Or, more to the point, what if there is no “next”?

Jobs rarely “come back.” When they go, they go for good. Something else takes their place. After the recession of the early Nineties, America lost some three million jobs in manufacturing but gained a little under the same number in construction.² Then the subprime hit the fan, and America now has more housing stock than it will need for a generation. So what replaces those three million lost construction jobs? What are all those carpenters, plasterers, excavators going to be doing? Not to mention the realtors, homeloan bankers, contract lawyers, rental-income accountants, and other “professional service” cube people whose business also relies to one degree or another on a soaraway property market.

What if we’ve run out of “next”? When the factories closed, Americans moved into cubicles and checkout registers. What happens when the checkouts automate and the cubicles go the way of the typing pool?

At America’s founding, 90 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture. ³ Today, fewer than 3 percent do. Food is more plentiful than ever, and American farms export some $75 billion worth of their produce. But they don’t need the manpower anymore.⁴

So the labor force moved to the mills and factories. And they don’t need the manpower anymore. Manufacturing produces the same amount with about a third of the labor that it took in 1950.⁵ By 2010, the U.S. economy had restored pre-recession levels of output but without restoring pre-recession levels of employment: it turned out there was no reason to hire back laid off workers, and a lot of reasons not to, once you factor in the taxes, insurance, and the other burdens the state imposes on you for putting even modest sums in the pocket of employees you don’t really need. In H. G. Wells’ bifurcated future, the Eloi lounged around all day while the Morlocks did manual labor underground. In our dystopia, the Eloi face a subtly different bifurcation: there’s nothing for the Morlocks to do. A society with tens of millions of people for whom there is no work, augmented by tens of millions of low-skilled peasantry from outside its borders, is unlikely to be placid.

The first year of the Obama era and its failed “stimulus” pushed the national unemployment numbers up to almost 10 percent—officially.⁶ But if you were one of his core supporters—black or young or both—then the unemployment rate was at least half as much again, and higher than that in many other places. In the summer of 2010, as Barack was golfing and Michelle was having public beaches closed on the Costa del Sol to accommodate her sunbathing needs, the black unemployment rate in America climbed to just under 16 percent, as opposed to a general figure of 9.5 percent. That’s two-thirds higher—again, officially. That year, the number of young people (16 to 24) in summer employment hit a record low. Big Government is a jobs killer.⁷ Big Government augmented by a terrible education system and a tide of mass immigration is a life killer. So if—when—the United States’ AAA credit rating is downgraded and the economy starts to contract, what happens? An increase in the unemployment rate to 30 percent, higher in the decaying cities. Core government services cut. Basic shortages and deteriorating infrastructure for delivery. Civil unrest. Most of those go without saying: if you lay off a bunch of sixtysomethings a couple of years before retirement, they sit at home and fester. If you fire—or never even hire—younger, fitter groups, they tend to express their dissatisfactions more directly.

As farm work and factory shifts and service jobs fade, what occupations are on the rise? An America comprised of therapeutic statists, regulatory enforcers, multigenerational dependents, identity-group rent-seekers, undocumented menials, stimulus grantwriting liaison coordinators, six-figure community organizers, millionaire diversity-outreach consultants, billionaire carbon-offset traders, an electronic-leisure “knowledge sector,” John Edwards’ anti-poverty consultancy, John Kerry’s vintner, and Al Gore’s holistic masseuse will offer many opportunities, but not for that outmoded American archetype, the self-reliant citizen seeking to nourish his family through the fruits of his labor. And nor for millions of others just struggling to stay afloat.

The ruling class divides its subjects into Representation and Taxation categories. Favored groups are those that will expand the dependent class and, therefore, the dependent-administration class. Single women vote 60-something percent for Big Government, in part because, for unwed mothers, government is an absentee father you can always rely on to mail the check.⁸ About 20 percent of U.S. households are unmanned. Thirty percent of rural women living alone exist below the poverty line.⁹ One-third of all female-headed households live in poverty.¹⁰ Which suits government just fine, because then you’re more willing to serve as a pliant, dependent subject of the benign Sovereign. These worsening statistics do not demonstrate a need for Big Government. They are a consequence of Big Government.

But how pliant will you be when the money runs out and the programs get cut? The “austerity” riots in Greece, France, and the United Kingdom suggest the answer to that.

As for the taxation class, when the statists confiscate more of your dwindling earnings to prop up the wages and pensions of the government workforce and the benefit checks of the dependent class, what do you get in return? The security of the Nanny State? You’ve still got a job, you’ve still got a home, and all that does is make your property and place of employment a target for those who don’t.

Remember our gentleman from 1890 taking a whirl on the time-machine. First we shunted him forward to 1950: wow, was he astonished! Then we pushed him ahead another six decades: this time, not so much. The TV’s flatter, the fridge has an ice-dispenser in the door, but there is no sense, as there was in mid-century, of a great transformative leap. American energy has ebbed palpably; he is seeing the republic in stasis. Suppose we nudge him on just a little further, not decades but a few years—to that same ordinary house lot on a residential street.

His old home still stands, but as he gets his bearings he notices everything seems a little shabbier; even the electronic toys are dinged and scratched, as if the owners have foregone the new models. He looks out back through the bay window: strung across the grass is a sagging clothes line, which he can’t recall seeing back in 2011. But, compared to a washer, it’s “environmentally friendly,” right? So was the hedge, but that’s gone, and the fence is topped with barbed wire. He turns ’round. The front window has bars on it. Outside the car is small and old, and has more color-coded government permits down the driver’s side of the windshield than ever before. But the yard is a mess, as if passers-by are tossing trash in it. And the house across the road—the old Alden place, back in his day—is boarded up.

He steps outside. He’s never seen the street like this. In 1890, it was a pleasant residential neighborhood, never wealthy but neat and maintained. Now half the homes look abandoned. There are “For Sale” and “Foreclosure” signs everywhere, but they’re leaning and hanging and faded, as if not even the realtor’s placards are maintained. One in four homes is shuttered and dead. Another one in four looks like a carcass picked clean by predators: window holes like eyeless sockets, roof shingles stripped, exterior fixtures gone. The rest appear to be lived in, but half have missing panes patched with board and other signs of decay. He moseys down the street, past a gaggle of sullen youths slumped against the wall and eyeing him appreciatively. He crosses over, past another kid, in a wheelchair. No, not a kid. Maybe late forties, but dressed like a child. Our visitor from 1890 has noticed a lot of that since he moved on from 1950. He has one of those T-shirts with an in-your-face attitudinal slogan. But his face doesn’t have much attitude or energy in it, and his legs are missing below the knees. Along the sidewalk are some parched saplings with a few browning leaves, each tree bearing a sign saying, “This Community Improvement Project brought to you by the Federal-Urban Bureau of Arborial Renewal—FUBAR: Working Together on the Road Ahead.”

Our time-traveler asks the present owner of his old home what happened. But nothing really “happened”: it just turned out this way. It was never luxurious, but it was a nice neighborhood, and you knew who your neighbors were. The tough times were a few blocks away, with the repossessed homes and the abandoned cars on bricks in the yard. But then the couple three houses down got foreclosed on, and the bank put their property up for sale, and nobody bought. So now the boarded up homes aren’t a few streets away, but next door. And the night is full of sounds: the word gets round that Number 23 and Number 29 are empty, and people break in for copper wiring or anything else there’s a market or a need for. And sometimes they bust in just because they’re up to something and require a place where they know they won’t be disturbed. So the drug dealers creep a little closer, and then the shootings.

On Wall Street, recessions are “cyclical.” Out in the hinterland, the cycle settles in, and it’s vicious: abandoned homes lead to more crime lead to more abandoned homes lead to even more crime lead to even more abandoned homes.... A lifetime’s labor has gone to pay the mortgage on a house that will never be worth in real terms what you paid for it and that now stands in a neighborhood the old you—the young you, the one with modest dreams of a better life earned through effort—would never want to live in.

So our time-traveler listens to the present owner of his old home explain that, yes, they could rent out the upstairs, but, even though the Bureau of Compliance at the city Department of Furnished Accommodation approved their fire retardant cushions, the state Agency of Access & Equality says they need a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator. And, even if they could afford that, the only place they could put it is where that ugly old poplar is, and taking that down requires permission from the Board of Environmental Impact, which has a three-year backlog of tree-removal cases. They could just cut it down, and gamble that no one would check, but Ken and Ron down the street did it and got fined, and, even though they’re appealing to the Human Rights Commission on the grounds that the fine was homophobic, it wouldn’t be the same for them because they’re not in any minority category, not since the state Supreme Court ruled that diabetes no longer qualified because too many people have it....

The gentleman from 1890 suddenly realizes that for the last ten minutes he has had absolutely no idea what this lady is talking about, but he has an overwhelming desire to get back on his time-machine before the youths sitting on the wall opposite strip it for parts and he winds up stuck forever in...well, whatever country this is. “America” doesn’t seem quite the word.

You don’t have to engage in H. G. Wells speculations about the near future. Put a time-traveler from 1950 in Detroit sixty years later. He, too, would doubt he’d landed in the same country. For decades, Americans watched the decline of a great city and told themselves it was an outlier. It didn’t used to be: “When General Motors sneezes, America catches a cold.” When Detroit gets the ebola virus, America is surely in line to catch something—unless you’re entirely convinced that its contagion can be quarantined. Half-a-century ago, the city was the powerhouse of the world. Now it’s a wasteland. It’s a motor city with no motor, a byword for industrial decline and civic collapse that Big Government liberals seem determined to make their template. To residents of the mid-twentieth century it would have seemed incredible that one day the president of the United States would fire the CEO of General Motors and personally call the mayor of Detroit to assure him he had no plans to move the company’s head office out of the city. By the time it actually happened, it provoked barely a murmur.¹¹

In 2009, General Motors had a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail.¹² For purposes of comparison, GM’s market capitalization was then about $2.4 billion versus Toyota’s $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM).¹³ General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a sprawling retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The United Auto Workers is the AARP in an Edsel: it has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely).¹⁴ GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan were making a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler, and GM a loss of $500 to $1,500.¹⁵ That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red.

President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that quickly became a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won’t duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can’t make a car for a price anybody’s willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation thirty years earlier, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. Telling your political allies they can now go on overpaying themselves in perpetuity is a piece of cake.

When the going gets tough, the tough get bailed out. Your car business operates on a failed business model? Don’t worry, the taxpayers will prop that failed business model up forever. You went bananas on your credit card and can’t pay it back? Order another round and we’ll pass a law to make it the bank’s fault. Your once Golden State has decayed into such a corrupt racket of government cronyism that the remaining revenue generators are fleeing your borders faster than you can raise taxes on them? Relax, we’re lining up a federal bailout for you, too. Your unreadable newspaper woke up from its 96-page Obama Full Color Inaugural Souvenir bender to discover that its advertising revenue had collapsed with the real-estate market and GM dealerships? Hey, lighten up, John Kerry’s already been pleading your case in the Senate.¹⁶ Is it really so hard to picture the President calling the Mayor to assure him he has no plans to move the New York Times out of New York?

America is now a land that rewards failure—at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge sucking statist swamp. From Motown to no town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?

Nobody did this to Detroit. The city and its business and civic leaders did this to themselves. In once functioning parts of Africa, civil war, a resurgent Islam, and other forces have done a grand job of reversing all the progress of the twentieth century. But the deterioration of Sierra Leone or Somalia is as nothing compared to the heights from which Detroit has slid. Entire blocks are deserted, and the city is proposing to turn commercial land back into pasture—on the unlikely proposition that attracting Michiganders to graze Holsteins between crack houses will lead to urban renewal. For a coffee-table book of ineffable sadness, two French photojournalists, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, wandered through the rubble of lost grandeur: the ruined auditorium of the United Artists Theater, built in 1928 in the Spanish-Gothic style, abandoned in the Seventies.¹⁷ The shattered ballroom, with upturned grand piano, of the Lee Plaza Hotel, an art deco landmark from 1929, derelict since the Nineties. The Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, pews splintered, dust-caked Bibles and hymnals scattered across the floors. Messieurs Marchand’s and Meffre’s predecessors would have seen such scenes in bombed-out European cities circa 1945. But this was America, and no bombs fell. And the physical decay is as nothing to the deterioration of human capital: 44 percent of adults in the city have a reading comprehension below Grade Six level.¹⁸ Or to put it another way: nearly half the grown-ups in Detroit could not graduate from elementary school. And, believe me, what Sixth Grade requires of American 12-year-olds is no great shakes.

According to Time magazine: “The estimated functional illiteracy rate in the city limits hovers near 50 percent.”

With that pool of potential employees, why would anybody start a business in Detroit? What could you hire people to do?

Detroit did this to itself.

Well, you say, maybe things’ll brighten up with the next generation?

Don’t hold your breath. In March 2010, the president of the School Board, Otis Mathis, sent out the following email:

Otis Mathis is not only a Detroit high school graduate but a college graduate.²¹ His degree from Wayne State was held up for over a decade because of his repeated failure to pass the English proficiency test. Eventually, he did things the all-American way: he sued the college. So Wayne State dropped the English proficiency, and Otis Mathis got his degree. By then, he’d already been elected to the School Board.

By the way, he’s not the only beneficiary of America’s joke academic standards. In the Eighties, Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, also dropped its English proficiency requirements in hopes of attracting wealthy foreigners. It worked. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, a chap called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed enrolled, fell in with a group of hardcore Muslims, transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study mechanical engineering, and used the knowledge he acquired to pull off the first World Trade Center attack, the African embassy bombings, the assault on the USS Cole, 9/11, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl.²² A little larnin’ is a dangerous thing—particularly for Americans on the receiving end.

Whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sees himself as a role model for American students, Otis Mathis certainly does. “Instead of telling them that they can’t write and won’t be anything, I show that that cannot stop you,” Mr. Mathis told the Detroit News. “If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that’s something....”²³

The only one dreaming here is the president of the School Board. Being illiterate “cannot stop you” in Detroit, but try it in Bombay or Bangalore or almost any city in China—and then ask yourself to whom the future belongs. On present projections, at some point around the year 2025 American teachers will be earning two million per annum, and American Twelfth Graders will be unable to count their toes.

Detroit did this to itself.

Its profligate past destroyed the present, and its present will ensure there is no future, because lavishly funded civic institutions are incapable of providing the educational standards of a one-room schoolhouse of 200 years ago. This is an American city at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and one in two of its citizens are illiterate. That’s about the same rate as the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Republic, which for much of the Seventies and Eighties was ruled by a cannibal emperor. Whereas in the Seventies and Eighties Detroit was ruled by a Democrat mayor, a bureaucracy-for-life, and an ever more featherbedded union army, all of whom cannibalized the city. Say what you like about Emperor Bokassa but, dollar for dollar, his reign was a bargain compared to Mayor Coleman Young’s. Hizzoner called himself the MFIC—the Muthafucker In Charge—and, by the time it was over, Detroit was certainly fucked, and the only mothers still around were on welfare.

Return to those auto statistics: GM has one worker for every ten retirees and dependents. That math is Detroit’s math, too. The city’s population has fallen by over 50 percent since 1950.²⁴ So who’s left? Thirty percent of the population are government workers.²⁵ According to the Detroit News, another 29 percent are out of work, “using the broadest definition of unemployment.”²⁶ According to Dave Bing, Mayor Young’s successor as MFIC, the real unemployment number is “closer to 50 percent.”²⁷

An unemployable, dysfunctional citizenry, a rapacious government, crimeridden streets, and an education system that dignifies moronization as a self-esteem program: in Detroit, everything other than government is dead.

Decay sets in imperceptibly, but it accelerates, and, by the time you notice it, it’s hard to reverse. Somewhere like Detroit isn’t Somalia, not yet. But like other parts of the country it is en route to Latin America—a society with a wealthy corrupt elite that controls the levers of power, and beneath it a great swamp of poverty, whose inhabitants divide into two species—predators and prey. The Motor City is the Murder City, with one of the highest homicide rates on the planet—and 70 percent of them go unsolved.²⁸

It will not seem quite such an outlier in the future.

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring yourself of the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a huge population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or college subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another huge population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a transfat monitoring bureaucracy, a Bureau of Compliance for this, a Bureau of Compliance for that) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another—the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what minority retraining programs they qualify for, or the private manufacturer from whom the TSA buys disposable latex gloves for enhanced patdowns. Either way, what you get from government—whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit, or a government contract—is a central fact of your life.

But, if you’re not on welfare, or working in the welfare office, or working for a “green solutions” business that’s landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, or the trial lawyers behind the class action suit after the green-friendly recycled latex gloves cause mass Chlamydia outbreaks at Newark, O’Hare, and LAX, it’s not an attractive society to be in. It’s not a place to run a small business—a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting the state sector. After all, what does it matter to them if your business goes under? Either you’ll join the government workforce, or you’ll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that’s dependent upon the dependent class. Whichever it is, Big Government wins.

We’re told that America’s and the world’s economy depends on “consumption.” Hence, the efforts of the government and the Federal Reserve to stampede recalcitrant consumers back into the malls. But consumption is a manifestation of an economy, not the cause of it. In order for something to be consumed, it first has to be produced—which is why healthy societies make wealth before consuming it. Big Government prefers to “stimulate” the public into consuming because it’s easier than stimulating them into producing. But the latter is what matters.

What happens when you consume without producing? You can see it on any American Main Street, whose very inhabitants would startle a time-traveler from 1890 long before he noticed any of the technological marvels. A time-traveler from 1950 might have a more specific reaction: back in those days, a signature image of sci-fi movies and comic books was the enlarged brain, the lightbulb cranium with which a more evolved humanity would soon be wandering around. Evolvo Lad had one in his tussles with Superboy. So did Superman’s sidekick in a futuristic fantasy called “The Super-Brain of Jimmy Olsen.” “With his super-intelligent brain, Jimmy has me at his mercy!” gasps Superman. But Clark Kent’s gal pal felt differently about her colossal noggin when it showed up in “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain.” “The evolution ray that made me super-intelligent turned me into a freak!” she sobs, clutching her unsightly Edisonian incandescent of a head.

There’s good news and bad news, Lois. As any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with “The Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen,” they’d have been up there with Nostradamus. “Our culture’s sedentary character—our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action—seems closely correlated to our changing physical shape,” wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. “We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 percent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.”²⁹ We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production.

Dependistan is an unhealthy land. In America, obesity starts earlier and earlier: it’s doubled since 1980.³⁰ According to some surveys, a third of all children over two are obese.³¹ Libertarians instinctively recoil from a nanny state that presumes to lecture you on eating your vegetables, and red-state conservatives have a natural cultural antipathy to effete, emaciated coastal metrosexuals nibbling their organic endives—and that was before Michelle Obama decided to make an anti-obesity crusade the centerpiece of her time as First Lady. They’re not wrong to be suspicious. Almost all public health behavioral campaigns end up as either bullying or brain-dead or both: half a century ago, nobody thought smokers would wind up huddled on the sidewalk outside windswept office buildings. Few foresaw that high-school “zero tolerance” policies for drugs would lead to students being punished for having Aspirin in their lockers. In 2008, a bill in the British House of Commons attempted to ban Tony the Tiger, longtime pitchman for Frosties, from children’s TV because of his malign influence on young persons.³² Why not just ban Frosties? Or permit it by prescription only? Or make kids stand outside on the sidewalk to eat it? Already, San Francisco’s city council has voted against life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals by attempting to criminalize fast-food menu items that offer free children’s toys.³³ It’s not far-fetched to imagine government attempting to alter the contents of our stomachs: in fact, they already do. The Public Health Agency of Canada requires that white flour, enriched pasta, and cornmeal be augmented by folic acid to help women lessen the risk of neural-tube defects in their babies.³⁴ It’s also not far-fetched to predict the usual unforeseen consequences: a Norwegian study published in The American Journal of Medicine found that folic-acid fortification could increase your risk of cancer.³⁵ Oh, well.

Our “changing physical shape” (in Ferguson’s words) seems an almost literal rebuke to the notion of republican self-government. Never mind the constitution, where are our checks and balances?

What might restore the unprecedented size of contemporary Americans to something closer to mid-twentieth-century Americans? The family meal, with mom, dad, and the kids all ’round the kitchen table, like The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch? More competitive sports at school? A paper round? “Social media” novelties that don’t require you to sit on your butt and look at a screen all day? A summer of farm work before six years of Fat Studies at George Mason University?

None of these things is going to happen. So instead we’re left with Mrs. Obama as Marie Antoinette for an age of PC Bourbons: “Don’t let them eat cake.” What will that do? Push the percentage of obese kids up to 60 percent? Seventy? Senator Richard Lugar, one of the GOP’s Emirs of Incumbistan, demands more “federal child nutrition programs.”³⁶ But the National School Lunch Act (whose very name nineteenth-century Americans would have regarded as a darkly satirical fancy from dystopian science fiction) dates back to 1946. The bigging up of American schoolchildren happened on Washington’s watch. Yet we’ll fight the “war on obesity” as we fight the “war on poverty”—with more dependency and more government programs. While we’re “fighting” all these phony wars, it’s not even clear we could fight the old-fashioned kind anymore: according to the U.S. Army’s analysis of national data, 27 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 are too overweight for military service.³⁷ Even running for our lives is beyond many of us.

There is already an almost surreal disconnect between the emaciated sirens of popular culture and those who gather in the dark to watch small stars on the big screen. The largest people on the planet outside the hearty trenchermen of Western Samoa pay ten bucks to watch all-American stories set in all-American towns featuring increasingly un-American boys and girls who bear less and less resemblance to them. It seems likely that trend will continue, and a vast mass of vast mass will sink to the bottom while an ever more cadaverous elite gets all the best jobs. It also seems inevitable that, in response, Big Nanny will decide that she’s the one who needs to get bigger and bigger, and to micro-regulate her 350 to 400 million charges ever more coercively. It’s not such a leap to imagine the GAUNT Act (Government Assistance for Universal Nutritional Transformation) passing Congress circa 2020 to lessen strains on health-care costs. It won’t work. You can’t reduce the citizen’s waist through government waste—not absent anything this side of a nationwide famine. But it won’t stop the statists trying.

The landscape will adjust to accommodate: there will be more class action suits, and your local multiplex and car manufacturers and discount airlines will change their seat configurations every ten, five, two years. This is a cultural phenomenon arising from socio-economic changes that would be difficult to reverse even if our elites accepted the legitimacy of attempting to reverse them.

From the English-language edition of Pravda:

Well, huff the elites, what’s wrong with that? Are you stigmatizing these women? Are you saying they shouldn’t have the rewards of a fulfilling career?

Whether or not juggling (as many of my North Country neighbors do) three minimum wage jobs—a checkout clerk, some part-time waitressing, a bit of off-the-books house cleaning—is every woman’s idea of a fulfilling career, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for hands-on parenting. Yet instead of trying to correct the structural flaws we will increase dependency—because single women are the most reliable voters for Big Government, even as it turns them into junkies for the state pusher and ensures their kids will reach their adulthood pre-crippled.

When America was hit by economic depression in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson was fascinated by how the struggling republic’s energy was visible even on the fringes of society: “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of the household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not?—of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet....”³⁹

In the disease-ridden Dependistans of the new America, there are fewer signs of currents in the extremities. Western societies already face an explosion in health costs. From a report on Canada in The Economist: “Health spending, which is administered by the provinces, has increased from nearly 35 percent of their budgets in 1999 to 46 percent today. In Ontario, the most populous province, it is set to reach 80 percent by 2030, leaving pennies for everything else the government does.”⁴⁰

Eighty percent, huh? Add Chinese debt interest payments and that would be the entirety of U.S. government revenues spoken for. Beleaguered health administrators drowning in deficits will be way beyond death panels by then, and into living-death panels: Diabetes? Take three aspirin and call us when your legs drop off.

For a peek at the future, wander ’round the public housing in any American city: look at the number of wheelchairs, and the predominantly black men and women with missing limbs. And then look in their faces, and see how young they are. In ten years’ time, there will be more, and they will be younger, and they will be wheeling in from the projects and the derelict husks of post-industrial cities, and a familiar sight almost everywhere in the United States.

The unhealthiness of Dependistan underlines the real problem with the modern welfare state: it’s not that it’s a waste of money but that it’s a waste of people. There is a phrase you hear a lot in Canada, Britain, and Europe to describe the collection of positive “rights” (to “free” health care, unemployment benefits, subsidized public transit) to which the citizens of western democracies have become addicted: the “social safety net.” It always struck me as an odd term. Obviously, it derives from the circus. But life isn’t really a high-wire act, is it? Or at least it didn’t use to be. If you put the average chap—or even Barack Obama or Barney Frank—in spangled leotard and tights and on a unicycle and shove him out across the wire, he’s likely to fall off. But put the average chap in spangled leotard and tights out into the world and tell him to get a job, find accommodation, raise a family, take responsibility, and he can do it. Or he used to be able to, until the government decided he was “vulnerable” and needed a “safety net.”

When did human life become impossible without a “safety net”? My neighbor’s family came to my corner of New Hampshire in the winter of 1767–68 when her great-great-great-whatever dragged his huge millstones up the frozen river from Connecticut to build the first gristmill on a swiftrunning brook in the middle of uncleared forest in a four-year-old township comprising a dozen families. And he did it without first applying for a federal business development grant. No big deal. Her family’s nothing special, my town’s nothing special: that’s the point. It was routine—in a pre-“safety net” society.

In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Paul Rahe writes, “Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”⁴¹ But today the state cocoons “one’s own affairs” so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge.

The welfare state is less a social safety net than a kind of cage—a large cage but a cage nonetheless. And its occupants are not a trapeze act but more like an expensive zoo animal. Think of a panda. He’s the most expensive item in any zoo’s budget: those American institutions lucky enough to host a big cuddly panda spend some three million per annum on the cute l’il feller. They feed him, they protect him, they give him everything he could possibly want—except a purpose. Eventually, like Europeans, he can’t even be bothered to breed. You put the comeliest lady panda you can find in the cage with him, and he’s not interested. He just lies around all day. To reprise Charles Murray’s line, Big Government “drains too much of the life from life.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”—by definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how allembracing the government nanny.

A few years ago, Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics wrote that ours is the age of “the new Epicureans” in which the “freedom to choose” trumps all.⁴²

A childless couple can choose to conceive.

A female couple can choose to conceive.

A male couple can choose to conceive. Barrie and Tony from Chelmsford, England, had been trying for a child for ages but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because they’re both men. So they advertised for an egg donor on the Internet and then found a Californian woman with a nine-month opening in her womb. A court in the Golden State agreed to register both men as the fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had “co-mingled” their sperm before FedExing it to their Fallopian timeshare and her turkey baster, but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony “self-identify” and it would be cruel to deny them. The mother did not rate a credit on the birth certificate. Nor did the turkey baster. This would seem to be in defiance of reality, but what price biology when measured against self-esteem?⁴³

A woman in Bend, Oregon, can choose to become a man, and then a “pregnant man.”⁴⁴

A man can choose to become a woman, get halfway there, and then decide it’s more fun to “live in the grey area,” like “award-winning Canadian writer” Ivan E. Coyote, who prefers to be addressed as he/she and self-identifies as a “very masculine reading estrogen-based organism,” and resents the way the hicks at U.S. Customs and Border Protection don’t have a check box for that.⁴⁵ In 2009 Mr./Ms. Coyote was detained by CBP along with an American friend, “a tall, feminine woman with a heavy moustache.”

Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the “pregnant man” is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in “the grey area” is in reality black or white—at least according to what we used to call “the facts of life.” But issuers of passports, drivers’ licenses, and birth certificates increasingly defer to the principle of “self-identification.”

In terms of sexual identity, we’re freer than almost any society in human history, at least in terms of official validation of our choice to “redefine” ourselves in defiance of biological and physiological reality. But sexual liberty has provided the cover for a sustained assault on individual liberty in every other sphere—in speech rights, in property rights, we are less free than our parents, and getting more constrained every day. Big Government seems to understand that if you let your subjects shag anything that moves and a lot that doesn’t they’ll mistake their shackles for a complimentary session at the bondage dungeon. Give me liberty or give me sex! Live free or bi-! In an age of suffocating statism, sexual license is the only thing you don’t need a license for.

As for the sex, for niche identities and boutique demographics like Mr./ Ms. Coyote and Oregon’s pregnant man, things seem to be working out swimmingly. But, among the masses, it’s harder to avoid the sheer mountain of human debris being piled up. The story of the last forty years is the mainstreaming of rock-star morality: instant gratification, do your own thing, whatever’s your bag. Jodie Foster and her turkey baster are rich enough to weather any unintended consequences of their fling, but the evidence suggests that, for the general populace, defining celebrity down is more problematic. “Oops! I Did It Again” is easy for Britney to say. Less so for Kaylee at the hair salon.

The new school soldiers on, arguing that chastity, fidelity, monogamy, etc., are mere social constructs: we’ve been indoctrinated into them by repressed cultural hierarchies. Sexual promiscuity is part of our nature: you should be getting it on with that hot chick at Number 27. And her husband. And get your wife in to video it. Screwing whatever you want whenever you want in whatever combination you want is as natural as wearing a mammoth pelt and sitting round the cave rubbing two sticks together. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá wrote a rather laborious book on the subject, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, that demonstrates by frequent recourse to biology, anthropology, ethnography, and primatology that the idea of lifelong heterosexual marriage is a crock imposed on the world by party poopers.⁴⁶ Your hunter-gatherer was the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP.

At this point in the argument, it’s customary to bring up bonobos. No, not the bloke from U2. He loves Africa, too, but not in that way. The bonobo is some kind of chimp that lives south of the Congo River, and is apparently the closest extant relative to humans. And, like us, he’s a bi-guy who can’t get enough casual sex. So, if he’s hip to it, why have we got so many hang-ups?

That’s easy, say the anthropologists: agriculture. Man stopped hunting and gathering and started farming. Bummer, man: families, monogamy, way less action. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris Hilton? Agriculture was not merely an ecological “catastrophe” (as the author Jared Diamond sees it), but also a sexual one.⁴⁷ Sure, these pre-agricultural societies may have had a lot of rape, incest, and female genital mutilation, but at least they knew how to party.

Let us take this argument on its face—that moving from primitive hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture not only introduced to the world concepts of property, autonomy, civil society, and markets but also deeply repressed our libido. In other words, sexual propriety is a function of civilization. The question then arises: Is it possible to restore man’s unbounded license without also de-civilizing us? And, if so, what else are we losing with our inhibitions? In a state of nature, without a legal code or even social norms, you’re free to pursue all your desires. Then again, so’s the guy in the next tree. And, if he’s bigger and stronger and if what he happens to desire is you, you may not enjoy it so much when it’s you on the receiving end. That’s another consequence of the liberation from responsibility: some of us lie around the well-appointed Big Government cage like listless, lethargic pandas and polar bears; others are more like those tigers that, after years of somnolence, wake up one morning and devour their devoted keeper.

The wreckage is impressive. The Sexual Revolution was well-named: it was a revolt not just against sexual norms but against the institutions and values they supported; it was part of an assault against any alternatives to government, civic or moral. Utopianism, writes the philosopher Roger Scruton, is “not in the business of perfecting the world” but only of demolishing it: “The ideal is constructed in order to destroy the actual.”⁴⁸ Who needs families, or marriage, or morality? Who needs nations, especially nations with borders? We’ll take a jackhammer to the foundations of functioning society and proclaim paradise in the ruins.

“Moderate” Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they’re fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism. As Congressman Mike Pence put it, “To those who say we should simply focus on fiscal issues, I say you would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses.”⁴⁹

But the collapse of the traditional family is already well advanced—and as part of a conscious Big Government strategy. Big Daddy sings a siren song: a kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but statism is a girl’s best friend. So it is in government’s interest to diminish those men old-fashioned enough to marry women and thereby woo them away from the Big Stash of Big Daddy Statist. Big Government’s bias against marriage and family isn’t an unforeseen quirk of the tax code. It’s in logical, strategic support of its mission—to expand government and diminish everything else. How’s it going? Well, 40 percent of American children are now born out of wedlock. ⁵⁰ A majority of Hispanic babies are born to unmarried mothers. So are 70 percent of black children. And so are 70 percent of the offspring of non-Hispanic white women with a high school education and an income under $20,000. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of daughters abused by their mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Congressman Pence’s doomsday scenario is already here: millions and millions of American children are raised in transient households and moral vacuums that make not just social mobility but even elemental character formation all but impossible. In an America of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease, and growing ethnocultural resentments, the shattering of the indispensable social building block will have catastrophic consequences.

What prevents the “state popular” from declining into a “state despotic”? As Tocqueville saw it, what mattered was the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. In France, the revolution abolished everything, and subordinated all institutions to the rule of central authority. The New World was more fortunate: “The principle and lifeblood of American liberty” was, according to Tocqueville, municipal independence.

Does that distinction still hold? In the twentieth century the intermediary institutions were belatedly hacked away—not just self-government at town, county, and state level, but other independent pillars: church, civic associations, the family. After the diminution of every intervening institution, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why the latter now assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life and why Henrietta Hughes in Fort Myers, Florida, thinks it entirely normal to beseech the Wizard in the far-off Emerald City, where the streets are paved with borrowed green, to do something about her bathroom.

In its debased contemporary sense, liberalism is a universalist creed. It’s why the left dislikes federalism. Federalism means borders, and borders mean there’s always somewhere else to go: the next town, the next county, the next state. I’m pro-choice and I vote—with my feet. Universal liberalism would rather deny you that choice. America has dramatically expanded not just government generally, but nowhere-else-to-go government in particular. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1979:

Bazillionaire senators will always have workarounds—for their land, for their yachts, for their health care. You won’t. Meanwhile, they’re relaxed about cities and states going broke—because it’s a great pretext for propelling government ever upward. When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State’s woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large: the feckless must have their irresponsibility rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington accelerates the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminates any advantage to voting with your feet. It will be as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.

What then are the alternatives? And, if you’re a relatively sane, lightly populated state such as Wyoming or a fiscally viable powerhouse like Texas, are you prepared to beggar yourself for the privilege of keeping fifty stars on Old Glory?

In 2010, just as a federal court was striking down the Arizona legislature’s attempt to control the state’s annexation by illegal aliens, far away in the Hague the International Court of Justice declared that the province of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia two years earlier “did not violate any applicable rule of international law.”⁵³ Certain European secessionist movements—in Spain, Belgium, and elsewhere—took great comfort in the ruling. Russia and China opposed it, because they have restive minorities—Muslims in the Caucacus, and the Uighurs in Xinjiang—and they intend to keep them within their borders.⁵⁴ The United States barely paid any attention: if the ICJ’s opinion was of any broader relevance, it was relevant to foreigners, and that was that. But, taken together, the Hague and Arizona decisions raise an interesting question: What holds the United States together? And will it continue to hold?

In 2006, the last remaining non-Serb republic in Yugoslavia flew the coop and joined Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia ... hold on, isn’t it Bosnia-Herzegovina? Or has Herzegovina split, too? Who cares? Slovenia’s independent and so is Slovakia. Slavonia wasn’t, or not the last time I checked. But Montenegro is, and East Timor, and Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and every other Nickelandimistan between here and Mongolia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, big countries (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Indonesia) and not-so-big countries (Czechoslovakia) have been getting smaller. Why should the United States remain an exception to this phenomenon? Especially as it gets poorer—and more statist.

For the best part of a century, America’s towns, counties, and states have been ceding power to the central metropolis—even though, insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have sufficiently common interests. In The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: the United States (310 million people), Switzerland (a little under 8 million), Norway, and Singapore (both about 5 million).⁵⁵ Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore argue, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up.

That theory is now being tested on a daily basis. To ram government health care down the throats of America, Congress bought off regional factions with deals like the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase. It is certainly no stranger to buying off ethnic factions in pursuit of the black and Hispanic vote—with immigration un-enforcement and affirmative action. Yet to attempt to impose centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history.

In the years ahead America will have its Slovakias and Slovenias, formally and informally. But it cannot remain on its present path and hold its territorial integrity.

Let us grant that the United States is not such a patchwork quilt of different ethnicities as Yugoslavia; it’s a “melting pot”—or it was. Let us further accept for the sake of argument that the United States’ success was unconnected to the people who established it and created its institutions and culture. It is famously a “proposition nation,” defined not by blood but by an idea:

Once upon a time, the mill owner and his workers lived in the same town. Now American municipalities are ever more segregated: the rich live among the rich, the poor come from two or three towns away to clean their pools. Nor is the segregation purely economic. The aforementioned Bell, California, was the town whose citizens had a per capita income of $24,800 but a city management that awarded themselves million-dollar salary-andbenefits packages. It comes as no surprise to discover 90 percent of its inhabitants speak a language other than English at home. Bell is an impoverished Latin American city, and so, like thousands of others south of the border, it has corrupt, rapacious Latin American government. Celebrate diversity!

Ask not for whom Bell tolls. Joe Klein, the novelist and columnist, was one of the most adamant of media grandees that the Tea Party’s millions of “teabaggers” were “racists and nativists.” “Sarah Palin’s fantasy America,” he explained to his readers at Time magazine, “is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals ... to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.”⁵⁷ Joe, naturally, is entirely cool with all that. “The things that scare the teabaggers—the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism—are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country.”

Joe Klein finds “the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism” of America so “exhilarating” that he lives in Pelham, New York, which is 87.33 percent white. By contrast, Sarah Palin’s racist xenophobic hick town of Wasilla, Alaska, is 85.46 percent white. (Percentages courtesy of the 2000 census.) As for those “furriners of all sorts” that Klein claims to dig, Pelham’s “uppity blacks” make up only 4.57 percent of the population, and Asians, whether of the southern or eastern variety, just 3.96 percent. Unlike Wasilla, which is a long way to go, Pelham is within reach of splendidly diverse, urbane, and cosmopolitan quartiers—the Bronx, for example—yet Joe Klein, Mister Diversity, chooses not to reside in any of them, and prefers to live uppitystate of the uppity blacks. Statistically speaking, he lives in a less diverse neighborhood overrun by fewer “furriners” than that chillbilly bonehead’s inbred redoubt on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Yet she and her supporters are the “racists and nativists,” while Joe preens himself on his entirely theoretical commitment to “diversity.”⁵⁸ He would seem to be volunteering himself as a near parodic illustration of the late Joseph Sobran’s observation that “the purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”⁵⁹

I don’t mean to single out Joe Klein, who I’m sure is the soul of kindness to lame dogs, l’il ol’ ladies, uppity blacks, and South Asian furriners, where’er he encounters them. No doubt Pelham has the occasional African-American college professor, East Asian hedge-fund manager, and perhaps even a Muslim software developer or two sprinkled among its 87.33 percent upscale honky populace. But Joe Klein is like a lot of Americans of his class: “diversity” is an attitude rather than a lived experience.

And it will be ever more so: the more starkly we Balkanize into Bells and Pelhams, the more frenziedly the Kleins of the world will bang the “diversity” drum. The more rarefied the all but all-white communities get, the more “COEXIST!” stickers they’ll plaster on their Priuses: hybridity is for your cars, not your municipal demographic profile.

In an age of political correctness, older people sometimes express bewilderment at the lack of “common sense.” But you can’t have common sense in a society with less and less in common: What does a gay hedonist in San Francisco have in common with a Michiganistan mullah? What does a Mississippi Second Amendment gun nut have in common with a Berkeley diversity enforcement officer? What social conventions can bind them all? Even as we degenerate into ever more micro-regulations ever more targeted for ever more bewildering permutations, assertive identities will figure out ways to wiggle free.

But forget gays and Muslims and consider two sixtysomething whitebread Wasps living side-by-side in Yonkers, New York: At Number 27 is a lady who retired from teaching in the local school at the age of fifty-nine and lives on an annual pension of $78,255, exempt from state and local tax, with gold-plated health benefits, and everything inflation-proofed. At Number 29 is a guy exactly the same age who owns a hardware store, can’t afford to retire, has health issues and crummy provision for amelioration thereof, yet will be working till he dies, while his neighbor enjoys a lavish two-decade retirement that he paid for in his taxes. This is a recipe for civil war, and no gay hedonists or firebreathing mullahs need be involved.

The “happy” ending for a statist America is an ever more self-segregating patchwork of cultural ghettoes from the barrios of California to the mosques of Dearborn to the beaches of Fire Island, each with its own TV networks, fashions, churches, mores, history, even children’s names (Connor, Mohammed, Tyrone), but presided over by a bloated centralized government that presents itself as the sole legitimate arbiter between these factions, as they compete for its favors while ever more onerously taxed. What kind of America would that be? E pluribus who-num?

“Would it not be easier,” wrote Bertolt Brecht after the East German uprising in 1953, “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

The thought has occurred to several governments over the years, and I don’t mean the dictatorships. The easiest way to elect a new people is to import them. So the Eloi not only turn a blind eye to mass “undocumented” immigration, but facilitate it, and use the beleaguered productive class to subsidize it. Grade schools are not allowed to ask parents if they’re in the country legally, so there has been a massive expansion of “bilingual education” from the Rio Grande to municipalities within a few miles of the Canadian border: a school system that can’t teach its charges in one language has smoothly diversified into not teaching them in two. Across America, school district taxpayers are funding the subversion of their own communities.

Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. “Sober-minded economists reckon that the potential gains from freer global migration are huge,” writes Philippe Legrain in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. “The World Bank reckons that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere three percent by letting in an extra 14 million workers from developing countries between 2001 and 2025, the world would be $356 billion a year better off, with the new migrants themselves gaining $162 billion a year, people who remain in poor countries $143 billion, and natives in rich countries $139 billion.”⁶⁰

$139 billion? From “a mere” 14 million extra immigrants? Wow!

As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the aggregate gross domestic product of the world’s advanced economies for the year 2008 was estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion. So an extra $139 billion works out to an extra, er, 0.0035. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Dr. Evil’s triumphant announcement (in the film Austin Powers) that he’s holding the world hostage for one million dollars!!! “Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.”⁶¹ As for that extra $139 billion divided between the inhabitants of all the world’s “rich countries,” that works out to less than what the U.S. Government spent in 2010 on unemployment insurance ($160 billion).

So much for the economic argument in capitalist terms. In welfare terms, Europeans were told they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: in reality, Germany’s Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) are heavy on the Gast-, ever lighter on the—arbeiter. Turkish immigrants have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is fifty.⁶² Foreigners didn’t so much game the system as discover, thanks to family “reunification” and other lollipops, that it demanded nothing of them. Entire industries were signed up for public subsidy. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.⁶³ Does the World Bank set their welfare checks on the debit side of that spectacular 0.0035 economic growth? Or does that count as valuable long-term investment in the critical economic growth sector of incendiary mullahs? A dependence on mass immigration is neither a goldmine nor an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness.

“Moderate” Republicans often say that the party base represents a declining demographic (too white) and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Hispanics and other fast-growing segments of the population. The argument would seem to assume that this dramatic demographic shift is an entirely natural development. Why, after all, are white guys in decline and Hispanics on the rise?

Because the governing class decided, with the 1965 immigration act and much that has followed, that that’s the way it’s going to be. In the not entirely likely event that the GOP could persuade Hispanics to vote in overwhelming numbers for small government, the Democrats would look elsewhere for new clients—Muslims, say, maybe from Somalia, a nation which, in barely more than a decade, has transformed the welfare profile even of such backwaters as Lewiston-Auburn, Maine.⁶⁴ “Moderate” Republicans would then argue that the party’s white-Hispanic base was now stagnating, and that the GOP needs to do more to reach out to Lewistan-Auburnistan.

The problem with dissolving the people and electing another is that you’d have to be a genius to pull off such a transformation without any unintended consequences. On the scale and speed with which much of the West has attempted it, you quickly reach a tipping point, in which the cultural capital of a functional nation state has been exhausted and what follows is ... something else. The particular nature of America’s mass illegal immigration is almost consciously designed to fracture the republic, and lead to enormous tracts of the country becoming entirely dysfunctional.

For the corporate right, undocumented immigrants mean cheap labor. For the statist left, they mean dependents—and cheap votes. For sentimentalists in between, it’s an act of ethnocultural penance: hence, the Cinco de Mayo observances in schoolhouses up and down the land. The left are right. Big Government centralists don’t mind about the costs Undocumented America imposes, because in the main it imposes them on states, cities, and school districts—and thus makes previously self-sufficient branches of government ever more dependent on central authority. And just as Big Government doesn’t care about the impact on local government, Big Business doesn’t care about the impact of illegal labor on small business. This is a recipe for civil strife, if not, ultimately, civil war.

The corporate right wanted open borders for cheap workers in part because the statist left has made American workers too expensive: you can ship manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas, but it’s not so easy with hotel chambermaids and seasonal agricultural workers. Meanwhile, the statist left favored open borders as a way of importing voters: untold millions of poor, ill-educated people with little English would need government services, and untold hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats would need to be hired to service them. And so Big Government grows its base. Most illegal immigrants arrived in the Southwest, where states are not red like the Old South nor blue like the Northeast, but kinda purple—50/50 congressional districts and Senate seats where a few anchor babies here and English-as-a-Second-Language programs there and the Democratic Party can tip the demographics permanently in its favor. In such a world, what happens when the economy nosedives and you have competing groups of poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Hispanics chasing ever fewer jobs and crushing the welfare system through sheer numbers?

The left was smarter than the right: the business class told itself it was importing hardworking families who just want a shot at the American Dream. But welfare mocks the Ellis Island virtues, upending them as easily as the shattered Statue of Liberty Charlton Heston stumbled across in the sands of a ruined planet. In an America with ever bigger government and ever poorer people, the dependency rationale for illegal immigration will win out over the business rationale. Seventy percent of births at the San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California, are the so-called “anchor babies” born to illegals.⁶⁵ In related news, by 2010 Stockton’s school district had a deficit of $25 million.⁶⁶ Same thing at Dallas General: 70 per cent of newborns are “anchor babies.”⁶⁷ Seven out of ten isn’t any kind of “minority”; it’s the dominant culture of America’s tomorrow.

As for “racist” Arizona, the majority of its schoolchildren are already Hispanic.⁶⁸ So, even if you sealed the border today, the state’s future is as a Hispanic society: that’s a given. Maybe it’ll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys bemoaning the irrational bigots knew what was best for them.

To the coastal Eloi, “undocumented immigrants” are the unseen Morlocks who mow your lawn while you’re at work and clean your office while you’re at home. (That’s the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent “undocumented” servant class by far too many “documented” Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic self-serving sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states illegal immigration is life and death. A few days after Arizona passed its new law, I gave a speech in Tucson for the Goldwater Institute, and a lady came up to me afterwards to talk about the camp of illegals that’s pitched up on the edge of her land, a few miles from downtown, but where the Federal Government has posted highway “Danger” signs warning the public that travel beyond this point is “not recommended.” My audience member had no choice in the matter: she’s not passing through; this is her home—and, if the Government of the United States is now putting up signs explaining that its writ no longer runs, they didn’t think to warn her ahead of time. So she lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the Arizona law as an offense against “fairness.” ⁶⁹ But where’s the fairness for this woman’s family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she’s just supposed to get used to living under siege? She has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away from the intimidation, and the cartel hits, and the remorseless ebbing of U.S. sovereignty. The fetishization of the Undocumented is a form of class warfare waged against poor whites by Eloi elites who don’t have to live with the consequences of the socioeconomic experiments they impose on others.

As for “the jobs Americans won’t do,” most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won’t hire Americans to do—because, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one’s employees has become one of the easiest levers for controlling costs. Why would this change? After all, as the official unemployment climbed to 10 percent and the non-college-educated unemployment rate hit 15 percent and the unofficial rate among blacks and other groups rose even higher, the rote-like invocations of “the jobs Americans won’t do” was affected not a whit. If Americans won’t do them (or won’t be hired to do them) even at a time of high unemployment, maybe that’s the problem that needs to be addressed. Instead, to solve an artificially created labor shortage, the U.S. government deemed U.S. immigration law unenforceable and illegitimate. And so the armies of the Undocumented will swell exponentially as Mexico dissolves into a murderous narco-state feeding ever greater northern habits. What is happening on the southern border is the unmaking of America.

There was a story that zipped around the Internet a few years ago, about a Mexican Air Force pilot who’d supposedly photographed a UFO. North of the border the response to this amazing news, from professional comedians to website comment sections, was well nigh universal: Mexico has an air force. Who knew?⁷⁰

Ha-ha. Mexico. Third World joke. Actually, two centuries back, it had a bigger military than the United States. Like America, it was a settler society, but older and larger: Mexico City was founded in 1524, and, when Madrid belatedly recognized the independence of “New Spain” in 1821, the city gave its name to a country—and, indeed, empire: Imperio Mexicano. Not as silly as it may sound. Before the Louisiana Purchase, if you’d been asked to predict which settler capital, Mexico City or Washington, would emerge as the seat of power in post-colonial North America, many an analyst would have plumped for the Spaniards. They had an imperialist’s sweep: when they seceded from Madrid, they did so in a “Solemn Act of the Declaration of Independence of Northern America,” which definition stretched all the way north to what’s now the Oregon border and quite a ways south, to Panama. By comparison, the United States seemed a weak and vulnerable territory holed up east of the Appalachians. It was a land economically dependent on exports but with few strategic transportation routes and unable to protect its sea lanes.

And then Napoleon sold America the port of New Orleans. “I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride,” he said, making mischief.⁷¹ But the Mexican border was less than 200 miles from the newly American port, and a mere hundred from the expanded republic’s critical artery, the Mississippi River. The wannabe Imperio, for its part, had a problem of its own. The land west of New Orleans, in the Mexican department of Texas, was mostly desert or mountains, and consequently lightly inhabited. So it suited the southern power to let American immigrants settle in this unpromising terrain—“doing the jobs Mexicans won’t do,” one might say. When Sam Houston decided it was time for northern settlers to rebel, the distant imperial capital of Mexico City had a hell of a time just getting troops through to Texas in order even to be able to hold a war. The defeats that left the U.S.-Mexican border where it is now delegitimized New Spain’s ruling class, destabilized the politics of Mexico City for the better part of a century, and led to the squalid and violent polity we know today.

There are, give or take, 200 countries in the world. If you had 20 million “undocumented” immigrants more or less proportionately distributed between those 200 countries—Irish, Uzbeks, Belgians, Botswanans—then maybe they would be assimilable, although even then it would be an unprecedented challenge. But borderland immigration is different. In British terms, consider not the rapidly Islamizing East London or Yorkshire, where Muslims are aliens replacing a native population, but think instead of Ulster: when Ireland came under the English Crown, Scots Protestants settled the north. When the south seceded to become the Irish Free State in 1922, the United Kingdom got a land border for the first time in its history. The loyalists could have had all nine counties of historic Ulster for their Northern Ireland statelet, but insisted on a mere six because they knew they did not have the numbers to hold the other three. And even in the six counties thousands were murdered in the decades ahead. A border settles things, but only conditionally: for Irish nationalists in Fermanagh and Tyrone, the line meant nothing. This was Ireland, not Britain, and they had been there first. That’s how many Mexicans feel about the southern frontier: Arizona is Mexico, not the United States, and it was Mexico first. You don’t have to be a large minority to cause an awful lot of trouble—as the British found out on a small patch of turf where Irish nationalists were outnumbered two-to-one by Unionists. And you don’t even have to believe so fervently that you’re willing to kill and bomb. You just have to believe enough to live it, in your daily routine. In the Arizona of tomorrow, Hispanics will be not a minority but a majority: they will not assimilate with the United States because they don’t need to. Instead, the United States will assimilate with them, and is already doing so, day by day.

In July 2010, Maywood, California, became the first city in America to lay off its entire workforce, including the police and fire departments, and contract out all services.⁷² It did this because the city was so mismanaged that its insurers canceled the coverage and every alternative provider declined to accept the city’s business. I was interested to discover, via the 2000 census, that the city is 96.33 percent Hispanic. Celebrate lack of diversity! What will it be by the time the 2010 census numbers are out? 98.7 percent? Maywood does not seem an obviously Spanish name, and in fact the city was named for Miss May Wood, a young lady who worked for the real estate developers responsible for the original subdivision that led to the incorporation of the city in 1924. If you lived there in the boom years of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, you’ll remember a blue collar town with good jobs, a civic culture, and a population that reflected the ethnic mix of the time. Then the jobs disappeared, and the civic culture declined, and Maywood turned 96.33 percent Hispanic in little more than two decades. So much for the melting pot. Today, one third of the population is estimated to be “illegal.”⁷³ I put it in quotations because possession is nine-tenths of the law and in this case there’s no doubt who possesses Maywood. How many other towns will similarly transform, and how fast?

Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something America’s ever weakening assimilationists no longer have the stomach for. So go with the numbers: the Southwest will be Mexican, and Washington’s writ will no longer run. The Mexican-American War established the borders of the America we know today. It took a couple of centuries, but illegal immigration has reversed the results of that conflict. America won the war, Mexico won the peace.

For Eloi America, it’s a short step from ethnocultural penance to ethnocultural masochism. Los Angeles, New York, and other “sanctuary cities” have formally erased the distinction between U.S. citizens and the armies of the undocumented. This is the active collusion by multiple jurisdictions in the subversion of United States sovereignty. In Newark, New Jersey, it means an illegal-immigrant child rapist is free to murder three high-school students execution-style for kicks on a Saturday night.⁷⁴ In Somerville, Massachusetts, it means two deaf girls are raped by MS-13 members.⁷⁵ And in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, where four young men obtained the picture ID with which they boarded their flight on September 11, 2001, it means Saudi Wahhabists figuring out that, if the “sanctuary nation” (in Michelle Malkin’s phrase) offers such rich pickings to imported killers and imported gangs, why not to jihadists?⁷⁶

So here is another proposition for the proposition nation: Is it more likely that these trends will reverse—or that they will accelerate? Consider life in a permanently poorer America with higher unemployment, less social mobility, and any prospect for self-improvement crushed by the burden of government. Will that mean more or less marijuana? More or less cocaine? More or fewer meth labs? Mexican cartels account for approximately 70 percent of the narcotics that enter the U.S. to feed American habits .⁷⁷ Arizona already has a kidnapping rate closer to Mexico’s than to New England’s. Are the numbers likely to rise or fall in an ever more Mexicanized United States? If you’re lucky, San Diego will seem no worse than Cancun, eastern resort capital of the Caribbean Riviera and generally thought of as relatively far from the scene of Mexico’s drug wars.⁷⁸ Yet even in Cancun, within the space of a year, the head of the city’s anti-drugs squad was murdered; the chief of police was arrested on drugs-trafficking charges; and then the mayor was, too. We will start to read similar stories of wholesale corruption and subversion from the cities of the American Southwest. And similar tales of depravity, too: in 2010, the bodies of four men and two women were found in a cave on the outskirts of Cancun.⁷⁹ They had been tortured. Their abdomens were branded with a “Z.” The mark of Zorro? No, the Zeta drug cartel. Three of them had had their chests ripped open and their hearts removed.

As I said, Cancun is regarded as one of the towns least afflicted by drug violence. More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. In 2010 alone, some 13,000 Mexicans were killed in the drug wars.⁸⁰ More than 3,000 died in just one town—Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso.⁸¹ America will be importing not just drugs from Mexico, but the dominant players, the municipal outreach, and the business practices.

It’s foolish to assume “globalization” is a purely economic phenomenon. In 2006, a group of Muslim men raised in suburban Ontario were arrested and charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister.⁸² Almost simultaneously, the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River.⁸³ In 2010, four headless bodies were left dangling from a bridge in the picture-postcard tourist town of Cuernavaca.⁸⁴ The same year, authorities arrested a leading hit-man beheader for one of the Mexican drug cartels.⁸⁵ He was fourteen years old, and a U.S. citizen, too (the anchor baby of an undocumented Californian). The drug cartels weren’t Muslim last time I checked, but decapitation isn’t just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head.

How about stoning? Isn’t that something they do to women in Iran? Yes, but a good idea soon finds an export market. In 2010, the body of Gustavo Sanchez, mayor of Tancitaro, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, was found with that of an aide in an abandoned truck.⁸⁶ Both men had been stoned to death. Tancitaro isn’t anywhere important: it’s a town of 26,000 people. Nonetheless, in the year before the mayor’s fatal stoning, the city council chief was kidnapped and tortured to death, and Sanchez’ predecessor and seven other officials resigned after being threatened by drug gangs and left unprotected by local cops. The entire 60-man police department was subsequently fired. In Santiago, they found their mayor’s corpse with his eyes gouged out.⁸⁷ Mexico is degenerating into a narco-terrorist enterprise with a sovereign state as a minor subsidiary. George W. Bush liked to say of Iraq that we’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here. In Mexico, America has no choice in the matter: the decapitations and stonings and eye-gougings will move north of the border.

Of course, the real narco-state is not Mexico but America: if we didn’t take drugs, we wouldn’t need someone to supply them, and running a cartel wouldn’t be such a lucrative enterprise. America’s hedonist stupor has real consequences for others, and we will be living with them north of the “border” all too soon. But it’s not necessary to argue about the drug cartels, or the gang killers, the child rapists, the drunk-drivers. Even without these, the central fact of Hispanic immigration—the wholesale transformation of innumerable American municipalities at unprecedented speed—would place a huge question mark over the future. Don’t take my word for it, take the New York Times’. In 2009, it ran a story of immigrants in Langley Park, Maryland, “Struggling to Rise in Suburbs” (as the headline put it).⁸⁸ Usual sludge, but in the middle of it, helpfully explaining Langley Park to his readers, the reporter, Jason DeParle, wrote as follows: “Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money-transfer stores. Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city government, few community leaders, and little community.”

At which point I stopped, and went back, and reread it. For it seemed to me at first glance that Mr. DeParle was airily citing laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional metropolitan government all as evidence of “the aura of Central America.” And that can’t be right, can it? Only a couple of days earlier, some Internet wags had leaked a discussion thread from the JournoList, the exclusive virtual country club where all the hepcat liberals hang out. In this instance, the media grandees were arguing vehemently that Martin Peretz of The New Republic was, in the elegant formulation one associates with today’s J-school alumni, a “crazy-ass racist.”⁸⁹ The proof that this lifelong liberal is a “fucking racist” came in his observations on our friendly neighbor to the south: “I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations,” said Mr. Peretz. “A (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, neartropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.”⁹⁰

Martin Peretz’s assumptions about “the aura of Central America” are not so very different from Jason DeParle’s, but Mr. Peretz brought down the wrath of his own side’s politically correct enforcers. Even though his remarks are utterly unexceptional to anyone familiar with Latin America. But since when have the PC police cared about observable reality?

Langley Park is a good example of where tiptoeing around on multiculti eggshells leads: there is literally no language in which what’s happening in suburban Maryland can be politely discussed, not if an ambitious politician of either party wishes to remain viable. America is a land where the NAACP complains about the use of the widely known scientific term “black hole” on a Hallmark greeting card, and Hallmark instantly withdraws the card;⁹¹ a land so obsessed by race that, in order to reverse an entirely fictional manifestation of “racism,” it invented the subprime mortgage and sat back as it came within a smidgeonette of destroying the housing market, banking system, and insurance industry. But, even if it had, at least we’d have demonstrated our anti-racist bona fides even unto self-destruction, so that’s okay.

To exhibit any interest in immigration or its consequences is to risk being marked down as, if not a “racist,” at least a “nativist.” And “immigration” isn’t really what it is, is it? After all, in traditional immigration patterns the immigrant assimilates with his new land, not the new land with the immigrant. Yet in this case the aura of Maryland dissolves like a mirage when faced with “the aura of Central America.”

Two generations ago, America, Canada, Australia, and the rest of the developed world took it as read that a sovereign nation had the right to determine which, if any, foreigners it extended rights of residency to. Now only Japan does. Everywhere else, opposition to mass immigration is “nativist,” and expressing a preference for one group of immigrants over another is “racist.” Until the Sixties, governments routinely distinguished between Irish and Bulgar, Indian and Somali, but now all that matters is the glow of virtue you feel from refusing to distinguish, as if immigration is like a UN peacekeeping operation—one of those activities in which you have no “national interest.”

Very few elderly, established residents of Langley Park knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of a century it’s become a fait accompli. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it.

And so it just kinda happened. Another proposition: When large tracts of the United States take on “the aura of Central America”—laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, civic collapse, to cite only New York Times-observed phenomena—will such a land still be the United States? Or will it increasingly be the northern branch office of Latin America? None of us can say for sure, but, underneath the smiley-face banalities about hard-working families wanting a shot at the American Dream, I think most of us know which way to bet.

Human capital is the most reliable indicator of what society you’ll be. Even liberals, even Martin Peretz, even the New York Times acknowledge that, at least in unguarded moments. For almost half a century, the human capital of the United States has transformed faster than at any time since the founding of the republic.

“Poor Mexico,” Porfirio Diaz, the country’s longtime strongman, is supposed to have said. “So far from God, so close to the United States.” Today Mexico is America’s southern quagmire—farther from God than ever, and not close to the United States but in it.

After the Arizona court decision, Jon Richards published a cartoon in the Albuquerque Journal. It showed three Indians standing on the shore watching the Mayflower approach. “Are they legal?” wonders the chief. “What do we do if they have babies?” asks his squaw. “Is it too late to build a fence?” says the brave.⁹²

What is the message of this cartoon? That America has always been a land of immigrants? Or that the tide of illegal settlement is going to work out as well for the United States as it did for the Algonquin nation? Is Richards’ cartoon just the cheap triumphalism of a self-loathing Anglo’s cultural relativism? Or is it actually a portent of the future? The latter isn’t so hard to imagine: a largely impoverished Hispanic Southwest, with a few tony Anglo gated communities—or, if you prefer, “reservations.”

The Conformicrats live off the fruits of the productive class and they need to keep them in a state of quiescence. They achieve this with their allies in the dependent class by a kind of pincer movement. From above, the ideological aristocracy can inflict any amount of pain through its administrative enforcers. From below, there is the seething dysfunctional jungle of the underclass. You can measure civilized societies by how easy it is to insulate yourself from the predators, and in America it is still easier than in Britain. But, lurking in the Conformicrats’ coercion of the beleaguered productive class is the implicit threat of a good cop/bad cop routine—or good statist/dysfunctional statist: if you don’t give us what we want—more money for more agencies and more bureaucrats—we may not be able to hold the underclass in check, and you’re within easier reach of’em than we are. It is a worthless guarantee: given the human wreckage piled up by half-a-century of diseducation, welfarism, sexual self-destruction, and much else, the Eloi aristocracy cannot hold a Morlock dependent class in check. “We have not yet seen what man can make of man,” wrote the behaviorist B. F. Skinner.⁹³ Well, we’re about to.

Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks, some of the ruled class have workarounds (gated communities, offshore accounts), but others among the ruled class just get unruly.

What will the statists do? We are already watching municipalities drown in the pensions liabilities of their bureaucracies. Do they fix the problem or do they cut core services? The latter’s the way to bet: you don’t fire the police officers, but you reassign them to desk jobs where they’ll get out less and thus require fewer vehicles, less gas, less equipment, less ammunition. It’s already happening in the poorer cities, but, like rot in the boarded-up houses, the signs of decay will creep further up. A lot of cities will take on the character of Third World swamps the colonial authorities are resigned to losing: the police hole up in well fortified headquarters venturing out in heavily armored vehicles ever more rarely. Think St. Louis, Missouri, or Gary, Indiana, with a Green Zone, and your house is twelve blocks outside the perimeter. When the neighborhood’s up for grabs, all that expensive law enforcement of the Security State won’t be there for you. Get yourself a gun, while you’re still allowed to.

Picture an American airport on the Friday afternoon before a big public holiday—the long, slow trudge to gain admission to the secure area. The “secure area” won’t be just for airports anymore. More and more of America will seek to be “secured” in the interests of constraining the forces on the other side of the fence. Think of those decapitated heads in Mexico and hope the cartels don’t decide to learn incompetent transit terror from the jihad—because, inevitably, Big Government will respond with big, bloated, manpower-intensive, ever more intrusive bureaucratic overreach. A citizenry that shrugged when government bureaucrats took to themselves the power to poke around with no probable cause in the nooks and crannies of its genitalia will discover that such extraordinary powers will not remain penned up in Terminal Three, but will spread—to bus stations, and key Interstate ramps, and eventually random Main Streets. As the Shoe Bomber led to the shoeless shuffle and the Panty Bomber led to the federally mandated scrotal grope, so the first Suppository Bomber will lead to complimentary federal prostate exams from LAX to JFK.

Then factor in the end of the dollar as global currency. Oil heads up past five, six, seven bucks a gallon, and everything else follows. That inflation-proofed schoolmarm in Yonkers isn’t going to want to stay at Number 27 when everybody else in the street is poor and hates her. Nobody travels very much anymore—who can afford it?—but the lines are as long as ever: the Security State barely bothers to pretend it’s for anything other than domestic crowd control. As the armed forces shrink with the dollar, hundreds of thousands of American troops are demobbed and come home to find that, whether or not it’s over over there, it’s certainly over over here. A statist America won’t be a large Sweden—unimportant but prosperous—but something closer to the Third World. As a dead-end economy drives its surplus manpower deeper into poverty, addiction, and crime, parts of the country will take on post-Soviet Russian characteristics, with a gangster class manipulating social disintegration for its own ends. What’s left will be Latin America, corrupt and chaotic, broke and brutish—for all but a privileged few.

What to do? Where to go? In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham began working on his famous “Pan-opticon”—a radial prison in which a central “inspector” could see all the prisoners, but they could never see him. In the computer age, we now have not merely panopticon buildings, but panopticon societies, like modern London, with its wall-to-wall CCTV cameras. Soon perhaps, excepting a few redoubts such as Waziristan and the livelier precincts of the Horn of Africa, we will have a panopticon planet.

Yet high-tech statism still needs an overarching narrative. The “security state” is a tough sell: if you tell people the government is compiling data on them for national security purposes, the left instinctively recoils. But, if you explain that you’re doing it to save the planet by monitoring carbon footprints and emissions compliance and mandatory recycling, starry-eyed coeds across the land will twitter their approval, and the middle-class masochists of the developed world will whimper in orgasmic ecstasy as you tighten the screws, pausing only to demand that you do it to them harder and faster. Consider a recent British plan for each citizen to be given an official travel allowance.⁹⁴ If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—all in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and his county-sized carbon footprint. The Soviets restricted freedom of movement through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British favor the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes: the movement’s still free; it’s just that there’ll be a government processing fee of £412.95. And, in a revealing glimpse of the universal belief in enviro-statism, this proposal came not from the Labour Party but from the allegedly Conservative Party. At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler, and Mao are kicking themselves: “‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?”

You remember how President Bush used to talk about illegal immigration—about how we needed to help all those undocumented people “living in the shadows”? Doesn’t that sound kinda nice—and restful? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork. By comparison, those of us in the blazing klieg lights of the nanny state are shadowed everywhere we go: government numbers for this, government cards for that, a life of barcodes and retinal scans, the TSA Obergropinführers at the airport.... You’d almost think that, compared to the 15 or 30 or however many million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community are out there, the 300 or so million in the overdocumented segment of the population get a lousy deal.

Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came to America after September 11, 2001.⁹⁵ That’s to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that. Even under the panoptic surveillance of the “security state,” certain identity groups seem to be indulged by Big Government. In California one notices that the same regulatory leviathan that thinks nothing of sending in the heavies if a hardware store is offering complimentary coffee to its customers seems somewhat shyer of enforcing its bazillions of building code/food prep/environmental/health and safety rules against ad hoc mobile kitchens serving piping hot Mexican dishes up and down the highway. Park your van, get out the plastic chairs, pull out a tarp for a bit of shade, and start selling. All those county kitchen inspectors and food-prep permit issuers? Not a problem. Victor Davis Hanson, a tireless bicycler round the Golden State’s Central Valley, notices the ever proliferating slicks of fat and lard emptied out on the road by such mobile restaurants, as do the crows and squirrels who love lapping them up.⁹⁶ In the Panopticon State, the Shadowlands are thriving: a state that presumes to tax and license Joe Schmoe for using the table in the corner of his basement as a home office apparently doesn’t spot the half-dozen additional dwellings that sprout in José Schmoe’s yard out on the edge of town. Doit-yourself wiring stretches from bungalow to lean-to trailer to RV to rusting pick-up on bricks, as five, six, eight, twelve different housing units pitch up on one lot. The more Undocumented America secedes from the hyper-regulatory state, the more frenziedly Big Nanny documents you and yours.

This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is happy to let them do so. In Undocumented America, the buildings have no building codes, the sales have no sales tax, your identity card gives no clue as to your real identity. In the years ahead, for many poor Overdocumented-Americans, living in the Shadowlands will offer if not the prospect of escape then at least temporary relief. As America loses its technological edge and the present Chinese cyber-probing gets disseminated to the Wikileaks types, the blips on the computer screen representing your checking and savings accounts will become more vulnerable. After yet another brutal attack, your local branch never reconnects to head office; it brings up from the vault the old First National Bank of Deadsville shingle and starts issuing fewer cards and more checkbooks. And then fewer checkbooks and more cash. In small bills.

The planet is dividing into two extremes: an advanced world—Europe, North America, Australia—in which privacy is vanishing and the state will soon be able to monitor you every second of the day; and a reprimitivizing world—Somalia, the Pakistani tribal lands—where no one has a clue what’s going on. Undocumented America is giving us a lesson in how Waziristan and CCTV London can inhabit the same real estate, like overlapping area codes. There will be many takers for that in the years ahead. As Documented America fails, poor whites, poor blacks, and many others will find it easier to assimilate with Undocumented America, and retreat into the shadows. It will not merely be states and sub-state jurisdictions that secede, but individuals, too.

In 2003, Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev got together for an all-star recording of Prokofiev’s beloved children’s classic, Peter and the Wolf.⁹⁷ In the original, Peter and his friend the duck are out frolicking in the meadow when the slavering wolf shows up and embarks on his reign of terror. He gulps down the duck as his hors d’oeuvre, and has the cat lined up to follow. But fortunately, Peter gets hold of a rope and uses it as a noose with which to muzzle the wolf and take him into captivity.

In the Clinton version, you won’t be surprised to hear, Peter realizes the error of his lupophobia and releases the creature back into the wild. The wolf howls a friendly goodbye. Which is jolly sporting of him when you consider that it’s all our fault in the first place. “Forgetting his triumph, Peter thought instead of fallen trees, parched meadows, choked streams, and of each and every wolf struggling for survival,” narrates our Bill, addressing the root causes and feeling the wolf ’s pain. “The time has come to leave wolves in peace.”

How about the duck? Is she left in peace? Or in pieces?

Do you recall the weeks before September 11, 2001? On the Eastern Seaboard, it was the summer of shark attacks. Jessie Arbogast, an eight-year-old lad from Pensacola, Florida, had his arm ripped off, but his quick-witted uncle wrestled the predator back to shore, killed him, and retrieved the chewed-up limb from his jaws. The New York Times, in an eerie aquatic pre-echo of the left’s reaction to 9/11, came down on the side of the shark: “Many people now understand that an incident like the Arbogast attack is not the result of malevolence or a taste for human blood on the shark’s part,” explained the Times editorial. “What it should really do is remind us yet again how much we have to learn about them and their waters.”⁹⁸

Why do they hate us? (Underwater version.)

There is a fairly recent journalistic genre, specimens of which now turn up on the news pages with numbing regularity. A cougar kills a dog near the home of Frances Frost in Canmore, Alberta.⁹⁹ Miss Frost, an “environmentalist dancer” with impeccable pro-cougar credentials, objects strenuously to suggestions that the predator be tracked and put down. A month later, she’s killed in broad daylight by a cougar who’s been methodically stalking her.

“I can’t believe it happened,” wailed a fellow environmentalist. But why not? Cougars prey on species they’re not afraid of. So, if they’ve no reason to be afraid of man, they might as well eat him. He’s a lot easier to catch than a deer. Taylor Mitchell, a singer-songwriter, was killed by coyotes in Cape Breton National Park in Nova Scotia.¹⁰⁰ “It’s hard to understand why this may be happening,” said Derek Quann, a resource conservation manager, after a second attack. “We don’t think there’s been a significant increase in the population. There could be a larger problem in the ecosystem at play.” That was his coy way of suggesting that coyotes are losing their traditional fear of man, and with it their tendency to stay out of his way.

Aside from the boom in Islamic terrorism, the Nineties and the Oughts were also the worst decades ever for shark, bear, alligator, and cougar attacks in North America. The obvious explanation is that there are more of these creatures than ever before—the bear and cougar populations have exploded across the continent. But the more sinister one is that animals have not just multiplied but evolved: they’ve lost their fear of man. They now see him for what he is: a tasty Jello pudding on legs.

In 2003, Disney brought us its latest animated feature, Brother Bear, the usual New Age mumbo-jumbo with a generic Native American gloss. It told the tale of Kenai, a young fellow in a bucolic Pacific Northwest at the end of the Ice Age. To avenge his brother’s death, Kenai kills the brown bear responsible. But trouble’s a-bruin: his late brother is wise enough to know that killing is not the answer and so gets the Great Spirit to teach Kenai a lesson by transforming him into a bear. He thereby learns that bears are not violent beasts but sensitive beings living in harmony with nature who understand the world they live in far more than man does. I would certainly agree that bears are wiser and more sensitive than man, if only because I’ve yet to meet a bear who’s produced an animated feature as mawkishly deluded as this.

Among the technical advisers on the film, hired to ensure the accurate depiction of our furry friends, was Timothy Treadwell, the self-described eco-warrior from Malibu who became famous for his campaign “to promote getting close to bears to show they were not dangerous.”¹⁰¹ He did this by sidling up to them and singing “I love you” in a high-pitched voice. Brother Bear is certainly true to the Treadwell view of brown bears, and he would surely have appreciated the picture had he ever gotten to see it. But, just as Kenai found himself trapped inside a bear, so did Mr. Treadwell—although in his case he was just passing through. In September, a pilot arrived at the ursine expert’s camp near Kaflia Bay in Alaska to fly him out and instead found the bits of him and his girlfriend that hadn’t yet been eaten buried in a bear’s food cache.

Treadwell had always said he wanted to end up in “bear scat,” so his fellow activists were inclined to look on the bright side. “He would say it’s the culmination of his life’s work,” said his colleague Jewel Palovak. “He died doing what he lived for.”¹⁰²

I wonder if he was revising his view in the final moments. And if his girlfriend was quite so happy to find she had a bit part in “the culmination of his life’s work.”

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at the fate of the eco-warrior, but it does make Brother Bear somewhat harder to swallow than its technical adviser manifestly was. There are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but sadly no Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People. And, just as bugs are becoming resistant to antibiotics, so the big beasts are changing, too. Wild animals are not merely the creatures of their appetites; they’re also astute calculators of risk. Not so long ago, your average bear knew that if he happened upon a two-legged type, the chap would pull a rifle on him and he’d be spending eternity as a fireside rug. But these days it’s just as likely that any human being he comes across is some pantywaist Bambi Boomer enviro-sentimentalist trying to get in touch with his inner self. And, if the guy wants to get in touch with his inner self so badly, why not just rip it out of his chest for him?

North American wildlife seems to have figured that out. Why be surprised if other predators do? A soft Eloi culture will bend and accommodate and prostrate—and still be consumed as easily as Timothy Treadwell. At American airports, to avoid even the hint of a suggestion that people who want to blow up airplanes are more likely to have certain characteristics than others and to maintain the polite fiction that all seven billion inhabitants of the planet pose an equal security risk, the Government of the United States has decreed that federal officials are entitled to inspect your private parts and those of your children and your grandmother. All 300 million sets of American genitalia are up for grabs—without probable cause. God forbid you should be so insensitive as to use “enhanced patdown” techniques on any Guantanamo detainees, but you can use them on three-year-old girls and octogenarian nuns. Cougars, lambs, sharks, baby seals: we must not profile.

Think of Frances Frost vigorously objecting to any suggestion the predator cougar be tracked down. Al-Qaeda understand that mentality—which is why they advise captured jihadists always to claim they’ve been tortured, and let the Frances Frosts of the grievance industry help them get lawyered up. So do the armies of the Undocumented. That sends a message about U.S. will, and not just to Latin-American peasants seeking economic betterment.

Picture Timothy Treadwell cooing love songs to his killers. You don’t have to go to the Arctic to see that. In Philadelphia, there is an organization called the BDS Coalition. BDS? As in “Bush Derangement Syndrome”? No. It stands for “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions,” and it’s an alliance of groups committed to working for “social justice” in “Palestine.” So they staged a disruptive “flashdance” at a Philly supermarket to protest the store’s “policy” of carrying brands of hummus made by companies perceived to have too close ties to Israel.¹⁰³ Watching these young white twentysomething American students “dance into action” around the hapless grocery clerks, you couldn’t help noticing that (without wishing to stereotype from modes of dress and levels of hirsuteness) more than a few of the young ladies appeared to be stern feminists, if not, ah, persons of orientation. In America, so what? But try it in Hamas-run Gaza.

There is a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. When they march in Gay Pride parades, they chant:

A few years back, I thought even spaghetti-spined western liberals might draw the line at “Female Genital Mutilation”—or “FGM,” as it’s already known in far too many western hospitals from Virginia to Australia. After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest. Yet already female genital “mutilation” has been replaced by the less judgmental term of “female genital cutting.” In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics floated the suggestion that, because certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “cutting,” in a spirit of multicultural compromise perhaps U.S. pediatricians should amend their opposition to the practice, and provide a “ritual nick” to young girls.¹⁰⁷

Nonetheless, at the Gay Pride parade they know their priorities:

So Jews are to blame for lesbians? Do the prancing sapphists in that Philly supermarket know they’re just tools of the International Jewish Conspiracy?

Fortunately for them, they’re taking their courageous stand for Palestinian “social justice” in Pennsylvania. Not everyone keeps such a discreet distance. In 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set off to hitchhike from Milan to the Palestinian Territories to promote “world peace.” She was dressed as a bride, and the purpose of her trip was to show that if only you put your trust in our common humanity then all will be well. A month later, her naked body was found in the bushes near Gebze in Turkey. She had been gang-raped and then killed. Like Timothy Treadwell’s, her illusions met reality.¹⁰⁹

Most of us as individuals retain enough of a survival instinct that, if we find ourselves on a rough city block in a foreign land late at night, we mothball the PC pieties until we get back to the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. But what happens when Pippa Bacca’s illusions become the dominant political discourse of a free society? And how many Timothy Treadwells crooning to their killers does a society have to have before it loses even the very idea of a survival instinct?

Eloi passivity offers a template not only to a resurgent Islam. In Europe, we can already see what happens when the ruling class is obliged to tell a citizenry mired in dependence that there’s no more money. In France, the government announced the retirement age would be raised from 60 to 62 by 2018, and there were protests. In Britain, the government raised the cost of university education, and the elderly “students” rioted. En route to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, and his consort the Duchess of Cornwall became separated from their police escort and had their Rolls besieged and battered by a mob chanting “Off with their heads!” That’s a portent of America’s future—except that for a failed and discredited elite there will be no pampered princes to serve as a focused target. After economic ruin, the Eloi will retreat from an unenforceable border and other areas of the country, not out of choice but from necessity. As the years go by, they will find it ever harder to insulate themselves from the pathologies they have fed. The collapse of the dollar as the global currency and the end of cheap imports will cause shortages in much of the land. But beyond that the abandonment of America’s animating ideas will leave a large porous continent with insufficient social glue to make it governable. And then, as H. G. Wells’ Eloi discovered, the Morlocks will take their opportunity, and in their “feeble prettiness” the elites will no longer even know how to rouse themselves.

An America that abandons the American idea will be a turbulent society. The present de facto segregation—in Maywood, California, and elsewhere—will decay into tribalism, both cultural and economic. The United States will quietly retreat from the southern borderlands and other redoubts of the Undocumented, in the way that the Government of France has retreated from those banlieues that Muslims regard as part of the Dar al-Islam. Other neighborhoods will opt for de facto secession, and still functioning states will opt for de jure secession, anxious to escape being buried by federal debt. Balkanization will cease to be a pejorative and become the least worst hope: united we’re done for, but divided a few corners of the map might stand a chance. The Eloi elites who did this to America will hunker down within protected enclaves while outside life grows increasingly savage and violent. But eventually they will come for the elite communities, too—as the cougar came for Frances Frost, and the bear for Timothy Treadwell.