Recently we had a disagreement here between us and commenter Joe about Mark Steyn. I defended Steyn, and I also cited a number of National Review scribes who both write and argue well. I think I may have left one out, or if I didn’t, I did him less than justice.

Charles C.W. Cooke is his name. I know. Another Brit. Hadn’t realized that before I saw him on Gretchen Carlson’s show. Unlike Steyn, he doesn’t tell us all the time that he wasn’t born here. I only started noticing him in the past few weeks when he was covering ObamaCare with meticulous research and outstandingly correct — no, make that talented — writing and reporting.

Okay. For the record. Yes, he’s An Oxford grad. As I looked further into his résumé, I realized that Joe has a point. Compared to Cooke, who is all of 29, Steyn does seem at times callow. As if, and though I hate to put words in anyone’s mouth, I will, Steyn seems to be saying, “I plighted my troth with the USA, but you’re not quite up to it, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, though thank goodness I still have my mordant wit for protection from ultimate heartbreak. As do you.”

Charles Cooke strikes me as substantively different. I can usually detect Brit writing. I didn’t detect his. He is writing as an American journalist, not as an inside/outsider doing us the favor of his insight. My initial take was that he was a serious reporter and a highly competent wordsmith, but I had no guess about his background beyond confidence in what was obviously an excellent education. I’ve come increasingly to rely on his updates about the politics and pratfalls of ObamaCare. He has an editorial opinion but it remains focused on facts.

Then I encountered this essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 presidential election. I’ll give you representative teaser quotes, but if you don’t read the whole thing, please don’t comment.

Why I Despair

Once upon a time, when civic society flourished in Britain, it was uncontroversial to observe that to demur at government involvement in the achievement of an end was not necessarily to consider that end undesirable. Under Leviathan, such distinctions draw blank stares. In 2010, on the BBC’s Question Time — a British current-affairs show on which the guests trip over one other to display the appropriate degree of fealty to whichever orthodoxy is in the news that week whilst the audience tries to be as clever as one can be without doing any reading — the question of impending government spending cuts was raised. One audience member stood up and, waving her hands around, asked who would mow her elderly mother’s lawn if the government no longer did it. The audience clapped. The host looked serious. Not a single person on the panel said, “You!” Neither of the putatively Conservative guests even raised an eyebrow. A particularly oleaginous MP proceeded to tell her that it was a “good question.” I threw a coffee cup at my television…

I quite earnestly believe in all of the stuff that I’m not supposed to. I believe that America is exceptional; that it is an objectively better nation than any other that has ever existed; and that it is, as it was explicitly designed always to be, the last, best hope for mankind. As Winthrop’s sermon poetically put it, America is the “Shining City upon a Hill,” there so that men without liberty have somewhere to turn and a light that they might follow. I followed that light — 3,500 miles from my friends and my family — because I believed that my life would be better here, because I wanted to be free, and because I felt that under American liberty I would be able to be myself more honestly and more fully. There is nowhere else I could have gone…

The president has an ample library of ideas from which to choose, and yet he raids the Old World. Compare Barack Obama’s entire oeuvre to a single line from Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus or Frederick Douglass — or even Ronald Reagan. Does it stand up? Only in a society that has lost touch with the ancient and is reflexively in love with the new could such a man be considered to be an inspiration.

And yet, he has now won twice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect such a man once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to elect him twice looks like carelessness. (Or, rather, criminal negligence.) This year, certainly, was not the perfect storm of 2008. Then, novelty and redemption played a role; this time, an insipid bore ran on an openly statist platform and won the day in a country that is supposed to be “center right.” Maybe it no longer is. In 1980, when faced with a set of policies that demonstrably hadn’t worked and a president who wanted to take America leftward, America chose a different path; in 2012, it doubled down. That says a lot about a people. The central problem, then, is not that Obama will be president for the next few years, but that the American people — knowing him — chose to reelect him. Even if this is put down to a failure of Romney’s turnout operation or Hurricane Sandy or Obama’s brilliant targeting, it does not say much for their commitment to classical liberalism that a significant group of Americans stayed away from the fight because they didn’t like Mitt Romney. That this was not a clear-cut repudiation of the president should sound the alarm.

Yes, this whole essay sounds very English. It’s a voice, I suspect, that only emerges when he is speaking from the soul.

And I see here a kindred soul. He fears it’s all over. I feel exactly the same way. But he’s still not giving up. He knows this is the last stand on earth, and he’s resolved to be here and fight to the bitter end, doing the best job he can.

Not so bad if we can receive an infusion of passion from overseas. I know I welcome it. Maybe you will too. You should. A day may come when we’re all manning the last barricade together. And for such occasions Brits always have that cool little half pint silver hip flask full of 12 year old scotch.

Here’s his archive at National Review.

P.S. Yeah, upon review, I should have known he was a Brit. In page after page after page, I can’t find a syntax error, a grammatical error, a usage error, or even a prepositional or comma error. (Well, there was a typo in one of his posts the other day… but it was more of a shock than a proof.) Frankly, I didn’t know they still had those guys. You know. People who really are as accomplished in the niceties as Benedict Cumberbatch sounds. I’d bet the farm he doesn’t even talk about the problems between “you and I,” which the Laborites have embraced along with Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow.