by Paul R. Hollrah, Lincoln Heritage Institute Senior Fellow
Conservatives scratch their heads, wondering why the American people fail to see the glaring similarities between the agenda pursued by liberals and top-ranking Democrats, and the agenda of Osama bin Laden and Islamic fascists. Dinesh D’Souza, a senior policy analyst in the Reagan Administration and author of The Enemy At Home – The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, sheds some very clear light on this question in a recent interview with TownHall.com.
When asked about the connection between the left’s attack on traditional American values and the growing hostility by Muslim extremists towards the United States, he said, “It might seem at first glance that the cultural left should be in the forefront to fight radical Islam…(because) bin Laden and the Islamic radicals are so illiberal. They despise women’s rights and gay rights. I think we all know what they would do with Hillary Clinton or Barney Frank. Even so, the cultural left has shown itself extremely reluctant to support Bush’s War on Terror. They aren’t just against the Iraq War, they are against the Patriot Act, the telephone surveillance program, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the sanctions proposals against Iran’s nuclear program. In short, they want Bush’s War on Terror to fail.…”
And why would self-professed loyal Americans wish for the defeat of their own country? D’Souza suggests, “(It) has nothing to do with cultural relativism or multiculturalism. It has everything to do with domestic politics. Basically the left hates Bush more than it hates bin Laden. Bin Laden is a foreign threat, but Bush is a domestic threat. In the last couple of decades the left-wing agenda has become increasingly dominated by social and sexual concerns. So who threatens abortion rights in America? Not bin Laden, Bush. Who is blocking gay marriage? Not Al Qaeda, Bush’s court appointees.… Consequently the left is quite willing to ally with the lesser evil, the Islamic radicals, in order to defeat the greater evil, Bush and the conservatives.”
Which leads us to wonder, exactly what is it that the left has to gain from an American defeat in Iraq and a general retreat in the War on Terror? D’Souza explains, “The same thing that the left gained from Vietnam. We say America lost the Vietnam War, and this is true, but the left won the Vietnam War. The left wanted America to accept humiliation and withdraw, and America accepted humiliation and withdrew. Not only was this a stunning foreign policy victory for the left, disabling America from seriously intervening abroad for almost a generation, but Vietnam also paid other dividends. A whole generation of liberal Democrats, the so-called Class of 1974, swept into Congress. Moreover, the antiwar movement greatly fortified the counterculture. It strengthened the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the sexual revolution. So Vietnam was not only a foreign policy success but also a political success and a cultural success (for liberal Democrats).”
Then D’Souza was asked, “What does the military war against the terrorists abroad have in common with the cultural war with the left at home? Why is it that we cannot win the war against Islamic radicalism without first defeating the cultural left?
D’Souza replied, “This war is tough going in Iraq. But it is even tougher going in America. The war is being lost not on the streets of Baghdad but right here in America. It is the cultural left that is doing bin Laden’s work for him.… Fortunately for bin Laden he has a whole political movement in the United States (the Democrat Party) that is dedicated to exactly this objective. So how can Bush expect to win over there when he is losing over here? In Vietnam the military won the Tet Offensive, but here in America it was portrayed in the media as a humiliating defeat. In fact, Tet became a symbol of American failure. So Bush had better wake up to the fact that he is facing two enemies, an enemy abroad and an enemy at home…”
When asked what ordinary citizens can do to fight the War on Terror, D’Souza replies, “Fight the left at home. It is the left, the enemy at home, that is fighting to weaken the resolve of the American people and thus undermine Bush’s chance to win the War on Terror.”
The Democratic Party is a party comprised of two percent cultural and political elites and ninety-eight percent “useful idiots” – people who regularly walk into the voting booth and pull the Democrat lever for no better reason than that it has a jackass engraved on it. They absolutely must be shown the truth of D’Souza’s words.
