Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (32 page)

The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, and the Russians are all getting richer and stronger due to wealth creation. Yet the leaders of these countries, while they appreciate wealth creation as one way to gain power, have never given up on the conquest ethic as another way to gain power. In fact, they see wealth creation as a way to increase their military power; then that power can be deployed to acquire more wealth through conquest. To see what I mean, imagine if we discovered a new planet rich in minerals and energy but inhabited by peaceful aliens. Would America regard it as right to conquer them and take their stuff? No, we no longer have the conquest ethic. But the Chinese do; they have never given it up. This is why the world still needs America. We remain the custodians of the idea that wealth should be obtained through invention and trade, not through forced seizure.

In terms of maintaining its leadership and strength, no one can deny that America faces a parlous challenge. Given this, the behavior of the Obama administration, and of progressives more generally, can only be considered surreal. I am tempted to say that they are like the violinists who played music while the
Titanic
sank. In this picture, Obama would be the strange conductor, obsessed with his tunes while missing the larger reality of the situation. This analogy, however, is unfair to the musicians on the
Titanic
. Their conduct was entirely rational. They knew the ship was going down and there was nothing else they could do. So they bravely resolved to play and give people what little cheer they could. In America’s case, however, there is a great deal we can do. Yet Obama seems unwilling to do any of it. I am not saying he is ignorant of the global reality. In fact, he knows it quite well. His behavior is also rational, from the progressive point of view. If we think of the
Titanic
as symbolizing the American era, Obama wants that ship to go down.

Obama is the architect of American decline, and progressivism is the ideology of American suicide. Here’s a way to think about what Obama and the progressives are doing. Imagine if they were in charge of a basketball team with a fifty-year track record of success. We hired them as coaches to keep the team winning. Yet they designed plays to ensure the team would lose. They didn’t do so because they hated the team, but because they thought it was wrong for the team to win so much. The long previous record of victories, they argued, was based on exploitation, and it would be better for everyone if our team wasn’t so dominant. If we had such a coaching staff, there is little doubt that we would get rid of them. We would ask ourselves why we hired them in the first place.

Even though we currently have such a coach, decline is not an inevitability; decline is a choice. We don’t have to let Obama and the progressives take us down. We certainly don’t have to hire another
coach who is like Obama. Do we want to live in a country that no longer matters, where the American dream is a paltry and shrunken thing, where bitter complaint substitutes for real influence in the world, where we can no longer expect our children to live better than we do? The Greeks, the Turks, the French, and the English are all once-great nations that have had to cope with irrelevance, and although they have had time to adjust, the sense of defeat still shows on their faces. It’s not so bad to be irrelevant if you’ve always been irrelevant. But to become irrelevant when you were formerly leading the world; that’s a wound that permanently scars the psyche.

I pray this does not happen to America, sapping the optimism that built this country, and that I still saw when I came here a generation ago. And it need not happen: the crisis we face is also an opportunity. But we cannot delay—to delay is to convert a crisis into an irreversible situation. Then we will have not only failed ourselves, we will also have failed our children. We will have failed America when we were in a position to save her.

In fact, America is now in a situation that has arisen only a few times previously in history. This is a rare time when America’s future hangs delicately in the balance, and when Americans can do something about it. This occurred in 1776, when Americans had to figure out whether to create a new country or live under British domination. This was the crisis of the creation of America. It occurred again in 1860, when Americans had to decide whether to preserve the union or let it dissolve. This was the crisis of the preservation of America. And now we have to choose whether to protect the American era and uphold America’s example to the world, or to let the naysayers, at home and abroad, take us down. This is the crisis of the restoration of America.

Whether we like it or not, this is the American moment in world history. The American era cannot endure indefinitely, but it can last
a lot longer. The spirit of 1776 is taking root around the world; this can happen with us in the lead, or without us. In previous crises there were great Americans who showed leadership, and ordinary Americans who showed commitment and heroism; together, they vindicated the American experiment. So what will be our legacy? Will we keep the flag flying, or will we submit to progressive self-destruction and go down with a whimper? I believe we will prove up to the task of restoration. But in any event, this is our turn at the wheel, and history will judge us based on how we handle it. Decline is a choice, but so is liberty. Let us resolve as Americans to make liberty our choice.

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NOTES

Chapter 1: Suicide of a Nation

1.
        
Robert Frost, “A Case for Jefferson,” in Edward Connery Lathem, ed.,
The Poetry of Robert Frost
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1975), p. 393.

2.
        
Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
(New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 3, 28, 31.

3.
        
Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, January 27, 1838,
abrahamlincolnonline.org
.

4.
        
Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009,
whitehouse.gov
.

5.
        
Giacomo Chiozza, “America’s Global Advantage,”
Political Science Quarterly
, Summer 2011; Stephen Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong,
The End of Influence
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), pp. 6, 14, 143; Fareed Zakaria,
The Post-American World
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

6.
        
Kenneth Ragoza, “By the Time Obama Leaves Office, U.S. No Longer No. 1,”
Forbes
, March 23, 2013,
forbes.com
; Stephen M. Walt, “The End of the American Era,”
National Interest
, October 25, 2011,
nationalinterest.org
.

7.
        
Fawaz Gerges,
Obama and the Middle East
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 13, 152.

8.
        
Tom Paine,
Common Sense
, Appendix to the Third Edition,
ushistory.org
; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay,
The Federalist
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), No. 1, p. 9; George Washington, letter to James Warren, March 31, 1779.

9.
        
James Burnham,
Suicide of the West
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1985), pp. 15–16, 20, 24.

10.
      
John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” in
John Milton: The Major Works
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 370–71.

11.
      
I get this phrase from Irwin Stelzer, “The Obama Formula,”
The Weekly Standard
, July 5–12, 2010,
weeklystandard.com
.

12.
      
Dinesh D’Souza,
Obama’s America
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012), pp. 67–90.

13.
      
Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 76, 101–3.

14.
      
Howard Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2005), p. 10.

15.
      
Howard Zinn,
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
(San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), p. 23.

16.
      
Cited by David Remnick,
The Bridge
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010), p. 265; Christopher Wills, “Obama Opposes Slavery Reparations,” Huffington Post, August 2, 2008,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/02/obama-opposes-slavery-rep_n_116506.html
.

17.
      
The “stolen goods” argument, attributed to Hardy Jones, is summarized in Robert Detlefson,
Civil Rights Under Reagan
(San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991), p. 54.

Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Frenchmen

1.
        
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(New York: Vintage, 1990), Vol. I, p. 244.

2.
        
Edmund Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 172.

3.
        
Howard Zinn,
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
(San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), pp. 57–61.

4.
        
Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, Vol. I, pp. 3, 94, 191–19, 292, 294, 303, 305, 334–35, 394, 427; Vol. II, pp. 22, 38.

5.
        
James Miller,
The Passion of Michel Foucault
(New York: Anchor, 1994), p. 16, 20.

6.
        
“Obamacare Freeing the Job-Locked Poets?”
New York Post
, February 7, 2014,
nypost.com
.

7.
        
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault,
The Chomsky-Foucault Debate
(New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 39, 41, 51–52, 138–39.

8.
        
Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” cited in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson,
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
(University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also Jeff Weintraub, “Foucault’s Enthusiasm for Khomeini—the Totalitarian Temptation Revisited,”
New Politics
, Summer 2004,
jeffweintraub.blogspot.com
.

9.
        
Paul Hollander,
Political Pilgrims
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

10.
      
Michel Foucault,
Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984
(New York: Semiotext, 1996), p. 383.

11.
      
Miller,
The Passion of Michel Foucault
, pp. 260–61, 264; Patrick Moore,
Beyond Shame
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 72; David Macey,
The Lives of Michel Foucault
(New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 369.

12.
      
Miller,
The Passion of Michel Foucault
, pp. 29, 350, 381; see also Roger Kimball, “The Perversions of M. Foucault,”
The New Criterion
, March 1993.

Chapter 3: Novus Ordo Seclorum

1.
        
Cited in John Richard Alden,
George Washington: A Biography
, p. 101,
books.google.com
.

2.
        
Charles Beard,
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
(New York: Dover Books, 2004).

3.
        
Noam Chomsky, “The U.S. Behaves Nothing Like a Democracy,”
salon.com
; Howard Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1983), pp. 74, 85–86; Howard Zinn,
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
(San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), p. 116.

4.
        
James Fallows, “Obama on Exceptionalism,”
The Atlantic
, April 4, 2009,
theatlantic.com
.

5.
        
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed.,
The Portable Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 585.

6.
        
Cited by Harry Jaffa,
A New Birth of Freedom
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 46.

7.
        
Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), pp. 120–21.

8.
        
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay,
The Federalist
, No. 84 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006), p. 474.

9.
        
Ibid., No. 51, pp. 288–89.

10.
      
Eugene Kamenka, ed.,
The Portable Karl Marx
(New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 389.

11.
      
Bob Young, “Obama’s Big Time Fumble,”
Arizona Republic
, May 17, 2009.

12.
      
Confucius,
The Analects
(New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 74; Paul Rahe,
Republics, Ancient and Modern
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), Vol. I, p. 44; Ibn Khaldun,
Muqaddimah
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 313.