Mark Steyn reminds us that it’s twenty years since he published America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which has become more and more accurate every year:
~As some readers may be aware, next year marks the twentieth anniversary of a certain “niche Canadian”‘s boffo international bestseller on demography. So the other day I was musing on whether it was too soon to mark the occasion — only to find I’d been beaten to the punch by the Nigerian media bigfoot Azu Ishiekwene:
It’s nearly 20 years since Mark Steyn wrote a non-fiction book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
Steyn, a Canadian newspaper columnist, could not have known that the kicker of this book title, which extolled America as the last bastion of civilisation as we know it, would become the metaphor for a wrecking ball.
Steyn thought demographic shifts, cultural decline, and Islam would ruin Western civilisation. The only redeeming grace was American exceptionalism. Nineteen years after his book, America Alone is remembered not for the threats Steyn feared or the grace of American exceptionalism but for an erratic president almost alone in his insanity.
The joke is on Steyn.
Oh, well. It was good while it lasted — which wasn’t as long as it should have, thanks to the dirty stinkin’ rotten corrupt American “justice” system (see below).
~But I thank Mr Ishiekwene for reminding me of the twin theses of my book: on the one hand, “demographic shifts, cultural decline, and Islam” and, on the other, “American exceptionalism”. The first half is undeniable: At one point last year, there were no Anglo-Celtic heads of government anywhere in the British Isles except for Northern Ireland. Nobody even talks about “demographic shifts”, with even “conservative” politicians preferring to focus on “British values” or “French values” or “[Your Country Here] values”, even as those “values”, not least freedom of speech, are remorselessly surrendered. The UK’s “Deputy Prime Minister”, Angela Rayner, is proposing as the state’s reaction to the Southport stabbings, about which the most intemperate Tweeters were less inaccurate than the state propaganda, to restrict free expression even further. Islam? In Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, we would rather our children be stabbed and gang-raped than do anything about it, especially if it risks being damned as “Islamophobic”. The delightful Ms Rayner, who once boasted about flashing her soi-disant “ginger growler” across the Commons to Boris Johnson at Question Time, will be keeping it under wraps in the years ahead.
~As for the second part of my book’s arguments — “American exceptionalism” — well, it’s been a rough twenty years. But, to cast Azu Mr Ishiekwene’s contempt for an “an erratic president almost alone in his insanity” in a more generous light, the last three weeks have been a useful reminder that America is still different — or, at any rate, retains the capacity to be different. In his first days in office Trump 47 yanked the US from the World “Health” Organisation and the Paris “climate” accord and the UN “Human Rights” Council. If I have been insufficient in my praise for this energy, it is only because I held out hopes that a man “alone in his insanity” might have simply nuked the WHO. But, such disappointments aside, in Britain (and in the EU it has yet to leave in any meaningful sense), no such decisive acts in the here-and-now can even be contemplated.
And just because I’ve been including a fair bit of USAID-related stuff this week, he comments on Elon Musk’s epic sidequests investigations into US government waste and corruption:
~That’s the good news — and it’s very heartening. The bad news is that almost everything the national government (it is no longer really “federal”) of the United States touches is a racket.
The United States Agency for International Development is so-called in order that gullible rubes who listen to NPR think that it’s something to do with helping starving children in Africa. The cynical rubes who follow Conservative Inc think it’s something to do with helping African dictators’ Swiss bank accounts and endlessly regurgitate the old line about “international aid” taking money from poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries. But this is the cynicism of the terminally naïve and does a great injustice to the average blood-drenched Somali warlord. As Elon Musk has pointed out, ninety per cent of USAid funds are disbursed in the Washington, DC area. Opponents of that line say, ah, yes, but that’s misleading because some of it then gets passed on outside the Beltway eventually to reach some emaciated Congolese laddie.
Well, I would doubt it. There is no legitimate reason for Bill Kristol and Mona Charen to be receiving any funds from an agency for “international development” — and they surely know it. The least we should expect from them is that they come by their Never Trumpery honestly.
But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that that 90-10 ratio is pretty standard. The US armed forces account for forty per cent of the planet’s total military spending. Does ninety per cent of that also get disbursed in the District of Columbia? On Thoroughly Modern Milley’s ribbon budget? It’s as good an explanation as any for the failure to win anything since VJ Day. The rube right’s antipathy to foreigners shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the corruption is domestic — and it’s a very bipartisan sewer.
So I wish Trump, Musk et al the best of luck. But, notwithstanding that every rinky-dink District Court judge seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that he’s head of the executive branch of government, Trump has spent the last three weeks doing things. There is no sign that that is even possible in the rest of the west, where the Dutch model seems to prevail: Geert Wilders wins the election, but then gets neutered.
So, in a sense, Azu Ishiekwene is right. There is a yawning chasm between Trump and the poseur attitude-flaunting rest of the west. And yet Mr Ishiekwene is wrong on this: an erratic president is not almost alone in his insanity. In case you haven’t noticed, Panama won’t be renewing its Chinese deal on the Belt & Road Initiative, and El Salvador is happy to gaol anybody Trump sends them. It turns out that the quickest way to solve any international dispute is to threaten the recalcitrant with twenty-five per cent tariffs starting at midnight. If the forty-seventh president doesn’t seem interested in “winning hearts and minds”, it’s because he’s found something more effective.
