Dinesh D'Souza

Illiberal Education, published in 1991 (Free Press), helped inaugurate a backlash against political correctness at U.S. universities and became the center of a growing debate at the time about multiculturalism and affirmative action policies in higher education. D'Souza argued that the trend in offering preferential treatment to minorities and other marginalized groups (like homosexuals), as well as efforts to diversify curriculum so that non-Western cultures received more attention, ultimately resulted in a dumbing down of higher education. Although credited with shedding light on some of the more notorious effects of politically correct education, such as the promotion of harsh censorship policies, Illiberal Education was criticized by some observers for being tendentious, facile, and disingenuous. In a review published by the New York Review of Books, Louis Menand wrote that D'Souza's tone was "of a man who is curious about the reports he has been hearing of campus strife over issues involving race and sex, and who, as a friend to liberal learning, is sympathetic to all the parties involved (or nearly all, for he cannot find a good word to say about homosexuality)." However, Menand wrote, D'Souza was never a friend of liberalism, having been associated with a number of rightist projects since his undergraduate days at Dartmouth College (cited in Janet McNew, "Politicized Polemics: Who Names the Controversies?" ADE Bulletin, Fall 1992).

Commenting on the string of similar "New Right" critiques of higher learning that appeared at the time, and of which Illiberal Education was merely the most notorious, Janet McNew, an English professor at St. John's University Minnesota, wrote in 1992: " To me, the analyses of higher education put forward by [William] Bennett, [Lynne] Cheney, [Roger] Kimball, and D'Souza suggest a shared political ideology. I have even wondered whether the New Right intellectuals swept into power by the Reagan revolution have identified universities as the last institutional bastions of anticonservatism and targeted them for 'reform' that would put them in step with the rest of the nation. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., a conservative disciple of Leo Strauss like Allan Bloom, reveals the mentality and motives of this group when he defensively says that the reason so many Straussians came to Washington to work for Reagan was that they couldn't find jobs in universities, where their brand of ideology had become unfashionable. It sometimes seems that everywhere we look nowadays in the media, there is some manifestation of the conservative agenda that aims to snatch universities away from liberal loonies, and a mobilization of the same massive resources that packaged and sold Reagan and Bush may have the power to do it."

A more recent D'Souza book is the 2007 The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday). As its title suggests, the book is a harangue about how the supposed appeasement policies of "liberal" leaders, beginning with the Carter administration in the late 1970s, and the left wing's "aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family," helped set the stage for the radical Islamic attack on America, which ultimately led to 9/11. As many commentators and public figures have pointed out, the irony of the book is D'Souza's at times sympathetic treatment of the points of view expressed by the likes of Osama bin Laden, described by D'Souza as "a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply religious person" who "has not launched a single attack against Israel" (quoted in Alan Wolfe, "None (But Me) Dare to Call It Treason," New York Times, January 21, 2007).

According to Publishers Weekly, D'Souza argues that much of the ire directed at America by the likes of bin Laden is a direct result of the fact that people like Britney Spears, Hillary Clinton, and Noam Chomsky have "teamed up with Hollywood and the UN to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture—epitomized by Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives—on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al-Qaida in its effort to defeat Bush's war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home."

Wrote Alan Wolfe in the New York Times, "I never thought a book by D'Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil. But in The Enemy at Home, D'Souza's cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be 'highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle, and soft-spoken manner.' Islamic punishment tends to be harsh—flogging adulterers and that sort of thing—but this, D'Souza says 'with only a hint of irony,' simply puts Muslims 'in the Old Testament tradition.' Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, 'even better than polygamy.' And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while 'pooh-poohed by Western commentators,' was 'undoubtedly accurate'" (January 21, 2007).

Pointing to D'Souza's plea for "decent liberals" to join with him in a crusade against the American left, Wolfe quips at the end of his review: "So let this 'decent' liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D'Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible ... I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University."

Not surprisingly, critiques from the right of D'Souza's book have taken a slightly different approach. Andrew Stuttaford, a writer for the New York Sun and a favorite of the neoconservative letterhead group the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, takes D'Souza to task for his efforts to identify "moderate" Muslims whom America should woo. Writes Stuttaford: "In his fawning, flattering portrait of a supposedly 'traditional' Islam, he offers Americans possibly the most misleading depiction of an unfamiliar way of life since Margaret Mead returned breathless and babbling from Samoa. The reason that such a smart writer has chosen to take such a strange tack is, alas, all too obvious. He's more interested in fighting the culture wars at home than confronting the global ideological challenge posed by Islamic extremism. In The Enemy at Home, Osama bin Laden is reduced to little more than another stick with which Mr. D'Souza can beat those he considers to be our naughtier, more godless citizens: so not only is same-sex marriage a bad idea, but it will also bring the wrath of al-Qaida crashing down upon our heads, and as for that pesky separation of church and state, well ... To say this line of reasoning is somewhat unconvincing is to be very polite" (February 2, 2007).

D'Souza has penned a number of other books, including: The End of Racism, a 1995 national best-seller that argued that racism is largely a Western creation and that achievement gaps between races is due mainly to cultural differences and criticizes the "civil rights industry"; Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (1997); The Virtue of Prosperity (2000); What's So Great about America, a 2002 best-seller; and Letters to a Young Conservative (2003).

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Education

Dinesh D'Souza Homepage, http://www.dineshdsouza.com.

Janet McNew, "Politicized Polemics: Who Names the Controversies?" ADE Bulletin, Fall 1992.

Alan Wolfe, "None (But Me) Dare to Call It Treason," New York Times, January 21, 2007.

Review of Diensh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home, Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2007.

Andrew Stuttaford, "The Wicked West," New York Sun, February 2, 2007.

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