[Bret L]

John Derbyshire Says We Are Doomed!—Good News For The Alternative
Right

By Steve Sailer

"As the subtitle of John Derbyshire’s new book, We Are Doomed, suggests, Derb has a serious message for his fellow conservatives in the post-Bush Era:

“Conservatism has been fatally weakened by yielding to infantile
temptations: temptations to optimism, to wishful thinking, to happy
talk, to cheerily preposterous theories about human beings and the
human world. Thus weakened, conservatism can no longer provide the
backbone of cold realism that every organized society needs”.

Derbyshire then embarks on a high-velocity tour of the worldview of
the emerging Realist Right (also known as the Alternative Right or
Indie Right, descended from the paleoconservatism of the 1990s).

And without the George W. Bush millstone around their necks,
mainstream conservatives have the opportunity to conveniently check
out what has developed in this underground during this decade: a
comprehensive, coherent way to think about the world as it is.

This all sounds frightfully serious. But there’s nothing funnier than
realism spiced with a little acerbic caricaturization. We Are Doomed,
a high-spirited romp through everything likely to ruin our children’
lives, would make an excellent Christmas present for those with a
sense of humor.

After all, who doesn’t like a little doom and gloom? Why should Al
Gore have all the fun of roaring around the world on a private jet,
making a fortune telling us we are ruined due to global warming
climate change, when topics like demographic change are so much more
alarming that we are not even supposed to talk about them?

In We Are Doomed, Derb does talk about them, mordantly and even
gleefully, in chapters such as “Diversity: Nothing to Celebrate”,
“War: Invading the World”, “Immigration: Inviting the World”, and “The
Economy: In Hock to the World” (using my helpful categories).

He notes, for example, that Washington State University in Pullman, a
small town on the Idaho border, has a Chief Diversity Officer who
oversees a full-time staff of no less than 55. Derb even worries about
the career prospects of the diversicrats:

“What will happen to all these smiley-face yuppies employed in the
Diversity industry when Diversity has done its work, when … the last
Diversiphobe has been hustled off to a reeducation camp? … Will not
all the Diversity consultants, Diversity trainers, Diversity
assessors, Diversity lawyers, writers of diverse school textbooks,
distributors of grants for Diversity workshops …—will they not be
unemployed?”

There are, however, limits to even Derb’s capacity for concern:

“My advice would be not to worry too much about this. Diversity will
be with us for a long time. Perhaps its work will never be done.”

Derbyshire’s interest in the politics of pessimism goes back at least
to his 1997 novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, in which Chai,
once a Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution, now an older but
wiser Long Islander, comes to realize that Confucius would have
esteemed Silent Cal over all other 20th Century Presidents (not to
mention the stupendously optimistic Chairman Mao).

Derb is also unusual among political pundits in finding other topics
more intriguing than politics. His bestselling book so far has been
2004’s Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved
Problem in Mathematics, which he followed up with Unknown Quantity: A
Real and Imaginary History of Algebra.

Perhaps his greatest love is poetry, as embodied in his audio CD, 36
Great American Poems.

Verse is not, though, a passion among contemporary Americans, as Derb
notes in his chapter “Cultu Pooped Out”. For example, President
Obama, whose career as a poet fortunately terminated in college,
selected as his Inaugural Poetess Elizabeth Alexander [Email her]
She’s the kind of person Obama is most comfortable around: a high-
status member of the affirmative actionocracy without noteworthy
individual talents. On January 20, 2009, she regaled the nation with
such prosaic lines as:

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to preempt grievance.

Indeed! Without “grievance”, where would Elizabeth Alexander’s career
as a Yale professor of English, African-American literature, and
gender studies be?

As Derb asks:

“And with all that victimology, what is Ms. Alexander a victim of? She
had a very comfortable upper-middle-class upbringing, a deal more
comfortable than my working-class one, I’d guess—her father was
secretary of the Army!”

We Are Doomed is written in a sort of quantitatively anecdotal style
that combines ease of reading with the kind of original research that
the Internet has made possible (but not terribly popular).

For instance, Derb quotes his role model, Dr. Samuel Johnson: “The
chief glory of every people arises from its authors”. He then
quantifies that on a traditional measure of glory, Time Magazine
covers, Americans aren’t much interested in literature anymore. He
counts the number of novelists or poets on Time covers in this decade
(zero) versus the number who made the cover from the Time’s founding
in 1923 through 1929 (sixteen).

Similarly, to demonstrate his experience that “the single major factor
determining house prices in the suburbs, we quickly discovered, was
proximity to a good school; and ‘good school’ was universally
understood … to mean ‘school with … not too many black or Hispanic
students’.” Derb gives us the numbers on his municipality of
Huntington and two neighboring burgs on Long Island:

((Snipped due to formatting issues-Bret))

He asks: “Am I telling you something you don’t know?”

He goes on to point out: “This illustrates the emerging demographic
split in the United States: whites and East Asians on one side,
African Americans and Hispanics on the other.”

That raises a question of terminology, however. One problem with my
coinage “Non-Asian Minorities” is that NAMs won’t be minorities all
that many decades longer. As an alternative to “NAMs”, Derb suggests:

“Leonard Jeffries, [Email him] professor of black studies at City
College, New York, has suggested the terms ‘Ice People’ for whites and
East Asians, ‘Sun People’ for blacks and Hispanics.”

Perhaps a more specific acronym for affirmative action beneficiaries
would be best, such as “Blacks, Latinos, Indians, and Polynesians”, or
“BLIPs”.

Well, we can leave this question of nomenclature to the marketplace to
decide.

In his immigration chapter, Derb unloads on “Kumbaya conservatives”
whose thinking about immigration goes no farther than “rhapsodize,
moralize, demonize”.

He then coins a neologism that, tragically, has become even more
apposite in the few weeks since its publication:

“Many immigrants of course assimilate to American society. I think I
have. I hope I have; I’ve tried to. Many others, however, especially
in the second and following generations, absimilate. …”

(When I stayed at Derb’s house in Huntington five years ago, he asked
me to pick out a movie at the video store for the family to view. My
choice of Spellbound, the fine documentary about the National Spelling
Bee finals, proved apt: my host, the recipient of an old-fashioned
English education, could not only spell almost all the ridiculously
hard words, but could even define them. )

“Absimilation seems to be rather common, though you don’t read much
about it. I noticed it years ago in England. The first generation of
black Caribbean immigrants to my native land strove to be as English
as possible. … It was dismaying, in the 1970s and 1980s, to see a
large piece of the second-generation cohort break off and slip into
crime, idleness, and social dysfunction.”

Major Hasan is a classic example of second-generation absimilation.

In summary, American conservatives have felt themselves locked into
optimism ever since Ronald Reagan’s electoral successes. Yet, Reagan
was realistically optimistic, in contrast to the conventional wisdom
of the 1970s that held that American capitalism couldn’t even out-
compete Soviet Communism.

It’s after 20 years of national success that you need to start really
worrying.

George W. Bush, however, then tried to introduce a new, “compassionate
conservatism”, taking Ronald Reagan’s American optimism to the global
level. While Reagan’s optimism focused on tapping his fellow
Americans’ capacities, Bush’s greatest enthusiasm was reserved for
foreigners. His grand strategy of Invite—Invade—In Hock placed his
trust in illegal immigrants, Iraqi voters, and Chinese factory workers
and bankers.

Doomed we may be, but Bush is gone, and we of the Realist/Alternative/
paleoconservative Right are still here.

With We Are Doomed, we now have a deft and delightful way of
introducing ourselves."

http://vdare.com/sailer/091115_derbyshire.htm