Dinesh D’Souza’s movie, “America,” again criticized for being too political

When Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2016: Obama’s Americacame out the summer before the 2012 presidential election, my parents tried to convince me to go see it. My father actually mailed me a full-page ad for the film that he’d inscribed with the words “this movie will change your life.” I guess he was hoping that the political views I’d formed over my 50-odd years might somehow be drastically altered by a piece of right-wing agitprop.

I never made it to the theater to see the movie and the segments I happened to catch months later on cable TV were cringe-inducing. But D’Souza is back. His latest offering–America: Imagine the World Without Her–hit the theaters on July 2nd. So, last week I put on my dark glasses and slunk into a matinee, along with about a dozen senior citizens, to see it.

America starts with the fictional image of a young Revolutionary War soldier sitting down on–I kid you not–September 11, 1777 to write a letter to his family extolling the virtues of his unit’s commander, General George Washington, just before his unit heads off to face the British. Washington, he says, exemplifies the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence; he truly believes that all men are entitled to their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, Washington does not survive the battle. A sniper guns him down and the British unceremoniously dump his body into a ditch. As a result of Washington’s death, the American rebels lose the War of Independence and are subjugated by the British. Cue D’Souza’s voice asking us to imagine what the world would be like today if the United States had died at its inception.

And then D’Souza promptly drops that thought to get to his main theme–that America is being destroyed from within. To author your country’s destruction, D’Souza intones “you start by telling a new story.” This story, a story of shame, has and is being told by all the usual suspects: left-wing academics and their allies in the media and politics, most notably Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren. D’Souza focuses on two villains in particular, the historian Howard Zinn and community organizer Saul Alinsky, both secular Jews and both conveniently deceased (Alinsky since 1972).

At this point, the film descends into a rehash of talking points known to anyone familiar with what I like to call the “re-righting” of American history, a conservative effort to reverse the study of history from the leftward turn it took in the 1960s, rescuing it from the liberal academy and its allegedly anti-American distortions of the nation’s past.

According to conservative historian Larry Schweikart, co-author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, an honest telling of American history inevitably leads to pride in country.  Schweikart argues that “over the last 40 years, people have told the story of this country’s past dishonestly. They have over-exaggerated racism and sexism. They have lied.” An honest account of American history, Schweikart notes, “must begin and end with the recognition that, compared to any other nation, America’s past is a bright and shining light.”

D’Souza is but one of several conservative scholars, many of them evangelical Christians, now working to reclaim the writing of history from the left. While their focus may differ, all, D’Souza included, share a set of common assumptions:

• that the United States is exceptional, a shining city on a hill;
• that our government is based on Judeo-Christian ideals;
• that the Founders never intended to separate church and state; but
• that the Founders did intend to limit strictly the powers of government;
• that the Constitution must be interpreted as the Founders originally intended and not in light of changing times; and,
• that free enterprise, free trade, and unregulated markets are the secret to ever-increasing prosperity.

Fighting Back Against The “Zinning” of History

America is D’Souza’s paean to American exceptionalism, wherein he seeks to debunk a list of charges left-leaning academics have supposedly leveled at this country hoping to shame its citizens and undermine the nation from within. These charges include:

• that Americans stole land from Native-American tribes and committed genocide against them;
• that they stole the labor of African-American slaves;
• that they stole the Southwest from Mexico;
• and, that American corporations have stolen resources from the rest of the world.

Zinn, the author of A People’s History of the United States is D’Souza’s go-to villain for this section of the film. Zinn saw himself as a social activist, and his history of the nation was self-consciously written to tell the country’s story from the standpoint of the poor and dispossessed. It presents a synthesis of the work of 1960s New Left historians, who attempted to write history from the bottom up, bringing the voices of slaves, laborers, women, and other marginalized groups to the conversation.

D’Souza is right about one thing: Zinn’s work is unabashedly polemical. Its critics, even those on the left, chided it for reducing “historical analysis to political opinion.” Yet it struck a chord perhaps because, despite its weaknesses, it provided, as historian Thaddeus Russell notes, “a liberatory corrective to traditional American historiography” by inverting the traditional textbook focus on “great men.”...