The West’s Last Gasp

By A. S. Erickson | Friday, January 12, 2007

BOOK REVIEW

America Alone
Mark Steyn
Regnery, 2006

The inside flap of Mark Steyn’s America Alone, his latest book, proclaims, “it’s the end of the world as we know it… Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.” If this seems far-fetched to some readers, it may pay to imagine how absurd the idea would have seemed to post World War II Europeans. Steyn has set out to warn America—Europe is already lost—before it is too late.

Steyn’s world is bipolar, one in which the world of Islam, radical or moderate, perpetually butts against the decaying West. The decay he speaks of is neither that of the magnificent buildings wrought by those long dead nor the newly erected monoliths that pepper today’s metropolises. He is not writing of the decay of Western culture, but of the population itself: Europeans are not reproducing at a rate guaranteeing their survival. The people responsible for ‘The Western Tradition’ are, in effect, spiraling towards suicide.

As Steyn points out, however, this vacuum cannot remain unfilled. In contrast to our immigration “problem,” an influx of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East is flooding Europe. After all, the most popular name for a baby boy in Belgium is now Mohammed; a nice name, surely, but it lacks that certain Flemish touch.

For Steyn, it’s largely a numbers game, and he is at his best in America Alone when he sticks to the numbers. In order for a country maintain a stable population its women need to have approximately 2.1 children, anything lower indicates population decline, and anything higher corresponds with population increase. Where does America sit? At 2.11, America is right on the fence. A closer look, however, belies the larger trends: blue states have lower rates than red states; the level for white women in America sits at 1.85; &c. Just a glance at these figures makes it clear that something is afoot, and when one casts his gaze to the north, or over the ocean, faltering European and Canadian birthrates confirm the suspicion: the United Kingdom is at 1.6, Canada at 1.5, Germany and Austria at 1.3, Russia and Italy at 1.2, and Spain, at 1.1, on pace to halve itself with every passing generation. All told, on average Western women within the EU have 1.4 children, but—and here’s where it gets interesting—Muslim women within those same countries have 3.5 children. It takes little imagination to guess what the countries with the five highest birthrates on the continent have in common (Albania, Macedonia, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark). The same five nations reproducing at the highest rates have the five highest percentages of Muslim residents. Demographic shift, then, is inevitable.

Demographics rule, or so Mark Steyn touts. His preoccupation with the subject then, comes as little or no surprise. He throws case study after case study at the reader, hoping to bludgeon his point across. The book suffers from anecdotal overload. What a few charts and graphs could have conveyed instead comes to the fore via regurgitation of continental newspaper clippings. America Alone spends nine tenths of its space striving to prove the obvious: (1) Birth rates in Europe (and the world over) are on the decline. (2) Europe’s state handouts hasten the decline. (3) Muslim rates started falling later and more slowly than those in Western nations. (4) At some point in the near future, Europe’s population will no longer consist of mostly Europeans.

Steyn is both fervent and good-natured, not always an easy accomplishment. However, the larger question is whether or not he can sell his argument? I’m rather pessimistic for a few reasons. The first and most obvious reason is our track record of ignoring end-of-the-world-doom-mongers. Sorry Al, the chances are slim that the US will listen to you before every other American drowns in rising seas. Historically, ignoring this ilk has served us well in the past: anyone remember the global cooling scare in the seventies? While many hand-wringers fret about the apathetic American public, this very same apathy can be a savior. Say what one will, but apathy is a moderating influence, and it has kept America from plunging headfirst into many of the frigid waters that have enveloped Europe in the past. Does Steyn believe people will listen to him even as they didn’t believe those previous acolytes of disaster? He doesn’t say. Instead, he starts talking numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading about demographic trends as much as the next person, probably a whole lot more. But demographics don’t sell, period. Anyone who has doubts as to the veracity of that need only think back a few years. Does Social Security reform ring a bell? Any intellectually honest person, left or right, who has looked at the data can see that a crisis looms. This is clear. Result? Status quo. If politicians cannot get people scared about their own retirement, it is difficult to foresee the populace getting worked into a lather over birthrates. 1.4 versus 3.5. Dire? Yes. But who cares? Certainly not enough people to make a difference.

Many reviews of the book have remarked on Steyn’s consistent sense of humor. One even remarking, “Mark Steyn is the funniest writer now living.” While I did not begin reading expecting him to live up to such hyperbole, I hoped for, if nothing else, an entertaining read. His style, tiresome at times, disappointed me. A syndicated columnist by trade, I have no trouble imagining that he writes a very good seven- or eight-hundred word piece. His constant punning (he takes delight in pointing out to the reader just how clever he is), when spread over the length of a book, becomes tedious. One begins to wonder if he is indeed trying to make a serious point about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, or if he just likes saying the name of their test rocket (No Dong). To be sure, humorless writing is generally not worth reading, but when the joke becomes more important than the message, the author fails. Too often it seems as if one is merely bouncing from one joke to the next while Steyn rewords something he has said in a previous chapter.

Much of the book is spent hammering home the direness of the situation. Too much of the book, actually. By the end I began to wonder if he had any suggestions for a solution at all. When, however, he finally presented them, I saw why they needed so little space—they are non-solutions.

He sees “three possible resolutions to the present struggle: (1) Submit to Islam, (2) Destroy Islam, (3) Reform Islam.” He writes, “because most of us don’t take number one as a serious possibility, we’re equally unserious about being forced to choose between two and three.”

Submission, however, is a very real possibility. Islam is on pace to surpass Judaism right here in America. It goes without saying that most of those in the Middle East view this as the certain outcome. He settles on the reformation of Islam as the only way forward, acknowledging all the while reformation comes only from the inside. That isn’t to say he advocates us sitting on our hands and hoping for the best.

So what is Steyn’s plan? Well, he’s been so kind as to enumerate a series of ten steps, among them: support women’s rights (real rights, not feminist pieties), “throttle the funding of mosques, madrassas…by Saudi Arabia,” “euthanize the UN, NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency…We need real allies now,” transform the energy industry, “end the Iranian regime,” and “strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself.”

His suggestions strike the reader as either overly vague or unrealistic—let me know when he ponies up enough support for those last two steps, not even President Bush has the backbone to do either, much less whoever succeeds him in office. Where does Steyn propose we find our “real allies,” in the Northern Alliance?

How exactly he intends to “throttle the funding of mosques [and] madrassas,” he does not say. I’m skeptical that the house of Saud would welcome the freezing of all their assets, and even if that were to happen Saudi Arabia will always be able to keep selling its oil. Which leads us onto transforming our energy industry. As Al Gore can testify, if scaring people with apocalyptic prophesies, in which billions perish, fails to convince Joe Sixpack to use public transportation, then surely the threat of another 9-11 type attack will not do it.

His other steps are equally inadequate. Perhaps his most inane concept is the creation of what he calls “a post-imperial equivalent to Britain’s Colonial Office.” This, Steyn insists, is what should have been created instead of the “bloated bureaucracy” of the Homeland Security Office. The irony seems to escape him.

Steyn may or may not be right that reforming Islam is our best bet, but of the three scenarios it is far from being the most likely to occur. The way things are stacking up, my money is on “Submission to Islam.”

To be fair, America Alone tries gallantly to bring an important issue to a wider audience than it might normally have. Steyn’s writing, though often over-the-top, is mostly enjoyable. Occasionally he brings to the table something quite interesting (for example, in an aside about traffic signs in a small Danish town), but unfortunately this is most often not the case.

In the end, Steyn’s book boils down to demographics, pure and simple. He brings to light a few interesting anecdotes while delivering the facts, but the book’s argument is both simple and convincing. People: they have ‘em, and we don’t. As such, his book doesn’t serve much purpose beyond the numbers; it raises the alarm, but by illuminating no viable way out of the predicament, Steyn risks his readers drawing the conclusion that America Alone consists of several pages of interesting facts, and 200-plus pages of fluff—occasionally amusing fluff—but fluff nonetheless.

The alarm, then, is raised. Without question it will go unheeded. The die is cast, and we have come up short. We may squabble over the cause, but there can be little doubt the Abendländer indeed face a setting sun.

The West’s Last Gasp

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