Someone commented on Alex's recent post re: conservatism and poses the question: how do you support modern day Conservatism with lower-case-"c" conservatism - meaning, how does Corrupt support some elements of free market ideology while simultaneously advocating that people contribute to and help revive organic culture in their own towns? The two seemingly are at odds, but we like to look at history, learn from it, and propose solutions that would work for people who care about a sustainable future.

Since we have history to fall back on, we realize that, for example, in the European model, talented young folks would leave small towns and make their way into cities so they could indulge in culture, arts, science, etc. In the US, though we started out with cities (colonies) and spread into farmland instead of the other way around, our talented folks have the same tendencies - to migrate to cities where they have more resources with which to realize their full potential. So the commenter is asking, what's the solution to this - we need to keep a mobile labor force as America has to support some of the free market ideology, while simultaenously encouraging most people to stay in the towns in which they grew up - or at least find a place where their values are shared with most other members of the community. For example, if you love sodomy, maybe you can enjoy a community of people who are open about their love for sodomy, and so forth. For those who love math and science, there would be communities undoubtedly built with many labs and universities.

I think Michael Arth may have found a good start to a compromise between the two seemingly conflicting ideas. In his model, you're certainly not forced to stay in one place, but if more of our towns and cities looked like his pedestrian villages and you add the element of people living with others who share their values, people wouldn't need to always be on the go because everything they need would mostly be within walking distance. I understand this would require huge amounts of rebuilding within our existing infrastructure, but it's crumbling anyway, so why not rebuild it properly? A movement toward a better, more sustainable culture will be gradual, and what we propose in part are the first steps toward combining the best elements of our existing society and balancing them out with necessary, functional elements like the free market.

Just when you thought you had a reason to feel depressed about the world, it turned out to be far more promising. Conservatism is now winning ground, even in traditionally socialist nations:

"The last 50 years have shown that private farmers are more socialist than the state. State farms are antisocialist. The only thing they socialized is loss-making," said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a former state economic adviser who is now a vocal critic of the government.

"There is too much control and bureaucracy that hinders everything," Espinosa Chepe said. "It's impregnated with a 50-year-old operating method that is built on taking orders and is not used to decentralization.

Such quasi-free-market language wasn't heard much in Cuba until recently. But Rául Castro has shown a pragmatic streak on economic matters, trying to improve state efficiency. In July 2008 he surprised many by advocating a shift away from the orthodox socialist concept of equal pay, arguing that those who were more productive should be paid more.

Less bureaucracy and State intervention, more competition, and more incentives to ensure that harder work leads to a greater pay off--that's the private market proving its simplicity and efficiency. Even hardcore socialists like Raul Castro understand this, which is why he's cutting back on government programs and is instead trying to motivate his socialist army of workers to do their part for the national economy.

I bet he'll see clear improvements over time, unlike the Obamaramafied Amerika, which attempts to softly emulate the European model. Naturally, with historical proof in mind, we know that the European socialist model of society is inferior to a deregulated market where individuals are forced to take personal responsibility and work together for their communities. Sweden is an excellent example of how a society can improve - and degrade - depending on whether it chooses the Right or Left path:

Beginning in the 1870s, however, Sweden created the conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world's fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third-highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. By the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

So the short story is that Sweden came out of deep poverty around the late 1800s by embracing Conservative solutions, but entered a decline during the 1960s when the Social Democratic (center-leftist) hegemony took over, and today Sweden has entered a post-welfare phase where welfare reforms are embracing more and more market solutions instead of government take-overs. As a result, we're rapidly taking back what we lost during the 60s.

There is no doubt that a form of sound Conservatism, preferably similar to the one Corrupt advocates, will lead to greater prosperity and positive hope for the future of Europe, but where or who is the voice to carry this message around in the otherwise politically stalled Europe? Here is one prominent figure Alfred and I approve of:

Until recently, Daniel Hannan's political career appeared to be in rude health. After ten years as a Conservative MEP he had become the darling of the party's libertarian right, acquiring a large following among grass-roots Tories. His speech in the European Parliament denouncing Gordon Brown as a "Brezhnev-era apparatchik" was watched by thousands on YouTube, earning him a prominent slot at the Conservatives' spring conference. His passionate Atlanticism and his stylish turn of phrase had made him a staple of America's conservative talk shows.

But after using a succession of US television appearances to attack Britain's National Health Service, Hannan stands accused of undermining David Cameron's modernising mission and of handing Labour cheap ammunition for a spring election campaign. Hannan has made his views on health care clear for some time - in his most recent book, The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, published last year, he advocates the introduction of a Singapore-style system of personal accounts - but it took the increasingly fractious debate over President Obama's health-care reforms to bring them to public prominence.

Like John Redwood during the mid-1990s - a man Hannan hails as an "Old Testament prophet" - he could become the standard-bearer of the Thatcherite right, those who continue to believe in Conservatism as a transformative project. Hannan's brand of Conservatism, advocating a profound rupture with New Labour, exhilarates those activists privately disquieted by Cameron's more evolutionary approach.

What we have predicted before can, and will, come true:

After the speech, a generic mob of fork-wielding peasants bursts into the chamber and carries Gordon Brown to the nearest guillotine. Daniel Hannan MEP duly receives an important government posting.

And so victory is ours, if we dare to seize it.

Although the anti-American sentiment has gradually dissipated since the end of the Bush Administration, it's now growing slowly again during the Obama era. Europe scorns America's policies, yet it seems to be worried little about its own future, despite the fact that there are plenty of signs of the European empire slowly crumbling:

World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently told Spanish newspaper El País, "What began as a great financial crisis and became a great economic crisis is now becoming a great crisis of unemployment, and if we don't take measures there is a risk of a great human and social crisis, with major political implications."

Although unemployment is high and rising across all demographic groups, Europe's young workers have been especially hard hit. Throughout this decade, Europe has had higher rates of youth unemployment -- about 16 or 17 percent -- than the OECD average. But until recently, the rate was mitigated by a boom in short-term temporary contract work, which does not always require employers to offer expensive benefits. These jobs went, disproportionately, to young people. By some economists' estimation, they accounted for most of Europe's job growth in the past decade.

Moreover, youth unemployment, much more so than for older workers, carries dangerous social effects: social exclusion, depression, poorer health, social disruption, and higher incidences of crime, incarceration, and suicide. With every month a teenager is unemployed, for instance, his or her likelihood of being convicted of a crime increases.

Wait, what "European youth"? Oh yeah, the labour you imported from the third world. What a great recipe for disaster, especially knowing the record of assimilation in Europe is terrible. We won't have to wait very long before Paris burns again, and yet again our leftist leaders will have the opportunity to blame social factors like poverty, unemployment and anal sex during childhood. No one would dare to mention what Conservatives in Europe have been trying to explain for a decade: Welfare socialism and multiculturalism is a bad mix. What happens if you say it?

Last month’s EU election results saw the press reacting with horror at the rise of “far-Right” parties. However, while some parties (such as the anti-Semitic Jobbik, which created a paramilitary wing in 2007) are indeed far-Right, some others described as such, are, as Soeren Kern has observed, among “[…] the best allies that Jews (and Israel) will find in Europe today.”

Fascists, the far-Right, neo-Nazis and skinheads aren’t really fond of Israel, Jews, women’s rights, or gay rights. They aren’t interested in the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, democracy, or freedom. As it turns out, they’re fond of Islamism. Islamism and Nazism have had an on-off relationship since the 1930s. However, only last year Abraham H. Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, observed a “[…] burgeoning relationship of far-right and Muslim extremists who increasingly are working together to promote anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”

But just as the West seems so thoroughly unwilling to support Iran’s democracy movement over the Islamofascist regime, so the same governments, political parties, and much of the media, have shunned moderates and reformers in Western countries. It is the extremists that the authorities appear keen to appease or promote, and the Islamic fascism of Hamas and Hezbollah that they appear keen to accommodate in their own countries.

This is why I recently noted that the European Right probably are the Jews' best friend. No one would pay any attention to that, because Israel has already been linked to oppression in Europe by the leftist elite, which essentially means it's as bad as Nazi Germany. Nevermind that it was the favorite victim just a decade ago. This is the logic of masochism that's tearing Europe apart and making it an inconsequential, impotent ally to America in the struggle for Western independence and momentum.

We're seeing an increasing religious radicalization in the Middle East, whose tentacles of suicidal force are spreading to Europe. You haven't forgotten the bombings in London and Madrid, and the Muhammad caricatures, have you? Sweden investigated Islamic fundamentalism in the pluralist suburb of Malmö, and came to the conclusion that while a minority of all Muslims were fundamentalist, they exerted great influence over the rest of the "moderate" Muslim citizens, to the point where the latter group lived a more fundamentalist lifestyle in Sweden than at home. Wait, that report was intolerant, so the media put a bin on the whole topic and everyone was told to mind work, family and mindless entertainment instead. Sorry we conducted that study.

Europe is weak, and radical forces can sense it far away. When a culture declares it's no longer willing to defend itself, some other culture will come along and dominate it. It doesn't really matter if that cultural force in itself is as weak and unstable as the current political and cultural climate in the Middle East, because it has got a demographic and will-powered advantage that Europeans don't have. It's nasty to say it, but it's worse not to mention it at all. America may right now be a decaying empire on its own, but while it is struggling to stay afloat on the world political scene as a dominant actor, Europe is increasingly transforming into Eurabia De Luxe. Who are we laughing at?

America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
Mark Steyn

"Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." This quotation from Arnold J. Toynbee opens up the first chapter in Conservative Mark Steyn's provocative book about the decline of the West. It suggests two things: First, the greatest enemy of the West today is civilization exhaustion, or the lack of will to defend its founding traditions and principles. Second, weakness is, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, "a provocation" to imperial forces. Steyn's story takes place in the midst of a Europe in economic and demographic collapse, contrasted against an American super power slowly coming to an end.

Steyn's main thesis is that Europe has succumbed to suicidal demographic trends, essentially forcing it to invite mass immigration from North Africa and the Middle East to finance its unsustainable Social Democratic welfare State. Combined with native culture denial, an impotent civil society, and the multicultural doctrine of cultural relativism, Europe is, according to Steyn, giving in to the new great enemy of radical Islamism. The follow-up question to this scenario is obvious, and explained by the title: Will America have to stand alone to defend Western values against radical Islamism?

The answer is a sad but truthful "yes." America is a unique player in the West in that it hasn't (yet) adopted the European welfare model, has not yet entered the demographic decline, and has resisted the ideological suicidal virus of cultural masochism. To back his thesis up, Steyn arms himself with demographic figures, analyses of Islamic radicalization pre- and post-9/11, and an impressive historical knowledge of the relationship between the East and the West. His conclusion is startling and is likely to force many anti-Americanists and multicultural dimwits in Europe to alter their views about their own future.

This is a horrifying book to read, because there's actually little hope in the struggle to preserve what's left of Western civilization in light of the enormous challenges we face. But most worrying of all is what Steyn, with sardonic wit and cruel facts, describes as the real enemy we need to battle: the spirit of resignation. "The end of the world as we know it" is the world post-WWII, created for a short period of human history. Despite its negative aspects, it's what keeps our empire going -- but if we don't confront the realities of our time, our moment may not survive our generation.