Just in time for the release of Steyn’s book, Walter Russell Mead has an essay on the “American Tinderbox.” Starting from an overview of flash mobs of black teenagers attacking random white victims, he ends this way:

The conditions for a Category 5 hurricane are all there; it is easy to see a political reaction taking shape in this country that would make the Tea Party movement look like a PTA bake sale. They say that great storms start with trivial causes: a butterfly waves its wings and, when conditions are just right, the wind begins to grow.
The country is so angry now that it would not take much more than the right butterfly in the right place to take us to the next stage of struggle over the Great Society legacy. Just as the urban riots of the 1960s played a role in the hasty adoption of the sixties policy complex, so a rash of small urban confrontations that caught on à la française could dramatically accelerate and intensify the current upheaval in American politics.
If that happens, the result is very unlikely to be a strengthening of the foundations of the Great Society state.