^{CHAPTER FIVE}

THE NEW BRITANNIA

The Depraved City

Sometimes you do live to see it. In America Alone, I pointed out that, to a 5-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically emaciated, strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, ran the automobile industry, controlled much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent me mocking letters pointing out Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early twentieth century on.

True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.”¹

The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is always an illusion. Mighty nations can be entirely transformed mighty fast, especially when history comes a-calling. The “something unpleasant” doesn’t have to be especially so: national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were bloodily militarist, and as militantly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist.

Well, who can blame ’em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

Yet what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world—perhaps the single greatest force for good. In the second half of the twentieth century, even as their colonies advanced to independence, dozens of newborn nation-states retained the English language, English parliamentary structures, English legal system, English notions of liberty, not to mention cricket and all manner of other cultural ties. Insofar as the world functions at all, one can easily make the case that it’s due largely to the Britannic inheritance. Today, from South Africa to India to Australia, the regional heavyweights across the map are of British descent, as are three-sevenths of the G7, and two-fifths of the permanent members of the UN Security Council—and in a just world it would be three-fifths. The usual rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if that were so, Canada would have a greater claim to a permanent seat than either France or China. The reason Ottawa didn’t make the cut is because a third anglophone nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a simple truth—that, when it mattered, the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty.