After America: Get Ready for Armageddon

by Mark Steyn

The author of America Alone is back with another large parcel of bad news and sardonic humor. In his previous book, he prophesied the collapse of every country in the western world except the U.S. In his new offering, he describes our country's rapid descent into economic and geopolitical Armageddon. Steyn foresees a post-American world where China is the new superpower, the Middle East is dominated by Iran, and our domestic scene has descended into chaos. An energetic, witty appraisal of approaching doom.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Cultural, Economics, Political Science, American

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 19, 2010

About the author

Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and cultural commentator. He has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Steyn has been published by magazines and newspapers around the world, and is a regular guest host of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show. He also guest hosts Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appears as a guest.

Steyn lives and works mainly in Woodsville, New Hampshire. He is married, and has three children.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazon review:
Steyn takes aim at the people who have driven the US to this economic Armageddon with his usual razor wit. The man seems incapable of writing a dull sentence.

The cover of Steyn's book shows a dead Uncle Sam, flat on his back and with a toe tag. Steyn is not warning about a coming American decline. "We're already in it" he announces with gloomy relish, "What comes next is the fall--fast, sudden, off the cliff" (p 13).

And who is at the helm as this wreck is taking place, it's ... wince...Obama. Obama, who promised us hope and change and gave us that wild, draconian suggestion--in his Debt Commission--to raise "the age of Social Security eligibility to sixty-nine...By the year 2075" (p 8).

Gee. Imagine the courage it took to suggest that dramatic change.

To think that Michael Beschloss said about Obama the day after his election, "He's probably the smartest guy ever to become president" (p 55). I wouldn't be surprised to hear Beschloss has retired to France under an assumed name.

The Barackracy, as Steyn puts it, is going to lead us as far and as fast as they can away from the American Dream. In twenty years like this Steyn predicts we'll be "living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin American, the rich fleeing for Bermuda....and the rest trapped" (p 22).

Europe and all the American left imagined they could wrench money from the wealthy, or just print money if they had to, and provide endless nanny state happiness. Free medical care. Long vacations. Assured jobs with little hard work. Bliss and free lunches for all.

And it even worked for a while in Europe, when there were between seven to ten young adults being taxed for each senior citizen. Then a funny thing happened. The Europeans stopped reproducing. It was as if all of Europe woke up one day having decided to commit suicide. In Germany, for example, one out of every three women is childless. And the women who do have a child frequently only have only one.

So all too soon, across Europe there will be two young adults supporting every retired senior citizen.

Oh, and did I mention the debt the two young adults will also have to pay off due to the ever profligate welfare state?

Furthermore, Steyn points out how uncontrollable medical costs have been even for the most strictly controlled economies. In Canada the health budget "increased from nearly 35 percent...in 1999 to 46 percent today. In Ontario...it is set to reach 80 percent by 2030" (p 228).

Somehow I doubt those` two young adults in Ontario will be able to afford many vacations.

All this perfect storm of economic bad news is coming at the worst time possible, given our cultural state.

As Steyn puts it, "the story of the last forty years is the mainstreaming of rock -star morality" (p 232), not to mention the wreckage of traditional marriage. In the US over 40% of our children are illegitimate. "Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of daughters abused by their mom's latest live-in boyfriend" (p 234).

What will happen to all the children raised in fragmented families if the economy really collapses?

This is an important book, compelling and at times frightening. I hope it will be widely read.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I've enjoyed another book this much in at least the past year. It's hard to say whether I liked this or America Alone better, but both were excellent and are highly recommended.

I have always enjoyed Mark Steyn's witty writing style. He'll make you laugh when you probably should be crying, given the grim topic. This book is no exception. His topic is the civilizational suicide being committed by Western nations (not exempting America, as he did in his previous book). He argues that the United States is on a trajectory toward some of the same crises being faced by European nations such as Greece. While I think the timeline leading to such future events might be longer than he predicts, it's a scary scenario nonetheless.

The release of this book was coincidentally synchronized with a downgrade in America's credit rating (which he predicts) and riots in Britain (which he strongly suggests will happen). I hope he's wrong with some of his other predictions.

I wasn't necessarily a big fan of his last two chapters. The second to last chapter was written as a letter from the future to someone from 1950, but it was sometimes difficult to tell when he was talking about true events or whether he was making predictions about the future. The final chapter was good and contained a little more hope for the future than did the rest of the book, but I would have enjoyed more elaboration about his recipe for avoiding the decline he suggests is on its way. But despite the shortcomings at the very end, I enjoyed this book throughout and found myself chuckling and/or laughing out loud many times. It easily gets 5 stars.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop"

The above quote is from the economist Herbert Stein. Besides being a clever little bit of the obvious, a Yogi Berra-type quote, it is also part of a scary thought about America itself that Mark Steyn points out in After America - America cannot keep doing what it is doing forever and hope to lead the world - it will stop. It cannot keep borrow 40% of its budget forever and hope to keep its economy afloat or offer its children a decent future. America cannot hope that a post-America world will be pleasant - as Steyn notes on page 14 "...it's not hard to figure out how it's going to end."

After America: Get Ready for Armageddon is really the sequel to America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It a book that details how low birth rates, a general cultural malaise and a nanny state stupor threatens to overwhelm the same countries that once led the world in political, military and cultural might. Now, he warns of the same sorts of danger happening to America itself - we will not be "America Alone" but something different - different culturally, maybe more than one country, maybe nothing but a hazy memory.

Mark Steyn is truly one of the wittiest writers I have ever read. I have always enjoyed his columns, but in a larger format Steyn truly shines. He builds on what he has already written about so well that it almost becomes like an extended conversation with the man. He almost seamlessly ties together point after point. Steyn makes you laugh at the absurdity of the situation and then, while in mid-chuckle you stop and think, "Wait! That's not really funny at all. That's outrageous (or sad, or scary)." This is simultaneously the funniest and the scariest book that I have read this year...

Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...

[Roland Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnum-opus of observation on the decline of western civilization. I couldn't put it down. Beyond the cavalcade of evidence, both anecdotal and actual, Steyn carves out the heart of the belief system of the multi-cultural, moral relatavist and barbecues it. Steyn paints with a broad brush and while there are topics where he misses the greater picture,(Peak Oil being a key one for me.) if you finish this title and walk away unconvinced then clearly you suffer from delusions about the state of humanity in the early 21st century.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an enjoyable read, even as Mark Steyn lays out our stark future in no uncertain terms. Stein is deadly serious about the deep excrement in which we too-blithely reside. Niggling details like impending calamity aside, the book is so much fun. But many readers might want to keep a dictionary handy. While discussing the expansion of wealth, Steyn so effortlessly rips off a sentence like this [pp 34-35]: "But then Mr. and Mrs. Peasant start remodeling the hovel, adding a rec room and indoor plumbing, replacing the emaciated old nag with a Honda Civic and driving to the mall in it, and the next thing you know, instead of just having an extra yard of mead every Boxing Day at the local tavern and adding a couple more pustules to the escutcheon with the local trollop, they begin taking vacations in Florida." I admit I had to look up "escutcheon".

But you don't always need a dictionary. This is clear enough: "Permanence is always an illusion. Mighty nations can be transformed mighty fast, especially when history comes a-calling." [p 190]

Yes, Steyn exaggerates to make his points. Put that aside and consider the essence of what he is saying. The blurb on the inside cover reads, "Optimistic about America's future? Don't be." We need to quit screwing around, get back to our founding principles, defend our liberty, and rediscover our morals and even the need for morality. Or it's Welcome to the Third World Nightmare... Everywhere. And it's coming sooner than you think.

I didn't like the one chapter called "After: A Letter from the Post-American World" which is really dark. Considering the subject matter and Steyn's outlook, it wasn't the darkness that bothered me so much, but I found the chapter hard to follow. Perhaps if Steyn had toned down the lexical pyrotechnics in this one chapter, his main points would have been more clear.

In summary, an excellent book.

(Note: This review is for the 424 page After America published September 2011. Goodreads shows this as being published in January 2010 and only 256 pages long. I'm thinking there is a mistake in the listing. Goodreads' ISBN matches the one printed in my year 2011, 424 page copy. Goodreads' cover also matches the newer, longer copy I have.)

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

DEEPLY DISTRURBING.

“Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream.”—page 24

I’m not a big fan of end-of-the-world, doomsday-scenario books, and Mark Steyn’s dystopian screed, ‘After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,’ is certainly one of those. In this book he manages to insult almost everybody on the planet, and, those few he doesn’t insult, he scares the crap out of. Yet much of what he has to say makes too much sense. The incredible statistics and demographics he shares are enough, by themselves, to scramble your head.

He writes, on page 295: “There is a fine line between civilization and the abyss.” For most of the rest of the book he postulates that America, along with all of western civilization, has already crossed that line and are now terminally plunging into the abyss—and that the post-America era is going to be an exceedingly dark age. Probably the darkest age in history.

Recommendation: It’s hard to think to whom one could or should recommend this book, because it’s just, overall, too frightening. Perhaps, instead of “Get yourself a gun, while you’re still allowed to.”—page 235; I could just say, you might want to go ahead and read this book, while you’re still allowed to.

“Changing the culture (the schools, the churches, the movies, the TV shows) is more important than changing the politics”—page 313

Adobe Digital Editions [.ePub] on loan from http://www.lapl.org/catalog/emedia.html/, 368 pages

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's rare that I rate a book before I'm done reading it, or that I give five stars to any book, let alone a political one (I've liked a a lot of them, it's just that they aren't timeless), but I'm going to make an exception here. Mark Steyn has been compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, and it's really no exaggeration.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 enthusiastic stars! Mark Steyn is brilliant and incredibly funny. Every person in this country should read this book. One of the reviews on the back cover of the book is exactly what I wanted to write here..."Only Mark Steyn can write about the decline of America and leave you laughing."

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just read Niall Ferguson's Civilization The West and the Rest, which details ways in which the West came to dominate the world, as well as how quickly it might disappear, I followed with Mark Steyn's latest which details the details of our decline. Steyn addresses the problem of American decline in great depth but with great wit. The book's blurb line is far too accurate as well: "Optimistic about America's future? Don't Be." What are the sources of impending disaster? Much of what we have to fear can be seen today in Europe: a declining birthrate, uninhibited government spending, an unsustainable debt level, an ever growing government sector that makes clients out of citizens as it promises more and more "benefits." Added to this is unceasing regulation of small business, regulations that have to be paid for via enforcement, user fees, inspections and so on. Steyn's metaphor for much of this is H.G. Well's The Time Machine with it's rude division of society into Eloi and Morlock. The difference is that Steyn posits that the time traveller had only to travel 80 years into the future, i.e. our present, to observe profound and unsettling differences. It's a conceit to be sure but once surrounded by a wealth of anecdotal detail much of the conceit seems relevant. After 400-odd pages of unsettling analysis Steyn finishes with a call to action, a manifesto centered on undoing things - decentralize, de-governmentalize, de-regulate, de-monopolize, de-credentialize, de-complicate. Steyn, a long-time resident of New Hampshire concludes with "Live Free or Die." What he suggests here is not taking up arms, although such might be the case, but living free and unbeholden to Big Government. In the book Steyn observes, in an echo of Tocqueville, "big government makes small citizens," surely an end not to be desired. Change has to be recognized as needful and there are many who reject such tales of decline (witness Adam Gopnik in his review of Ferguson's book, The New Yorker, Sept. 12, 2011) but for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear . . .

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other reviews have parsed out the main point of this book, which is, in a word, chilling. I'll not add to that bulk, but instead I will simply quote a paragraph from After America, which for me says it all:

Conservatives often talk about "small government," which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they're for Big Government--and, when you're arguing for the samll alternative, it's easy to sound pinched and mean and grudging. But small government gives you big freedoms--and Big Government leaves you with very little freedom. The opposite of Big Government is not small government, but Big Liberty. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher--and you make it bery difficult to ever change back. In the end, it's not about money, but about something more fundamental. Yes, you can tax people to the hilt and give them "free" health care and "free" homes and "free" food. But in doing so you turn them into, if not (yet) slaves, then pets. And that's the nub of it: Big Government leads to small liberty, and to small men. If a 26-year-old is a child, as President Obama says; if a 50-year-old hair-dressercan retire and live at the stat's expense for over half her adult life, as the Government of Greece says, then you are no longer free. "You can be anything you want to be?" Not at all. Not when you're owned by the government.

[Deborah Spencer · Rating 1 out of 5]

how did i end up spending money on this book??? what a crackpot. entertainingly written? sure, but there's no "there" there. i happily acknowledge that i am a liberal bordering on socialist, so i knew right off the bat that i would not likely agree with much of Steyn's opinions, but i'm a firm believer in listening to and learning from those with very different perspectives. however, i have zero interest in listening to the rantings of someone making ludicrous claims with no substantiation.

[Hindrik Hettema · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very sad book by a very frustrated person. One really hopes the book will improve - and I managed to reach 2/3 of it - but then I gave up, it was just too much. It cannot even be called cherry-picking, Mark really only has eyes for his cherries... and the rest of the world is either not a Jew or a real American, or just plain wrong. Whatever.

[Rhonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second book I read by this author...first one was "America Alone" how other countries are falling all around us, but we still stand. THIS book is now about how America is on a fast track to do the same thing, America is in a downward spiral...
backed by tons of data and examples...not that everyone can't see it already.

The book starts with a scenario of a man in the last nineteenth century, in an ordinary home around 1890. Look at his surroundings. Then fast forward him in a time machine just 60 years, to 1950, and he would be astonished with all the changes...refrigerator, washing machine, radio, vehicles, furnace, telephone, vaccines for polio, insulin, penicillin! Just imagine the differences these 'machines' and medicines all made to our lives...

then fast forward just another 60 years...

but it's not that different, buttons instead of dials, etc,
EXCEPT for the computer. Other than a few small changes, like a CD player and cup holders in the car, icemakers, etc. the only major change is the computer, and all the advancements have been made to technology of the computer (cell phones, etc)
No cures for cancer, Alzheimers, etc. but we now have vaccines for venereal diseases and drugs for E.D. !! wow!
What used to take short periods of time for getting a drug to the public, now takes forever to get through regulations...

We need to lessen the amount of government interference in our lives...


Favorite Quotes:

"Education is the biggest single structural defect in the U.S. No country needs to send a majority (never mind 'all,' as is Pres. Obama's ambition) of its children to college, and no country should: not every child has the aptitude to benefit from college, and not every child who has wants to go, or needs to . For most who wind up there, college is a waste of time, and money, and life. Hacks pretend to teach, slackers pretend to learn, and employers pretend it's a qualification. ...I long ago gave up marveling at how little American education asks of its inmates. By universalizing university, you let K-12 off the hook. College becomes the new high school---which is exactly the opposite of what a dynamic, efficient society would be doing: middle school should be the new high school. Early-year education is the most critical; if you screw up the first eight grades, keeping the kid in class till he's thirty isn't going to do much to fix things. " p 149

"Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea---of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest---or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. " p 348

[Chris Dietzel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This could have been excellent but instead turned out to be a huge waste. Steyn starts with the 5-star premise that the U.S. is racing toward economic oblivion, which I agree with. He also uses the first couple pages to note that it's an issue that was driven by both parties and that it doesn't matter which party is in power because the same issue keeps becoming worse and worse, which is also something I agree with. I was hoping this book would then lead into becoming a great "After the fact" tie-in to Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, which provides an incredibly powerful argument that America's debt is an insurmountable global issue.

However, after the first couple pages, Steyn's book quickly devolves into a hot mess of bigotry (Islam is awful and scary and violent), nonsense (bureaucracies are "left-wing", "Euro-leftists" were laughing when the Trade Towers collapsed), and fear-mongering ("the world will be a much more violent place after the US disappears from the world stage"). If you pause to think about any of this for even half a second you realize Steyn is just making stuff up to play to his audience (i.e., Islam is no more or less violent than other religions, bureaucracies are a-political, no one was laughing when the Trade Towers fell, and of the 22 military conflicts in the 21st century the U.S. provided weapons or soldiers to fight in at least 14 of them, so how could the world be MORE violent if a country that has participated in 2/3 of the world's conflict stops fueling those conflicts?)

Absolute garbage.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book. You'll laugh a lot. You'll cry a lot. You'll wet your pants.

I really don't want to believe that we're as far down the path of ruin as Steyn says we are. But the facts he presents, and the logic behind his analyses is hard to argue with. We are soooo screwed, I'm afraid, and it will all become glaringly clear to everyone sooner than anyone imagines. We are living in the waning days of a golden "empire", and even though the signs and portents abound around us, most of us are as unaware of the approaching dark age as were Romans 1500 years ago.

Yes, it's that dire. What can you do about it? Not much really. Enjoy the ride while you can, because there's a boulder on the tracks around one of the bends just ahead.

[Adam Balshan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars [Politics]
Steyn produces another phenomenon with this sequel to America Alone. The linearity of writing is of slightly lesser quality, but the wordplay and directness deserves a standing ovation.

Everyone concerned with dwindling liberty in America should read this book. It isn't quite the masterpiece America Alone was, primarily because that book was a diagnosis of the world as it was, covering the Decline of the West and backed by a nigh-irrefutable sub-theme of demographic failure. After America, on the other hand, is partially a predictive book. It foreshadows the Fall of the West, and paints a grim picture. Mr. Steyn may well be right as to the political abysses we are about to careen into, but one element missing from his book is the role of the Judeo-Christian ethic. It is one of the most central, formative aspects of Western culture. It need not have been included in his previous book, but here it did require at least a sub-theme: the moving of God will determine the world's end, and a book with the word "Armageddon" in the subtitle should have had some reference to the God who will enact it. Even if Mr. Steyn's predictions do come true of the West, the Kingdom of God will still march on until the appointed End arrives. And it would likely move to China, where 1 out of 14 are now born-again Christians; Steyn talks much of the Chinese menace without even mentioning that fact, and how it would markedly affect their national character in the long-run.

Nevertheless, the book is fairly amazing, and rests high on the ladder of worthy political commentary. I must have underlined one-eighth of the book. It might, one day, even find its way into the Western Civilizational canon, as an eyewitness testimony of the end--in an Indian public library.

[Greg Perciak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the paranoid who occasionally has something genuine to fear, Mark Steyn is the alarmist with something to be alarmed about, and he writes about it with a healthy dose of gallows humor. We're looting the future to bribe the present. And the demography is not in our favor - with birthrates being what they are, we're running out of people to stick with the bill. Worse yet, big government makes for small citizens, as the nanny state makes more of our decisions, drains our ambition, and assumes responsibilities that once belonged to the individual.

Here's a typical passage (from 2011):
"In September, the 10th anniversary of a murderous strike at the heart of America's most glittering city was commemorated at a building site: the Empire State Building was finished in 18 months during a depression, but in the 21st century the global superpower cannot put up two replacement skyscrapers within a decade. The 9/11 memorial museum was supposed to open on the 11th anniversary, this coming September. On Thursday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that there is "no chance of it being open on time." No big deal. What's one more endlessly delayed, inefficient, over-bureaucratized construction project in a sclerotic republic?"

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a big Mark Steyn fan; love reading his essays and listening to him occasionally on the radio. This book was a bit of a disappointment in that a lot of the material is nearly identical to some of his previous essays - and in some cases word-for-word identical - so that I wasn't reading anything new. I don't have much argument against the message, and there was a least one laugh-out-loud moment in the book, but nonetheless I wasn't really able to "get into" this one. The best point he makes is when he postulates a time-traveller that starts in 1890 and travels forward 60 years to 1950, and then another 60 years to 2010. The improvements in everyday live between 1890 and 1950 are enormous, whereas the differences between 1950 and 2010 are much less so. His observation is that our rate of "progress" is actually slowing down with time, as American atrophies into a more centrally-controlled, federally-regulated nanny state.

[Brook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admire Mark Steyn for writing with both humor and erudition on such a disheartening topic as the decline of western civilization. After completion, I was pleased to give my copy to an open-minded education graduate student whose own reading choice was "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

[Holly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is written by someone who feels that name calling is a productive form of criticism. He may have valid points but their lost in the hyperbole.

[Dan Glover · Rating 4 out of 5]

To summarize my appreciation for this book, I echo the sentiment of Ann Coulter in that only Mark Steyn could make you laugh this hard while reading a book on the death of America. However, unlike Coulter, my praise for Steyn's astute observation and critique of the ills must be counter-weighted by my disappointment and downright puzzlement at what Steyn proposes in place of the status quo. With a problem this bad, the solution must be far more radical than Steyn proposes. For these reasons, I give him 4 stars for this critique and elucidation of the problems but only 3 for his answers to them (more on this later).

In his previous book, America Alone (see my review), Steyn argued from demographics that the Islamic world was taking over the west and that the U.S. was the only nation in the west with a birthrate that didn't portend a hopeless national death spiral. In After America, Steyn looks at the world through the lens of economics and he determines that the U.S. has joined the rest of the west in a self-destroying debt spiral, one which will result in a short shift of power to countries like China and Russia, but which will ultimately end in the balance of power going to the new world order that radical, determined and forward-planning Islam is working hard to establish.

Since Steyn published America Alone, a lot has happened. Obama was voted in by a star-struck, celebrity worshipping, fiscally suicidal U.S. majority who believes that Obama's personal charisma can underwrite an eternal and bottomless credit line with China and other (often hostile) foreign creditors. But unlike most party-line republicans, Steyn recognizes that, while Obama has done much to worsen and hasten the U.S. fiscal death spiral, he is not the real problem. In fact, the best America could hope for from a majority of republican politicians and presidential candidates would be to slow the car from 90 to 70 miles per hour as it speeds toward the cliff. What the U.S. (and every other western nation) needs is not token cuts to spending but systemic and wholesale change to how the whole nation thinks and functions. The umbilical cord that runs from the over-weaning nanny state to citizens everywhere needs to be cut and tied until it withers and drops off. People need to come to value personal liberty and the resultant responsibility for their own well being once again instead of looking to the state for everything from unemployment income to health care to education to old age security to grants for the arts to...well, pretty much everything. We need to ditch the mindset that sees the left-leaning media's latest panic-crusade and responds with the knee-jerk reaction of "there oughta be a program for that".

The problem as Steyn sees it is that, while the U.S. may have a 2 party system, any difference in worldview between the two are rendered ineffectual since both parties are beholden to a centralized, heavily regulated, over-taxing, gross deficit spending mega-state bureaucracy and it's attendant maverick justice system bent on reinterpreting the constitution to mean the opposite of what the founding fathers intended. Sure, the president or congress or senate might change, but the bureaucracy never does. The system is broken and continues to be so. The way Americans (and citizens of other western nations) view the state needs to change. The federal government is the most powerful institution in the U.S. today, with oversight and regulations that touch every aspect of daily life, like telling a local hardware store it can't provide free coffee and donuts for its patrons as it has for 30+ years since it does not have a licensed kitchen. This was not what the founding fathers envisioned for the republic. They believed the sphere of family should have the most authority, then church and other voluntary associations of citizens, then local communities, then individual states and then, last and least of all, the federal government. When the state becomes so very big, as it has, it creates small citizens. The more powerful and larger the state, the weaker and smaller its citizens.

As we have come to expect from Steyn, the book is full of sharp verbal barbs, snappy shots and devastating blows and his scathing critique of the ethos of present-day America and the west is nearly spot-on. He ably examines the deterioration of family, community and the can-do spirit of an America gone-by. But his strength lies in pointing out the heights from which they/we have fallen and in describing the problems, not as much in proposing solutions. Not that Steyn has no good advice to avoid what is surely certain ruin if there is no radical and immediate change of direction. In the last chapter, he does propose some crucial and necessary sea changes to western society. And yet, even he is not radical enough. There are some glaring inconsistencies with his approach. For example, you can't both radically scale back government and sever the over inflated borrow-spend Keynesian mentality of both bureaucracy and the general public at the same time as carrying on a global "war on terror" which, as it turns out, is primarily an excuse to secure cheap oil for the average American consumer who believes that the constitution somewhere protects their right to cheap foreign oil. Radically cutting government spending while continuing to be the world's beat cop through a massive military spend (more than the next several highest military spending countries put together) isn't possible. The U.S. needs to get their own house in order, not provide unwanted maid service to half the third world, the middle east and legacy Cold War bases across the west. Steyn talks about this as well, but his solution is that the US demand compensation from the rest of the UN countries which benefit from their security services. This is about as intelligent a solution as it is likely that the DND will start receiving multi-billion dollar free will donations from the EU. Get real. Along with the domestic big gov't nannyism and bloated, hippopotamic bureaucracy, it was foreign military-industrial imperialism that got the US into their massive economic woes in the first place and the only reason many nations went along with it was that the nation instigating it was the financial powerhouse of the globe. The phrase, "not any more" applies here in multiple ways.

The logical conclusion of Steyn's observations and the most clear and decisive thing the average American citizen could do to begin to transform and reform the US back into the constitutional republic it was intended by the founders to be is to vote for Ron Paul as the next president. I kept waiting for Steyn to draw this conclusion himself but Paul doesn't even get a passing mention in this book - a glaring oversight as Steyn spends some time talking about the Tea Party, the very grass roots movement which wouldn't exist without Ron Paul. Could Steyn himself be a little too mainstream republican/neo-con to really take the radical steps necessary to see the U.S. return to its true, constitutional republican roots? That's the conclusion I'm left with in light of Steyn's disparaging remarks about Paul in the media. Steyn needs to pick between US domestic fiscal and social survival OR extension of the "global war on terror" and an expansion of US global policing against radical Islam and every other interest which threatens to compete with US interests around the world because he can't have both. The former would mean getting one's own house in order, in part, by bringing home the military presence from the four corners of the globe. The latter would mean continuing and expanding it and continuing to bear both the cost and the backlash from it, thereby worsening the fiscal heart rate of the US (which is already nearly flat-lining). Steyn is better than most at critiquing the ills of the US and he is spot on when he says that Americans need to value personal liberty and responsibility above nanny state hand-outs. But some of Steyn's solutions aren't consistent with his overall conclusions. I don't agree with everything Ron Paul stands for or proposes, but I think he is right that the US military needs to cease being a global police force. Like Steyn, I am no friend of radical islamofacism, but his desire to "take the fight to them" will not only perpetuate the very problems (especially fiscal) his book was written to expose but will serve to make them far worse.

I wish someone would introduce Steyn to Ron Paul at a Tea Party rally and Steyn could get to work campaigning for Ron Paul for the next President of the United States and the only one in the running who understands the dire situation in the US, which Steyn so rightly worries about, even better than Steyn himself does. Big problems require big solutions and Steyn's proposals ain't nearly big enough to do enough fast enough.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that sane men are even asking this question ought to be deeply disturbing.

This is sort of a companion piece to Dennis Prager’s Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph; where Prager applies logic to history to construct a philosophy, Mark Steyn is much more anecdotal, weaving funny stories together with historical lessons into a frightening prediction. It’s hardly a surprising one, and in fact at no point in this book is any individual portion surprising or strange; it is only the juxtaposition that becomes disquieting. Where Prager constructed a philosophy, Steyn constructs a theory, and then makes predictions from that theory.

When world backbones such as the United States has become bend, they rarely take long to break. Much of U.S. power is paper. Pull one card, and the rest also fall. Much of the mayhem Steyn predicts after America’s fall is undeniably true (what happens to the dollar when it is no longer the de factor world currency?) and the rest, while not undeniable is certainly not unlikely.

Which sounds extraordinarily pessimistic, and it is, but it’s also a very entertaining read. Steyn constructs his theory and predictions using two ancient science fiction stories: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which most people are familiar with even if they haven’t read it, and the far more obscure The Last American by J.A. Mitchell. Throughout the book he provides quotes from Mitchell’s story, quotes that were so familiar I thought I’d read it, and recently, but it turns out to be extraordinarily similar to Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights in The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.

He has Wells’s time traveler go from 1890 to 1950, and be “astonished”. The refrigerator, the washing machine, the radio, the automobile, central heating, the commonality of the telephone, the airplane. Then, he travels from 1950 to 2010,

…and he wonders if he’s made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: the layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone… Oh, wait. It’s got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem… larger, and dressed like overgrown children.

And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.

He blames a lot of our being stuck in the fifties on bureaucratic red tape, comparing the development of insulin (two years from concept to saving lives, three years from concept to drugstores) to the far more lengthy approval process today. But it’s also the state of modern education. One of the saddest comparisons the time traveler makes is between two letters, one from the president of the Detroit school board and one from Jack the Ripper’s first victim, Mary Anne Nichols.

He extends the Time Machine analogy by talking a lot about the difference between the Eloi and the Morlocks. The writing is, of course, witty and filled with the turns of phrase that make Steyn easy to listen to:

But eventually even that mirage fades and you see the writing on the Wal-Mart.

If you enjoy listening to Steyn, you’ll enjoy reading this book. It is very easy to read it in his voice.

Besides being pessimistic, it’s also Cassandrite. He provides advice at the end, but this is advice that, if it were going to be followed, already would be. The advice is correct, but to be implemented requires a country that doesn’t need it. For example, talking about the 2008 recession:

At the start of the “downturn,” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.

A country whose government fiddles that much while its people burn and is not turned out on its ear is unlikely to improve.

[Purple Wimple · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is there a snappier writer publishing today? Steyn makes a case that is potent, and as far as I am aware, unrebutted. The burden is on his detractors (even friendlies, like Andy Sullivan at the Weekly Standard) to prove him wrong.

Two flaws (and they are minor) -- it's too easy to get lost in the anecdotes and examples, and forget where in the argument you are reading. There's almost too much flesh on the bones. More major, and this goes for any apocalysist: Steyn tries to prove his point with examples, but not by disproving his point's opposite. It's rhetorically weaker. (But not so rhetorically weak that he fails to make his case, and powerfully.)

Below are several quotes from the book. Enjoy.

"By 2015 or so, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet... will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers... If interest rates were to return to, say, 5.7 percent (the average for the period 1990-2010), the debt service projections for 2015 would increase from $290 billion to $847 billion. China would be in a position to quadruple its military budget and stick U.S. taxpayers with the bill." 6

"When government spends on the scale Washington’s got used to, that’s not a spending crisis, it’s a moral one... There’s nothing virtuous about “caring” “compassionate” “progressives” demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born... Increasing dependency, disincentivizing self-reliance, absolving the citizenry from responsibility for their actions: the multitrillion-dollar debt catastrophe is not the problem but merely the symptom. It not just about balancing the books, but about balancing the most basic impulses of society. These are structural and, ultimately, moral questions. Credit depends on trust, and trust pre-supposes responsibility. So, if you have a credit boom in an age that has all but abolished personal responsibility, it’s not hard to figure out how it’s going to end." 14

"A society can cope with corroded infrastructure and a devalued currency more easily than with corroded liberty and a devalued citizenry." 15

"As Britain and other great powers learned, the price of Big Government at home is an ever smaller presence abroad." 21

"Just as the late Roman Empire was no longer an aqueduct-building culture, we are no longer a dam-building one. It’s not just that we no longer invent, but that we are determined to disinvent everything out great-grandparents created to enable the self-indulgent lived we take for granted and that leave us free to chip away at the foundations of our own society... Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity." 34

"The computer is, in the Roman context, a cyber-circus." 36

"Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very easily to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life... The story of the western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, the right to eat non-state-licensed homemade pie, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, the UN Human Rights Council, and U.S. college campuses) what you’re permitted to say and think. An America running out of ideas eventually gives up on the American idea." 38

"The bigger government gets, the more transformative, the more intrusive, the louder it proclaims its moral purity/virtue... This is politics as a form of narcissism: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? In the name of “fairness,” they grant privileges to preferred identity groups over others—that is, they treat certain people unfairly. Yet, if you oppose “fairness,” you must be on the unfair side." 63

"In the Orwellian language of Big Government, “rights” are no longer individual liberties that restrain the state but state power that restrains you." 63-64

"The problem facing advanced societies isn’t very difficult to figure out: the twentieth-century welfare state has run out of people to stick it to... To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the western world isn’t “printing money” but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. That’s the difference: in America, the improvident, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, there are no kids or grandkids to screw over." 105

"People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense." 106

"Absolved from having to pay for their own defense, Continentals beat their swords into welfare checks, and erected huge cradle-to-grave entitlements. Even under the U.S. security umbrella, they proved unsustainable. Why? Well, like Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead—so why not bilk the future? We won’t be here, and our creditors won’t have a forwarding address. No one has engaged in transgenerational theft on the scale that Europe has." 111-112

"Ultimately, judge-made law and bureaucrat-made regulations and dancing with the czars strike at the compact between citizen and state. By sidestepping the consent of the governed, as regulators do, or expression open contempt for it, as judges do, the governing class delegitimizes itself. When government is demanding the right to determine every aspect of your life, those on the receiving end should at least demand back that our betters have the guts to do so by passing laws in legislatures of the people’s representatives. Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me’s." 336

"Entitlements are the death of responsible government: they offend against every republican concept. Regardless of government revenues or broader economic conditions, they “mandate” spending: they are thus an offense against one of the most basic democratic principles—that a parliament cannot bind its successors. In a sense, they negate the American revolution... “Human dignity,” writes Paul Rahe, “is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.” When the state annexes that responsibility, the citizenry are indeed mere sheep to the government shepherd." 341

"When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty." 346

[Nathan Chattaway · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written over 10 years ago but is proving remarkably prophetic. Read it if you want to understand what's going so wrong in the US and most Western nations this century.

["How Do You Pronounce That?" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative, eye-opening, and shockingly well-researched. All delivered with great tone and sharp wit.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both funny and well-written, but I can't say I enjoyed it. How can one enjoy predictions that the country you love and the prosperity it has enjoyed are most likely things of the past. While the book shares my prejudices and political view, I believe I can say confidently-putting aside any predictions of doom and gloom-that it is a realistic appraisal of our current cultural and political straits.

The doom and gloom may seem a bit much, but Steyn gives a frightening look into a not-so-distant future of racial and class segregation, an over-class consisting of "credentialed" betters who produce nothing but govern over a restless, unemployed permanent underclass and an ever-shrinking productive class. Steyn, though, puts aside the doom and gloom at least for the last chapter in an appeal to America's children to fight back against the hedonistic generations of their parents and grandparents that have spent their future on the present.

Steyn's overarching theme is that as America's government (at all levels but especially the federal) has grown, those institutions-family, church, schools, economic associations-that allow free citizens to thrive have been weakened such that Americans are becoming more dependent on government for things they used to do for themselves. He describes a vicious cycle where by government begets more government. An elite class, which Steyn analogizes to H.G. Wells's Eloi, that has acquired the politically correct prejudices of our age through a bankrupt (bankrupt and yet awash in money) educational system presides over a bureaucracy that bestows favors on a class dependent upon government provision. These classes combine to form a majority or near majority political interest. It is in the interest of both groups (or at least the governing class's) that the other continues to grow. More dependents equals more government jobs equals more bureaucrats equals more political power...

The problem, as Steyn reminds us through the words of Margaret Thatcher, is that you eventually run out of other people's money. That is where America finds itself after the first decade of the twenty-first century. Instead of correcting course, however, the government continues to metastasize and is even accelerating its growth under the Obama administration with giant government intrusion into healthcare and financial markets. It continues to do so despite the example of Europe's failing welfare states.

Steyn's more subtle theme is that this is in part our fault. It is easy to point fingers at Obama and Bush or whomever, but freedom requires a citizenry jealous of its liberty. It requires citizens that participate in civic life to guard that liberty. It is not simply electing the right people Steyn explains, quoting Milton Friedman. Freidman said that the goal is not merely to elect the right people but to make it politically profitable for the wrong people do the right thing.

Right now it continues to be politically profitable to spend away the future. Borrowing is much less painful in the short term than reigning in government which requires taking away jobs and handouts from the governing and dependent classes. And reigning in is what is needed, not just spending but scope. Americans are no longer self-governing in any meaningful respect. The government has taken over vasts swaths of public life that a free people handle without Washington or the state capital. The result has been the destruction of the family and other institutions of civic life. By and large, Americans don't even elect the people who govern them any more. More and more "law" is made by executive or "independent" agencies staffed by bureaucrats who cannot easily be removed.

How to turn it around? As I said Steyn ends with a call to arms of sorts, and although his heart may be in it, it doesn't seem hopeful. Steyn pleads to today's grade-schoolers to push back against the profligacy of their grandparents. America must de-centralize, de-governmentalize, and reclaim its founding spirit. Anyone who wants the twenty-first century to be another American century should read this book.

[Bernie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved America Alone. Steyn's analysis there was spot-on and witty, and though ominous, at least a good American could cling to the belief that unlike Europe and the rest of the Western World, his fellow citizens could be trusted to excercise enough virtue and wisdom to step away from the cliff. The assessment in "After America"? Not gonna happen. It seems America is tied at the ankle to the declining and stumbling Western World, and while She may be at least able to slow the West's descent, there is no mountaineer ready with an extra rope to save her. Therefore, not only will there be a fall for the US, but it will be sharp, fast, dramatic, and inevitable. True, if we are able to reverse our "Hopey-Changey-in-Chief", Mr. Obama, and his suicidal allies in the "Barakracy" Steyn concedes, we might be able to delay the fall, but it will, he asserts, happen. The problem is systemic, and the systematic problems have passed the point of possible return. Steyn spends most of the book giving witty and trenchently convincing evidence for why this is true and what the world will be like when it happens. Because America has by in large been a great force for good in the world, the global snapshot of its fall isn't pretty, though Steyn's deligtful wit helps the medicine go down. But is it really medicine, or rather is Steyn's prescience in his "After" chapter concerning the world after America, just a recitation of logical inevitability? After the read, I was depressingly more inclined toward the latter. This being so, his epilogue, "The Hope of Audacity" seemed supremely weak and alrmingly cynical. In this chapter he gives some eight or ten things that can be done to turn the situation around, that, given the weight of the rest of the book seem a mere spitting into the wind. One can only hope that he's either underestimated the audacious resolve of US citizens and overestimated the trouble stalking the country, or that he views a frank assessment of the desperate situation as the only way to strengthen audacious resolve. Mark Steyn accurately brings the reader to face same stark choice described in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln: whether to "nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth." If you are one of the deluded that believes that the United States has NOT been a force for good in the world, this book will only be irrelevant. But if you are convinced of the opposite, it's a must-read.

[Aaron Kleinheksel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy Mark Steyn's wit and sense of humor, and share his views on many things, so it was a given I'd enjoy this book. If you like his editorials you'll like it too. Mark is a far better writer than he is a speaker, IMO.

Rather than write a long review of the book, which details many of the most salient ways that America (and the West) is committing cultural and national suicide, here a couple of quotes that, I think, provide a flavour of what a reader can expect.

1. "Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly." (pg. 72)

2. "You don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement. The Athenian "public service" of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. As Arnold Schwarzenegger... told the legislature in his fourth State of the State address, "California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta." That's half-right: California has the ideas of Athens. Unfortunately, it's late 20th century Athens. As for "the power of Sparta," unless he's referring to gay marriage, it's hard to see what he's on about." (pg. 106)

Later in the book, Mark devotes a chapter to "prophesying" as to what the future will look like in the wake of American declension. As it was written in 2009-2010, some of the things have already happened. Mark shouldn't feel too smug however, as much of it is an entirely predictable course of events, unfortunately.

The book is not perfect, and I would disagree with him on a few things (such as the state of American ingenuity and innovation, technological advancement, etc.), but overall I recommend this book for anyone who has not thought very deeply about the present course of our country and the ideas that are directing it.

[Norbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The heading on the inside front jacket is "Optimistic About America's Future? Don't Be." Pretty much says it all. I could quote the whole book but it would be easier, on me, if you just read the book. If America falls then what will be left will be a repeat of the 1,000 years of the Dark Ages. If you don't know what direction America is heading then you're either a liberal, progressive, libtard, or just plain stupid. Remember the 70's oil crises when "we imported one-third of our oil? Now, 30 years later, we import two-thirds." The European countries are rapidly helping to create this demise also. "British Pakistanis with less than 2 percent of the population account for a third of all children born with rare diseases . . . which cost the education system over $100,000 per child." What is the cost to America educating all the illegal aliens children? It no longer matters how much we might borrow in the future as we can never pay back what we already owe. Besides the 17 trillion of debt there is also 60 trillion unfunded entitlements lurking in the near future. Remember when George Clooney and the other Hollywood types were having a gay time (no pun intended) at the "interpretative-dance fundraiser, while hundreds of thousands of people were murdered with machetes in Darfur." "At the 2009 Copenhagen summit, America offered to pay for China to lower its carbon footprint." Insanity will surely lead to ruination. We borrow money from them (China) so we can pay for them to clean up their act. We pay American kids from money we borrow from them so they can go to China to teach the Chinese English. When America falls where will all the people from other countries go to escape the dangers posed by their own governments?
I strongly recommend the book.

[Thomas Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Steyn dares to go where no one is brave enough to venture. The focus of this book is to show how the choices Americans and politicians are making with government are in fact destroying us. He compares America to empires of the past such as Rome and Britain; in this comparison, he points out the mistakes those empire made that led to their destruction and how America is not very different. He delves into America's inevitable decline and asks how steep or gradual will we decline. According to his book, we are headed over a cliff very soon.

He uses the two topics that were his main focus in his previous book "America Alone"; which are demography and Islamization. If you do not know about the demographic disaster approaching, you really ought to read either this book or America Alone. If you think worry of Islamization can be chalked up to Islamophobia, you REALLY ought to read America Alone. This book definitely touches on the subject matter, but the other book delves much deeper.

On Steyn's writing style, I really enjoy the fact that he can rite about such dark subject matters and make jokes at the same time. It definitely helps get through the awfulness on which he is shedding light. Steyn is succinct and concise, while never getting overly detailed. HE is also very thorough in his citations.

I cannot tell if this book is as impressive as his other book that I have mentioned. The first book astounded me and opened my eyes to concepts an facts I had never heard of. I would probably rate this closer to 4.5 if that were an option, but 5 stars it shall get.