Conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza has added another solid non-fiction tome to his resume with United States of Socialism: Who’s Behind It. Why it’s Evil. How to Stop It (2020). His long list of titles include Letters to a Young Conservative, The Virtue of Prosperity, and Illiberal Education, and like these volumes, he focuses on the political, economic, and social implications of socialism.
One of D’Souza’s most intriguing sections is what he calls “the socialist of temptation (p.28).” As someone who has studied this growing threat for several years, I’ve heard all the reasons why anyone would want to join up—free college and free healthcare paid for by the country’s wealthiest. That sounds like a paradise, except for the part where it is an economic failure waiting to happen because it has always happened anywhere socialism has been attempted.
D’Souza also touches on this when he states that socialism “requires the art of historical forgetting” because no one who actually knew the truth of socialism’s “genocidal record” would wish to try it in a different incarnation (p.72). If you take that train of thought to its natural conclusion, “‘Never again!’ suddenly becomes ‘Why not (p.72).’” It is a popular and unsettling educational trend to replace actual history with a rewritten history. The 1619 Project is one of the most aggressive recent examples of this (Hannah-Jones, 2019, August).
According to the website, “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contribution of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative (Hannah-Jones, 2019, August).” What people who advocate this preposterous narrative forget, is that we fought something called The Civil War from 1861-1865 in a bid to shed the vestiges of slavery, and 620,000 men died on both sides. I don’t know how you can get around that fact, but I’m sure they will find a way (American Battlefield Trust, n.d.).
These movement leaders take advantage of a shallowly educated mass who managed to topple a statue of Ulysses Grant in San Francisco. It is unknown if they knew that Grant was a champion of the war and helped to further the cause that ended actual slavery in America. Rodriguez, O. R. (2020, June 30). Several minority-owned businesses were looted in the George Floyd protest riots in Minnesota and Texas. What is the point of that kind of protest? What message were they trying to send, except for anarchy (Foundation for Economic Education, 2020, June 5)? When these things start happening, we are a country of “an upside-down society where walruses can talk and pigs have wings (D’Souza, 2020, p.133).”
D’Souza’s take on cancel culture is worthy of 5 stars, and is a great addition to the genre.
