After America - Mark Steyn [126]
Very few elderly, established residents of Langley Park knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of a century it’s become a fait accompli. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it.
And so it just kinda happened. Another proposition: When large tracts of the United States take on “the aura of Central America”—laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, civic collapse, to cite only New York Times-observed phenomena—will such a land still be the United States? Or will it increasingly be the northern branch office of Latin America? None of us can say for sure, but, underneath the smiley-face banalities about hard-working families wanting a shot at the American Dream, I think most of us know which way to bet.
Human capital is the most reliable indicator of what society you’ll be. Even liberals, even Martin Peretz, even the New York Times acknowledge that, at least in unguarded moments. For almost half a century, the human capital of the United States has transformed faster than at any time since the founding of the republic.
“Poor Mexico,” Porfirio Diaz, the country’s longtime strongman, is supposed to have said. “So far from God, so close to the United States.” Today Mexico is America’s southern quagmire—farther from God than ever, and not close to the United States but in it.
After the Arizona court decision, Jon Richards published a cartoon in the Albuquerque Journal. It showed three Indians standing on the shore watching the Mayflower approach. “Are they legal?” wonders the chief. “What do we do if they have babies?” asks his squaw. “Is it too late to build a fence?” says the brave.92
What is the message of this cartoon? That America has always been a land of immigrants? Or that the tide of illegal settlement is going to work out as well for the United States as it did for the Algonquin nation? Is Richards’ cartoon just the cheap triumphalism of a self-loathing Anglo’s cultural relativism? Or is it actually a portent of the future? The latter isn’t so hard to imagine: a largely impoverished Hispanic Southwest, with a few tony Anglo gated communities—or, if you prefer, “reservations.”
SHADOWLANDS
The Conformicrats live off the fruits of the productive class and they need to keep them in a state of quiescence. They achieve this with their allies in the dependent class by a kind of pincer movement. From above, the ideological aristocracy can inflict any amount of pain through its administrative enforcers. From below, there is the seething dysfunctional jungle of the underclass. You can measure civilized societies by how easy it is to insulate yourself from the predators, and in America it is still easier than in Britain. But, lurking in the Conformicrats’ coercion of the beleaguered productive class is the implicit threat of a good cop/bad cop routine—or good statist/dysfunctional statist: if you don’t give us what we want—more money for more agencies and more bureaucrats—we may not be able to hold the underclass in check, and you’re within easier reach of’em than we are. It is a worthless guarantee: given the human wreckage piled up by half-a-century of diseducation, welfarism, sexual self-destruction, and much else, the Eloi aristocracy cannot hold a Morlock dependent class in check. “We have not yet seen what man can make of man,” wrote the behaviorist B. F. Skinner.93 Well, we’re about to.
Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks, some of the ruled class have workarounds (gated communities, offshore accounts), but others among the ruled class just get unruly.
What will the statists do? We are already watching municipalities drown in the pensions liabilities of their bureaucracies. Do they fix the problem or do they cut core services? The latter’s the way to bet: you don’t fire the police officers, but you reassign