The Failure Of The Social Model

DECADES AGO a much-loved European pleasure was to shake the head in knowing exasperation about American race riots. Those Americans just didn’t have a clue.

But now the tables are turned. There is nothing more delicious than for an American to sit back and enjoy the social problems of Old Europe. And this week we have a ringside seat at the race riots in Paris. Or are they religious riots? We can chuckle as French government leaders issue firm statements about the rule of law and preserving peace. And as rivals for the French presidency snipe at each other.

One of the key responsibilities of any government is to control the volatile spirits of young single males. As Lee Harris has written, the civilized world is in a neverending battle with the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” The gang of ruthless men has always found a ready source of recruits among young single men. Legitimate government needs to get to the young men first before the ruthless men—the revolutionaries, the criminal gangs, the religious warriors—do.

In the modern welfare state, as Theodore Dalrymple writes, we have built an almost perfect system for delivering angry young men to the gang leaders. The brilliance of our progressive thinkers and policymakers in bringing this about is almost breathtaking.

First of all, they have made it possible for single women to raise children without having to marry their fathers. This is helpful in raising a generation of gangbangers. Then they have set up a rigid labor market that vitiates the traditional employment at will contract. There are minimum wage laws; there are licensing requirements; there are penalties for firing employees; there are generous unemployment benefits. All of these worthy measures discourage employers from hiring combustible young men and they discourage combustible young men with limited skills from seeking employment. And then there is the whole left-wing discourse of social justice, discrimination, and multiculturalism that condones and encourages alienation in the lower orders.

So what do these young men do? They do what comes naturally. They join a gang, and hang out looking surly. From time to time they have a rumble. In the case of young Muslim men from South Asia, the rumble takes the form of suicide bombing.

A highly secularized Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so; the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society; the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy; the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value; the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient;

What is left for the disaffected youth but the holy sacrifice of suicide bombing?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.