Be afraid, be very afraid seems to be the refrain that comes across loud and clear in the Dinesh D’Souza film, “2016: Obama’s America”. It is an extremely popular entry into the Obama-as-other collection of narratives.
The film would have actually been far more compelling had D’Souza just stayed with his own life story, as he had for the first 20 minutes or so, because it fails as a honest critique of the president’s life and actual policies.
Documentaries, generally, have either a stated or unstated objective, so the fact that D’Souza pushes a certain perspective is not the problem. The trouble is that he pushes his point based, to a large extent, on supposition, conjecture and a psycho-analysis of the Obama that a freshman psychology major would have been better equipped to render.
Let’s be clear, Dinesh D’Souza is more hyperbolic and volatile than the unassuming and scholarly visage he tries to portray in 2016. There’s a radical streak that he possesses that causes him to suggest that liberals were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In his book, “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11,” he states:
The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11 … the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the non-profit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.
And insinuating in another text, “What’s So Great About America,” that the problem with Africa is not that it was colonized, but rather that it was not colonized long enough — he alludes to this belief in his exchange with the president’s younger brother, George Obama.
The template for the film, however, is derived from his 2010 book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” — a highly subjective volume in which we first hear of the anti-colonial Kenyan mindset that Newt Gingrich would later parrot. This tome was near-universally panned for the logical gymnastics D’Souza had to perform in order to reach the vast majority of his conclusions.
Conservative publications also criticized D’Souza’s perspective. Daniel Larison of the American Conservative said, “Dinesh D’Souza has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written. … All in all, D’Souza’s article reads like a bad conspiracy theory.” Larison, in the same piece, also criticizes the claim of D’Souza that Obama is anti-business, noting a lack of evidence for this claim.
Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard wrote, “D’Souza always sees absence of evidence as evidence of something or other. … There is, indeed, a name for the beliefs that motivate President Obama, but it’s not anti-colonialism; it’s not even socialism. It’s liberalism!”
2016’s moral inconsistencies
The problem that this writer faced in penning this piece wasn’t so much about what to write, but rather where to begin. The film has a number of moral inconsistencies, stretches of logic and factual inaccuracies —- on a positive note he does at least say the president was born in America, even if he spends most of the movie trying to make him look like a foreigner.
One moral inconsistency I found compelling is that in the film we are told to look back to 1963, the year of Kenyan Independence, and to a father president Obama barely knew in order to understand current policy measures in the Obama administration, but we are, by inference, told to ignore what happened more recently, less than 4 years ago, during the Bush administration (whose policies have had a more direct impact on the political and economic realities of today).
Another is when D’Souza states at the beginning of the film that in India his destiny would have been handed to him or decided for him, but in America he could construct his own destiny and yet, he disabuses the president of the same privilege by insisting that Obama is an empty vessel in which only certain dogma can poured into and whose worldview cannot be divorced from his father’s.
D’Souza and Shelby Steele also decry what they believe is the propensity of people of color (and those with an anti-colonial mindset) of assuming that whites are racist and yet have no problem assuming that whites who voted for Obama were motivated by white guilt and people of color by notions of racial solidarity.
The most egregious moral inconsistency, in my opinion, is the belief that the anti-colonial sentiment expressed by the colonists of 18th century America was altogether right and propitious, while the same feelings are condemned and vilified in Kenyans, Palestinians and Eastern Indians. The very thing that made this nation the United States of America, its rejection of foreign rule, is denigrated when voiced by other peoples.
Further, D’Souza proves to be duplicitous in his logic when he intimates, during his conversation with George Obama, that what takes place in African nations has nothing whatsoever to do with colonization, while insisting that what Obama does will impact generations to come.
If European regimes’ and empires’ indiscretions have no lingering effects on the countries they occupied, why would Obama’s alleged sins continue to dog Americans beyond his administration? Shouldn’t Americans be able to pick up and move on, without playing the victim, in the same manner that D’Souza suggests that Africans should?
There are several other things that the film either ignores or takes for granted, that destines it, by-and-large, to go no further than the cult of the already-converted.
The film ignores, and invites the viewer to ignore, the road traveled to bring us to this place of a $16 trillion deficit. Obama’s deficit spending is rooted more in economic theory that is more Keynesian than it is Kenyan anti-colonial ideology. Agree or disagree, this approach has been used by Republican and Democratic alike.
The mainstream economics position is that deficit spending is desirable and necessary as part of countercyclical fiscal policy, but that there should not be a structural deficit: In an economic slump, government should run deficits to compensate for the shortfall in aggregate demand, but should run corresponding surpluses in boom times so that there is no net deficit over an economic cycle – a cyclical deficit only.
This has been the mainstream economics view (especially in Western nations) since Keynesian economics was developed and largely accepted in the Great Depression in the 1930s.
And yes, this model has been a source contention with fiscal conservatives who believe that the budget must always be balanced, but D’Souza deceptively acts as if this battle is only taking place in the “fevered” and conflicted mind of President Obama.
And most interestingly, I have been unable to find any writing by D’Souza during the Bush administration that addresses the mounting debt that he is now so concerned about under Obama.
The film takes for granted that all the old buzzwords and boogey-men, like socialism and communist, carry the same weight it did years ago.
I find most bewildering the belief that radical socialism is what we should be most afraid of right now, when the recent devastation was unleashed on the global economy by radical capitalism and rampant deregulation. What does credit default swaps and toxic assets have to do with socialism?
What socialist created too big to fail financial entities, left stockholders and taxpayers with the bill (when they did indeed fail), while they received robust compensation and severance packages?
And yet, nothing ever disproves the uber-capitalism argument in the minds of its most devoted disciples. Depressions and recessions are just inconsequential gnats that can be shooed away and afterward we can return to the fiscal doctrine that brought us to the brink of economic oblivion.
Even Alan Greenspan, the deregulation and uber-capitalism Godfather had an epiphany in the wake of the financial crisis: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.
“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades … The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”
The expectation that communist is the epithet that it was during the days of McCarthy and that the not-so-free market ideology D’Souza subscribes to hasn’t all but been disproved, is just one of the many stretches he makes throughout the film.
Inundated with innuendo
The film is also rife with innuendo camouflaged as fact. Among D’Souza’s most specious allegations:
– D’Souza says Obama is “weirdly sympathetic to Muslim jihadists” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This dubious claim has been repeated in recent weeks in the aftermath of the embassy attacks in Egypt and Libya. This completely ignores, however, the president’s escalation of what has been coined (childishly, in my opinion), the War on Terror, through the use of drone attacks.
This problematic strategy and policy may be, according to this writer, causing more problems than it’s solving, but it can hardly be called sympathetic, especially in light of the recent report that details how more civilians —- in places such as Pakistan —- have been killed by drones.
– D’Souza says Obama has “done nothing” to impede Iran’s nuclear program, despite the harsh trade and economic sanctions his administration has imposed on that nation to halt its suspected nuclear program.
Although he never quite says, definitively, what greater action against Iran would entail, here it seems that D’Souza is saying that anything short of war with Iran is capitulation on Obama’s part.
After over a decade of being involved in two wars, another one, it appears, would be just fine with him. It is fascinating how many wars the saber-rattlers would have us engaged in and yet never quite seem to be able to find it convenient, in the course of their lives, to put themselves in the position to fight in the wars for which they advocate.
– D’Souza seems to attribute something nefarious and foreboding about President Obama’s desire to reduce U.S. nuclear weapons. Now this is probably one of the most perplexing assertions in that D’Souza speaks with great pride and affinity of wanting to come to Washington to be part of the “Reagan thing.”
Well, part of that Reagan thing was the proposed START Treaty with the Soviet Union that would have greatly reduced America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Reagan, in a January 1984 speech, went as far as to say, “My dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”
Nevertheless, when Obama suggests the very same thing, it’s construed as some sort of Trojan horse designed to cripple the nation.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter if Obama is shipping illegal immigrants out the United States with zeal more akin to a member of the John Birch Society than a bleeding heart liberal; it’s of no consequence that he’s executing alleged terrorists with a fervor that would make a neo-conservative hawk blush.
And no, it matters very little that a stock market that was at an anemic 6500 around the time he took office has rebounded to over 13,000 points, because he will always be, to some, the anti-business anti-colonial, socialist secret-Muslim, that this film strives very hard to make him out to be.
So into the round hole of Obama’s life’s history, D’Souza stridently pounds the square peg of his projections and presumptions.
2016 is a theory in search of a real conspiracy; it is a pre-ordained and prejudicial psychosis on a quest for a patient to attach to.
This film is several things, none of which can be rightly called a serious documentary. It is an hour and a half infomercial meant to call attention to “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and plug his more recent book, “Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream.”
It is a 90-minute Super PAC campaign ad meant to stir up a hard-right base and provide the type of partisan red meat that they simply salivate for.
It’s an exercise video in that it stretches the ligaments of its speculations to the point of tearing; it works up quite a sweat leaping from one preconceived notion to another and the cardio-vascular workout achieved chasing after hearsay and insinuation is enough to put the most hardcore circuit trainer to shame.
An honest and lucid rendering of an individual’s life and a president’s policies it is not.
He speaks to an audience whose disdain for Obama is palpable and that believes that if you hear the same information that they hear, regarding the president, it must be received uncritically and viewed through the very same prism that they use to understand the world.
An audience that isn’t content with merely disagreeing with Obama’s policies and politics, but has an almost pathological need to make him out to be a near Anti-Christ (the actual one in the imaginations of some) bent on enslaving the people of America and destroying democracy around the world.
An audience that requires all “others” to prove, beyond an unreasonable doubt, their legitimacy, while those who share their perspective and echo their ideology are given a pass when it comes to those troublesome little nuisances called facts.
It is considered sheer and utter heresy if an individual doesn’t arrive at the same conclusions that they have drawn in regard to this current administration’s policies or this current president’s character. This is what 2016 unapologetically taps into.
In the end, D’Souza eschews what can be reasonably proved for what he knows his target audience is willing to believe.