Programming note: Tonight, I'll be here with Episode Five of our latest Tale for Our Time, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be back behind the microphone taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the world at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A. Hope you can swing by.
~A generation ago, before my life and my health were consumed by litigation without end, I wrote two international bestsellers - one was principally on demography, and the other on debt. Neither is what publishers back then would have called a "sexy" subject, so I am grateful that large numbers of readers bought both books. But credit where it's due: I did happen to pick the two topics that, if you reside almost anywhere in the western world, are determining your future right now. The demographic death-spiral is more immediately relevant to Europe, and the debt abyss to America, but there is plenty of overlap. One notices too that each existential threat is largely immune to politics: whoever governs France or Germany, the migrants continue to pour across the border; whoever rules in Washington, the debt accelerates up and out the top right-hand corner of the graph. The federal debt is now up over $37 trillion and cruising on to forty tril. It took until 1986 - or the first two centuries of the republic - to ramp up an initial two trillion; now we add that in a typical year.
There are subtle differences in the reactions each book received: my demographic thesis - that the peoples of England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden et al were going out of business - prompted, for a while, a ton of A-list princes, presidents and prime ministers to put me on speed-dial and call me in for a little light doomsday chit-chat. "This is a paradigm shift, right?" said Dick Cheney to me in his butch waterboarding voice. And he was right: it is. But none of the A-listers did anything about it and the demographic transformation of the western world continued only to be part of what Tony Blair called the "subterranean conversation" - ie, you couldn't talk about it. Two decades on, it's still "subterranean" - save for occasional eruptions in Ballymena - but one notices that everyone who matters (from the King to Nigel Farage) is making their accommodations with what they regard as the inevitable.
When I wrote my sequel - on the western world's insolvency - I spent a day or three waiting for the bigshots to call me in. But the 'phone never stopped not ringing. Why? Because the Islamisation of, say, Vienna was news to them, but the debt explosion was not ...and they had already decided they weren't going to do anything about it.
Back then, the federal debt was a third of what it is now, and fellows such as Paul Ryan pretended to be concerned about it. On stage, I used to get a lotta cheap yuks by pointing out that no one in the course of human history had ever had to pay twelve trillion bucks just to get back to having nothing in his pocket. From After America:
Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military. You read that right: more on debt service than on the armed services. According to the CBO's 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the government will be paying between 15 and 20 per cent of its revenues in debt interest. Whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 per cent.
Just to clarify: We're not talking about paying down the federal debt, just keeping up with the annual interest charges on it.
That has now come to pass:
Military budget for FY 2024: $822 billion.
Interest payments on national debt for FY 2024: $870 billion.
It's not so different elsewhere: The UK government is having to borrow money to pay the interest on the money it's already borrowed. To put it in terms Keir Starmer can understand, that's like having to borrow money from tonight's Ukrainian rent boy to pay off yesterday's Ukrainian rent boy. Except that the fetching Donbas twinks would already have blown up your car.
What both the debt and the demographics have in common is that, because our rulers did nothing back when my books came out, both issues are now beyond solution by mainstream political norms. But, beyond that, we are witnessing the merger of the two existential questions facing the west: Sir Keir spends money he doesn't have housing "migrants" in four-star country hotels so they can get a good night's sleep after raping your daughter. Today, my friend Dan Wootton brings you a story most of the media won't go anywhere near. Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu of Ethiopia arrived by boat on June 29th as what His Godawful Majesty The King calls an "irregular migrant"; in his first two days on English soil, he sexually assaulted three girls:
England is supposedly, after Iran and China, the third oldest nation on earth; now it's Abyssinia in all the old familiar places. Same story in California, which precipitated America's own flyer on a demographic crapshoot, as the first society ever to choose the demographic eclipse of its own people: the first white nation to virtue-signal its way to minority-white status. Twenty years ago, I allowed that the Grand Remplacement was such an unprecedented experiment that there was, to one degree or another, an element of an open question about it. From the opening of America Alone:
Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European: It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors. Or maybe the all-black Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! is a better comparison: Pearl Bailey instead of Carol Channing, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever's at the switch.
But what if it doesn't work out like that? In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House's survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest 'freedom' score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France's fortunes as a fourth member of that group.
We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous.
Two decades on, we know what the consequences are: London and Paris have degenerated into what Trump would call bleepholes. Violent civil unrest is the minimum that will be required to reverse what the political class have done to you. Because governments around the west have decided to prioritise Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu and his fellow paragons of diversity over you, young persons have increasingly little to lose: you can't get your foot on the housing ladder, because government-funded "migrants" have priced you out of it, etc. You are denied the very possibility of the life your parents and grandparents led.
As for those preceding generations, well, many of them are still invested in the system. Because, if you've got a house and a pension, total societal collapse is a mixed blessing. Which brings us back to Washington's forty trillion in debt and the similar degeneration of finances throughout its vassal states. Meanwhile, everybody other than the west is signing up for BRICS and making plans for a post-dollar world.
So we face two eleventh hours - the debasement of the west's human capital, and the debauching of its finances. The first is already taking out those on the immediate receiving end of the demographic assault; the second will do the same to those for whom the post-war era has worked out pretty sweet. When demographic conquest and fiscal insolvency meet and merge in the migrant hotels of western government, what will be left holding up the joint? And who won't bet the abandoned farm on revolution?
~The Mark Steyn Club is now in its ninth year. I'm thrilled by all those SteynOnline supporters across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. My only regret is that we didn't launch it twenty-three years ago, but better late than never. You can find more information about the Club here - and, if you've a pal who might be partial to this sort of thing, don't forget our special Gift Membership.