Article by John Derbyshire |
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| Unpleasant
Truths One
of the disorienting things for an Old World conservative settling in
America is that over here, even conservatives are optimistic. This really won’t do.
A conservative ought to be a pessimist, at least about human
nature, human society, and the prospects for improving them.
Not for us the facile cheeriness of the lefty world-perfecters,
with their New Soviet Man, their Socialist Spiritual Civilization, their
City of the Sun, their coming reign of peace, justice and absolute
equality. We are more of the
temper of H.P. Lovecraft, who began one of his short stories with the
arresting observation that: “Life
is a hideous thing.” In
an attempt to redress the balance, to tug my conservative American friends
back towards a properly gloomy outlook on events, I have given over
today’s column to a list of unpleasant truths.
This is stuff you don’t want to hear, but that, if you are a true
conservative, you cannot dispute. Remember
the slogan of the 1964 Goldwater campaign**:
“In your heart you know he’s right.” Most
of us will die in poverty.
There is no way that systems devised to provide for
mid-20th-century retirees will be able to cope in the mid-21st, with
imploding demographics and a centenarian on every block.
“Defined-contribution” pension plans will have to be baled out
by the federal government, if private enterprise is to survive.
The dollars we get from them will therefore be massively devalued.
Since there is no-one to bale out Social Security, benefits will
soon be restricted to citizens more than 80 years old.
Similarly for Medicare. In
fact... Quality
health care for all is not possible.
Quality health care is what rich people get.
(Actually, according to one of the depressingly tiny number of rich
people I know, even they have trouble getting it.)
The rest of us must wait on line to be mis-diagnosed by
ill-trained, paperwork-swamped, litigation-shy doctors, assisted by nurses
imported from the less hygienic parts of the Third World, and unionized
hospital staff with no-way-you-can-get-me-fired attitudes.
This could only change if the U.S.A. devoted her entire Gross
National Product to health care; and even then, it probably wouldn’t
stay changed for long. Pop
culture is filth.
It is now completely degenerate.
Why do you never hear anyone humming a current pop song any more?
Because none of them is hummable, or even worth bothering to
remember. What is the main
topic on TV sitcoms and “dramedies”?
You know what. Why do
you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: “There
isn’t a single damn movie in here I want to watch”?
Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap. Si
jeunesse savait, si
vieillesse pouvait.
The saddest true thing ever said (by Henri Estienne, 1531-98). Translation: “If
youth only knew, if age only
could.” The
environment is collapsing. The
U.S. will get the blame for it, of course, but the main culprit is the
Third World. Take a trip to
China: the air is a soupy
smog, even in quite remote places. Vast
dust storms sweep periodically across the north of the country, sometimes
continuing right on across the Pacific.
(And in one case last year, the Atlantic, too!)
The rivers run purple, orange and turquoise.
People tell me India is worse.
The inhabitants of Africa are busily stripping their continent of
all vegetation, having already pretty much exterminated the fauna, except
in a few tourist reservations. The
oceans are being fished out, and near-earth orbit is filling up with
lethal junk. Science
has stopped.
None of the really major scientific advances that you have been
reading about since 1970 as “just over the horizon”
is ever going to happen. Cheap
fusion power; the
colonization of Mars; artificial
intelligence; supersonic air
travel you can afford; contact
with extraterrestrial civilizations;
the conquest of cancer, tooth decay or the common cold;
fuhgeddaboutit. Not
all groups are equally good at all things. East Asians will continue
to win Olympic diving events, and runners of West African ancestry will
continue to win the 100-meter dash. Similarly,
nobody will ever be able to devise a test of knowledge or understanding on
which groups with different population-genetic histories all record
identical statistical profiles. You
can have meritocracy, or you can have equality of outcomes by
ancestry-group, but you can’t have both.
Which one do you want? It
seems we have already made up our minds.
Corollary..... Affirmative
action is absolutely essential to social order.
Think about it. Socialism
is popular.
Practically all of the Socialist
Party platform on
which Norman Thomas ran in 1928 has been implemented.
Thomas himself noticed this as far back as 1962, exulting that:
"The difference between Democrats and Republicans is:
Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while
Republicans have accepted them reluctantly."
Yet the main negative factors in the national life today, according
to spokespersons for this country’s largest political party, are
corporate greed, tax cuts for the rich, and poverty-stricken old folk
crying out for life-saving medications.
Plainly we need still more socialism.
Don’t worry, we’ll get it.
Conversely... Conservatism
is dead. No genuinely conservative policy will ever be enacted, ever
again, by any U.S. government or the government of any important state.
Great masses of ordinary Americans believe that “conservative”
means “repressed fundamentalist freak.”
Why would they not believe this?
Every medium of mass entertainment and mass information has been
preaching it to them, over and over and over, for twenty years.
The Ronald Reagan of 1980, if he were to stride onto the national
stage today, would be unelectable. Calvin
Coolidge would be laughed out of public life, if by some bizarre accident
he were permitted to wander into it.
Even when large majorities of Americans favor a conservative
policy, nothing will be done to implement it.
For example.... Nothing
will be done about immigration.
Business leaders and economic decision-makers all believe (perhaps
correctly) that mass immigration is the main reason for this country’s
continuing economic vitality. The
Left sees poor immigrants as clients.
Huge numbers of Americans are now “Hispanic,” and believe that
anti-immigration activists hate them.
The Joint Chiefs have no intention of letting their commands be
used to police the southern border, understanding perfectly well that they
would never be allowed to open fire on anyone — which is the main thing
that trained soldiers are trained to do, and the inability to do which
leads to collapsing morale and cratering recruitment.
(It is also, of course, the only thing that would have any actual
effect.) Only
Anglo-Saxon countries can do democracy. The natural state of human
society is despotism. If you
tally up all the human lives that have ever been lived on this planet
under organized systems of government, no more than five per cent were
lived under consensual systems. Even
to get up to five per cent, you have to include places like ancient Athens
and Tudor England, which wouldn’t pass muster as “democratic” by
modern standards. In the last
couple of centuries, practically all consensual systems have been
Anglo-Saxon. Other cultures
can fake it for a few decades, as France, Germany, and Japan are currently
doing, but their hearts aren’t really in it and they will swoon
gratefully into the arms of a fascist dictator when one comes along.
As a corollary of this... China
will get stronger and richer, without moving one inch closer to
constitutional government. The
Chinese Communist Party has got “over the hump” into a plateau of
stability that, barring severe environmental catastrophe (see above), will
last for decades. Rich and confident, unrestrained by electoral considerations
or Judeo-Christian ethics, or any other kind of ethics, they will do all
the things we dare not do: human
genetic experimentation, culling of “useless mouths,” militarization
of space, minor wars of aggression, etc.
In particular... Taiwan
will be re-united with the Motherland.
...by some combination of economic carrot and military stick.
The U.S. will grumble ineffectually, up to the point where the
Chinese Ambassador loses his patience and asks the U.S. Secretary of State
point-blank: “How many
cities are you willing to lose over this?
We ourselves are willing to lose three or four.”
Then we will stop grumbling. Something
inconceivably horrible will happen in the Middle East.
Probably the following: The
Arabs will commit some huge, gross atrocity against Israel.
Surviving Israelis will respond by massacring the Palestinian
Arabs, and perhaps erasing a couple of Arab capitals.
100 years of peace in the Middle East will follow. The
four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride.
Just to remind you, their names are:
War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.
No. 4 will presumably always be with us, but at least we have got
Nos. 1, 2 and 3 pretty much fenced off in sub-Saharan Africa, right? The chance that you or me, or your kids or mine, will die in
a genuine mass-mobilization-type, carriers-going-down-with-all-hands-type,
flattened-cities-type war, or from starvation, or in some horrid
medieval-type, communal-grave-type, 1918-flu-type plague, is actuarily
insignificant, right? Well,
believe it if you like, but your belief has no foundation more substantial
than wishful thinking. History
suggests that it is most likely false. The
next version of MicroSoft Windows will be even buggier and more
counter-intuitive than the last. That
one you know perfectly well, of course — I don’t know why I bothered
to include it. Further bad
news on this front: e-mail
will be rendered completely useless by spam, all that wonderful free
information on the web will gradually be shut off into fee-paying sites,
and NRO will start posting my photograph again. Poverty
and hardship build character; prosperity and security destroy it.
Look around you. The
U.S. constitution is incompatible with a war on terrorism.
It is absurdly easy to commit a terrorist act in the U.S.A. This state of affairs could be changed only by abandoning key
constitutional protections. We
shall be very reluctant to do this; but if deaths from terrorism reach a
certain number, we shall do it anyway.
That number has either seven or eight digits.
Justice
is dead. As the last of the generation of judges who actually believe
in the law heads into retirement, the administration of justice will be
divvied up between avaricious trial lawyers and ideology-addled graduates
of lefty law schools. Their
morale destroyed by “brutality” and “profiling” hysteria, police
forces will sink into corruption and paper-pushing.
Ambitious public prosecutors will concentrate on framing up
law-abiding citizens with “hate crime,” “corporate corruption,”
“dangerous product” (guns, fast food) or “child abuse” charges.
Actual crime — murder, rape, robbery, burglary and assault —
will skyrocket, but it will be illegal to talk about it. We
are living in a golden age.
The past was pretty awful; the
future will be far worse. Enjoy!
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