After America - Mark Steyn [117]
In 2006, the last remaining non-Serb republic in Yugoslavia flew the coop and joined Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia ... hold on, isn’t it Bosnia-Herzegovina? Or has Herzegovina split, too? Who cares? Slovenia’s independent and so is Slovakia. Slavonia wasn’t, or not the last time I checked. But Montenegro is, and East Timor, and Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and every other Nickelandimistan between here and Mongolia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, big countries (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Indonesia) and not-so-big countries (Czechoslovakia) have been getting smaller. Why should the United States remain an exception to this phenomenon? Especially as it gets poorer—and more statist.
For the best part of a century, America’s towns, counties, and states have been ceding power to the central metropolis—even though, insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have sufficiently common interests. In The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: the United States (310 million people), Switzerland (a little under 8 million), Norway, and Singapore (both about 5 million).55 Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore argue, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up.
That theory is now being tested on a daily basis. To ram government health care down the throats of America, Congress bought off regional factions with deals like the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase. It is certainly no stranger to buying off ethnic factions in pursuit of the black and Hispanic vote—with immigration un-enforcement and affirmative action. Yet to attempt to impose centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history.
In the years ahead America will have its Slovakias and Slovenias, formally and informally. But it cannot remain on its present path and hold its territorial integrity.
Let us grant that the United States is not such a patchwork quilt of different ethnicities as Yugoslavia; it’s a “melting pot”—or it was. Let us further accept for the sake of argument that the United States’ success was unconnected to the people who established it and created its institutions and culture. It is famously a “proposition nation,” defined not by blood but by an idea:
Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That’s what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it.56
Who said that? A Frenchman: Nicolas Sarkozy, addressing Congress in 2007. But what happens when America no longer teaches men how to practice freedom? What then is its raison d’être? Does it have any more reason to stick together than any other “proposition nation” that dumps the proposition? Such as, to take only the most obvious example, the Soviet Union. What is there to hold a post-prosperity, constrained-liberty, un-Dreamt America together? The nation’s ruling class has, in practical terms, already seceded