Moments "After America"

On Sunday I’d mentioned that I was reading Mark Steyn’s After America.

Finding the book less “LOL funny” than Steyn’s previous book, America Alone, I was nevertheless unable to put After America down, and I write more about it in my column at First Things:

I thought of Chesterton a great deal while reading After America. Steyn quotes de Tocqueville liberally throughout the book and makes great, relevant references to H. G. Wells’ Eloi and Morlock populations, but in reading about the sort of creeping bureaucratic minutia that is shutting down childhood lemonade stands, depriving church groups of homemade pie and hardware store customers of complimentary cups of coffee, it was Chesterton’s warning I remembered. “When you break the big laws,” he wrote, “you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”

And it’s the small laws, more than flash mobs or even terrorist threats, that will put the chokehold to the United States. It is the intrusion of governmental nitpickers into neighborly kindnesses—the punishment of the instinctive small generosities that have always defined American openness—that will eventually isolate us from each other, and from our understanding of ourselves, until we are just a nation of dead things, carried down the burbling river, or caught within the stagnant pools.

Read the whole thing, here. And yes, I highly recommend picking up the book and passing it around through the family.