This exchange between Lawrence and Ursula reminds me of the arguments in Mark Steyn's book America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It.
In it he describes his three-fold thesis that 1) the West is in rapid demographic decline that is especially affecting Europe, 2) the advanced Western social-democratic state (i.e. the entitlement state) is unwieldy and top heavy and cannot be sustained, and 3) we are ashamed of our greatness and too tired to do anything about the previous two (what he terms "civilizational exhaustion").
In the prologue he writes "...the third factor--the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two...there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social-democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. That 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.
There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End of History--written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism--is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans may talk about 'winning' the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and the Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies--they were, technically, on the winning side against horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves...But when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there as no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea beat their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And with the end of the Soviet existential thread, the enervation of the West only accelerated."
The Blame America First Crowd (see my Howard Zinn post) is all too quick to remind us of America's faults, real and imagined, while trying to ensure our mediocrity with failed social and economic ideals. Two books I recommend on the topic, besides Steyn's wonderful tome, are What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza and Hard America, Soft America by Michael Barone.
~Brian On Dec 14, 2006, at 12:40 PM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
All the Leftist condemnations, abuse, criticism, skepticism, scorn, and misinformation can't alter the fact that the US is all of my superlatives: the best nation in the world, just as our founding fathers hoped it wouldbe.
What a list of adjectives...preeminent, finest, freest, most democratic, richest, brilliantly successful.... I remember that America. I learned about it in my fourth grade history class. The real America isn't like that.
