After America: Get Ready for Armageddon is almost as depressing
as its title. Mark Steyn’s 2011 book, which I’m reading now for the first
time, gives statistical heft to the doomsday thread that animates this forum
form time to time. There’s no point in trying to save the Republic, Steyn
warns, because it’s too late; it is too far gone. The Nanny State has become all-pervasive,
meddling in every detail of our lives in ways that even King George III would
have rejected as too intrusive. Still worse is that the unelected bureaucrats
who toil ceaselessly at crushing the energy, initiative and vitality from the
economy are not only everywhere, they are paid far more than their
counterparts in the private sector. Steyn notes that in 2009, the
average civilian employee of the U.S. Government earned $81,258 in salary
plus $41,791 in benefits, for a total of $123,049. The private-sector worker,
meanwhile, received a mere $50,462 in salary and $10,589 in benefits, for a
total of $61,051. That’s why the latter will be working until they are 80 to
pay for government workers who retire with absolute security as early as 55.
As for electing Republicans to obstruct a Marxist president who is
hell-bent on destroying America, Steyn reminds us that the loyal opposition
is as much a part of the problem as the Democrats they would seek to rein in.
This is even more obvious now than it was when Steyn published the book. Back
then, we might have hoped that Obamacare, the most destructive piece of
legislation ever enacted by Congress, as well as the largest new tax ever
levied on America’s middle class, would have been repudiated and rescinded by
now. Instead, the GOP has been taking potshots at the ACA’s gratuitous
tax on medical devices while they bide their time waiting for the Supreme
Court to decide King v. Burwell. Although the case seems likely to invalidate
Obamacare subsidies in the 30 or so states that wisely decided not to set up
their own healthcare exchanges, Republicans evidently have no strategy for
pressing the advantage when the court decision is rendered sometime this
summer.
A Network of Petty Regulations
No one knew America better than Alexis de Tocqueville, and Steyn quotes a
particularly prescient passage at length to show how America, a democratic
republic, was vulnerable to “slyer seductions” than the despotism of Europe:
“I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves
without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill
their souls.” “That’s not a bad description of a populace preoccupied
with ‘social media,’” notes Steyn. But then de Tocqueville goes on:
“Over these is elevated an immense tutelary power, which takes sole charge of
assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute,
attentive to detail, regular, provident and gentle. It would resemble the
paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for
manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in
childhood…it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs,
guides them in their principal affairs….
“The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole, it covers
its surface with a network of petty regulations – complicated, minute and
uniform – through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous
souls know not how to make their way…. It does not break wills; it softens
them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force on to act, but it
constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own…it does not tyrannize,
it gets in the way; it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies,
and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid
and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.”
Just so. Two more years of Obama, and the American Dream will be yet a few
steps closer to death by a thousand cuts. The economic depression that is
surely coming will only hasten and consolidate the triumph of the Nanny State
over the hardiest strain of individualism that the economic world has ever
known.
