Read Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Tags: #Non-fiction, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science
Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) (11 page)
BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
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Reading through Unger’s corpus of work, as I have, is no easy task. He is a serious, passionate, and frequently abstruse writer. He began as a Critical Legal Scholar—a radical within the world of legal studies—but his work is now massively interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of economics, political science, and international relations. I must say I admire the broad sweep of his vision, and the intensity of conviction and analysis that he brings to it. He is truly a global thinker. Even his obscurity has a kind of charm. I told myself, this is the type of figure who would be comical anywhere except in academia. Reading his works, I asked myself: How can you change the world, as this man seeks to, when you write in such an abstract and arcane academic dialect? What Unger needs, I realized, is a “translator,” someone to take his revolutionary ideas and figure out how to apply them. In Obama, Unger may have found such a man.
Unger’s basic complaint is that the world is grossly unequal in its distribution of power and resources. For this reason, he says, democracy has failed. Democracy for Unger doesn’t mean voting rights; it means a basically equal distribution of global resources and opportunity. So how do we solve this problem? For Unger, the key is to realize that the whole structure of global institutions, from globalization to free trade to property rights, is the main obstacle to achieving greater universal equity. We should not, he says, regard these social arrangements as part of “the natural order of things.” They are man-made institutions, and thus they are subject to change. Unger argues that to achieve true global democracy, these institutions have to be transformed or, in Unger’s favorite word, “remade.” But before we can remake something, we have to re-imagine it. Once we can envision the alternative, we can set about realizing it. Unger’s work is focused on achieving this re-imagining. This should not, however, be thought of as a benign academic exercise. “The advancement of alternatives like these,” Unger writes, “would amount to world revolution.”
Unger thinks that legal decisions should not take the language of the U.S. Constitution too seriously. “The cult of the Constitution is the supreme example of American institution worship.” Basically, he argues, the Constitution means what we want it to mean. Nor is Unger a fan of traditional property rights. He calls for “the dismemberment of the traditional property right” in favor of what he calls “social endowments.” Basically, all citizens are entitled to certain things, such as health care and jobs and a stable retirement, and if other people’s property gets in the way, that property has to be seized in order to meet the social entitlement. Unger insists, however, that he is not merely talking about the United States or the Western countries. These social entitlements must be globally recognized. Consequently, we have to redesign and remake the institutions of globalization and free trade. “The doctrine of free trade, as it has been understood, is fundamentally defective.” Unger calls for an end to immigration laws in the West that prevent a free traffic of people across national borders. Why should goods, he writes, be free to move across national frontiers but not people? Everyone, he insists, is socially entitled to seek opportunity where it can be found. Finally, Unger calls for a global coalition to reduce the influence of the United States. He calls this a “ganging up of lesser powers against the United States.” He specifically calls for China, India, Russia, and Brazil to lead this anti-American coalition. Unger says global democracy is impossible when a single superpower dominates. He wants a “containment of American hegemony” and its replacement by a plurality of centers of power. “Better American hegemony than any other that is now thinkable,” he writes. “But much better yet no hegemony at all.”
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We can see in later chapters how these ideas may have shaped Obama’s policies. But recently a strange video surfaced on the web in which Unger called for Obama’s defeat. At first I thought it was a “cover,” an arrangement by which Unger would safely distance himself from Obama by denouncing him. As I listened to Unger’s remarks, however, I realized he was attacking Obama for not being radical enough.
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Perhaps Obama should remind Unger that he hasn’t been re-elected yet. Some founding fathers just don’t understand the virtue of patience.
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Perhaps Obama should remind Unger that he hasn’t been re-elected yet. Some founding fathers just don’t understand the virtue of patience.
Next we turn to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor and friend. I was, in retrospect, unduly harsh on Wright in my previous book,
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
. Knowing more about him and his relationship with Obama, I now feel sorry for him. Wright is a genuine intellectual. He has a fully developed political theology. He was up-front about that in his pulpit, and it resonated deeply with Obama. Yet when Wright became an issue during the campaign, Obama betrayed him and got rid of him, making it seem that Wright had become some sort of a crank. Wright’s reputation was ruined, and Obama moved on to gather praise for his famous race speech in Philadelphia; in fact, the speech did deserve a prize—a prize for skillful political deception.
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
. Knowing more about him and his relationship with Obama, I now feel sorry for him. Wright is a genuine intellectual. He has a fully developed political theology. He was up-front about that in his pulpit, and it resonated deeply with Obama. Yet when Wright became an issue during the campaign, Obama betrayed him and got rid of him, making it seem that Wright had become some sort of a crank. Wright’s reputation was ruined, and Obama moved on to gather praise for his famous race speech in Philadelphia; in fact, the speech did deserve a prize—a prize for skillful political deception.
In the speech, “A More Perfect Union,” delivered at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, Obama pretended that the controversy over Jeremiah Wright was typical of the confusions and contradictions that color race relations in the United States. Obama implied that he stood above such confusions and contradictions. He proceeded to lecture us about how America has never come to terms with our racial heritage, how we need to acknowledge the complexities of race in this country, and blah, blah, blah. Americans were so taken with Obama’s rhetoric that they forgot the main issue involving Wright had very little to do with race. Rather, it had to do with American foreign policy. In his sermon “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” delivered after 9/11, Wright portrayed America as the source of evil and terrorism in the world. The evil of American hegemony was Wright’s central theme, leading to his resounding conclusion, “God damn America!” Yet Obama deftly shifted the topic from whether America is the bad guy in the world to a completely irrelevant discussion of the unfinished work of race relations in this country. And we bought it; we let him get away with it.
Now we need to understand Wright better to see what suckers we were, and how there always was, and is, a close resemblance between Wright’s political theology and Obama’s. Wright is not fundamentally a race guy, although he started out that way. In the 1960s, he read Stokely Carmichael and Afrocentric literature, and he was highly influenced by James Cone, the founder of Black Liberation Theology. Cone, however, expanded Black Liberation Theology to include the non-white people of the Third World.
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Essentially he became a Third World liberation theologian. And Wright also broadened his theology to encompass a global, Third World perspective. Sure, there were plenty of blacks in Wright’s Trinity church, and for them he supplied a steady diet of blackness: the so-called Black Value System, “black learning styles,” the suggestion of government conspiracies involving blacks and AIDS, and a whole bunch of Afrocentric propaganda, basically adding up to the idea that blacks invented civilization and whites stole all their ideas. We can see from Obama’s writings that he was never attracted to any of this nonsense. What interested him was Wright’s global theology which identified the West, and specifically the United States, as a global occupier and oppressor, and the rest of the world as a global victim seeking equality and justice.
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Essentially he became a Third World liberation theologian. And Wright also broadened his theology to encompass a global, Third World perspective. Sure, there were plenty of blacks in Wright’s Trinity church, and for them he supplied a steady diet of blackness: the so-called Black Value System, “black learning styles,” the suggestion of government conspiracies involving blacks and AIDS, and a whole bunch of Afrocentric propaganda, basically adding up to the idea that blacks invented civilization and whites stole all their ideas. We can see from Obama’s writings that he was never attracted to any of this nonsense. What interested him was Wright’s global theology which identified the West, and specifically the United States, as a global occupier and oppressor, and the rest of the world as a global victim seeking equality and justice.
Remarkably, we all know about “God damn America,” but hardly anyone has bothered to analyze Wright’s sermon to determine the context of those remarks. The sermon was called “Confusing God and Government,” and it was delivered at Trinity on April 13, 2003. Wright began by talking about how there is no peace in the world, just division and conflict and war. And he traced the problem to America and colonialism. “Regime change, substituting one tyrant for another tyrant with the biggest tyrant pulling the puppet strings, that does not make for peace. Colonizing a country does not make for peace. If you don’t believe me, look at Haiti, look at Puerto Rico, look at Angola, look at Zimbabwe, look at Kenya, look at South Africa. Occupation does not make for peace, and subjugation only makes for temporary silence.” Wright says the problem is one of tyranny and colonialism. “The Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from east to west. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British failed.” Then Wright moves to the failures of the current instrument of tyranny and occupation, which is America.
We cannot see how what we are doing is the same thing al-Qaeda is doing under a different color flag, calling on the name of a different God to sanction and approve our murder and our mayhem . . . . We believe in this country, and we teach our children that God sent us to this Promised Land. He sent us to take this country from the Arawak, the Susquehanna, the Apache, the Comanche, the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Choctaw, the Hopi, and the Arapaho . . . . We confuse God and Government.... We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery. We believe God makes Europeans superior to Africans and superior to everybody else too . . . . We believe God approved Apartheid . . . . We believe that God approves of six percent of the people on the face of the earth controlling all of the resources on the face of this earth while the other 94 percent live in poverty and squalor, while we give trillions of dollars of tax breaks to the white rich . . . . We believe we have a right to Iraqi oil. We believe we have a right to Venezuelan oil. We believe we got a right to all the oil on the face of the Earth, and we’ve got the military to take it if necessary.... We believe it’s all right to decimate the Afro-Colombian community by arming the paramilitary with United States tax dollars—our dollars—by hiring military whose real job is to protect the oil line owned by United States companies . . . . The government lied about Pearl Harbor.... The government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin . . . . The government lied about Nelson Mandela, and our CIA helped put him in prison and keep him there for 27 years.
This prelude leads to the final consummation: God damn America.
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When Wright became the focus of campaign controversy, he vainly attempted to clarify his true position. In an interview with TV host Bill Moyers, Wright stressed that his argument with America was not limited to race. “We have members from Cuba. We have members from Puerto Rico. We have members from Belize. We have members from all of the Caribbean islands. We have members from South Africa, from West Africa, and we have white members.” Wright insisted that his church made up a coalition of the oppressed, all united in a theological understanding of the distinction between colonizer and colonized. Third World liberation theology means looking at history and at the world from the point of view of the victims of empire. Throughout biblical history, Wright pointed out, the people of God suffered “under Egyptian oppression, Syrian oppression, Babylonian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression. So that their understanding of what God is saying is very different from the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians.”
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Wright developed these same themes in his speech to the National Press Club. He emphasized that his theology was no longer confined to James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology; rather, “I take it back past the problem of western ideology and white supremacy.” Wright introduced the concept of Third World liberation theology. “Now in the 1960s the term liberation theology began to gain currency with the writings and teachings of preachers, pastors, priests and professors from Latin America. Their theology was done from the underside—their viewpoint was not from the top down or from a set of teachings which undergirded imperialism . . . . Liberation theology started in and from a different place. It started from the vantage point of the oppressed.” Wright said that his congregation maintained a global outlook. “Our congregation ... took a stand against apartheid when the government of our country was supporting the racist regime of the Afrikaner government of South Africa. Our congregation stood up in solidarity with the peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua.” For Wright, the basic enemy was and always has been imperialism. Specifically, he compared Roman imperialism and American imperialism. “The Roman oppression is the period in which Jesus was born. Imperialism was going on when Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that the whole world should be taxed—they were in charge of the world, sounds like some other governments I know. We have troops stationed all over the world, just like Rome . . . . because we run the world. The notion of imperialism is not the message of the Gospel of the Prince of Peace nor of the God who loves the world.” No one present could miss Wright’s logic: just as the people of Israel called on God to damn Rome, so Wright was, in effect saying, that we the people of God today should call on God to damn America.
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Wright today seems a broken, bitter man. The Obama people have tried everything to shut him up. Wright said in a recent interview that in 2008 “one of Barack’s closest friends” offered him $150,000 in exchange for his agreement “not to preach at all until the November presidential election.” Wright has left Trinity, and maintains an office at the Kwame Nkrumah Academy, a school named after the first president of Ghana. Wright now wonders whether the Obamas ever had a real interest in Christianity. “Church is not their thing,” he says. “It never was their thing.” Instead, he says, “the church was an integral part of Barack’s politics.” So Wright feels used, and I suspect it’s because he was used. One day, he continues to hope, Obama will come back and make amends. “He’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck,” he told journalist David Remnick. “Or in eight years when he’s out of office.”
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I doubt Obama will bother. Wright has served his purpose, and he is disposable. But we should understand what Wright and Obama had in common: a set of beliefs, grounded in anti-colonialism. This is why Obama embraced Wright as a mentor and enthusiastically participated in his church for two decades.
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I doubt Obama will bother. Wright has served his purpose, and he is disposable. But we should understand what Wright and Obama had in common: a set of beliefs, grounded in anti-colonialism. This is why Obama embraced Wright as a mentor and enthusiastically participated in his church for two decades.
BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
8.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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