2016: Deconstructing Dinesh D’Souza’s Right Wing Fantasies

[Updated 9/25/12 with extended fact checking of film at end of post]

This post offers a media analysis and political commentary on Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie 2016: Obama’s America. I had assigned both of my Intro to Politics classes at Fordham University to view the film as part of our study of the election and campaign politics. The film has done quite well, recently moving to #8 in box office sales. Although I am not a fan of Obama, neither am I a fan of D’Souza, having met him many years ago at a public talk at Ohio University, and having read his work on and off over the years. However, I went in with as open a mind as possible, wanting to get a better understanding of the internal mindset of people like D’Souza and the conservative, fundamentalist right politics that he represents, as a growing part of my dissertation research is looking at these contemporary fundamentalist manifestations.

I watched the movie at the Union Sq cinema, and there were about 20 people in the audience, including a young black couple, two Jews, a group of gay men, and several couples or individuals. I’d estimate the crowd was about 50/50 split by age, with half under 40 and half over 55. That’s about as much demographics as I could gather from basic observations, so it’s hard to know who came as a fan of D’Souza and who came out of curiosity or horror to see how Obama was being portrayed.

Now to the real substance of this piece, the film. If I had to sum up the main thesis of the film, it would go something like this:

Barack Obama is actually a closet socialist, anti-capitalist and ardent anti-colonialist. Obama rejects the claim of American exceptionalism and wants to destroy America. He is doing this in four key ways:

1) Running up the biggest deficit in US history in order to destabilize our economy and undermine the basis of our strong, individualist, free market ethos;

2) Weakening the US  militarily by actively downsizing the armed forces, and in particular getting rid of our nuclear arsenal, which would eventually be non-existent if Obama has his way;

3) Covertly putting in place the first steps to a Socialist takeover of the US, with “Obamacare” as the first step in a long line of examples of quasi-socialistic ideas he has proposed;

4) And finally, allowing Islamo-fascism to take over in the Middle East and North Africa by a combination of not actively supporting Israel and not attacking Iran or other rogue Islamic nations.

All of these actions can be accounted for, we are told, through the convenient explanation of New York child psychologist Paul Vitz, who read Obama’s book, and who was apparently able to “diagnose” Obama as having “daddy issues,” which D’Souza supposedly proves by pointing to the title of Obama’s autobiography–“Dreams from my father,” which clearly shows, D’Souza claims, that he is living in the shadow of his father’s ghost, because otherwise Obama’s book would have been called “Dreams of my father.” (The subtle prepositional distinction– “from” versus “of”–magically and very conveniently explains the entire psychology of Obama. In political science jargon, we might call this a “parsimonious” causal theory.) And as D’Souza goes to great lengths to show, the ghost of Obama’s father was a drunken, violent, anti-colonial Kenyan polygamist with an axe to grind with America.

Furthermore, this absentee father made sure that Obama would follow in his footsteps by having him brought up by influential radicals like Frank Marshall Davis, a card carrying member (#47544 in case you care) of the Communist Party in America back in the 40’s and 50’s (according to right-wing Christian academic Paul Kengor, who is the author of The Communists, the book on Davis that serves as the sole evidence for this claim.) So thanks to Obama’s father’s anti-colonial legacy and the socialist influence of Obama’s youth, as well as his covert love of Islam–he did live in Indonesia after all–we now have incontrovertible proof that Obama is trying to realize his father’s dream. And just to prove D’Souza isn’t making this up, he adds in out of context excerpts from Obama’s book and “key figure” interviews with people who “met” Obama in his youth and therefore can, apparently, offer us valid character assessment on Obama’s current political worldview.

In conclusion, from this wildly speculative narrative we are led to believe that Obama is really a closet socialist bent on destroying everything good and valuable about the United States, which D’Souza tells us is a great and powerful empire–but an empire only in the senses of an “empire of ideas”–ruling over a chaotic and unstable world that means to do us harm. Ergo, if Obama is re-elected in November he will finally have the freedom to remove the democratic mask and begin imposing his real agenda, which is to make the US into a weak, impotent, Islamic-loving, multicultural, anti-colonial, socialist dictatorship!

No joke, this is the message I took away from the film.

There is a lot more I could say about this film, but I’ll wait until I’ve read my student’s papers on this film, and see what the response was from this mix of 40 or so students to this film. I’m sure it will be enlightening.

For those who have not seen the film, here’s the trailer.

Fact checking D’souza’s political claims

D’Souza claims Obama has anti-colonial politics and opposes US global supremacy
A) A father’s opposition to British colonialism tells us nothing about his son’s political views
B) America itself was founded by an anti-colonial revolution against the British, so it is unclear why being anti-colonial is suddenly a problematic political position now
C) Studying anti-colonial movements in college does not prove a person’s politics are anti-colonial, this is a form of argumentation known as “guilty by association”
D) Claiming the US is not exceptional is quite different than expressing hatred of the US

D’Souza argues that spending levels hit record highs under Obama (~$16 trillion debt)
A) Many American Presidents inherit a higher national debt than their predecessor, but this tells us nothing about their actual spending record by itself
B) The current debt/deficit explosion began under Republican President George W. Bush, largely linked to the costs of a war in Afghanistan and Iraq and major tax cuts
C) The 2007/8 global financial crisis provoked multi-billion dollar bailouts which Bush Jr. approved, but which largely took effect under Obama
D) Reagan, LBJ or Bush Jr. had higher nominal budget increases while in office (depending on which indicators you use and what other factors are adjusted for, such as inflation, defense, etc.). Only one independent analysis showed a higher inflation adjusted overall increase in social spending by Obama (7.5% adjusted without defense spending and 2009 bailout), which was still lower than Nixon (8.5%) during the Vietnam war, but a legitimate claim of higher social spending

D’Souza claims Obama wants to return control of Falkland Islands to Argentina
A) Obama merely supported calls by the OAS and UN for sovereignty discussions over the land
B) In early 2012 the U.S. refused to endorse Argentina’s final claim to the islands at the Summit of the Americas, provoking criticism from other LA nations

D’Souza says Obama has “done nothing” to impede Iran’s nuclear ambitions
A) Obama has imposed severe trade and economic sanctions on Iran to halt its suspected nuclear program
B) Obama opposes a near-term military strike on Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, but has publicly stated that he will not allow a nuclear-armed Iran

D’Souza claims Obama blocked oil drilling in US, but supported it in places like Brazil
A) President Obama has consistently supported all major oil drilling in the US, with the exception of the Keystone XL Pipeline and a 1-year moratorium after 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill
B) Obama has consistently been a supporter of more oil and gas drilling on US lands
C) Domestic crude oil production has increased over the past few years, with an increased from 5.1 mbd in 2007 to 5.5 mbd in 2010, according to a 2012 EIA energy report
D) Support for Brazil and other countries oil & gas exploration came from the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank), which is independently funded and generates revenue (~$3.5 billion since 2007)
E) The Ex-Im Bank allocated $2 billion in credit for Brazilian oil company Petrobras to use “solely for the purchase of American-made goods and services.” In other words, the Ex-IM Bank funds all go to support American companies who are selling equipment and services to Petrobras

D’Souza says Obama removed Churchill bust because of his anti-colonial politics
A) White House curator William Allman said the bust, which had been on loan, was already scheduled to be returned before Obama took office
B) The bust of Churchill is still on display in the President’s private residence

D’Souza says Obama is “weirdly sympathetic to Muslim jihadists”
A) Ignores the fact that Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan
B) Ignores the ongoing drone strikes that have killed dozens of other terrorists in the region
C) Ignores the ongoing detention in Guantanamo Bay of Islamic “enemy combatants”
D) Ignores the ongoing support for FBI and other federal surveillance of US mosques

D’Souza claims Obamacare is an example of the President’s socialist agenda
A) The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) mandates purchasing private insurance, not state run insurance
B) The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) uses free market health care exchanges for providing insurance options, not state insurers
B) The Act was passed by Congress and later upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012
C) Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are all economic redistribution vehicles run by the US government with no serious public opposition

President Barack Obama shows Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom a bust of Sir Winston Churchill in the private residence of the White House, July 20, 2010. (White House Photo by Pete Souza)