Catastrophe - Dick Morris [31]
As if that weren’t enough, Charles Murray, the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has articulated an even greater divide between European and American attitudes—and a greater challenge to those who want to keep our side of the Atlantic filled with our traditional approaches to work, family, and life.
Noting the rapid decline in European birthrates, Murray has predicted that “the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.”101
He points out that these low birthrates, well below those necessary simply to maintain Europe’s current population, exist in countries “providing generous child allowance, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves.”102
Similarly, despite the fact that European jobs are “most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are the most lavish,” Murray points out that to Europeans the concept of work “is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.”103
Instead of having children and reveling in their work, Murray says, Europeans are having a “great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and [see] no voids in their lives that need filling.”104
Citing Europeans’” self-absorption,” he says they increasingly see work as “something that interferes with the higher good of leisure.” He posits that much of the Europeans’ low birthrate stems from their asking that if leisure is “the purpose of life, why have a child? What good are they really?”105
Murray views Obama’s desire to move us closer to the European socialist model as a threat to the American way of life. He warns that “irreversible damage [may] be done to the American project over the next few years. The drift toward the European model…is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional.”106
He argues that we must again see:
the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious…. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiring quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close.107
It’s hard to imagine a better way to describe what we may lose in the leveling, bureaucratizing, and narcotizing of America that Obama seems bent on pursuing—all disguised as an economic recovery program.
The idea that work is just an interruption of our leisure time—and that we value leisure over work—runs counter to how most Americans live their lives. In his poem “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” the English poet Rudyard Kipling articulated best what we do think:
…And no one shall work for money.
And no one shall work for fame.
But each for the joy of working,
Each by his own separate star.
To draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are.
ACTION AGENDA
Once you recognize how Barack Obama is trying to change