I’m not sure how old you are, so I hope I’m not wishing for your demise.

And I do agree about Mark Steyn’s shortcomings, sort of. I mean, things do tend to be more layered, but basically the mould is there. I mean, think about it. They attacked big time, in the heart of Establishment, killing friends and family of the Establishment (whom I mean to be the people in the west he’s talking about), and just four years later that Establishment doesn’t care anymore, and thinks any galvanization is just an over-reaction. There’s a good section on this in today’s Best of the Web, btw. So now we’re at the point that he talks about, except as well these guys can’t control their more enthusiastic young crazies and yet still things go their way.

But I think what Mark’s missing, and this is because he’s of a certain age, that all the people in the West he’s talking about are all baby boomers, and everyone behind baby boomers are going to run things a lot differently when the baby boomers have been gracious enough to drop dead. But because everyone in the West runs on democracy, and the baby boom that produced the boomers was so boomy, we basically have to wait that long to get anything accomplished.

But by (stupidly) attacking now, they are galvanizing the west to react against them, rather than letting it slide into the sunset. (Of course the “intellectual elite” – including the media – will never get it, and will perhaps only ever achieve enlightenment as their heads roll across the floor, but the rest of us – the ordinary people – are waking up).

That is the thing I have noticed with Mark Steyn: his thinking is very linear. Current trends are just extrapolated, without understanding that there are usually two or more players in the game that react and counter-react. The type of thinking required here is more common in the economic analysis of markets, for example.

Not that Mark isn’t good, but he ends up being too pessimistic because of this limitation in his thinking. Personally, I think even France will be OK, after all.

Mark Steyn worried about demographics and mentions the European crisis on a regular basis. Well today he has an extensive article on the subject on OpinionJournal, actually a reprint from the New Criterion. The basic observation is that westerners are…