America: Imagine the World Without Her, directed by Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan. Written by Dinesh D’Souza, John Sullivan, and Bruce Schooley. Distributed by Lionsgate, 2014. Rated PG-13 for violent images. Running time: 105 minutes.
“If [danger] ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” Abraham Lincoln spoke these words of warning in 1838. Dinesh D’Souza quotes them in his documentary, America, and contends it is a warning we still must heed.
D’Souza sets out to explain why some Americans today loathe their own country—and why America, whatever its historical shortcomings, far from deserving the condemnation it often suffers, stands out as a gloriously moral nation.
If America declines from within, argues D’Souza, it will be because leftist intellectuals persuade Americans to feel ashamed of their own country. Americans cannot morally support that for which they feel ashamed. But the leftist case against America is flawed, D’Souza argues, and Americans properly are proud of their country and the ideas it represents.
The two primary villains in D’Souza’s account are Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States; and Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, leftist “community organizer” extraordinaire in Chicago and mentor to Hillary Clinton (among many others). D’Souza persuasively argues that the presidency of Barack Obama is in many ways the culmination of the work of those two men, especially of Alinsky.
D’Souza spends most of his film describing five main claims against America, then showing why those claims fail. As D’Souza notes, although Zinn did not originate these five claims, he synthesized and popularized them, weaving them into “a single narrative of American shame.”
As D’Souza describes, Obama and other leftists believe that “wealth and abundance of American life are not earned, they are stolen.” And, “If our wealth is stolen, then we must give it back.” Why is it allegedly stolen? First, leftists claim, America was founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the theft of their lands. Second, the United States stole a huge portion of Mexico. Third, American prosperity was built on the backs of slaves. Forth, America exploits other regions through “imperialist” military policies, of which the war in Vietnam is the most glaring example. Fifth, American capitalism is inherently “greedy,” and it involves the exploitation by capitalists of workers in America and abroad.
D’Souza fairly presents the leftist case for each of these claims, interviewing or showing archival footage of such icons as Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore, and professors Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, as well as lesser-known figures.
In his rebuttal, D’Souza, of course, does not deny that historically some American policies were unjust and at times horrific. But, D’Souza counters, leftists either ignore crucial historical context, or else they mischaracterize crucial aspects of history.
D’Souza grants that American policy horribly mistreated Native Americans at times (e.g., by violating treaties) and long permitted slavery. But look at the historical context in judging America, D’Souza urges. Conquest and slavery hardly originated with the United States, he points out; rather, both of those things have been the norm throughout most of human civilization and persist throughout much of the world today. What’s distinctive about America, notes D’Souza, is that it was explicitly founded on the principle of individual rights, however far some American leaders have strayed from that principle.
One example D’Souza gives regarding Native American lands involves Mount Rushmore. Although that land was taken from Native Americans in violation of treaty, it had been taken by conquest numerous times before by warring Native American tribes. The United States, however, unlike the warring tribes, eventually paid reparations for the lands, which was at least an attempt to make good. The case that arises from D’Souza’s film is that the left damns America for having rights-respecting moral standards and sometimes failing to live up to them while glorifying cultures that have no such standards to begin with and that commit far worse wrongs.
Regarding slavery, the Founders explicitly declared in the Declaration of Independence that all men are equal in their rights. Within a century, the nation went to war over slavery, after which it was outlawed. Even though slavery is a blot on early America, D’Souza argues, slavery was not the cause of American prosperity; rather, it was a drag on it. America became an economic powerhouse despite slavery, not because of it. D’Souza provides rich historical detail regarding such matters, much of which was new to me.
What about “stolen” Mexican lands, America’s “imperialist” foreign policy, and America’s “greedy” capitalism? In these matters, D’Souza demonstrates, the left is simply wrong.
The Texans waged a justified war of independence against the tyrannical Santa Anna, then joined the United States. In Vietnam, whatever the merits or demerits of the war, he argues, the goal of the United States was not to exploit or oppress the Vietnamese, but to free the South Vietnamese from brutal Communist oppression. Anyway, D’Souza points out, there are no grounds to rationally claim that America somehow “stole” its prosperity from Mexico or from other nations. Regarding Mexico, the “lost territories” did not make America prosperous; rather, America made those territories prosperous by instituting policies of relative freedom.
Although D’Souza does not present anything like a full defense of capitalism, he effectively explains that the system is geared to the creation of wealth, not the expropriation of it. “Capitalism works, not through coercion or conquest, but through the consent of the consumer,” he says. “The wealth of America isn’t stolen, it’s created. . . . What’s uniquely American is the alternative [to conquest]: equal rights, self-determination, and wealth creation.” As in other segments, the facts that D’Souza musters convincingly make his case.
For its rebuttal of leftist historical claims, D’Souza’s America is an excellent introduction to the relevant issues. (As a relatively short documentary, it is, of course, limited in what it can accomplish.)
In other ways, though, D’Souza’s film falls short, particularly in failing to discuss how religious conservatives helped foster the very problems that D’Souza blames solely on the left. Although at various points of the film D’Souza indicates that Christianity is central to American liberty, he fails to mention that the Bible, far from promoting free-market capitalism, promotes the morality of altruism, which calls for self-sacrificial service and lies at the heart of the left’s moral case for wealth redistribution. And although D’Souza rails against the modern surveillance state, he fails to mention that the religiously motivated war on drugs, particularly as expanded by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, is most to blame for the rise of rights-violating law enforcement tactics. He also fails to notice that the religiously motivated altruism in America’s foreign policy—as expressed by George W. Bush and many others—has led to the U.S. government spying on its own citizens rather than destroying America’s enemies. But D’Souza, a Christian apologist, has long failed to address such matters.
Another problem with D’Souza’s film is that it focuses too much on the activists of the left while ignoring the ideological waters in which they swim. In historical terms, Howard Zinn and Saul Alinsky are small fry. Far more important are the philosophers whose ideas they reflect, most notably the intellectual line from Kant to Hegel to Marx, down to the modern “progressives.” Americans will not save their country by trimming away a few branches of leftist activism. Ultimately, they must confront the fundamental ideas those activists enact.
Despite its flaws, America is well worth watching and promoting to active-minded friends and young adults. If students are going to read Zinn’s account of American history and similar works, America will provide them at least with a starting point for rational rebuttal.
In my view, America is D’Souza’s best work to date. D’Souza makes perfectly clear that, although we ought not defend every American policy or practice, neither should we feel ashamed of America or the fundamental ideas and documents on which it was founded. Rather, because of America’s founding principles of liberty and individual rights, and because to a substantial degree Americans have lived true to those principles, we should stand tall, defend America’s principles, and proudly call ourselves Americans.
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