I suppose it is a bit rum, now you mention it, that Mark Steyn’s first book was about the rest of the world going down the swanee while good ol’ Uncle Sam marched with a jaunty twirl of his baton to the broad sunlit uplands, and yet his second book says, whoops, my bad, boy did I get that one wrong, turns out America’s doomed as well. What could possibly have happened in the meantime to change Mr Steyn’s mind? Do you think it has something to do with them no-good Democrats getting back into the White House? Yes; yes it does. In fact it’s all their fault, spending money like there’s no tomorrow and being nice to foreigners instead of liberating them a new asshole. Why I oughda … *shakes fist* ‘After America’ continues a long and immensely distinguished tradition of wintry conservative gloom. There are bad times just around the corner, as Noel Coward once sang, and the outlook’s absolutely vile. I’ve forgotten who it was, Belloc probably, who said that the difference between left and right isn’t so much one of politics as theology. If you believe in Original Sin, or the imperfectability of man, you tend to look askance at all the schemes and all the dreams of socialists, liberals, and well-meaning fellows like Mr Cameron who have somehow neglected to read Burke. No good will come of this, you mutter to yourself. It will end in tears. We cannot build Heaven on earth; we cannot immanentise the eschaton. Or, in Steyn’s words, if Washington has ambitions as the new Jerusalem, the best it can hope for is to be like the current one: ‘a beleaguered citadel in a world that wants to kill it’. My own view is that things can hardly be as bad as all that. Yes, it’s very annoying that the Democrats are attempting to immanentise the eschaton; but when aren’t they? That’s what Democrats do, the silly old poppets, and they haven’t immanentised so much as the tiniest eschaton in all the years they’ve been trying. True, the Chinese are hoovering up everything that’s not nailed to the floor, and now own most of Africa, but as Steyn points out, their foolish ’one child’ policy will eventually be their undoing. It’s all in the numbers, and it‘s the same problem faced by Europe and Japan: not enough babies in 2000 equals not enough workers in 2021. The US is looking pretty healthy in this respect, thanks mainly to Mexican immigrants, which makes me wonder why Steyn gets so tremendously het up about them in this book. If I were an American conservative, or even a Canadian conservative now resident in New Hampshire like Mr Steyn, I’d be rubbing my hands in glee at the thought of all those hard-working, family-oriented Catholics streaming over the border. One would be hard pushed to think of any minority group more perfectly attuned to Republican Party values, except for the Poles, and they’re not allowed in at all these days. It’s therefore somewhat unsavoury for Steyn to end one of his chapters with a description of terrorists sneaking through the fence with a nuke and then blowing up Washington. You could use exactly the same scenario to justify closing down the ports, which are a much more likely conduit. Or why not just intern all the Canadians? Better safe than sorry. Since I demurred from so much of this book’s content, you might be wondering why I gave the thing four stars. Heaven bless us all, it’s because it’s fun! No commentator in Britain or America writes as well, and as amusingly, as Mark Steyn. Here is a very brief excerpt. Mr Steyn notices a bumper sticker saying ‘I think, therefore I’m a Democrat’. It does not delight him: ‘What kind of sentient being boasts on a bumper sticker about his giant brain? And cites as evidence thereof his unyielding loyalty to a political machine? Talk about putting Descartes before the whores’. Regardless of which side of the political toast you spread your butter on, I hope we can all agree that conservative writers who write with such brilliance, ingenuity and skill as this are in every case preferable to the likes of Heffer and Hitchens (P), who compete with each other every time they pick up a pen for the title of World's Grumpiest Man.