America Alone:
The End of the World As We Know It
Septermber 11, 2001, was not “the day everything changed,” but the day that revealed how much had already changed.
{p. xv}
I wonder how many pontificators on the “Middle East peace process” ever run this number: the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.
Once you know that, all the rest is details.
{p. xvi}
We are witnessing the end of the late twentieth-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society.
{p. xix}
[T]here is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social-democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood–health care, child care, care of the elderly–to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal “deficit” isn’t the problem; it’s the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen’s sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on September 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
{p.xx}
No Comments