What's So Great About America

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Qutb’s alternative to this way of life is Islam, which is much more than just a religion. Islam is not merely a set of beliefs; rather, it is a way of life based upon the divine government of the universe. The very term “Islam” means “submission” to the authority of Allah. This worldview requires that religious, economic, political, and civil society be based on the Koran, the teachings of the prophet Muhammad, and on the sharia or Islamic law. Islam doesn’t just regulate religious belief and practice; it covers such topics as the administration of the state, the conduct of war, the making of treaties, the laws governing divorce and inheritance, as well as property rights and contracts. In short, Islam provides the whole framework for Muslim life, and in this sense it is impossible to “practice” Islam within a secular framework.

  This is especially so when, as Qutb insists, the institutions of the West are antithetical to Islam. The West is a society based on freedom whereas Islam is a society based on virtue. Moreover, in Qutb’s view, Western institutions are fundamentally atheistic: they are based on a clear rejection of divine authority. When democrats say that sovereignty and political authority are ultimately derived from the people, this means that the people—not God—are the rulers. So democracy is a form of idol worship. Similarly capitalism is based on the premise that the market, not God, makes final decisions of worth. Capitalism, too, is a form of idolatry or market worship. Qutb contends that since the West and Islam are based on radically different principles, there is no way that Islamic society can compromise or meet the West halfway. Either the West will prevail or Islam will prevail. What is needed, Qutb concludes, is for true-believing Muslims to recognize this and stand up for Islam against the Western infidel and those apostate Muslims who have sold out to the West for money and power. And once the critique is accepted by Muslims, the solution presents itself almost automatically. Kill the apostates. Kill the infidels.

  Some Americans will find these views frightening and abhorrent, and a few people might even object to giving them so much space and taking them seriously. But I think that they must be taken seriously. Certainly they are taken seriously in the Muslim world. Moreover, Qutb is raising issues of the deepest importance: Is reason or revelation a more reliable source of truth? Does legitimate political authority come from God or from man? Which is the highest political value: freedom or virtue? These issues are central to what the West and America are all about. Qutb’s critique reveals most lucidly the argument between Islam and the West at its deepest level. For this reason, it should be welcomed by thoughtful people in America and the West.

  The foreign critique of America would not be so formidable if Americans were united in resisting and responding to it. Patriotism, then, would be an easy matter of “us” versus “them.” But in truth there are large and influential sectors of American life that agree with many of the denunciations that come from abroad. Both on the political Left and the Right, there are people who express a strong hostility to the idea of America and the American way of life. In many quarters in the United States, we find a deep ambivalence about exporting the American system to the rest of the world. Not only do these critiques make patriotism problematic, but they also pose the question of whether an open society, where such criticisms are permitted and even encouraged, has the fortitude and the will to resist external assault. They also raise the issue of whether, if the critics are right, America is worth defending.

  Conservatism is generally the party of patriotism, but in recent years, since the end of the Reagan administration, patriotism on the Right has not been much in evidence. This is not due just to post–Cold War lassitude. Many conservatives are viscerally unhappy with the current state of American society. Several right-wing leaders have pointed to the magnitude of crime, drugs, divorce, abortion, illegitimacy, and pornography as evidence that America is suffering a moral and cultural breakdown of mammoth proportions. The Reverend Jerry Falwell even suggested that the destruction of the World Trade Center was God’s way of punishing America for its sinful ways. Falwell was strongly criticized, and apologized for the remark. But his cultural pessimism is echoed in the speeches of Bill Bennett, former secretary of education, and Gary Bauer, former presidential candidate and head of the Family Research Council, as well as in books such as Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The De-Moralization of Society.

  How, then, can we love a society where virtue loses all her loveliness, one that has promoted what Pope John Paul II has called a “culture of death”? Some conservatives say we cannot. A few years ago the journal First Things argued that America had so fundamentally departed from the principles that once commanded allegiance that it was time to ask “whether conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”16 Pat Buchanan characteristically goes further, asserting that for millions of Americans, “the good country we grew up in” has now been replaced by “a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for.”17

  On the political Left, anti-Americanism has been prevalent and even fashionable at least since the Vietnam War. Admittedly a direct attack on the American homeland by Islamic fundamentalists who imprison homosexuals and refuse to educate their women was a bit too much for some, like Christopher Hitchens and David Rieff, who enrolled as supporters of the U.S. war effort. Some on the Left, too embarrassed to rationalize mass murder, and too timid to provoke the public’s rage, fell prudently silent. But others could not help muttering that “America had it coming” and that “we must look at our own actions to understand the context for this attack.” Columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, said the United States was responsible for “the vast global inequalities in which terrorism is ultimately rooted.”18 This viewpoint was applauded at a Washington, D.C., town meeting sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.19 And on the American campus, several professors went further, blaming the United States itself for the carnage of September 11. University of Massachusetts professor Jennie Traschen suggested that America deserved what it got because throughout the world it was “a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.”20

  These strong words should not have come as a surprise. For years the left-wing opponents of globalization have carried banners in Seattle and elsewhere saying “America Must Be Stopped” and “The World Is Not For Sale.” On campuses across the country, professors have been teaching their students what Columbia University scholar Edward Said recently argued: that America is a genocidal power with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.” 21 Many intellectuals and activists have devoted a good deal of their adult lives to opposing what one termed “a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy, its gunboat diplomacy, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its marauding multinationals, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.”22 Could bin Laden have put it better? If what these people say is true, then America should be destroyed.

  The most serious internal critique of America comes from the political movement called multiculturalism. This group is made up of minority activists as well as of sympathetic whites who agree with their agenda. The multiculturalists are a powerful, perhaps even dominant, force in American high schools and colleges. The pervasiveness of their influence is attested in the title of a recent book by Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now. This group has become the shaper of the minds of American students. The multiculturalists are teaching our young people that Western civilization is defined by oppression. They present American history as an uninterrupted series of crimes visited on blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, and natives of the Third World. This is the theme of Howard Zinn’s widely used textbook A People’s History of the United States. Other lead
ing scholars affirm Zinn’s basic themes. Cornel West, who teaches African-American studies at Harvard, says that American society is “chronically racist, sexist and homophobic.”23 Political scientist Ali Mazrui goes further, charging that the United States has been, and continues to be, “a breeding ground for racism, exploitation and genocide.”24

  The reason America exercises such a baleful influence, multiculturalists argue, is that the American founders were slave owners and racists who established what one scholar terms “a model totalitarian society.”25 No wonder that multiculturalists are not hopeful about the future of the American experiment. In the words of historian John Hope Franklin, “We’re a bigoted people and always have been. We think every other country is trying to copy us now, and if they are, God help the world.”26

  Multiculturalists insist that immigrants and minorities should not assimilate to the American mainstream, because to do so is to give up one’s identity and to succumb to racism. As the influential scholar Stanley Fish puts it, “Common values. National unity. Assimilation. These are now the code words and phrases for an agenda that need no longer speak in the accents of the Know-Nothing party of the nineteenth century or the Ku Klux Klan of the twentieth.”27 The multicultural objective is to encourage nonwhites in America to cultivate their separate identities and to teach white Americans to accept and even cherish these differences. For multiculturalists, diversity is the basis for American identity. As a popular slogan has it, “All we have in common is our diversity.”

  Multiculturalists also seek to fill white Americans with an overpowering sense of guilt and blame so that they accept responsibility for the sufferings of minorities in America and poor people in the rest of the world. One favored multicultural solution, taken up by the Reverend Jesse Jackson upon his return from the recent United Nations–sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban, is for the American government to pay reparations for slavery to African nations and to African-Americans. “The amount we are owed,” says black activist Haki Madhubuti, “is in the trillions of dollars.”28

  What we have, then, is a vivid portrait of how terrible America is and of the grave harms that it has inflicted on its people and on the world since the nation’s founding. These charges of the low origins of America, and its oppressive practices, and its depraved culture, and its pernicious global influence—are they true? If so, is it possible to love our country, or are we compelled to watch her buildings knocked down and her people killed and say, in unison with her enemies, “Praise be to Allah”?

  “To make us love our country,” Edmund Burke wrote, “our country ought to be lovely.”29 Burke’s point is that we typically love our country for the same reason that we love our children—because they are ours. Some people have kids who are intrinsically unlovable, but they love them anyway. This partiality that we all show for our own seems to be part of our tribal nature. But Burke implies that this is not the highest kind of patriotism. In the movie The Patriot, the hero, played by Mel Gibson, refuses to fight for America until his son is killed and his home is burned to the ground. Despite its great battle scenes, the film conveys the message that patriotism is a kind of selfishness. This would not seem to be the noblest form of patriotism, which calls us to look beyond private interests to the public benefit. As Burke suggests, the genuine patriot loves his country not only because it is his, but also because it is good.

  Now, more than ever, we need this higher kind of patriotism, and it is by necessity a patriotism of the reflective sort. Reflection was not in evidence when, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, an Arizona resident named Frank Roque fired three bullets into a Sikh gas station attendant, killing him. When the police arrived, Roque explained his actions: “I am an American.” Actually, so was the man he killed, Guru Khalsa. Roque apparently thought Khalsa was a Muslim from an Arab country. Wrong man, wrong country, wrong religion. This was a rare incident, but even so it is brutish exhibitions of nativism like this one that convince some thoughtful people, like philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that attachment to any tribe or nationality is dangerous and that our moral allegiance should be to “the community of all human beings.”30

  If the only possible patriotism were based on “my country, right or wrong,” then Nussbaum would be correct. If patriotism were inevitably to degenerate into the kind of blind hatred that motivated Roque, then we are better off without it. But one can make a distinction between nativism, which is based on resentment, and patriotism, which is based on love. The former is objectionable, but the latter is indispensable. Certainly America requires it now and will require it even more in the foreseeable future. Even when our initial anger toward our enemies has cooled, we still need an enduring attachment to our country to see her through the long trials ahead. America desperately needs the love of her citizens, for what she is and for what she might become.

  A patriotism of this sort—a thoughtful and affirming patriotism—must necessarily be based on an examination of first principles. The need for this approach was illustrated by an American radio show host who recently erupted, “I don’t know why those crazy Muslims want to fight with us. They believe in Allah this, and Allah that, and they don’t realize that we don’t give a damn. So why can’t we just agree to disagree?” The reason, of course, is that agreeing to disagree is a liberal principle, and it is liberalism itself that is being disputed here. The procedural liberalism that we are so used to invoking—which presupposes that liberal mechanisms like free speech and equal rights are the best way of organizing society—is ineffective against those who do not believe that these are self-evident goods and who insist that religious truth and virtue have higher claims. We have to show why our society is a moral improvement on theirs, and this is neither an obvious nor an easy task.

  I feel that I am in a unique position to write about this subject. I am a native of India who grew up in Bombay and came to the United States as an exchange student in the late 1970s. Since I spent the first part of my life in a different society, I am able to see the United States from the outside and to identify unique aspects of American society that seem completely unremarkable to the natives. This may be called the “Tocqueville advantage,” although, in invoking it, I am by no means comparing myself to Tocqueville. Visiting America in the 1830s, Tocqueville declared that he had encountered “a distinct species of mankind.” Tocqueville was especially struck by the average American’s “inordinate love of material gratification.” At the same time, Tocqueville detected a restlessness of soul that afflicted even the most fortunate and prosperous families. Tocqueville observed that, by contrast with Europeans, Americans exhibited a high degree of civic activism and religious fervor. Tocqueville further remarked that Americans were fierce egalitarians who, despite differences of income and status, refused to bow and scrape before anybody.31

  These are perceptive observations, and most of them are true today. But a great deal has also changed since Tocqueville came here, and the United States displays some new distinguishing characteristics. I am impressed at the fact that Americans cannot fight a war and say they are doing it for strategic advantage or for oil; they have to be convinced, or to convince themselves, that they are fighting to expel a tyrant, or to secure democracy, or to ensure human rights. In other societies there are multiple measures of social recognition, such as family background, education, caste, and so on; in the United States, it pretty much comes down to how much money you have. Even so, “old money” carries very little prestige in America: all it means is that your grandfather was a robber baron or a bootlegger. As a frequent speaker at American companies, I am struck by the ease with which Palestinians and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Turks and Armenians, all work together in apparent disregard of the bitter historical grievances that have shattered their communities of origin. Elsewhere in the world the poor aspire to middle-class respectability, but in the United States the wealthy seek to dress and act like middle-class people, or even like bums. American children seem to believe quite
literally that you can “be whatever you want to be,” implausible though this seems to people in other places. American parents seem unnaturally eager to befriend their children and to treat them as equals, yet the children seem firmly convinced that they are far wiser than their elders. Young people in the United States “go away to college” and typically never return home to live. In many other countries this would be regarded as abandoning one’s offspring. Americans are the friendliest people you will encounter, but they have few friends. Most people in the United States do not believe in idleness and pursue even leisure with a kind of strenuous effort. There are very weird people in America, but nobody seems struck or bothered by the amount of weirdness. In many countries old people believe their life is over and pretty much wait to die, while in America people in their seventies pursue the pleasures of life, including remarriage and sexual gratification, with a zeal that I find unnerving. While the funeral is a standard public ceremony in most countries, funerals are a very rare public sight in America, and no one likes to go to them. It seems that Americans don’t really die: they just disappear. The significance of some of these cultural peculiarities will be explored later in this book.

  Another reason I feel especially qualified to write this book is that I have the background and credentials to evaluate the various accusations that are launched against the United States and the West. Having been raised in a country that was colonized by the West for several hundred years, I have a good vantage point to assess how Western civilization has harmed or helped the peoples of the non-Western world. As a “person of color” who has lived in the United States for more than twenty years, and having devoted a decade to studying issues of race and ethnicity, I am competent to address such questions as what it is like to be a nonwhite person in America, what this country owes its indigenous minorities, and whether immigrants can maintain their ethnic identity and still “become American.”