Four times in the past month, somebody has
taken me aside (usually when I was talking about my book on the Founding
Fathers) and asked me, in a hushed voice, “have you seen the movie 2016? You really should. It will explain
everything.” And so I did. This is a pretty rare step
for me. I don’t watch movies, normally. And I don’t even own a TV. But I am
going around the country trying to present myself as a refuter of the extreme
right, so I broke down and gave myself something else to refute. Here it goes.
Having
encountered Dinesh D’Souza in the past, I was expecting a fairly slick piece of
propaganda—something like Michael Moore’s anti-Bush screed, Fahrenheit 9-11(not coincidentally, the only political documentary ever to gross more than 2016: Obama’s America). With the
exception of the “slick,” this is more or less what I found. The production
values of the film are mediocre at best. More important is the message, which
is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of nonsense.
I am not talking about “nonsense” in the “gee-I-really-don’t-agree-with-your-politics”
sense of the word, but in the
“no-rational-human-being-could-buy-your-cartoonish-mix-of-psychoanalytical-doublespeak-baseless-speculation-and-third-rate-McCarthyism”
sense of the word. The film really is that bad.
Here is the central assertion of 2016 in a nutcaseshell: Obama’s decisions as president have been so startlingly bad and so consummately anti-American that we need to look deep into his family history to understand them. We find it by looking at his father’s anti-colonialism and his desire to please the absent father that he hero-worshipped. Because 20th century anti-colonialism is anti-everything-America-stands-for, Obama hates American values on a very deep level. This is not his fault, of course—its just the way he was raised.
Here is the central assertion of 2016 in a nutcaseshell: Obama’s decisions as president have been so startlingly bad and so consummately anti-American that we need to look deep into his family history to understand them. We find it by looking at his father’s anti-colonialism and his desire to please the absent father that he hero-worshipped. Because 20th century anti-colonialism is anti-everything-America-stands-for, Obama hates American values on a very deep level. This is not his fault, of course—its just the way he was raised.
Let me present three key scenes from the
movie that give us a better sense of its narrative arc. The first scene is what
rhetoricians call a “parade of horribles,” or a scary list of all of the
America-hating, Third-World-loving Barack Obama has done:
Got it? But here’s the thing: not a single one of the
horribles is self-evidently true. Some of them are patently false (the bust of Churchill is still in the White
House where it has always been); others are extremely biased evaluations of
actions that could just as easily be spun the other way (stating that America would remain neutral in the Falkland
Island issue, as it has always been, is only “taking the side of Argentina”
under a very labored interpretation of side-taking). Every sentence in this clip
could be rebutted, or at least contested, with far more evidence than D’Souza
presents in its favor. But this is not exactly a movie about evidence.
Except when that evidence
involves the Freudian psychology that the Dinesh D’Souza of Illiberal Education detested, but which
D’Souza 2.0 seems to have embraced. Enter New York psychologist Paul Vitz,
whose controversial academic work attributes mental disorders such as atheism
and liberalism to the absence of strong fathers.
Even
among reputable Freudians, it is considered good form to actually talk to
a patient before issuing a diagnosis--especially when you have to make a call
as weighty as "he hates and resents his father" and "he hates
and resents America because he actually loves and idolizes his father."
Dr. Vitz, however, is comfortable making the call based on a book in which
Obama actually says that he loves and respects America because he was
disillusioned by his father's politics.
But Vitz's diagnosis is the key to D'Souza's whole
argument. Once we know that Obama really wants to show his absent father that
he is a good son, we can finally understand why he hates America so. It is
because his father was a post-colonial scholar, asserting (against all of the
evidence) that colonialism was actually bad for the colonized people. The only
way for Barack Obama to be his father’s son is to hate colonialism (and
America) too. Mystery solved. And here is the proof:
And there you have it. Obama hates America
because his father wrote an obscure article in a political journal advocating
higher taxes. Doesn't it all make sense? I knew it would.
The real question, of course, is not
“why is Obama such an America-hater,” but “how has a political attack film that
can offer nothing better than 100-year-old defenses of colonialism and
50-year-old apologies for Freudian psychoanalysis become such a prominent part
of the hard right’s anti-Obama echo chamber"? Clearly, we who teach
critical thinking have fallen flat on our faces and allowed our students to go
into the world without an even basic understanding of what constitutes an
“argument.”
