If Dinesh D’Souza is right, President Obama’s second term will be devoted to the destruction of America. Dinesh D’Souza isn’t right, of course. Dinesh D’Souza is almost never right. He is fortunate enough to live in a country where pundits don’t lose their jobs when nothing they predict comes true, so long as what they have to say is shocking enough to hold pensioners through the commercial breaks. He can be found often bloviating in the same chairs as Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. He writes the same kind of books, and he has the same sort of things to say. In fact, the movie is essentially a companion piece to his book ‘The Roots of Obama’s Rage’.
And this is the beginning of our troubles. ‘The Roots of Obama’s Rage’ is a work of speculative fiction, and this movie is as well. D’Souza takes a large number of random, disconnected items and attempts to spin us a story not about Obama’s policies, or his promises, but about his motives and his soul. His evil, spiteful, communist soul.
The first problem is that Dinesh D’Souza doesn’t know any more about the President’s soul than you do. Frankly, he seems a little at sea even about the policies. To make the facts fit his conjecture, he has to perform some very uncomfortable-looking ethical gymnastics.
In a nutshell, D’Souza says that Obama’s father was a Kenyan anti-colonialist. This is, in Dinesh’s tortured logic, an unacceptably radical position. D’Souza very casually conflates ‘anti-colonial’, ‘left-wing’, ‘liberal’, and ‘radical’, as if they were somehow all the same thing. As one does.
The central lunacy of this movie is the idea that a man is somehow reducible to the opinions and actions of the people he meets. If we can prove that some of Barack’s friends, confidants or even casual acquaintances have unpopular views, then we can assume that Barack must surely share all of those opinions. The only proof is a negative one: Obama has not publicly repudiated these people, QED.
So many problems grow from this slipshod thinking that it’s hard to choose which to address. If political ideology is some sort of airborne pathogen that can be transferred by simple contact, how is it that Dinesh D’Souza has remained so ideologically pristine? He makes a point that he was educated at the same time, in the same nation, and in similar institutions. Certainly his path must have crossed with the occasional radical. How did Dinesh avoid infection?
Second, the idea of anti-colonialism isn’t particularly radical, especially for the colonized. When America was a colony, the sentiment was popular enough to support a war for independence.
D’Souza seems to enjoy the contrarian position, and he doesn’t seem to mind if it doesn’t always make a lot of sense. I’ll admit here that some of this was a little tough to follow, but here’s what I think he meant when he inveighed against anti-colonialism.
The British occupation of India wasn’t all bad. The new India that emerged after the occupation wasn’t all good. In fact, it was kinda socialist, and young Dinesh found that stifling and unpleasant. Upon arriving in America, he was shocked to find that some ungrateful young Ivy Leaguers were displeased with their lot. Worse, some of them professed admiration for India, which D’Souza knew well enough to hate. This duality threw D’Souza into a tailspin from which he has yet to recover.
It’s hard to escape the idea that Dinesh wishes the Brits had stayed. Not just in India, maybe.
But the Brits these days are pretty socialized. They have a National Health Service that far outstrips the modest ambitions of Obamacare. They elect actual socialists to positions of power. While the struggle between progressives and conservatives is going on there as well, Britain is not the United States. To become the United States, we had to become anti-colonialists.
Obama isn’t a radical. Pretending that his desire to see the top marginal tax rate move back up a few points is proof that he hates capitalism is beyond silly. He appoints his advisors and technocrats from the same pool as his predecessors. He has been quite slow to extricate us from our unfunded wars. He only moves off the centerline when he’s forced.
More importantly, Obama isn’t a dictator. He was popularly elected. He’s been fairly candid about his thoughts – to the point of writing a couple of memoirs (used in truly cringe-worthy fashion in this very movie). If he does have some dark agenda that he’s been waiting to unleash on us since he was a boy in Hawaii, he will find opposition in the Congress, in the Courts and at the ballot box. He will find his will stymied by the checks and balances we’ve put into place, and people in the Fear-Industrial Complex like D’Souza will have to find some other monster in our closet to point at and scream.
