Dinesh Right Around The Bend
We’re way past baroque at this point, but I’m sure D’Souza and Ponnuru and Goldberg and their musteline ilk will keep pushing the envelope. In this episode, D’Souza polishes the moral propriety of those who agree with him, while morbidly insulting everyone else in the country. From the promotional material (with exegesis chez Le Bérubé):
In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.
D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.
The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.
It’s breathtaking. No doubt he’s somewhat vexed at the little ABC/Disney imbroglio that’s stealing all his precious, precious thunder. Not to fear, Dinesh. You have so many greatest hits that will live forever on the Web. Like this one, courtesy the professor:
… Ten years ago I published a review of The End of Racism, the book in which D’Souza dilates on the “civilizational differences” between blacks and whites, poses the searching question, “what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” and argues that “the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.” …
For his own part, D’Souza, of course, has everything all sorted out, if you’ll just shut up and listen for once in your life:
After his 1983 graduation from Dartmouth College, D’Souza moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked for Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative organization strongly critical of coeducation, affirmative action, and campus access to birth control. As writer and editor-in-chief for Prospect, the organization’s magazine, D’Souza wrote a March 1984 cover story identifying a Freshman undergraduate who had begun a sexual relationship with another student against her mother’s wishes. D’Souza offered details of the woman’s sex life, and criticized Princeton University for paying the student’s tuition fees after the student’s mother withdrew financial support. The ensuing scandal was reported in The New York Times.[1] D’Souza claimed that the woman’s name had been published as the result of a “proofreading error” and that he “care[s] about the girl; that’s why [he] wrote the story.”
D’Souza also denounced feminism in Letters to a Young Conservative:“The feminist error was to embrace the value of the workplace as greater than the value of the home. Feminism has endorsed the public sphere as inherently more constitutive of women’s worth than the private sphere. Feminists have established as their criterion of success and self-worth an equal representation with men at the top of the career ladder. The consequence of this feminist scale of values is a terrible and unjust devaluation of women who work at home.” (pp. 105–106).
Don’t be fooled into thinking he’s actually smart, just because he uses the phrase “the public sphere” and the word “constitutive.” They’re often a sign of complete flim-flammery. (I should know; I used them both this morning.)
