Mark Steyn Gets It Right

As usual, Mark Steyn gets it right on the campaign:

Because Fleet Street correspondents are disproportionately concentrated in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, it’s easy for them to get the impression that there’s not all that many conservatives — just a few isolated communities in the Bible Belt and a couple of survivalist militias up in the Rockies. This leads to the careless assumptions of so many in the European media about John Kerry’s election prospects and the inevitable tears on the morning of 3 November. But the way Kerry’s campaigning on cultural issues gives you the real clue to the dominant forces in American life: he talks up his Catholicism; on abortion, he says he ‘personally believes’ life begins at conception, it’s just that as a Democrat he can’t find it in him to legislate according to his principles; everywhere he goes he gets photographed brandishing guns, even guns that he, as an effete Massachusetts panty-waist, has voted to ban; he boasts to hunting magazines about his favourite assault rifle — at least until the legality of his ownership of such a weapon is called into question. This is how a big-government, anti-globalisation, socialised-healthcare, Francophiliac Democrat has to campaign in America: pro-guns, pro-God, deeply evasive on abortion. In almost any other Western nation, none of these things would matter...

Conservatives embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney has ever said was a couple of weeks after 9/11: ‘One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.’

Really? I’d say 9/11 vindicated perfectly a decentralised, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big-time, as the Vice-President would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers.

On the other hand, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he’d bought The Dummy’s Guide to Martyrdom Operations two years ago and their ‘We have some suggestions for you!’ box would be proffering a 30 per cent discount on The A-Z of Infidel Slaying and 72 Hot Love Tips That Will Have Your Virgins Panting For More. Amazon is a more efficient miner of information than US Immigration.

Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon’s system is very cheap, but it’s in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower. To take another example from September 11, on three planes the crew and passengers followed Federal Aviation Administration procedures largely unchanged from the Seventies and they all died, along with thousands of other people; on the fourth plane, Flight 93, they used their cellphones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free-born citizens, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private citizens. The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: ‘Let’s roll!’ as Todd Beamer told his fellow passengers. Within 90 minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93 had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it. By contrast, on 11 March 2002, six months to the day after Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi died flying their respective planes into the twin towers, their flight school in Florida received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service informing it that Mr Atta’s and Mr al-Shehhi’s student visas had been approved. Even killing thousands of people wasn’t enough to impede Mr Atta’s smooth progress through a lethargic bureaucracy. And the bureaucrats’ defence — which boiled down to: don’t worry, we’re only issuing visas to famous dead terrorists, not obscure living ones — is one that Americans largely have to take on trust.