That’s the only thing Wells got wrong: the date. He was off by a mere 800,690 years. If he’d set his time machine to nip ahead just a hundred or so to the early twenty-first century, he’d have been bang on target. Today, an insular myopic Eloi while away the hours conversing with the flowers, while the American Morlocks are beyond the horizon and rarely glimpsed. These groups are not yet formally divided into vegetarian on the one hand and carnivorous on the other, but they are evolving into physiognomically distinct species—an attenuated, emaciated coastal elite nibbling arugula in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard, while the vast bulk of people with vast bulk are confined to the intervening and less fashionable zip codes waiting in the drive-thru lane for a 2,000-calorie KrappiPounder. In his Obama hagiography, the MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe reported that, at lunch one day, a conspicuously overweight White House aide was ostentatiously presented with a light salad by the president himself. The staffer responded that he could take care of both his health and his menu selections himself, but Obama was having none of it. “I love you, man,” said the Commander-in-Chief. “Eat the salad.”¹

As an Obama acolyte, Mr Wolffe characterized this vignette as an example of how “caring” the president is, but a whiff of aesthetic revulsion from a coercive Conformocracy hangs over the incident: I love you, man. But you don’t want people to get the impression that perhaps you’re...not one of us. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the conformity enforcers urged the hold-outs just to close their eyes and go to sleep. In Invasion of the Body Shrinkers, the last lardbutt in the Obama circle is enjoined to eat the salad.

Beyond the White House as within, these are the salad days of the West. Researchers at the University of British Columbia published an exhaustive analysis of all those stories you read in the paper that begin “A new study shows that....”² In effect, UBC did a study of studies. They found that between 2003 and 2007, 80 percent of the population sample in the studies of six top psychology journals were university undergraduates, a demographic evidently containing many persons who would rather take part in studies than study what they’re supposed to be studying. But these same psychology journals had somewhat carelessly assumed that the behavior patterns of wealthy western co-eds speak for the wider world. In other words, studies show that people who take part in studies are not that typical. The UBC paper gave a cute name to this unrepresentative sample of humanity: WEIRDs—Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic. I’d have gone for Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeats myself, but chacun à son goût. The researchers were concerned with a very specific point: How representative of humanity at large is a tranche of affluent western college students? But they may have stumbled on the key not just to “scientific” studies but to liberal foreign policy, domestic spending, and the advanced social democratic state in the twenty-first century. If you take the assumptions of almost any group of college students sitting around late at night having deep-thought-a-thons in 1975, 1986, 1998, and imagine what a society governed by that sensibility would be like, you’d be where we are now—in a western world in elderly arrested adolescence, passing off its self-absorption as high-mindedness.

How high-minded are we? After the publication of America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That, too, has about it the sun-dappled complacency of idle trust-funders whiling away the sixth year of Whatever Studies. But it’s an accurate distillation of a dominant worldview. Since 9/11, there have been many citations, apropos radical Islam, of Churchill’s observation that an appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping he’ll eat him last. But we have fed the crocodile at home, too: we threw money at the Big Government croc for the privilege of not having to think seriously about certain problems, and on the assumption that, whatever we paid to make him go away, there would still be enough for us—that we were rich enough to afford our stupidity. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich. But, if anything, even more stupid.

Nevertheless, a lot of people take my correspondent’s view: if you have old money well-managed, you can afford to be stupid—or afford the government’s stupidity on your behalf. If you’re a carbon-conscious celebrity getting $20 million per movie, you can afford the government’s stupidity. If you’re a tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat in a nominally private industry whose labor contracts were chiseled in stone two generations ago, you can afford it. But a lot of Americans don’t have the same comfortably padded margin for error on the present scale. And, as our riches vanish, the stupidity pours into the vacuum.

In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work. The modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to toss public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it. The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it.

But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. And so we threw money at the dependent class, and indulged a gang of halfwit and/or malevolent ideologues as they hollowed out the education system and other institutions. We were rich enough to afford their stupidity.

That works for a while. In the economic expansion of the late twentieth century, average citizens of western democracies paid more in taxes but lived better than their parents and grandparents. They weren’t exactly rich, but they got richer. They also got more stupid. The welfare states they endowed transformed society: to be “poor” in the twenty-first-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes. When Michelle Obama turns up to serve food at a soup kitchen, its poverty-stricken clientele snap pictures of her with their cellphones.³ In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works.⁴ They are not so much without employment as without need of it. At a certain level, your nine-to-five bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the state treasury is entirely wasted, if not actively destructive. It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. But, in good and good-ish times, so what?

Very few people are fiercely political, which is reasonable enough. The point of politics is to enable life—the pleasures of family, the comforts of home, the rewards of work, good food, good company, music, golf, snowboarding, horse-shoeing, whatever’s your bag. So, among America’s elite, there are many non-political members, comfortable, educated beneficiaries of the American Dream who just want to get on with their lives. For these people and many others, liberalism is the soft option, the one with all the nice words—“diversity,” “tolerance,” “peace,” “social justice,” “sustainability”—and the position that requires least defending if you happen to be at a dinner party and the conversation trends toward current events. If you have to have “opinions,” these are the safe ones. They’re not really “opinions,” are they? Just the default settings of contemporary sensibility.

“I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued,” wrote H. G. Wells of the Eloi. “A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.” They love everything—in small doses. After all, if you love everything, why pay attention to anything in particular? If you drive around with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker, you’ve relieved yourself of having to know anything about Islam. You went to an awareness-raising rock concert: it was something to do with Bono and debt forgiveness, whatever that means, but let’s face it, going to the park for eight hours of celebrity caterwauling beats having to wrap your head around Afro-Marxist economics.

“Their sentences were usually simple and of two words,” recalled the Time-Traveler, “and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions.” Very true. But whereas Wells’ Eloi could only speak in “concrete substantives” and had lost the use of abstract language, our Eloi drone nothing but:

What do you think of illegal immigration?

Climate change? It’s not a question, and there aren’t two sides: there’s the side of “the environment,” and then there’s the “deniers.” Illegal immigration? There’s the side of “diversity,” and then there’s the racists. From kindergarten up, America’s “educators” teach their young charges the no-side buzz-words: Peace, Montag. The seductive peace of comfort and complacency.

“Diversity” is an attitude rather than a lived experience. Slap the “COEXIST” sticker on your Subaru and you’re more or less done. No need to be nervous. For the most part, you’ll still be COEXISTing with people exactly like you. It certainly doesn’t mean COEXIST with that crackbrained guy who services your car and listens to Rush Limbaugh, which you found out when you picked it up from the shop and couldn’t figure out what was going on until you realized he’d retuned the radio and you were frantically pounding the buttons trying to get back to NPR so you missed the offramp but by then you’d found your way back to “All Things Considered” so you did get to hear that interview with the singer who has a new album but mainly wanted to talk about how the concession stands on her tour will be required to serve only fair-trade coffee.

And so the state religion co-opts many of the best and brightest but politically passive. It anesthetizes them into forgetfulness. The historian Victor Davis Hanson thinks his fellow Californians are now trending in a very Wellsian direction: the new Eloi expect to be able to enjoy all the benefits of an advanced prosperous society while erecting a regime of regulated sentimentalization that will make its continuation impossible. “The well-off like nice cars, tasteful homes, good food, and appropriate vacations,” writes Hanson, “but not the oil, gas, coal, nuclear energy, transmission lines, timber, cement, farmland, water pumps, etc, that bring that to them.”⁵ Indeed, they actively wage war on the latter. Just like President Obama, we love our arugula, but we support the EPA ruling that shuts down the “human use” irrigation canal that enables our farmers to grow it.

Wells’ Time-Traveler had a similar reaction to the Eloi: they lived comfortable lives, yet disconnected from the world that sustained their comforts. “I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil,” he wrote. “These people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made.” And yet he saw “no workshops” or sign of any industry at all. “They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.” So it is in our time: things are “kept going” by forces largely out of sight, whether in the Flownover Country of working America, or in the shadows of the Undocumented, or in the factories of China.

Conversely, as Professor Hanson sees it, the new Morlocks of the American underclass demand iPods and video games and other diversions they regard as their birthright, but are all but incapable of making any useful contribution to the kind of society required to produce them:

In his book Civilization and Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes of a collective “forgetfulness” that over time settles in to peaceful societies. The so-called “Greatest Generation” made serious mistakes when they took control of the levers of the state, but always somewhere, however deeply buried, they remembered what it was like to live in a world at war and, before that, a world of mass privation. The Baby Boomers who followed knew nothing other than peace and prosperity. They weren’t “forgetful,” for they had nothing to forget.

“It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise,” says Wells’ Time-Traveler. As he subsequently reflects: “After the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.” In time, the Sixties rebels ascended to power and became the teachers, and then their children, until we were three generations removed from memories of World War and Depression.

During the 2010 World Cup, the eminent Egyptian imam Mus’id Anwar gave a sermon in Cairo attacking young men who follow soccer instead of memorizing the Koran:

Or as H. G. Wells put it: “This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.”

Because even the “culture” part of “la culture du plaisir” eventually becomes too much effort. Our age does not produce great symphonies or operas but merely electronic delivery systems, new toys for enjoying old strains. The “artistic impetus would at last die away,” wrote Wells of the Eloi. “To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity.”

Odd how many philosophical singalongs of the Sixties that one sentence anticipates: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”; “All we need is music... and dancin’ in the streets”; “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day....”

A culture of pleasure can be very convenient for the government class. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the World State Controller, to whom the author gave the oddly prescient name of Mustapha Mond, understands that people prefer happiness to truth, “happiness” being defined as round-theclock sensory gratification—food, drugs, sex, consumer toys. Given that he was writing in the late Twenties, Huxley’s parody pop songs anticipate very well the sensual torpor of our own culture du plaisir:

Is that the fate the United States is destined for? It’s what a lot of Americans would like. In 2008 many people were just exhausted by the “war on terror.” Not because it demanded anything of them—quite the opposite: it was entirely outsourced to a small professional soldiery the twenty-first-century Eloi rarely encounter. But so what? They still had to hear about the war, and they were bored by it. Having to be at Code Orange in perpetuity was just kind of a downer. So they voted for “change”—by which they meant a quiet life: I don’t want to have to think about wacky foreigners trying to blow us up; I don’t need that in my life right now.

As for the Eloi’s mostly inactive “activism,” professions of generalized concerns about “world poverty” or “saving the planet” do not testify to your idealism so much as what Adam Bellow calls “a certain blithe assurance about the permanence of freedom”:⁹ you worry about lofty and distant problems because you assume there are none closer to home. Our Eloi are smugly self-satisfied. I cite at random four stickers from the cars parked outside a children’s “holiday” concert in small-town Vermont:

Because anything other than striking self-flattering, mock-dissident poses is too much like hard work.

Adam Bellow may be understating the problem: even as they take their own freedoms for granted, it’s not clear the Eloi care much about freedom per se. And even the lofty and distant causes are merely a pretext for a pampering overweening conformism. So don’t pick up Poems Against the War under the misapprehension that the poems might address the, you know, war. Kim Addonizio’s “Cranes in August” is about her daughter making cranes out of paper while “outside/the gray doves/bring their one vowel to the air,” ominously. Don’t care for gray doves in August? No problem. The very next poem is about geese in October:

Campaigning for the Democrats in 2004, Ben Affleck offered a pearl of wisdom to John Kerry and his consultants: “You have to enervate the base,” the Hollywood heartthrob advised solemnly.¹² As it happens, if it’s enervating the base you’re after, Senator Kerry was doing a grand job. It would be easy to mock Mr. Affleck as a celebrity airhead, but these days even the airheads are expensively credentialed: Ben is an alumnus of one of the same colleges as President Obama (Occidental). And liberal progressivism has done a grand job of enervating its base. A self-absorbed passivity is now the default mode of the enlightened worldview. Behind those “IMAGINE PEACE” stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.

Appearing at the University of Denver in 2010, the talk-show host Dennis Prager was asked to identify the single greatest threat to the future of America.¹³ Several enthusiastic members of the audience bayed “Obama!” and Mr. Prager found himself obliged to correct them: “No, it’s not Obama,” he said. “It’s not. If, God forbid, President Obama came down with an illness nothing would change. Nothing.”

This is correct. Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him. That’s what should worry you, not whether he was born in Mombasa and had his minions fake a Hawaiian birth certificate. That just gets you off the hook: aw, gee, we were duped. No, you duped yourself, America. That’s the problem. Mr. Prager explained that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that “we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation.... A society does not survive if it does not have a reason to survive.” For Prager, small government is a moral question:

In all its shallow obsession with sexual and racial politics, the ever more leisurely vacuity of education also puts a question mark over identity in a more fundamental sense. In January 2009, Canada’s Globe and Mail (which is like the New York Times but without the jokes) chose to contrast the incoming U.S. president with, er, me. “He belongs to a demographic—it made his win possible—that doesn’t even get the problem with a black, a woman or a gay president,” wrote Rick Salutin. “They don’t clutch old identifications with race or ‘the west.’ They glory in ‘hybridity’.... For another demographic, this shift induces panic. They worry about ‘shriveled birth rates’ in the United States and its ‘enervated allies’ (Mark Steyn); they mourn the decline of ‘the last serious western nation.’”¹⁵

Crumbs. I wasn’t aware I was an entirely different “demographic” from Barack Obama. We’re more or less the same generation, but plainly the president stands for hope and the future and I represent the past and fear. As for “not getting the problem,” a lot of those black voters who turned out in huge numbers for Obama in California stayed in the polling booth to vote down gay marriage:¹⁶ the rainbow coalition shimmers beguilingly but dissolves on close contact—and that’s before you ask the shy Muslim girl in the corner of the classroom if she wouldn’t be happier at Lesbo High. Still, in a broad sense Rick Salutin is correct: the demographic that is the change it’s been waiting for doesn’t want to be seen “clutching old identifications.” What a yawneroo that’d be.

For decades, western elites have been bored by their own traditions and fetishized the exotic. Obama was both the beneficiary of this syndrome and its apotheosis. He was living his own COEXIST sticker: his parents were Kansan and Kenyan, as if paired by an alphabetically minded dating agency; he was Hawaiian, and Indonesian; for white liberals he offered absolution from racial guilt, but he wasn’t one of those in-your-face types like the Reverend Al and the Reverend Jesse yelling grievance jingles all day long; he was a community organizer from the mean streets of Chicago, yet he was also by some happy if vague process an alumnus of half the schools in the Ivy League, and he had the great good fortune not to live in any of the “communities” he “organized” but instead in the more salubrious Hyde Park, a community organized by John D. Rockefeller’s money; he embodied “change,” but he peddled the same reassuringly shopworn bromides (“America, this is our moment”) whose woozy evasions liberals chose to regard as the second coming of Cicero; he was kinda Christian (albeit of the paranoid, neo-segregationist, Afro-nationalist branch) but sorta Muslim (from a Jakarta madrassah, but don’t worry, not one of the heavy-duty kind); he had a white grandmother but also an undocumented auntie served with an unenforced deportation order. If that’s not the all-American resumé for the twenty-first century, what is?

After the inauguration, my old pal Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, tweeted ecstatically: “What a speech!! Speaking as citizen of the world that was exac what I wanted to hear from an Amer Pres’t.”¹⁷

What that seems to boil down to is an Amer Pres’t who isn’t hung up on being Pres’t of Amer: that Obama can do. “People of the world,”¹⁸ he droned to his audience for his famous Berlin speech, sounding as if his spacecraft had just landed from Planet Hopechangula and you earthlings had no choice but to submit to his awesome power. In postmodern terms, he’s not as far gone as Michael Ignatieff, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa. Previously a professor at Harvard and a BBC late-night intellectual telly host, Mr. Ignatieff returned to Canada in order to become Prime Minister, and to that end got himself elected as leader of the Liberal Party. And, as is the fashion nowadays, he cranked out a quickie tome laying out his political “vision.” Having spent his entire adult life abroad, he was aware that some of the natives were uncertain about his commitment to the land of his birth. So he was careful to issue a sort of pledge of a kind of allegiance, explaining that writing a book about Canada had “deepened my attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”¹⁹

My, that’s awfully big of you. As John Robson commented in The Ottawa Citizen, “I’m worried that a man so postmodern he doesn’t need a home wants to lead my country. Why? Is it quaint? An interesting sociological experiment?”²⁰

Indeed. But there’s a lot of it about. Many Americans quickly began to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama governing America was “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: it’s hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He is, as John Bolton says, post-American. ²¹ In his own book on the president, Dinesh D’Souza argues that Obama is defined by his father’s anti-colonialism.²² Speaking as an old-school imperialist, I find him exactly the opposite: in his attitude to America, Obama comes across as a snooty viceregal grandee passing through some tedious colonial outpost. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job—that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along. When he lectures America on the Ground Zero mosque or immigration, he does not speak to his people as one of them. When he addresses the monde, he speaks as a citoyen du for whom the United States has no greater or lesser purchase on him than Papua or Peru. There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can “absorb” another 9/11.²³ During the long Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British officials used to talk off-the-record about holding casualties down to “an acceptable level of violence,” but it’s eerie to hear the head of state take the same view—and about a far higher number of fatalities.²⁴ Ask the 3,000 families who had a huge gaping hole blown in their lives whether another 9/11 is something you want to “absorb” rather than prevent.

But why be surprised at the thin line between Obama’s cool and his coldness? Jeremiah Wright (his race-baiting pastor), Van Jones (his Communist “green jobs” czar), William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (his hippie-terrorist patrons) are not exactly stirred by love of country, either. Nor, to be honest, are America’s desiccated media—although they know enough to understand that you have to genuflect in that direction once in a while: Would it kill you to wear the stupid flag pin? The rubes’ll lap it up. Hence, the commentariat’s subsequent panic at Obama’s indifference even to faking feeling.

With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism. Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrassingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism. What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the Eloi; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.

In both Chicago’s Ward Four, where the Obamas lived, and Ward Five, where they worked, 95 percent of electors voted Democrat in 2004.²⁵ You would be hard put to find another constituency so committed to celebrating lack of diversity. Like most professional multiculturalists, Obama has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. The aforementioned Michael Ignatieff, who actually has viewed the world, gets close to the psychology in his response to criticisms of him for spending so much time abroad. Deploring such “provincialism,” he replied: “They say it makes me less of a Canadian. It makes me more of a Canadian.”²⁶

Well, yes, you can see what he’s getting at. Today, to be an educated citizen of a mature western democracy—Canada or Germany, England or Sweden—is not to feel Canadian or German, English or Swedish, heaven forbid, but rather to regard oneself as a citoyen du monde, like Obama in Berlin. Obviously, if being “more Canadian” requires one actually to be a Harvard professor or a BBC TV host or an essayist for The Guardian, then very few actual Canadians would pass the test. They would be condemned to be eternally “less Canadian.” What Ignatieff really means is that in a post-nationalist west, the definition of “Canadian” (and Dutch and Belgian and Irish) is how multicultural and globalized you feel. The UN, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Bono: these are the colors a progressive worldly westerner nails to his mast. You don’t need to go anywhere, or do anything: you just have to pick up the general groove, which you can do very easily at almost any college campus.

This Barack Obama did brilliantly. His rise and the dancing fountains of media adoration accompanying it are a monument to the fraudulence of so much elite “accomplishment.” The smart set were bamboozled because he seemed like one of their own: Columbia, Harvard Law, sort of “editing” a journal yet the only editor in its history never to publish a signed article, giving a lecture or two on constitutional law, handing out leaflets on the South Side of Chicago, voting present, listening to Jeremiah Wright’s conspiracy theories for twenty years, dining with terrorist educator William Ayers.... This is a life? These are achievements?

Well, yes. For the parochial one-worlders among the American elite, that’s a resumé and Sarah Palin’s isn’t. The American Eloi elected one of their own, and, if a year into his reign it was possible to detect signs of embarrassment among some of those gullible enough to fall for such a transparent crock, well, thanks for nuthin’. “I thought he’d do a better job,” whimpered telly genius Jon Stewart.²⁷

“Based on what, his extensive experience?” responded Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. “Rube.”²⁸ The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it.

Within months of his inauguration, I found a lot of Americans saying to me sotto voce that they had no idea the new president would feel so “weird.” But, in fact, he’s not weird. He’s WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He’s not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure—as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are. Instead, he’s a creature of the broader culture: there are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of an unbounded lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. Even as he denies American exceptionalism, he gets turned on by his own. Or as someone once said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

We were waiting for a man who would have been unthinkable as the leader of a serious nation until our civilization had reached such a level of bland bovine prosperity it truly believed that the platitudinous nursery chants it teaches our children as a substitute for education are now a blueprint for governance. Obama is not just a product of his time, but the product of his time.

In 1940, a majority of the U.S. population had no more than a Grade Eight education.²⁹

By 2008, 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college.³⁰

So we’re on track to a world in which the typical American is almost twice as old by the time he completes his education as he was in 1940, and has spent over twice as long in the classroom—and, in theory, gotten twice as much attention from his schoolma’am: the pupil/teacher ratio is half of what it was a century ago.³¹ Indeed, since 1970 overall public school employment has increased ten times faster than public school enrollment—with no discernible benefit to student performance.³² Here’s reporter Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times: “Despite thousands of teacher layoffs and shrinking school budgets, Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school system, posted gains on annual standardized tests. Schools statewide also posted overall gains in results released Monday.”³³

“Despite”?

Today’s “educators” take no chances with their young charges, to the point of keeping as many as they can in “school” until well into what now passes for adulthood. What dragons have been slain by this semester-creep? In 1940, before this process got rolling, Americans had a literacy rate of over 97 percent.³⁴ Seventy years later, at a student demo to protest budget “cuts” at the University of Washington, the elderly demonstrators waved printed placards bearing the slogan:

Education is the biggest single structural defect in the United States. No country needs to send a majority (never mind “all,” as is President Obama’s ambition) of its children to college, and no country should: not every child has the aptitude to benefit from college, and not every child who has wants to go, or needs to. For most who wind up there, college is a waste of time, and money, and life. Hacks pretend to teach, slackers pretend to learn, and employers pretend it’s a qualification. Full disclosure: I never went to college, which is why my critics usually preface their dissections with a reference to “the uneducated” or “the unlettered Mark Steyn.” Guilty as charged: no letters on me. But I was doing ancient Greek in high school and Latin by middle school, not because I was “gifted” but because that’s just the way it was back then. I long ago gave up marveling at how little American education asks of its inmates. By universalizing university, you let K-12 off the hook. College becomes the new high school—which is exactly the opposite of what a dynamic, efficient society would be doing: middle school should be the new high school. Early-year education is the most critical; if you screw up the first eight grades, keeping the kid in class till he’s thirty isn’t going to do much to fix things.

Beyond the academic arguments, no functioning state can afford to keep its kids at school till they’re twenty-two. It leads to later workplace participation, later family formation, and societal infantilization. Take America in its most dynamic years—the period when it put great inventions within the reach of every citizen (the automobile, the telephone, the washer and dryer), and, for you culture-du-plaisir types, also developed the modern entertainment industry (radio, talking pictures, gramophone records, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Broadway, Hollywood): it did all this with a population whose median education was 8.3 years. Eighth Grade America won a world war, and emerged afterwards as an economic superpower that dominated the post-war era until Eighteenth Grade America sleepwalked it off the precipice.

Oh, well. What does an American get for sticking with the system to Ninth Grade, Twelfth Grade, Sixteenth Grade, and beyond? Is he more “educated”? Not obviously so. But he is indisputably credentialed, and in the credential-fetishizing America of the early twenty-first century, that’s what counts. So American families plunge themselves into debt and take huge amounts of money out of the productive economy in order to feed the ravenous diploma mill. It’s not too demanding, and getting less so every year: by 2010, only 23 percent of courses offered at Harvard required a final exam.³⁶ For most of its “scholars,” college is a leisurely half-decade immersion in the manners and mores of American conformism. Other than that, it doesn’t matter what, if anything, you learn there, just so long as you emerge with the diploma. It used to be made of sheepskin. But these days the students are the sheep and the ones getting fleeced are their parents.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, America had per capita two-and-a-half times as many college students as Britain and Spain. Its college population was significantly larger than its high school population, mainly due to the fact that such fields of scholarship as “Jiggle in My Walk: The Iconic Power of the ‘Big Butt’ in American Pop Culture”³⁷ are so rigorous that to complete a bachelor’s degree can take twice as long as it once would have. Say what you like about half a decade of “Peace Studies” but, while light on the studies, it’s certainly peaceful. To acquire the ersatz sheepskin, Americans not only forego what might have been six years of profitable and career-advancing work, they also rack up a six-figure debt in order to access a job that is increasingly unlikely to justify that outlay. But then taking that first step on the debt ladder is as important an initiation into contemporary adulthood as the magic credential.

In fairness, there remain certain exceptions to these leisurely frauds. America retains world-class academic institutions in science and engineering. But half the graduate students in these fields are foreigners, and more and more return home at the end of their studies.³⁸ Perhaps we could retrain a few Diversity Officers to replace retiring physicists. Beyond that, has universal credentialism created a golden age of American scholarship? Not so’s you’d notice. Michelle Obama was born in 1964, so, unlike Condi Rice, she has no vivid childhood memories of racial segregation. She was among the first generation to benefit from “affirmative action,” which was supposed to ameliorate the lingering grievances of racism but seems, in Mrs. Obama’s case, merely to have transformed them into post-modern pseudo-grievance. “All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me,” she told an audience in Madison. “Every step of the way, there was somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do. Applied to Princeton. ‘You can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.’ I went. I graduated with departmental honors. And then I wanted to go to Harvard. And that was probably a little too tough for me. I didn’t even know why they said that.”³⁹

But hang on. Her test scores weren’t “high enough” for Princeton? Yet, rather than telling her “You can’t go there,” they took her anyway. And all the thanks they get is that her test scores are now a recurring point of resentment: “The stuff that we’re seeing in these polls,” she told another audience, “has played out my whole life. You know, always being told by somebody that I’m not ready, that I can’t do something, my scores weren’t high enough.”⁴⁰ If she had been Elizabeth Edwards and her scores weren’t high enough, that’d be that (Teresa Heinz Kerry could probably leverage the whole Mozambican thing). Yet Mrs. Obama regards contemporary statemandated compensation for institutional racism from before she was born as merely another burden to bear. In testament to an age of boundless selfinfatuation, she arrived as a black woman at Princeton and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the difficulties of being a black woman at Princeton. “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community”⁴¹ is a selfmeditation by the then Miss Robinson on the question of whether an Ivy League black student drawn into the white world is betraying lower-class blacks. Or as she put it:

That’s the argument, such as it is: “Affirmative action” discriminates positively—in favor of certain groups that add an unspecified richness to campus life. As we know, Michelle Obama fell into the latter category of “black student.” But what about the “farm boy from Idaho”? In 2010, the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford produced an analysis of applications for eight highly competitive colleges and universities.⁴² What was most revealing was the way “affirmative action” has progressed from mere race bias to ideological apartheid. Espenshade and Radford found that participating in “red state” activities such as 4-H, ROTC, or the Future Farmers of America substantially reduced a student’s chances of being accepted by these colleges. “Being an officer or winning awards” with such groups had an even more severe impact, reducing your chances of admission by 60 to 65 percent.

So, if you’re a white farm boy from Idaho, you’re already at a disadvantage compared with the Michelle Obamas and Sonia Sotormayors of your generation. And, if you participate in 4-H or JROTC, you’re only making things worse. And, if you hold a leadership position in 4-H, you’re pretty much doomed. Over time “affirmative action” and “diversity” have so corrupted the integrity of American education that it now affirmatively acts in favor of ideological and cultural homogeneity. Or as the blogger Kate McMillan likes to say: What’s the opposite of “diversity”? University.⁴³

This is why the massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite—its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity—for the price of which you wind up in Hock. “Our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in,” wrote Angelo Codevilla of Boston University, noting the unprecedented uniformity of the new American elite. “Until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.”⁴⁴ The social engineers changed all that, imposing a single orthodoxy on their pupils. For the most part, “diversity” is merely a sentimental cover for mediocrity. As Codevilla pointed out:

Well, they were too busy cranking out sludge about the “desparation” [sic] of separationists, or whatever Michelle was droning on about at Princeton in unreadable maunderings all too typical of what passes for “education.” Is the credentialing mill up to the job of producing an American leadership class capable of competing with those of China, India, and other emerging societies? Aw, we’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid. California’s teachers are the highest paid in the United States, and its classrooms are among the worst.⁴⁶ But at least they’re expensive—why, the Robert F. Kennedy Community School in Los Angeles is the first schoolhouse on the planet to cost over half-a-billion dollars ($578 million, to be exact). ⁴⁷

The Credentialed Age symbolizes an important transition in society. We’ve gone through those before, of course—from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and thence to the so-called “knowledge economy.” But, when you think about it, is the “knowledge economy” really that knowledgeable? It would seem improbable that any society could undergo the massive expansion of college education that America has seen since the Second World War, and either effectively impart that much extra “knowledge” or create the jobs that require it. So, instead, we have witnessed an explosion in the ersatz-knowledge economy, where it is possible to pass one’s entire life in an entirely bogus occupation—such as “community organizer” or “diversity consultant,” to name only the First Couple’s contributions to the scene. Addressing a group of financially strapped women in economically debilitated central Ohio, Michelle Obama told them: “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America.”⁴⁸

But isn’t “corporate America” what pays for, among other things, the Gulf emir-sized retinue of courtiers the average U.S. senator now travels with? And in what sense did the Obamas “leave” corporate America? Before ascending to her throne, the First Lady worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals. She wasn’t a nurse or doctor, or even a janitor. She was taken on by the hospitals in 2002 to run “programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting.”⁴⁹ She was a diversicrat—a booming industry in Eloi America. In 2005, by happy coincidence, just as her husband was coming to national prominence, she received an impressive $200,000 pay raise and was appointed Vice President for Community and External Affairs and put in charge of managing the hospitals‘“business diversity program.” Mrs. Obama famously complained that America is “just downright mean,”⁵⁰ and you can see what she’s getting at: she had to make do with a lousy $316,962 plus benefits for a job so necessary to the hospitals that when she quit to become First Lady they didn’t bother replacing her.⁵¹

Leave “corporate America” and get a non-job as a diversity enforcement officer: that’s where the big bucks are.

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a “community organizer.” I’m not sure that’s progress—and it’s certainly not “sustainable.” If he hadn’t become president, his resumé wouldn’t be anybody’s idea of a return on investment. His life would read like one of those experimental novels that runs backwards. But who cares? At every stage along the way, he got the measure of his guilty white liberal patrons and played them for saps.

President Obama now wants the rest of America to follow in his and Michelle’s footsteps. Under his student-loan “reforms,” if you choose to go into “public service” any college-loan debts will be forgiven after ten years.⁵² Because “public service” is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. That’s another one of those things that “everybody” knows. So we need to encourage more people to go into “public service.”

Why?

In the six decades from 1950, the size of America’s state and local workforce increased three times faster than the general population.⁵³ Yet the president says it’s still not enough: we have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like many career politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s offering, you’ll be working till you drop dead to fund an ever swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks’ vacation a year and retires at fifty-three on a pension you could never dream of.

Centralization, unionization, and credentialization have delivered American education into the grip of a ruthless and destructive conformity. America spends more per pupil on education than any other major industrial democracy, and the more it spends, the dumber it gets.⁵⁴ Ignorance has never been such bliss—at least for the teachers’ union. As for the students, nearly 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates entering community college require remedial education.⁵⁵ In New York, it’s 75 percent.⁵⁶ Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster. But, in his lavish, leisurely, over-lettered education, he embodies the failings of his class: credentialism isn’t going to be enough in the post-abundance economy, and 90 percent of expensively acquired college “educations” won’t see any return on investment.

Way back in 1993, in The American Educator, Lillian Katz, professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois, got the lie of the land:

Lillian Katz made her observations in the early Nineties. Fifteen years later, a generation expertly trained in tinny self-congratulation went out and voted for a candidate who told them:

Many electors voted for Barack Obama in order to check “vote for a black president” off America’s to-do list. Framed like that, it sounds worthy and admirable. But one could also formulate it less attractively: they voted for Obama in order to feel good about themselves. Which is what “celebrating diversity” boils down to.

As for feelings in general, Obama himself is the perfect emblem of the Age of Empathy. Unlike the hard-faced Bush regime, he “cared.” After all, he told us so. Asked what he’s looking for in a Supreme Court justice, he gave the correct answer: “The depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”⁶⁰ In a TV infomercial a few days before his election, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief ” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.”⁶¹

Hmm. Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year.⁶² If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When Barack Obama claims that “I am my brother’s keeper,” what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper. Aside from that, his only religious belief seems to be in his own divinity:

“Do you believe in sin?” Cathleen Falsani, the religion correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked then Senator Obama.

“Yes,” he replied.

“What is sin?”

“Being out of alignment with my values.”⁶³

That’s one convenient religion: Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself. Unlike Clinton, he can’t feel your pain, but his very presence is your gain—or as he put it in his video address to the German people on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”⁶⁴

Tear down that wall ... so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that November 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who led dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for GQ. But it’s their day, not yours.

Is all of human history just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic? “Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand/ the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you.”

If he is not as esteemed in the world’s chancelleries as an American president might have the right to expect, he is at least self-esteemed. He is the ne plus ultra of self-esteem, which may explain why, whenever Obama’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely offmessage. You could hardly devise a better jest on the Feeler generation, those Americans reared in the Cult of Empathy, who voted for Obama because he was supposed to embody both their empathy for him and his empathy for all the victims of the heartless Bush regime. Within months, liberal columnists complaining about his “detachment” found themselves confronting the obvious—that whatever they felt for him, he didn’t feel for them. In this Obama was yet again the supreme embodiment of our times: in the Age of Empathy, “feeling good” is better than “doing good”, and feeling good about yourself is best of all.

In contemporary education’s flight from facts to feelings, “empathy” has become a useful substitute for reality. In the schoolrooms of America, you’ll be asked to empathize with a West African who’s sold into slavery and shipped off to Virginia, or a loyal Japanese-American in a World War II internment camp, or a hapless Native American who catches dysentery, typhoid, gonorrhea, and an early strain of avian flu by foolishly buying beads from Christopher Columbus. This would be a useful exercise if we were genuinely interested in socio-historical empathizing. But instead the compliant pupil is expected merely to acknowledge the unlucky Indian as an early victim of European racism, and to assign the slave a contemporary African-American identity and thereby “empathize” with his sense of injustice. At this level, empathy is no more than the projection of contemporary and local obsessions over the rich canvas of the past and the other.

You didn’t hear the word much a generation back. Now people who would once have sympathized with you insist on claiming to “empathize” with you. As Obama explained to his pro-abortion chums at Planned Parenthood: “We need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges. Alright?”⁶⁵

Alright. So let’s take the fourth of those empathetic categories. If you’re paralyzed in a riding accident, I can sympathize at the drop of a hat: my God, that’s awful. Helluva thing to happen. But can I empathize (to quote a definition from David Berger’s Clinical Empathy) “from within the frame of reference of that other person”?

Example: “Driving down there, I remember distinctly thinking that Chris would rather not live than be in this condition.”⁶⁶

That’s Barbara Johnson recalling the immediate aftermath of her son Christopher Reeve’s riding accident. Her instinct was to pull the plug; his was to live. Even the boundlessly empathetic Bill Clinton can’t really “feel your pain.” But the immodesty of the assertion is as pithy a distillation as any other of what’s required in an age of pseudo-empathy.

The first definition in Webster’s gets closer to the reality: “The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.”

That’s geopolitical empathy as practiced by the western world.

In the December 2007 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, contemplated the ascendancy of Barack Obama and decided that his visage alone would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.”⁶⁷ As he explained: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.... If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

I was The Atlantic’s in-house obituarist for some years and I retain an affection for the magazine. But honestly, how could any self-respecting publication pass off such fatuous projection as geopolitical analysis? Let us grant that Mr. Sullivan is genuinely smitten by “Obama’s face” and that his effusions are sufficiently widely shared that they help explain the appeal of a man of minimal accomplishments to a certain type of American liberal whose principal election issue is that he wants to feel good about himself. Nevertheless, the assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Karachi or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the laziest kind of projection even by the standards of progressive navel-gazing.

For a start, the new pan-Islamism notwithstanding, there is an awful lot of racism in the Muslim world. If liberals stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” just for a moment, they might recall that little business of genocide in Darfur. What was that about again? Oh, yeah, Sudanese Muslim Arabs were slaughtering Sudanese Muslim Africans. Sure enough, a week after Obama’s election, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, issued a video denouncing the new president as “abeed al-beit,” which translates literally as “house slave” but which the al-Qaeda subtitles more provocatively rendered as “house Negro.”⁶⁸

But, putting aside the racism, there is just a terrible banality underlying assumptions such as Sullivan’s. Those who hate the Great Satan don’t care whether he has a white face, a black face, a female face, or a gay face. In a multicultural age, we suffer from a unicultural parochialism: not simply the inability to imagine the other, but the inability even to imagine there is an other.

Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of the “known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”⁶⁹ The old Cold Warrior’s cool detachment is unfashionable in an age of ersatz empathy, but it has a rare humility. In an age of one-worldist fantasy, it helps to know that you don’t know—and that, even in a therapeutic culture, you don’t know how everybody feels.

For four decades America watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while conservatives deluded themselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact, that it could be contained within the precincts of academe, was always foolish. So what happens when the big colored Sharpie words on the vestibule posters—Diversity! Tolerance! Respect!—bust out of the grade school and stalk the land? On September 11, 2007, at the official anniversary observances in Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick said 9/11 “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.”⁷⁰

“Mean and nasty”? He sounds like a kindergarten teacher. Or an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulis again. But that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days—the shot heard round the world and so forth. Anyway, Governor Patrick didn’t want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he went on, “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”

We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words “each other.” They posit not just a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim but also a dangerously delusional “empathy.” The 9/11 killers were treated very well in the United States: they were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lapdancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the big day gave them a good time—or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. September 11 didn’t happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohammed Atta.

But the lessons of 9/11 were quickly buried under a mountain of relativist mush. Consider the now routine phenomenon by which any, um, unusual event is instantly ascribed to anyone other than the obvious suspects. When a huge car bomb came near to killing hundreds in Times Square, the first reaction of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, was to announce that the most likely culprit was “someone with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill”⁷¹ (that would be me, if his SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). When, inevitably, a young man called Faisal Shahzad was arrested a couple days later, Mayor Bloomberg’s next reaction was to hector his subjects that under no circumstances would the city tolerate “any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”⁷²

How many times do the American people have to ace that test? They’ve been doing it for a decade now, and every time the usual suspects try to kill them the ruling class, with barely veiled contempt, insists that its own knuckledragging citizenry is the real problem. A couple months later Nanny Bloomberg went to the Statue of Liberty of all places to tell the plebs he has the misfortune to rule over to shut up. The man on whose watch Ground Zero degenerated from a target of war to a victim of bureaucracy was there to lecture dissenters that the site of the 9/11 attacks is a “very appropriate place”⁷³ for a mosque. The people of New York felt differently, but what do they know?

“To cave to popular sentiment,” thundered Nanny, “would be to hand a victory to the terrorists—and we should not stand for that.”⁷⁴ We used to hear this formulation a lot in the months after 9/11: If we do such-and-such, then the terrorists will have won. But this surely is the very acme of the template: If we don’t build a mosque at Ground Zero, then the terrorists will have won! You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists—and the American people are with the terrorists.

As is the way with the Conformity Enforcers, Nanny Bloomberg pulled out all the abstractions. “It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.”⁷⁵ Really? That’s not what Osama bin Laden said. But, if we put away our abstract generalities and listen to what the enemy is actually telling us, then the terrorists will have won! For a fellow so open and accepting, Nanny Bloomberg seems awfully dogmatic and strident. This is the WEIRD syndrome—the determination to hammer the hard square peg of global reality into the hole of multicultural nullity, whatever it takes. Even after Faisal Shahzad’s arrest for the attempted bombing of Times Square, the Associated Press, CNN, the Washington Post, and other grandees of the conformicrat media insisted on attaching huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments in Connecticut.⁷⁶ Subprime terrorism? Don’t laugh. To the media, it’s a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I-and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit?

Poor old Faisal Shahzad. Before heading off to Times Square, he made a pre-detonation video outlining the evils of the Great Satan.⁷⁷ Nothing about mortgage rates or foreclosure proceedings in there. He couldn’t have been more straightforward, but still Nanny Bloomberg and the media cover their ears and go “La-la-la. Can’t hear you.”

Paul Berman, a lifelong liberal, says that the doctrine of relativism makes “everything the equal of everything else.”⁷⁸ As a result, our ruling class—political, academic, cultural—have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” This is almost right. In fact, the cult of absolutist relativism is a kind of affirmative action against their own civilization: In any dispute between the boundlessly tolerant West and a highly intolerant Islam, it must be the fault of the former for being insufficiently tolerant of the latter’s intolerance. A society led by men with such a self-destructive urge will get its wish, and very soon, and deservedly so.

Not so long ago I saw a two-panel cartoon: on the left hand panel, “This is your brain”; on the right hand panel, “This is your brain on political correctness”—a small and shriveled thing, but now standard issue.

Here’s a random selection of headlines:⁷⁹

Fred Astaire in Follow the Fleet, 1935, words and music by Irving Berlin:

This is your brain on political correctness.

As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in U.S. history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit.⁸³ And he gave it to a roomful of fellow Army psychiatrists and doctors—some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And when the question arose of whether then Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic,” the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried, “How would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.”⁸⁴

This is your brain on political correctness.

So instead he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood. And barely had he got to Texas when he started making idle chit-chat praising the jihadist murderer of two soldiers outside a recruitment center in Little Rock. “This is what Muslims should do, stand up to the aggressors,” Major Hasan told his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee. “People should strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”⁸⁵

In less enlightened times, Colonel Lee would have concluded that, being in favor of the murder of his comrades, Major Hasan was objectively on the side of the enemy. But instead he merely cautioned the major against saying things that might give people the wrong impression. Which is to say, the right impression.

This is your brain on political correctness.

“You need to lock it up, major,” advised the colonel.⁸⁶

But, of course, he didn’t. He could say what he wanted—infidels should have their throats cut, for example. Meanwhile, the only ones who felt any need to “lock it up” were his fellow psychiatrists, his patients, his teachers at the Uniformed Services University, officials at Walter Reed, and the brass at Fort Hood. So they locked it up for years, and fourteen people died.

And even when the slaughter had happened, much of the media found it easier to slander both the United States military and the general populace than to confront the evidence. Like Nanny Bloomberg, the Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano professed to be most worried about an “anti-Muslim backlash” from the bozo citizenry she had the forlorn task of attempting to hold in check.⁸⁷

As for the Army, well, obviously, they’re a bunch of Bush-scarred psychos who could snap at any moment. Newsweek called the mass murder “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”⁸⁸ “A psychiatrist who was set to deploy to Iraq at the end of the month, Hasan reportedly opened fire around the Fort Hood Readiness Center,” wrote Andrew Bast. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers individually that it makes it increasingly difficult for the military as a whole to deploy for wars abroad.”

No mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim,” but Mr. Bast was concerned to “get at the root causes of soldier stresses.” As in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Operative word “post”: you get it after you’ve been in combat. Major Hasan had never been in combat.

But, just as they effortlessly extended the subprime mortgage crisis to explain the Times Square bomber, the same conformicrat “experts” redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone. Until November 5, 2009, PTSD was something you got when you returned from battle overseas and manifested itself in sleeplessness, nightmares, or, in extreme circumstances, suicide. After November 5, PTSD was apparently spread by shaking hands and manifested itself in gunning down large numbers of people while yelling “Allahu akbar!” This is the first known case of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but there could be thousands out there just waiting to blow.

This is your brain on political correctness.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year before that Major Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as spiritual advisor to three of the 9/11 hijackers and an imam so radical he’s banned from Britain, a land with an otherwise all but boundless tolerance for radical imams. Al-Awlaki advocates all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that there was no need to worry because this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests.”⁸⁹ Which is one way of putting it.

Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (with its Potemkin membership but lots of Saudi funding) and the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (the biggest voting bloc at the UN) want a world where Islam is beyond discussion—where “red flags” are ignored because to do anything about them would risk career-ruining accusations of “Islamophobia,” or six months of “sensitivity training” to spay you into a docile eunuch of the PC state.⁹⁰ How’s that project coming along? After Major Hasan’s pre-Post-Traumatic Stress breakdown, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, assured us that, despite the slaughter, it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”⁹¹

Celebrate diversity, yea unto death. The fact that a grown man not employed by a U.S educational institution or media outlet used the word “diversity” in a non-parodic sense should be deeply disturbing. “Diversity” is not a virtue; it’s morally neutral. A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan’s leading clitoridectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the better for it.

Nevertheless, asked “Who ya gonna believe—the Celebrate Diversity Handbook or your lyin’ eyes?” more and more of us plump for the former, if only for a quiet life. Nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to and preventing potential workplace violence.”⁹²

“Workplace violence”? Yes, it’s the new official euphemism: “The changes include plans to educate military commanders on signs of potential workplace violence....”

Say what you like, but at least the Army’s workplace violence is “diverse.”

The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. Old watchword: Better dead than red. Updated version: Better screwed than rude. In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: if you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put that down as mere confirmation of your longestablished “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in a micro-regulated, credential-obsessed society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

And “Allahu akbar?” That’s Arabic for “Nothing to see here.”

Pace General Casey, what happened was not a “tragedy” but a national scandal.

Anwar al-Awlaki and his comrades have bet that such a society is too sick to survive. Watch the nothing-to-see-here media driveling on about “combat stress” and the Pentagon diversicrats issuing memos on “workplace violence” like gibbering lunatics in a padded cell, and then think whether you’d really want to take that bet. The craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Café hatcheck girl, the wish for a quiet life leads to death, and not that quietly. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you’re in big (and probably terminal) trouble. And when the guy’s on the table firing wildly and screaming “Allahu akbar!” the PC kindergarten teachers won’t be there for you.

Political correctness is the authoritarian end of a broader infantilization. Hardly a week goes by where you don’t read a lifestyle feature such as this, from New York magazine:

One wouldn’t want to place too great a metaphorical burden on an obscure novelty number, but to the jaundiced eye America’s Eloi can easily seem like infantilized cuties unaware they’re riding in a death cab. In the old days, there were, broadly, two phases of human existence: You were a child until thirteen. Then you were a working adult. Then you died. Now there are four phases: You’re a child until twelve, eleven, nine—or whenever enlightened jurisdictions think you’re entitled to go on the pill without parental notification. Then you’re an “adolescent,” an ever more elastic term of art now stretching lazily across the decades. Then you work, after a fashion. Then you quit at sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five in France, fifty in Greece, whatever you can get away with, and enjoy a three-decade retirement at public expense. The tedious business of being a grown-up is that evershrinking space between adolescence and retirement.

Let Barack Obama explain things: “I see some young people in the audience,” began the president at one of his “town hall meetings” in Ohio.⁹⁴

Not that young. For he assured them that, under ObamaCare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were twenty-six.

The audience applauded.

Why?

Because, as the politicians say, “it’s about the future of all our children.” And in the future we’ll all be children. For most of human history, across all societies, a 26-year-old has been considered an adult—and not starting out on adulthood but well into it. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parents, but someone who would be expected to have parental responsibilities himself. But not anymore. Sure, come your twenty-seventh birthday, it’ll be time to move out of your parents’ insurance agency—at least until Obama’s next piece of child-friendly legislation. But till then, here’s looking at you, kid.

This ought to be deeply insulting to any self-respecting 26-and-a-halfyear-old. As for the rest of us, the kind of society in which 26-year-olds are considered children is a society in decline—in economic decline, cultural decline, spiritual decline, in demographic decline (as Europe already is), in terminal decline. The western world lives increasingly in a state of deferred adulthood. We enter adolescence earlier and earlier and we leave it later and later, if at all.

As everyone knows, our bodies “mature” earlier so it would be unreasonable to expect our grade-schoolers not to be rogering anything that moves, and the most we can hope to do is ensure there’s a government-funded condom dispenser nearby. But even as our bodies reach “maturity” earlier and earlier, it would likewise be unreasonable to expect people who’ve been fully expert in “sexually transmitted infections” for a decade and a half to assume responsibility for their broader health-care arrangements.

And, come to think of it, isn’t it unreasonable to expect 30-year-olds who’ve been sexually active since sixth grade to assume responsibility for their sexual activity? As the Washington Post reported:

Fair enough. Why should T. Squalls, thirty, bill D.C. taxpayers for his sex life? Thirty is so old you’re not even eligible for Obama’s child health-care coverage. Thirty is what less evolved societies used to call “early middle age.” Why is Washington Post chairman Donald Graham (to pluck a D.C. householder at random) buying condoms for 30-year-old men he doesn’t know?

Because that’s Big Government for you: you start a free-condom program for sexually active fourth graders, and next thing you know elderly swingers in the twelfth year of Social Construct Studies want in. The D.C. condompalooza is a perfect example of progressive thinking’s malign paradox: it both destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood, leaving a big chunk of the populace as eternal teenagers.

What was it the hippies said? Never trust anybody over thirty? Advice to D.C. women: Never trust anybody over thirty who expects the government to buy his condoms.

As the recession hit, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile on a hip new social phenomenon: “funemployment.”⁹⁷ They had good jobs, great pay, and then they lost them. But if you’re not married and your parents have kept your old bedroom open, what’s the diff? Two of the funemployed, Andy Deemer, thirty-six, and Amanda Rounsaville, thirty-four, connected through Facebook and took off in search of Asian mystics. They visited a fortuneteller in Burma, a tarot card reader in Thailand, some Saffron Revolution monks on the border, and, after spending ten days tracking her down, a reindeer-herding shaman in Mongolia.

Only the last advised them to “go back to work.”

Whoa! Heavy, man! But maybe they went off to Bhutan to get a second opinion from a shaman-herding reindeer.

In the Sixties, privileged youth used to go off to find themselves in the year before college. Now they go off to find themselves when they’re pushing forty. They seek the company of reindeer-herders at the age previous generations sought the company of Elks Lodgers.

“They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies,” writes Adam Sternbergh in New York. “It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.”

I think we know the answer to that.

For H. G. Wells’ late Victorian traveler, what was most striking about the Eloi was how they had evolved beyond sex:

In 2006, Harvey Mansfield wrote a book called Manliness and was much mocked for it by the likes of Naomi Wolf, the feminist who picked out earth-toned polo shirts for Al Gore in his presidential campaign to make him seem more of an Alpha male—because nothing says “Alpha male” like hiring a feminist to tell you what clothes to wear.⁹⁹ “I define manliness,” Professor Mansfield told one interviewer, “as confidence in the face of risk. And this quality has its basis in an animal characteristic that Plato called ‘thumos.’ Thumos means bristling at something that is strange or inimical to you. Think of a dog bristling and barking; that’s a very thumotic response to a situation.”¹⁰⁰

Thumotic certainly. But not approved of terribly much nowadays: Bristling at the strange? Where’ve you been?

“I don’t think manliness has gone away or become less manly,” Professor Mansfield continued, “but it certainly has much less of a reputation. It’s what I call ‘unemployed,’ meaning there’s nothing responsible or respectable for it to do.”

Quite so. Promoting her new film, about a fortysomething “choice mother” who decides to conceive a child by sperm donor, America’s sweetheart d’un certain age, Jennifer Aniston, declared that women “don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child.... Times have changed, and what is amazing is that we do have so many options these days.”¹⁰¹ Some women want a “new man” who’ll be there at the birth. Others don’t even want him there at conception. The progeny of such “choice mothers” have rather less choice in the matter, and research on the first generation (from the report “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor”) suggest a higher incidence of drug abuse, police run-ins, and the other now familiar side-effects of social rewiring. But hey, don’t let that get in the way of your “many options.”¹⁰²

As for all those amazing options, don’t try this one at home: marry young, have kids and a successful career. You’ll be inviting a mountain of opprobrium. In the weeks before the 2008 election, I received an extraordinary number of emails from so-called “liberals” revolted by Sarah Palin’s fecundity. One gentleman—well, okay, maybe not a “gentleman” but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressive new male—wrote to me from Shelton, Washington: “This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains. And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed.”

Golly, if Mister Sensitive is typical of the liberal male, you can understand why Jennifer Aniston would rather load up on turkey basters. By contrast, a few years back, it was reported that Mrs. Palin’s contemporary, Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha, was paying $28,000 a month in an effort to get pregnant.¹⁰³ She told People magazine that she’d “wanted a baby since she was 37,” but that her ex-husband was “completely ambivalent about kids.”¹⁰⁴ So these days she injects herself once a month with a drug that causes her to ovulate in thirty-six hours. “I go to the doctor’s office and they put me under anesthesia and use an 18-inch needle to remove about ten eggs,” she explained. “Then, I go home to my apartment in TriBeCa, change, and get ready for my Sirius Radio show, ‘Whatever.’” The doctor then fertilizes the eggs by a method known as intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection. “I’m using an anonymous donor,” Alexis confided to People, “but not from a genius bank. Those are creepy.” Unlike giving celebrity interviews about your 28-grand-per-month intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection.

Each to her own. You can be a 45-year-old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and serving as Governor of Alaska. Or you can be a 45-year-old single “career woman” hosting a satellite radio show called “Whatever” and spending a third of a million dollars a year on intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection in hopes of becoming pregnant. What was it the feminists used to say? “You can have it all”? Politico reported that, to the enforcers at the National Organization for Women, Sarah Palin is “more a conservative man than she is a woman.”¹⁰⁵ It seems “having it all” doesn’t count if you do so within more or less traditional family structures. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad. Miss Stewart is untypical only in her budget in an age when, according to one survey, massive numbers of British women, their maternal instincts stymied by indifferent male “partners,” are unfaithful in order to get pregnant.¹⁰⁶ One day Jennifer Aniston will make a glum romantic comedy about that exciting “option.”

Alexis Stewart is probably wise to skip the genius bank. Her mom is genius enough—who else would have figured out there were millions of dollars in things like “coxcomb topiary”? Nevertheless, there is something almost too eerily symbolic about the fact that America’s “domestic diva” is a divorcee with an only child unable to conceive. The happy homemaker has no one to make a home for. You look at the pictures accompanying Martha Stewart’s Thanksgiving and think: Why bother just for her and Alexis? Why don’t they just book a table at the Four Seasons?

A fortysomething single woman’s $27,000-per-month fertility treatments are the flip side of the Muslim baby boom in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Just as Europeans preserve old churches and farms as heritage sites, so our homemaking industry has amputated the family from family life, leaving its rituals and traditions as freestanding lifestyle accessories. Today many of the western world’s women have in effect doubled the generational span, opting not for three children in their twenties but one designer yuppie baby in their late thirties.

Demographers talk about “late family formation” as if it has no real consequences for the child. But I wonder. The abortion lobby supposedly believes in a world where every child is “wanted.” If you get pregnant at seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, you most likely didn’t really “want” a child: it just kinda happened, as it has throughout most of human history. But, if you conceive at forty-six after half-a-million bucks’ worth of fertility treatment, you really want that kid. Is it possible to be over-wanted? I notice in my part of the country that there’s a striking difference between those moms who have their first kids at traditional childbearing ages and those who leave it till Miss Stewart’s. The latter are far more protective of their nippers, as well they might be: even if you haven’t paid the clinic a bundle for the stork’s little bundle, you’re aware of how precious and fragile the gift of life can be. Hence, the so-called “helicopter parents”—always hovering. When you contemplate society’s changing attitudes to childhood—the “war against boys”¹⁰⁷ that Christina Hoff Summers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever tighter chain—I wonder how much of that derives from the fact that “young moms” are increasingly middle-aged. Martha Stewart’s daughter seems a sad emblem of a world that insists one should retain timehonored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of dismantling the most basic building blocks of society.

As always, conservatives fight these battles by playing catch-up: “gay marriage” is seen as a threat to “traditional marriage.” But, after the societal remaking of the last half-century, marriage is near kaput in most of the developed world, and hardly worth finishing off even in America. Rather, “gay marriage” offers a far more enticing target: today, a “family” is any living arrangement you happen to dig at that particular moment; a “marriage” is whatever tickles a California judge’s fancy; and along with these innovations proceeds the de facto and de jure abolition of “the sexes.” In his decision striking down California’s Proposition 8, the most significant of Judge Walker’s so-called “findings of fact” are about the elimination of sex, of male and female. After all, if a man can marry a man and raise a child, then the division of marital roles into “husband” and “wife” no longer applies, and the parental categories of “father” and “mother” are obsolete—“Parent One” and “Parent Two,” as the new U.S. passport form now puts it, or, in the friskier designations of Spanish birth certificates, “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.” And in that case in what sense do we still have “men” or “women”?

“The gender-neutral society is really a kind of experiment,” says Mansfield, himself adopting the prissy liberal usage of mutable “gender” rather than immutable “sex.” “It’s something that hasn’t been done before in human history.”¹⁰⁸ If the aim is to create an androgynous people, then so far women are proving better at being men than men are at being women. For the first time in American history, there are more women than men in the workplace, and they dominate the professions.¹⁰⁹ The 2008 downturn accelerated the trend: the recession was for the most part a he-cession. There are more women than men at college: for 2009 graduates, the college enrollment rate was 73.8 percent for girls, 66 percent for boys.¹¹⁰ Almost 60 percent of Bachelor’s Degrees go to women.¹¹¹ Speaking of bachelors, in 1980 the number of men who reached the age of forty without marrying were 6 percent of the population.¹¹² A quarter-century later, they were 16.5 percent. How many by 2030? Currently some 55 percent of men aged 18 to 24 live with their parents.¹¹³ Even before the recession, more than half of all American college seniors moved back to the family home after graduation. ¹¹⁴ Thirteen percent of American males (“men” doesn’t seem quite the word) aged 25 to 34 live with their parents.¹¹⁵

From time to time, many ambitious regimes find themselves minded, as Bertolt Brecht advised, to elect a new people. The immigration policies of most western nations seem intended to accomplish that goal. But you can also change the existing people, in elemental ways and over a surprisingly short space of time. Give me a boy till seven, said the Jesuits, and I will show you the man. Give me a boy till seventh grade, say today’s educators, and we can eliminate the man problem entirely.

Men are no longer hunter-gatherers, and have now ceased to be breadwinners. It isn’t such a bad deal. Though discriminated against in matters such as child support, the average male—if he retains enough of the wily survival instinct from the caveman days—can still have a pretty good time. Most of these new-type gals still like a good old-fashioned shagging every now and again, and there’s no obligation to marry them anymore, or even pretend you’re dating seriously. You certainly don’t have to meet their parents, and, if the stork decides to spring a little unwanted surprise on you, there’s always your friendly local abortionist. After all, being “pro-choice” is a good way to show these babes what a sensitive new man you are.

So, even if constrained in all other rowdy boyish inclinations more or less since nursery school, guys are still free to abandon women in greater numbers than ever before. In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old white men were married. By 2000, it was 33 percent.¹¹⁶ The remainder don’t have wives, kids, homes—in the sense of mow-the-lawn wash-the-car paintthe-spare-bedroom homes. So what do they do? Well, they drink, they listen to music, they hook up, they lead teenage lives on an adult salary. Males 18 to 34 years old play more video games than kids: according to a 2006 Nielsen survey, 48.2 percent of men in that demographic amused themselves in that way for an average of two hours and forty-three minutes every day—that’s thirteen minutes longer than the 12- to-17-year-olds.¹¹⁷

When these games were first produced, parents used to fret that they were taking boys away from baseball and tree-climbing and healthy outdoor activities. Now they’re taking men away from ... what? their midlife crisis? “For whatever reason,” concluded Kay Hymowitz in City Journal, “adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state.”¹¹⁸ Anthropologists are generally agreed that wherever you go on the planet, what suppresses (to use an unfashionable concept) adolescence and turns boys into men is marriage and children. When you marry ever later and have children ever later, manhood also comes much later—if at all. “The conveyor belt that transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down,” declared Dr. Frank Furstenberg after studying the “adultescence” phenomenon.¹¹⁹ But the belt didn’t really “break down.” It was systematically slowed down, then cut up and recycled into extra-strength condoms. Among the general, swift, and transformative re-ordering of social structures, the percentage of homes with two parents and children has fallen by half since 1972, while the percentage of homes with unmarried, childless couples has doubled.¹²⁰

As Gloria Steinem proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Today, in our feminized aquarium, we have all but eliminated the bicycle, save for a few rusting barnacle-encrusted spokes on the bottom. The full impact of our endlessly deferred adulthood is not yet known, although its contours can already be discerned. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In his book Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: “Where have all the men gone?”¹²¹

Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.

“It is easier,” said Frederick Douglass, “to build strong children than to repair broken men.” But what if, as a matter of policy, we’re building our children to be broken men? And broken not just psychologically but biologically. Headline from the Daily Mail, 2004: “Concern as Sperm Count Falls by a Third in UK Men.”¹²²

Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for “Sperm count drops 25 % in younger men”¹²³ (The Independent, 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Do we still need sperm? Oh, a soupçon here and there still has its uses. In 2009, a shortage of the stuff was reported in Sweden.¹²⁴ There had been an unexpected surge in demand, from lesbian couples anxious to conceive. So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. The problem seems to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm. Even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer.

H. G. Wells’ Time-Traveler writes of the softened Eloi:

Are you sure about that? As I say, the author’s dystopian vision is off only insofar as the world he predicted showed up 800,000 years ahead of schedule. In Wells’ Britain in the early twenty-first century, men routinely stand around watching girls drown.

In May 2010, a 37-year-old woman was drowning in the River Clyde while police officers called to the scene stood on the bank and watched.¹²⁵ “As a matter of procedure it’s not the responsibility of the police to go in the water,” explained a spokesperson, sniffily, “it’s the Fire and Rescue Service.” And, as they weren’t there yet, tough. The woman would have died had not three Glasgow University students jumped in to save her. Needless to say, the students were in complete breach of “matters of procedure.”

In February 2010, a 5-year-old girl was trapped in a car submerged in the icy River Avon for two hours while West Mercia Police stood around on the bank watching.¹²⁶ They were “prevented” from diving in to rescue her by “safety regulations.” In 2007, two police officers watched as a 10-year-old boy, Jordon Lyon, drowned in a swimming pool in Wigan.¹²⁷ The same year, fireman Tam Brown dived into the River Tay to rescue a drowning girl and got her back to shore, only to find he was now subject to a disciplinary investigation by Tayside Fire Service.¹²⁸

In 2008, Alison Hume fell sixty feet down an abandoned mine shaft. An 18-strong rescue crew arrived, but the senior officer said that a recent memo had banned the use of rope equipment for rescuing members of the public. It could only be used to rescue fellow firefighters. So Alison Hume died, in compliance with the memo.¹²⁹

Could this sort of thing happen in America? Oh, it already does. In 2010, KING-TV in Seattle broadcast footage of three “security guards” at a downtown bus station standing around watching while a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten for her purse, phone, and iPod.¹³⁰ But it’s okay, the “guards” were “just following orders not to interfere.” The victim later told police that she had deliberately stood next to the “guards” while waiting for her bus thinking it would be the safest place. As the video shows, she was punched and slammed against the wall while standing adjacent to so-called “security”—and still they did nothing. And King’s County Sheriff ’s Department congratulated the “men” on their forbearance: “The guards were right to follow their training.”

You have to be “trained” to stand around doing nothing?

Recall Harvey Mansfield’s definition of manliness—“confidence in the face of risk”—and then look at the helmets grown men wear to take a Sunday bicycle ride ’round a suburban park. As for Plato’s concept of “thumos”—an animal instinct to bristle at the sense of danger—the instinct seems all but lost.

To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.¹³¹

To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.

For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: Marc Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wifebeater. And no, I’m not suggesting he’s typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he’s not typical of anything, least of all what we might call (if you’ll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. The defining image of contemporary maleness is not Monsieur Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obeyed, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

In 2009, the director Denis Villeneuve made a film of the story, Polytechnique. “I wanted to absolve the men,” he said. “People were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old.... It was as if an alien had landed.”¹³²

But it’s always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It’s supposed to be “women and children first,” but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship—the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer’s home town in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.)¹³³ Mr. Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. “An alien landed” on the deck of a luxury liner—and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our “gender-neutral society,” there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale.¹³⁴ But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.

No two ship disasters are the same, but the testimony from the MV Estonia provides a snapshot of our new world: according to the Finnish Accident Investigation Board’s official report, several survivors reported that “everyone was only looking out for himself.” According to a Swedish passenger, Kent Harstedt, “A woman had broken her legs and begged others to give her a life jacket, but it was the law of the jungle.”¹³⁵ “Some old people had already given up hope and were just sitting there crying,” said Andrus Maidre, a 19-year-old Estonian. “I stepped over children who were wailing and holding onto the railing.”

You “stepped over” children en route to making your own escape? There wasn’t a lot of that on the Titanic. “There is no law that says women and children first,” Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. “That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean the early twentieth century.

As I said, no two maritime disasters are the same. But it’s not unfair to conclude that had the men of the Titanic been on the Estonia, the age and sex distribution of the survivors would have been very different. Nor was there a social norm at the École Polytechnique. So the men walked away, and the women died.

Whenever I’ve written about these issues, I get a lot of emails from guys scoffing, “Oh, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. You’d be pissing your little girlie panties,” etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it: “When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”¹³⁶

I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.

These are Finnish men, Estonian men, Canadian men. Are you so confident after the blitzkrieg on manhood waged by the educational establishment that the same pathologies aren’t taking hold in the U.S.? Consider the ease with which an extraordinary designation has been conferred upon the men who won America’s last great military victory—long ago now, before Afghanistan, before Mogadishu, before the helicopters in the Iranian desert, before Vietnam, before Korea. When Tom Brokaw venerates the young men who went off to fight in Europe and the Pacific seven decades ago as “the Greatest Generation,” by implication he absolves the rest of us. For, if they are so great and so exceptional, it would be unreasonable to expect us to do likewise.

“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness,” wrote Wells. “Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilized man.”As the Time-Traveler observed of the Eloi: “Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.”

Wells describes the Eloi drifting into “feeble prettiness.” Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay “humanist,” which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. He was reflecting on the accelerating Islamization of the Continent and concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”¹³⁷ In the famous Kübler-Ross stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.