Near the end of 2016: Obama’s America, Dinesh D’Souza
— who is the principal on-screen presence and co-director (with
John Sullivan) of the movie based on his book The Roots of
Obama’s Rage — interviews the former Comptroller General
David Walker as part of an effort to sound the alarm about our
country’s ballooning debt. There is, as you would expect, an
on-screen graphic, in fact a graph, stacking up President Obama’s
massive $5 trillion in new debt in only three and a half years
against the more modest contributions of his predecessors — though
his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, is lumped together with
him for the convenience of making the point that these two
presidents between them have piled up more debt than all their 42
predecessors combined. In any reasonably well-ordered democratic
political culture this, you might think, would be scandal enough
and to spare, but in our hyper-charged media environment today we
have been mainlining scandal for so long that it apparently takes
something a good deal more potent than looming bankruptcy to give
us that longed-for high.
At any rate, Mr. D’Souza’s movie certainly gives us the hard
stuff, as it imputes to President Obama an agenda culminating in
nothing less than the prospective destruction of the United States.
The bit about the debt comes across almost as an afterthought. Too
obvious, I guess. Instead, with the promise of mystery and
intrigue, the hidden truth that only they can get at which is
always so congenial to the movies, 2016 concentrates on
finding the clues in Mr. Obama’s not-quite-secret radicalism as to
his secret agenda for his second term. It’s the secrecy that is
meant to give the movie its kick. The tag-line is “Love him, Hate
him: You don’t know him.” But of course we do know him — or we
would if we took the trouble to look in to the publicly available
record. The movie fills in the picture already made clear by the
likes of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright with the less well-known
figures of Frank Marshall Davis and Roberto Unger, but the general
outline of the President’s radicalism will come as no surprise to
anyone whose reading goes much beyond that supplied by the
mainstream media.
And therein lies the film’s justification, such as it is, for it
gives those of us on the right who have long been alarmed by the
anti-American assumptions of the American left and the extent to
which they appear to be shared not only by America’s president but
by his political party, a presumptive way to get around the media’s
indifference and into the consciousness of the mostly politically
inert masses. At least in his survey of Mr. Obama’s intellectual
influences, whom he cheekily calls his “Founding Fathers,” Mr.
D’Souza has an interesting story to tell and he tells it well. My
fellow conservatives are already helping to make the movie a big
and unexpected success at the box office, and there must be many
who are not conservatives and who have had their eyes opened to one
of the least attractive and most alarming features of the liberal
world-view, which our President completely shares.
Yet I would urge them to treat these criticisms with a degree of
caution. For the problem with the film lies in the surely overblown
sensationalism necessary to sell us on the connection between a
bunch of idiotic but essentially harmless armchair revolutionaries
— as even Mr. Ayers has become in his post-terrorist career — and
what the President actually wants to do in office. By overhyping
Mr. Obama’s supposedly secret radicalism and his supposedly hidden
agenda to bring America down from its position of world leadership,
the film runs the risk of making us pay less attention than we
should to the non-secret radicalism and the agenda we already know
he has, which are both quite bad enough and the real reason he
deserves to be defeated. Moreover, the movie is on much shakier
ground when it attempts to make the case for the biggest influence
on him of all, which is that of the long-dead Barack Obama Sr.
I, at least, was unpersuaded when an academic psychologist, Dr.
Paul Vitz, of NYU, was produced to confirm the importance of the
Kenyan father’s absence to his infant American namesake and
therefore, putatively, to explain the wholesale adoption by Barack
Junior of Barack Senior’s dotty ideas — which apparently once
included a proposal for 100 percent taxation. “Is this what Obama
means by paying our fair share?” asks Mr. D’Souza ominously. Well,
actually no. Not so far as anybody knows, anyway, and even if it
were he would have no chance of imposing such a draconian measure
on a democratically empowered republic. Not for the first time in
watching the film, the viewer is likely to ask himself if there
isn’t enough to disturb and frighten us about the measures we know
the President and his party have in store for us if he and they are
re-elected without our having to invent bugbears like confiscatory
taxation imposed on us from beyond the grave?
The central importance of the father may be related to the
film’s very personal tone. Dinesh D’Souza is himself so much
front-and-center in order to stress his view that the similarity of
his own background to that of his subject — since both are
mixed-race products of former British imperial subjects who joined
the American elite through the gateway of an Ivy League education
— makes him uniquely qualified not just to expose but to
explain Barack Obama’s radicalism, which he sees as
differing in no important respect from that of his father. “I
get this guy,” he tells us. And, in one sense at least, he
probably does. The best parts of the movie come when he jets off to
Kenya to interview family and friends of the elder Obama, most
notably another son named George born only months before his father
died in a car accident in 1982. George it is who scandalizes
post-colonial studies’ orthodoxy by suggesting that maybe Kenya
would today be a more developed country than it is if the white man
had stuck around a bit longer. Granny Obama, who was paid off in
goats, promised even fruitier stuff, but was got at by someone and
persuaded not to talk.
Such stuff is interesting and engaging in itself, but of
somewhat dubious relevance to the question of what may lie in store
for us in the next four years if the President is re-elected. Mr.
D’Souza’s sympathetic understanding of this post-colonial outsider
emboldens him too far, tempting him to think that he understands
more than he really can and to project an apocalyptic future that
is at best highly speculative. One understands, of course, that his
purpose is to frighten us, which is what movies are for, and that
the unknown is more frightening than the known. But when there is
so much genuinely to be frightened of, I can’t help wondering how
useful it is, in raising the alarm, to concentrate quite so heavily
on things doubtful and speculative at the expense of things open
and obvious. The academic left whose ties to President Obama are
pretty unmissable certainly ought to be a national scandal, but not
because it is using him as its revolutionary catspaw. There is
plenty to regard with alarm about its corruption of America’s
intellectual life, as there is about what the Obama administration
is doing to the nation’s defenses, its legal system, its economy
and its Constitution, but a doubtful attempt to connect the two
things will only give the left and the media an excuse to dismiss
both.
