How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza,
09.27.10, 12:00 AM ET
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps
in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back.
Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He
has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages,
investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The
Weekly Standard
summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and
supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue
of the
Wall Street Journal
: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly?
You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off
the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank
offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil
company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de
Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian
exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the
Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact
that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less
than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's
century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to
do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if
America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even
banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission
to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's
"stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even
then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might
force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of
billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The
unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now
it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist
the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich,
Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems
odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income
taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10%
pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does
indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million
mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name
of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that
"our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly
irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be
constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London
Times
reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional
release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in
connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an
eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent
him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and
appropriately complained. The
Times
, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a
week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on
"compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in
Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya.
Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to
Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home
country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced
that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be
to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he
got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to
reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly
Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution
to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the
International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was
not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese.
Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former
astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the
President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of
landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations.
Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to
here?
Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in
the business community--including some Obama voters who now have
buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that
Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a
socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style
socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they
could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his
foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we
have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political
spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history.
In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent
his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American
mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent
journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question:
What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's
dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders.
They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century
later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct
species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when
asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal,
Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional
than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind
society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a
nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he
represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's:
The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or
race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue
simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not
Dreams of My Father
but rather
Dreams from My Father
. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya
and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of
his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark
Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular
drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and
causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982
he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the
elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of
anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free
of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans
chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of
Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after
my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the
rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the
20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an
unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich
by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and
South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences,
Frantz Fanon, wrote in
The Wretched of the Earth
, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the
sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow
races."
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political
independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors.
This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African
statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book
Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be
nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by
powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of
neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in
their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow
the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr.
and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the
East Africa Journal
called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire
socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary
means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away
from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For
Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African
who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the
economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been
built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals
shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The
senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise
taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically
there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income
so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate
with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well,
has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there
has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly
relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the
neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when
he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was
shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of
anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but
America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of
Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in
Culture and Imperialism
, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage.
For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the
end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover,
9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two
countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic
domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did.
So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that
subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of
Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United
States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his
formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global
domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an
instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position
that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder.
Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of
neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a
measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and
America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes
the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the
rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the
neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our
anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it
provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but
also the little details that no other theory can adequately account
for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America?
Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the
world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less
and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his
proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is
getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore
reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his
speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the
West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to
nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks
to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the
government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse
bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health
insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once
they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with
them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law
forcing every American to buy health insurance.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain
why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income
in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that
since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth
doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from
them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965
paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified
under certain circumstances.
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event
that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and
Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against
America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the
way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his
trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would
explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of
Americans to be released from captivity.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of
Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and
international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by
recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for
man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at
the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather
telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man
on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not
for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder
he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of
American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to
explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we
can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know
Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real
grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told
Newsweek
, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything
from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The
dreams of the father are still alive in the son."
In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only
to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir
"the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his
father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a
black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black
man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in
myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life,
Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted,
inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work
hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up,
black man!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at
his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent,"
he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally
close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just
a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I
saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense
of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed
in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an
ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color
of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave
and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the
earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's
spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body
but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he
will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama
Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his
son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb,
the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man
in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market
economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the
problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and
growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top,
we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped
in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled
according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This
philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world
for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now
setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in
his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only
living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the
inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is
governed by a ghost.
Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book
The Roots of Obama's Rage
(Regnery Publishing)
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