Dinesh D’Souza on why they hate us, The Enemy at Home, and the culture war.
Dinesh D’Souza is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a prolific author of works concerning politics and society. He worked briefly for the government in the late eighties as a senior domestic policy analyst in the Reagan Administration. As an author, he has always been a controversial figure. Illiberal Education and The End of Racism made him hated by the Left; but it was not until his 2006 release, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, that he found himself savaged by the Right. The book provoked a tsunami of criticism due to the nature of his conclusions.
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BC: It’s not hyperbole to say that your latest release, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, brought about a firestorm of contention. You were criticized by both leftists and conservatives. For what reason did the book outrage so many people?
Dinesh D'Souza: Well, it’s not surprising that the book provoked hysteria from the Left. The position I take is not one previously espoused by the Right concerning the left’s role in 9/11. The common view that conservatives have is that liberals are naive or simply don’t understand terrorist motivations, but none of my peers have directly pointed their finger at the Left and said that it was the liberals who bear direct responsibility for the volcano of hate which brought about 9/11.
The book does to the Left what they have been doing to the Right forever. They argue that our foreign policy produced blowback but I argue that their cultural policies and values are what sewed the seeds of 9/11.
The book helps us understand the language of the Left. Why are the liberals so reluctant to join in a fight against the most illiberal persons in the world? Regardless of our enemy’s values, the liberals refuse to say that this is also their fight. As the fundamentalists that oppose us are far worse than any Christian fundamentalists in America, it makes no sense that they did not sign up for the struggle. That the Left reacted in a frenzied and hysterical way was expected. What was not was the reaction I received from the Right.
BC: Ah, that brings me to my next question. Several very famous conservatives condemned your book including the likes of Roger Kimball, Peter Berkowitz, and Victor David Hanson. I know that you penned a series of responses, but what is it that so angered them? Also, how much does this type of criticism personally affect you?
Dinesh D'Souza: Well, I think I’m a very non-confrontational guy in person. As a result of my early political education at Dartmouth, I have developed a thick skin in regards to criticism. The hysterical reaction that The Dartmouth Review received in the early eighties gave me an initiation to politics so I’m not a stranger to controversy. I’ve come to expect a certain degree of irrationality from the Left — not the liberals I mean — but from true leftists.
The difference with The Enemy at Home is that conservatives failed to take my back. That they chose not to do so is disappointing because my book is breaking new ground. So, in that sense, the reaction I got was completely different. There were half a dozen conservatives who went after me. Victor Davis Hanson and Peter Berkowitz are colleagues of mine at the Hoover Institute so the critical and harsh tone of their criticism disappointed me. The irony, of course, is that Victor Davis Hanson wrote a blurb for another book of mine, What's So Great About America. At Hoover, there’s a divide among us concerning Bush and the Iraq war but Hanson and I were on the same side of the issue so his response was unanticipated.
The real point is that the entrenched assumptions conservatives have held for several years have now grown stale. With some conservatives, when things go poorly, like they are now, they decide to continue pushing in the same direction with more force as opposed to examining their initial assumptions. Reexamination is what The Enemy at Home is all about. I do a post-mortem on 9/11 and apply a microscope to the ideas we once believed were true and this could be one reason for the negative response on the part of conservatives. What I didn’t realize is that a lot of people have bought into a fixed framework of thought and have now decided to go down with the ship. I was the recipient of such conservative attacks. I think they drew their conclusions from the summary of the book and its title as opposed to my actual positions. The very idea that our nation had any culpability for the attacks of 9/11 outraged people.
It’s not an unintelligent question to ask how the terrorists became strong enough to pull off the deeds they did. What emboldened them to act? Bin Laden was doing other things throughout the eighties and nineties so what made him decide to target us? Given my background as a strong defender of conservatism and America they should have known better based on my history.
BC: What can we do to correct the decadent trajectory of this nation? Is the culture war over with conservatives having lost?
Dinesh D'Souza: No, I don’t think it is over. I’ll give you an example. I live in Southern California which used to be Nixon and Reagan country, but now it’s liberal country. Schwarzenegger discovered this so he has now moved to the Left. It used to be that when people became more affluent they moved to the Right, but we now live in a time where such people move to the Left. My family resides in the suburbs of San Diego and our neighbors are quite liberal on the social issues but there are two very important distinctions which have to be made in regards to their worldviews. First, they are not liberal in the way in which they live their lives. Second, they are not liberal about their schools and their children. I see this in the reaction parents have to changes made at my daughter’s private school (I don’t want to go into the specific issues). Many of the liberals live by traditional values even though they’ll never go to a pro-life rally or watch Pat Robertson’s television show, but when it comes to non-political situations they’re actually quite conservative. Their opinions are to the left of their actions.
The culture war is not lost but we need to make a non-traditional argument for better societal values. We need to approach it in a new way. Most of the attacks on Christianity are on fundamentalists and the Christian Right. Conservatives, in turn, defend the fundamentalists but what they really should be doing is pointing out that the Left is not attacking fundamentalists — who are but a small part of Christians, and even Evangelicals, for that matter — the truth is that traditional Christianity is what they’re really after. Conservatives should acknowledge this instead of writing why Jerry Falwell wasn’t so bad. My position is that whenever they attack fundamentalists their real target is traditional Christianity, so let’s defend that instead. Prayer in schools and intelligent design are not the real issues. Those are but symbolic indicators of a moral slide in our society.
In every survey, the vast majority of Americans agree that our portfolios have gone up while our values have gone down. These individuals are the new group we should target. That’s the majority. We can’t do it in the old way. We need to try something new. A new language and a new articulation of our positions is what is needed. We must make these into policy issues. We must impose academic and civil discipline rather than The Ten Commandments. The politician who sees this and runs with it will equal the success that Reagan had.
BC: You often used the term “liberal” to describe the Left. In my mind this is a faulty practice as there is nothing liberal about most of these people. Do you think that conservatives should attempt to reclaim the word liberal from the Left?
Dinesh D'Souza: No, I think it is a pointless argument. We’re moving into a phase of ideological redefinition. It will involve labels and terms but it’s really much more than that. For twenty years we’ve been in the Reagan phase. He had a three-tiered platform and the liberals defined themselves in opposition to it. If we were anti-communist then they were anti-anti-communist. If we were against big government then they were for it. If we believed in traditional values then they took more libertine positions. Almost two decades after Reagan we still have the same labels. Look at “Islamo-fascist,” which is a term that is quite misleading.
There are important differences between the past and today. The Republicans continue to ride on the Reagan agenda. We need a new application of Reagan’s principals for the present. Liberals stopped being liberals a generation ago but conservatives had no alternative but to discredit the term they use to describe themselves. The word has been discredited to the point where all the leading Presidential candidates won’t use it as a means of self-description. Liberals flee from the label; whereas, conservatives are proud to call themselves conservative. Indeed, the candidates fight over who is actually the real conservative. Peter Berkowitz and the others are engaged in a largely quixotic attempt to rescue the word liberal. I don’t think that’s a good idea as with politics you really need to surf on the wave. If they call themselves liberal then you discredit them.
[Editor's note: An earlier version of this interview made reference to a blurb written by Victor Davis Hanson. The earlier version did not make clear that the blurb was written for What's So Great About America, not The Enemy at Home.]
According to D’Souza, liberals “bear direct responsibility for the volcano of hate which brought about 9/11.” Not “indirect responsibility,” mind you. Not even mere “responsibility.” “Direct responsibility.” Implicitly, once the decadence of American society brought on by the Left reached the Middle East, Sayyid Qutb and his followers, including Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, simply could not control themselves. We can skip them entirely in the chain of responsibility, or maybe chide them for their indirect responsibility, their inability to fend of the rage that American culture created in them, their. “Volcano of hate” is our metaphor, and volcanoes cannot control their own eruptions. “Direct responsibility” for 9/11 lies with the American liberals, not with Muslims drugged into jihad against their wills.
While he’s at it, D’Souza might as well say that women who wear short skirts are “directly responsible” for being raped.
D’Souza justifies his monstrous argument thus: “The book does to the Left what they have been doing to the Right forever. They argue that our foreign policy produced blowback but I argue that their cultural policies and values are what sewed the seeds of 9/11.”
That’s a defense of his argument? If I were D’Souza, I would want better justication for my book than the meek excuse that my opponents’ books aren’t any better. D’Souza is surprised by the criticism of him from the Right; he is learning that there are conservatives who will not happily receive a demogogic book, simply because it is right-wing rather than left-wing.
As one of the right wing “savagers” of his books noted, D’Souza used a quote of a Muslim from the “good old days” of the 20s. Even the 20s were too disgusting for the “moderate Muslims”. D’Souza got savaged because his work was lazy and silly. He outright says that the moderates only difference from the radicals is their use of suicide violence…then tells us to find common ground. That’s silly.
I suspect Mr. D’Souza has touched a nerve that needed to be touched. It seems that most of his critics address everything but what that twitching nerve reveals – a realization that the fuel of Muslim hate is supplied in abundance by leftists and liberals.
Foreign policy a factor? Certainly, but how much dislike for our policies is rooted in the fear among fundamentalist Muslims (which like it or not amounts to most Middle Eastern Muslims) that our foreign policy will lead to the introduction of our liberal morality to their lands and corrupt their people?
It also should not be forgotten that policy is a product of government and in traditional Islam, there is no separation between religion and government.
Anyone who can see what scares Muslims knows the answer to why they hate us.
It’s true they hate our policies, but what they fear is that those polcies may result in fellow Muslims going the way of the liberal West.
The comment by Katzen points out that women who wear short skirts should not be responsible for their being raped. Mr. D’Souza might point out that wearing short skirts, jeans or anything else short of a tent is a legitimate justification for rape in fundamentalist Islam, where women are little more than cattle to be done with as good Muslim men see fit.
Katzen and D’Souza are both right. Now what?
Nick,
The difference is that D’Souza sees blame in debauchery. He blames our culture of sin so to speak. Yet all his instances of Muslim hate PRE-DATE the hippy movement of whos feet he lays the blame. In fact, the history of Islam is not in finding fault with that which is “wicked”, but in labeling “wicked” anything which they have a fault with. And Islam finds fault with people simply being different.
As one of the reviewers put it “since the period of time is one which conservatives wish to go back to, D’Souza’s argument falls short.” Indeed, the Muslim grievance with the west dates back to the days of Thomas Jefferson.
Any attempt to link Islam’s aggression with the West, which dates back centuries, to the morality of the past few decades is assinine. It’s akin to saying that a woman got raped because her daughter is a whore…even though her mother was raped before she was ever born.
THAT is what D’Souza is trying to do. And it’s shameful.
Wolven: Sounds like a reasonable assessment until you test it against the reality of the here and now.
Ask a fundamentalist Muslim what they hate about the West and the U.S.
They hardly every mention Jefferson or his contemporaries.
It is important to note that a couple of factors are in play – the decline (advancement if you ask a progressive) of Western morality along with globalization and the emergence of communication technologies. It is sometimes easy for Westerners to forget that the “odor” we give off can now be smelled around the world, whereas in times past, the winds never blew that far.
You ignore the impact of the 60′s on the East, yet the East cannot. When Dylan sang “These times, they are a changin’ ” he wasn’t kidding, and while some of us celebrated it, the East began to gird up to ensure its times would most certainly not be “a changin’.
To suggest that the sexual revolution, liberalized ideas of drug use, poronography, homosexuality and even same sex mariage exploding forth in such a short time has not been a shock and an important factor to a culture that has not reformed religiously or moved socially more than an inch the last 800 years requires either a good deal of thought or none at all.
As for your point that we have always been infidels, I can agree, but at the same time I cannot ignore that it is we who have changed, while Islam’s expectations of mankind have not changed at all. That means the more we change, the more we become at odds with that which does not change. And as far as that goes, it cannot be argued that we have changed mightily in the last 50 years.
To establish that D’souza is wrong about liberal morality being partly to blame for attacks, the burden of proof is on his detractors.
I hold radical Islam responsible for its actions and would never excuse it, but to suggest that liberal/progressive morality as it has evolved in recent years is not enough to provoke attacks, one would have to prove to me that video clips of SanFrancisco Gay Pride parades and other examples of “Western depravity” are not effective tools for those recruiting suicide martyrs to journey to America to enforce Allah’s law.