Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  It was his task and the task of all patriots, Lincoln concluded, to “demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have been fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.”

  So now we can see why Lincoln went to war. He went to war to save not just the nation but a certain type of nation. For Lincoln, America would not be America once the proposition of all men are created equal—and the whole ensemble of constitutional principles that flow from it—was given up. Lincoln refused to submit to an America defined by the principles of the slave plantation, principles whose realization Lincoln regarded as tantamount to the death of the nation. Even more, in Lincoln’s words, it would “practically put an end to free government upon the earth.”2

  But why did the Democratic South start the war? Even a scholar as astute as Harry Jaffa argues that the planter class made a colossal strategic mistake. These people had slavery in the South. Lincoln had pledged not to interfere with it there. Yet after the war slavery was permanently abolished throughout the country. “One might suspect,” Jaffa writes, “that the Southern secessionists were financed by abolitionism as they catapulted slavery toward its destruction.”3

  I believe, however, that these Democratic planters were not so dumb. They realized what Lincoln’s election signified, that the balance of power had tipped against them. Slavery was now indeed, as Lincoln promised, on its way to “ultimate extinction.” The Southern Democrats went to war, but they knew that they could count on the Northern Democrats to undermine Lincoln from within Union ranks. If they waited longer, their political position was likely to deteriorate further. Yes, they might lose the war and lose it all, but they were going to lose it all in any event. Thus their best time to strike was now.

  A SIMILAR SITUATION

  I think the perceptive reader will know full well why I am recounting this history. Notwithstanding all the Solomonic pronouncements about how history does not repeat itself, we are in a very similar situation today with Trump. Trump, like Lincoln, came out of nowhere; both men were outsiders. Yet from the outset Lincoln showed a resolve in taking on the Democratic plantation that can provide a valuable lesson to Trump.

  Lincoln was portrayed by the Democrats and their allies, just as Trump is now, as being a grave threat to their fundamental liberties. Yet we may ask about Trump the same question that Lincoln asked about himself. Has Trump actually violated any of the basic constitutional rights of his opponents? Has he deprived them of their free speech or the right to assemble or vote? No, he has not. And yet they persist in trying to drive him from office for the same reason their Democratic forbears sought to bring Lincoln to his knees, because they cannot abide the result of a free election.

  We need to step back and take in the full scope of this. For all that we learn about America’s two-party system, as a practical matter one party has dominated politics for a generation or more. We cannot count the founding period, because there were no parties in the modern sense then. But from the 1820s through 1860, the Democrats were the majority party. From 1865 through 1932, it was the Republicans. From 1932 to 1980, the Democrats became the dominant party once again.

  Political dominance does not mean you control the presidency, both parties in Congress and the Supreme Court. We know, for example, that Eisenhower and Nixon were Republican presidents during the era of Democratic dominance. But they were pulled to the center by the Democratic tide. Neither Eisenhower nor Nixon sought to undo the New Deal, nor could they have done so had they wanted to. In a way, Eisenhower solidified the New Deal, and Nixon parts of the Great Society, by acquiescing to them.

  Since 1980, however, American politics has been a draw. Neither party has enjoyed real dominance. Reagan was president for two terms in the eighties, but he mostly had a Democratic Congress. Then Clinton was president for two terms in the nineties, but the GOP swept the Congress in 1994. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both initially had congressional majorities in both houses but couldn’t hold them, forcing them to deal with rival party obstruction in their second terms.

  Then, in 2016, everything came up for grabs. The Democrats saw a chance to make their plantation permanent. If Hillary won the presidency and Democrats rode her coattails to make strong gains in the House and the Senate, Democrats would have not only the presidency and the Congress but also the chance to lock the Supreme Court into a 6–3 Democratic majority. This would spell the beginning of the end for Republicans, sending them the way of the Whigs.

  Then the Democrats could open the gates to massive illegal immigration, while at the same time granting amnesty to the illegals already here. By adding several million new voters to the rolls—mostly but not exclusively Latino—Democrats could expand their Latino plantation and also tip the balance of American votes, now precariously divided between the parties, decisively in their favor. This would give Democrats the kind of control that would last indefinitely into the future.

  We’ve seen it happen in California, which was once Nixon country and Reagan country. As James Q. Wilson argued decades ago in the essay “Reagan Country,” California once embodied the American dream of owning a piece of paradise with two cars in front and a pool in the backyard.4 But illegal immigration has changed the demographic composition of the state. The Republican Party is no longer competitive at the state level, and Democrats can safely count on Californians to vote for whomever they nominate in a presidential year.

  I moved to California in 2000. Much as I liked the sun, the palm trees and the ocean, over time I saw what it means to live in a progressive one-party state. Eventually I grew weary of the confiscatory taxation, the absurd regulations, the preposterous edicts making it illegal to report illegals and granting children the right to decide their own gender. This, I realized, is progressive utopia, and I didn’t want to subsidize it anymore, so Debbie and I moved to her home state of Texas. For progressive Democrats, however, California is the model, and their hope is that as California goes, so goes the nation.

  But the American people, speaking through the same relatively narrow electoral majority that elected Lincoln, decided otherwise. By electing Trump and preserving Republican majorities in the House and, much more narrowly, the Senate, Americans gave the GOP the dominance that Democrats aspired to. In his first few months, Trump saved the Court by shepherding Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to confirmation. One more appointee and the Court—which is now leaning GOP—will be out of Democratic hands.

  So this explains the dismay and horror of the Democrats at Trump’s presence in the White House. For them, in the words of progressive critic Walter Kirn, “the unimaginable has become the historical.” Trump’s election “gave me the impression that time was warping.” It was a “trick of the gods to remind us cocky mortals that we are not in control of our affairs.” It was a “total eclipse . . . cutting a spooky swath of darkness across the republic,” giving Kirn himself a “sense of temporal displacement.”5 This quasi-religious vocabulary gives you a sense of how big the stakes were for Kirn and others like him.

  Then there is Trump’s Olympian vigor, which must only add to the left’s dismay. Not only is Trump in there but he is a fighter, and he fights on both the political and cultural fronts. He is the most politically incorrect president in American history. And as the tax bill, the Gorsuch nomination and progress on peace in Korea and in the fight against ISIS showed, Trump has the ability to get things done. Having dismissed him as a buffoon and a moron, the progressive left is now deathly scared of him.

  THE WOLF AND THE LAMB

  The similarities between Lincoln’s day and our own go far beyond the surface resemblance between the 1860 and 2016 elections. Today, too, we have a Democratic plantation,
not just black this time, but populated with dependent and subjugated minority populations. Today, as well, we have a befuddled Republican Party tempted to make peace with the plantation and in search of a leader who might have Lincoln’s prescience and fortitude. Today Republicans have a chance, as Lincoln did, to topple the Democratic plantation, perhaps this time even beyond the possibility of salvage and rehabilitation.

  Let’s begin with the perversion of language, a problem as familiar in Lincoln’s time as it is in our own. Then, as now, enslavement was justified by the Democrats through an appeal to obfuscation and deception. Lincoln did not hesitate to point this out. In an 1864 address at a Baltimore fair, Lincoln said, “We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.”

  Continuing in his characteristic manner of being both homespun and deep, Lincoln added, “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty, and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.”6

  Even in the North. Lincoln recognized that the Northern and Southern Democrats were in it together, and that the Democrats were the party of the wolf, invoking liberty for themselves even as they suppressed and choked the liberty of others and stole the fruits of their labor. For all the vicissitudes of history, some things remain the same. Vulpine extortion and theft have defined the Democratic plantation from the outset, and they continue to define the Democratic plantation even now.

  This is not to say that the plantation in the twenty-first century is unchanged from what it was in the nineteenth. In a partial vindication of both Parmenides and Heraclitus, we see that history is an account of both continuities and discontinuities. In the movie The Godfather, the Corleone family moved its operations from New York to Las Vegas. Why? Because their opportunities in New York grew thin. Thus they moved from labor rackets involving control of the unions and bootlegging to the more fertile territory of casino gambling.

  The move to Vegas showed creative improvisation, the ability to start afresh and build from the ground up, and yet the Corleones remained the Corleones. The crime family itself did not change, even when it changed location and tactics. Theft and extortion continued as the heart of the operation. In New York it was camouflaged as the olive oil business; in Vegas it was hidden behind the operation of casinos. In both places, however, the Corleones used their power to forcibly extract money from others.

  In some respect, the Democrats are like the Corleones. And just like that large and varied family, the Democrats over time have shown themselves to be a mixed bunch. Some are thoughtful, like Calhoun and Fitzhugh; others are dull, like Pierce and Buchanan. Some are swashbuckling, like Van Buren, Boss Tweed and LBJ; others are drearily pedantic, like Woodrow Wilson and Obama. Some are straight-laced, like Taney and Jimmy Carter; others are con artists, like Andrew Jackson, FDR and Bill and Hillary Clinton. What unites this political family through time, however, is the commitment of its leaders to the plantation in its various guises and phases.

  The old Democrats made a gallant attempt to make an open public defense of the slave plantation. Today’s Democrats, however, recognize that their new urban plantations are indefensible. In this respect, we can liken the Democrats to today’s neo-Nazis. The old Nazis were open about their anti-Semitism, and they attempted to justify their horrific treatment of Jews. Hitler repeatedly warned that the Jews deserved what was coming to them, and so on. But after the Holocaust, things changed.

  Today’s neo-Nazis don’t try to defend the Holocaust; they deny it even happened. In a similar vein, today’s Democrats don’t claim credit for the conditions of their urban plantations. Even though those places are one-party systems, run exclusively by Democrats, they attempt to foist the blame for their unlivable conditions on white racism, on Republicans, on America in general, on anyone except the group that created those plantations and has governed them over the half century from their formation to the present.

  TWO BIG LIES

  The progressive account of American history—which is basically a narrative designed to cover up the plantation—is defined by two big lies. The first big lie is that fascism is a phenomenon of the right. The second is that racism is a defining characteristic of conservatives and of the Republican Party. Both lies work together to distort American history and to project the blame for Democratic atrocities onto the very people who sought, with varying degrees of success, to stop them.

  In reality, as I have shown in this book, fascism is a phenomenon of the left, and racism is the defining characteristic of progressives and the Democratic Party. This is true not merely of the origins or the history of progressives and Democrats; it is also true of the ideology and practice of progressive Democrats today. So they are the real fascists; they are the real racists. Only when these big lies are fully exposed can we clearly see the plantation in full view and recognize who is responsible for it.

  We need to look closely because the Democratic plantation is a kind of amoeba; it evolves over time. In this book I have shown five distinct plantation phases, bringing us up to the present. The first phase was the old rural slave plantation, 1828 to 1860. Here the Democratic planter class became rich and lazy by directly stealing the labor and liberty of the slaves. The Democrats became prosperous by ripping off the poorest of the poor.

  We should not think of this as a purely private racket. The state played a role as well, through an elaborate structure of laws that upheld the plantation. The state also employed slave patrols to protect what it viewed as the property of the plantation. It was a good racket while it lasted, but unfortunately for the Democrats, it was ruined by Lincoln and the Republicans and finally came to an end at Appomattox in 1865.

  The second phase was Van Buren’s Northern urban machine, 1836-1932, itself modified from the rural plantation. Here the Democrats figured out how to exploit not blacks but ethnic immigrant populations, recognizing them to be as fearful, vulnerable and insecure as the slaves. Democrats bought the votes of these groups through goodies appropriated from the city treasury; essentially they perverted the founders’ constitutional scheme by turning politics into a crooked game of looting the taxpayer to fund an ethnically based patronage system of government employment and government handouts designed to keep the crooks perpetually in power.

  The third phase was the national progressive plantation, which we can also term the fascist plantation. I date this from 1932 to 1964. Here Wilson in theory and FDR in practice converted the local and state ethnic machines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a single machine. The federal government became the Big House, controlling the private sector and, increasingly, the ordinary lives of citizens. FDR’s plantation overseers were not city ward operatives but rather labor union organizers and strongmen who drew on the muscle of the federal government to force into compliance employers and also fellow workers.

  While importing ideas from Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, FDR created in America a distinctive democratic brand of fascism, which is to say, fascism that courted popular support in order to sustain FDR in office. Yet notwithstanding his appreciation for Mussolini, FDR’s fascist plantation more closely resembled Nazism than Italian fascism in that it had a strongly racist component, facilitating segregation, lynching and racial terrorism against African Americans.

  The fourth phase was LBJ’s plantation, which can be officially dated 1964 to 1980, although a good bit of it continues to the present day. LBJ realized that after
World War II, racism had declined sharply and therefore the Democratic Party could no longer count on the white racist vote, even in the South. The problem was that Americans were simply not racist enough! So in a historic turn, LBJ decided that Democrats thereafter should go after the black vote.

  He reconstituted FDR’s plantation by, in effect, turning blacks from a group directly oppressed and exploited by the Democrats into a group only indirectly exploited because now they were an ethnic constituency, as for example the Irish had been in the past. Unlike the old plantation, where the slaves worked and produced things, LBJ’s plantation was designed to produce nothing and prevent its inhabitants from working. Self-control was replaced by government control, and the idle, uneducated, irresponsible citizen became LBJ’s model citizen. The Big House now existed to take care of such people.

  LBJ’s plantation was responsible for the cultural pathologies of the inner city, in some cases doing even more harm to the African American community than had been done by earlier generations of Democrats through slavery. Slavery, for example, disabled but did not permanently destroy the black family; somehow LBJ’s welfare state managed to do what even slavery could not do. Democrats, although rhetorically inconsolable about the plight of the black underclass, have no intention of changing it because they want to keep this population fully dependent on them.

  Finally, there is today’s multicultural plantation, which includes LBJ’s plantation but can more accurately be termed Obama’s plantation. Thus we can date it from the 1980s through today. Notice that Obama himself did very little for blacks. He rarely visited the inner city. He did nothing to address the issues of crime, gangs or broken families. All he did was to expand welfare benefits and food stamps. Clearly blacks are a group that Democrats now take for granted. Even America’s first African American president didn’t feel the need to address their plight, other than to keep the benefits flowing to ensure their total dependency on the Democratic Party.