Mark Steyn has a long article in The New Criterion that's more or less a compilation of the general points he's made throughout the year (or last several years). It's comprehensive and tackles a number of issues through "the demography, stupid" as he's often said. I won't summarize the whole thing, but this section is worth excerpting.
This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative—I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington last year, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.
Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 9 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.
This seems to be the most important aspect of the GWOT, if not for the U.S., then certainly for Europe. Even Steyn crosses things up by using an American pro-abortion rally in the present to illustrate what won't be happening in Europe in a generation. I think this shows that we (the U.S.) are going to come out of this more intact that the Europeans will. It's been said a million times by conservative pundits like Steyn and in a jillion blog posts on the right side of the 'sphere that the confluence of Sharia-type values based in the sheer demographic realities of Europe and the multi-cultural left that turns a blind eye toward the eventual outcome of promoting "the other" is as big a part of this war as killing terrorists.
