Mark Steyn: We're Doomed!

Mark Steyn is one of my favorite political writers:  funny, smart, clearheaded about what's happening in Europe and, more slowly, in America, unafraid of the nanny-state ninnies and PC thought-police.   His piece today about the upcoming election is on the money on how important it is that Republicans, if they do prevail in taking back the House and Senate, don't blow the opportunity to make real corrections to the current trends toward Bigger Government, Bigger Budgets, Bigger Debt:

A Republican victory is not the end but merely the means. The Tea Party and other members of America’s beleaguered productive class decided that this time round it suited them to work within the diseased husk of the GOP. This is really the last chance for the unloved Republicans. If the party establishment is sufficiently dimwitted to see November 2nd as the restoration of the 2004-2006 GOP, they will be setting up the conditions... for a serious third-force challenge in 2012.

But Steyn methinks goes too far when he says that the alternative to a conservative reformation is Götterdämmerung:

And, without serious course correction, America is doomed. It starts with the money. For dominant powers, it always does – from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. “Declinism” is in the air these days, but for us full-time apocalyptics we’re already well past that stage. In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the world’s largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy. Everything that can be outsourced has been – manufacturing to by no means friendly nations overseas; and much of what’s left in agriculture and construction to the armies of the “undocumented”.   At the lower end, Americans are educated at a higher cost per capita than any nation except Luxembourg in order to do minimal-skill checkout-line jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology. At the upper end, America’s elite goes to school till early middle age in order to be credentialed for pseudo-employment as $350 grand-a-year diversity consultants (Michelle Obama) or in one of the many other phony-baloney makework schemes deriving from government micro-regulation of virtually every aspect of endeavor.   So we’re not facing “decline”. We’re already in it. What comes next is the “fall” – sudden, devastating, off the cliff. That’s why this election is consequential....

I live in the Midwest, in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, known as Wauwatosa.  I call it "Wawatopia," because it is, in many ways, still the kind of small town that made America great.  People work hard, they go to church, their kids walk to school -- my kids to the Catholic grade school a hundred feet from my door. They set their chairs out on the street the night before the Fourth of July parade so they'll have spots for the parade close enough so that their kids can catch the candy that the parade strollers toss out.   People around here volunteer  to do good works for their communities, their schools, their churches, at a prodigious clip.   A neighbor who is ill can expect more meals from their friends in the neighborhood than they can eat.  A parish festival is standing room only.  

Is it fragile?  Sure.  Could it all spin apart?   Sure it could.  I just don't think we're quite as close to it as Mark thinks.   I don't think we're one election away from the Weimar Republic, in other words.

Glad to see Mark back writing, though.   Missed him all summer.