Mark Steyn resists this unscholarly temptation better than his more scholarly rival. This literary lumberjack, who fells whole forests of liberal sacred oaks with his mordant wit, has produced two books, America Alone and After America, which have done a great job of  subverting the legitimacy claimed by the political classes in Europe and America for their self-aggrandising projects and self-destructive habits. On Europe, Steyn is as damning as he is persuasive: from demographic suicide to the abdication of self-defence, he conducts a forensic analysis of the hollowing out of the high culture for which the Continent was still respected a generation ago. Indeed, Steyn wrote off Europe years ago: content to be dictated to by dictators from Colonel Gaddafi to Colonel Putin, the European Union is much less than the sum of its parts. After two world wars, one Cold War and now World War IV, Americans are as resentful of doing the heavy lifting and Europeans are as ungrateful as ever. Yet indignation and ingratitude are not a good basis for policy and the US still has interests as well as sentiments at stake in Europe. The Obama doctrine of leaving the world to stew in its own bile is neither practical nor decent; in fact it is another product of the mythology of decline. No American statesman wants to be indicted when the cry goes up: "Who lost Europe?" 

But if it is perverse of Mark Steyn to write off Europe, it is surely even more perverse to write off America. The flavour of After America is indicated by its subtitle: Get Ready for Armageddon. Steyn believes that while Europeans had the good fortune to have the United States on hand to cushion its postwar decline, Americans will have no such luxury. This is a fair point, but it is a stretch to conclude from this that the US is on the brink of catastrophe, perhaps in the course of the next presidential term. Once again, the villain of the piece is China, which is expected by some to overtake the US economy within the next few years. Steyn has an original twist on the rise of China: he sees it as a much larger version of Islamist Iran: an ageing totalitarian behemoth, demographically crippled by its one-child policy, and rendered much more dangerous by its flaws. Steyn also points out that, contrary to so much "expert" opinion over several decades, economic westernisation has not, so far, led to meaningful political reform. Armageddon is just round the corner because for the first time in history a one-party state, run by a politburo, is in the process of supplanting America not only as an economic superpower, but as a political and cultural one, too. His favourite symbol is the steady shift from English to Mandarin as the world's predominant language. The charge is that it was on our watch the world got used to paying homage (and interest) to an evil empire that doesn't even use the Roman alphabet.

Steyn may be right in this analysis, but I don't see how he can have it both ways. Either China's rise is indeed Armageddon, or there is still everything to play for. Either America's multiple malaises are terminal, or what he calls the "post-American world" is avoidable. Steyn's concluding chapter is devoted to an action plan to restore American greatness: de-centralise, de-governmentalise, de-regulate, de-monopolise, de-complicate, de-credentialise, dis-entitle, de-normalise. In short: what the Tea Party might adopt as a manifesto, if it really were a party.