Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Both Swain and Loury advocate that America move away from ethnic identity politics. Loury, in particular, calls for a “racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock.”34 I am on board with this, and I will discuss this further in the concluding chapter, but here I should say why white nationalists should not be expected to cheerfully go along.

  It is all very well to tell them that politics ideally should not be structured along the lines of race or ethnicity. Their point is: it is. And as long as the Democratic Party mobilizes groups along ethnic lines, they are going to feel justified in doing as whites what every other group does in the name of its own ethnicity. Multiculturalism has come home to roost, and white nationalists are its newest advocates.

  WHO IS RICHARD SPENCER?

  I had never interviewed a white supremacist before, so I didn’t know what to expect when Richard Spencer showed up to talk to me, with my film team present and the cameras rolling. Spencer is often portrayed as the most dangerous man in America; a recent profile of him in the Atlantic Monthly likened him to Hitler with the title “His Kampf,” and when he showed up to speak at the University of Florida, the governor declared a state of emergency. Normally you have to be a hurricane or an epidemic to qualify for that designation.35

  Debbie and I had arranged security—after all, we are both immigrants from Third World countries and Spencer is not known to be a fan of our type—but from the moment we saw him we knew we had nothing to fear. Spencer came alone, unaccompanied by goons. He looked around nervously, giving me an eager-to-please smile. I saw right away he was a cordial, diffident guy. Dressed in a tweed jacket, he looked somewhat like an academic from a previous era.

  “No, I’m not a Nazi,” Spencer said right away. “I’m not a neo-Nazi. I’m not any of those things.” Why then, I asked him, did you and your pals give the Nazi salute, the raised arm and the “Heil Trump”? At first Spencer pretended it was no big deal. “Well, you know, we have ‘Hail to the Chief,’ lots of things.” But when I pressed him, he acknowledged it was for effect, a kind of up-yours to the politically correct class. “I was being provocative.”

  Spencer said he wasn’t a white supremacist either, but he admitted to being a white nationalist. “I don’t believe in nationalism in terms of silly or hokey flag-waving, and I definitely don’t believe in nationalism in the sense of Europeans fighting one another. I believe, actually, in a greater brotherhood of European peoples.” Would this, I asked, include Greeks and Italians? Spencer said yes. “We’re all cousins. We’re all part of a big extended family.”

  What’s so great, I asked him, about the white race? Spencer spoke of what he termed its “Faustian spirit. The white race is expansive whether in terms of conquering, in terms of exploration of the seas or space, or scholarship and analysis of science. We possess something that’s peculiar to us, and it makes us special.” And was that something, I inquired, in the genes? “It is,” Spencer replied. “No question. Everything is in the genes.”

  My real interest was to find out what Spencer really believed and where he really belonged on the political spectrum. I asked him whether he sought to conserve the principles of the American founding. He responded, “I’ve been critical of the American founding throughout my career.” The whole concept of individual rights, he said, was “problematic.”

  Me: So, all men are created equal. True or false?

  Spencer: False, obviously.

  Me: The idea that we have a right to life, true or false?

  Spencer: I don’t think we have rights to really anything.

  I asked Spencer about the two main prongs of Reaganite conservatism.

  Me: One prong is American influence is good for the world and that American power should project American values, agree or disagree?

  Spencer: If American values are wielded to destroy other cultures and bring them into one big capitalist market or something, I don’t think we should be promoting American values in that sense.

  Me: The second prong of Reaganism was free-market economics, promoting a global free market in which people trade with each other. Would you like to see the world be a global capitalist order?

  Spencer: Absolutely not. This notion that we need to destroy our own industries, that our people are just one more competitor in a global marketplace. Good luck, sink or swim, pal. The notion that that should be the guiding philosophy of our citizens is disgusting, actually. I totally reject that.

  I asked Spencer about his advocacy of a concept called the white ethno-state.

  Me: What I take you to be saying is that the white ethno-state would have a powerful state at the center of it.

  Spencer: No question.

  Me: But this notion of limited government . . . As you know, the founders saw the government as the enemy of our rights.

  Spencer: No individual has a right outside of a collective community. You have rights, not eternally or given by God, or by nature.

  Me: Who gives them to us?

  Spencer: Ultimately the state gives those rights to you. The state is the source of rights, not the individual.

  Me: Would it be fair to say you are not just against illegal immigration but immigration, period?

  Spencer: I’m definitely against illegal immigration. That’s an easy one. I’m against replacement immigration in the sense that I’m against immigration coming in from the Third World that is ultimately going to change the ethnic and cultural constitution of the United States. I wouldn’t say I’m against immigration in itself. I would actually be happy to open the door to white South Africans among many who are truly suffering. I would be happy to take in those refugees.

  Me: Would you be happy with an immigration policy that said, we want people from New Zealand, Australia, white guys from Europe and South Africa. We don’t want people from Barbados or Bombay.

  Spencer: Yes, and that was the immigration policy beginning in 1924 up until 1965. That period of time coincided with American greatness.

  Me: Now this seems very different than Trump. Trump was quoted in the paper saying to Bannon, if there’s an Indian guy working in Silicon Valley and his visa runs out, and we have to send him home, that’s a loss. That’s something we should try to prevent. You disagree?

  Spencer: I do disagree with that. The H-1B Visa program has been totally detrimental to white people. I want white people to become doctors, lawyers. I want white people to achieve their dreams.

  I asked Spencer about his favorite presidents. Reagan? “I do not think he was a great president.” Lincoln: Spencer blamed him for starting “an unnecessary war” instead of negotiating a solution with the slave-owners. Spencer wasn’t too hot on Washington either. Who, then, were his favorites? “There’s something about Jackson,” he said. “There’s something about Polk, who took something from Mexico and made it ours.” I pointed out to him that they were both Democrats.

  Finally I asked Spencer about the movie Birth of a Nation.

  Me: Have you seen it?

  Spencer: Yes, I have.

  Me: What did you think of it?

  Spencer: It’s an amazing film, one of the most important films ever made.

  Me: Leaving aside its technical merits, the notion that the sex-crazed blacks are taking over the country and the Ku Klux Klan was a redemptive movement of white identity to clean the place up—you agree with that?

  Spencer: It was a romanticization of the first Klan in response to Republican Reconstruction. It’s an idealized vision that paints in really broad strokes.

  Me: But it’s your music.

  Spencer: Sure. It appealed to many Americans including presidents.

  As I interviewed Spencer, I kept saying to myself, obviously this guy is not a conservative, but what is he? He’s not a progressive in the contemporary sense, either. And yet his ideas are so familiar. Only towar
d the end of the interview did it hit me. Spencer’s views are virtually identical to those of the progressive racists of the Woodrow Wilson era. He even dresses the part. Basically, the guy is a relic.

  In a purely logical sense, Spencer should be a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats invented the ideology he espouses, and even today the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic identity politics. Spencer’s problem, however, is that the Democrats mobilize black, Latino and Asian identity politics against that of whites. Since whites are now the all-round bad guy, Spencer’s brand of progressivism is no longer welcome at the multicultural picnic.

  Thus Spencer, a man without a party, turns to Trump. Now there is very little on which Spencer and Trump actually agree. Trump is a flag-waving patriot who cherishes the American founders; Spencer isn’t and doesn’t. Trump is a capitalist; Spencer prefers a strong state regulating markets on behalf of white interests. Trump wants to keep illegals out so legal immigrants and other American citizens—whether white, black or brown—can thrive. Spencer wants more white immigrants, fewer—if any—black and brown ones. In sum, Trump is generally conservative in his ideology and Spencer is clearly not.

  Why, then, did Spencer vote for Trump? Why does he consider himself on the right? The simple answer is that Spencer has no place else to go, so he is trying to carve out a niche for himself in the only party where he can find some measure of agreement, however small. The point here is that Trump isn’t embracing Spencer, just as Lincoln didn’t embrace the Know-Nothings. Rather, Spencer is going to Trump, as the Know-Nothings eventually went with Lincoln.

  Look at it from Spencer’s point of view. If you’re a white nationalist who wants racial preferences for whites, would you rather go with the Democrats, who want racial preferences against whites, or with the Republicans, who want racial preferences for no one? Clearly the latter. If you’re a white nationalist who wants to eliminate minority immigration altogether—legal and illegal—would you rather vote for the Democrats, who encourage more illegals, with a view to gaining more future voters, or for the Republicans, who support legal but not illegal immigration? Again, the answer is obvious.

  We can see the same phenomenon on the Democratic side of the aisle. Consider a radical communist who wants a 100 percent tax rate and the complete abolition of private property. Would such a guy prefer the Republicans, who affirm property rights and seek to lower the tax rate, or the Democrats, who push for tax increases and more regulation of private property rights? Obviously the latter. Does it follow, then, that the Democrats are the party of communism or that they should feel morally obligated to repudiate the communist vote? Not at all; no one even asks this of them.

  To sum up, white nationalism is not conservative, even if white nationalists end up in the Trump column. The left tries to portray Spencer and other white nationalists as right-wingers in the same way they claim Hitler was a right-winger; it’s an attempt to conceal their own history. Nor is white nationalism the most potent form of racism in America today. The institutionalized racism of the Democratic plantation is far worse. This is the new form of progressive ethnic exploitation that whites as a group have, at least to date, bravely resisted.

  11

  Emancipation

  How American Nationalism Can Save the Country

  Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, and tell old Pharaoh, let my people go.

  —Negro Spiritual

  On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln stood at the battlefield of Gettysburg and delivered some brief, telling remarks. Without making any specific reference to the battle of Gettysburg and without once mentioning the word “America,” he said that the Civil War was a test of whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal “can long endure.” Lincoln said it was for “us the living” to continue the “unfinished work” of the war dead, to ensure “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”1

  For all their familiarity, these words are also strange. Clearly Lincoln was saying that in the Civil War America’s very survival was at stake. But why? Wouldn’t America still exist whichever side won the war? Let’s say that Lincoln negotiated a settlement with the Confederacy in which the Missouri Compromise—the law that had kept the peace from 1820 to 1860—was restored in an expanded form so that slavery would be permanently allowed south of the Mason-Dixon Line, which would now be extended all the way to the Pacific.

  This is not imaginary or counterfactual history. Such a solution was proposed and seriously debated. The Crittenden proposal was named after the man who devised it, Kentucky senator John Crittenden. Historians agree that it was the only way the Civil War could have been averted. Some Republicans, terrified of the prospect of war, warmed to a seemingly equitable division of territory that would have prevented it.

  Had Abraham Lincoln gotten behind the Crittenden proposal, it would most likely have passed, and there would have been no Civil War. Yet Lincoln worked behind the scenes to defeat it. “Stand firm,” he told his fellow Republicans. Compromise on the very core of what the Republicans campaigned for, he said, would mean “all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over.” Admittedly the pressure to give in seemed irresistible; that was why Republicans had to be tough. “The tug has to come, & better now than any time hereafter.”

  We must admit, in taking his stand against Crittenden and other compromise measures, Lincoln, notwithstanding his seeming attributions of the war to unavoidable circumstances—“And the war came”—nevertheless played a decisive role in its tragic and bloody occurrence. If Lincoln’s stance here were self-serving or reckless, he could be said to have plunged the nation into an unnecessary cataclysm and, far from being America’s greatest president, he would have to be considered the worst. No defender of Lincoln can agree with such an assessment.

  So why did Lincoln reject the Crittenden compromise? For him, the issue was starkly simple and yet unutterably profound. He had won a free election, and now the Democratic Party was attempting to reverse the outcome of that election. He had secured an electoral mandate for halting the spread of slavery, and now the Democrats, both in the North and the South, sought to force him to bargain away his mandate. The Democratic South had not only threatened to break up the country but was in the process of breaking it up, putting Lincoln in a position of having to relinquish his Republican principles in order to discourage this process.

  Lincoln said he would not and could not do it. Why not? Because, Lincoln argued, his electoral mandate was not his to give up. True, he and his fellow Republicans had campaigned on the platform of restricting the spread of slavery. Once the American people, speaking through an electoral majority, approved that mandate, Lincoln insisted that it no longer belonged to him—it now belonged to them.

  “No popular government can long survive a marked precedent, that those who carry an election, can only save the government from immediate destruction by giving up the main point upon which the people gave the election.” For Lincoln to bargain away his mandate would be to give up on the meaning of democracy. Only the people themselves could give up what they alone possessed. “The people themselves, and not their servants, can safely reverse their own deliberate decision.”

  Therefore, Lincoln said, “I will suffer death before I will consent or advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right . . . I should regard any concession in the face of menace as the destruction of the government itself, and a consent on all hands that our system shall be brought down to a level with the existing disorganized state of affairs in Mexico.”

  And again, “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance the government sh
all be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. If we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.”

  Now Lincoln acknowledged that while majorities have a right to rule, the power of even elected majorities is strictly limited by what the Constitution authorizes. Majorities do not have unlimited power. Moreover, they are obliged to respect minority rights no less than their own. Even elected majorities have no warrant to trample on the constitutionally specified rights of minorities.

  Lincoln conceded that if he had violated the constitutional rights of any individual or group—such as its right to free speech or freedom of religion or to freely assemble—then those individuals or groups would be justified in leaving the union. “Think, if you can,” Lincoln said on March 4, 1861, “of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has been denied.” Then Lincoln added, “Such is not our case.”

  Lincoln had violated no constitutional rights, let alone vital ones. Therefore, Lincoln said, the election and its aftermath “presents to the whole family of man the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy, a government of the people, by the same people, can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.”

  In his July 4, 1861, Special Message to Congress, Lincoln added, “Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled—the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.” Lincoln insisted, “We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose,” because “if we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”