The Roots of Obama's Rage (2 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
As with my previous books, I have never objected to genuine and thoughtful concerns and objections, and have always been willing to engage them. My only objection is to uncritical analysis and uninformed attacks. Still, these attacks turned out to be a blessing in this case. The benefit of all the agitation by the Obama Choir was that it activated an equally intense response from the right. Newt Gingrich called
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
“stunning . . . the most profound insight I have read in six years about Barack Obama.” In other words, Gingrich considered mine the best analysis of Obama since he emerged into the national spotlight with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Rush Limbaugh also praised the book, calling it “indispensable” and “irrefutable.” Limbaugh interviewed me for a profile in his
Limbaugh Letter
, which probably didn’t hurt sales. I did Glenn Beck’s radio show and got a wildly enthusiastic response, after which I was on Glenn Beck’s show two nights in a row. We did the blackboards, the charts, everything. Beck came dressed as a student and he designated me the professor. I was able not only to present my thesis but offer explanatory background and telling examples. It is very rare to get this kind of time on national TV. Naturally all the exposure drove my book onto the bestseller lists: Number 1 on Amazon, number 4 on the
New York Times
bestseller list.
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
“stunning . . . the most profound insight I have read in six years about Barack Obama.” In other words, Gingrich considered mine the best analysis of Obama since he emerged into the national spotlight with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Rush Limbaugh also praised the book, calling it “indispensable” and “irrefutable.” Limbaugh interviewed me for a profile in his
Limbaugh Letter
, which probably didn’t hurt sales. I did Glenn Beck’s radio show and got a wildly enthusiastic response, after which I was on Glenn Beck’s show two nights in a row. We did the blackboards, the charts, everything. Beck came dressed as a student and he designated me the professor. I was able not only to present my thesis but offer explanatory background and telling examples. It is very rare to get this kind of time on national TV. Naturally all the exposure drove my book onto the bestseller lists: Number 1 on Amazon, number 4 on the
New York Times
bestseller list.
Still, my objective in writing this book was not merely to sell a lot of copies but also to help shape the national debate. This I was able to do in the months leading up to the mid-term election, one in which Obama took a heavy and much-deserved shellacking. Since then, however, the Obama Choir has gone into a sullen silence about this book and its thesis. That’s why I’m delighted to have the book coming out in paperback.
Notice that in the book’s last chapter, I use my central thesis about Obama to make some specific predictions about him. I say that Obama will do nothing in the rest of his term to seriously prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. I say that Obama will make no genuine attempt to reduce the deficit or the national debt, and if he is pressured to do so, he will seek to raise taxes on the rich and to cut funding for the military. Since the book’s publication, Obama has in a sense acted out the script that I laid out for him. One TV producer even emailed me, “From now on, Dinesh, I am going to start calling you Elijah.”
This is the real measure of an argument’s validity: not only can it explain the things that have happened; it can also predict with reasonable accuracy what is going to happen. Moreover, a good theory should even be able to contend with facts that seem, at first glance, to contradict it. For instance, Obama’s decision to order the killing of Osama bin Laden has flummoxed right-wing claims that Obama is anti-American, or a dithering incompetent, or a man allergic to the use of military force. But Obama’s action is in no way inconsistent with my theory and his defense of the killing—as an act of justice, not an act of war—fits perfectly with my account of his ideology. So the anti-colonial theory has so far held up extremely well, and I promise you that if you put on the anti-colonial spectacles, in the manner suggested by this book, you will understand Obama in a new way and you will see him as you have never seen him before.
Either way, I’d like to hear from you, so read the book and then send me your comments to [email protected].
CHAPTER 1
A TALE OF THREE DREAMS
D
reams are powerful things. Sometimes they have motivational power, as with Martin Luther King’s dream. King aspired to a color-blind society, and this guided his difficult striving. Dreams can also provide artistic inspiration, as when the Muse of the mind supplies ideas and images to the creative imagination. Here I think of Blake’s sketches, Shakespeare’s comedies, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. For Freud, dreams were clues to repressed desires, wishes that could not be expressed, not only to society but even to the self. There are sweet dreams and whimsical dreams, but there are also dark dreams. Think of the war veteran who has nightmares of being tied up in a hut, or being starved and beaten by his captors. That’s a man who can wake up screaming. And there have been cases of men who are so preoccupied with their dark dreams that they have difficulty adjusting to contemporary reality. The dream, as it were, becomes a time machine. They live in the time machine, continuing to quixotically charge imaginary windmills and slay fictitious evil knights. The windmills and knights were real enough, but they belonged to another world, a world that is long gone, but a world etched into the fabric of human memory. Men who have dreams like that can be great visionaries, or leaders with a dangerous obsession. This book is about one such man, who happens to be the president of the United States.
reams are powerful things. Sometimes they have motivational power, as with Martin Luther King’s dream. King aspired to a color-blind society, and this guided his difficult striving. Dreams can also provide artistic inspiration, as when the Muse of the mind supplies ideas and images to the creative imagination. Here I think of Blake’s sketches, Shakespeare’s comedies, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. For Freud, dreams were clues to repressed desires, wishes that could not be expressed, not only to society but even to the self. There are sweet dreams and whimsical dreams, but there are also dark dreams. Think of the war veteran who has nightmares of being tied up in a hut, or being starved and beaten by his captors. That’s a man who can wake up screaming. And there have been cases of men who are so preoccupied with their dark dreams that they have difficulty adjusting to contemporary reality. The dream, as it were, becomes a time machine. They live in the time machine, continuing to quixotically charge imaginary windmills and slay fictitious evil knights. The windmills and knights were real enough, but they belonged to another world, a world that is long gone, but a world etched into the fabric of human memory. Men who have dreams like that can be great visionaries, or leaders with a dangerous obsession. This book is about one such man, who happens to be the president of the United States.
Barack Obama is an enigmatic figure, a puzzle both to his adversaries and to his supporters. Somehow the Obama of the 2008 election campaign seems to have metamorphosed into a very different President Obama. The two men are not merely politically different—different in their policy agenda—but also psychologically different. The centrist, reassuring Obama is gone and has been replaced by a more detached, unreadable and, to some, even menacing Obama. It’s hard for Americans to respond to Obama because we aren’t sure where he is coming from, what motivates him.
“Who is Barack Obama?” Richard Cohen titled a recent article in the
Washington Post.
Cohen’s answer: no one really knows. “He led no movement, was spokesman for no ideology... he casts no shadow.” Cohen contrasts Obama with Reagan. He notes that unlike Reagan, who connected so intimately with his supporters and so effectively with the country, Obama has left his own backers and indeed the nation at large guessing. “Americans know Obama’s smart, but we still don’t know him.”
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Washington Post.
Cohen’s answer: no one really knows. “He led no movement, was spokesman for no ideology... he casts no shadow.” Cohen contrasts Obama with Reagan. He notes that unlike Reagan, who connected so intimately with his supporters and so effectively with the country, Obama has left his own backers and indeed the nation at large guessing. “Americans know Obama’s smart, but we still don’t know him.”
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Come to think of it, what did we ever really know about Obama? He is certainly the least-known figure ever to reach the presidency. The political mystery of his agenda is compounded by the psychological mystery of the man. Since he is our president, however, we had better try to figure out who he is and what he intends to do to America and the world. This book supplies the key.
This is not the book I set out to write. In fact, it represents my third take on Obama. If it took me, who shares so much in common with the man, three times to get this guy, I can see why he has eluded so many others. Despite our differences, I’m a lot like Obama. I’m a native of Mumbai, India, so I grew up in a different part of the world, as Obama did. I’m nonwhite, as he is. He had a white mom and grew up in an interracial family; I have a white wife, and we have a mixed-race daughter. Like Obama, I see America both from the inside and from the outside. We were born in the same year, 1961, so we’re the same age. Obama and I attended Ivy League colleges, graduating in the same year, 1983; we also got married in the same year, 1992. He went into elective politics, while I have spent my life writing about politics and once served in the White House as a policy adviser. In sum, both of us have cosmopolitan backgrounds, grew up in the same era, and have made our careers in American politics.
I’m a conservative, and I didn’t vote for Obama. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I read an interesting article in the London
Telegraph
titled “Barack Obama’s ‘Lost’ Brother Found in Kenya.” The article featured a picture of a 26-year-old man standing inside a ramshackle hut on the outskirts of Nairobi. CNN confirmed the story, reporting, “We found Barack Obama’s half-brother living in a Nairobi slum.” He was George Hussein Obama, the product of a liaison between Barack Obama Sr. and an African woman. “I live here on less than a dollar a month,” George said. Humiliated by his poverty, he confessed he never mentioned his famous half-brother. “I say we are not related. I am ashamed.” In 2006, George briefly met Barack Obama, who was then a United States senator from Illinois, but felt as though he was talking to a “total stranger.” I found it remarkable that Barack Obama, who had a net worth of several million dollars and who was within striking distance of the world’s highest office, hadn’t lifted a finger to help a destitute close relative.
Telegraph
titled “Barack Obama’s ‘Lost’ Brother Found in Kenya.” The article featured a picture of a 26-year-old man standing inside a ramshackle hut on the outskirts of Nairobi. CNN confirmed the story, reporting, “We found Barack Obama’s half-brother living in a Nairobi slum.” He was George Hussein Obama, the product of a liaison between Barack Obama Sr. and an African woman. “I live here on less than a dollar a month,” George said. Humiliated by his poverty, he confessed he never mentioned his famous half-brother. “I say we are not related. I am ashamed.” In 2006, George briefly met Barack Obama, who was then a United States senator from Illinois, but felt as though he was talking to a “total stranger.” I found it remarkable that Barack Obama, who had a net worth of several million dollars and who was within striking distance of the world’s highest office, hadn’t lifted a finger to help a destitute close relative.
Seeing from the article that George Obama aspired to be a mechanic, I started the “George Obama Compassion Fund.” On a daily blog I wrote for AOL at the time, I invited people to make small contributions to help George move out of his hut and get some training to realize his dreams. We raised a couple thousand dollars, and a Christian missionary promised he would deliver the money in person to George. Then I was contacted by a reporter for a large newspaper in Kenya who told me that the Obama family had refused the money. Evidently they had consulted with the Obama campaign and been told to go into hiding. My attempts to locate George proved unavailing. So I tore up the checks, figuring that perhaps I had jostled Obama into doing something for George, if only to save himself from political embarrassment.
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While I was puzzled by Obama’s indifference to George, I did not join the conservative chorus bashing Obama. On the contrary, when Obama was elected I wrote a column for
Townhall.com
on “Obama and Post-Racist America.” In it I confessed I was moved by the sight of him taking the oath of office. To me, Obama wasn’t just America’s first African American president; he also represented the promise of “the end of racism.”
The End of Racism
was the title of a controversial book I published in 1995. In it I contended that racism was no longer systemic; it was now episodic. It existed, but it no longer controlled the lives of blacks and other minorities. Racism could no longer explain why some people in America succeeded and others didn’t.
Townhall.com
on “Obama and Post-Racist America.” In it I confessed I was moved by the sight of him taking the oath of office. To me, Obama wasn’t just America’s first African American president; he also represented the promise of “the end of racism.”
The End of Racism
was the title of a controversial book I published in 1995. In it I contended that racism was no longer systemic; it was now episodic. It existed, but it no longer controlled the lives of blacks and other minorities. Racism could no longer explain why some people in America succeeded and others didn’t.
That book might have been ahead of its time, but Obama’s election seemed to show that I was basically right. Consider the oceans of ink that have been spilled in the past several decades about how America is a racist society, how bigotry runs in the veins of white America, how little real progress has been made, how far we still have to go, and so on. Would anyone who had been drinking this intellectual Kool-Aid for the past several years have been prepared for Obama’s election? True, Obama was no Jesse Jackson. But precisely the difference between the two showed that individual conduct and demeanor, not skin color, was decisive. Obama didn’t come across as a race hustler. He didn’t seek to turn victimization into profit. Rather, he made his claims on their merits and appealed to shared American ideals. To borrow a line from Martin Luther King, Jr. he sought to be judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. So Obama’s election, I wrote, means that we are living in post-racist America. And that’s something we could all celebrate.
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Since Obama’s inauguration, I have written virtually nothing about him, because I didn’t want to judge him too early. Personally, I liked Obama—a nice man with a nice family. What a refreshing contrast from the previous Democratic occupants of the White House, the Clintons! I felt confident Obama would not entertain interns under his desk or leave with the White House china. The man had class, not to mention an undeniable gravitas. Besides, he had inherited a huge financial mess. He deserved a chance to clean it up. I recall saying in one of my campus speeches, “We have to give this guy a year to see what he is going to do.”
As Obama launched his spending spree—a bailout plan followed by a stimulus plan followed by an automobile industry rescue plan followed by a national health care plan and then new environmental and financial regulations—I became alarmed. Obama insisted that his policies were aimed at rescuing America’s economy from the precipice, but many of them, notably in energy, the environment, education, and health care, had nothing to do with the financial crisis. The proposed solutions were unconnected to the original problems. Moreover, by piling on public debt and driving up costs to business, they threatened to worsen the economic crisis.
I didn’t fear only the economic repercussions, but also the degree of government control over the economy and over the lives of free citizens. I talked to my publishers and proposed a book called “Obama’s Leviathan.” I planned to contrast two types of liberalism, one with its roots in Locke and the other in Hobbes. Both were liberals, yet Lockean liberalism implies limited government, while Hobbes argued that in order to enjoy security we should concede all our rights to an all-powerful state. Hobbes called this state “Leviathan,” a reference to the massive sea beast in the Bible. I set out to document how Obama and his team were moving America further away from the Lockean liberalism of the founders toward a more menacing Leviathan.
But even as I worked on the book I felt I was missing something, and that something was Obama himself. Somehow the Hobbesian explanation was too philosophical; it didn’t capture what motivated Obama. That’s when I got my second idea. I intended to contrast Martin Luther King’s dream with Obama’s ongoing scheme of taking advantage of the civil rights movement. My basic premise was that Obama had to be understood as a product of that movement. That was the milieu in which he grew up; those were the ideals that shaped him. In one sense, Obama had embraced King’s color-blind aspiration. He was a nonracial candidate, and as president he did not appeal to race. At the same time, my thesis held that Obama got his Big Government philosophy from the civil rights era.
Here, a bit of explanation is necessary. For the American founders, rights were seen as a limitation on government. That’s why the Bill of Rights typically begins its specifications of rights with the phrase, “Congress shall make no law. . . .” Congress can pass no laws regulating freedom of speech, or the press, or assembly, and so on. In the founders’ view, the rights of citizens are protected by restricting the power of the federal government. For American blacks, however, the federal government was the indispensable securer and guarantor of rights. The federal government ended slavery and Jim Crow. It took federal troops to enable black kids to attend public schools in the segregated South. Through its Great Society programs, the federal government was the biggest employer of African Americans and is largely responsible for the creation of a black middle class. Surveys have consistently shown that blacks are much more sympathetic toward Big Government than any other group; many blacks believe that because of their history America owes them, and therefore they are entitled to jobs, benefits, health insurance, and retirement income at society’s expense.
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I sought to show that Obama had adopted the viewpoint of black America but removed the black label. Essentially he was applying black remedies to all of America, and the danger—I intended to argue—was that if he succeeded, all of us as citizens would become more dependent on the state and consequently less free as individuals.
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I sought to show that Obama had adopted the viewpoint of black America but removed the black label. Essentially he was applying black remedies to all of America, and the danger—I intended to argue—was that if he succeeded, all of us as citizens would become more dependent on the state and consequently less free as individuals.
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