America Alone Read Online Free Page A

Philip Longman writes: So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism - a new Dark Ages.
    Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To agitate about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's America Alone

    Page 13
    not about race; it's about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70 percent of them are "white" or only 5
    percent are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90
    percent of the population or only 60 percent, or 50, or 45 percent. Which is why that question lies at the heart of almost any big international news story of recent years - the French riots, the attacks on Danish embassies and consulates over the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Turkey's membership in the European Union, Pakistani riots over Newsweek's Koran-down-thetoilet story. Whenever I make that point, lefties always respond, "Oh, well, that's typical right-wing racism." In fact, it ought to be the Left's issue. I'm a "social conservative." When the mullahs take over, I'll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple extra wives, and keep my head down. It's the feminists and gays who'll have a tougher time. If, say, three of the five judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court are Muslim, what are the chances of them approving "gay marriage"? That's the scenario Europe's looking at a few years down the road.
    The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But in Europe it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time around, for much of Western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
    As for America, Shelby Steele sees the tentativeness of our performance in Iraq as a geopolitical version of "white guilt," a "secular penitence" for the sins of the past. Even while waging war, our culture has internalized the morbid syndromes of the age: who are we to liberate the Iraqis? We represent imperialism and all the other evils. On that point, I wish we did represent imperialism, at least to this extent: there's a lot to be said for a great nation that understands its greatness is not an accident and that therefore it should spread the secrets of its success around; conversely, there's not much to be said for a great nation that chooses to hobble itself by pretending it's merely one vote among coequals on international bodies manned by Cuba and Sudan-the transnational version of
    "affirmative action," to extend Shelby Steele's thought. As clashes of civilizations go, this one's between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive warwealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. Everything else it requires it can pick up at Radio Shack: cell phones and laptops, which, along with ATM
    cards and some dime-store box-cutters, were all it took to pull off September 11. For this to be an existential struggle, as the Cold War