Death of a Nation

Few people were surprised when Dinesh D’Souza released his latest political documentary in August of last year, like he has done every two years since 2012. Even fewer were shocked that the book that accompanied it provocatively compared President Trump to Abraham Lincoln, since D’Souza has built a career centered around infuriating the political left, albeit usually exhibiting the intelligence befitting an alumnus of The College. And absolutely nobody was amazed that every major left-leaning outlet and individual despised the book for its unapologetic — and at times unnecessary — opposition to the party of liberalism.

Dinesh D’Souza ‘83 edited the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review between 1985 and 1987, before serving in the Reagan White House as a policy advisor in 1987 and 1988. The author of such conservative classics as Illiberal Education and The End of Racism,D’Souza used to be the John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and served as a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University until 2007.

Given D’Souza’s impeccable conservative credentials, it is almost certain he sees President Trump for what he is: the chimeric amalgamation of Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader, driven by an unknown ideology that is guided only by the caprices of the people, and devoid of any knowledge of the history of conservatism in the United States — though his relationships with Hugh Hefner and the New York elite are sufficient evidence he knows quite a bit about the liberalism Mr. D’Souza so despises.

So why then does he equate the current President to the Great Emancipator? His past would suggest it is not out of some undying loyalty to the man who pardoned him — it isn’t hard to picture him honoring Cruz in a similar fashion had the Texan won — but out of spite towards to the Democrats. The man most hated by the Left must be likened to one of America’s most beloved Presidents precisely because it is the polar opposite of what the Left would like to be true. The only thing the two Presidents have in common, prima facie,is their protectionist economic policy. Even a deeper exploration of the individuals reveals little in common between the Lincoln, the epitome of moral fortitude, and Trump, a man whose myriad indiscretions are legendary. The reader understands D’Souza’s point only when he realizes the comparison of Trump to Lincoln has little do with either man, and is instead a comparison of the Democrats during the two periods, even though the author tries to disguise it in an attempt to maximize provocation.

The book serves as a historical analysis of the Democratic Party from its tacit validation of slavery, to its explicit support for white supremacy, to its overt racism, to its support for civil rights legislation, and finally to its endorsement of multiculturalism. D’Souza strains to extract from these a single notion, a simple principle that has defined the Democratic Party from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama. He partially succeeds by demonstrating a plausible link between every major Democratic leader and an earlier one which, when coupled with the similarities he establishes between Jackson and Van Buren, implies modern Democrats possess something in common with their 19th century predecessors. The book’s central thesis is similar to that of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, although unlike Goldberg’s focus on the liberal ideology, D’Souza looks at the political party which has historically adhered to said ideology. Unlike Liberal Fascism,wherein Goldberg highlights, as the name suggest, similarities between the ideologies of liberalism and fascism and tries to convince his audience of the existence of a common totalitarian temptation, Death of a Nation sets itself the less lofty goal of trying to demonstrate that modern Democrats, the party of the Left, share something in common with their slave-owning precursors. Though the author succeeds, his polemic brilliance occasionally serves as a poor substitute for the well-researched intellectualism he displayed in his early books.

For instance, when Mr. D’Souza lists prominent Dixiecrats who remained with the party after the ‘60s, he mentions a “Senator William Murray,” a man whose existence is questionable, a fact that while utterly irrelevant to D’Souza’s argument provides fodder for the intellectually dishonest leftist ideologues who seek only to decry the book as propaganda. He also lists some people who did not live to see the passage of the civil rights bills and at times, the invective against the Democratic Party appears to devolve into to unnecessary vituperation. Further, D’Souza seems to suggest that the Republican Party is the party of civil rights, even though he himself has advocated for its repeal of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. The confusion could have easily been resolved had the author spent a few more pages outlining the obvious fact that while conservatives might have had other reasons for voting against the legislation, big-government Democrats’ opposition to the bill could only have been due to their disbelief in civil rights for their black constituents. Likewise, D’Souza could have substantiated more of his plausible, though not entirely obvious, arguments. Death of a Nation,unfortunately, was a few hundred pages too short, which the author must have realized. His failure to be thorough indicates his target audience is different from that of his first two major successes, people who care little for detail but are intrigued by the central premise of the book. Dinesh D’Souza now writes for Sean Hannity’s viewers, not for Roger Scruton’s readers.

However, the question remains as to what brought about this shift. It is not often that one abandons the high-brow conservatism of James Burnham for the low-brow conservatism of Rush Limbaugh. In fact, D’Souza may very well be the first prominent conservative to do so. Has he transformed into a huckster, as Ross Douthat claims? Does he only care about profit, and is willing to compromise his beliefs for more money? Unlikely, but possible. However, one needs to operate from the assumption that the author’s writing documents his thoughts, because the contrary assumption reduces reading to a meaningless exercise in comprehension.

Like in The Roots of Obama’s Rage,Mr. D’Souza tries to distill his opponents’ philosophy into a single thought, ideally one that elicits a negative emotion in the minds of men. In President Obama’s case, it was Kenyan anti-colonialism. In the case of the Democratic Party, it was the ideology of the slave-master, the caricature of evil in the eyes of many Americans. In both books, the thesis is plausible, but more hypothesis than theory. It appears D’Souza, sometime in the last ten years, forsook the green pastures of intellectual thought in favor of a larger audience.

D’Souza hates liberalism with every fiber of his being, evident by the fact that he once said he had more in common with Islamists than with liberals. But this visceral hatred was not shared by most prominent conservatives, and D’Souza left the Hoover Institution in 2007, and has since been intentionally distancing himself from the mainstream conservative movement, much like former-professor Jeffrey Hart ‘51. A speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, Hart tore into George W. Bush’s Republican Party and correctly accused the Grand Old Party of succumbing to Rousseau-republicanism and “Bushism” of poisoning conservatism itself. It is hard to imagine him saying anything different about “Trumpism”. While his mentor denounced the decline of conservatism, D’Souza has historically said little about the Republican Party, instead fixing his gaze upon liberalism and the Democrats that champion it, striving for political victories in an age of intellectually-bankrupt conservatism. Though his political opinions land him squarely in the camp of the conservative mainstream, he still tries to shake off the label of stereotypical conservativism. Only the cloak of populism could shield D’Souza from being associated with the movement which all but expelled him ostensibly for daring to propose an alternative to the ludicrously-named War on Terror in his book The Enemy at Home.

In a lot of ways, Death of a Nation is the perfect book for the 21^st century. It does just enough to “trigger” the left, doesn’t do enough to avoid condemnation from many intellectual conservatives, and is inundated with praise for President Trump, not all of it justified. Dinesh D’Souza has adapted his writing to reflect the conservatism of the Trumpian era, perhaps in all its perversity. His principled conservative critics who add their voices to the tempest of liberal excoriations fail to recognize the many social forces which run against them. For better or worse, D’Souza’s Death of a Nation reflects the most politically feasible manifestation of conservatism in present-day America and the man does an admirable job of revealing the strain of evil that to this day continues to haunt the Democratic Party, not that many will care.