Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (6 page)

My story may be unusual in certain respects, but it is also part of a larger American narrative. Over the centuries, tens of millions of immigrants have come to America, initially from various parts of Europe, now mostly from places like China, Korea, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Mexico. Why do all these people come? First, they want to escape the places they are from. Something about those places suffocates their aspirations or undermines their dignity. Second, they come because they know America is different. America doesn’t just offer them a more prosperous life; it also offers them a fuller and better life—a life that is unavailable elsewhere in the world.

Consider the Irish peasant of the mid-nineteenth century, living in a village where scarcity is the norm. The family lives in a tiny cottage, wears tattered clothes, and seldom has enough to eat. The structure of society is basically feudal. Large landowners direct the lives of those who labor on their property. They in turn are answerable to local aristocrats, who kowtow before even more powerful aristocrats, who are ultimately subservient to the English throne. As a peasant, you learn to play by the rules—rules that regulate your work, your food, and your family life. If you prove recalcitrant, the
big men will beat and break you—at best, they will throw you off their land, and then you must find some other landlord before whom to bow and scrape. This bowing and scraping is humiliating, to be sure, but you aren’t alone in this: even people in the highest quarters of life must learn the courtier virtues, which means bowing and scraping before others even higher and mightier than they are.

And so it goes, a way of life that seems impervious to change. You might even have regarded it as eternal, but then came the potato famine, a famine worse than any before it, and now you are threatened with death by starvation. You grow tired of eating insects and roots, and soon even these are scarce. You look into your children’s eyes, and you know death lurks nearby for them and for you. Your family somehow gets out, on a boat, leaving behind everything you have, and the only life you know. This is how you come to America. Future generations will say you were an immigrant, and you came voluntarily. Your fate will be contrasted with that of African Americans who were brought here involuntarily, in chains. The distinction is a valid one, of course, and yet it is only technically true that you came of your own accord. In fact you were pushed out of your own country, driven abroad by hunger and desperation, and you found America not because you had a dream but because you were fleeing a nightmare.

Even in America, nothing is easy. No one invited you and your fellow Irish to come here; no one is especially excited that you are here. Everything is unfamiliar—the landscape, the way people talk, the food, the work. To add to your woes, there is overt discrimination. Jobs are posted with signs: “No Irish need apply.” When there is work to be had, it is strenuous and sometimes dangerous, there is no insurance if you get sick or hurt, and you can be fired or replaced on a whim. The word among the immigrants is that the slaves down South have it better, because they are looked after in
old age and sickness, while you must solve those problems for yourself. At times you are so disheartened you wish you could go back, but there is no going back—there is nothing to go back to. So you push on, enduring rather than prospering, surviving rather than thriving. Yet gradually your situation improves. Slowly—and it could take a couple of generations—your family and the other families who have settled in the new country win the long hard battle against necessity. Now you have “arrived,” and in a sense you are an “insider” poignantly viewing the new immigrants who come after you. You know exactly the travails, and also the opportunities, that await them.

In Ireland you were a native; in America, you are a foreigner. You cling to your old ways, even when they don’t work very well, and you search for others who look and talk like you, who know the old Irish songs. In time, however, you realize you must attempt to become part of the new country. This is not an option; it is something you must do. You have lived long enough in America that you are no longer fully Irish; yet neither are you fully Americanized. You are like a man walking a tightrope from one building to another, and now you are precariously between the two structures. You nervously look back—you are tempted to retreat—but at this point the distance you have already traveled is more perilous than the one in front of you. So intrepidly you push forward. In a manner your ancestors in the old country would have thought impossible, you resolve to stop thinking of yourself as Irish; instead, you “become American.” And to your amazement you realize that you can do this. If you thought about it, you would realize how strange it is. No one can move from some other country to Ireland and “become Irish,” any more than they can move to India and “become Indian.” To be Irish you need Irish ancestors and Irish blood. To be Indian you need brown skin and Indian parents. By contrast with Ireland, India, and other
countries, America is defined not by blood or birth but by the adoption of the nation’s Constitution, its laws, and its shared way of life. That’s how the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, and today the Koreans, the South Asians, and the West Indians, can all come to this country and in time “become American.”

This chapter is about the spirit of the American founding, the spirit of 1776. I intended to begin with a brief discussion of the history of immigrants coming to the United States, but soon I realized that the history of the United States is the history of immigration. Decades ago Franklin Roosevelt was invited to speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution. This is a conservative group whose members claim to be descended from the country’s earliest settlers. Even so, President Roosevelt began by addressing the group, “Fellow immigrants.” With the exception of African Americans who were brought here as slaves, all Americans are immigrants or descended from immigrants. Even the native Indians came to America from somewhere else; most likely they came from Asia and crossed the Bering Strait over a land bridge to the North American continent. Strictly speaking, they too are immigrants.

What is the relevance of America’s immigrant heritage? It is that America has been from the beginning a special type of country. It was a country originally uninhabited and then settled by people who inevitably came from somewhere else. Immigrants are different from the normal type of person. First, they tend to be, by disposition or circumstance, restless people—people who are not content with the given order of things. Second, they tend to be risk-takers; they are willing to leave almost everything behind to make their lives over anew. Third, by necessity they become improvisers, people who can adapt to new conditions and learn what is necessary to survive and prosper. Fourth, immigrants are self-reliant folk. They leave behind the old social supports—of caste or family—to make a new life
dependent on their own efforts. These are the types of people for whom America was made, and these are the people who have made America what she is today.

The spirit of 1776 is an immigrant spirit. It is the spirit of getting away from the old world and starting again. The same spirit that motivated people, before 1776 and after, to leave their native lands and come to America, motivated America’s decision to declare its independence from Great Britain. In a way, the whole country decided to pack up and leave Mother England. Together, Americans resolved to make a new political and economic system for a new kind of people. Americans in the late eighteenth century understood very clearly what it meant to risk everything—including life itself—upon a new venture of nation-building. They understood this because they were of immigrant stock—they or their ancestors had individually undertaken the same risks that they were now jointly undertaking in violently breaking away from the British empire and setting up their
novus ordo seclorum
.

The immigrant character of Americans—and the American founding—is the essential background against which we must assess the progressive and left-wing critique of the spirit of 1776. This is a critique that dubs the American Founders to be landed gentry, rich white men who owned slaves, and who set up a government for the protection of their ancestral and aristocratic privileges. Although this critique became mainstream in the 1960s—and is now widely taught in schools and colleges—it originated with the early twentieth-century work of historian Charles Beard. In his magnum opus,
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
, Beard argued that the Founders were wealthy landowners with interests in farming and manufacturing and that many of them owned slaves. From this he deduced that the Constitution was little more than a mechanism for these rich white folk to protect and extend their own privileges.
Beard regarded it as highly significant that women, slaves, and indentured servants were not represented at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.
²

These themes have been taken up by progressive scholars like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Chomsky contends that the American Founders, just like the British, were wealthy aristocrats who despised the ordinary working man whom they considered part of “the rabble.” Consequently, Chomsky writes, the Founders sought to protect slave-owners and property owners, and to pass their privileges on to posterity. The constitutional debates reveal Madison’s scheme to, as Chomsky puts it, “protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.” Zinn too stresses the affluence of the Founders. “George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer.” Zinn concludes that “from the founding of the nation to the present day, the government has generally legislated on behalf of the wealthy; has done the bidding of corporations in dealing with working people, and has taken the nation to war in the interests of economic expansion and political ambition.”
³

How fair are these accusations? Certainly the Founders were among the more prosperous and better-educated citizens of their society, and a good thing this is, for who knows what America would look like had it been founded by the least successful and most ignorant citizens of the time. Admittedly, out of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia, no less than thirty owned slaves. Even so, these were not landed aristocrats who sought to conserve and extend their own titles and privileges. The proof of that is simple: Where are those titles and privileges? When I recently visited Mount Vernon, I asked about the whereabouts of the descendants of Washington’s extended family. The guide said she had no idea, but there was one relative who lived in the area, although she may have moved. In
any other country, this would be astonishing. People would expect the descendants of the founder of the country to be basking in fame and wealth. This option was available to Washington, who could probably have become monarch if he had wanted to, and established a royal lineage. Instead he renounced the monarchy and opted for a system of government that would give members of the Washington family no special advantages. Jefferson’s descendants live in the same historical obscurity. The only time I have seen a public reference to Jefferson’s progeny is when the descendants of his slave Sally Hemings appeared on
Oprah
to insist upon their blood connection to America’s third president.

If progressives are mistaken about the spirit of 1776—if in reality that spirit is not one of landed aristocracy but of the immigrants—then does the critique of the American founding go away? On the contrary, it assumes an even more powerful and interesting thrust. In its revised conception, the progressive critique is an attack on the immigrants themselves. The charge of theft, previously pinned on putative aristocrats, is now launched against the immigrants and their progeny. The immigrants are faulted for being greedy and acquisitive and for establishing a society as greedy and acquisitive as themselves. No wonder that such a society seized the land from the native Indians. This was the original thievery. No wonder that these hard, selfish people took advantage of the slave-trade to import Africans to work for free. No wonder that the settlers set about grabbing half of Mexico by force and later establishing imperial rule over the Philippines. America, like South Africa, established a
herrenvolk
democracy—in other words, a democracy for the white settlers and their ilk to the exclusion of blacks and other minorities. This too was a kind of piracy, robbing dark-skinned minorities of their goods and rights under the law. Capitalism, many progressives suggest, is a system of organized theft of what working people have produced; it
is well-suited to the dog-eat-dog qualities that immigrants display. And it is totally in character for these immigrant capitalists to want to use America’s military power to subjugate and dominate the rest of the world.

Throughout this book, I will be examining and answering these charges. We cannot assess them, however, without asking what is new about the spirit of 1776. In a sense, this is an answer to the ignorance of President Obama. Asked in 2009 whether he believed America is exceptional, Obama replied that he believed America is exceptional in the same way the British believe Britain is exceptional, or the Greeks believe that Greece is exceptional. Obama’s real point was that America was no more exceptional than any other country.
⁴
In the spirit of presidential education, I venture to prove him wrong. Here I content myself with specifying the two unique principles that were articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then integrated into the Constitution and the political architecture of the American founding. These principles are represented in two significant phrases: “created equal” and the “pursuit of happiness.”

According to Thomas Jefferson, the American Revolution was motivated by “the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their back, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
⁵
This may seem like verbal extravagance on Jefferson’s part, except that before the American Revolution, all governments in all countries were based on a favored few, booted and spurred, claiming their authority to saddle, ride, and rule the mass of mankind. This is not to say that citizens everywhere had no rights. England, for instance, granted rights to citizens in a tradition stretching back to the Magna Carta. The operative term, however, is “granted.” In England, as in other countries, it was the king or the ruling class that conferred
rights and privileges from above. If the people enjoyed rights and protections, those were the king’s to give, and were granted out of his magnanimity. In England the Crown was also considered the owner of all real property in the realm, and property rights were simply temporary grants of use conferred by the monarch. By themselves—and absent this bestowal of royal title and privilege—the people had no rights and owned nothing.