Neocon illusions

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent review of Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. I am reticent to buy the book, as I do not need convincing of the things of which Steyn writes. But perhaps I do need to be steeled in my resolve, commitments.

I'll put it on the Christmas wish list.

This reviewer at Amazon.com has, so far, the best anti-neocon (that is, conservative) argument couched in his review of Steyn's book:

This is vintage Mark Steyn: spit-in-yer eye straight talk; wit; and searing analysis of the problems created by our dumbed-down anti-culture and by the ennui of Westerners who've been too comfortable for too long, such that they can't even be bothered to defend the things that made for those comforts in the first place.

Unfortunately, his remedy for the ills of Westernity and the dangers of Islamic fecundity is the neoconservative one: that we should try to universalize the U.S. model around the globe, in short order. That's bad news. His neoconservatism is every bit as imperialistic as the liberalism touted by the oiks of the UN and EU technocracies and through the daily Hollywood assault upon morality and religion -- all things that Steyn rightly castigates. If the trouble with liberalism is that it's so bloomin' intolerant, the trouble with Steyn's (or Bush's) neoconservatism is that it doesn't conserve anything; it's bringing bloody warfare and revolution, and is trashing traditional societies that won't be ready for democracy until about the same stage that Britons and Americans were, i.e. several standards of living up from where they are right now (to make no mention of the cultural differences). Iraq's been a fiasco, NOT for the reasons Michael Moore would cite -- but because Iraq is not a 'nation'; its population has no notion of an impersonal state and no tradition of the rule of (abstract, impersonal) law. That's why, in the absence of those things, force will have to do for at least two generations to come -- maybe more.

Steyn has to get 5 stars, for his brilliant assault upon Western complacency and the idiocies and secular pieties of Europe, Canada and (much of) the U.S.. His analysis is spot-on. But it's a shame that his conclusions will reinforce the myopia and related prejudices of 'conservative' Americans who are already more than myopic enough.