Too Much, Too Fast

Mark Steyn writes in his Happy Warrior column this week in the dead tree edition of National Review that America and Europe’s “ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the cause:”

As Angela Merkel well understands every time she switches on the TV and sees a news report from Greece, culture trumps economics. I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago: One moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first came out west over 40 years ago.

And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected.

Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland, Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are “more than two genders.”

The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe self-confidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast. We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why everything’s changed.

The incident that Mark describes above — cheers at the Rose Bowl for Mexico’s soccer team and boos for America’s team — is also touched upon in Victor Davis Hanson’s latest post at PJM, which describes the funhouse mirror identity politics and Frankfurt School-style critical theory has warped the topic of illegal immigration.