In defense of Steyn

Mark C. writes:

Your latest criticism of Steyn prompts me finally to try and get you to ease off on it, after many months.

I’m a VFR reader who has come to share the large majority, and the most central, of your published views. Only three years ago I was extremely liberal; only eight years ago I was radically so, virtually to the point of violent tactics. Among the things that changed was encountering Steyn, the only conservative voice in mainstream publications that consistently engaged me. I am certain that his ability to write in a way that hit the bell for my generation has similarly affected many thousands of people—that there is an army of people who were freed from the liberal spell, and progressively sucked deeper into non-PC ideas, by Steyn personally.

Okay, so much for that. If we only go as far as Steyn and no farther, it’s no improvement, right? But, one has to go through there to get to ideas like yours, for those of us brought up where your views are not just alien but actually portrayed as the most vicious possible. More importantly, you are undercrediting Steyn in the present instance. You write:

“Imagine how it would feel to those Europeans who perhaps are just awakening to the scale of the threat they face from Islam and are looking about for allies in their struggle, and they open a book by this very popular “conservative” writer from the Anglosphere and see themselves written off.”

I can imagine how it must feel. It must feel like it’s well past time to organise to save your civilisation. It must feel like they can’t depend on the U.S. to come home from work and make the world right again.

Your main problem with Steyn is that he focuses on birthrates to the exclusion of the immigration problem, or worse, that by focusing on birthrates he makes the immigration problem seem unimportant, when that is in fact the more immediate and disastrous problem. Where you go wrong is that this leads you yourself to underplay the birthrate problem. It is okay that someone is devoting themselves pretty much full-time to the birth-rate issue. It is an issue.

Granted, replenishing our population won’t matter as long as we continue to admit the rest of the world to our countries. But ending immigration and even repatriating won’t matter as long as we fail to replenish. Ultimately, you need the numbers to keep out the greater numbers.

And at a more fundamental level, Steyn is right that the lack of interest in replenishment—which became a virtue for the narcissists, especially under the sway of the self-serving enviro-rhetoric—is the most telling signal of cultural/civilisational suicide, that has to be addressed. It may be more urgent, sure, to address the borders, but there’s a longer-term urgency to facing up to the extinction-through-breeding of the glory of the West—the apathy of the socialised, deracinated, personal-short-term-pleasure-centred and atheistic complex. Steyn is on the money on that front, and he is the biggest reason anyone is talking about it.

Ah, but he is too sanguine about Europe’s doom? Look, I know what you mean, and you express it well. But try to come at it honestly from his point of view. If the numbers say what they say—i.e., Europe is doomed—then the strategy of using Europe as an example to forewarn the outposts that can be saved, while time remains, is not a foolish one. Incidentally, it is certainly not a treacherous one, whatever else you can say. Your traitor terminology is very poorly-chosen—you must see this. I want to say it’s obscene, but hesitate—I respect your work, and don’t want to go over the top—but you are going over the top, and it’s hard not to respond. Steyn is “consigning Europe to doom”? No. He is observing the process. Many things are consigning Europe to doom, but Steyn is not one of them. As a very lonely voice in those media that have any impact whatsoever, he can only be helping Europe to awaken to impending doom. Whether or not that is helpful to Europe could be beside the point, however. As an American, he is not a traitor if he fails to serve the interests of Europe (we here disagree that about the practical value of his “apocalypsism” for Europeans).

Steyn is a Christian—something you fail to note when you discuss him, but you must have noticed that he is one of the stronger Christian voices in the mainstream media. He has children. He wants the U.S. to chart a certain course, learning from the lessons of Europe, so that his children can enjoy the bounties that God bestows on hard-working self-reliant people. He is pessimistic about whether Europe can pull out of its death swoop—are you optimistic? Should he lie about his pessimism? Do you really see no strategic value in flinging it bluntly in the face of that populace, when no one else will? And he is trying to use that extremely potent weapon at least to serve America well.

I’m not trying to be Steyn’s apologist. He’s pretty good at standing up for himself, though perhaps too glibly for your tastes sometimes (again, there is an element there of a divide in the sort of communications that actually speak to different generations). I also don’t mean to do that thing of telling you what to write in your blog. I bet his staff pass on your comments, and I bet they influence him, and it’s worth trying to get him to inject some more immigration-conscious stuff into his work in that way (although the traitor stuff will not endear any human). All I mean to do, and sorry for rambling, is to remind you that Steyn has been a massively influential force for good, so that when you take issue with him, you could try to temper your comments with a more global appreciation of the value of what he is trying to do.

(I haven’t read the Rick Darby blog you cite, but what you quoted is really, really facetious. “Have more babies to keep the welfare state going”? Come on, no-one that’s ever read a work Steyn has written could put that in his mouth with straight face.)

Respectfully,
Mark

LA replies:

Well written, well thought out. I freely admit there may be a cohort for whom Steyn’s brilliantly mocking columns on liberalism have helped wean them from their liberalism, and that I am not sufficiently appreciative of this. It may be that he is addressing one audience, and I (on a far smaller scale!) am addressing another, and that I simply am not granting enough importance to his success at “winning over liberals to conservatism,” because I am into other things, addressing readers who are at a different grade level, so to speak.

Nevertheless, I feel it is my job to call things as I see them. I write the things I write, and Steyn writes the things he writes, and I guess it is up to each reader to filter from each of us what he thinks is sound, and what is not.

As for the “traitor” charge, in 1939-40 many people thought the victory of Nazism was inevitable, and they told the world that they should just give up. But it was not inevitable. (Though as recently as 1999 Patrick Buchanan in A Republic Not an Empire, p. 269, was arguing it would have been better had America allowed Hitler to become the ruler of Eurasia.) Last spring the open-borders crowd was telling us that the passage of Bush’s immigration plan was inevitable. But it was not inevitable. When people argue that some controversial historical development is inevitable and cannot be resisted, it is almost invariably the case that they personally favor tht development or at best do not oppose it. A person who, claiming to be a foe of Islamization, states definitively and repeatedly that the Islamization of Europe is inevitable is guilty of a monstrous betrayal. When that person is also extremely popular and influential, and among conservatives no less, SOMEONE must talk about this.

By the way, the writers at vdare routinely accuse open-borders advocates of “treason.” I have not seen immigration restrictionists criticize vdare for this.

Also, you wrote:

“I haven’t read the Rick Darby blog you cite, but what you quoted is really facetious. ‘Have more babies to keep the welfate state going’? Come on, noone that’s ever read a work Steyn has written could put that in his mouth with straight face.”

I think Darby means, more babies to pay the taxes to keep the welfare state going.

Carl Simpson writes:

I don’t think Steyn is necessarily a deliberate traitor to the West, like Jorge Busheron, the leftists, et al. While the end result of people adopting his flippant attitude about our civilization might very well be disastrous simply because there is no opposition to the actual treasonous policies of open borders, etc, I seriously doubt he considers the ramifications of the type of arguments he makes. His “historical inevitability” comments are really quite Marxist in nature, but I expect he’d be surprised if someone actually told him so to his face.

My overall impression is that it’s all a game to him. Despite all the great profundity ascribed to him in conservative circles, the Churchill awards, etc, Steyn strikes me as the ultimate dilettante, a most un-serious writer on serious subjects out there. I regard him as more of a fool or useful idiot than an actual traitor. The real traitors know very well what they are doing. As Shrewsbury put it so well a few weeks back: “[it] must have that destructive zing or it don’t mean a thing” to those engaged in the active treason.

This is not to say that I disagree with your criticisms of Steyn, for they have really been an eye-opener for me personally, a former Steyn fan. I still think he’s a gifted writer with a great sense of irony. It’s really a pity that he is apparently still wedded to many aspects of the universalist utopian ideology known as neoconservatism. However, people can change over time—just look at David Horowitz. Maybe Steyn, if he faces serious criticism like the points you’ve raised, will start to consider things that he never considered before.

You are right to nail him on his flippancy, his alarming oversights and blind spots, and his indulging in a Marxist-style “historical inevitability” argument. Even so, Mark C. has presented a valid point here. Steyn generally attacks and ridicules the left. If folks like Mark C are helped on the path out of darkness, lies and deception by Mark Steyn’s baby-food and candy, that’s not a bad thing, but a good thing.

Mark A. writes:

Mark C wrote:

“Granted, replenishing our population won’t matter as long as we continue to admit the rest of the world to our countries. But ending immigration and even repatriating won’t matter as long as we fail to replenish. Ultimately, you need the numbers to keep out the greater numbers.”

I fear that this statement is not true. The more we admit from the Third World the less Americans will replenish as they fear for the future. Couples that see the apocalypse on the horizon are not going to be big on having many kids.

More importantly, as Steve Sailer has documented, Americans have the most children when real estate is inexpensive and schools are decent. Third World immigration is bidding up the price of real estate and destroying the schools simultaneously. This is a double-blow to Americans. The demographic I associate with is white males and females in their late 20s to early 30s. Most are married. Yes, many of them are narcissists, but almost ALL of them want children. (Even the highly educated women. Feminist propaganda is no match for the natural female desire to have children.) When I ask why they don’t have children yet I almost always get the same answer: 1) We can barely afford our mortgage and 2) The public schools are hell-holes and we need money to send our child to a private school.

In sum, we need to stop immigration and begin deportation in order to increase our numbers.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 17, 2006 06:32 PM | Send