WE OFTEN use the word "Western" as a shorthand for for liberal-democratic values, but we're really being polite. What we mean is countries that have adopted the Anglo-American system of government. (Daniel Hannan, "The World of English Freedoms," wsj.com, November 15, 2013)
At a time when most countries defined citizenship by ancestry, Britain was unusual in developing a civil rather than an ethnic nationality. The U.S. [read United States], as so often, distilled and intensified a tendency that had been present in Great Britain, explicitly defining itself as a creedal polity: Anyone can become American simply by signing up to the values inherent in the Constitution.
Let's pull over to the side of the road and conduct a thought experiment. What would happen if the United States were governed by a president had never signed up to the values inherent in the Constitution? Answer: We would have a president whose overarching purpose is the fundamental transformation of America. How? Mr. Hannan is not overtly political here, but the next paragraph perfectly describes the America of Barack Hussein Obama and his acolytes in faculty lounges, sophomore dorm rooms, newspaper editorial boards, union headquarters, Progressive think tanks, and other precincts populated by species of self-righteous ideologues, John Edwards-style trial lawyers and other rent seekers, government employees, gender supremicists, racists, and lazy people.
There is, of course, a flip-side. If the U.S. [read United States] abandons its political structures, it will lose its identity more thoroughly than states that define nationality by blood or territory. Power is shifting from the 50 states to Washington, D.C., from elected representatives to federal bureaucracies, from citizens to the government. As the U.S. [read United States] moves toward a European-style health care, college education, carbon taxes, foreign policy and spending levels, so it becomes less prosperous, less confident and less free.
We sometimes talk of the English-speaking nations as having a culture of independence. But culture does not exist, numinously, alongside institutions; it is a product of institutions. People respond to incentives. Make enough people dependent on the state, and it won'g be long before Americans start behaving and voting like . . . well, Greeks.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama's curiously qualified defense of American exceptionalism. ["I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."] Outside the Anglosphere, people have traditionally expected -- indeed, demanded -- far more state intervention. They look to the government to solve their problems, and when the government fails, they become petulant.
That is the point much of Europe has now reached. Greeks, like many Europeans, spent decades increasing their consumption without increasing their production. They voted for politicians who promised to keep the good times going and rejected those who argued for fiscal restraint. Even now, as the calamity overwhelms them, they refuse to take responsibility for their own affairs by leaving the euro and running their own economy. It's what happens when an electorate is systematically infantilized.
This is what declinism looks like.
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