The president hastens—and embodies—American decline.

Obama and the Burden of History

Myron Magnet

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith calmly reassured a friend who despaired that the American defeat of General Burgoyne at Saratoga in the Revolutionary War meant that Britain was finished. 

A great deal of ruin, no doubt—but not unlimited. 

Pondering President Obama’s reelection, I can’t help remembering that in the course of my adult life, the Britain I first knew half a century ago has run through its allotment of ruin and is now almostunrecognizably transformed from the stiff-upper-lip, never-say-die redoubt of fair play and free-born Englishmen of very recent stereotype. 

Now it is the land where snarling, shaven-headed louts beget still more louts upon a succession of compliant, abused sluts as clueless as they about what makes a meaningful and decent life; the land where stately ancient towns turn into nighttime circuses of drunken, vomit-smeared degradation, as young people purposely divest themselves of their human rationality and civility; the land where, to show their pride in a National Health Service they think proves their country’s unique compassion and social equality, the curable sick obediently die in accordance with official protocols that ensure that outcome; the land that jails citizens for free speech it deems “hate speech”; the land that, even when it had Royal Navy ships mightier than Lord Nelson could imagine, had sailors so cowardly and undutiful as to let Iranians in outboard motorboats take them captive without firing a shot, making the great ships useless.

It’s sobering proof of how quickly the interaction of culture and policy can remake the character of a people. Across the Channel, the Europeans simply decided to stop reproducing.

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