Dinesh D'Souza has written a troubling book about America's political "trajectory," titled The Roots of Obama's Rage. According to D'Souza, President Obama has steered us away from "the invisible hand of the free market" toward an economy "increasingly controlled by the visible hand of the federal government." Undoubtedly, it is true. The federal government under the current administration has been colonizing the economy — to the detriment of the nation's currency and future prospects.
In attempting to understand the president's course, D'Souza asks whether Obama is a socialist. It is not far off the mark, he admits. "Obama is a president who spends the taxpayer's money with shameless promiscuity." Of course, we are witnessing the great unraveling of the American economy, the progressive destruction of longstanding arrangements, the reduction of property rights in the name of so-called "human rights." Capitalism in America is under siege, and part of the alarm felt across the country is coming from small business owners who face the prospect of higher taxes, or the prospect of paying for employee health insurance at a time when revenues are down.
The president signed a healthcare bill that is unpopular, probably unconstitutional, and totally destructive as it applies to a particular class of persons. A knowledgeable Communist theoretician will tell you that the small businessman is the greatest enemy of socialism because he is more closely attached to his property, and clings to it with ferocious tenacity. For socialism to succeed, small businesses, above all, must be crushed before the attending political reaction can crystallize. But even the executives of major corporations are falling prey. "Never before have the tentacles of government reached so deeply into the private sector," says D'Souza. "Obama even woke up one day and decided to fire the CEO of General Motors."
For all this, however, D'Souza says that the socialist label doesn't entirely fit Obama. The case is much worse. Obama is not merely a social democrat in multicultural clothes. He is, according to D'Souza, a follower of his African father's anti-colonial ideology, which D'Souza describes as containing "noticeable strains of Marxism and socialism," but essentially signifying hostility to European civilization and to its neo-colonial spawn, the United States of America. In this view, American power is essentially racist. Overall, Western civilization did not achieve anything special, except to enrich itself by looting and enslaving Africans and Asians and native Americans. According to D'Souza, Obama's anti-colonial ideology sees the United States as a racial despotism, built on the denial of human rights, extreme exploitation and minority extirpation. If D'Souza is right, then we have in the White House someone who is much more dangerous than a socialist. If D'Souza is right, we have a man in the White House who is animated by hatred of the very thing entrusted to his care. "It may seem shocking to suggest that this is Obama's core ideology," says D'Souza. "I am saying nothing more than what Obama himself says: that his father's dream has become his dream. It is a dream that, as president, he is imposing with a vengeance on America and the world."
Is D'Souza right? He lays down persuasive arguments; but nothing is proved, of course, because you cannot prove personal intentions. D'Souza merely interprets what is said in a way that suggests underlying attitudes. About the president, D'Souza writes, "He cannot say America is a nuclear menace to the world, so he has to say that he wants a nuclear-free world." When the president's policies are examined, D'Souza's interpretation fits like a glove. By registering Obama's hidden rage against the rich, and against so-called American neo-colonialism, D'Souza paints a frightening picture.
In all fairness to Obama, there are some factual errors in D'Souza's book. For example, D'Souza remarked on Obama's snub to French "prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy" [sic] when he turned down a dinner invitation while visiting France, though François Fillon has been prime minister of France since 17 May 2007. (Sarkozy is the president of France, not the prime minister.) Such errors in the text diminish D'Souza's credentials as a political expert, but detract little from the substance of his thesis.
Given the anti-American tenor of anti-colonial ideology, what does Obama think of China's ongoing strategic buildup or Russia's development of new generation strategic weapons? With regard to Russia, in particular, D'Souza quotes a clueless conservative pundit to the effect that the size of Russia's "rotting" nuclear arsenal doesn't matter. And what about America's rotting arsenal? This is nowhere addressed, or connected with D'Souza's narrative. The balance of power has somehow become irrelevant. Only al Qaeda terrorists count as enemies, and the president appears — in D'Souza's narrative — sympathetic to the terrorist cause, as it resembles the national liberation struggle of his African father. The fact that Russia and China are led by terrorists who already possess nuclear weapons is dismissed out of hand as irrelevant. The fact that Russia and China have declared themselves in favor of the anti-colonial ideology, making common cause with the "national liberation" movements of the Third World, does not enter into the overall assessment of Obama's presidency. Yet here is the most important potential connection of all.
In an era of nuclear rocket weapons, when life and death for millions may be decided in minutes, democracy pronounces a death sentence against itself by electing as president a deceptive individual who cannot be bothered with the conduct of an ongoing war (see Gen. McChrystal's complaint in Rolling Stone), who wants to eliminate the very weapons that protect the United States from utter annihilation, who openly associates with anti-American ideologues, who despises and snubs America's allies (the British, French and Israelis), who tramples American businessmen great and small, and who strives mightily to bankrupt the country. This death sentence, pronounced by the citizens against themselves, is seconded by the very critics who suppose they have seen a fang in the darkness while neglecting to consider the presence of a whole tiger.
