Broadly speaking, my dissertation is on Trumpism vs. Reaganism and how Trump was able to win the support of conservatives who had previously emphasized the importance of ideological purity for winning their vote. As such, a part of my dissertation will be devoted to identifying the common rationales used by those who consider themselves philosophically conservative, yet supported Trump in the general election, if not earlier. Today, I came a little bit closer to solving that puzzle by watching Dinesh D’Souza’s absurd, but undeniably influential, “documentary” Hillary’s America.
Cinematically speaking, I have seen worse films. When I was a child, I had to endure Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, a film lacking any semblance of a plot. When I was in high school, the long-term substitute for my Mythology class showed us an Italian version of Oedipus Rex that could have been improved upon by a six-year old director. And a few years ago, I willed myself through the mercifully-short “feature length film” of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas- a film so bad, I would rather pour hot sauce into my eyes than ever watch it again. D’Souza’s movie, purely in cinematic terms was better than these, but not by much. The few attempts at acting the movie makes were so bad that they made Hayden Christensen look like Sir Christopher Lee. And a couple of the settings were just mind-bogglingly absurd: why would the DNC allow D’Souza to walk around their building, by himself, until he finds their secret basement that contains the “big secrets” of the Democratic Party’s history? And why would Hillary Clinton allow D’Souza to walk around her headquarters, find her secret basement with the files of all her secret plots, and then cover the walls with the evidence to show how all the plots are connected (the way a paranoid conspiracy theorist living in a windowless room would)? From top to bottom, the movie is a cinematic disaster (although I get what he was trying to do with the national anthem blaring at the end; a person who fully bought into this movie would probably be crying patriotic tears at the end, I just laughed).
Now, D’Souza would likely dismiss this criticism as just the angry ramblings of some butthurt progressive (or worse). I am not a progressive, nor am I particularly threatened by the message of the film. However, I cannot pretend that the movie was some kind of cinematic classic, or anything. Even mockumentaries, such as Borat, are cinematically far superior to the product that D’Souza put out.
Now we turn to the real reason for this critique: the message of the film, itself. D’Souza takes a long, meandering route to essentially tell his audience that the Democrats are a party that, from its founding until today, has really been an evil cabal of Lex Luthor-like criminal masterminds hellbent on “stealing America” from good, innocent Americans. D’Souza basically puts every single sin in American history at the feet of the Democratic Party, while highlighting all of the best points in the history of the Republican Party. In other words, he rewrites American history so that the Democrats are Mordor and the Republicans are Gondor. As mentioned above, D’Souza’s entire argument is a long, meandering one that can make even the most attentive viewer forget the central thesis he is trying to argue.
D’Souza first ties his grand thesis to his personal life. D’Souza, who pled guilty to violation of campaign finance laws in what was undoubtedly the most useless criminal scheme of all-time (finding ways to pay more money to Wendy Long than he was allowed), interviews some prisoners who tell him about the grand schemes they had conducted that led him there. These insurance schemes form the framework for how D’Souza casts and understands the motives and actions of the Democrats for the rest of the film. He essentially argues that everything the Democrats do, and have done, is analogous to a con, while the Republicans are always the good guys. Ergo, the entire history of the Democratic Party is one of crime, corruption, schemes, and evil.
As such, D’Souza starts with Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, and a personal hero of President Trump (a fact that D’Souza conveniently omits). D’Souza rightly points out Jackson’s support for slavery and his oppression of Native Americans. But, as he does with his coverage of the Democrats from the 1830’s through the 1960’s, he fails to make a convincing case as to why that history is politically relevant today (ie: why current Democrats should have to answer for Jackson’s misdeeds and failures). It has been nearly two centuries since Jackson put the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears and enslaved human beings. Yet D’Souza’s entire argument rests on the assumption that the Democrats have not changed since then; that the Jackson coalition is still what drives the party and that the same is true of the Republican Party since Lincoln and other former Whigs created it.
The political science literature is quite clear that D’Souza’s thesis is not only wrong, but comically absurd. Yes, the South was a one-party region for a century after the Civil War so that the antebellum racial caste system of the South could endure. Yes, they found other ways to essentially enslave African-Americans again, through sharecropping and other methods (see Doug Blackmon’s excellent book on this) and utilized Jim Crow laws to ensure the endurance of white supremacy. And yes, they were united under the banner of the Democratic Party. But, the makeup of the Democratic Party has changed substantially over the course of American history, with 1932 and 1964 especially standing out.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in an era in which the Democrats would reign supreme for nearly 50 years, forging a coalition of white liberals, working class whites, Jews, African-Americans, Catholics, and Southern Democrats. However, for the next thirty years, the tenability of the coalition was shaky, at best, as tensions between the northern and southern wings over some issues, chiefly civil rights, constantly threatened to tear the party apart. FDR and Truman did their best to appease both wings, but by the late 50’s, it became clear that the northern wing was gaining the upper hand and intent on quashing the southerners (see my colleague, Boris Heersink’s work on the DNC in 1956). And then, as everyone but D’Souza seems to know, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 proved to be the final straw and the Democrats began to lose the Solid South.
D’Souza would counter, as he does in his film, that the “Big Switch” is a myth, and he uses as his proof the fact that very few Democrats in power at the time ultimately became Republicans. While technically true, this is a grossly misleading reading of history that is a hallmark of D’Souza’s partisan hackery. He ignores the fact that Southern Democrats had major incentives to stay with the party- the seniority system put in place by Speaker Rayburn as a way to mollify the tensions between the two wings of the party meant that switching parties would cost the representatives and their districts a great deal of power, influence, and federal funds. The South’s switch to the GOP required several decades for these politicians to die or retire and thus lose their seniority and all of its perks. But at the presidential level, the South became a reliably Republican voting bloc starting in 1964 (with a few exceptions, such as 1976 when the South rallied behind Jimmy Carter, and 1968 when the Deep South backed George Wallace). In some places of the Old South, particularly in the Appalachian regions, the Republicans have still not taken control of state and local offices, even if those districts voted overwhelmingly for Republicans in presidential elections. The Big Switch is real; it just took decades for the GOP to capture Congressional seats and even longer to really take over state and local positions. D’Souza completely ignores all of this in his cursory dismissal of the political realignment that was sparked by the Civil Rights Act.
As for the Republicans, D’Souza lionizes them, while omitting the unpleasant facts that Lincoln’s GOP is nothing like the current GOP. The Republican Party that ruled America for nearly 70 years bears little resemblance to the Reagan/Bush GOP, and only some resemblance to Trump’s GOP. First, the current GOP is the party of white America; a party that seeks to minimize the influence of people of color in the national system by incarcerating minorities at high rates, barring felons from voting, being demagogues on immigration-related issues, and finding other creative ways to suppress minority votes. The only common ground the Trump Era GOP has with the Lincoln GOP is that they are for tariffs and massive infrastructure programs. But even that commonality is only a recent change- the Romney/Ryan ticket of 2012 was for free trade, cutting spending, and especially for cutting entitlements. If the GOP can flip that much that quickly, then it is ridiculous to try to argue that the Republicans of 1860 are the same as the Republicans of 2016.
And, to be fair, the current GOP is less racist than the Republicans of 1860. As much as the Lincoln Republicans were abolitionists, they still were not paragons of egalitarianism. Racism was still a powerful force in the North, and remained so long after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. But in the time since 1860, the Democrats have become far less racist by becoming a party of multiculturalism, while the GOP has lost its former African-American base and picked up the white South. I do not know of any Republicans who believe that we should be enslaving POC, but there are portions of the Republican base (which have become more prominent in the Age of Trump) which argue for “racial realism” and spread fears of “white genocide” and other such concerns. Most of the GOP’s white nationalist rhetoric is thinly veiled by phrases like “defending western civilization” and “America First,” but they are less racist than they were in 1860, just not as much as the Democrats have become.
Most of the rest of the movie follows similar patterns. D’Souza correctly points out, for instance, that the eugenicists and racial Darwinists of the early 1900’s were “progressives,” but the sad truth is that such beliefs constituted the common ideology of the era. Teddy Roosevelt, often considered a GOP icon by people like D’Souza, was a staunch adherent of the Aryan Myth and advocated benevolent colonialism to “civilize the savages” in the Philippines, Cuba, and other parts of Central and South America. Although D’Souza would have the audience believe that it was just progressives who believed this, TR’s successor, conservative icon William Howard Taft, served as the Governor of the Philippines during Roosevelt’s presidency and expressed his belief that it would take 50 years of occupation before the Filipinos could even begin to conceive of liberty and freedom. The Progressive Era, in short, was a period during which white supremacy and the Aryan Myth were the dominant ideologies, believed in by people of both parties across the political spectrum. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were heroes of racial equality during this time.
In short, D’Souza’s work is a hyper-partisan rewriting of history that lacks any sense of nuance or context. It is a hit job that portrays the Democrats as the eternal villains of American history and the Republicans as the eternal heroes. It is a film that ignores the complexities of party development and the evanescent nature of dominant issues in American political discourse. Its purpose is quite clear, of course- to scare the American people by painting the picture of an Orwellian future caused by the election of Hillary Clinton, the heir apparent to this “secret, dark history” (which is not the least bit concealed by actual historians and political scientists) of the Democratic Party. That might actually be the most annoying part of D’Souza’s work- his ludicrous assertions that historians and political scientists have conspired to cover up the racist history of the Democratic Party, when in fact, there are countless books out there about the history of the Democrats and it is covered in any half-decent high school history class. But D’Souza acts like it has been memory-holed by a cabal of liberal academics (for what it is worth, I still consider myself to be a conservative libertarian, even though I left the GOP almost 3 years ago). The only value of the movie is to better understand the mentality of Republicans and conservatives who held their nose to vote for Trump in 2016 which, fortunately for me, is a focus of my dissertation. But anyone who wants a true, intellectually honest understanding of American political history should run the other way.
PS: Follow Kevin Kruse (@KevinMKruse) on Twitter if you want to see thorough, scholarly debunking of D'Souza on a frequent basis.
Cinematically speaking, I have seen worse films. When I was a child, I had to endure Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, a film lacking any semblance of a plot. When I was in high school, the long-term substitute for my Mythology class showed us an Italian version of Oedipus Rex that could have been improved upon by a six-year old director. And a few years ago, I willed myself through the mercifully-short “feature length film” of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas- a film so bad, I would rather pour hot sauce into my eyes than ever watch it again. D’Souza’s movie, purely in cinematic terms was better than these, but not by much. The few attempts at acting the movie makes were so bad that they made Hayden Christensen look like Sir Christopher Lee. And a couple of the settings were just mind-bogglingly absurd: why would the DNC allow D’Souza to walk around their building, by himself, until he finds their secret basement that contains the “big secrets” of the Democratic Party’s history? And why would Hillary Clinton allow D’Souza to walk around her headquarters, find her secret basement with the files of all her secret plots, and then cover the walls with the evidence to show how all the plots are connected (the way a paranoid conspiracy theorist living in a windowless room would)? From top to bottom, the movie is a cinematic disaster (although I get what he was trying to do with the national anthem blaring at the end; a person who fully bought into this movie would probably be crying patriotic tears at the end, I just laughed).
Now, D’Souza would likely dismiss this criticism as just the angry ramblings of some butthurt progressive (or worse). I am not a progressive, nor am I particularly threatened by the message of the film. However, I cannot pretend that the movie was some kind of cinematic classic, or anything. Even mockumentaries, such as Borat, are cinematically far superior to the product that D’Souza put out.
Now we turn to the real reason for this critique: the message of the film, itself. D’Souza takes a long, meandering route to essentially tell his audience that the Democrats are a party that, from its founding until today, has really been an evil cabal of Lex Luthor-like criminal masterminds hellbent on “stealing America” from good, innocent Americans. D’Souza basically puts every single sin in American history at the feet of the Democratic Party, while highlighting all of the best points in the history of the Republican Party. In other words, he rewrites American history so that the Democrats are Mordor and the Republicans are Gondor. As mentioned above, D’Souza’s entire argument is a long, meandering one that can make even the most attentive viewer forget the central thesis he is trying to argue.
D’Souza first ties his grand thesis to his personal life. D’Souza, who pled guilty to violation of campaign finance laws in what was undoubtedly the most useless criminal scheme of all-time (finding ways to pay more money to Wendy Long than he was allowed), interviews some prisoners who tell him about the grand schemes they had conducted that led him there. These insurance schemes form the framework for how D’Souza casts and understands the motives and actions of the Democrats for the rest of the film. He essentially argues that everything the Democrats do, and have done, is analogous to a con, while the Republicans are always the good guys. Ergo, the entire history of the Democratic Party is one of crime, corruption, schemes, and evil.
As such, D’Souza starts with Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, and a personal hero of President Trump (a fact that D’Souza conveniently omits). D’Souza rightly points out Jackson’s support for slavery and his oppression of Native Americans. But, as he does with his coverage of the Democrats from the 1830’s through the 1960’s, he fails to make a convincing case as to why that history is politically relevant today (ie: why current Democrats should have to answer for Jackson’s misdeeds and failures). It has been nearly two centuries since Jackson put the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears and enslaved human beings. Yet D’Souza’s entire argument rests on the assumption that the Democrats have not changed since then; that the Jackson coalition is still what drives the party and that the same is true of the Republican Party since Lincoln and other former Whigs created it.
The political science literature is quite clear that D’Souza’s thesis is not only wrong, but comically absurd. Yes, the South was a one-party region for a century after the Civil War so that the antebellum racial caste system of the South could endure. Yes, they found other ways to essentially enslave African-Americans again, through sharecropping and other methods (see Doug Blackmon’s excellent book on this) and utilized Jim Crow laws to ensure the endurance of white supremacy. And yes, they were united under the banner of the Democratic Party. But, the makeup of the Democratic Party has changed substantially over the course of American history, with 1932 and 1964 especially standing out.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in an era in which the Democrats would reign supreme for nearly 50 years, forging a coalition of white liberals, working class whites, Jews, African-Americans, Catholics, and Southern Democrats. However, for the next thirty years, the tenability of the coalition was shaky, at best, as tensions between the northern and southern wings over some issues, chiefly civil rights, constantly threatened to tear the party apart. FDR and Truman did their best to appease both wings, but by the late 50’s, it became clear that the northern wing was gaining the upper hand and intent on quashing the southerners (see my colleague, Boris Heersink’s work on the DNC in 1956). And then, as everyone but D’Souza seems to know, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 proved to be the final straw and the Democrats began to lose the Solid South.
D’Souza would counter, as he does in his film, that the “Big Switch” is a myth, and he uses as his proof the fact that very few Democrats in power at the time ultimately became Republicans. While technically true, this is a grossly misleading reading of history that is a hallmark of D’Souza’s partisan hackery. He ignores the fact that Southern Democrats had major incentives to stay with the party- the seniority system put in place by Speaker Rayburn as a way to mollify the tensions between the two wings of the party meant that switching parties would cost the representatives and their districts a great deal of power, influence, and federal funds. The South’s switch to the GOP required several decades for these politicians to die or retire and thus lose their seniority and all of its perks. But at the presidential level, the South became a reliably Republican voting bloc starting in 1964 (with a few exceptions, such as 1976 when the South rallied behind Jimmy Carter, and 1968 when the Deep South backed George Wallace). In some places of the Old South, particularly in the Appalachian regions, the Republicans have still not taken control of state and local offices, even if those districts voted overwhelmingly for Republicans in presidential elections. The Big Switch is real; it just took decades for the GOP to capture Congressional seats and even longer to really take over state and local positions. D’Souza completely ignores all of this in his cursory dismissal of the political realignment that was sparked by the Civil Rights Act.
As for the Republicans, D’Souza lionizes them, while omitting the unpleasant facts that Lincoln’s GOP is nothing like the current GOP. The Republican Party that ruled America for nearly 70 years bears little resemblance to the Reagan/Bush GOP, and only some resemblance to Trump’s GOP. First, the current GOP is the party of white America; a party that seeks to minimize the influence of people of color in the national system by incarcerating minorities at high rates, barring felons from voting, being demagogues on immigration-related issues, and finding other creative ways to suppress minority votes. The only common ground the Trump Era GOP has with the Lincoln GOP is that they are for tariffs and massive infrastructure programs. But even that commonality is only a recent change- the Romney/Ryan ticket of 2012 was for free trade, cutting spending, and especially for cutting entitlements. If the GOP can flip that much that quickly, then it is ridiculous to try to argue that the Republicans of 1860 are the same as the Republicans of 2016.
And, to be fair, the current GOP is less racist than the Republicans of 1860. As much as the Lincoln Republicans were abolitionists, they still were not paragons of egalitarianism. Racism was still a powerful force in the North, and remained so long after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. But in the time since 1860, the Democrats have become far less racist by becoming a party of multiculturalism, while the GOP has lost its former African-American base and picked up the white South. I do not know of any Republicans who believe that we should be enslaving POC, but there are portions of the Republican base (which have become more prominent in the Age of Trump) which argue for “racial realism” and spread fears of “white genocide” and other such concerns. Most of the GOP’s white nationalist rhetoric is thinly veiled by phrases like “defending western civilization” and “America First,” but they are less racist than they were in 1860, just not as much as the Democrats have become.
Most of the rest of the movie follows similar patterns. D’Souza correctly points out, for instance, that the eugenicists and racial Darwinists of the early 1900’s were “progressives,” but the sad truth is that such beliefs constituted the common ideology of the era. Teddy Roosevelt, often considered a GOP icon by people like D’Souza, was a staunch adherent of the Aryan Myth and advocated benevolent colonialism to “civilize the savages” in the Philippines, Cuba, and other parts of Central and South America. Although D’Souza would have the audience believe that it was just progressives who believed this, TR’s successor, conservative icon William Howard Taft, served as the Governor of the Philippines during Roosevelt’s presidency and expressed his belief that it would take 50 years of occupation before the Filipinos could even begin to conceive of liberty and freedom. The Progressive Era, in short, was a period during which white supremacy and the Aryan Myth were the dominant ideologies, believed in by people of both parties across the political spectrum. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were heroes of racial equality during this time.
In short, D’Souza’s work is a hyper-partisan rewriting of history that lacks any sense of nuance or context. It is a hit job that portrays the Democrats as the eternal villains of American history and the Republicans as the eternal heroes. It is a film that ignores the complexities of party development and the evanescent nature of dominant issues in American political discourse. Its purpose is quite clear, of course- to scare the American people by painting the picture of an Orwellian future caused by the election of Hillary Clinton, the heir apparent to this “secret, dark history” (which is not the least bit concealed by actual historians and political scientists) of the Democratic Party. That might actually be the most annoying part of D’Souza’s work- his ludicrous assertions that historians and political scientists have conspired to cover up the racist history of the Democratic Party, when in fact, there are countless books out there about the history of the Democrats and it is covered in any half-decent high school history class. But D’Souza acts like it has been memory-holed by a cabal of liberal academics (for what it is worth, I still consider myself to be a conservative libertarian, even though I left the GOP almost 3 years ago). The only value of the movie is to better understand the mentality of Republicans and conservatives who held their nose to vote for Trump in 2016 which, fortunately for me, is a focus of my dissertation. But anyone who wants a true, intellectually honest understanding of American political history should run the other way.
PS: Follow Kevin Kruse (@KevinMKruse) on Twitter if you want to see thorough, scholarly debunking of D'Souza on a frequent basis.
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