Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (4 page)

CHAPTER 2

A TALE OF TWO FRENCHMEN

The idea of right is simply that of virtue

introduced into the political world.
¹

A
LEXIS DE
T
OCQUEVILLE
,
D
EMOCRACY IN
A
MERICA

A
nti-Americanism, like Americanism, is a home-grown phenomenon. I am defining anti-Americanism, not pejoratively but clinically, as a strong antagonism to American ideas and institutions. Here I am not concerned with the anti-Americanism of some Bolivian radical, Russian apparatchik, or Iranian mullah. That could be written off as ignorant prejudice or arising from conflicting national interests. Rather, I am speaking of the anti-Americanism of Americans who know their country well, and have well-considered objections to its conduct. While it can sometimes be offensive, anti-Americanism of this sort should not be shunned but rather welcomed, to see if the criticisms are correct. In the words of Edmund Burke, “To love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”
²

Progressives sometimes sound anti-American, but they are not simply advocates of destruction. In destroying one America they seek to construct another. In other words, their unmaking is a prelude to a remaking. So there is a vision of America that progressives affirm. It just happens to be very different from, indeed antithetical to, the vision that conservatives affirm. Contrary to what we hear, the great American divide is not a clash between conservatives who advocate liberty versus progressives who oppose liberty. Rather, the two sides each affirm a certain type of liberty. One side, for example, cherishes economic liberty while the other champions liberty in the sexual and social domain. Nor is it a clash between patriots and anti-patriots. Both sides love America, but they love a different type of America. One side loves the America of Columbus and the Fourth of July, of innovation and work and the “animal spirit” of capitalism, of the Boy Scouts and parochial schools, of traditional families and flag-saluting veterans. The other side loves the America of tolerance and social entitlements, of income and wealth redistribution, of affirmative action and abortion, of feminism and gay marriage.

I recently debated Bill Ayers—1960s radical and Obama mentor—at Dartmouth College. Our topic was “What’s So Great about America.” Ayers began by celebrating what he considered to be great about America. He did not, in this context, make any reference to the Founding Fathers. He didn’t mention Abraham Lincoln. Rather, he invoked a protest tradition in America, going back to the nineteenth-century socialists and continuing through the twentieth-century progressives right up to, well, himself. Similarly in a recent book, Howard Zinn calls for America’s existing pantheon of heroes—such as the Founding Fathers—to be replaced by such figures as the Seminole leader Osceola, who fought a guerilla campaign against the U.S. government, anarchist and social activist Emma Goldman, and the Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan.
³
This is their America; this is the America progressives celebrate on the Fourth of July.

If patriotism isn’t the dividing line, neither is American exceptionalism. Again, both sides believe America is exceptional but one side believes America is exceptionally good while the other believes that America is exceptionally evil. One group considers America the good society; the other considers America the evil empire. Even here, conservatives bemoan certain aspects of modern America while progressives celebrate them, such as government-administered national healthcare or forced acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.

How can we compare and contrast these two Americas—the one that conservatives uphold and the very different one that progressives cherish? Oddly enough, we can do so by comparing the journeys of two Frenchmen to America. Their outsider perspective helps Americans see ourselves more clearly. The first, Alexis de Tocqueville, was an aristocrat who traveled widely in America in the early nineteenth century. A young man in his mid-twenties, Tocqueville was accompanied by a fellow aristocrat, Gustave Beaumont, who had a special interest in America’s prison system. Together they journeyed from New England to Philadelphia to New Orleans to Wisconsin, covering more than seven thousand miles over a period of ten months. Tocqueville’s visit occurred a few decades after the founding, so he was in a position to observe how the principles of the revolution had imprinted themselves into American life. He carefully observed American mores, eventually publishing his findings in his classic book
Democracy in America
. Intended originally for a French audience, this work is today more widely read and studied in America.

The other Frenchman, Michel Foucault, was an intellectual who first came to America in 1975. Over the next several years he made extended visits to the San Francisco Bay Area while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley; and later, in the early 1980s, lectured at Dartmouth where I met him as an undergraduate. Foucault obviously saw a very different America than Tocqueville, an America reshaped by the tumult of the 1960s. Moreover, Foucault’s
interests were very different from Tocqueville’s. What Tocqueville found most appealing, Foucault found most repulsive. Indeed traditional America illustrated many of the things that Foucault considered most objectionable about Western civilization. But Foucault should not be written off as an anti-American. On the contrary, Foucault found himself wildly enthusiastic about America to the point that his French colleagues considered him madly pro-American. For Foucault, America in the late 1970s and early 1980s was great because it allowed people the chance to transcend all sexual limits; adults could not only have sex with each other, but also with young boys. Foucault regarded this as a noble ideal worth dying for. Together these two men illustrate the very different Americas affirmed by conservatives and progressives today.

Let’s begin with Tocqueville, who observes at the outset that America is a nation unlike any other. It has produced what Tocqueville terms “a distinct species of mankind.” Tocqueville here identifies what will later be called American exceptionalism. For Tocqueville, Americans are unique because they are equal. This controversial assertion of the Declaration—that all men are created equal—Tocqueville finds to be a simple description of American reality. Americans, he writes, have internalized the democratic principle of equality. They refuse to regard one another as superior and inferior. They don’t bow and scrape in the way that people in other countries—notably in France—are known to do. In America, unlike in Europe, there are no “peasants,” only farmers. In America, there are employees but no “servants.” And today America may be the only country where we call a waiter “sir” as if he were a knight.

Equality for Tocqueville is social, not economic. Competition, he writes, produces unequal outcomes on the basis of merit. “Natural inequality will soon make way for itself and wealth will pass into the hands of the most capable.” But this is justified because wealth is
earned and not stolen. Tocqueville is especially struck by the fact that rich people in America were once poor. He notes, with some disapproval, that Americans have an “inordinate” love of money. Yet he cannot help being impressed in observing among Americans the restless energy of personal striving and economic competition. “Choose any American at random and he should be a man of burning desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all an innovator.” What makes success possible, he writes, is the striving of the ordinary man. The ordinary man may be vulgar and have a limited education, but he has practical intelligence and a burning desire to succeed. “Before him lies a boundless continent and he urges onward as if time pressed and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions.” Tocqueville observes what he terms a “double migration”: restless Europeans coming to the East Coast of America, while restless Americans move west from the Atlantic toward the Pacific Ocean. Tocqueville foresees that this ambitious, energetic people will expand the borders of the country and ultimately become a great nation. “It is the most extraordinary sight I have ever seen in my life. These lands which are as yet nothing but one immense wood will become one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world.”

There is one exception to the rule of the enterprising and hardworking American. At one point, Tocqueville stands on the Ohio-Kentucky border. He looks north and south and is startled by the contrast. He contrasts “industrious Ohio” with “idle Kentucky.” While Ohio displays all the signs of work and well-maintained houses and fields, Kentucky is inhabited “by a people without energy, without ardor, without a spirit of enterprise.” Since the climate and conditions on both sides of the border are virtually identical, what accounts for the difference? Tocqueville concludes that it is slavery. Slavery provides no incentive for slaves to work, since they don’t get to keep the product of their labor. But neither does slavery encourage
masters to work, because slaves do the work for them. Remarkably slavery is bad for masters and slaves: it degrades work, so less work is done.

While Americans cherish their freedom, Tocqueville emphasizes that they do not consider themselves immune from moral obligation or moral law. “It was never assumed in the United States that the citizen of a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases.” Americans, however, derive their obligations not from government mandate but from religious morality and social pressure. There are innumerable sects in America, but “all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.” Moreover, religion balances entrepreneurial striving: the latter teaches how to better yourself, for your own good, while the former teaches obligations to others, for the good of the community. Therefore quite apart from its theological function, Tocqueville writes that, for Americans, religion “must be regarded as the first of their political institutions.” As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, Tocqueville sees “rights” as steering people to do what is right—for him, the free society is also the decent society in which people can simultaneously do good and do well.

Everywhere in America, Tocqueville is struck by how Americans look to themselves rather than the government to get things done. Initially people try to do things for themselves. If they can’t, they rely on family. (Tocqueville notes that from the outset it was families, not individuals, who settled America.) Americans also employ what Tocqueville calls the “principle of association” to form countless voluntary groups—religious groups, recreational groups, philanthropic groups, educational institutions, and so on. Unlike in Europe, Tocqueville observes that in America “when a private individual meditates an undertaking, however directly connected it may be with the welfare of society, he never thinks of soliciting the cooperation
of the government; but he publishes his plan, offers to execute it, courts the assistance of other individuals, and struggles manfully against all obstacles… . In the end the sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the government could have done.”

At one point Tocqueville is amazed—he thinks it must be a joke—to see a large group of men gather together and vow to avoid intoxicating drink. Then he realizes that temperance is best achieved through this kind of voluntary social effort than through compulsory laws. “There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.”

Tocqueville finds the same participatory spirit when it comes to democracy—the people get involved. Their involvement, however, is most active and effective at the local level. This is the spirit of the New England town meeting. Democracy works well here because people know their own problems and how best to solve them. Tocqueville takes a different view of the federal government. He terms it “an immense and tutelary power” which seeks to control people by promising “to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.” Its power may seem mild at first but it could gradually expand until it becomes “absolute.” Its promises are illusory. “It would be like the authority of a parent if … its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood.” In sum, an overweening federal government would make itself the provider and arbiter of the happiness of Americans, but what it would really do is “to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living.”
⁴

Michel Foucault first came to America in the mid-1970s, after a meteoric career in France. Born in Poitiers, Foucault attended the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. There he got good grades, but also attempted suicide, evidently on account of depression caused by his latent homosexuality. Throughout his life, Foucault
seems to have had a deathwish. In
The Passion of Michel Foucault
, his biographer James Miller reports that Foucault fantasized about being a martyr—not a martyr for God but a martyr for the “lyrical core of man, his invisible truth, his visible secret.” Foucault also said that “it is in death that the individual becomes at one with himself… . Let us hasten the appointed time when death permits us to rejoin our selves.”
⁵
In other countries people who seriously believe such things are given medical treatment; in France they are lionized as philosophers.

In the early 1950s, Foucault joined the Communist Party, leaving it when Stalin’s crimes were exposed by his successor Khrushchev. Foucault then taught in Tunisia, where he roomed with his homosexual companion Daniel Defert. Returning to the University of Paris in 1968, Foucault turned the philosophy department into a center of radical leftism. Once Foucault proved he could out-radical the radicals, he was honored with election to the prestigious College de France. While Tocqueville came to America as a young man without a reputation, Foucault came to America when he was perhaps the most influential intellectual in Europe, a position he attained upon the death of Jean-Paul Sartre.