary statism of the worst kind. As to whether this last effect is by accident or design, I leave to the reader to decide.
