OT: It's the demography, stupid, Mark Steyn essay

QUOTE

A commenter on Tim Blair's website in Australia summed it up in a
note-perfect parody of a Guardian [left wing UK newspaper] headline:
"Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's
Terrorist Attack."

snip

And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom
blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty
years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled.

snip

That's the way to look at Islamism: we fret about McDonald's and
Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis
have taken what was eighty years ago a severe but obscure and
unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and
successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam,
Manchester, Buffalo .

snip

In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to
apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John
Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took
twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there
will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans-and
mostly red-state Americans.

snip

Why ..., if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are
you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest
demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all,
are going to be the first victims of the west's collapsed birth rates?
Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able
to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing
Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for
setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense. I
watched that big abortion rally in Washington last year, where Ashley
Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush
off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White
Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose,"
western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows
far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women
marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might
like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be
unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around
demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my
bush!"

snip

Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine-the plan to
promote liberty throughout the Arab world-innumerable "progressives"
have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty
and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's
a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after
tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British
Muslims want to live under sharia-in the United Kingdom. If a
population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding
group on the planet-if there are more Muslim nations, more
fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims
within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in
more and more transnational institutions-how safe a bet is the survival
of the "modern world"?

END QUOTE

==============================================================

http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the-demography/

It's the demography, stupid

The New Criterion

Jan 2, 2006

Mark Steyn

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as
baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will
survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within
our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries.
There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as
Italy or the Netherlands- probably-just as in Istanbul there's still a
building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's
merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and
the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The
challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance
better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least
some parts of the west.

One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election
campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms
of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties
in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the
secondary impulses of society-government health care, government day
care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity
leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the
secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family,
faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity-"Go forth and
multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those
secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans
sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the
developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental
cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician
passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health
department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion
if he were moved to Health & Human Services.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it
requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian
hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than
Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to
ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a
twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were
forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers
by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake
their weaknesses for strengths-or, at any rate, virtues-and that's why
they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Speaking of which, if we are at war-and half the American people and
significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don't
accept that proposition-than what exactly is the war about?

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war
against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its
merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us.
There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule,
it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims
vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs.
Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs.
Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali.
Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about.
Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it's not the HIV
that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to
fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they
lose-as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I
with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some
boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the
smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the
battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag
things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam
inherits by default.

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As
a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide,
not murder"-as can be seen throughout much of "the western world" right
now. The progressive agenda -lavish social welfare, abortion,
secularism, multiculturalism-is collectively the real suicide bomb.
Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that
it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures-the capital of
Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is
feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I
would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to
the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but
an advanced western society: Multiculturalism means your kid has to
learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead
of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your
holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American
spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to
live in an African or Native-American society. It's a quintessential
piece of progressive humbug.

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about
every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush
did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
did, the Prime Minister of Canada did. . The Premier of Ontario didn't,
and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him
for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there
was a big backlog, it was mosque drivetime, prime ministers in gridlock
up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the
Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he
couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's Citizenship
Minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great
insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games.
So the Premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved
imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as The Toronto Star's
reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial
government does not see them as the enemy."

Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set
the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old
definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light
changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new
definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release
from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In
most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to
deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a
purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of
Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the west is awash in an epidemic
of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's website in Australia
summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim
Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist
Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us.

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along.
In The Survival of Culture, I quoted the eminent British barrister
Helena Kennedy, QC. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued
on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic
fundamentalists." "We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist
ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those western liberal
fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist
upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is
something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure
that's true."

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance
is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is
intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the
highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays
and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that,
but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of
pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS
pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so
9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects
of the multicultural agenda.

For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to
Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son
and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was
the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda-plenty of other Canucks in al
Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the
Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror.
Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive me being
judgmental) but no can argue that they aren't in the thick of things.
One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a
U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo.
A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa
Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with Pakistani forces in
early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in this war!

In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was
paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital
in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could
enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. "I'm Canadian, and
I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm
demanding my rights."

As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the
circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he
providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in
fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light
Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been
participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the
Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side.
Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on
the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate
his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked about the
Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you are a
Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to
disagree."

That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which
side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just
tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian Prime
Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He could have
said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are
disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health
care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of
convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to
tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his
reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of
the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened western
leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on
his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and
conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups
persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets:
the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the
capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that
while they could never win militarily, they also could never be
defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is
that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first
truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole
world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it and
they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see
them off.

We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites and
we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have
behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But, if it were
just a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: the mob
could rise up and hang 'em from lampposts-a scenario that's not
unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way
beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most
of the key responsibilities of life-child-raising, taking care of your
elderly parents-has profoundly changed the relationship between the
citizen and the state. At some point-I would say socialized health care
is a good marker-you cross a line, and it's very hard then to persuade
a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In
National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford
always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: "A
government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to
take away everything you have." Actually, you run into trouble long
before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you
want still isn't big enough to get you to give anything back. That's
what the French and German political classes are discovering.

Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held
out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about
taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians, and the Nigerians,
why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and
New Zealanders?

So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a
prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk,"
it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the
clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy
worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's
bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going
belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's
why they're not a G8 member or on the UN Security Council. Same with
the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of
"societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society
collapses because it chops down its trees.

Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the
trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing reforestation.) One
way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry
about. The western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to
more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in
return we've developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics
of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book The Population Bomb, the
eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will
undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to
death." In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club
of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of
mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and
copper, lead, and gas by 1993.

None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is
happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out
of people-the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of
the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest
country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's
dying-its population is falling calamitously.

The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens-from
terrorism to tsunamis-can be understood only as deriving from the
perniciousness of western civilization. As Jean-François Revel wrote,
"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and
does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom
blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty
years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended
estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the
United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction
of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of
species. . More than half the world will be afflicted by water
shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe
problems . 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds
will be extinct ."

Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as The Guardian
headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."

Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the
world faces a future . where the environment will look pretty darn
good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the
Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of
their natural habitat.

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions,
deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's
worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that
aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we
should be worrying about. For thirty years, we've had endless wake-up
calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very
real, remorseless shifts in our society-the ones truly jeopardizing our
future-we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now
and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the
Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the
road there's unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers
left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about
First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral,
primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a
threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite-that the
peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World.
Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China-and
next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in
Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at
Islamism: we fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big
globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was
eighty years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam
practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to
the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo .

What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and
pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its
culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the
nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in
2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026
(or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger
Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies
around the western world is that they're running out a lot faster than
the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate-i.e., the number you need for
merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any
smaller-is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that:
the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan
6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and
you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement
rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79,
Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below
replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the
death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half
replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every
generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22 percent,
Bulgaria's by 36 percent, Estonia's by 52 percent. In America,
demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for
honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the
sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of
the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100
million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans-and mostly
red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older-and Japan and much of Europe
are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And
we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of
business-unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that
likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results-most
recently in Germany-it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are
unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly
because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits
and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road,
they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish
executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement
age of Scottish public workers. It's presently sixty, which is nice but
unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that
that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in
22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no
politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing
the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and
the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to
allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S.
military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated
European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could
concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's
problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose
fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created
NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The "free world," as the
Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been
absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly
surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them.
In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent
are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening
of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a
primal force like Islam.

There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birth rates are
declining all over the world-eventually every couple on the planet may
decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the
age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing.

The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge
advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood
that their so-called "population explosion" was really a massive
population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between
1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9 percent of it,
while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the increase.
Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30
percent of the world's population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim
nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.

1970 doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps
running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower
than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape
of your life-the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape
of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the
fridge-isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the
cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the
same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald
statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of
the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent.

By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then
and a lot less "western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having
taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)-or the
equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries
(Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing
religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend
religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having
consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent
after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but
the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a
remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or
ill, shaped the modern world.

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the
one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will
find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than
Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given
Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either
way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find
enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to
topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and,
given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the
emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes
into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few
more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows
a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You
don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually
there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly,
self-deluding slogan-like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all
our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking
Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from
the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the
west can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children
has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the
Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within
half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan
as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the
Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was
that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In
1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the
Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.

Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents,
so-called "post-Christian" civilizations-as a prominent EU official
described his continent to me-are more prone than traditional societies
to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious
cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a
century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great majority" in
"the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is that this is
all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest
the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it's ever
had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting
place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it's
suicidally so.

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at
a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the
EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much
everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a
shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook
is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is
rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next
couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the
EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be
watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on
American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of
a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is
laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans,
and what's left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan
faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline,
the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to
climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by
Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by
Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax
rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner-and
we're already seeing a drift in that direction.

In July 2003, speaking to the United States Congress, Tony Blair
remarked: "As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time
invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you
leave behind?"

Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled
power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance
endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players
in the world today-Australia, India, South Africa-and in dozens of
island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes
its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People's
Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from
the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time
derives its political character from eighteenth-century British
subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother
country was willing to go.

A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history
triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent
than most of us expected. "The west," as a concept, is dead, and the
west, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

What will London-or Paris, or Amsterdam-be like in the mid-Thirties? If
European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the
populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks, retirement at
sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health
benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa
and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim
by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of
population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly
Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly
Islamic in its political character?

This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative-I'm not entirely
on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites
and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a ***: I'm with
Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or
abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance
will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully
intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the
west's collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic
view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of
Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim
world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to
choose," in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington
last year, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women
waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the
equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a
"woman's right to choose," western women are delivering their societies
into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad.
If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still
have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little
girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to
prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting
"Hands off my bush!"

Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron
Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:

"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our
bodies. . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But
if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah's
viewers, "then you should vote."

Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost
all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to
France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on
the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy
that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book
The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: "So where will the children of
the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are
at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive
human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist
course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by
fundamentalism-a new Dark Ages."

Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft
out there.

Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals
mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be
any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a
generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what
proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate.
But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100 percent of your
population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter
whether 70 percent of them are "white" or only 5 percent are. But, if
one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and
the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether
the part that does is 9 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45
percent.

Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine-the plan to
promote liberty throughout the Arab world-innumerable "progressives"
have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty
and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's
a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after
tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British
Muslims want to live under sharia-in the United Kingdom. If a
population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding
group on the planet-if there are more Muslim nations, more
fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims
within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in
more and more transnational institutions-how safe a bet is the survival
of the "modern world"?

Not good.

"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very
few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint
of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen
to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the
dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is
whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are
reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography,
stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "what
do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.


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