Death of a Nation

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

After reading Dinesh D’Souza’s Death of a Nation (2018), I find myself pondering the many subjects that he brought up in one of his latest books. This particular book is actually a companion piece to the documentary that D’Souza released with the same title. I have been a long-time fan of D’Souza’s work, but he does have stances that I don’t entirely agree with. For instance, he seems to repeat the myth that the Civil War was a black and white conflict over slavery, which is far from the truth, since Lincoln spent most of the war ignoring the issue, until he delivered the half-hearted Emancipation Proclamation. Also, I don’t believe that Lincoln was the saint that D’Souza portrays him. When D’Souza mentions Woodrow Wilson using Lincoln as a model for his presidency, he said that Lincoln would be horrified at such a thought. While that may be true, D’Souza still has to understand that Lincoln set a bad precedent for giving presidents unlimited powers during war time. The man deported a congressman, shutdown newspapers, imprisoned thousands of people without trial for arbitrary reasons and even put an arrest warrant out for a federal judge. I know that people like D’Souza try to justify Lincoln’s actions by saying that they were necessary to keep the union together, but I have never bought into the idea of suspending our liberties for the sake of security. Lincoln probably wouldn’t have been fond of somebody like Woodrow Wilson invoking his name to justify the horrible things that Wilson carried out during his presidency, but part of this would be Lincoln’s own fault for setting such a bad precedent in the first place.

I do believe that D’Souza was spot on about everything else. Death of a Nation actually expands on the subjects of his previous books and documentaries, such as Hillary’s America and The Big Lie. One of the subjects being the idea that the real party of racism isn’t the Republican Party. As D’Souza correctly points out, it was the Democrats who were the real party of slavery, Jim Crow and the KKK. Of course, leftists know that they can’t deny this, so they tell us that the Republicans abandoned minorities to court racists with the so-called Southern Strategy during the late sixties. The sad part is that it isn’t just leftists who buy into this nonsense. Even ultra-conservatives such as Pat Buchanan and hardcore libertarian, Judge Andrew Napolitano have been guilty of repeating this same nonsense. D’Souza isn’t even the first one to point out that the Southern Strategy is a myth. Ann Coulter did a good job of pointing this out in her book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, as well as Bruce Bartlett did in his book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Yet, the left keeps repeating this same nonsense, despite there not being a shred of evidence that there was any such strategy for Republicans to court segregationists from the South. As D’Souza pointed out, there are no quotes from anyone in the Republican Party who supported such a measure, especially from Richard Nixon who the leftists claim was the one who spearheaded the whole strategy. To me it never made any sense how the same guy who created Affirmative Action and the Busing strategy to integrate the last of the segregated schools would support an element that was not only racist, but was clearly on the losing side of history.

Also, if you do any research, you can clearly see that many of the urban areas of the South that were becoming wealthier and more industrialized were already starting to vote Republican, long before the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. It’s also telling that this so-called strategy could only convert two segregationists to the Republican Party. It’s even more telling that that the Republicans didn’t end up dominating the South until the eighties, long after this strategy was supposed to have taken place.

The book actually became a real eye opener when they revealed that many key members of the Alt-Right didn’t seem all that Right-Wing. Many of these White Nationalists, especially those involved in the Charlottesville protest, seemed to lean more to the left. One of them had been a participant in the Occupy Wall street Protests. Even Richard Spencer who Dinesh interviewed for this book, didn’t seem all that right-wing when it came to economics or individual rights. He actually said that instead of having individual rights, people have rights that are granted to them by the collective society. He also said that he wasn’t at all against the idea of Socialism and that he certainly supported having markets regulated by a strong central government.

I just wish that the Republicans would show a little more backbone when it comes to the issue of racism. After the fiasco in Charlottesville, the Republicans practically lined up to denounce the KKK and its Neo-Nazi allies. Instead of virtue signaling and denouncing a bunch of groups that are no longer relevant in present day America, they should tell the left “Enough of this racism nonsense. We are not the party of racism. We never were. If there was any party that supported racism it was yours. You were the party of slavery, Jim Crow and the KKK. Not the Republicans. Hell, we were the ones who put an end to slavery and battled the KKK during the Reconstruction years. For the most part it was our side that fought Jim Crow, while Democrats like George Wallace fought to preserve it. Yeah, I know you Democrats like to take credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since LBJ was the one who pushed it through congress, but if it weren’t for us Republicans the Dixiecrats probably would have gotten in the way. Don’t you dare give us that crap about the Southern Strategy. The reason why you guys lost the South was because they become richer and more industrialized, which means that they began to favor climates with less taxes and fewer regulations. Also, just because your party has been able to successfully manipulate minorities into believing that you care about their interests, it doesn’t mean that you actually do. Seriously, what have you done lately for the minorities in America? It’s your party that runs the inner cities and quite frankly, it’s not something we would call a success story (understatement of the century). Instead of making us denounce people and organizations that are no longer relevant in this day and age, how about you disavow groups such as Antifa? Yeah that’s what we thought.”