USA UNITY - What hold What?

USA UNITY - WHAT HOLD WHAT?

by Mark Steyn


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."" Certain
European secessionist movements-in Spain, Belgium, and
elsewheretook 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. 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 BosniaHerzegovina? Or has Herzegovina split, too? Who cares?
Slovenia's inde pendent 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)." 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 Pur chase. 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:

"Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know
that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be
earned. That's what constitutes the moral value of America.
America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them
how to practice it."

Who said that? A Frenchman: Nicolas Sarkozy, addressing Congress
in 2007. But what happens when America no longer teaches men how
to practice freedom? What then is its raison d'etre? Does it have
any more reason to stick together than any other "proposition
nation" that dumps the proposition? Such as, to take only the
most obvious example, the Soviet Union. What is there to hold a
post-prosperity, constrained-liberty, un-Dreamt America together?
The nation's ruling class has, in practical terms, already
seceded from the idea of America. In the ever more fractious,
incoherent polity they're building as a substitute, why would
they expect their discontented subjects not to seek the same
solution as Slovenes and Uzbeks?

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 Amer ica," 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." 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."" 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."

I don't mean to single out Joe Klein, who I'm sure is the soul of
kindness to lame dogs, l'il of ladies, uppity blacks, and South
Asian furriners, where'er he encounters them. No doubt Pelham has
the occasional African-Ameri can 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?
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