Mark Steyn • After America • © 2012 Edward Driscoll, Jr.

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DRISCOLL: Mark, last year, when After America debuted, we had Moody's lower America's debt rating and the British riots. This year, Regnery seems to be paying off rioters in Egypt and Libya to promote both the new book and America Alone, your look at America during the War on Terror, back when we still called it the War on Terror. How do you consistently gin up such great publicity for your books?

STEYN:  Yeah, I know. My book ends with an apocalyptic nuclear finale. And you should be out of town once Regnery decides to do the publicity tie-in for that. But it's true that when it came out last year, I had the great good fortune on the day of the launch to have Moody's downgrade. And, in the British riots, they were reenacting pretty explicitly my chapter on Britannia's post-imperial decay.

This time around, you're right; what's going on in Libya, Yemen, and various other U.S. embassy compounds around the region is the next phase. Decline always starts with money but then moves on to other things. When money drains, power drains. I disagreed with Condi Rice. A lot of Condi Rice's speech at the Republican convention, but she had one perfect line when she said that a nation that loses control of its finances eventually loses control of its destiny. And that's what you're seeing on the streets of the Middle East.

DRISCOLL:  While all that's going on, Mark, what do you make of the Pentagon having Pastor Terry Jones on speed dial and ringing him up after this year's 9/11 riots?

STEYN:  I would fire General Dempsey, the Chief of Staff, for that. I say that as an immigrant to this country. One thing you notice about this country is the U.S. government is actually quite coercive. The United States Department of Justice, if it decides to, can bring unlimited resources to bear. When you soak in the United States Treasury, the IRS has far more powers to freeze your kid's bank account than equivalent revenue agencies in most free societies.

So it's not a small thing when the most senior military officer in the United States government calls you at home over a film you've made. And it's simply not appropriate. Kathy Shaidle, my compatriot, the great Canadian blogger, had a joke about the Manson killings, the Pentagon calling up the Beatles to warn them not to release the White Album – or whichever it was that it allegedly provoked Charles Manson. But this is something the United States government should not be doing. It's legitimizing the view of these loons that the content of films, novels, cartoons, and everything else is the state's business. And that may be true in Islamic states, but it's not true in free societies.

And again, there's a futuristic chapter towards the end of my book where we look back on our time from around 2020 to 2025. And when we look back on that time, we will marvel at how quickly western elites were willing to trade core western principles such as freedom of speech. We see it in that disgusting Twitter chain from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, in the weaselly words of Secretary Clinton and President Obama, and in that outrageous phone call that General Dempsey made to Pastor whatever-his-name-is.

DRISCOLL:  Mark, we'll get back your take on current events in a moment, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Please quickly outline its thesis for those who didn't read After America when it debuted last year. The title alone must sound like crazy talk to someone trapped in the New York Times' information cocoon.

STEYN:  Yes. Many people have seen those sorts of Congressional Budget Office graphs that show the straight line going all the way up and circa mid-century disappearing off the top of the page and going up through the ceiling and out through the roof timbers. And that's why people, even those aware of the multi-trillion-dollar debt and entitlements, think of it as a problem for mid-century. What if we don't get that? Yes, if we don't get this stuff under control, then it will be consuming, you know, 800 per cent of GDP by the year 2080 or whatever.

And in a sense, people think, well, that's going to be a problem for my grandkids, but nothing I need to deal with right now. The thesis of After America is that we're way beyond decline. We're worse than Greece, we're worse than Iceland, we're worse than Portugal, and if we don't get this stuff fixed by mid-decade, not mid-century, then it's over. And by dead, I mean that the United States will simply cease to exist as we know it. It doesn't necessarily mean Mad Max on I-95; although I wouldn't rule that out, it does mean everything gets worse. And it gets worse on a scale unknown to small European countries in a wrong way. In the end, anyone who's been in rural Greek villages knows that they could take quite a bit of decline and societal collapse, and when the dust clears, they'd be pretty much as they were. Iceland, for example, was the first country to go belly-up when the downturn hit in 2008; Iceland's dreams of some kind of, you know, being a significant global financial power are over. But Iceland is still okay if you're Icelandic, and if you're not, who cares. It's not going to be like that with the United States. When the U.S. goes over the cliff, it lands with a much bigger thud than Iceland. And it's in danger of slipping past the point of no return circa 2015, 2016.

DRISCOLL:  As we're recording this interview, the Fed is announcing that QE3 is sailing, another round of quantitative easing, which is the Newspeak euphemism for firing up the printing press and printing more money. How's that going to work out?

STEYN:  Yes. One of the things that's interesting to me about After America is that there's an element of delusion on the right, too. For example, I was — when I was making the rounds when the hardback edition came out, and it was around the time of the downgrade and everything. And I said, well, say what you like about Greece, but Greece can't do quantitative easing because it doesn't print its own currency; Greece is on the euro. One can have an argument about whether Greece should have gotten into the euro in the first place, but the fact is that Greece is in the euro now, so those guys must figure something out without being able to do quantitative easing. And a Fox Business Channel reporter said to me that that just shows how much superior we are, how great we are. I don't think so. Quantitative easing is your left handwriting an IOU to your right hand. The idea that — which has been happening since After America came out seventy per cent of debt issued by the U.S. Treasury is bought by the Federal Reserve. And if you — that's like paying off your Mastercard with your Visa card at the end of the month. You can do that for a while, but eventually, that's going to that's unreal. That's unreal, and quantitative easing is unreal.

And I think in that sense, again, that's a reason why whatever the insanity of the euro. The euro is a make-believe currency for a make-believe jurisdiction. But one thing it does is it eliminates a government's ability to quantitatively ease its way out of its irresponsibility. And in that sense, whatever you say about the Greeks, the Greeks aren't lending money to their right hand with their left hand.

DRISCOLL:  QE3 involves lending money on a gigantic basis, but there's also the money banks lend to individuals and families. Glenn Reynolds, my colleague at PJ Media.com, has linked to articles on "the coming middle class anarchy." Our entire nation's economy rests on owning a home and paying your mortgage each month. If enough people underwater say the system is rigged and nuts to all this, America's fragile economy could be in deep trouble.

STEYN:  Yes. That's certainly the case. I mean, if you look at what has been wrecked by government, they include all the things that prudent people — we're not talking about people with, you know, grand ambitions. We're not even talking about, you know, dreams. We're not talking about fancies. We're talking about just what prudent, responsible people do. People say oh, you know, buy property. What is it? They're not making any more of the Mark Twain line, you know, whatever.

Buy a home. Buy a house. Own your own home. Through Fannie and Freddie and subprime mortgages, the government wrecked the property market, so the idea of the whole sort of safe-as-houses concept is gone. Then they said oh, you know, get an education. Get an education. Get a qualification; you'll always have something to fall back on. Most American qualifications are worthless, and people stack up six figures of debt to acquire them, so they've wrecked that element too.

So these are things that, as I said, not dreamers but prudent, sensible people that get an education, buy property — look after your health, that's another thing that's wrecked now. So, in other words, the government has hacked all the props of prudent, sensible middle-class life — considerable government interference with them. And there's not a lot left to wreck once you do that.

DRISCOLL: As you write in After America, starting a business is also increasingly anathema. Whether it's a kid with a lemonade stand or a hardware store wanting to put out its coffee and doughnuts without being over-regulated to death.

STEYN:  Yeah. This is a big piece of stuff. And there's a problem here. Again, there's a delusion on the right about how important this stuff is. Because people do get annoyed about it, but again, a lot of people don't fully understand the implications of it. A society in which you need five hundred dollars worth of permits to put a lemonade stand on your lawn is not a free society.

You could have the Second Amendment. I mean, a lot of people, when I mentioned it was on Rush, I mentioned the lemonade, like, half a dozen lemonade stands stories from around the country. And a couple of guys e-mailed me and said, "Oh, this isn't important stuff, Steyn; you shouldn't be talking about this. We've got the Second Amendment, so nobody's going to do all the — you know, nobody's going to come and take away our freedoms.

That's all very well, but you can easily wind up in a situation where you still have the Second Amendment, and every other freedom has been lost. A society where you cannot legally sell lemonade in your front yard is not free. In a community, you mentioned the hardware store. A society in which a hardware store in Ventura County, California, cannot offer its customers complimentary coffee and doughnuts is not a free society.

And at some point, people have to get honest about this. This is one of the reasons why the sort of codification of the U.S. Constitution gets in the form of looking at things clearly. Because clearly, what's happened over the last eighty years is that successive governments at the national level, but also at the state and county level, have ridden a coach and horses through the principles of the U.S. Constitution. But because it's still there on a piece of paper that some guys put down on parchment with ink and quill feather, and it's written down, people still think that it's there. It's effective even though eighty years of significant government expansion has driven a coach and horses through it.

DRISCOLL: Several of America's woes come from academia. They've created what Yale's David Gelernter calls "America-Lite," in which the culture of America has been hollowed out from the top. And they've made what Glenn above Reynolds calls the higher education bubble. And now, in Rahm Emanuel Chicago, we're seeing the lower education bubble as his teachers are on strike. Do these bubbles give conservatives an opportunity to reform that broken and increasingly fiscally broken system?

STEYN:  I would like to think so. Strangely the Rahm Emanuel situation is more difficult because it's more disturbing to me that you've got this kind of social engineering in kindergarten and grade one, then by the time people get to middle age like Sandra Fluke. Because basically by that point, you've had — how old is she? Thirty-one.  So, she's had twenty-five, twenty-six years of this stuff. So, I regard the smashing of the teacher's union monopoly as critical to this country. I think the Right abandoned almost all the levels of society that mattered apart from electoral success.

And I think we saw in 2008 — by the way, Obama and Mrs Obama are themselves superb embodiments of the worthlessness of this over-credentialed society. If you look at Obama, he's had a million bucks the elite education between Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law. Then he goes and becomes a community organizer. If he hadn't become president, nobody would think that was any kind of, you know, return on investment for what that guy's education is worth. Similarly, Mrs Obama goes to Princeton and becomes the diversity outreach consultant for the University of Chicago hospitals. A job is so essential that they pay her 380,000 dollars a year. And when she becomes — when she must leave it to become First Lady, it's so indispensable, that diversity outreach consultant job, that they don't even bother replacing her.

I mean, these two, in their disconnect from any kind of primary wealth creation, I think, embody the sort of decay of America in that they — if you recall, people mocked Sarah Palin because she'd been a mayor. Before that, she'd run a commercial fishing operation in Wasilla. And people thought that was — for some reason, that was a snare. She'd been in the trade as opposed to thinking big thoughts like Obama.

This country's elites are now like dowager duchesses in an English social comedy from the late nineteenth century. They're horrified by mere tradesmen:  oh, my dear, Sarah Palin, commercial fishing operation. Why couldn't she have been a supposed community — or done a small light community organizing like Obama. Nobody would want to live in a society that had been organized by Obama; the neighbourhood he did organize, they have — what are they up to now, a dozen murders on a good weekend in Chicago?

This is the sort of decay of the elites and the decline into a Latin-American setup where you have this super-privileged elite at the top and then a vast dysfunctional mass underneath and no middle class. I think that's where we're headed if we don't change course.

DRISCOLL:  So with all of that as a prologue, with the ongoing collapse of so many aspects of what makes up Barack Obama's worldview, why is Mitt Romney seemingly flailing in the polls as of the time of this interview?

STEYN:  Yeah.  That bothers me, too, because this guy should be losing by ten points at least. And I know people say, well, it's a fifty-fifty nation, and it's going to be a tight election and all the rest. If it's closed this time around, that says something very alarming. Many people don't — simply don't get the numbers. The word trillion doesn't mean anything to people; it has no relation to their lives. And at a certain point, it takes on a bit of unreality because if you can spend trillions of dollars you don't have, and you do it for one year, and you do it for two years, and you do it for five years, people think well, why we can't keep on doing that. So that doesn't seem like a real problem to many people.

And then there's something even more worrying. If you go back to 2008 — and we all did this at the time — we said those of us, you know, who reluctantly supported McCain. When he lost, we said well, the guy gave the impression he wanted to lose. People were exhausted by war and tired of the Bush administration, and the Republicans hadn't covered themselves in glory in a previous couple of years. This guy would be the first black president, and everyone's saying he's the most excellent speaker of all time and he's an actual glamorous celebrity figure.

McCain did the thing where he was mocking Obama as a celebrity. Now we've had four years of him. He's a crashing bore. He could be a better speaker. He's got nothing new to say. He staggers around doing the same — giving the same leaden speech as the economy flatlines, as the jobs market shrivels, as people in their early fifties go on disability and people in their late 20s move back with their parents.

If he gets elected as the nonglamorous failure, that will mean that America is saying there's no prospect of recovery. We're sticking with big nanny Obama because he's guaranteeing our food stamps and disability checks. And they would be accepting — they would be getting, I think — a European nanny state view of America that would spell this country's end. They'd be saying there's no possibility of an American dream.

Yes, we could vote for Romney, but who wants to take a flyer on economic recovery. At least if we go with Obama, we have the certainty of food stamps and disability checks. That's a — there's no hope — he's offering them the hope — the assurance of no change. And he's saying when everything gets worse, and it's going to be bad for as far as the eye can see, vote for me because you'll get your food stamps.

DRISCOLL:  And that certainly sounds like After America to me, or at not the America I grew up in.

STEYN:  Yeah. It is After America. And the difference, I think — the point I try to make in the book, Ed, which is, you know, really, I consider particularly important is that Europe's post-war decline was cushioned by the United States, the successive power. The power that inherited Britain's global networks built up over the previous century and a half; that's the smoothest transition of international order ever in world history. To the point where I don't think historians in centuries to come will even look at it as a transfer. They'll look at the Anglo-American imperium from the battle of Trafalgar for the next two centuries as one continuous period.

But then — it's not going to go that way this time. We see on the streets of Benghazi and Cairo that there is no — we will live in a world with no order. And again, the isolationist right, the Ron Paul guys say, well, who needs the rest of the world; screw off. We can be a nineteenth-century isolationist republic and don't have to get mixed up with any of this stuff.

I mean, get real. Show me what's — show me in your house something that's made in America. Where's your nineteenth-century Yeoman republic gone. Go to your local Walmart and show me something made in the United States of America. When everything in your home — you know, it's easy to say we don't want to be the big global policemen; we just want to be rich, fat, and happy and watch Dancing with the Stars. But when the TV you're watching, Dancing with the Stars, is made on the other side of the planet, and when the clothes you're wearing are made on the other side of the earth, when everything comes from the other side of the planet, you're engaged with the world whether you want to be or not. So don't give me this nineteenth-century isolationist mumbo-jumbo. That ship has sailed. It's a container ship, and it's sailed to Shanghai to pick up all the junk in Walmart you want to buy because it's cheaper than trying to make it over here.

DRISCOLL:  Sadly, much like America, we're out of time. This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com, and we've been talking with Mark Steyn, of Steyn Online.com, the author of the last year's New York Times best-seller, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. It's now out in paperback at both Amazon.com and your local bookseller. And Mark, thank you for stopping by once again.

STEYN:  Hey, always a pleasure, Ed.

(Advanced appreciation is rendered for materials used without the express permission of copyright owners – Tommy Peters)