A decade and a half back, the late Christopher Hitchens was talking to the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and brought up my demographic-death-spiral thesis from America Alone. Hitch wanted to know whether, when the PM got together with the Continental bigwigs, it was part of “the European conversation”.
Tone replied that it was part of “the subterranean conversation”.
By which he meant that nice house-trained EU prime ministers hadn’t figured out a way to raise such subjects in public without being damned as racists and becoming electorally unviable, at least anywhere west of the Landstraße, to modify Metternich. They still haven’t. Fifteen years on, almost every subject worth talking about remains part of “the subterranean conversation”.
