Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Obama’s “remaking” of America seems to have focused more on what may be termed the frontier of the Democratic plantation. Obama fought hard to legalize and normalize gay marriage, and he introduced the DACA policy of refusing to deport the children of illegal immigrants who have grown up in the United States. In this respect Obama may be considered a plantation recruiter, seeking to draw new groups—homosexual activists and illegals—to join blacks in relying on the federal government for their security and advancement.

  Obama, like Bill Clinton, was part of the project to expand the Democratic plantation beyond blacks to include Latino barrios and Native American reservations. Each group was recruited into a project of delivering votes as part of an ethnic collective, in exchange for which each group was maintained in a state of stupefied subjugation. So powerful was this parasitism that groups became dependent and servile and, despite their miseries, constantly voted to sustain in power the party that was subjugating them.

  Even Asian Americans would have enclaves if the Democrats could figure out how to lock them into ethnic Chinatowns and Koreatowns. Of all minorities, Democrats have had the least success with this group. The Asian American plantation seems to have only overseers, very few inhabitants. Democrats, however, are hoping to change that. As an Asian American myself, I can only wish them failure with this exploitative project.

  PLANTATION CONTROL

  Only whites—even whites undergoing economic hardship and plagued by cultural dysfunction—have so far resisted succumbing to the lure of the Democratic plantation. What makes this hard for the Democrats to take is that whites used to be on the plantation, both the poor whites of the South and the ethnic whites who were once part of the Northern urban machines. Van Buren had them, Wilson had them, FDR had them, but now the Democrats have lost them.

  What happened? The problem is that whites assimilated. The Irish became Americans and ceased to think of themselves as Irish. They were once Irish Americans; now they are Americans of Irish descent. One may say that ethnic identity became an American identity. The affirmation of American identity is one of the hallmarks of the Republican Party. Thus when the immigrants assimilated, the Democrats lost them as a group to the GOP. This is the main reason why Democrats don’t want Latinos to learn English and assimilate, because that might mean Latinos would follow the example of the Irish and escape the political captivity of the Democratic Party.

  Plantation control is a very serious business. These are terrible places that no one is supposed to leave, or even want to leave. The happiest people on the plantation are the overseers, who siphon off large amounts of money reserved for the poor and the destitute while also enjoying their task of lording it over the plantation’s hapless inhabitants. Conscious of this, the Democrats have anointed a vast multicultural overseer class to patrol their new ethnic plantations.

  One of the main tasks of the overseers is to ensure that few people depart the plantation. The overseers do this not merely through working to establish the complete dependency of their subject populations. They also do it by vilifying anyone—especially blacks or other minorities—who seek to criticize or reform the Democratic plantation. In the mode of Du Bois vilifying Booker T. Washington, today’s overseer class bashes black and Hispanic conservatives and independents, accusing them of being accessories to minority oppression.

  What makes these accusations downright insane is that the Democratic plantation is the greatest force for oppression and racist subjugation in American history. Nowhere is racist exploitation today more obvious than on the Democrats’ multicultural plantations. Even so, we have the strange phenomenon of plantation administrators and accessories—the real Uncle Toms—accusing free-thinking and freedom-loving minorities of being Uncle Toms. The vehemence of these accusations shows how much the Democratic plantation class has always hated runaways.

  The only prospect scarier for a Democrat than a plantation runaway is the dismantling of the plantation system itself. The Democrats currently have no intention of dismantling it. The only way they would consider that would be if the plantation ceased to pay off politically for them. In that case, they might give it up. But that would spell the end of the Democratic Party as it is now constituted. The Democrats, in that case, would have to go straight or, what seems more likely given the party’s history, find themselves a new scam.

  A GLORIOUS HISTORY

  There is only one group that can shut down the plantation: Trump and the Republican Party. Both have a direct stake in doing this, because the plantation is antithetical to what Trump believes and to what Republicans have stood for and stand for today. While many Republicans have no idea how to defeat the plantation—some are in fact wasting their energies fighting against Trump—they can and must learn. Only Trump and the GOP together can save American nationalism and avert the death of the nation.

  To a degree never recognized, Lincoln and the Republicans are the founders of modern American nationalism. Wait a minute, you say. Shouldn’t we credit the American founders for that? Not really. It is true, as Samuel Huntington writes, that only in the founding era “did the British settlers on the Atlantic coast begin to identify themselves not only as residents of their individual colonies but also as Americans.” Ben Franklin, who called himself a “Briton” prior to 1776, began to consider himself an American following the Revolution.

  Even so, Huntington recognizes, it was not until the conclusion of the Civil War that America’s identity as a single nation was securely established. Prior to the Civil War we were the United States, plural; only after Appomattox did we become the United States, singular. “Since the Civil War,” Huntington writes, “Americans have been a flag-oriented people. The Stars and Stripes has the status of a religious icon and is a more central symbol of national identity for Americans than their flags are for people of other nations.” Memorial Day was also commemorated for the first time following the Civil War.7

  Today’s progressive Democrats, just like their Democratic forbears, loathe American nationalism because it advances a unifying vision that poses a mortal threat to their politics of ethnic mobilization and to the Democratic plantation itself. “I never use the word ‘Nation’ in speaking of the United States,” John C. Calhoun declared in 1849. “We are not a Nation but a . . . Confederacy of equal and sovereign States.”8

  If Calhoun reviled American nationalism in the name of states’ rights, today’s Democrats do so in the name of internationalism or ethnic diversity. Progressive philosopher Martha Nussbaum denounces “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous” and urges Americans to give their “allegiance” to the “worldwide community of human beings.” Political scientist Amy Gutmann insists it is “repugnant” for Americans to regard themselves “above all as citizens of the United States.” And invoking the ethnic diversity in this country, Elizabeth Bruenig recently wrote in the Washington Post that nationalism is a chimera because the American nation itself is a chimera. “Such a thing does not exist.”9

  The Republican Party is well equipped to fight the plantation because it has a glorious history of fighting against racism and white supremacy. This is hardly known, even in the precincts of the GOP. Here we can identify the great battles fought by the GOP. First, Republicans mobilized the armies of the North to defeat the combined efforts—military and political—of the Democratic Party to save slavery and make it permanent.

  Second, Republicans shut down the Ku Klux Klan for a period and fought vigorously, though not successfully, to curb Democratic efforts to promote segregation and racial terrorism. Third, Republicans spearheaded the civil rights revolution of the 1860s—the revolution that produced the Thirteenth, Fourteen and Fifteenth Amendments—as well as Reconstruction, the first attempt to build a multiracial democracy in America, which was sadly thwarted by the Democrats. Fourth, a century later, Republicans were indispensable to the passage of the civil rights laws, including the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 that made those original Republican amendments a practical reality.

  Republicans are also the original formulators of the doctrine of color-blindness that is often credited to Martin Luther King Jr. When King said he dreamt of living in a nation where we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin, he was echoing the GOP ideal first enunciated a hundred years earlier by Frederick Douglass. King deserves appreciation, of course, for reaffirming the principle, but he should have given credit to Douglass for coming up with it.

  Progressives privately loathe Douglass, and in public they dishonor him by ignoring him. Douglass, not King, is America’s greatest black leader—I suspect King would have acknowledged this—yet progressives fawn over King while spurning Douglass. This silent treatment is not merely because Douglass was a Republican. It is also because Douglass, speaking to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society just days before the Civil War ended, uttered what is from the progressive point of view the ultimate heresy.

  Douglass raised the question: what must be “done” for the former slaves? He answered, “Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall! . . . All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs also! Let him alone! . . . If you will only untie his hands and give him a chance, I think he will live.”10

  Ouch! What could be a starker repudiation of the Democratic plantation? Douglass can be heard speaking across the span of time to that conniving bigot LBJ, telling the corrupt old Democrat that he sees right through him and wants none of his condescending patronage. Progressive Democrats can forgive Douglass his tirades against the old slave plantation—at least publicly, that is their position also—but they cannot forgive the scorn he presciently heaped on their current one.

  PARTY OF LINCOLN

  Douglass embodied who the Republicans are, the party of individual rights and upward striving and what Douglass himself called the “self-made” man. These were also, as we have seen, Lincoln’s ideals. Today there are many Republicans who blame Trump for the de-Reaganization of the Republican Party and wistfully pine for the 1980s era of gentleman’s politics. This is, by and large, the main source of anxiety about Trump in some Republican quarters, and it is also the driving momentum of the so-called Never Trump movement.

  I came of age in the Reagan area, and I too prefer a more civil political climate. But that is not the America we live in now. Reagan’s policies and style were calibrated to deal with the specific problems and specific political environment of the late 1970s. Today, however, a good deal of Reaganism is dated. Not only has stagflation—that toxic combination of slow growth combined with runaway inflation—disappeared and the Soviet Union collapsed, but Reagan himself would be a fish out of water in the dark, roiled currents of today.

  But Lincoln wouldn’t. His political environment was even more roiled than the one we have now. And Lincoln would have seen that, in this environment, an environment made by a gangster clan of Democrats like Obama and Hillary, you don’t get very far with Reagan’s courtly style. In short, Trump is the man of the hour, not Reagan. Trump has the chance to do what Reagan never even dreamed about, taking a page from Lincoln and smashing the Democratic plantation.

  When we consider Trump’s two big Republican “heresies”—his positions on trade and immigration—we can see that they might be heresies from Reagan’s point of view, but they were not heresies from Lincoln’s point of view. As Gabor Boritt shows in Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, Lincoln’s GOP was unabashedly protectionist and viewed tariffs as a necessary and valid economic strategy to protect American workers and American industry from mercantilist competition from European powers. And while many progressives as well as conservatives insist that tariffs have never worked, Boritt shows that America had tariffs from Hamilton’s time through the end of the nineteenth century, and it was during this period that America grew most rapidly and became the largest economy in the world, surpassing Great Britain.11

  On immigration, too, Trump and Lincoln can be seen as generally aligned. This point is hardly obvious, but we get a vital clue about how Lincoln would have thought about today’s immigration debate by considering the position Lincoln actually took on extending civil rights—the right to full citizenship, the right to vote, the right to serve on juries—to blacks. Lincoln basically held that it was wrong for any people, anywhere, to enslave another people, because slavery was wrong or, to put it philosophically, against natural right.

  But natural rights are not the same as civil rights. Civil rights are the product of living in a particular community. The community is a social compact between the citizens who have formed that community. These existing citizens have the right to decide who gets to be a member of their club, and on what terms. For this reason, Lincoln insisted that opposition to slavery and the extension of civil protections to blacks were two separate issues. Before the war Lincoln was committed to fighting only for the former; only after the war did he move tentatively in the direction of the latter.

  It follows from this that Lincoln would have agreed with Trump that the interests of natives must be considered prior to those of potential new immigrants, and that natives are the ones who get to decide who is allowed to immigrate, and in what number, and on what conditions. This, by the way, applies to decisions about legal and illegal immigration. But hold it, the progressive will say, “America is a nation of immigrants. Immigrants are the ones who made America.”

  Actually, this is only a partial truth. As the founders and Lincoln all recognized, the first Americans were not immigrants. They were settlers. There’s a difference. Immigrants are people who come individually, in families or in small groups to a country that has already been created and established. Immigrants, one may say, are people who apply to be members of a club whose rules appeal to them. Settlers, however, are the original group that forms that community in the first place and charts out its basic rules or constitution. This settler label would apply both to the Pilgrims and the American founders.

  Trump somehow knows all this, either through learning or just intuitively. And ironically Trump, in adopting the policies of Lincoln rather than those of Reagan, is proving that he is the first Republican since Reagan to win the support of the group once known as the “Reagan Democrats.” Since Reagan, the GOP has unsuccessfully wooed these voters by anodyne appeals to abortion and other social issues. Trump is the first one to appeal to them both on economic and social issues, and that is why the descendants of the Reagan Democrats now have a new name: Trumpsters.

  Trump is the only Republican on the scene today who actually has a chance to launch the final defeat of the Democratic plantation. Trump can realize Lincoln’s goal of a country that lifts “artificial weights from all shoulders” and affords its citizens “an unfettered start” in the race of life.12 To do this he must re-Lincolnize the GOP.

  First, this means going further than opposing racial preferences and affirmative action. He must eliminate racial categories from the census and promote a new civil rights act that outlaws using those categories to discriminate against any ethnic group, black, white, brown or yellow. Republicans have been talking color-blindness for a long time; it’s time to implement it.

  Second, Trump must invade the Democratic plantation with creative policies that restore entrepreneurship, jobs and opportunity to America’s barrios, ghettos and Native American reservations. Surely there are blacks, Latinos and Native Americans in these communities who would welcome a chance to learn, to improve themselves and to prosper there. Trump and the GOP can help this process through a bold combination of tax incentives, deregulation and arm-twisting of the kind that Trump specializes in, as well as the suspension of destructive family and social policies that encourage illegitimacy, crime and civic breakdown. The GOP already has the formula; what’s needed
now are the spine and the nerve to put it into effect.

  It won’t be easy. Trump needs the Republicans behind him on this because the Democrats, who are already in a fevered mode, are going to go berserk. We are likely to see a Democratic uproar echo through the halls of Congress, reverberate through the media, cause fainting spells in Hollywood and crack the tectonic plates of the culture. Trump and the Republicans—united, calm and collected—should show the same resolve that Lincoln said, in effect, to the Democratic planters of his time: bring it on.

  To be clear, the long-term goal for Trump and the GOP is not merely to improve life on the plantation. The goal, rather, is its shutdown, the panic-filled dispersion of the overseers, in short, total emancipation. Once these hellholes are permanently transformed, no longer will America be plagued by the wretched politics of white supremacy and ethnic exploitation. Whites, blacks and browns can all dream the American dream and pursue happiness, not so much as whites, blacks, Latinos or whatever, but rather as individuals, as families and as Americans.

  Finally, we need the cleansing antidote of truth. Democrats today are not content with promoting lies; they are insistent that we collaborate and bow down to their lies. This is not a new demand. “The question recurs,” Lincoln said of the Democrats in his Cooper Union speech in February 1860, “what will satisfy them?” And Lincoln answered, “this and only this: cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right . . . Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”13 The enforcement of political correctness has been a Democratic strategy from Lincoln’s day to our own.

  For too long conservatives and Republicans have allowed big lies to take over the culture and, in some cases, their minds. This progressive cultural hegemony has polluted our education system and our media with fake narratives and fake history. It has also created a kind of Stockholm syndrome among conservative intellectuals. “In our hearts we know we’re wrong.” But we’re not wrong. We’ve been lied to. It’s time for us to stop apologizing—we have nothing to apologize for—and go on the offensive. Truth is our deadliest weapon, if we will deploy it.