John Derbyshire at NRO tries his best to harsh our mellow, but I'm not buying it:

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.

Just as the American Left is different in character from the European Left -- never having truly embraced all-out Socialism or dallied with Communism -- the American Right is distinct from the European Right. There's that stubbornly optimistic Libertarian streak. The European Conservative understands that government cannot provide happiness or lead to the perfection of the human condition, and despairs; the American Conservative notes the same fact, but understands that the individual can achieve happiness, and that, as Adam Smith taught us, individuals pursuing their own ends in a civil manner will lead to the improvement of the human condition.

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.

There is more to Hollywood than Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino, and there is more to pop culture than Hollywood. Just off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of recent movies that a sex-and-violence-hating conservative would enjoy: "Apollo 13", "Chicken Run", "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", "The Fellowship of the Ring", "Shrek". As Ted Sturgeon reminds us, ninety percent of everything is crud. Pop culture has always been mostly crap, and always will be. We pan through the past like a prospector, sifting out and saving the flecks of gold. The past was no Golden Age; we just remember the gold that we saved, not the dross we discarded.

And much of the vulgarity that Derbyshire laments is a characteristic of a mass media corporate culture that is on its way out, and is struggling to hang on to its power and influence. As cable channels catering to every taste proliferate, and broadband Internet promises to expand the options unimaginably further, the old guard -- the big three networks, the MPAA, the RIAA -- flail about, trying to summon the monolithic audiences they once commanded, with ever greater -- and ever coarser -- spectacles and stunts. They are desperate and dying; pay them no mind.

The environment is collapsing.

On this topic, I defer to Bjorn Lomborg.

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.

Yeah, and global data networks, two-way radios small enough to carry in your pocket, aircraft that are invisible to radar, a tunnel under the English Channel, robotic dogs, and space travel so routine as to be boring -- what were we thinking back then?

Fugeddaboudit, indeed; the irony of reading such a comment in National Review Online is beyond my ability to lampoon sufficiently. Yes, a lot of predictions about the precise shape of the future were off the mark; but how can any adult in the Western world -- simply observing the changes that have taken place in his lifetime -- believe that scientific and technological progress has ground to a halt?

Only Anglo-Saxon countries can do democracy.

The oldest extant democracy in the world is that of Iceland. The second oldest is Switzerland. Compared to these, the Anglosphere has yet to prove it can stick with democracy for the long haul.

The third oldest democracy is the United States, which started out Anglo-Saxon, but has not remained so. True, the majority of Americans are still of European descent, though perhaps not for much longer; but to be caucasian is not necessarily to be Anglo-Saxon. I have not a drop of English blood in me, as far as I know; I and many other Caucasian Americans are descended from peoples that, by Derbyshire's analysis, only pretend at democracy. Some of them have pretended so hard as to have died fighting for it.

Taiwan will be re-united with the Motherland ... Something inconceivably horrible will happen in the Middle East ... The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride ... The U.S. constitution is incompatible with a war on terrorism ... Justice is dead ... We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!

Lighten up, Francis.

UPDATE (9 Aug 2002): Though he makes no reference to the Derbyshire piece, Eugene Volokh provides an elegant counterpoint to the gloomy conservative, as a justifiably optimistic libertarian.