Dinesh D'Souza and the arrogance of the theoretical

When meeting Dinesh D'Souza he is, by all measures, a reasonable man.

D'Souza has served in the Reagan White House and worked for both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. His neo-con bona fides are in place, going back to 1981 when D'Souza published the names of officers of the Gay Student Alliance in an article for The Dartmouth Review, including the names of those who were still closeted. Prior to marrying, he was romantically linked to both Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, to whom he was engaged.

I met Mr. D'Souza last Tuesday at a dinner and lecture at Wilkes University. He seemed an unassuming and polite man. His credentials show him to be an educated man.

But as I listened to him spin like a fan in a gale wind during his lecture, I couldn't reconcile the man with the performer. Because a performer is what he was. He began with a crude dick joke about Churchill and went from there.

Let us be clear, that he is an apologist for the right is no crime. That he bends and skews facts to meet his needs is. It is no wonder that his nickname is Distort D'Newza.

The title of the lecture was "Why Is America Loved and Why Is America Hated?". He argues - rightly - that America is a land that gives people a chance to break outside of the rigid expectations of conformity that had historically been a part of so much of the rest of the world. As an Indian immigrant, he is much more qualified to speak to that than am I.

My problems with D'Souza came during the "Why Is America Hated?" segment (which, not coincidentally, was approximately 40 of his 55 minutes of lecture time).

D'Souza argues that there are two liberalisms. "Liberalism A" is the liberalism of the Founding Fathers, that we are free to pursue life, liberty and happiness. He argues that much of the world admires us for Liberalism A. The problem, he states, is "Liberalism B". Liberalism B is the stereotypical 60's mindset of free love and no boundaries. It turns out that D'Souza is an excellent stereotyper.

The target for much of his disdain is Hollywood, and it's here that D'Souza makes the most elemental mistake. He treats Hollywood as a monolithic entity, storming through small-town America, bent on corrupting youth and instilling counter-cultural values.

We can argue about the content of what comes out of Hollywood, and I will agree that there is a lot of trash. However one feels about content, conservatives ought to embrace Hollywood, as it's the ultimate capitalist proving ground.

Hollywood is not a monolith. Hollywood is a loosely connected amalgam of businesses, each of whom has the sole goal of turning a profit. It's all about money - money from advertisers who buy based on ratings, money from DVD sales, money from merchandising. Simply put, they produce what people will purchase.

It is the free market at work. Hollywood introduces a product and the nation votes with their wallets. If a product succeeds, it spawns imitators. If a product bombs, it goes away.

So while Hollywood is an easy whipping boy for the right, when they decry Hollywood, they're really criticizing free market capitalism. When they say 'something should be done', they are in effect saying "we must be rescued from ourselves". This is the very definition of a nanny state.

But don't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

D'Souza argues - rightly - that America is a force for a lot of good in the world. He correctly cites World War II as an example. Then he tries to slide Iraq in there unnoticed. Iraq, he claims, was an attempt to introduce a third option to the Middle East. Instead of secular tyranny or religious tyranny, we offered democracy.

Inspiring.

Revisionist and patently untrue, but inspiring.

The argument he makes is the 2006 argument, not the 2002 one. It's the revisionist argument. The "Oh, there weren't any WMD's, sorryboutthat" argument. The "Whoops, Saddam didn't have any ties to the 9/11 hijackers, so try this one on for size" argument.

I defy anyone to present contemporaneous evidence that President Bush ever suggested the 'spreading democracy' argument as the primary reason to launch war. He didn't because no one would have followed him. His arguments were fear-based. Yellow cake from Niger. WMD. Terror and 9/11 plots were offered as reasons. 'Bringing democracy' was a fallback after the lies that launched the Iraqi War were brought to light.

Again, don't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

D'Souza then offered a piece of advise to President Obama, telling him that he should offer a vision of regular America, not Hollywood, to the world. Show them our hard-working people, our families. On this subject, I could not agree more.

Then he offered what he called "the most salable version of America": the 1950's.

REALLY?!?!?

Is he talking about the television version of the 1950's (you know, the one from Hollywood) or the real 1950's? A commentator once posited that when people cite "the best generation", they cite the generation that existed when they were children. We see the world in far more simplistic terms as children, and so it's no surprise that the vision of the 1950's that D'Souza has is Ozzie and Harriet. He offers the vision of the 1950's that was on TV in 1966 when he was 5.

The real 1950's weren't Ward, June and the Beav. It was Joe McCarty and the Red Scare, the Korean War, Brown v. Board, Montgomery, Orval Fabus and Little Rock desegregation, Sputnik and nuclear annihilation.

This vision of a divided America at war with itself and its own citizens, not to mention an unprovoked foreign invasion based on the debunked Domino Theory, is what D'Souza wants to present to the world?

Again and again, its simplistic arguments, devoid of any of the hard truths that experience brings. For a man that bemoans Hollywood's artifice, he can certainly lay on the paint with the best of them. Stereotyping indeed.

But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

D'Souza attempted to make the case that the Founding Fathers would be disgusted at what Liberalism A has turned into. On this he's both hypocritical and quite likely wrong.

He's hypocritical because not 5 minutes before, he took a shot at recently deceased Rep. John Murtha for attempting to tell Congress exactly what the Iraqis want. 'The Iraqis don't want this war, they want this, they don't want that'. D'Souza stung, following it up with "John, how would you know?". In that aspect, he's right. Although Murtha is not by any stretch the only politician who confabulates what he thinks people want**, D'Souza is right. How would Murtha know?

(**remember "we'll be greeted as liberators"?)

So then why would D'Souza think he is capable of speaking with any authority on what the Founding Fathers would think? What makes him more prescient than Murtha? "Dinesh, how would you know?"

Again, monolithic generalizations. "The Founding Fathers would be...", as if they all agreed on the same things. Which, as any 9th grader knows, is not true.

D'Souza repeatedly mentioned Thomas Jefferson. I thought to myself, "Yes, Jefferson would be appalled at everything. He was such a sexual stick-in-the-mud, what with caring so much about convention that he had a child-bearing affair with a slave. Which was so in keeping with the mores of the time." I can make an equal argument that Jefferson would have loved porn and would have kept a Hustler in the outhouse at Monticello.

Then there's the Jefferson Bible, which conservatives routinely omit when discussing the faith of the Framers. The Jefferson Bible was Jefferson's attempt to compile and examine the moral teachings of Christ apart from any questions of his divinity, as well as to strip away the often self-serving interpretations that had been piled on those teachings by the time they were written down.

"In extracting the pure principles which he (Christ) taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves."
- Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was a deist who didn't believe in a God of miracles, or even a God who interfered in human events.

This is the same Jefferson that suggested that the Constitution should be scraped every 20 years to avoid one generation imposing its outdated will upon the next.

"This principle, that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,... will exclude... the ruinous and contagious errors... which have armed despots with means which nature does not sanction, for binding in chains their fellow-men."
- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:460, Papers 15:396

This is Jefferson admonishing the likes of D'Souza for daring to attempt to cite Jefferson's will.

"Dinesh, how would you know?"

This is also Jefferson admonishing the Glenn Beck's of the world, who attempt to use Jefferson's 18th century to try to steer a 21st century course.

So I sarcastically offer that yes, Jefferson was most orthodox. Please know that one can make an argument that Jefferson would be aghast at what became of his nation. But to D'Souza, I ask, "but how do you know?".

This is the problem of modern conservatism - the presumption that they KNOW. They don't know, any more than the rest of us. But instead of honest debate, they've claimed the holy truth of the Framers for themselves, they've presumed to know and they've sunk to generalizations, stereotype, and fabrication of 'truth' out of whole cloth.

For all of his scholarly credentials, D'Souza was far more entertainer and performer than scholar at Wilkes. He played the crowd for the easy laugh, not the challenging thought. His act, which admittedly felt toned down for a university crowd, seems tuned to throw red meat to his constituency. He did that well.