Hitchens: The U.S., like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World

Peter Hitchens’s column on the 2008 election is, in my opinion, even more apropos for the 2012 election. It starts out with a lot of tiresome blather (conciseness and cogency are unknown qualities in British opinion journalism) about Obama’s emptiness and lack of talent, but at the end becomes deeply significant. Here are the last several paragraphs of the article:

I was in Washington DC the night of the election….

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party—the Republicans—to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the U.S., like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 11, 2012 08:34 PM | Send