Looney Cool!

Marvellous!

How to avert disaster? It will not be easy, if for no other reason than that in America (and all through the West) the PC brigade continues to restrict genuine dissent, its fancy talk of “diversity” little short of Orwellian. The anti-establishmentarianism of the 1960s has metastasised into a form of soft totalitarianism. The supposed commitment by progressives to “rights” increasingly concerns itself with the rights of groups rather than the rights of individuals. Our ancient liberties, argues Steyn, are under threat from a left-of-centre political class who see their role as the authoritative arbiter between “tribes” rather than as the democratic sentinel of free individuals. This, sadly, represents only one aspect of the problem. It is Steyn’s contention that a “lefter-of-centre judiciary, a leftist-of-centre bureaucracy, all of whom have been educated by a lefterooniest-of-all academy”, hinders Americans from confronting Stealth Jihadism. The allegation of “Islamophobia” has become the weapon of choice for our PC hought police.

...In times past the concept of “cool” was adopted by many an underclass, from slaves to political dissenters, as a form of insolence in the guise of ironic disengagement. In the 1960s the psychedelic generation adopted it as a guiding moral imperative as they began discarding, thanks to the complicity or dimwittedness of their elders, the cultural traditions of our antecedents. Many of these self-styled rebels, along with their younger mimics, now hold positions of power and influence, and yet for the politically correct generations “cool” remains fundamental to their sense of self. All the allure and glamour of being cool, however, comes at the price of inertia and paralysis. Barack Obama, the coolest-ever President of the United States, far cooler than saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, is “less the leader of the Free World” than “the Bystander-in-Chief”.

Our children need to read After America and begin to understand its lessons. In the shorter term, the book’s primary value is that come November 2012 even more Americans might vote for a candidate blessed not with self-conscious aplomb (“street cred”) but with maturity, humility and common sense. The electoral demise of The One will not in itself save America, although it would be a good start.