I've had only a nodding acquaintance with the life and works of Dinesh D'Souza. I knew that after he wrote a negative book about on Barack Obama, New York prosecutors, possibly doing the will of the Obama administration, charged D'Souza with illegal campaign contributions. The eight months D'Souza spent in a low-security prison may have been good for his career in that both his books and documentary films have become popular with right-leaning audiences. Over the years, I read a few D'Souza essays and liked some ideas but thought he sometimes resorted to sophisms (like the well-worn "the Democrats were the party of slavery," which is broadly true but misleading).
AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER contains a few sophisms, but its theme statement provides a solid philosophical response to the Left's condemnation of the United States as irretrievably evil and imperialist. D'Souza marshals an impressive roster of intellectuals and academics-- including Marx, DeToqueville, James Madison, Adam Smith, and many of the 20th-century radicals, whose justifications of their hatred of America lay bare their dubious motivations, as well as their insidious influence upon Leftist politics. From these diverse voices D'Souza articulates his thesis: that America was unique in championing entrepreneurship as no country had before or has since.
Further, D'Souza connects good entrepreneurship with the quality Adam Smith, conceiver of the market's "invisible hand," called "empathy:"
...entrepreneurs created demand by introducing a product that no one asked for, but millions of people wanted once it was available. I call this "extreme empathy" because it's a case of entrepreneurs providing for the wants of consumers before consumers even know what they want. -- Chapter 10.
Now neither Smith nor D'Souza denied that the entrepreneur is motivated by what Smith termed "self-interest." But D'Souza asserts that such self-interest manifests in the maintenance of commerce, and because commerce is generally consensual, it stands in marked contrast to the ethic of conquest that dominated all older cultures:
The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.
To buttress this argument, D'Souza even quotes the 12th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (albeit in paraphrase), to the effect in his time violent conquest was deemed more honorable than the tradecraft of merchants, because conquest was more overt in its purpose to exploit others. But D'Souza's thesis persuasively argues that the ethic of conquest has been transcended by the actions of the colonists of early America, made up largely of either merchants or immigrants who aspired to be merchants.
I won't cover in detail the ways in which D'Souza exposes the grievance-based methods by which Leftist radicals have sought to tar the United States with the sins of the past. But he throws considerable doubt upon the motives of politicians like Obama and Hilary Clinton, and even if all of D'Souza's charges don't stick, it's a relief to find some of these sacred cows gored (so to speak).
One last comment: this 2014 book mentioned the fact that Obama was going to pass the Presidential torch to Hilary, which was correct. D'Souza thus makes no mention of the Presidential gamechanger Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy in June 2015. But it's fitting that Trump, whatever his faults, should arise to oppose the shame-dependent Left, not least because Trump is also-- an entrepreneur.
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