One of the most telling legacies of Barack Obama? Turning the Department of Defense cabinet position into Murphy Brown’s secretary. #fail
— Duane Patterson (@Radioblogger) November 24, 2014
But entirely predictable — in fact, it was predicted by one of Hugh Hewitt’s regular weekly guests almost a decade ago. Note the third paragraph of “It’s Demography, Stupid,” the 6,000-word magnum opus New Criterion and Wall Street Journal essay that was the dry run for American Alone, in which Mark Steyn wrote:
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society–government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity–“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.
At least until 2016, both for ideological and priority reasons, his successor would.
Related: “When the president goes through three [defense] secretaries, he should ask, ‘Is it them, or is it me?’”
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