Note: This appeared in the print-only version of The Marshall Independent TV Guide.
“2016: Obama’s America” is an electioneering movie modeled on Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and made for the same purpose, to influence the course of an upcoming presidential election.
The film is based on two books by D’Souza: “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” and “Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream.”
This movie will probably not be seen by Obama supporters in any great numbers, and is unlikely to persuade anybody who’s mind is made up. Co-writer and director Dinesh D’Souza most likely made it to sway independent voters, and rally the conservative troops.
The tagline of “2016: Obama’s America,” “Love him or hate him, you don’t know him,” is eminently true. Surprisingly little is known about the life of the current occupant of the White House, arguably less than is known about the life of George Washington in total.
However, the end line of the documentary, “Love him or hate him, now you know him,” is far less defensible.
“2016” presents a theory of motive. Obama’s motives for what he has done in office. According to D’Souza, other right-wing theories of Obama’s motives: he’s a socialist, he’s a secret Muslim, etc, are unsatisfactory explanations.
D’Souza presents his thesis that Obama is motivated by the Third World anti-colonialist vision inherited from his Kenyan father, Barack Obama Senior.
The problem with attribution of motive is, you can claim you know someone else’s motive all you like, and simply dismiss all counter-claims. Motive is impossible to know for sure, because it resides in people’s heads, is most often mixed and ambiguous, and is what people are most likely to lie about, even to themselves.
The only way to get a reasonably confident take on someone’s motives is to examine how well it explains their actions, and by ruthlessly honest introspection. If you can see the same motives in yourself under similar circumstances, you might be on the right track.
D’Souza takes this tack and presents his own background as being very similar to Obama’s. Both are mixed-race scions of families from countries colonized by Britain. Obama’s father was from Kenya, D’Souza’s family is from India, or former Portuguese Goa to be exact. Both were steeped in the anti-colonialist traditions of their respective families that explain essentially all of the Third World’s misery as the result of ruthless exploitation by the Western colonial powers.
According to D’Souza, the whole thrust of Obama’s presidency has been to weaken the West in general and the United States in particular, and transfer huge amounts of its wealth to the Third World.
D’Souza introduces Obama’s intellectual mentors: African-American poet and Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, Palestinian anti-colonialist Professor Edward Said, former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayres, etc.
It’s an intriguing hypothesis, one that might even strengthen Obama’s waning appeal among hard leftist who share their anti-colonialist views. But to be accepted as viable, a theory must not only explain but rule out other explanations.
To his credit, D’Souza has interviewed a number of people the media has never bothered to: friends from Hawaii, Obama’s mother’s PhD advisor, and a real coup, Obama’s half-brother George, who surprisingly argues the British should have stayed longer in Kenya.
D’Souza interviewed historian Shelby Steele, who also has a mixed-race background and presents some very interesting speculation about Obama’s appeal to white voters as a non-threatening African-American they can feel good about supporting.
And he presents the testimony of Obama himself, from the audiobook of his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.”
But he interviewed precisely one psychologist on the influence of absent fathers, and none with alternative opinions. He glosses over another possible explanation, that any possible anti-colonialist views came directly from his mother. Which actually seems more likely from the evidence presented in the film.
And he ignores data that contradict his thesis entirely.
If Obama’s natural sympathies lie with Third World Muslims against the United States, then why has he been killing them with Predator drone attacks at a rate four-five times greater than George Bush ever did? Why has he not followed up on his promise to close Guantanamo? Why has he continued to wage war in Afghanistan?
If Obama sees himself as a transformative president, impatient or outright hostile to constitutional constraints on his power, it is unnecessary to invoke a non-American mindset. Of our two other most transformative presidents, Franklin Roosevelt was patrician Dutch-American, and Woodrow Wilson was a southerner (also racist and ardent segregationist.) Both were as American as apple pie. And bottom line, there are plenty of Americans with no overseas background who share the same views.
Love him or hate him, I’d still say go see it. You’ll learn a lot of interesting things you didn’t know. But as for D’Souza’s theory, I’d say interesting but unproven.