Steyn turns from political and military triumphalism to cultural despair

Sounding as though he’s been reading VFR, or at least the e-mails I’ve sent him from time to time telling him to wake up, Mark Steyn has penned a column showing a profound cultural pessimism.

America, Britain, Australia and a select few other countries have demonstrated they can just about muster the ”war will” on the battlefield. On the broader cultural front, where this war in the end will be won, there’s little evidence of any kind of will….

It’s an open question whether the West will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won’t, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilizational suicide.

In typical neocon manner, Steyn relates this crisis only to our leftist elites, not to the presence of aliens among us and our adjustment to those aliens. But still, to the extent that anything said by Steyn can be taken seriously, this article represents a major shift by a writer who for the last few years has written one giddily triumphalist column after another.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2005 08:05 AM | Send