Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (3 page)

Consider Howard Zinn’s classic text,
A People’s History of the United States
. This is probably the most influential history book of the past half century. Zinn makes no effort to conceal his perspective. “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.”
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Zinn is not afraid to give a one-sided picture. He does not believe there is such a thing as objective history; therefore, he wants to
present
his
side. And what is his side? Zinn believes in global economic equality, looking forward, as he puts it, to “a time when national boundaries are erased, when the riches of the world are used for everyone.”
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Zinn makes his case, however, with a large compendium of facts, and I for one cannot fault his emphasis on “history from below.” It is both interesting and morally commendable to look at the world from the point of view of the ordinary man, the little guy. How do the great events of the past and present affect him or her? Nations cannot be judged solely by how they make provision for the high and mighty. Rather, what matters is what kind of life a nation makes possible for the newcomer, the commoner, the low man on the totem pole. In this book I too will be doing “history from below,” challenging Zinn and the progressives, but on their own terms.

Incredibly, the “theft” indictment of America has never been comprehensively answered. In fact, I am not aware of any previous attempt to answer it. America has champions and boosters, but so far they have relied heavily on slogans of liberty and patriotism and rah-rah-rah. But they have not squarely faced the progressive critique nor have they refuted it. Perhaps it is irrefutable. Didn’t we seize the country from the native Indians? Didn’t we steal the labor of the blacks? Isn’t it true that having taken the land of the Mexicans, we won’t now let them come back and work as agricultural laborers on what used to be their land? The progressive critique seems anchored in accepted facts.

The core of progressivism, of Obama’s philosophy, is a moral critique of capitalism. This is different from the twentieth-century debate between capitalism and socialism, in which capitalism prevailed. In the last century, capitalism won the economic debate on the grounds of efficiency. But capitalism has never fully met the charge that it is unethical. In the 2012 presidential campaign, we
heard about how America is divided into two groups: makers and takers. The makers are supposed to be the productive people, and the takers the ones who rely on the government. Presumably if takers outnumber makers, then progressives will continue to win elections.

This analysis, however, misses the appeal of progressivism to makers no less than to takers. Consider the fellow who parks cars at an expensive resort and earns $12 an hour. How many cars did he park yesterday? Let’s say a hundred. And it costs around $25 to park a car overnight at the Ritz Carlton or the Beverly Hilton. So how much did the hotel make on the parking? It made $2,500. And how much did the hotel pay the parking guy? Around $100. So from the point of view of the parking guy, he’s being cheated. He’s the one who is parking the cars. Yet virtually the entire profit goes to the hotel. Why does he get so little? Who gets the remaining $2,400? Our indignant parking guy imagines some rich fellow using the money to take his girlfriend to Hawaii. The parking guy doesn’t view himself as a “taker.” Rather, he’s a “maker.” It’s the rich guy who is the “taker,” depriving his employees who do the work of their “fair share.” The parking lot attendant wants to know, “Where’s my American dream?”

We cannot convince the parking guy—and countless others like him—by simply chanting, “Free markets!” “Capitalism!” “America—Love It or Leave It.” We have to actually show where the other $2,400 went. In other words, we have to show why the rewards of the free market system are not only efficient but also fair. If we cannot do this, we must admit that the actual outcomes of the capitalist system cannot be ethically justified.

If the facts adduced by the progressives are true, the conclusion is both startling and unavoidable. If America is founded on theft, and continues to sustain its wealth through rip-off and plunder, then America as a nation is morally indefensible.

So what should be done about this? A few progressives—the real radicals, the ones who are not afraid to speak their inner mind—do not hesitate to say it: America should be destroyed. For my
America
film I interviewed the radical activist Ward Churchill. I asked him where today is the “evil empire.” He said, “You’re in it.” He added that the world would be better off if America, like Nazi Germany, were destroyed. I asked him bluntly if he would be satisfied if a bomb could be detonated that would wipe out America. In a calm tone, he replied, “Yes.” So this is the extreme progressive view.

But there is also a rival view, which we can call the mainstream progressive or Obama view. This view agrees with the diagnosis of America but provides a different remedy. The mainstream progressive remedy is guilt and atonement. Americans, in this view, should feel guilty about what they have done and continue to do. Moreover, Americans—especially those who are productive and successful—must realize that their wealth is illegitimate and
must be returned to its rightful owners
. Obama clearly believes this. He aggressively peddles the theft critique, especially through his “fair share” rhetoric, and his own presidency is a tribute to the power of the theft argument. How, for example, did Obama get elected as a complete unknown? How did he get reelected when the economy was doing so badly? Why do the media give him a perpetual honeymoon? There is a one-word answer: slavery. America’s national guilt over slavery continues to benefit Obama, who ironically is not himself descended from slaves.

Much of the progressive expansion of government—from the welfare state to affirmative action—can be understood as America’s form of reparations for the crimes of history: not just slavery but also segregation, Jim Crow, and racism. Many blacks today still believe America owes them, and some advocate racial reparations in the form of cash payments. What does Obama think about reparations?
Consider a revealing statement by one of his former students. He said that when Obama taught at the University of Chicago, Obama “told us what he thought of reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.” In order to have reparations, a society would have to settle such questions as “who is black, how far back do you go, what about recent immigrants,” and so on. Considering such complexities, Obama rejected the idea of reparations for slavery. And this was also his position when running for president.
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But while Obama rejects race-based reparations, I believe he has found a way to achieve global reparations. This involves large transfers of wealth from America to the rest of the world. It also involves wealth redistribution within America. Why should America, which has 5 percent of the world’s population, consume 25 percent of the world’s resources? Why should successful people in America have so much more than other Americans? Obama insists these inequalities are undeserved; as he famously told a crowd of supporters, “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Obama seems convinced that wealth is at best appropriated or at worst stolen rather than earned. He seeks to use his power to take it back. He intends to redistribute the money in America and around the world. In his view, he’s giving back to people what has been illicitly taken from them.

Obama’s approach is supported by a theme in philosophy that goes under the name of “stolen goods.” The basic idea is simple: if you are in possession of stolen goods, you have to return them. If you have acquired wealth by stealing, or if you inherit goods that your ancestors stole from others, it’s not enough to say sorry or to provide token compensation. No, you must return what isn’t yours, and if you’ve used the wealth to accumulate more, then you must return that too.
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So if it is true that America was built on stealing,
and that America’s abundance is the product of theft, then America as a nation is indefensible, inexcusable, and under obligation to undo the crimes she has committed and continues to perpetrate on her own citizens and on the rest of the world. Undoing America’s crimes—and if necessary undoing America in the process: this is a summary of the progressive agenda. This is the progressive case for American suicide.

In this book, I intend to refute the progressive critique and provide a new understanding of what America means and why America is worth preserving. I will examine the historical critique by asking a simple question: As a result of the events of American history, are the people on the bottom better off or worse off? In other words, are the native Indians today better or worse because of the arrival of Columbus and Western civilization? Are blacks today better or worse because their ancestors were hauled here as slaves? Are Mexicans who now live on the American side of the border better or worse than Mexicans whose land was not conquered during the Mexican War? This is a way of examining history by considering its current impact.

I also intend to argue that America invented something new in the world. There are very few truly world-changing inventions. Fire is one of them. The wheel is another. The invention of agriculture is a third. In this book I will show that America is a society based upon perhaps the most important invention of all time: the invention of wealth creation. For most of human history, wealth was presumed to be finite. Consider a boy on the playground with ten marbles. How can he get more marbles? There is only one way. He has to take someone else’s marbles. In the same way, wealth was mostly in land and the only way to get land was to take it. Conquest, in other words, was the natural mode of human acquisition. That’s how most countries were founded, through force and conquest. Slavery and feudal
economic exploitation were simply extensions of the conquest ethic. You get stuff by grabbing it or, as Abraham Lincoln once put it: You work and I eat.

Conquest was not merely the way of the world; conquest was seen as a legitimate way to acquire wealth. It is still seen that way in much of the world. This idea is hard for us in America to understand. The ethics of conquest are rooted in the ethics of tribal solidarity. Our tribe is the most worthy of our allegiance, and therefore its interests are paramount. Our job is to ensure the protection and welfare of our tribe. Therefore we should attempt to subjugate other tribes, before they do the same to us. The ethics of conquest are the ethics of a football game; we want our team to possess the ball at all times, and we cheer when our guys knock down and run over the other guys. If we recall the Old Testament, we see how the victories of Israel over its enemies are considered by the Israelites to be unambiguously good. It’s either them or us, and it may as well be us.

Recognizing that conquest had been the universal ethic, America developed a new ethic, the ethic of wealth creation. America is founded on the understanding that wealth can be created through innovation and enterprise. Through the system of technological capitalism, we can go from ten marbles to twenty marbles without taking anyone’s marbles. Obviously there were inventors and merchants around before America. But America is the first society to be based on invention and trade. America is the capitalist society par excellence. I will show how this new system of wealth creation is fair and just, and how it produces a better life for little guys in America and around the world. I will not shy away from addressing the progressive arguments that earning is itself exploitation, that profits are plunder, and that America’s global actions are a disguised form of thievery.

I intend to turn the progressive critique on its head. I will demonstrate that the progressives are the real thieves, in that they use the power of the state to seize the property and possessions of people who have earned them. In the name of the ordinary citizen, progressives have declared war on the wealth creators. Yet they are not on the side of the ordinary citizen, because their policies lead to stagnation, impoverishment, indebtedness, and decline—all in evidence today. It is progressives who rely on government seizure and bureaucratic conquest to achieve their goals and increase their power. We work, and they eat. As we shall see, the progressives have a comprehensive scheme—one that relies on deceit—to win political support for their wealth confiscation. Most recently, in order to quell dissent, the progressives are implementing a chilling policy of national surveillance and selective prosecution—using the power of the police to harass and subdue their opposition. Ultimately what the progressives seek is a suicide of national identity, a dissolution of the American era. This involves not merely a diminution of America but a diminution of Americans.

I intend to blow the whistle on these people, starting with Obama and continuing with Hillary Clinton and the whole progressive menagerie. Once the ordinary American understands how moral terms have been inverted, and how he is being conned by his self-styled partisans, he will rise up and repudiate his new oppressors who are none other than his old oppressors under a new name. America remains now, as it has long been, a solution to the global problem of scarcity and the human problem of how to achieve prosperity and happiness. The world needs America, but only Americans can restore the formula for prosperity and human flourishing to the benefit of untold millions, here and everywhere, now living or yet to come.