The American Spectator

Two things set Mark Steyn apart from dystopian naysayers like Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. First, Steyn is an irrepressible bon vivant — an odd trait in a journalist touting “the end of the world as we know it.” Linguistically, no turn of phrase is too banal, risque, or obscure to be included in Steyn’s repertoire of fin de siecle ripostes. If Western civilization is going down the tubes, Steyn will at least get in a few bon vins, bonbons, and bon mots before the Eiffel Tower becomes the world’s most prominent minaret.

Second, Steyn has a drawer-full of hard data at his disposal — not cherry-picked computer models whose calculations are amazingly dependent on the speculative formulas fed into them. On an LP sold contemporaneously with Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, the late comedian Don Adams mimics an incompetent defense attorney who protests how easy it is for the prosecutor to accuse his client of murder. After all, “He’s got proof. All I have are trickery and deceit.” Ehrlich and Gore may have imaginary numbers up their sleeves, but like the comic’s legal adversary, Steyn has a briefcase of persuasive exhibits: moribund European birth rates, unsustainable social welfare systems, growing Muslim immigration, high Muslim birth rates, the murder of Theo van Gogh, deadly bombings in London and Madrid, the nightly torching of Renaults and Citroens by French “youths,” craven acts of multi-culti cowardice in the face of sharia demands, and a future-be-damned philosophy that coincides perfectly with plunging birth rates.

For Europe, Steyn notes, this is “The Gelded Age” — with Spanish women reproducing at a rate that will halve the nation’s population in a generation or so. Almost as dire, demographically, is the 1.3 births per woman ratio that prevails in Greece — a figure that belies the image of fecundity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Indeed, it seems that uptight red-state Protestants are doing a better job of being fruitful than Italians who, if current trends continue, will live in a nation where 60 percent of them “have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, [and] no uncles.” Dinner tables filled with pasta and relatives will be replaced by pizza for one.

This population bust spells disaster for Ponzi-shaped welfare schemes that depend on young bodies to support generational transfers to oldsters who neglected the primary task of regeneration. Greece’s pension liabilities, for example, are projected to reach 25% of GDP by 2040. More immigration from people-rich Muslim nations is the clear “solution” to this demographic vacuum — a solution that’s already altered the habits of women in Amsterdam and London who “cover up” to avoid jeers in increasingly Muslim neighborhoods. Such examples show how, in Western Europe, assimilation has come to mean (as Kofi Annan implied when commenting on the Danish cartoon violence) a nation adjusting its ways to accommodate new arrivals.

Steyn’s term, “Eurabia,” suggests the future he foresees for a continent flirting with a “demographic death spiral” and brooding in the lounge of that “old ennui.” Rotterdam, where the Muslim population is 40%, may presage the shape of things by 2050 — or sooner if “white-flight” out of “Eutopia” accelerates. In such an environment, “Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.” Put more dramatically, it’s unlikely that “Pornistan” will peacefully co-exist with “the Islamic Republic of Holland.” And in the struggle between those two, the strong horse doesn’t belong to those who take pride in the fact that they aren’t prepared to die for anything.

To fend off charges of Islamophobia, Steyn issues periodic caveats that acknowledge what “of course” everyone knows — that most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists, that many have assimilated to Western ways, and that not every baby named Mohammad (the most popular boy’s name in Belgium) is destined to strap explosives to his chest and blow up a Brussels bus. Still, the author makes a convincing case that neither demographics nor cultural clout favor the continued existence of Europe as we know it. In the meantime, Western women in the EU are producing an average of 1.4 children while the Muslim EU rate is 3.5. At least one North African tyrant is on record predicting that the “Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” The official number of Muslims now living in Europe is 20 million. Colonel Qaddafi’s figure is 50 million. If Muammar isn’t right today, he soon will be.

Unlike native Europeans, the birth rate in the United States is still at replacement level, 2.1 — 1.85 among whites. And while the nation has its immigration woes, those problems don’t involve large percentages of Muslims or the gradual introduction of sharia. Still, many Europhiles find the continent’s dance-macabre enchanting. And, like elites on the other side of the pond, these blue-state sophisticates despise their “self-righteous, gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, non-passport ownin’” redneck cousins. Steyn observes, however, that these pejoratives can be translated more positively as “culturally confident, self-reliant, patriotic, procreative, [and] religious.” Judging from census figures, such traits are also more productive of a viable culture than the infantilizing statism to which Europeans have become addicted. “Over there” servile selfishness has spawned a continent of non-spawners.

Unfortunately, Steyn laments, the United States hasn’t exported self-reliance and limited government half as well as Terminator movies and Madonna concerts. If it had, some viable national partners would be standing alongside it. Instead, America subsidized social irresponsibility after World War II by taking upon itself more than the lion’s share of Western Europe’s defense. Simultaneously, America lessened its political influence by puffing up international institutions like the United Nations. This diplomatic courtesy didn’t win America the support of nations to whom it graciously ceded bits and chunks of power. It’s now time, Steyn avers, for the U.S. to speak with a voice commensurate with its strength and to tout its best cultural ideals. If it doesn’t, the only thing the rest of the world will associate with America will be cheeseburgers, tawdry films, and weak knees.