Never More Dangerous

A good article until you check the name of the author. The union of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the form of universal healthcare free at the point of need certainly does not gladden his soul. Nor does the fact that two of those four countries, including his own, had the wit to say out of the Iraq War.

He is most unlikely to celebrate the status of the Queen in any of the other 12 Commonwealth Realms, or in at least eight of the 10 British Overseas Territories (and there are a lot of Saint Helenians in the Falkland Islands these days), or in any of the three inhabited territories dependent on Australia, or in either of the two states in free association with New Zealand, or in the one inhabited territory dependent on New Zealand, or as Paramount Chief of the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji, which elects the President of that Republic from among the members of the chiefly houses paying homage to the Paramount Chief.

What unites those overwhelmingly or entirely non-white places, and the pertinent Melanesian half of Fijians, with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and each of the three Crown Dependencies, is Christianity, usually of a very traditional kind.

Whereas neoconservatism, although it has inherited the Leninist sense that religion is sometimes useful, derives from Max Shachtman (and through him from Trotsky), from Ayn Rand, from Leo Strauss, and from the eponymous author of The Jefferson Bible, through three of whom it is, like so many coercive utopianisms, ultimately a manifestation of the denial of the Messiah and of the rejection of the doctrine of Original Sin. When Steyn praises the monarchy, it is because it is useful to whom in the way that the institutional Orthodox Church was sometimes useful to Lenin.

And useful to what end? Suitably refreshed, if even that is necessary, Steyn would doubtless welcome the giving of effect to the American statute, still on the books, which provides for Her Majesty's Canadian provinces to be made States of the Union by the deployment of armed force. Or, at least, he would have done when there was a President of the United States of whom he approved, and he would do if there were such again.

Each of the present parts of the United Kingdom, each of the present Canadian provinces and territories, each of the present Australian states and territories, and New Zealand, could keep the mere trappings of things like the Crown, just so long as they used the US dollar, gave preference to American goods and services with no suggestion of reciprocity, likewise allowed unfettered American settlement of their territory, adopted American English in schools and elsewhere, and entirely subordinated their foreign and defence policy to that of the United States as defined by the neoconservative think tank network.

Neocons are never more dangerous than when they are pretending to be paleocons; when they are pretending to be, to use a very Canadian word, Tories. There are Canadians from whom this article would have been welcome. There are contributors to an Australian magazine from whom this article would have been welcome. But neither those Canadians nor those contributors include Mark Steyn.