Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  The defeat of the plantation would make Trump the first great president of the twenty-first century and the GOP the worthy custodian of American ideals. With our support, Trump can bring to an end the vicious train of exploitation that the Democratic Party has wrought for nearly two hundred years. What better way to rescue the principles of the founders and to vindicate the philosophical statesmanship of Lincoln than to sweep away this blight on the American experiment, this nightmarish interruption of the American dream?

  “The fiery trial through which we pass,” Lincoln said in his Annual Message to Congress in 1862, “will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” The point, he had already stated in his Peoria speech several years earlier, was not merely to save the union. Rather, “If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.” This America worth saving is the object of our striving; it is what Lincoln termed “the last best hope on earth.”14

  Notes

  Please note that some of the links referenced in this work may no longer be active.

  Preface

  1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 172.

  2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2016), p. 6–7, 144.

  3. Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, January 27, 1838, abrahamlincolnonline.org.

  Introduction

  1. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 165.

  2. “Full Text of Donald Trump’s Speech in Poland,” July 6, 2017, nbcnews.com.

  3. Sarah Wildman, “Trump’s Speech in Poland Sounded Like an Alt-Right Manifesto,” July 6, 2017, vox.com; Jake Johnson, “Disturbing Undertones Detected in Trump’s Bizarre Poland Speech,” July 6, 2017, commondreams.org; Peter Beinart, “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech,” July 6, 2017, theatlantic.com.

  4. Jack Goldsmith, “Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?” October 2017, theatlantic.com; Conor Lynch, “Donald Trump Is Destroying America’s Standing in the World and May End Up Destroying the World,” June 8, 2017, salon.com; Edward McCarey McDonnell, “Donald Trump Is Killing American Ideals,” January 31, 2017, baltimoresun.com; Yascha Mounk, “The Past Week Proves That Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy,” August 1, 2017, nytimes.com; Ryu Spaeth, “Donald Trump Is Killing Us,” August 14, 2017, newrepublic.com; Dana Milbank, “President Trump Is Killing Me. Really,” September 15, 2017, washingtonpost.com.

  5. Laurence Tribe, “Trump Must Be Impeached. Here’s Why,” May 13, 2017, washingtonpost.com.

  6. Noah Millman, “Will Trump’s Loose Lips Lead to a Military Coup?” May 16, 2017, theweek.com.

  7. Kate Sheridan, “Trump Could Destroy the Entire Human Species Says Yale Psychiatrist Who Warned Congress Members,” January 6, 2018, newsweek.com.

  8. Jacqueline Thomsen, “Warren: Trump Is a ‘Racist Bully,’ ” January 16, 2018, thehill.com; Tom Tillison, “Joy Reid Blows Up on MSNBC: Trump Has ‘Blatantly Bigoted Views,’ He’s ‘Unabashedly White Nationalist,’ ” December 23, 2017, bizpacreview.com; Jay Pearson, “Donald Trump Is a Textbook Racist,” October 4, 2017, rollingstone.com; Frank Rich, “Nothing’s Shocking Anymore with Trump,” August 17, 2017, nymag.com; Jesse Berney, “Trump’s Long History of Racism,” August 15, 2017, rollingstone.com.

  9. Toni Morrison, “Mourning for Whiteness,” November 21, 2016, newyorker.com.

  10. Cited by Timothy P. Carney, “Racial Politics: Democrats Brought the Coals, Trump Fanned the Flames,” October 9, 2007, aei.org; Rich, “Nothing’s Shocking Anymore with Trump”; Chauncey DeVega, “Congratulations, America—You Did It! An Actual Fascist Is Now Your Official President,” January 21, 2017, salon.com; Michael Starr Hopkins, “Republicans and Their Identity Politics Are Destroying America,” September 6, 2017, thehill.com.

  11. “How White Supremacy Became the Alt-Right,” transcript, The Rachel Maddow Show, September 4, 2017, msnbc.com.

  12. “Hillary Clinton on Whether President Trump Is Racist,” September 15, 2017, pbs.org; Berney, “Trump’s Long History of Racism.”

  13. Paul Krugman, “Fascism, American Style,” August 28, 2017, nytimes.com; Isaac Chotiner, “Too Close for Comfort,” February 10, 2017, slate.com; Timothy Snyder, “Donald Trump and the New Dawn of Tyranny,” March 3, 2017, time.com.

  14. Charles Blow, “Trump Isn’t Hitler. But the Lying . . . ,” October 19, 2017, nytimes.com; Andrew O’Hehir, “Donald Trump: Not Exactly Hitler! But His ‘Nazi Germany’ Comments Conceal a Dark Parallel Pattern,” January 14, 2017, salon.com; Larry Elliott, “Joseph Stiglitz: ‘Trump Has Fascist Tendencies,’ ” November 16, 2017, theguardian.com; “Historian of Fascism: Why Trump Firing FBI Director Comey amid Russia Probe Is So Worrisome,” May 11, 2017, democracynow.org.

  15. Chris Hedges, “Trump and the Christian Fascists,” July 24, 2017, commondreams.org; Matthew MacWilliams, “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter,” January 17, 2016, politico.com; Charles Blow, “The Other Inconvenient Truth,” August 17, 2017, nytimes.com.

  16. Kirk Noden, “Why Do Working-Class People Vote Against Their Interests?” November 17, 2016, thenation.com.

  17. For the subsequent account see Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), p. 6–7, 10; Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (New York: One World, 2017), p. xvi, 164, 180, 182, 189, 211–12, 341–42, 344, 362, 346–47; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes,” June 17, 2009, theatlantic.com; Amy Goodman, “Full Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlottesville, Trump, the Confederacy, Reparations & More,” August 15, 2017, democracynow.org.

  18. Michael Omni and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 72.

  19. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 197; Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 177.

  20. House Divided speech, June 16, 1858, in Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 131.

  21. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), p. 94.

  22. Cited by Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 81.

  23. Mary Boykin Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Diary (New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 81–82.

  24. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 163.

  25. Cited by Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 524.

  26. Cited by Lewis Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point (New York: Stackpole Books, 2008), p. 155.

  27. Burton W. Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal? (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008), p. 145, 269; see also Mark Leff, The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. vi.

  28. Jim Hoft, “JFK Files: Documents Show Democrat President Lyndon Johnson Was KKK Member,” October 29, 2017, thegatewaypundit.com; Michael Miller, “Strippers, Surveillance and Assassination Plots: The Wildest JFK Files,” October 27, 2017, washingtonpost.com.

  29. Cited by Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer, Lincoln on Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 3.

  30. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York: Vintage, 1984).

  31. Dave Weigel, “Racialists Are Cheered by Trump’s Latest Strategy,” August 20, 2016, washingtonpost.com.

  32. Cited by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land (New York: The New Press, 2016), p. 224.

  2. Dilemma of the Plantation

  1. Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 568.


  2. Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem,” August 27, 2016, nfl.com.

  3. Eric Reid, “Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee,” September 25, 2017, nytimes.com.

  4. Noel Ransome, “Colin Kaepernick Took a Knee for All of Us,” October 2, 2017, vice.com.

  5. Dennis Farney, “As America Triumphs, Americans Are Awash in Doubt,” Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1992, p. A-1.

  6. John Hope Franklin, “The Moral Legacy of the Founding Fathers,” University of Chicago Magazine, Summer 1975, p. 10–13.

  7. Carl Skutsch, “The History of White Supremacy in America,” August 19, 2017, rollingstone.com.

  8. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 4; James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Charles Scribner, 1945), p. 353.

  9. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

  10. Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 289.

  11. Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 177, 241; Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 314.

  12. Cited by David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 201.

  13. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 38.

  14. Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings, p. 99, 221, 243.

  15. Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 126–28.

  16. Cited by Lewis Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria (New York: Stackpole Books, 2008), p. 291.

  17. See, e.g., Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist,” October 1996, theatlantic.com.

  18. George Washington, letter to Robert Morris, April 12, 1786, in W. B. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1989), p. 319; James Madison, speech at Constitutional Convention, June 6, 1787, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), vol. 1, p. 135; John Adams to Robert Evans, June 8, 1819, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 209; Benjamin Franklin, “An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery,” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1154.

  19. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 140, 143.

  20. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Banneker, August 30, 1791, in Peterson, Portable Thomas Jefferson, p. 454.

  21. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 138.

  22. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 28–29, 32.

  23. Peterson, Portable Thomas Jefferson, p. 517.

  24. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 163.

  25. Cited by David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 146.

  26. Ibid., p. 125.

  27. Peterson, Portable Thomas Jefferson, p. 14.

  28. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 138.

  29. Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings, p. 95.

  30. Cited by Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p. 160.

  31. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012), p. 26.

  32. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p. 17.

  33. Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Proslavery or Antislavery?” (1860) in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York: International Publishers, 1950), vol. 2, p. 478.

  34. Cited by Donald, Lincoln, p. 176.

  35. Cited by Jaffa, New Birth of Freedom, p. 77.

  36. Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings, p. 120.

  37. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. vii.

  38. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p. 153; Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 186–87.

  3. Party of Enslavement

  1. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), p. 48.

  2. “Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down across the United States,” August 28, 2017, nytimes.com.

  3. Matt Vespa, “Progressives Gone Wild? Abraham Lincoln Statue Vandalized in Chicago,” August 18, 2017, townhall.com.

  4. Joshua Zeitz, “Why There Are No Nazi Statues in Germany,” August 20, 2017, politico.com.

  5. “Robert E. Lee’s Opinion Regarding Slavery,” letter dated December 27, 1856, civilwarhome.com.

  6. Cited by Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 312–13, 339; cited by David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 210.

  7. Cited by David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York: HarperPerennial, 1976), p. 347.

  8. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 73; Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 346.

  9. Cited by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), p. vii; cited by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 236.

  10. John Blassingame, The Slave Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 77; Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class, p. 231; Stanley Elkins, Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 209.

  11. Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 80–81.

  12. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 4–5; Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 131.

  13. James Henry Hammond, “Speech on Receiving Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” cited by Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class, p. 11.

  14. John C. Calhoun, speech on the Oregon Bill, 1848, cited in Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 212; John C. Calhoun, Senate speech of January 10, 1838, in Eric McKitrick, ed., Slavery Defended (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 18.

  15. Potter, Impending Crisis, p. 27, 29.

  16. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom (Bedford: Applewood Books, 1861), p. 16; Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 146.

  17. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), p. 10.

  18. Cited by Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), p. 17–18.

  19. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 115–16.

  20. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 7–9, 11–14, 74, 137.

  21. Mary Boykin Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Diary (New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 99; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 426.

  22. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 87.

  23. Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Diary, p. 338.

  24. Samuel Cartwright, De Bow’s Review, XI (1851), p. 331–34.

  25. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Penguin, 2014), p. 67.

  26. Ad placed by Andrew Jackson in the Nashville Tennessee Gazette, September 26, 1804, cited in Daniel Walker Howe, What God Hath Wrought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329.

  27. W. E. B. Du
Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: S. A. Russell, 1935), p. 9.

  28. Genovese, World the Slaveholders Made, p. 129.

  29. Junius Rodriguez, Slavery in the United States (New York: ABC-CLIO, 2007), vol. 1, p. 286.

  30. The subsequent account draws mainly from Fitzhugh’s two best-known books, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All!, as well as the Fitzhugh writings excerpted in Drew Gilpin Faust’s collection The Ideology of Slavery. See esp. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, p. 22–28, 45, 48, 83, 93, 179, 201, 291, 294, 302; George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 15–18, 30, 32, 52, 69, 94 199, 212, 247, 249; Faust, Ideology of Slavery, p. 274, 277, 283, 289, 295.

  31. C. Vann Woodward, “Introduction,” in Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, p. xxxviii.

  32. Abraham Lincoln, First Debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa, August 21, 1858, mason.gmu.edu.

  33. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana Regiment,” March 17, 1865, quod.lib.umich.edu; Abraham Lincoln, fragment on slavery, undated, in Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 175–76.

  34. Cited by Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, p. 35; Potter, Impending Crisis, p. 341.

  35. Stephen Douglas, “Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” September 1859, harpers.org; Kenneth Stampp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone, 1991), p. 108.

  36. Cited by Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, p. 311.

  37. Ibid., p. 48.

  38. Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings, p. 194.

  39. Cited by Potter, Impending Crisis, p. 342; cited by Jaffa, New Birth of Freedom, p. 326; cited by Lord Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1997), p. 131.