Posted by
Defend America on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 7:36:43 PM
March 23, 2010 7:00 A.M.
Tattered Liberty
From the January 25, 2010, issue of NR.
Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book
America Alone,
I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it
would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the
greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an
economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in
which (stop me if this sounds familiar)
the government
ran the hospitals, the automobile industry, and much of the housing
stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high
unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to
seek refuge abroad.
A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent
me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of
payments and other deteriorating
economic indicators
from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for
identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial
overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial
understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too
sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was
making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who
grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of
Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called
history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other
people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of
history, 1897 version.
Permanence is an illusion — and you would
be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed.
But, more important, national decline is psychological — and therefore
what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two
generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously
pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly
“European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can
blame ’em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness
after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the
Holocaust.
http://article.nationalreview.com/428996/tattered-liberty/mark-steyn