For decades, the late author Howard Zinn distorted history by writing it for one purpose: to inspire new activists to become engaged in today’s political struggles against the Left’s enemies. I and many others, including liberal David Greenberg and left historian Michael Kazin, have written critiques of  his work. Now, with Donald Trump as president, it has become the right’s turn to rewrite history for ideological purposes. 

Its scribe is Dinesh D’Souza, who gained notoriety decades ago as an editor of The Dartmouth Review, the conservative newspaper at the college. He then went on to have a distinguished career at various conservative institutions, published scores of books and made three political documentaries, two of which played in major cinemas. (I appeared in one of them to talk about Zinn’s misuse of history.)

Now, D’Souza has a new book, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party, which is accompanied by a political documentary now showing in AMC and Regal theaters. He tells us that his purpose in writing it is to save America and the American dream from the Democrats who are in the process of destroying it.  

To do this, D’Souza believes he must discredit a false progressive interpretation of American history he says has been fed to us by historians, taught in schools and widely accepted as the uncontroversial truth. Chief among these falsehoods, supposedly, is that it was the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, that has championed equality and civil rights and fought against racism. D’Souza argues that it is the Democrats who have been the bad actors throughout American history, a role they continue to play to this day. 

Going back to the 1820’s and the founding of the Democratic Party, he argues that  Northern Democrats and particularly President Martin Van Buren created an alliance between Northern and Southern Democrats to perpetuate slavery. Just as Southern Democrats supported the plantation system, Northern Democrats supported ethnic and racial ghettos—almost urban plantations—controlled by Democratic Party bosses and their political machines.    ...