My interview with Mark Steyn

The conservative journalist Mark Steyn came to Cornell for the second annual Roe Howard Freedom Lecture, which is described in the brochure as a place for speakers who "challenge familiar ways of thinking," but based on Steyn and last year's lecturer, Dinesh D'Souza, I think that's basically code for "yearly right-wing lecture," which is fine, because we're getting George Stephanopoulos in May.

Anyhow, I made it my goal to interview Mark Steyn for The Cornellian. I've always found him to be an interesting character. Compared to most conservative pundits, he's far and away a far more clever and funny writer than any of them, and what's more he seems to come from more of a background of cultural studies, so when he talks about the depravity of today's hip-hop or whatever he actually knows what he's talking about and cites specific, non-Ludacris examples.

So I read his latest book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and was surprised to find that I agreed with much of it, which in retrospect isn't so surprising because most of his points are incredibly hard to argue--yes, freedom of speech is a good and necessary thing, Islamic sharia law is a bad thing, and disaffected western Muslims are exerting more control on the secular western lifestyle. As a committed atheist, I find it hard not to point out that a Muslim takeover of the west is to be avoided, but surprisingly, many of my fellow atheists would disagree with me, even as they have no problem taking on innocuous (so to speak) targets like Fred Phelps.

His speech was extremely engaging and thoughtful, even if he mainly just regurgitated the main points from his book, and the audience, which I observed to be a mostly liberal (liberal arts school, natch), couldn't help but be entertained by his anecdotes and his obviously massive rhetorical skills, which you will be able to tell in this interview really put me to shame. I had previously contacted his publicist about meeting him after the lecture to interview him, but unfortunately he had to leave to go to some dinner thing, so he asked if I would come by early in the morning.

So I showed up at Brackett House at around 8:45 with Hainstock's tape recorder in hand, knowing that I had until 9:30 when class started to get as much out of this man as I can. I think the majority of this interview tended to involve William F. Buckley, who died last week, but I didn't really intend that. I'll probably blog about Buckley's death tomorrow. My dad was actually a huge fan, and I remember watching Firing Line as a kid and not learning, until years later, that he actually wasn't British.

Unfortunately the tape recorder didn't last long enough, but I think I have a decent amount of material. I got the impression that Mark Steyn is an individual invested passionately in culture and art, and he believes they are causes worth fighting for, even worth dying for. Unfortunately, there are not that many people anymore who feel this way. I think I am smitten.

Nathan Sacks: Uh, ok. I'm here with Mark Steyn...I think I'm going to go through these questions. I think you answered some of these more or less last night...I guess feel free to go off on tangents as you see fit. I thought I'd start with...because I don't know if you feel you've already talked about this way too much already, or it's just way too early, but your thoughts on the recent passing of William F. Buckley and what this means for the conservative movement and for political discourse in general.

Mark Steyn: Well, he was a great man. It's hard to imagine how how important he was. There was no philosophical, intellectual conservatism in this country until Bill rounded one up and got one going 50-something years ago. If you look at what the Republican movement was after FDR was elected, it had sort of dwindled down into this ineffectual mass of country club Republicans on the one hand and...pathetic, really, isolationists on the other. They nominated as their presidential candidates moderates like Thomas Dewey, or non-partisans like Eisenhower. But there was no intellectual energy on the American right. And such energy as there was was completely unattractive: the anti-semitic aspects, the conspiratorial aspects, both of which Bill had a critical part in getting rid of. He was the great impresario of the movement. Without him, we would not have had Goldwater in '64, and then Reagan in 1980.

I would also add personally that, you know that every forceful young man turns into a genial, relaxed wit in old age, that's the way it normally goes. But right until the end, Bill Buckley was always interested in the future and where things were going. He was personally very kind to me as he was to basically two generations of writers in this country. He was a brilliant man at spotting young talent, and very generous about promoting it and encouraging it.

I've reached that stage in my life where I've become rather resentful of younger whippersnappers coming up who are hot and going places (laughs), because you realize you are essentially confronting your own obsolescence. Bill was never like that, he was an incredibly generous guy. I owe him an awful lot and so do two generations of American writers.

Nathan Sacks: So you've had several interactions with him over the years since you both worked for National Review, right?

Mark Steyn: Yeah, I wouldn't say I knew him well because in some ways he was an enigmatic, he was an impossibly glamorous figure, and I think that if you meet someone at a time when they are really at a stage in life by which they have been glamorous for a long time, it's very hard to relate to them from your point of view as a normal person. I remember, the first time I met Frank Sinatra, which was not an in-depth encounter, you're meeting a guy who at that stage hasn't been treated normally by people for 50 years (laughs). So in a sense that's sort of unnerving, and that was true of Bill, which was even more unusual because Bill was not a singer or a movie star. But he was someone who became a very glamorous personality through television and through other things.

I'll always remember, my little boy got obsessed with the Disney movie Aladdin, which I found a rather tiresome film, but the kid wanted to watch it over and over and over again. One thing I liked about it is that Robin Williams at one point in that movie...

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, I remember that...

Mark Steyn:...He goes into a William F. Buckley impression, and I remember saying to my little boy, "Oh, that's daddy's boss!" (laughs) And my kid thought that was pretty cool. But that's the point, Bill Buckley was essentially a political commentator who was sufficiently glamorous to be parodied in Disney movies, and that's very unusual.

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, I remember he says something like, "Oh, there's some provisos, a couple of quid pro quo..."

Mark Steyn: Right, right (laughs). That's right.

Nathan Sacks: Um, what did you think of the response, not necessarily from or National Review or The Weekly Standard, from the mainstream media...like I was watching Bill Maher and he was talking about, you know, conservatives--and you talked about this yesterday--conservatives should pay their respects to William F. Buckley by refraining from all these "Hussein" attacks or whatever...

Mark Steyn: Right, right. Well, I don't know. The idea that Bill represented this sort of urbane, genteel, civilized conservative, I think isn't the whole story. He would not have succeeded if he was. Now the mainstream media always liked ineffectual conservatives. They like the 1996 Clinton-Bob Dole campaign because Dole was a civilized loser. He was what the media wanted conservatives to be. They want someone who is perfectly old, amusing, but past it and no threat. That's how they saw Bob Dole, and that was their preferred character of conservatives.

Now, sometimes they get that conservative in life, sometimes the Republican party nominates Bob Dole while he's still alive, and they get their preferred Republican candidate. Other times, they wait until the guy is dead, and then they discover that, you know, he was a great figure after all. When Reagan died, this guy was thought of as a madman by these people from 1980 to 1988. In the 1980s, the best-selling poster was that Gone With The Wind poster with Reagan holding Thatcher like Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, and a nuclear mushroom cloud behind them saying, you know, "She promised to follow him to the end of the earth, and he promised to arrange it." They thought he was an apocalyptic nuclear madman. When he died, and they realized the country loved him, suddenly Reagan in death was this genial, avuncular figure. Again, a man of no political accomplishments, an intellectual lightweight, all the rest of it...but, in death they discover that he's okay.

And I think the same is true of Bill Buckley. The point about Bill Buckley isn't that he used long words, or he was urbane, or he was elegant, it was that he achieved things, he used language for a purpose. He wasn't someone...this idea that he used words like (inaudible) is not the case. He used language for a purpose, and he accomplished these purposes. That's what made him dangerous. In the 50s, he changed the American political scene. So the idea that they would like urbane, elegant conservatives who who use long words and don't say all the nasty and mean-spirited things that Ann Coulter and Rush and the rest of the gang did isn't really true. The fact is that Bill was sort of the Ann Coulter or Rush of his day.

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, well...I remember he said something during the 80s, something like gay people should be stamped or something like that...

Mark Steyn: (laughs) Well I think in all fairness it was HIV-positive people tattooed on the base of their spine, and....

Nathan Sacks: And also, he said something during the 50s about how he was opposed to the civil rights act, and he said something like...blacks, well not just blacks but blacks and uneducated whites shouldn't be allowed to vote, or something like that?

Mark Steyn: Well, he came to see that he was wrong on the issue of civil rights in the 1950s. And that was the one thing he was wrong he about. He was right about every other issue but he was wrong about that and he came to see that.

On the matter of AIDS, I think he was making a joke in bad taste (laughs). I think in fact Jeff Hart, his colleague at National Review, who...they had sort of a running joke, that if you have AIDS there should be tattoo on the base of your spine saying, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," (laughs) which in a politically correct age is in bad taste, but it's a joke. It's really just a good joke in bad taste. And I think that's the point, that Bill was...you know, I think you want the main arguments, you know there was something very strange going on in the 80s. In the early days of AIDS, no one had ever seen a public health crisis like this, where the politically correct reasons...governments all over the world were going to sort of huge lengths to portray this public health issue as something other than what it is.

I remember a friend of mine telling me about his spinster aunt who lived in Yorkshire, in England. It was a snowed out day, the wheels were covered with snow, and she was watching the postman get off his bicycle and struggle twenty minutes over the snowed out hills to get to her house. So she was all excited, because he must have been delivering something. When he got to the door, there was one letter, and it was a form letter from her majesty's government, telling her to cut out the unprotected anal sex (laughs). And it was absurd, only you know, it wasn't really absurd, because a lot of people died that shouldn't have died. But Bill was writing, in a sense, about the peculiar political position that Thatcher was in during this public health crisis.

Nathan Sacks: Okay, so you talked a bit about how you think the media likes these sort of innocuous, ineffectual conservative figures. Do you think John McCain fits that sort of role now?

Mark Steyn: Well, John McCain is almost like the uber-definition, the apotheosis of the media maverick. And by media maverick, I guess what I mean is that...

Nathan Sacks: You mean not a maverick, really?

Mark Steyn: Well, no. What gets you credit for being a media maverick, a maverick is someone who is a Republican who votes with the Democrats on a bunch of issues. Not all issues, but the ones they care about, like campaign finance, which no real person in America really cares about but which the media do, in part because it's a threat to their own unbridled political...it's a threat to their own particular positions. So, he's the definition of a maverick, because he's a Republican who votes with the Democrats. If you were to have...it's a much more disciplined party in that respect...but if you were to have a Democrat who consistently voted with Republicans, he wouldn't get half the kudos...I mean, Joe Lieberman, Lieberman is essentially a doctrinaire Democrat on many, many issues, on abortion and all kinds of things, but because he supports the president on the war he's considered not a maverick. So, McCain is...this whole maverick type is a creation of the media, and one hopes that Senator McCain stands for more than that, but he's a problematic figure for conservatives.

Nathan Sacks: Yeah, well we've already seen several conservative figures--I don't think you count yourself among them--say that they would rather vote for Clinton than McCain, so that four years later they could get the Democrats back or something....

Mark Steyn: Well, that's essentially a Leninist argument, that things have to get a lot worse before they'll get better, so in a sense it's slightly unnerving to have conservatives making that claim because it is essentially a revolutionary argument. You know, the great Lenin thing was that traditions had to get worse, you need to assist conditions to get worse, and then society will be ripe for revolution. So when people say they need to make...and in part it is a delusion because you say, we need to get Hillary or Obama in there, then they'll screw things up so much that in 2012 or 2016, people will turn to a real conservative. It never works like that, it never ever works like that, and what they would do is, unless they're Jimmy Carter, that's a different thing, but what's more likely to happen is that society would carry on, not quite badly enough to cause the total meltdown of the Democratic party.

The idea that if you get Hillary or Obama in there, and you get incremental socialized health care, you get government annexation of various areas of life, but not to such a catastrophic degree that in 2012, there will be a stampede to vote for a real conservative. I think that's the real delusion. There's a skill in a two-party democracy, there is a certain amount of skill in knowing the right moment to lose, but I think those people who are saying, well, you get Hillary, you get Obama, and...generally speaking, Democrats are very skilled. They control the House, they control the Senate, and they would make sure to use that opportunity to the fullest. So people saying...you know, Hillary wouldn't be that bad, in fact, and the reality is that, on the war...if the argument is that John McCain is best on the war, there is another argument that says that in a two-party democracy, parties don't fight wars, nations fight wars. At some point, this is a war the Democrats have to take ownership of, and wage it themselves in the nation's name.

So, in a sense, John McCain's biggest strength, which is his reluctance to lose in Iraq at a time when Hillary or Obama were stampeding for the surrender parade, I think that's an actually not a strength really, I think that's an argument for saying that, no, the Democrats have to take ownership for this war too, whether they want to or not.

Nathan Sacks: Okay, so...I guess, getting back to your book, I was going to ask you what inspired you to write America Alone. You already sort of talked about how you wanted to reframe the so-called War on Terror, which is a term you don't really like...

Mark Steyn: Right.

Nathan Sacks: But, you wanted to redefine it not necessarily as a war against, you know, bomb throwers but as a slow population takeover.

Mark Steyn: Right. Well I guess it really happened about six years ago, about six months after September 11, I was...you know, we had September 11, and on September 12 all of us were suddenly public experts on Islam. And when the Afghan campaign started, all of a sudden we were all experts on Pashtuns and the great history of Afghanistan. Once the Taliban had fallen, I thought that there were aspects of this I didn't understand and I really wanted to learn more about it. So I sort of scheduled a fact-finding trip to the Middle East. And I guess that's a rather grim thing, so I thought I'd treat myself to a couple of weeks in the fleshpots of Europe beforehand.

So I went to Paris, Vienna, and Brussels and so forth, and I visited, for the first time, the Muslim ghettos of Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and some other places too. I realized when I went on to the Middle East that, in fact, that actually was relatively relaxing compared to the Muslims in western Europe. The Muslims in the Middle East were far less alienated than the Muslims in western Europe.

And once you think about that, you realize that...yeah, Mohammed Atta was part of a German cell who pulled of September 11. The shoe bomber was a British subject. The Millennium Bomber, who was arrested on the British Columbia-Washington State border, was a Canadian. So, you realize that in fact it is the most westernized Muslims who have the most intense grievances. The issue here is the intersection of Islam and the west. It's not about these Pashtun goatherds in their caves: they're not really a threat to any of those people. What it is, it's the proportion of second and third generation Muslims who, the longer the spend in the western world, the more they loathe it. That's the particular challenge here, this idea that it's, you're at war with sort of...everyone would like to think they're at war with primitive savages jumping up and down and shaking a spear. It's not like that.

What is happening here is that...the Ayatollah Khomeini used a great term when he created this thing, "the great Satan," because he recognized that America is a seducer. What he means is that he feared that Muslims around the world would be seduced by this "Satan." They would be seduced by America into adopting America's ways, so they'd all end eventually eating cheeseburgers, and listening to Britney Spears, and doing all these terrible things. As he saw it, they would be seduced into this godless, soulless, western way of life.

The evidence is that the west is in fact is an inadequate seducer, and that far from seducing people to a western ways of life, a significant chunk of western Muslims grow more fiercely opposed to it the longer they are exposed to it, and that's a fascinating sociological phenomenon. And it's really at the heart of what this thing's about.

Nathan Sacks: The end of the book provides sort of a ten-step plan for, I guess sort of encouraging Muslims to embrace reform. I was just going to ask if you think that any of these steps have changed very much, or if you think that some steps are more important than others, particularly step nine, which is to end the Iranian regime.

Mark Steyn: I think so, because...I think that really does raise the vision of mushroom clouds on the horizon. The Iranians have walked the walk for thirty years. If they say they're gonna do something, they do it. They changed the facts on the ground in Gaza. They took Arafat's horrible little kleptocratic squat and they turned it into a fiefdom of fierce Islamism, with Hamas. They changed the facts on the ground in Lebanon, with Hezbollah. They blow up community centers in Argentina, which is a long, long way from anything having to do with the Palestinian question. Every day, they do not even accept the minimal obligations of sovereign states and they never have done it, from the moment they seized the US embassy, from the moment they issued essentially a hit contract on Salman Rushdie and then started killing his publishers and translators.

If they have nuclear technology, they will use it in some form. That's the point. Even if they only use it to blackmail the Arabs and the Europeans into doing what they want. It changes the facts in a way that America cannot afford, and the Europeans have psychologically accepted the Iranian nuclear bomb. America can't.

Nathan Sacks: You said that...someone asked you yesterday about the oldest Muslim population in America, Cedar Rapids, and why that wasn't such a bad thing, and you talked about how there's a big difference between a multicultural and a bicultural society.

Mark Steyn: Right.

Nathan Sacks: Do you think it is possible that what is happening right now in Britain or Canada could possibly happen in the United States, and what steps would have to happen in order for that to come to pass?

Mark Steyn: I think there's an issue here, clearly, not to the same degree. You know, it's never a thing of, you know, the French government gets 100% wrong when it's dealing with Muslims, and Americans get it 100% right. There's all kinds of different shades. There are issues here where these fellows who were picked up from Georgia Tech were going to blow up various targets in Washington, and they took that video of the Pentagon and you hear them talking over it saying something like, "This is where our brothers struck the Pentagon," and, "Allahu Akbar." You can see that even though they are people who were raised in the United States and hold US passports. They are not Americans, they are not Americans here (points at heart), where it matters. Their identity, as they feel it, is not American.

Now, that may be different for the longstanding Muslim population of Cedar Rapids. The evidence is that a certain number of young Muslims around the world embrace this Pan-Islamist identity. There is fewer in the States than in Canada or in Europe.

Nevertheless, you have things here in America that I think are worrying, like the Minneapolis taxi business where you had Minneapolis cab drivers who were denying service to people carrying alcohol, to blind people with seeing-eye dogs, to women who they regarded as being dressed inappropriately. What was worrying was that the reaction of the Minneapolis Airport Authority was initially to say, well, we're gonna have two different colored lights on taxi cabs. So we'll have whatever it was, a light that says we won't take blind people or people carrying alcohol or women dressed like tramps, but we'll have another cab over there with a flashing light on. So if you are blind, or carrying alcohol, or you're some underdressed slut, you can go and get in that cab.

And that's completely...it's only been forty years since part of this country abandoned separate drinking fountains, segregated by race in the south, and they abolished it because it was racist. And now it wants to, in fact, reintroduce segregation at a Minneapolis airport in the name of multiculturalism. And that's always the issue, it's not the provocations of the Muslim cab drivers. It's the supine attitude of idiotic white progressives and western progressives and multiculturalists terrified when these things come up. I don't want to see, I don't think there should have been separate drinking fountains forty years ago and I don't think there should be separate cabs for blind people, and for people carrying alcohol, and for women who aren't covered from head to toe now.

I don't think segregation in the name of racism is a good idea, and I don't think segregation in the name of multiculturalism is a good idea. But it's the latter that is the bigger threat now. When you look at Harvard just the other week, its gym introduced...it's supposedly a coed university now...but its gym just introduced gender-segregated sessions at the gym for the benefit of its Muslim women. Eventually we'll have separate colleges for boys and girls again, because, you know, in the name of multiculturalism. The new segregation in the name of multiculturalism is a much bigger threat.

Nathan Sacks: On a slightly different topic, what sort of strategies do you use...I guess I'm curious as I am somewhat of a journalist...in maintaining such a prolific body of work, and writing in so many locations? It seems that you get published often and everywhere, and I was wondering where you get the time and what your schedule is like.

Mark Steyn: Well, I'm actually a slow writer. People always think that I must be a fast writer, but I'm a slow writer, generally speaking. Left to my own devices, I'm one of those people who paces, walks around, doesn't do anything until he gets a first paragraph. Once I get that, I sit down and get rolling. But I'm generally a slow writer. When I'm on the road and I'm covering a political convention or I'm live at some event or a bomb goes off an hour and a half before deadline and they want an instant reaction, I can do that, but generally, I'm a slow writer. What works for me is, that would be impossible for me to do if not for the fact that I write for places that are in different parts of the world, so I'm often writing for different time zones, as it were. So you can sort of fit things in because there will be, you know, an early morning thing or a late evening thing. So that gives you a bit of an opportunity to readjust. I find I write actually in a slightly different way, according to whether I'm writing during the day or writing during the evening or whatever.

But I think that, generally, I mean, I wouldn't recommend that. Bill--we were talking about Bill Buckley--Bill used to pride himself on being able to write a column in 45 minutes. I've never been able to do that, never. He could: he had his thoughts organized very clearly, and he could do that, and he also...

Nathan Sacks: He also wrote something like 5o-something books, right?

Mark Steyn: Yeah, and at a certain point, he's got the right idea. The Bill Buckley way is the only way to make writing viable, because if it's difficult for you--if you're torturing yourself over your paragraphs, if you're shifting this and that, this back and forth, paragraph B to paragraph A--I think it becomes all but impossible. I think it's in condensed forms, those are very hard to do. That's why 32-bar songs are some of the hardest things ever to write, because you've only got so many syllables. There's no way it can be increased--you get 32 bars to say only so many notes. So that is something that's you've got to, it has to be worked back and forth, back and forth.

Similarly, I think, a column, if you're writing an 800-word column, that has a rhythm of its own too. It doesn't have the same precision as a 32-bar song, but you've got to understand how to launch a thought, explore the thought, and resolve the thought, all in that form, and that's actually quite difficult. It's not a skill necessarily worth acquiring (laughs), but it is a skill.

Nathan Sacks: Could you name, besides Bill Buckley, some of your favorite writers or public intellectuals, or people you tend to read no matter what?

Mark Steyn: Well I loved Michael Kelly, because--he died in Iraq five years ago--he was an immensely, he had a great way of looking at the world, a lovely way of looking at the world.

At this point the tape recorder ran out (should have gotten the digital one from the Cornellian office). I talked to him for about five minutes more before I had to go to class, which in retrospect I should have just been late to.

Anyhow, besides Michael Kelly he also mentioned his relationship with Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) and mentioned Robert Kaplan as another writer he particularly admired. He also talked about how he refused to work for The New York Times because they insisted on dumbing down nearly everything he wrote (he cited writing something about someone having a "Dickensian air" only to find it had been changed to something like, "He had an air about him the resembled a character from a story by the British author Charles Dickens"), and how he sympathized with Americans who refuse to read because there is so little journalism that hasn't been sucked of its personality and vigor. We also talked briefly about his court case, and he told me that he was planning on live-blogging it, similar to what he did with the Conrad Black case, although I don't know how he's going to do it when he's on the witness stand.

All in all, I wish it had gone longer and I had said more, because I think he and I have more in common than I suspected. My article on his visit is going to be on the front page of The Cornellian, because I guess nothing bigger happened around here. I'll post that up when I feel like it, and hopefully they will post the actual article so I won't have to.