Review by Charles Davenport Jr.

"Happy talk and wishful thinking are for children, fools, and leftists. We are conservatives. We know better." -John Derbyshire
Progressive domination of the media, academia, Hollywood, and pop culture is the equivalent of Chinese water torture: the incessant drip, drip, drip of "enlightened" left-wing opinion takes its toll on those of us who are blessed (or is it cursed?) with a right-of-center worldview. We are force-fed a daily diet of global warming, "green" this and "eco-friendly" that, gay rights initiatives, race- and class-based grievances, new Nanny State programs, Bush-bashing zealots, the coddling of terrorists, the appeasement of Third World dictators-you get the idea.

At length, the conservative countenance darkens. Suddenly, the half-full glass is half-empty. Although most of us endure periodic episodes of gloom and despair, in due course, we regain our cheerful dispositions. John Derbyshire, on the other hand, embraces the negative, wallows in misery, and dips his pen in venom. The resulting volume, We Are Doomed, is a misanthrope's delight, overflowing with political incorrectness, gross insensitivity, and gratuitous meanness. Knee-slapping hilarity abounds, but Derbyshire is also highly persuasive.
The author is most effective when he escorts us into "the deepest depths of self-deceiving happy-talk folly, where dwell the smiliest faces of all, those who promote the great modern ideological cult of Diversity." To this subject Derbyshire devotes an entire chapter of scorn, ridicule, and piercing logic. There has "never been," he writes, "an ideology so heartily and jealously embraced by all the main institutions of a society, that was at the same time so obviously at odds with the evidence of our senses. It is as if the entire Western world had committed itself to the belief that human beings can fly by flapping their arms."

The political Left would have us believe that Diversity is an absolute benefit to society, a claim, Derbyshire writes, that is "demonstrably-easily demonstrably-false." According to studies cited by the author, Diversity is not a bridge to utopia, but the cause of considerable "rancor, disorder, litigation, and violence."

Predictably, a blog dedicated to discussion of We Are Doomed (www.johnderbyshire.com) features a post from an offended reader, who says the Diversity chapter "smells racist." Derbyshire's response is gloriously blunt: "I don't give a fig whether anyone thinks it's ‘racist.' I have not the slightest interest in what is, or is not, ‘racist.' What interests me is whether something is true. If you want to point to something in my book and say, ‘That's racist!', I'm afraid I will just shrug and say: ‘Whatever. Is it true?'" Derbyshire simply prefers to associate with "bourgeois people-people who have bourgeois attitudes and behaviors."
Derbyshire is equally unorthodox on foreign policy, casting a skeptical eye at military moderation and the spread of democracy. Consider his take on Iraq: "I don't, in fact, give a fig about the Iraqis." (He is quite stingy with the figs, isn't he?) "I'm happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples. When they do bother us, though, I want them smacked down with great ferocity." The conservative has long believed that the military's job-in contrast to the modern meals-on-wheels model--is to break things and kill people.
Speaking of broken things, Derbyshire blasts the American public education system, a task that, on C-SPAN, he likened to "shooting fish in a barrel." In his chapter, "Yale or Jail," Derbyshire mocks the conventional belief that every high school graduate should attend college: "American parents," he writes, "purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paying outsourceable office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paying, unoutsourceable work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation."
Despite fashionable opinion, the lack of a college degree does not condemn one to limp eternally among the proletariat-a class which we are importing through mass immigration from the Third World. Here, too, Derbyshire's prose is music to the ears of the long-neglected cultural conservative. The open-borders crowd suggests that "Mass immigration from absolutely everywhere is a jolly good thing," a belief that, Derbyshire writes, "has no evidentiary foundations." America's experience demonstrates only the effectiveness of "large-scale European-mainly British-settlement, under Anglo-Saxon legal and constitutional principles." Like most Americans, Derbyshire favors restricted and highly-selective immigration.

Derbyshire considers We Are Doomed "an exercise in attitude adjustment," and indeed it is. This book allows curmudgeonly conservatives to live vicariously through an author who brazenly declares what so many of us think.

Charles Davenport Jr. ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a freelance writer and a columnist for the (Greensboro, NC) News & Record.

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
By John Derbyshire
Published by Crown Forum
261 pages/$26.00

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