After America полностью

You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it. The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it.

But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

And so we threw money at the dependent class, and indulged a gang of halfwit and/or malevolent ideologues as they hollowed out the education system and other institutions. We were rich enough to afford their stupidity.

That works for a while. In the economic expansion of the late twentieth century, average citizens of western democracies paid more in taxes but lived better than their parents and grandparents. They weren’t exactly rich, but they got richer. They also got more stupid. The welfare states they endowed transformed society: to be “poor” in the twenty-first-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes. When Michelle Obama turns up to serve food at a soup kitchen, its poverty-stricken clientele snap pictures of her with their cellphones.³ In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works.⁴ They are not so much without employment as without need of it.

At a certain level, your nine-to-five bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the state treasury is entirely wasted, if not actively destructive. It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. But, in good and goodish times, so what?

Very few people are fiercely political, which is reasonable enough. The point of politics is to enable life—the pleasures of family, the comforts of home, the rewards of work, good food, good company, music, golf, snow-boarding, horse-shoeing, whatever’s your bag. So, among America’s elite, there are many non-political members, comfortable, educated beneficiaries of the American Dream who just want to get on with their lives. For these people and many others, liberalism is the soft option, the one with all the nice words—“diversity,” “tolerance,” “peace,” “social justice,” “sustainability”—and the position that requires least defending if you happen to be at a dinner party and the conversation trends toward current events. If you have to have “opinions,” these are the safe ones. They’re not really “opinions,” are they? Just the default settings of contemporary sensibility.

“I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued,” wrote H. G. Wells of the Eloi. “A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.” They love everything—in small doses. After all, if you love everything, why pay attention to anything in particular? If you drive around with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker, you’ve relieved yourself of having to know anything about Islam.

You went to an awareness-raising rock concert: it was something to do with Bono and debt forgiveness, whatever that means, but let’s face it, going to the park for eight hours of celebrity caterwauling beats having to wrap your head around Afro-Marxist economics.

“Their sentences were usually simple and of two words,” recalled the Time-Traveler, “and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions.” Very true. But whereas Wells’ Eloi could only speak in “concrete substantives” and had lost the use of abstract language, our Eloi drone nothing but: