This is an edited version of my column in Monday's Irish Daily Mail --
Since Barack Obama’s re-election last week, my email account has turned into something like a counselling helpline for distressed Americans.
Check the inbox: ‘My mood has been bleak since Tuesday. All the conservatives are trying
to rally each other, with various rationales. I will continue to fight, but with the spirit of a kamikaze pilot, not because of active hope.’
Another: ‘In a time of mortal danger – economic, social, cultural, educational, and military – I am certainly glad that we chose an America-hating, Muslim-sympathizing, economy-destroying, preposterous, lying, incompetent poseur as President.’
One email arrived without comment, just a link to a news report from Rawalpindi: the owner of a flag business said Obama’s re-election was good for business because there would be more drone strikes. More drone strikes mean more demonstrations in Pakistan, and ‘no protest is complete without an American flag being sent up in flames.’
Yes, the president who brags he personally chooses the targets for murder-by-drone is back in for another four years.
However, I am not as grief-stricken as these people. Of course, I send my condolences. I even offer an historic parallel in which they may find comfort: Southerners had to survive starvation, the suspension of law and civil liberties, and the military occupation of their country between 1865 and 1877. Grieving Americans must take inspiration from such fortitude and carry on.
But I only offer that as a polite gesture of comfort. I can’t see that Americans today, even Southerners today, have the endurance or character of the Southerners then. The old fortitude, like the old virtue, is gone from all parts of America.
I figured that out long before last week’s election results. I figured out years ago that America is over.
What I’m seeing in these emails is the grief of Americans who, until last Tuesday, had hope that the United States wasn’t yet over, that it could still be put right if only this latest, most dangerous president could be voted out of the White House.
Their hope was always misplaced. They were suckers.
Against all evidence, they embraced the hope that America could still be rescued. It can’t, not while the only available ‘rescuers’ are the contemptible Republican party, and not while vast millions of Americans have embraced a welfare culture which is destroying both the finances and the character of the country.
Look at the numbers. President Obama is on track to finish his second term with a $20 trillion federal debt. It is simply too late for a nation which has become hand-out junkies to pull back from the edge of that abyss.
The truth lies in a line from the Canadian commentator Mark Steyn writing in National Review: ‘A determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two.’
I think that is what we have seen in America. A series of governments has introduced enough poison into the political drinking water of America that the people have mutated.
Indeed, I’m not sure whom we are talking about now when we talk about ‘Americans,’ I mean beyond the obvious skull-count of how many human beings have the right to a US passport. I mean as members of a nation, as a cohesive people.
Would Americans of two or three generations ago recognise today’s US citizens as fellow countrymen? As today’s Americans might say while queuing for welfare and Medicaid health-care handouts: ‘La evidencia apunta en sentido contrario, amigo.’
The truth of the election result is closer to the comment made by my fellow Mail blogger, the American writer Thomas Fleming, writing the day after the election: ‘Whichever mob gets in power does not change the fact that a mob is in power. In this case, however, people like me can now look to four more years of deficit spending, foreign policy disasters, and cheap rhetoric, and we can anticipate a lifetime – blissfully short in my case – as part of the subjugated underclass of workers and professionals who do not live off the taxpayers.’
‘To all those who voted for Obama, my final word is: It’s your country, and I hope you enjoy the ride as the good old USA plunges down the roller coaster of imperial welfarism into failure and poverty. To all the Republicans, all I can say is that you have brought this on yourselves.’
Dr Fleming is dead right there. I won’t go into exactly how the Republicans have brought this on themselves, not today anyway, but the explanation involves connivance in unrestricted immigration – forget the party rhetoric, Republican big businessmen are just crazy about cheap brown Mexican labour, it keeps down the pay rates for white and black American workers -- compromise on principles, or no principles, greed, and the embrace 20 years ago of the imperialist, war-mongering Democrats who re-branded themselves as neo-conservatives.
Back to the even-worse Democrats, and the re-election of Mr Obama which, in an example of Celtic brainlessness, was cheered in Ireland.
Here were the Irish people, crippled by a bank-debt burden, cheering on the administration which ensured that the IMF did not allow Finance Minister Brian Lenihan a haircut on our unsecured bank debt.
Perhaps you have forgotten that, if you ever knew it: when our bank crisis broke, the IMF suggested – as was standard IMF policy until the IMF went euro-native – that the unsecured creditors of Ireland’s banks should take a two-thirds haircut.
That’s right. At the start of this disaster our then-Government had a chance to save us from the burden of two-thirds of the unsecured bank debt. We had an opening to default on billions, and with the cooperation of the IMF.
The reason Lenihan could not take the deal was that Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s
Goldman Sachs-loving Treasury Secretary, told the IMF to drop the idea. He would not allow any Irish bank to inflict any loss on any creditor bank.
Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, was coming in with a pincer movement from the EU, also forbidding Irish bank debt default. How wrong Mr Trichet was in every decision he took during the crisis was summed up earlier this month in an analysis by the notable Australian economist Billy Mitchell. He identified Mr Trichet’s ‘stupidity, lack of judgement and lack of qualification for the position he held.’
And yet the Irish last week were cheering the Obama administration’s re-election, as willingly as they have been obeying the heirs of Trichet. Stupidity or masochism, take your pick, but it is one or the other.
Democratic dominance in Washington, like euro-cult submission in Dublin, is bad for Ireland. The only question now is for how long the Irish will go on with the stupidity or the masochism.
We might find out when the backwash from the US fiscal shock due at the end of December hits Ireland.
You have heard about the US fiscal cliff. I warned about it in this column last May. Here are the numbers: unless the Republicans and the Democrats come to a deal, an automatic $136bn in spending cuts will come on January 1st, just as $532bn in tax increases arrive. Such a one-two punch would throw America back into recession.
So will this scare both the Democrats and the Republicans into some serious, rational, rapid changes to tax and spending?
Simon Heffer, one of my English colleagues at the Mail, thinks so. He writes that a deal by January 1st could just be to buy time, but ‘at some stage a serious deficit reduction plan will have to be agreed, or America will head the same way as the eurozone.’
‘When things get worse – and they will – it will be America’s moment to realise that the rhetoric of “change” has, instead, to be put into painful practice.’
Worthy thoughts, but I’d say the Englishman Heffer is wrong. He still thinks America can be saved and that the present generation of politicians can do it.
I don’t.
I think what is going to happen is more in line with what the Canadian Steyn says: ‘In the weeks ahead, Democrats and Republicans will reach a triumphant “bipartisan” deal to avert the fiscal cliff through some artful bookkeeping mechanism that postpones Taxmageddon for another year, or six months, or three, when they can reach yet another triumphant deal to postpone it yet again.’
However, ‘Washington cannot be saved from itself…Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.’