Recently, Mark Steyn argued that the US is in terminal decline, going the way of the rest of the West--Canada, UK, and Europe.
We believe he is likely correct. Our understanding of how the Lord Jesus Christ rules human history would predispose us to expect that the West, now virulently and triumphalistically post-Christian, would arouse the wrath of the Son. Our understanding of the blessing and cursing construct of the Covenant would lead us to expect that Western cultures and nations will face the fall of those curses upon them.
As Christians, we are neither defeated, nor ultimately dismayed by this. Rather, in a way not understood by the Unbeliever, we take great confidence and encouragement from such an outcome. It evidences to all who are not blind that the Lord Jesus does indeed reign as King over all the earth. It also provides assurance that the dark will be followed by a new dawn, since all enemies will be placed under His feet. If the curses of the Covenant are sure, so are its blessings.
Steyn paints a picture of how the curses and judgements are falling and will fall.
He points out that all modern western democratic societies have "gone left." We in New Zealand, for our part, can only say, "amen" to this observation. To regain the Treasury benches, National had to "capture the centre" which meant moving to the left. Why? Because the electorate has become predominantly and prevailingly dependant upon the government.
Steyn observes:
Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to "go left." Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.
Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are "moderates" or "conservatives" (i.e, the center and the right) and barely 20 percent are "liberals." And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.
So, regardless of which administration is in office, all governments expand the role of government; all spend more, regulate more, control more, manipulate more. Athenian religious beliefs compel them to do this. To the extent that dogmas built upon the "rights of man" prevail, they inexorably require it.
Steyn again:
Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage."
While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election, and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the West, it's government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama's promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: "Individual responsibility" and "self-reliance" are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to "stay in their homes" (and boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why shouldn't Peggy Joseph?
All throughout the West, more and more people depend upon governments to survive from day to day. Steyn argues that welfare dependants will dominate the US electorate in four years (sound eerily familiar):
I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they'll be routed in two or four years' time. The president-elect's so-called "tax cut" will absolve 48 percent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those who are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, on the dole.
By 2012, it will be more than half on the dole, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the Nanny State. That is the death of the American idea – which, after all, began as an economic argument: "No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. "No representation without taxation" has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable, and you've got to give some of it back?
This is how the curses of the Covenant are falling upon western civilisation. It is rotting from the inside out. In its bowels is a rapidly growing cancer that will swell to fill the entire body politic. Economic weakness and poverty will follow. Other nations, predominantly those in the East, will have inherited the mantle of economic hegemony and the military superiority that goes with it. Then the West will become just one more empire that faded into oblivion.
Steyn morbidly concludes:
At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty – for economic dynamism not the sclerotic "managed capitalism" of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business.
In Forbes last week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free – or die from a thousand beguiling caresses of Nanny State sirens.
Man is inexorably religious: God has created him so. Every person, every culture, every nation must, therefore, have its deity. It will either be the True and Living God, or it will be an idol. For Western culture, in the last half of the twentieth century, the deity and established religion became the State.
But the Living God is a jealous God. He will not allow His glory to be given to another. According to Psalm 2, He will arise and smash these false gods with a rod of iron. The West would be wise to kiss the feet of the Son before it is too late.
Let such humility and repentance begin with each of us.
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