Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (2 page)

Second, America is drowning in debt. While China is the world’s largest creditor nation, America is the world’s largest debtor nation. At $17 trillion, the national debt is now bigger than the annual gross domestic product—in other words, it is bigger than the total sum of goods and services that America produces in a year. Nearly half of this debt has been accumulated during the Obama years, at the average rate of a trillion dollars a year. At this pace, Obama will more than double the deficit in two terms. Since a substantial portion of America’s debt is owed to foreign countries, such as China and the Arab nations, debt produces a transfer of wealth away from America and toward the rest of the world. Today, instead of America owning the world, the world increasingly owns America. Moreover, if America continues to pile on debt in Obama proportions, it won’t be long before the country is bankrupt. The striking aspect of this is not that the problem is so serious, but that the president seems remarkably indifferent, as if he’s carrying on business as usual. As we will discover, he is. And the results are predictable. Rich countries, like rich people, can afford to act irresponsibly for a while, but eventually the creditors show up to take away your house and car.

Finally, America is losing its position in the world. The Obama administration is downsizing our nuclear arsenal when other nations are building and modernizing theirs. Under the START Treaty, America has gone from several thousand nuclear warheads to a limit of 1,550. In 2013, Obama proposed cutting that number even further to around 1,000, and he has said he intends getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether. Whether America’s nuclear impotence will enhance world peace is debatable; that it will reduce America’s military dominance is certain.

Besides nuclear hegemony, America is also relinquishing its hegemony around the world, especially in the strategically and economically vital Middle East. As political scientist Fawaz Gerges puts it in a recent book,
Obama and the Middle East
, “U.S. influence … is at its lowest point since the beginning of the cold war in the late 1940s… . America neither calls the shots as before nor dominates the regional scene in the way it did… . We are witnessing the end of America’s moment in the Middle East.”
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The growing power of China, Russia, and other emerging countries has also restricted America’s impact in Asia, Europe, and South America. America seems on the way to become a feeble giant, a second Canada.

Decline has consequences, not only for America but also for Americans. We are facing the prospect of a sharp drop not merely in America’s role in the world, but also in America’s standard of living. In some respects, America is exchanging places with the emerging countries. They are getting stronger while we grow weaker. They gain the influence that we have lost or relinquished. They are growing rapidly while we are risking an economic collapse that would plunge us into second- or even third-world status.

All this talk about America’s decline or even collapse is surprising when we recall that, just a few years ago, America seemed to be on top of the world. In fact, America was the sole superpower. America’s military might was unrivalled, its economy dominant, and its culture spreading contagiously on every continent. The American ascendancy began in 1945, after World War II. That’s when America became a superpower. But America became the sole superpower only when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1992. Thus the triumph of America in the second half of the twentieth century is accompanied by the sober realization that the American era is merely six decades old, and America has been the undisputed world leader for only two decades. When we consider that the Roman Age lasted a thousand
years, and the Ottomans and the British dominated the world for several centuries, America’s dominance seems brief, and already it is precarious.

America’s global ascendancy was predicted and indeed choreographed by the Founders, more than two centuries ago. The Founders who gathered in Philadelphia believed that they were creating a formula for a new type of society. They called it the
novus ordo seclorum
, a new order for the ages, or in Tom Paine’s words, America was “the birthday of a new world.” The Founders knew they were in a unique position. Alexander Hamilton noted that, historically, countries have been founded by “accident and force” but America was an opportunity to found a nation by “reflection and choice.” In one sense the Founders were creating a universal example; thus George Washington could say that the cause of America was also the “cause of mankind.”
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At the same time, the Founders had created a specific nation they believed would become the strongest, most prosperous, and most influential society on the planet—and they have been proven right.

What they could not have known, however, is that they were also creating the last best hope for Western civilization. For many centuries, Europe was the embodiment and defender of the West. The leadership of the West shifted from century to century—from the Portuguese in the fifteenth century to the Spanish in the sixteenth to the French in the seventeenth to the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth—but nevertheless the baton passed from one European power to another. It was only in the twentieth century that Europe itself lost its preeminence. The main reason was that World War II left all the three major European powers—Britain, France, and Germany—in ruins.

In 1964, the political scientist James Burnham published
Suicide of the West
. Burnham noted that “Western civilization has been in a
period of very rapid decline, recession or ebb within the world power structure.” Burnham wasn’t talking about the Western standard of living. Rather, he meant the decline of Western power and influence. Burnham noted that early in the twentieth century the West—led by Britain—controlled approximately two-thirds of the real estate on the planet. A “galactic observer” could not fail to see that “in 1914 the domain of Western civilization was, or very nearly was, the world.” But within a few decades, Burnham said, the area under Western control had dramatically shrunk. One by one the West gave up its colonial possessions, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes after a fight. Either way, the countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America were gaining their independence, which is to say, freeing themselves from Western control. “If the process continues over the next several decades more or less as it has gone on,” Burnham wrote, “then—this is merely mathematical extrapolation—the West will be finished.” And since historical contractions of this magnitude are seldom reversed, Burnham grimly concluded that “the West, in shrinking, is also dying.”
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Burnham missed one critical development—the transfer of leadership from Europe to the United States. Unlike the British and the French, America was not a colonizing power. (In fact, America had once been a colony of Britain.) America sought no colonies for itself in the manner of the British and the French. Indeed, in the decades after World War II, America encouraged Britain to grant independence to its colonies. Thus America’s influence in the world, unlike Europe’s, was not based on conquest but rather on attraction to American ideals and the American way of life. Milton writes in
Paradise Lost
, “Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.”
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America’s influence was greater because its institutions and values were adopted rather than imposed. Still, America’s triumph was accompanied by the sobering realization that if America fell, there
would be no one left to pick up the baton. The end of the American era would seem to signal also the end of Western civilization.

If America is going down, what is causing this to happen? Clearly the cause isn’t external. There is no Nazi or Communist menace strong enough to destroy the United States. The radical Muslims are a serious threat, both to American lives and American interests, but they do not control the U.S. economy nor can they threaten America’s existence. At best, they are an external drag. Disconcertingly, however, the most powerful drag on America seems to be coming from inside America. We are being brought down from within.

Who or what is responsible for this? In my previous two books, I focused on one man, Barack Obama. Obama’s presidency can be summed up in the phrase, “Omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.”
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Domestically, the Obama Democrats have been expanding the power of the state and reducing the scope of the private sector. Internationally, they have been reducing the footprint of America in the world. How to explain this dual motion? I stressed the anticolonial ideology that Obama adopted from his father, as detailed in Obama’s own autobiography
Dreams from My Father
. The core idea of anti-colonialism is that the wealth of the West has been obtained by theft. Consider the world as it must have looked in the mid-twentieth century to Obama’s Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr., or to my own dad, living in India. These men looked around the world and they saw affluence in the West and indigence everywhere else. They saw luxury in Paris and London and impoverishment in Nairobi and Mumbai. When they paused to consider why, the answer seemed obvious: the rich countries became rich by invading, occupying, and looting the poor countries. At this time, Britain still ruled Kenya, India, and many other countries. It was the heyday of colonialism. Thus the anti-colonial explanation seemed unavoidable, irrefutable. It is still widely believed and taught in schools and colleges as the
standard account of how the West grew rich and how other countries remained poor.

Anti-colonialism is a Third World ideology, but it came to the United States during the Vietnam War. Consequently Obama learned his anti-colonialism not just from Barack Obama Sr. but from a whole host of anti-colonial radicals in America. I call these men Obama’s founding fathers, and they include the former Communist Frank Marshall Davis, the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, the self-described Brazilian revolutionary Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and the incendiary preacher Jeremiah Wright. While Obama’s primary mentor was his dad, he learned chapter and verse of the anti-colonial ideology in America, in Hawaii, and at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, and in Chicago.
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Since the 1960s, anti-colonialism in America has been integrated into a larger ideology. For decades, that ideology used to be called “liberalism.” The ideology fell into such disrepute in the 1980s and 1990s, however, that liberals stopped calling themselves liberals. Now they call themselves “progressives.” The term progressive suggests a commitment to progress. Progress implies change, and Obama’s 2008 campaign slogans all focused on “change.” But change in what direction? Presumably change here means improvement, things getting better. But what improvement? Better for whom? It has been said that if termites could talk, they would call what they do “progress.” So we should reserve our enthusiasm for progressivism until we find out what progressives believe and what kind of change they want.

The term “progressive” harkens back to the progressive movement of the early twentieth century. Modern progressives invoke that movement, but they have formulated a much more comprehensive radicalism that goes far beyond anything that Theodore Roosevelt
or Woodrow Wilson envisioned. Roosevelt and Wilson were traditional American patriots who wanted to enact reforms, but not remake an America they believed was fundamentally good, indeed great. The new progressive ideology proceeds from a powerful left-wing critique of America, one that grew out of the 1960s and has been refined and elaborated since then.

This critique builds on a single idea: theft. Clearly this is also the core idea of anti-colonialism. Listen to Frantz Fanon, a leading anti-colonialist whom Obama said he read avidly in college. “The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too… . The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races… . Europe is literally a creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the under-developed peoples.” This awareness, Fanon writes, produces “a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due and the realization by the capitalist powers that they must pay.”
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Modern progressivism incorporates this theft accusation into a systematic critique of America and the West.

According to the progressive critique, America was founded in an original act of piracy: the early settlers came from abroad and stole the country from the native Indians. Then America was built by theft: white Americans stole the labor of African Americans by enslaving them for 250 years. The theft continued through nearly a century of segregation, discrimination, and Jim Crow. The borders of America were also extended by theft: America stole half of Mexico in the Mexican War. Moreover, America’s economic system, capitalism, is based on theft since it confers unjust profits on a few and deprives the majority of workers of their “fair share.” Finally, America’s foreign policy is based on theft, what historian William Appleman Williams termed “empire as a way of life.” Why are we in the
Middle East? Clearly it is because of oil. America’s actions abroad are aimed at plundering other people’s land and resources so that we can continue to enjoy an outsized standard of living compared to the rest of the world.

The progressive indictment is a powerful one, encompassing past and present. It is not merely a political critique; it is also an historical one. Since the 1960s, progressive scholars have been doing a new kind of research. They call it “history from below.” History, they say, has traditionally been told from the viewpoint of the great actors, the kings and statesmen who were seen to define events. This is history written by “winners.” Meanwhile, the little people get ignored and the losers never get to tell their side of the story. “History from below” is intended to correct the imbalance. So thoroughly has it been institutionalized that it has now become the mainstream way to tell the American story.