Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (8 page)

Some progressives regard the term “meritocracy” with suspicion, believing that it contradicts the equality provision of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, however, did not agree. Jefferson declared that “there is a natural aristocracy among men,” and he went on to say he considered it “the most precious gift of nature.” Jefferson’s defense of aristocracy may seem surprising, because like most of the Founders he was a fierce enemy of the aristocracies of Europe. But Jefferson emphasized that he opposed those hierarchies because they were based on chance and inheritance. He called the European system an “artificial aristocracy” and a “tinsel aristocracy” because its claims to excellence were spurious. Jefferson supported
differences that were based on achievement and merit.
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We see clearly here how, from the point of view of Jefferson and the Founders, the Declaration of Independence does not mean we are equal in endowments, only in rights. Equality of rights not only permits inequality of success or outcomes; it provides the moral justification for inequality of outcomes. It is fair that some receive gold and silver medals when everyone competed in the contest according to the same rules.

Since the American founding, the American formula of democratic self-government—of making the people control the rulers, and not the other way around—has become a virtually unquestioned norm for the world. Even governments that violate democracy pretend to rule on behalf of the people. Moreover, America’s focus on the entrepreneur has produced the most inventive and entrepreneurial society in history, which has benefited not just business-owners but workers and ordinary people. Already by 1815, historian Daniel Walker Howe points out, Americans were better fed and in better health than their English counterparts. Between 1830 and 1950, America had the fastest-growing economy in the world. By the mid-twentieth century, the American economy was so productive that a nation with around 5 percent of the world’s population accounted for one-fourth of the global economy.
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In America I am not surprised by how good the people at the top have it; I am amazed to see what a good life America has provided for its common man. Even people of little education and ordinary ability—I would go so far as to say even the unimpressive and the lazy—have nice homes and nice cars and take annual vacations. I do not believe that all this will be true in the future, but it has been true for the past half century.

Even today, the spirit of 1776 is very much alive, as American technology continues to lead the world and many Americans continue to guard their liberties and property from government usurpation. At
the same time, the spirit of 1776 is no longer the only, and perhaps no longer the dominant, spirit in America. It now has a serious rival—the spirit of 1968, the progressive spirit—that intends to become its permanent replacement. If that happens then America will, in a way, have been un-founded and re-founded, and a new group of people will have to be dubbed America’s founding fathers.

CHAPTER 4

AMERICA THE INEXCUSABLE

I thought of myself as a revolutionary, committed to overturning the whole system of empire.
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B
ILL
A
YERS
,
P
UBLIC
E
NEMY

T
he terrorists who bombed the Pentagon did not think they were doing anything wrong. They believed they were justified, because America was the bad guy, the Great Satan, and they were fighting against the evil empire. Initially they intended to strike against the symbols of American wealth and power. Ultimately they would have to find a way to dismantle the power structures themselves. For these hardened men, and their terrorist group, extremism in defense of national liberation was no vice; moderation in pursuit of justice was no virtue. To this day they have no regrets over what they did. Am I referring to Osama bin Laden, circa September 11, 2001? No, I am referring to Bill Ayers, circa 1972. Three decades before bin Laden and al Qaeda struck at the Pentagon and other American targets from abroad, Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground bombed the Pentagon and other targets from inside
America. Too bad for them the two groups didn’t meet; they could have worked together toward their common aim.

“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” Ayers recalls in his memoir
Fugitive Days
. “The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.” The bastards in this case were the U.S. military and the U.S. Congress. Ayers was getting ready to do to them what he believed they were doing to others. The Weather Underground’s targets were the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. Ayers was sick of merely protesting the Vietnam War. It was time to take action, what Ayers terms the “propaganda of the deed.” Why the Pentagon? “The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters for a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world.” Why the Capitol? “We have attacked the Capitol because it is, along with the White House … a monument to U.S. domination over the planet.” Al Qaeda could hardly have put it better.

Ayers had been radicalized by the Vietnam War—a war that he saw as part of a global struggle against U.S. imperialism. “My country stood on the wrong side of an exploding world revolution,” he says. “I thought of myself as a revolutionary, committed to overturning the whole system of empire.” To prepare himself, he and his friends studied the revolutionary manuals. “We read Castro and Guevara, Lenin and Mao, Cabral and Nkrumah, but on any point of ideology we turned most often to Ho Chi Minh.” For Ayers, Vietnam was a simple story of the good guys versus the bad guys. “The basic story line for us … was that Vietnam was fundamentally united fighting an aggressive invader from the West, that the Vietnamese allied with the West were puppets artificially installed, and that Vietnam would ultimately win.” Ayers wanted Vietnam to defeat the United States. “I’m not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I’m not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.”

Despite the centrality of Vietnam, however, Ayers was fighting a larger battle. “We had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide.” And finally the culprit was being held to account. Ayers found himself, he writes, in “a world in flames—mass demonstrations in the South, revolution in Latin America, upheaval across Asia, liberation in Africa, roiling tension in our cities, nuclear annihilation and mass murder hanging precariously over our heads.” Ayers concluded, “Seen through one lens, the madness was the war in Vietnam, and the monster was the politics and policy of that war. Through another, the madness was an aggressive and acquisitive foreign policy, and the monster the military-industrial complex. And through a third lens, our lens, the madness was the export of war and fascism into the third world, racism and white supremacy at home, the inert, impoverished culture of greed and alienation: the monster would be capitalism itself, the system of imperialism.”

Today Ayers is a respected professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Normally terrorists get sent to prison or Guantanamo; in this case, he got tenure. In fact, Ayers is one of the leading voices in elementary and secondary education in the country today. While Osama bin Laden is in his grave, and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri is a hunted man, Ayers attends academic conferences and is well-paid on the speaker circuit. I recently debated Ayers at Dartmouth. His speech echoed the themes of an earlier rant he delivered at the University of Oregon. There he crowed, “The American Empire is in decline, economically, politically, and in some ways culturally. The empire is declining and the game is over.”

Was Ayers rehabilitated by the progressives because he has sorrowfully repented and recanted? Actually, no. On September 11, 2001, the fateful day bin Laden struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the
New York Times
published a profile of Ayers to coincide with the publication of his memoir. Ayers told reporter
Dinitia Smith, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers has said that he might do it again. “I can’t quite imagine putting a bomb in a building today … but I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility either.”
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Ayers is a significant fellow in his own right, but he is also significant for his connection with President Obama. Ayers hosted a fundraising event for Obama in Chicago in 1995; the two of them have been friends for nearly twenty years. They have worked together, socialized together, and served on boards together. Even so, when the Obama-Ayers connection surfaced in the media, Obama and his aides pretended that Obama barely knew Ayers. Their only link, according to Obama aide David Axelrod, was that they lived in the same neighborhood and their kids went to the same school together. This of course was a bald-faced lie. Obama tried to cover his tracks, saying he should not be held responsible for what Ayers did “forty years ago, when I was eight years old.” But of course the issue isn’t just Ayers in the 1970s, but Ayers today. Obama failed to mention that Ayers has refused to apologize for his past, and that Ayers sees himself now as the same person with the same convictions he had then.

From Ayers’s own words we see that he was galvanized into action by the Vietnam War. Here in America, Vietnam was largely interpreted through an anti-Communist lens, a way of stopping the dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia. Yet this is not how Ayers viewed Vietnam—rather, he saw it largely through the lens of anti-colonialism. And Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the North Vietnamese, saw the war in exactly the same way. In a sense they were right. Vietnam was a colony of the French, and when the French withdrew in the early 1950s, the Americans stepped in. In Ayers’s day, there were numerous other anti-colonial struggles going on in Asia, Africa, and South America. Ayers candidly describes himself as a guerilla
fighter for anti-colonialism, with the difference that his operations were being conducted inside America, within the belly of the beast.

We see from Ayers—a Chicago boy who came to see his destiny as linked with that of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh—how anti-colonialism started as a Third World phenomenon but was imported to America through the Vietnam War. Thanks to Vietnam, the most important political movement in the non-Western world in the past century also became one of the most important movements in America. Anti-colonialism became embedded within the American left, and thus Ayers could join a global effort to defeat America without setting foot outside his own country. Rather, he went underground in America. Anti-colonialism itself became the underground ideology of American progressivism, so that black and native Indian and feminist and gay activists in the 1960s and 1970s saw themselves as fighting in some sense the same battle being waged by the anti-Vietnam movement and by the Vietnamese guerillas themselves. What unified them all was the conviction of America the Inexcusable.

This was the theme of the class of 1968; it was their shared ideology. I could choose as representative of that ideology any of a vast assortment of characters, from MIT activist Noam Chomsky to Yippie showman Abbie Hoffman to Columbia hothead Mark Rudd to folk singer Joan Baez to actress and radical activist Jane Fonda to her former husband (and Students for a Democratic Society founder) Tom Hayden. Except for Chomsky—who rages on in his eighties—the others are now irrelevant. So I have chosen instead to highlight a different cast of characters: Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I’ve previously called “Obama’s founding fathers.” Their relevance is that they articulate the ideology of 1968 while also demonstrating how that ideology was imbibed by Obama right here
in America—in Hawaii, at Columbia, at Harvard Law School, and in Chicago.

In my previous book
Obama’s America
I discussed in detail this cast of characters; here I just want to give a sense of their depth of alienation from America, and their open hostility to America’s foreign policy and free market system. Frank Marshall Davis, the former Communist who was Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, was so radical that he opposed President Truman’s Marshall Plan as a “device” for maintaining “white imperialism.” Truman and Marshall, he wrote, were using “billions of U.S. dollars to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions.” Indeed the objective of America after World War II was “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.” While Davis spurned America he praised “Red Russia” as “my friend.”
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Young Obama—sitting in Davis’s hut in Hawaii week after week for several years—took it all in. This portrait of devoted young Obama imbibing the ravings of a pot-smoking former Communist is the progressive version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

At Columbia, Obama studied under the Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said. Before his death in 2003, Said was a vehement critic of America, a country with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.” Said alleged that America replaced Britain and France as a global imperialist power after World War II. As a Palestinian, Said considered Israel the small colonial power and America the big colonial power. If Israel was the Little Satan, America was the Great Satan. “The United States,” Said wrote, “virtually underwrites the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and in effect pays for the bullets that kill Palestinians.” Consequently the Palestinians have a right to use violence to fight back in what Said termed “one of the great anti-colonial insurrections of the modern period.” The use of
force is legitimate in this context “to repossess a land and a history that have been wrested from us.” Like Ayers, Said believed in the propaganda of the deed, and there is a picture of him online throwing rocks at Israel. Of course the gesture is symbolic. Even so, for his support of Palestinian guerilla action, this former member of the Palestine National Council and associate of Yasser Arafat was termed a “Professor of Terror.”
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