Welcome to this week's episode of my ongoing audio adaptation of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Twenty years ago this month - January 4th 2006 - I published in The Wall Street Journal the first draft of my book's thesis, which the editors headlined "It's the Demography, Stupid". And, just in case you didn't grasp the stakes, they sub-headed it "The real reason the West is in danger of extinction":
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an 'amiable dunce' (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.
So here we are a generation on. The demography has worsened and the media are full of stories lifted straight from a decades-old column:
The number of deaths outpaced the number of births in France for the first time since the Second World War and ten years before the official French national statistics bureau had projected.
You don't say! Meanwhile, the same mainstream media wankers that dismissed my subsequent book as "alarmist" are now running headlines like:
Italy's birth rate crisis is 'irreversible', say experts
"Experts"? To modify Shakespeare: the first thing we do, let's kill all the experts. The "experts" have cost you your world. As a total non-expert said: It's the demography, stupid. Alas, if the demography has worsened, so has the stupidity. Opening paragraphs of a sample "expert" report:
There is no country in the European Union where the birth rate is high enough to prevent population contraction, according to data published by the European statistics agency.
Eurostat confirmed in a release this week that the irreversible demographic decline is worsening, which is straining the continent's welfare systems and hampering the prospects for economic growth.
And, by comparison with the title and sub- of my twenty-year-old Wall Street Journal essay, how is the above news story headlined?
Without foreigners, Europe risks aging and 'dying'
By definition, a Europe that is full of something other than Europeans will not be Europe. So the truth is the inverse of the headline: with foreigners, Europe is certain to be dead. How is it possible that wankery on the level of the above headline is still the default position of the respectable classes? Me again, from that yellowed and mildewed Journal piece:
Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
Well, thanks to the Uniparty, the "trends" have "continued" for two-thirds of the three decades posited above. In America today, "experts" think that the willingness to serve you a burrito should absolve one from an ICE raid:
There are no words. ICE agents ate lunch at a small local Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, enjoyed their meal, then came back later that night as the restaurant was closing down and arrested the people who had served them. pic.twitter.com/AiCzp49d8d
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) January 16, 2026
By contrast, in Britain, the impending saviour of the nation is cockahoop because he's managed to poach the treacherous Tory immigration minister who cheerfully implemented the "Boriswave" and covertly imported legions of Afghan sex fiends while imposing a gag-order on the press. What a coup, Nigel!
Prediction, albeit of a trivial pursuit: Farage will never be Prime Minister. (I see my friend Kathy Gyngell has now given up on him.)
As I have endeavoured to emphasise, the trick is to turn the Titanic before the iceberg. A tentative plan to start turning it twenty miles after hitting it isn't really worth the effort.
Which brings us to today's episode of our ongoing audio adaptation of my boffo bestseller - which addresses various of the "expert" concepts that have brought us to the end-stage. For example:
'Stability' is a surface illusion, like a frozen river: underneath, the currents are moving, and to the casual observer the ice looks equally 'stable' whether there's a foot of it or just two inches. There is no status quo in world affairs: 'stability' is a fancy term to dignify inertia and complacency as sophistication...
The "rules-based international order" is another illusion: it is the product of a geopolitical moment - 1950 - and its conventions date from an era in which one continent (Africa) was entirely the sovereign property of another (Europe). It has no real-world meaning:
'Containment' is another overvalued commodity... Even what's regarded as a successful example of the strategy – the west's decision to 'contain' the Warsaw Pact – was in practice no such thing, not for those on the receiving end... On the Hit Parade of nations with the unhealthiest demographic profile, the Top Five are all former provinces of European Communism: Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Russia and Ukraine. Of the Top Ten, nine are ex-Commie (the exception is Spain). Of the Top Twenty, sixteen are. Communism was so loathed by its subjects they gave up even breeding. And every year we allowed the Warsaw Pact to remain in place we weakened further the viability of any post-Communist societies that might emerge from the rubble.
And thus the Ukraine war enters its fifth year in. I have said we are now in the last fifteen years of anything remotely recognisable as "the western world". I fear I am overstating it, but that's because I'm a world-renowned Pollyanna.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
Twenty years ago this month, I wrote that Journal essay in order that we might change course. But the "experts" declined to. And they're still in charge.
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over seventy-five cracking audio adventures in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Twenty-One of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
