From the Archives: Book Review: Mark Steyn's "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It"

Previously Published at "Parcbench"

This review of Mark Steyn’s 2008 book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It was published at Parcbench on or around May 11, 2015. Thanks to editor Gregory Zeigerson (whose caricature of Steyn, drawn for my first Steyn book review, is below).

Mark Steyn is a cultural treasure and perhaps the culture’s most important and penetrating conservative.  Like all conservatives, he is not devoid of problems (particularly over the course and length of a book as opposed to an essay), and his worthwhile if flawed 2006 volume America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2nd Edition: Regnery, 2008) showcases his best and his worst thinking.

In the context of this culture’s debilitating death carrier of a false leftist/conservative dichotomy, most conservatives are at their best when they engage in polemics and objurgate and ridicule the worst traits of their rivals (not antipodes).  Steyn is all that and more.  In addition to his waggish skewering of all things left, he has a tremendous number of virtues often lacking in today’s right.  He offers a forthright, unapologetic defense of Western civilization that is never tinctured with Judeo-Christian appeasement and is often untainted with religion at all.  (He also never explicitly repudiates the Enlightenment as the culmination of that civilization and that too-brief period’s connection to America’s founding and the advance of what’s left of Western civilization, at least not in America Alone, as so many conservatives do.)  His writing bristles with the pride and puissance (and quality) of a Westerner for the ages.  He sees logical connections between ideas and other ideas as well as ideas and actions that are often elusive in the prose and disjointed, empiricist thinking of today’s pundits (especially on the left).  (E.g., after listing a seemingly unending parade of jihadists who were recipients of European welfare pelf, he concludes, “I’m not saying every benefit recipient is a terrorist welfare queen, only that the best hope of reforming bloated European welfare systems is if America declares them a national security threat.”)   Although his religious conservatism precludes him from penetrating to the deepest essence of his subject, the depth he does attain is rare these days (and all the better because he’s usually right—despite occasional forays into conventional social conservatism, he spends less time pontificating social conservatism than he does economic classical liberalism).  He views the world from an international, universal lens that is not provincial, nationalist, or even American per se but Western—but he recognizes that America is (or at least was) the strongest, most consistent exemplar of Western (and, therefore, moral) values.  (This combination of integration and relatively secular classical liberalism is rare enough now that it would be worth reading the book even if he weren’t so uproarious skewering the “multiculti,” “ecochondriacs,” “the Oprahfonic code,” etc. with his laugh-out-loud lexicon and devastating wit).  His humor, an anodyne for the pain of living in what Robert A. Heinlein would have called the crazy times, is also worth the cover price by itself.  The union of the two cements Steyn’s status as the most inestimable conservative.

A conservative he remains, however, as opposed to a consistent advocate of secular reason, individualistic egoism, and capitalism unhindered by social conservatism and tradition worship, and that undercuts his work (at least in this book), cementing its status as very good but not quite Earth-shattering.

A significant strain of Steyn’s thesis in America Alone—that the Islamic world, whatever its other defects, is bold and confident while the West, whatever its other strengths, is effete and self-defeating—is indisputable to any rational observer.  There are details and derivative points of Steyn’s that are debatable.  Steyn posits a fairly robust, fairly free America (the book does predate the age of Obama) that is an outlier compared to the decadent collectivism of Canada and Europe.  His obsession with birthrates clashes with his (correct) views that confidence in one’s moral righteousness is paramount in the clash of civilizations (particularly when such confidence is bolstered by technology).  The fecundity of Islamic cultures compared to the relative celibacy of a now-infantile West is but a symptom (and a less significant one than Steyn seems to realize at times).  This overemphasis on populations and sheer numbers (the book is teeming with related statistics and figures) is a concomitant of his underemphasis on ideology (he’s much more attentive to philosophy than most commentators but he is not consistent about it).  Steyn is also tainted with the standard false dichotomies of conservatism (including but not limited to Christianity vs Islam—both of which are rivals on the same side of the true dichotomy of Enlightened civilization vs. religion— and religion vs. nihilism, both of which are rivals on the same side of the true dichotomy of reason versus unreason).  He is inconsistent in other issues besides the importance of ideology.  Like Daniel Pipes, he believes Islam can be “reformed” (and still be Islam)—and his views on foreign policy, to the extent they are discernible, are not in line with his bold, unapologetic rhetoric (he would probably disagree with John David Lewis’s superlative and landmark Nothing Less than Victory).  As a conservative, he also cannot connect abortion rights to individual rights.  Fortunately, his forays into religiosity and typical conservatism are infrequent.

Given the above caveats, America Alone is highly recommended.  It is refreshing to see someone close to the mainstream (or, at any rate, a highly-read and -viewed public figure) identifying and integrating like Steyn—particularly when he emphasizes that will and moral righteousness (and self-righteousness) trumps the wealth and might of a relativist, multiculturalist, apologetic West.  And if that were not worth the cover price, Steyn’s wit would be.      Steyn is a not-so-religious Mencken of the twenty-first century whose stinging repartee helps one laugh at a dark culture (including its ironic false alternatives).  (He also has an appreciation for culture, including Europe’s evanescent one, often lacking in conservatives.)  A few salient examples: “Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: they regard capitalism red in tooth and claw as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it.  And in fairness some of their quasi-state corporations are very pleasant: I’d much rather fly Air France than United or Continental.  But what about the things Europeans supposedly value?  With so much free time, where is the great European art?  Assuredly Gershwin and Bernstein aren’t Bach and Mozart, but what have the Continentals got?  Their pop culture is more American than it’s ever been.  Fifty years ago, before European welfarism had them in its vise-like death grip, the French had better pop songs and the Italians made better movies.  Where are Europe’s men of science?  At American universities.  Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus 380, the QE2 of the skies, capable of carrying five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the damn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s a well idea.  It’ll come in very useful for large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015.”  Or: “Around the world, everybody was having a grand old laugh at the U.S. justice system.  Except for Saddam Hussein, who must be regretting he had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Iraqi justice system.  Nine out of twelve U.S. jurors agreed that the ‘emotional abuse’ [Zacharias] Moussaoui suffered as a child should be a mitigating factor.  Saddam could claim the same but his jury wasn’t operating on the legal principles of the Oprah-fonic Code.”  Or: “Lest you think this is veering close to the jingoistic xenophobia deplored by America’s East Coast media, let me do a bit of America-bashing.  The softening and feminization of the Western world isn’t merely a matter of gun confiscation.  I’ve never been one of those Americans who’s just plain old anti-foreigner—mainly because I’m not an American, I’m a foreigner.  [Steyn is a Canadian citizen who was educated in England and lives in the U.S.]  And so I’m quite partial to foreigners, apart from myself.  I blush to say it but I like French food, I like French coffee, I like French women.  To be honest, I’d rather see some interminable French movie where Isabelle Adjani or Isabelle Huppert or pretty much any other Isabelle sits naked on the end of a bed smoking a cigarette and discussing with her husband how each of their affairs are going than watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator XII.  Please don’t throw the book away in disgust until after you’ve paid for it.  I’ve never subscribed to that whole ‘cheese-eating surrender-monkey’ sneer promoted by my National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg [Steyn is no longer with National Review].  As a neocon warmonger, I yield to no one in my contempt for the French, but that said, cheese-wise I feel they have the edge.  … Personally, I want it all: assault weapons and Camembert, guns and butter and all the other dairy products that U.S. big-government federal regulation has destroyed the taste of.”  These hardly scratch the surface of Steyn’s uproarious integrations, but he also knows when gravitas is appropriate: Chapter Seven is titled “The State-of-the-Art Primitive”, and Steyn observes, in an extended sequence on “re-primitivized man,” including nuclear North Korea and Iran, that, “It’s at the meeting of apparently indestructible ancient ignorance and cheap, widely available modern technology that the dark imponderables of the future lie.”

They’re not entirely imponderable, Steyn is a mostly reliable guide to them, and his wit is a much-welcome palliative.