Mark Steyn’s invective

After spending a month listening to “economic” Republicans chant “jobs, jobs, jobs” like Democrats that can’t dance, you start to miss the untrammelled passions of “social” conservatives—until you glimpse at Mark Steyn’s latest book, After America: Get Ready For Armageddon. 

As a pugnacious Canadian prophet of hopeless decline, Steyn got his start diagnosing the vacuity of Canada and the approaching suicide of Christian Europe. He’s now closed off any hope of escape by portraying America as a kidnapped victim of fuzzy aliens. His evidence is highly eclectic. Real Americans would be building a much higher tower to avenge 9/11. His thesis—the America of Steyn and Orange County culture is being destroyed—can give no quarter to President Barack Obama.

He offers invective as fresh as any that was thrown during the dying days of the 2008 election:

“He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job—that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along. . . .There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can ‘absorb’ another 9/11.

“It’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism.”

—Excerpted from the recently released book After America: Get Ready For Armageddon by Mark Steyn, National Post, August 25, 2011

A good half of the Birthers promptly gave up their cause once they were presented with the evidence that Obama wasn’t born “wherever,” but in America. They, of course, were amateurs. Only a professional would relocate the issue in Obama’s head rather than in his accuser’s.

In truth, Chicago, New York and Boston are as emphatically not post-modern and as brutally American as any of Steyn’s enclaves of WASP authority—those white communities that pine for a 19th Century America that real WASPS thought was second-rate.