By STANLEY FISH
Stanley Fish on education, law and society. Note: Stanley Fish writes for the New York Times, so he's a liberal. I just thought that this interview provides more good insight into how liberals think.
Ninety-nine percent of the more than 500 readers who responded to my account of Dinesh D’Souza’s blockbuster documentary “2016: Obama’s America” objected both to D’Souza’s arguments and to my taking them seriously. The editors and I thought it might be useful if D’Souza replied to the most-often-voiced objections. He and I sat down last Thursday for the following interview. — S. F.
S.F.: How’s the movie doing?
D.D.: Today the film surpassed Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and this week it will surpass both Moore’s “Sicko” and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
S.F.: Congratulations! Many readers asked, “Who funded the movie?” Behind the question is a suspicion that it was bankrolled by right-wing money men, and that therefore it was a bought-and-paid-for campaign ad from the very beginning.
D.D.: The movie was funded by 25 individuals. It is true that none of them, to my knowledge, is an Obama fan, but none of them, not a single one, tried to dictate to me what should be in the film or even reviewed the film before it was released. So the film is not a production of the Republican Party or of the Romney campaign or of the talismanic figures like Karl Rove who are involved in the PACs. I am pleased to say that I will be able to give the investors their money back.
S.F.: Some readers characterized the King’s College, of which you are the president, as “barely above correspondence level,” a place where little science except creationist science is taught, a venue for the promotion of Christian doctrine rather than a genuine liberal arts college devoted to open inquiry. How would you characterize the college? Are you a creationist and do you believe, as one reader assumed you do, that the earth is 6,000 years old?
D.D.: I am not a creationist as the term is usually understood. I believe that the earth is billions of years old and the universe even older. I do believe that God is the creator, but that’s a completely different thing. I’ve written in defense of evolution and made arguments that are based on evolution. As for the King’s College, it is a quite selective liberal arts college. The SAT scores of our students are comparable to N.Y.U.’s and Georgetown’s and our students have routinely been admitted to those colleges. We don’t teach creationism and we don’t teach Christian doctrine. We do teach the New Testament and the Old Testament, but in a scholarly way. Our programs are politics, economics, business, philosophy, media, culture and the arts. We teach the history of science but we don’t teach laboratory science, in part because the economics are prohibitive and in part because our mission is to shape young people to go into certain institutions — law, media, journalism, finance, politics. Our students are not being prepared to enter seminaries, but to go to Goldman Sachs and Capitol Hill and Shanghai, where, from a liberal point of view, they will be even more dangerous.
S.F.: Some posters were dismissive of the idea of “American exceptionalism.” They wondered what the phrase meant and suspected that it was a rhetorical device enabling the United States to justify actions it would condemn if they were performed by other nations. What, in your view, is so exceptional about America?
D.D.: My definition of American exceptionalism is one of identifying the ways in which America is unique in the world. First of all, America is unique in being a country founded, in a sense, by a group of people sitting around a table. Other countries have been founded by “accidents of force.” America is a creation of thought. A second aspect of American exceptionalism is that while in other countries citizenship is a function of birth and blood, you become an American by assimilating to a certain way of life, a certain aspiration. And third, America has been a kinder, gentler superpower than traditional empires have been. What does the doctrine of American exceptionalism empower the United States to do? Nothing more than to act better than traditional empires — committed to looting and conquest — have done. So that’s American exceptionalism, an exceptionalism based on noble ideas, ideas that it holds itself to even when it falls short of them.
S.F.: You say in an e-mail to me that you don’t think Obama is anti-American. You just think he wants to “downsize” America, take her down a notch. Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? You pose a choice between America’s dream and Obama’s dream; the subtitle of your new book is “Unmaking the American Dream”; you say that the most dangerous man in America lives in the White House, and that those who vote for Obama will be “voting for their own decline and impoverishment.” Aren’t you labeling him anti-American at least in the sense that he desires America’s demise as a super-power?
D.D.: O.K., if the desire to knock America off its pedestal, to redistribute American income to other countries, to shrink America’s footprint in the world, makes you anti-American, then Obama is in fact anti-American[[anti? You changed it elsewhere]]. I don’t use that label for Obama because he thinks it would be good for America to play a smaller role economically, politically, culturally and so on. Most everyone else agrees that America should be prosperous, should be strong, should be a force for liberty, should be No. 1 as long as possible. All I’m saying is that Obama stands outside that consensus. So he might be very happy if the world was dominated not by one, but by six countries. He’d be very happy if America, which has 5 percent of the world’s oil, but uses 25 percent, instead used 10 percent, allowing developing countries to use more. These are not inherently evil or un-American ideas — so the slogan of anti-Americanism is not helpful; but they are ideas and an ideology most Americans don’t agree with.
S.F.: The vast majority of readers objected to your main thesis — that Obama’s views are best explained by the anti-colonialist ideology of his father. Some readers scoffed at what they call pop-psychologizing and find your analysis implausible given that Obama spent so little time with his father. Others deemed the analysis unnecessary as an explanation of Obama’s policies, which are, they say, exactly what one would expect from a mainstream, slightly left-of-center Midwestern pragmatist, many of whose ideas are taken from the moderate Republicans no longer welcome in the party.
D.D.: Well, let’s take that second argument first. We have seen in America, within four years, a complete redefinition of the relationship of the citizen to the state. The federal government has made incursions into a whole series of industries that were previously in the private domain. Bill Clinton’s doctrine — that the era of big government is over — has been completely repudiated. So the federal government now has a very active hand in medicine, in hospitals, in insurance, in banking, in finance, in automobiles, in energy. I’m not saying that government has had no role in these institutions before, but the degree of involvement has changed substantively. As for Obama and his father, in the film we interview psychologist Paul Vitz, who identifies two models of paternal influence, the inner city model — my dad abandoned me, he’s a jerk, I want nothing to do with him — and the World War II model — my father’s away, but he’s a hero, a great man fighting for his country and I wish I could be worthy of him. Obama ultimately takes neither of these two models. Instead, he takes a middle route and divides his father into the good father and the bad father. He says, I will not try to be like my father as a man, but I do want to take my father’s dreams. That is the meaning of his book’s title: “Dreams From My Father.” What I’m doing is not pop-psychologizing, unless you want to call Obama a pop-psychologist of himself. I’m just taking Obama’s cue that his father had a decisive, shaping influence on him, and saying let’s take the dreams of the father and look at the actions of the son and see if the jigsaw fits.
S.F.: Not a few readers turned the psychological lens on you. They argued that as a dark-skinned immigrant, you are over-compensating and cozying up to the white elite as your ancestors did in India. “Leave it to the ‘intellectual’ and dark-skinned immigrant … to do the dirty work for the racist faction of the conservatosphere. Can you imagine this documentary having as much power if it came from a white guy?”
D.D.: Well, first of all, this documentary would not have had the same power if it came from a white guy, not because my skin is brown, but because I grew up in the third world; my credibility comes from the fact that Obama and I are both global guys. Now it is true that my brown skin diffuses the race card, and I’m glad it does, not because I’m a pawn of the racists but because I don’t think that Obama is motivated by race and I don’t think the critique of Obama is motivated by race either. As for the charge that I am carrying water for the white elite, all I can say is that I grew up in a middle class, English-speaking family in India, and I embraced conservative ideas at Dartmouth because I realized that they were very similar to the values with which I was raised, values most Indians, most immigrants, hold — a belief in individual merit and the idea of a society which has social mobility; you can move from the bottom to the top.
S.F.: Many found the title of your book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” puzzling. They ask, what rage? Isn’t he no-drama Obama, determinedly cool and more than a little withdrawn?
D.D.: I think Obama is cool when he’s talking about things he doesn’t care about, like the inner city, the poor, hate crimes, race. When he talks about such matters, it often seems that he is reading from his tax return and then people think, “Oh, he’s so professorial.” But when he talks about banks, the insurance companies, the guys who fly corporate jets, his voice raises up a notch and his lip curls and he gets a little mean. So I think he does have rage, but it is sublimated rage. His is not the rage Clint Eastwood displays when he says “Make my day.” It is more like the rage Charles Bronson displayed in the “Death Wish” movies. He was inwardly furious; he would respond, but he would never fulminate. Obama’s father showed Clint Eastwood rage. Obama’s rage is there, but, as I said, it’s sublimated.
S.F.: Finally a question more for me than you. I was chastised repeatedly for having you as a friend, for breaking bread with you (as I am about to do again), and for giving your “crackpot” arguments the time of day. One reader hoped that my criticism of the movie (which he thought too mild) might end a friendship that brought discredit to me. The idea is that you should choose your friends or spouses or partner by applying a political litmus test. Have the right (in this case, left) views and you can be my friend. It doesn’t work that way in the world — witness Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia — and, if I can borrow from one of my own titles, it’s a good thing, too. Let’s eat.
(Postscript: Our entry into the restaurant, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was delayed when people on the street recognized D’Souza and asked if he would pose for a picture with them.)
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To read more about Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America, click here
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