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Walter Duranty: “What if we could just be China for a day?” he fantasized. “Where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions. . . .”126 Ah, yes. “Authorize” the “right” solutions without all that messy multi-party democracy getting in the way: why, in Beijing, where they don’t suffer the disadvantages of free elections, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”127

Ooooo-kay. But, pardon my asking, forward to where?

When the New York Times’ most prominent writer comes out in favor of dictatorship, and no one else in the smart set calls him on it, you get a glimpse at the very least of the scale of elite contempt for popular sovereignty and the republic’s animating principles. In breaking faith with the American idea, the political class got everything wrong: they exported millions of low-skilled jobs but imported millions of low-skilled workers; they fund both sides of the war on terror out of a wanton hostility to domestic energy production that leaves us dependent on noxious oil dictatorships that use their profits to wage civilizational warfare. And, having gotten us into this mess, the way to get us out is “China for a day.” This is the logical endpoint of a cocooned conformocracy: Big Government having “imposed” the problems in the first place, only Even Bigger Government can “impose” the solutions.

Never underestimate the totalitarian temptations of the smart set. We’ll hear a lot more of that in the years ahead.

In this chapter, Steyn writes:

“Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet.… Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from Julius Caesar.… Hundreds of leftie websites are so smart that, after the 2011 shootings in Tucson, they all blamed it on Sarah Palin by using the same fake Sinclair Lewis quote from It Can’t Happen Here.… Liberals are so smart they teach a fake book in college (I, Rigoberta Menchu).”

So what’s your best “Liberals are so smart they …” line?

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CHAPTER THREE

THE NEW ATHENS

The Drowning City

MR DIMPLE: Believe me, Colonel, when you shall have seen

the brilliant exhibitions of Europe, you will learn to despise the

amusements of this country as much as I do.

COLONEL MANLY: I do not wish to see them, for I can never

esteem that knowledge valuable, which tends to give me a distaste

for my native country.

—Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1787)

From the Times of London, May 6, 2010:

The President of Greece warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens bank where they worked.1

Almost right. They were not an “anti-government” mob, but a government mob, a mob comprised largely of civil servants. That they are highly uncivil and disinclined to serve should come as no surprise: they’re paid more and they retire earlier, and that’s how they want to keep it. So they’re objecting to austerity measures that would end, for example, the tradition of fourteen monthly paychecks per annum.2 You read that right: the Greek public sector cannot be bound by anything so humdrum as temporal reality. So, when it was mooted that the “workers” might henceforth receive a mere twelve monthly paychecks per annum, they rioted. Their hapless victims—a man and two women—were a trio of clerks trapped in a bank when the mob set it alight and then obstructed emergency crews attempting to rescue them.

Unlovely as they are,