Death of a Nation
Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party
Dinesh D’Souza
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[Master Thomas] told me, if I would be happy, I must lay out no plans for the future. He said . . . he would take care of me . . . and taught me to depend solely upon him for happiness.
—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
To our Gang of Four, who complete our family:
Brandon, Danielle, Justin and Julienna
Preface
On Gaining and Losing a Country
To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France1
A nation is so much more than its laws, its political system, even its founding documents. When I first came to America as an exchange student in 1978, I knew little of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. What first struck me about America was its people. To me, they were a sort of tribe. As a tribe, they had their own mannerisms and styles of speech, their own customs and cuisine, their own way of life and of looking at the world.
Anthropologists call these “folkways.” The contemporary word for them is “culture.” A nation, political scientist Benedict Anderson says, is an “imagined community,” by which he means a community of people who have never met each other but are linked through their common mores and mutual acceptance of each other as fellow citizens. Such loyalty, Anderson notes, can run very deep in that nations, like religions, are one of the very few things that people are willing to die for. People will die for America but they won’t die for the Democratic Party, the Los Angeles Raiders, or the United Way.2
Yet in constituting a tribe and having shared traditions and loyalties, Americans are no different from any other people in the world. I suppose if I went to Japan or France I would, in a similar manner, encounter the Japanese tribe, the French tribe. I myself hail from a tribe at the other end of the world, the East Indian tribe. We too have our folkways and culture, which I experienced in my childhood years through watching Bollywood movies, listening to radio broadcasts of cricket games, hanging out of the overcrowded trains on my way to school, eating street bhel puri and jabbering with my friends in that hybrid language of Hindustani and English that can be called Hinglish, and protesting, while submitting to, the corruption that defines the ordinary transactions of Indian life. So we too were a tribe of our own. Yet from my first experience with Americans, I knew they were a unique sort of tribe, a tribe like no other.
In a single year of living with four different families in Arizona—a preacher and his wife; the local postmaster and his wife; a wealthy rancher, his second wife and daughter; and two young schoolteachers with toddlers—I experienced America through a series of distinctive rituals. These included my first Rotary dinner during which I stared wide-eyed at my plate, bearing ingredients—namely, an absurdly large sirloin steak covered with mushrooms—I had neither tasted nor seen before; a raucous tailgate party preceding the Patagonia Union High School homecoming game; the abundance of American grocery stores, which had more types of cheese and more types of ice cream than I knew existed; the Sadie Hawkins dance, which included some of my early life’s most memorable embarrassments; and several church potlucks, including one in which a fellow showed me the odd sight of “In God We Trust” imprinted on his twenty-dollar bill. I remember cheering with my host family at a Little League baseball game; going to malls and restaurants and noticing the funny habit that people have of calling each other “sir”; seeing the Grand Canyon on an exchange student trip that included several strange signs that said “Adopt a Highway”; sampling Girl Scout cookies; attending what was at the time described as a “shotgun wedding,” featuring, incredibly, two students from my senior class; the Sphinxlike college application process, which involved me taking something called a standardized test and asking bewildered friends and family in India to write over-the-top recommendations comparing me to the greatest figures who had ever lived; and waving the flag at the Fourth of July fireworks and cookout.
This, for me, was America, America as I first discovered and experienced it. And this America was fascinating in and of itself. But through these experiences—and by looking underneath them—I knew there was a deeper side to America. Who, for example, adopts highways? My mom, visiting years later from Mumbai, could scarcely grasp the concept. It implied a notion of civic engagement, of taking responsibility for something unconnected to one’s private sphere, that she found incomprehensibly strange. Featuring God on a nation’s currency would seem to suggest not merely that trade is expected to be conducted honestly, under God’s supervision, so to speak, but also that the political and economic systems of the country are somehow based on transcendental principles, on the presumption of a divine creator.
The Sadie Hawkins dance, with the girls asking the boys, challenged conventional patriarchal sex roles while, at the same time, affirming the heterosexual norm. Many Indians live in extended families and marry through the intervention and arrangement of parents and relatives; Americans live in “nuclear” families founded by couples who choose each other and marry after falling in love. Even the poorest, least-educated, lowliest American considers himself just as good as any other American; no one can deny there is a powerful ethic of social equality in a country where people call their waiter “sir,” as if he were a knight.
Going away to college implied a mobility that expressed itself in phrases like “moving up” and “making it,” and wrapped up in all that was the powerful idea of the self-made individual and the self-directed life, in which we are the architects of our own destiny. The American dream is partly about success, but what struck me most about this country was not the spectacular Horatio Alger stories but rather the fact that here even the ordinary guy has a pretty comfortable—and by world standards an enviably lavish—life.
Americans are an active people; they are always doing something. In other countries people stand around idle for hours; Americans pursue even recreation with a kind of manic intensity. Americans work hard and play hard. If you pay Americans more they will work more hours; if you pay other people more they will use the money to work less and go on vacation. In other countries it is common to have adults who literally do nothing—they depend on family or friends to take care of them—but ask an American what he does and literally no one will answer, “Nothing.” I observed that this is a culture of effort and self-reliance; laziness and dependency have a stigma attached to them.
In other countries, a flag is just a flag. But in America, I discovered, the flag is the symbol of a founding event, emerging out of the Revolutionary War that articulated principles that could only be fully expressed almost ninety years later in the aftermath of one of the bloodiest civil wars in history. Other nations are the produc
t of history and chance; America, while hardly capable of eluding history, was primarily the product of design. It is that design that gave rise to an American dream; I noted in my mind that there is no such thing as a French dream, an Indian dream, a Chinese dream.
Identity in other countries is based on birth and blood; but in America it is based on embracing American ideals and the American way of life. That’s why the American tribe is so multiracial and includes white people, black people and brown people like me. Somehow I could come from another place like India and “become American,” while it would be reciprocally unthinkable for an American to come to Mumbai and, no matter how long he lived or worked there, “become Indian.” This is the America I fell in love with three decades ago. The American dream became my dream. That’s why I made the choice to live here, to work here, to make my life here and to go through the naturalization process and become an American citizen, which I did in 1991.
HOW NATIONS DIE
Nations come and nations go, and it is relevant to our purpose to ask how nations die. The Carthaginians, for instance, were one of the most powerful nations in the world; where are they now? Nations are sometimes wiped out through foreign conquest, as the Carthaginians were in the Punic Wars. The Romans, their conquerors, decimated one nation after another, incorporating them in the Roman Empire. Genghis Khan and his marauding Mongols stormed across the plains of Central Asia, reducing kingdoms and communities to rubble. Hitler and Stalin conspired together to obliterate Poland and share the dividends of her conquest and enslavement. This is a depressingly familiar pattern in history.
Sometimes nations are obliterated by domestic implosion. The Romans were not destroyed merely by barbarian invasions from the North; what made Rome vulnerable was its internal rot, caused by despotism, decadence and debauchery. The Ottomans too became the “sick man of Europe,” weakened by internal economic collapse and a decayed ruling class, long before the empire itself was decapitated during World War I. In Europe, the fascists and the communists sought to forcibly uproot their ancestral cultures in order to create new societies and, in their view, new types of human beings.
In my wife Debbie’s native country of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro destroyed the prosperity and political institutions of that oil-rich country and reduced it to its current state of chaos and impoverishment, a place where babies are abandoned on the street, girls become prostitutes to survive, antibiotics and medical supplies are scarce and citizens eat their domestic animals when they run out of food. “The country I was born in is dying,” Debbie says, and the desperate look in her face tells me she is speaking quite literally.
Abraham Lincoln predicted in his Lyceum Address that if America ever perished it would be through internal ruin. “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! . . . If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”3 I have for a long time now wondered about that word “we.” Who in America would want to kill America? Why would a country that has drawn immigrants for most of its history and that continues to be a magnet for the world want to take itself off the map? And what would the death of America look like?
A few years ago, I witnessed a determined, ruthless effort to kill my American dream. Shortly after I released a highly successful film criticizing Barack Obama, the FBI came banging on my door. Soon I discovered that Preet Bharara, the prosecuting attorney for the Southern District of New York, had charged me with violating campaign finance laws. My heinous offense was to give $20,000 of my own money to a longtime college friend of mine running a quixotic campaign for U.S. Senate in New York.
I knew of course that all kinds of people and groups give millions of dollars to candidates and to the Republican and Democratic Parties. Never having donated before, I gave in the wrong way. Had I given through a political action committee (PAC), I could have given much more.
This is not the place to discuss the legitimacy of campaign finance laws. The relevant point is that such laws are never prosecuted absent evidence of corruption. The only Americans who have been indicted are those who deployed campaign contributions for the purpose of getting an appointment or a tax subsidy or in some respect benefiting themselves. In these cases, of course, the “contribution” was not really a contribution but rather the purchase of a political favor or quid pro quo. But in my case no corruption or quid pro quo was involved; the prosecution conceded I was doing this out of what my attorney termed “misguided loyalty” toward a friend.
The friend, I should mention, was one of a small clan of Dartmouth students whom I befriended just a year after coming to America. With my family thousands of miles away, this little platoon of pals constituted my surrogate family. More than anyone else, they taught me about America and showed me what it means to be an American. I still remember the time they took me to buy my first navy blue blazer and showed me how to dress appropriately. “An Ivy League education,” one of them solemnly informed me, “is incomplete without learning to make a proper dimple in your tie.”
Essentially they were showing me how to assimilate, not just to America but also to the preppie subculture of the northeastern elite campus. My affection for this group was deep and reciprocated. My loyalty to them was not “misguided” in itself; it had been earned through years of devoted friendship.
Still, I found myself standing frightened and vulnerable in a U.S. courtroom and hearing the ominous phrase, United States of America versus Dinesh D’Souza. Those are words that no immigrant wants to hear. I knew that there was a whole team of FBI agents assigned to my case: one to go through my bank records, another to review my tax returns, a third to read through all my books. Their objective was clear: find something on this guy so that we can nail him. And the Obama administration sought to lock me away in federal prison for a period between ten and sixteen months.
A PLOT TO KILL A DREAM
A Clinton-appointee judge didn’t go along with this, but he did sentence me to eight months of overnight confinement in a halfway house, where I slept on a bunk bed in a dormitory with sixty hardened federal felons. In addition, I paid a fine and got five years of probation and community service, which I am still doing, so that my penance is not complete until October 2019. And absent a presidential pardon I will remain a lifetime felon.
From the first tap on my door, I knew that they were bent on destroying my life, on uprooting my American dream. But as the process got under way I realized that this was not about me. Sure, I had been reckless in giving the Obama administration a pretext to go after me. Didn’t I know there was a target on my back? I had just made a movie—the second-highest-grossing political documentary of all time—exposing the leader of the United States as a hypocrite and a fraud. I knew, better than most, what a thin-skinned narcissist he was. Shouldn’t I have expected him to use his full power to retaliate? If you strike at the Empire, won’t the Empire strike back? I was obviously the dumbest criminal in America.
Then I saw that this wasn’t just personal. Obama didn’t just despise me; he despised people like me. I was a nonwhite immigrant born in the same year as Obama, an Ivy League graduate as he was, an American success story just like him, and yet I saw America very differently than he did, and fought for a vision of America that he was assiduously trying to obliterate. People like me represented a threat to Obama’s project to “remake America,” as he put it, and in the name of that project, he had to defeat us, to discredit us, even to put us out of commission if possible. In trying to kill my American dream, Obama and his minions were going after the America that I love and represent.
So I came to see my travails as reflecting a larger enterprise, not the demise of my American dream but the project for the demise of the American dream itself. I realized that the most likely death of America would not involve the disappearance of
its people or the erasure of its national boundaries. Rather, it would involve the destruction and dissolution of all the things that make America distinctive. The death of America is the death of American exceptionalism.
Such a death would involve not only the collapse of America’s founding principles but also the extinction of its characteristic mores and values and what Lincoln termed its “mystic chords of memory.” In effect, we’d still have the American people but they would no longer bear the recognizable American stamp. They—we—would no longer dream American dreams. The America that I and so many of my fellow Americans have come to love would no longer exist.
If that happens, there will have been little point in my emigrating to this country; my life’s path would, to a large degree, have been a mistake. I might still love America but that America would be gone. I would simply not feel the same way about the America that remained, for how can one love a country that has ceased to be lovely? I am tempted to compare this catastrophe to a death in the family, but it would more accurately be a death of the family.
What makes this crisis especially acute is who is perpetrating the murder. It is none other than some of our fellow citizens. One may say that there is a revolt in the family by a faction that seeks to destroy the family, to wreck what the family has always stood for and to replace it by something else entirely, a new family in which many members feel like strangers. Some of them may have to be driven out or locked up because they no longer fit in and are perceived as a threat to the new ideological regime.
I realize with horror that there are many people in America who seek this sort of transformation or, as I have been putting it, demise. In this sense, the existential threat to America is genuine. The death of America is a real possibility. There are very powerful people in America who are working overtime to kill America.
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