EVERY MAN A WELFARE QUEEN:

Not Dead Yet: Bruce Thornton warns of Europe’s potential demise: a review of Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide, by Bruce S. Thornton (Jacob Laksin, 6 February 2008, City Journal)

It used to be said that when it came to worldviews, Americans were from Mars and Europeans were from Venus. But a new school of thought posits a different role for our continental counterparts. Europe, in this schema, is more like a dying star: a once-brilliant civilization whose best days lie behind it, that has lost the internal strength to endure, and that is headed toward oblivion. Bruce Thornton, a classics professor at California State University, is the latest to take up this thesis. In Decline and Fall, he makes the case that a number of factors—including unsustainable welfare states, dwindling birthrates, undiscriminating immigration laws, a society disconnected from the transcendent truths of Christianity, and a failure to confront the gathering threat of Islamic jihadism aggressively—are leading Europe to commit “slow-motion suicide.”

Government largesse may seem an unlikely source of civilizational decline...

To the contrary, the point of the welfare is that it acts as a solvent upon all of the civilizational ties that made men independent of the state. Once you have individuals completely atomized they're easy to control. They've traded liberty for security.

That's why the Left fights against the Third Way so hard, even though it advances their putative goals. Sure it can provide universal education, housing, health care, unemployment insurance, etc., but by doing so in a way that makes the citizenry independent it strikes at the core of the secular statist project.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 6, 2008 9:39 PM