Mark Steyn's Blog, page 44

Nothing Could Be Keener Than to be in Palesteena in the Morning

Jay, Michael: re the pre-war meaning of "Palestine," you're right, of course. Three years ago, in a post on "Jew-baiting, then and now," I wrote about the 1936 Cable Street riots in the East End:

By the way, those contemporary lefties who think the Jews should get out of Palestine might note the protest slogans of 70 years ago: In those London demonstrations, the Jews were told, “Go back to Palestine!”

Nevertheless, as much as I love "Shanghai Lil," in the interests of full disclosure, one must note "Lena From Palesteena," the 1920 novelty number by Con Conrad (who wrote "Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me" and the first Oscar-winning song "The Continental") and J Russel Robinson (who wrote "Singin' The Blues" and Cab Calloway's "Reefer Man").  (No vocal on this recording by Filu and his Swingers, but they're hot.)

The eponymous Lena appears to be a somewhat stereotypical Jewish New York gal of the period; Conrad's lyric has certain Yiddisher cadences ("Such a clever girl is Lena"); and Robinson's tune is not un-Klezmer-(or perhaps bulgar-)like. However, once Lena takes her concertina to Palesteena:

When she squeaks

Her squeezebox stuff

All the sheikhs

Can't get enough.

If only it were that easy.

Grand Old Polyannas?

In The Washington Post, David Ignatius writes about the National Intelligence Council's gloomy prognostications for America circa 2030. The NIC is not quite in the Steynian pit of despair, but they're getting there. What I found a bit silly was this passage from Ignatius:

This pessimism among intelligence analysts contrasts sharply with the relentlessly upbeat prognostications made by politicians, especially the field of Republican presidential candidates, who describe an America of perpetual sunshine and unchallenged leadership.

"Perpetual sunshine"? What planet is this guy on? The proposals by most of the leading candidates (and, indeed, Paul Ryan) are a bit too weak tea for my tastes, but all of them accept the premise that, unless there's some serious course correction in the next four years, America is headed for steep decline. Politico identified it as this year's GOP campaign theme. If there's a "perpetual sunshine" party out there it's the one that thinks there's nothing wrong with America that a few more trillions in "stimulus" won't cure.

As for his own contribution, Sunny Dave Ignatius offers this:

My own view (I was asked to critique the presentations as an independent journalist) is that the key issue is how the United States adapts to adversity. That offers a slightly more encouraging picture: Relative to competitors, America still has a more adaptive financial system, stronger global corporations, a culture that can tap the talents of a diverse population and an unmatched military. The nation’s chronic weakness is its political system, which is approaching dysfunction. If the United States can elect better political leadership, it should be able to manage problems better than most competitors.

That's awfully breezy, don't you think? Almost everything in that list is open to question - from an "adaptive financial system" that includes some of the most dysfunctional banking arrangements in the developed world to an "unmatched military" that, while undoubtedly superior to conventional armies around the planet, wily Pushtun goatherds have nevertheless spent a decade matching rather handily. The complaceniks in this debate are not those of us on the right.

Eye of Newt in Gaza

Like others round these parts, I've been reviled as a Rino squish and Romney shill for expressing a few misgivings about Newt, so credit where it's due: One thing I like about him is that he knows so much more about so many more things that once in a while he can't help blurting out something that no poll-tested, focus-grouped, finger-in-the-windy frontrunner would ever say in a thousand years. For example:

Senior Palestinian leaders on Saturday strongly criticized comments by Republican presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich that the Palestinians are an "invented" people, calling the comments ignorant and racist.

I wouldn't disagree with that - "Palestinian" as a national identity is entirely invented - and it's heartening to have it said out loud. But the Palestinians are hopping mad:

Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said the Gingrich remark was "the most racist statement I've ever seen..."

An executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hanan Ashrawi, said Gingrich has "lost touch with reality."

The statements show "ignorance and bigotry" and are "a cheap way to win (the) pro-Israel vote," Ashrawi told Voice of Palestine radio, in comments reported by the Palestinian Authority-controlled WAFA news agency.

To be honest, I had no idea "top Palestinian negotiator" Erekat and Mrs Ashrawi were still in business. They spent years serving as the bespoke western media frontmen for the kleptocrat Arafatists. Good to know that, even in the Hamas era, some things never change in the CNN and BBC rolodexes.

So, if you're keeping score of who's who on the Rino Squish list, it's me, Krauthammer, Coulter, Tom Coburn, and the Fatah Revolutionary Council.

Statist Delusions

The president of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kan., last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness archeologists of the future sifting through the rubble of our civilization will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.

“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc. remain the most inviting target and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to reelection and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess .#...#And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules .#...#It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”

#ad#This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student-loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less “on their own” in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life -- and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.

It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics -- the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game “Pass the Parcel,” in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.

The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” says Macbeth. “To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow,” said the political class, like Macbeth with a heavy cold (to reprise a rare joke from Mrs. Thatcher). And they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, Jon Corzine, former United States senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy, and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial-services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama’s Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Biden described as the fellow who’s always “the smartest guy in the room” explained his affairs thus: “I simply do not know where the money is.” Does that apply only to his private business or to his years in the Senate, too?

#page#When Corzine took over the two-and-a-quarter-century-old firm, he moved it big-time into sovereign debt -- because you can’t lose with sovereign debt, right? Because a nation, even one that is in any objective sense bankrupt as Mediterranean Europe basically is, is not bankrupt in the sense that a homeowner or small business is: Corzine figured, reasonably enough, that no matter the balance sheets of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the rest, they’d somehow be propped up unto the end of time. As their credit ratings hit the express elevator to Sub-Basement Level Four, Corzine was taken down with them. The smart guy made a bet on government and lost. That’s where the rest of us are headed: The “you’re not on your own” societal model of Western Europe has run out of people to stick it to.

#ad#In Kansas, in his latest reincarnation, the president channeled Theodore Roosevelt in trust-busting mode. “He busted up monopolies,” cooed Obama approvingly, “forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices.” But who wields monopoly power today? Washington dominates ever more areas of life, from government-backed mortgages to the government takeover of education loans to Obamacare’s governmentalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. In my most recent book, which makes an attractive and thoughtful Christmas gift for the apocalyptically minded loved one in your family, I quote an old joke about the British equivalent of the U.S. antitrust division: “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” This is a profound insight into the nature of statism: By definition, there can only be one government -- which is why, when it’s “monopolizing,” it should do so only in very limited areas.

Yet, after hymning the virtues of “better services and better prices,” the president went on to issue the latest brain-dead call for increased “investment” in education. America “invests” more per student than any other nation except Switzerland, and it has nothing to show for it other than a vast swamp of mediocrity presided over by a hideous educrat monopoly. Might this fetid maw not benefit from exposure to “better services and better prices”? Perish the thought! Instead, Obama is demanding increased “investment” in “education” in order to “give people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines and semiconductors.”

I am not a trained economist, but it is not obvious to me that the United States of America is crying out for more wind turbines, and, if it is, I’m sure many of those colleges’ tenured Race and Social Justice Studies professors could be redeployed to serve as such. In Europe, the political class is beginning to understand that the social-democratic state created to guarantee permanent stability risks plunging the Continent into the worst instability since those happy-go-lucky days of the 1930s. By contrast, in Kansas, the president of the United States is still riding the tie-dyed wind turbine and promising to waft you to Oz. These are dangerous times -- and, as many will discover, whatever assurances the statists give, in the end you’ll be on your own.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Re: Has Gingrich Changed? et al

Since Ramesh, Mona, Yuval & Co have got out the tire irons, I figured I might as well pile on. But then a reader from the Cayman Islands reminded me that I'd said pretty much everything I have to say about Newt in November 1998 - in the London Spectator, upon his resignation as Speaker. For those Newtroids who huff that I must be in the tank for Mitt (that's some tank), November 1998 is 13 years ago, when I'm not sure I'd even heard of Mitt Romney.

Anyway, back then, after a brisk trot through his collected Brainstorms-of-the-Week - "The Triangle of American Progress", "The Four Great Truths", "The Four Pillars of American Civilization", "The Five Pillars of the 21st Century", "The Nine Zones of Creativity", "The Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilization", The Thirty-Nine Steps to the Five Year Plan of the Six Flags of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers of the Nine-Inch Nails of Renewing Civilizational Progress for 21st Century America, etc, I concluded:

The Democrats demonised Newt as an extreme right-wing crazy. They were right - apart from the 'extreme' and 'right-wing', that is. Most of the above seem more like the burblings of a frustrated self-help guru than blueprints for conservative government. For example, Pillar No. 5 of the 'Five Pillars of American Civilisation' is: 'Total quality management'. Unfortunately for Newt, the person who most needed a self-help manual was him - How to Win Friends and Influence People for a start. After last week's election, Republicans have now embarked on the time-honoured ritual, well known to British Tories and Labour before them, of bickering over whether they did badly because they were too extreme or because they were too moderate. In Newt's case, the answer is both. He spent the last year pre-emptively surrendering on anything of legislative consequence, but then, feeling bad at having abandoned another two or three of his 'Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilisation', he'd go on television and snarl at everybody in sight... For Republicans it was the worst of all worlds: a lily-livered ninny whom everyone thinks is a ferocious right-wing bastard.

That's how it would go this time round. We'd wind up with a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Alvin Tofler who canoodled on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi demanding Big Government climate-change conventional-wisdom punitive liberalism just as the rest of the planet was finally getting off the bandwagon ...but the media would still insist on dusting off their 1994 "The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas" graphics.

Dogged If You Do, Dogged If You Don't

Even as a notorious Islamophobe, I confess to a certain admiration for the way Islam gets you coming and going. You may have noticed in recent years various foot-of-the-page news stories about Muslim cabbies at Minneapolis Airport refusing to allow seeing-eye dogs in their taxis, or a dispute between Dutch dog-walkers and a local mosque, or a mysterious spate of dog poisonings in heavily Muslim parts of Catalonia, or the decision by the British police to make sniffer dogs wear booties to avoid offending Muslims, or Anwar Sadat's daughter suing Dreamworks for naming a dog after her father in the film I Love You, Man, or the introduction of the seeing-eye horse for blind Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan. And you might have concluded, as a sensitive multicultural type, that Muslims aren't quite so keen on man's best friend as your average infidel.

More fool you. The French actress Marie Laforêt made that careless assumption and, as a result, she's now on trial:

72-year-old Laforêt, who first found fame as an actress in the 1960s, placed an ad on an internet site looking for someone to carry out some work on her terrace in 2009, reported daily newspaper Le Parisien on Thursday.

She specified in the ad that "people with allergies or orthodox Muslims" should not apply "due to a small chihuahua."

Laforêt claimed that she made the stipulation because she believed the Muslim faith saw dogs as unclean.

Perish the thought!

Experts in the Muslim faith were quoted as rejecting the defence.

"Dogs are not considered unclean and it's false to suggest otherwise," said one quoted by the newspaper.

Did the Council on American-Islamic Relations get that memo? Or the Ayatollah Khomeini? Or is it only French actresses who get hauled into court for having the temerity to "suggest otherwise"?

I'm no "expert in the Muslim faith", but surely one reason Muslims don't keep dogs is because so many infidels are eager to be their poodles.

The Terrorists Have Won

I wrote below that "sometimes societies become too stupid to survive". Yesterday, we learned that the crack operatives of the TSA had prevented a teenage girl from boarding her flight to Jacksonville because her handbag has a gun design on the front of it. But don't worry, after she'd been put through the wringer, SouthWest were able to get her on a later flight to Orlando, a mere 300-mile round-trip detour for her distraught mother and, in the scheme of things, a relatively modest transfer of man-hours from the productive class to the great sucking statist behemoth.

Today brings the news that, fresh from that triumph, TSA agents decided to strip-search an 85-year old, 4'11", 110-pound grandmother in a wheelchair:

As she tried to lift a lightweight walker off her lap, she says, the metal bars banged against her leg and blood trickled from a gash.

“My sock was soaked with blood,” she said. “I was bleeding like a pig.”

She says the TSA agents showed no sympathy, instead pulling down her pants and asking her to raise her arms.

“Why are you doing this?” she said she asked the agents, who did not respond.

As Andrew wrote below: "Because they can."

One reason we're the Brokest Nation In History is because the great moronic security bureaucracy of the United States devotes untold resources to criminalizing the law-abiding - as I often have cause to reflect when being finger-printed and eyeball-scanned every time I fly back to the US from abroad. In my case, that's because I'm a legal immigrant and making you feel like a punk who's held up the liquor store is part of the price the bozo bureaucracy exacts for a Green Card. But why US citizens born and bred put up with this nonsense is another matter.

US airport "security" serves no serious purpose except to accustom free-born peoples to behaving like a compliant bovine herd. America is now a land where 85-year old grannies are strip-searched without probable cause. You're extremely naive if you think that, once government acquires a taste for that, it will remain confined to the airport.

Zero Tolerance, Zero Proportion

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about the grand jury indictment of Jerry Sandusky and in particular the sad husk of a man, 28 years old, who watched Sandusky sodomize a ten-year-old boy in the showers and then went home to consult with his dad about the proper procedure for reporting any potential concerns he might have about child rape. And I concluded:

A land of hyper-legalisms is not the same as a land of law... When people get used to complying with micro-regulation, it’s but a small step to confusing regulatory compliance with the right thing to do — and then arguing that, in the absence of regulatory guidelines, there is no “right thing to do.”

Among much of America's hideous educrat monopoly, the Golden Rule is that regulatory compliance is always the right thing to do, no matter how stupid and wicked it is. This news item - "First Grader Accused Of Sexual Harassment" -came to my attention with the important qualifier "if we are to take this Boston Globe story at face value". But, if the facts are as the Globe reported them, then a seven-year old boy is about to have his life destroyed for kicking a schoolmate in the groin - as boys have done to each other throughout human history. One can understand that a school board might wish to discourage such activity, but not that it is so irredeemably, obtusely perverse as to categorize such an act as "sexual harassment". The response of the official school board spokesmoron, one Matthew Wilder, is not encouraging:

“Any kind of inappropriate touching would fall under that category,’’ Wilder said. “The school administration is conducting a full investigation that has not concluded yet.’’

The mother said she spoke with the principal, Leslie Gant, who supposedly told her:

It doesn’t matter who hit who first... He said he hit him in the testicles. That’s assault. That’s sexual assault.

There may be "another side" to this story, but it's hard to foresee any version of events in which a First Grader can plausibly be guilty of "sexual assault". Nevertheless, if found guilty, Mark Curran when he turns 18 will be placed on a "sex offender registry", and his life will be ruined. If officials of the Boston public schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year old kicks another seven-year old in the crotch that that is an act of "sexual harassment", then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city's children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. If you're wondering how a candidate's presidential campaign can be derailed by allegations of "gestures" of "a non-sexual nature" that made women "uncomfortable" two decades ago rather than by his total ignorance of foreign policy and national security, well, this stuff starts in kindergarten. The loss of proportion and of basic human judgment in the American education system ought to be an unnerving indicator.

Egypt's Descent

I’ve been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they’re unnerving enough. It’s the polls from Egypt. Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we’re so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going to throw trillions of dollars down the toilet they’d rather it was an Al Gore–compliant Kohler model in Des Moines or Poughkeepsie than an outhouse in Waziristan. Alas, reality does not arrange its affairs quite so neatly, and the world that is arising in the second decade of the 21st century is increasingly inimical to American interests, and likely to prove even more expensive to boot.

#ad#In that sense, Egypt is instructive. Even in the giddy live–from–Tahrir Square heyday of the “Arab Spring” and “Facebook Revolution,” I was something of a skeptic. Back in February, I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly within an hour or so of Mubarak’s resignation. Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was interviewing telegenic youthful idealists cooing about the flowering of a new democratic Egypt. Back on Fox, sourpuss Steyn was telling Megyn that this was “the unraveling of the American Middle East” and the emergence of a post-Western order in the region. In those days, I was so much of a pessimist I thought that in any election the Muslim Brotherhood would get a third of the votes and be the largest party in parliament. By the time the actual first results came through last week, the Brothers had racked up 40 percent of the vote -- in Cairo and Alexandria, the big cities wherein, insofar as they exist, the secular Facebooking Anderson Cooper types reside. In second place were their principal rivals, the Nour party, with up to 15 percent of the ballots. “Nour” translates into English as “the Even More Muslim Brotherhood.” As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, if that’s how the urban sophisticates vote, wait till you see the upcountry results. By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called Facebook Revolution, two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of sharia.

The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak’s Egypt was worse than King Farouk’s Egypt, and what follows from last week’s vote will be worse still. If you’re a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian, or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its finance minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a member of parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as finance minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly “unipolar” world. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem like that, does it? The term “Facebook Revolution” presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging. In London, young Muslim men used their cellphones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more disassimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents. To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women’s rights or gay rights is delusional.

#page#Consider, for example, the “good” news from Afghanistan. A 19-year-old woman sentenced to twelve years in jail for the heinous crime of being brutally raped by a cousin was graciously released by President Karzai on condition that she marry her rapist. A few weeks ago, you may recall, I mentioned that the last Christian church in the nation had been razed to the ground last year, as the State Department noted in its report on “international” religious freedom. But Afghanistan is not “international” at all. It is an American client state whose repugnant leader is kept alive only by the protection of Western arms. Say what you like about Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood but at least their barbarous theocratic tyranny doesn’t require vast numbers of NATO troops to build it.

#ad#I am not a Ron Paul isolationist. The U.S. has two reasonably benign neighbors, and the result is that 50 percent of Mexico’s population has moved north of the border and 100 percent of every bad Canadian idea from multiculturalism to government health care has moved south of the border. So much for Fortress America. The idea of a 19th-century isolationist republic holding the entire planet at bay is absurd. Indeed, even in the real 19th century, it was only possible because global order was maintained by the Royal Navy and Pax Britannica. If Ron Paul gets his way, who’s going to pick up the slack for global order this time?

Nevertheless, my friends on the right currently fretting about potentially drastic cuts at the Pentagon need to look at that poor 19-year-old woman’s wedding to her cousin rapist and ponder what it represents: In Afghanistan, the problem is not that we have spent insufficient money but that so much of it has been entirely wasted. History will be devastating in its indictment of us for our squandering of the “unipolar” moment. During those two decades, a China flush with American dollars has gobbled up global resources, a reassertive Islam has used American military protection to advance its theocratic ambitions, the mullahs in Tehran are going nuclear knowing we lack the will to stop them, and even Russia is back in the game of geopolitical mischief-making. We are responsible for 43 percent of the planet’s military spending. But if you spend on that scale without any strategic clarity or hardheaded calculation of your national interest it is ultimately as decadent and useless as throwing money at Solyndra or Obamacare or any of the other domestic follies. A post-prosperity America will mean perforce a shrunken presence on the global stage. And we will not like the world we leave behind.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Re: Wake Me When the Meaningless Deficit Arguments End

David, I'm inclined to agree with you. If you'll forgive a quick plugette, the thesis of my book is that the mountain of debt is a symptom rather than the disease. The same is true throughout most of the Western world: I'm sure Angela Merkel, for example, understands every time Athens comes a-knocking that the real problem is not the Greek finances but the Greek people. For what it's worth, Congressman Ryan seems to concur:

Moral relativism has done so much damage to the bottom end of this country, the bottom fifth has been damaged by the culture of moral relativism more than by anything else, I would argue. If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics — I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism. Now is it my job to fix that as a congressman? No, but I can do damage to it. But it’s the job of parents to raise their kids … But let’s not ignore it. These things go beyond statistics, they go into the culture. As a policymaker, I simply make that as an observation, not that I have an answer and a bill I can pass in Congress and to fix that.

A nation can survive debauching its finances. Debauching its human capital is a trickier fix.