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A smiling gloominary.

Article Excerpt
We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative

Pessimism, by John Derbyshire

(Crown Forum, 272 pp., $26)

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AS a temperamental opponent of John Derbyshire--I suffer from the disease of default optimism, making me one of those he calls "poseurs wearing smiley-face masks"--I hope I quickly forget his delightful (in a delight-expunging way), wide-ranging (though grimly focused), grati- yet terrifying new book. We Are Doomed is a blast of stale air, a key that opens up the dungeon of limitation, a burst of cloud rushing in to protect us from the daylight.

"The proper outlook of conservatives," says Derbyshire, "is a pessimistic one." Those who are familiar with his work in NATIONAL REVIEW will be unsurprised to learn that he considers it his mission to make conservatives cast off what he sees as the foolishly emollient schemes of George W. Bush and get their Samuel Beckett on.

Let it not be said that Derbyshire is cramped of vision: "Despair should be large and general, not petty and particular," he declares. And he's off, diagnosing ills demographic, economic, educational, cultural, political, and even intellectual. (One simple measure that might improve our lot, he notes in passing, would be a more pessimistic outlook on everything, but we hapless dopes can't handle even that.) He makes the case that ethnic diversity increases unrest, that the expansion of the government blob is unstoppable, that the arts have reached their day of...

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