Mark Steyn sounds positively Spenglerian in his essay in the New Criterion and Opinion Journal titled, "It’s the demography, stupid", but it's hard to argue with his conclusions (or his premises, for that matter). Here's how he kicks off the piece:

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.

What does a nation where "the secondary impulses of society" are its primary focus look like? Why, very much like The Great White Blue State to the North, as Ginna Dowler, guest-blogging for Pieter Dorsman (whom I met briefly during Pajamas' launch week) writes:

One of the things that has struck me most about the recent election campaign is how...insular it is. Aside from a brief discussion of military procurement, and a smattering of sniping about Harper's supposed support for the Iraq war not one party has discussed actual foreign policy.

Which is both sad, and not at all surprising.

Because big things are happening in the world, and Canadians don't really seem to care about them at all. Or rather, they care in an abstract fashion. Because these world events seem to have no relationship with our daily lives. With the exception of recent immigrants, we seem to view foreign affairs purely through the lens of how Canada "matters" on the world stage. Afghanistan only matters in any because we actually have troops there.

Discussion on the Iraq war, while vitriolic, is also detached. Our opinions are philosophical - we know they don't matter. Canadians have an opinion on George Bush, but they mostly hate him because he is "stupid", and because of knee-jerk reactions to the Iraq war. We are secure in our opinions, because our opinions have no consequences.

This struck me again while reading the transcript of Robert Kaplan's discussion with Hugh Hewitt. On China, for example, Canadians are bizarrely optimistic. All we seem to see are the trade issues. How can we sell to China, will China hurt our competitive advantage etc. There is no discussion of China an entity - no analysis of the threat an emerging China poses on the world power stage.

Which seems insanely short-sighted, given China's emphasis on establishing themselves as a Great Power, in every possible way.

Yet we criticize the Americans for being insular, for being unsophisticated. Kaplan also made a great comment (which Jay Currie also noted), regarding the so-called red-neck middle Americans.

One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.

Having spent time in the last few years travelling to so-called "Red State" places, I can confirm that in, say, your average manufacturing facility, a good proportion of the employees have a close relative serving in the US military, and they get these email updates. A connector assembler in Springfield MO knows a great deal about the situation on the ground in Baghdad - more than the average New York sophisticate, and far, far more than nearly all Canadians.

That's not at all surprising, as this paragraph by Steyn illustrates:

This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer.

He's writing about Europe, but that whole paragraph applies works equally well around the 49th Parallel.

Update (1/4/06): Not surprisingly, a number of bloggers have commented on Steyn's piece: follow the links here.