I was recently able to watch a free copy of Dinesh D’Souza’s
movie
2016:Obama’s America. I heard
plenty about it since it was released but made no plans to see it, because it
appeared to be just the latest in a long line of neoconservative crusades.
A detailed
review by Gary North, a principled proponent of
liberty and sound economics, confirmed my suspicions. Now that I’ve watched the
film, I can verify Mr. North is exactly right; the movie is a whitewash of the
Bush presidency and the whole federal government.
2016 is, says North,
“…dead wrong. That is because it
misses the fundamental political fact of the last dozen years: the Obama
Administration is the operational successor of the Bush Administration. In
Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, on Wall Street, Barack Obama is George W.
Bush in blackface. Obama is the star of a twenty-first century minstrel show.
This fact has been deliberately
ignored for almost four years by both the neoconservative Right and the
grin-and-bear-it Left. Neither side will admit what I regard as the fundamental
fact of this documentary. It is a long whitewash of the policies of George W.
Bush.”
I would add, Bush was the operational successor of Clinton,
Clinton of Bush Sr., and on and on. All modern Presidents have supported the
federal government serving the role it does today: including everything from
micromanaging the economy to operating a military that is expensive as the rest
of the world’s combined.
Obama is no radical deviation from the status quo; he perpetuates
it. 2016 would have you think Obama
is some unique threat to America. This may stir up the voters for a party that
has little to credibly offer as an alternative to the Democrat agenda of “big
government”, but it's not productive for the cause of liberty.
Unfortunately there are more problems with this film. It
addresses the debt, but only part of it. Worse, it ignores the fact that
Congress, and not the executive, has sole Constitutional authority over the
federal budget. The President cannot do anything on this subject without
Congress, yet the film omits this fact and pursues Obama alone. Ditto for the
Federal Reserve; it is also ignored even though its manipulation of the money
supply creates the booms and busts. When talking responsibility for the bad
economy, the Fed and Congress should be in the foreground, and the President in
the background.
On foreign policy, Obama’s problem, apparently, is that he
doesn’t intervene enough. Back to North’s review:
The documentary is a
neoconservative propaganda film. It strongly favors the United States as the
policeman of the world. It criticizes Obama for supposedly pulling out of this
role. On what basis? The closing of American military bases and spying bases,
now numbering closed to a thousand? No. The reduction of the Pentagon's budget?
No evidence yet, but the promise that he will, just you wait. Then what?
Because he has not gone to war in Iran and Syria.
I am a card-carrying member in good
standing of the Old Right (pre-1940), meaning the non-interventionist American
political tradition. I see no reason to get upset with the fact that Obama has
not yet invaded Iran.
Repeatedly, D'Souza blames Obama
for not stopping the nuclear weapons program that he says Iran is involved in.
The problem is, as far as anyone has proven, Iran is not involved in developing
a nuclear weapon. Given all of the talk about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction back in early 2003, before the U.S. invaded, I think it is
reasonable that somebody who promotes military intervention against Iran by the
United States should prove that Iran does have a nuclear weapons program. It
may, but what can we do about it? Are we ready to bomb, bomb Iran, the way
John McCain sang back in 2007?
2016 spends much
time trying to make sense out of Obama’s ideology and his influences. This is a
legitimate subject but also a relatively unimportant one, as James Antle
explains well:
“Is there anything less interesting
than the theorizing about why Obama governs as he does? Obama is a liberal, and
a fairly banal one at that … Yet there remains a cottage industry of
explanations for why a liberal president has compiled a record of generally
liberal policy positions, something akin to a discovery process as to why a
quarterback is so taken with throwing touchdown passes.”
Instead of explaining how the anti-liberty agenda of Obama and
his Washington D.C. cohorts is wrong and destructive, movies like this deflect attention from the real problem, the
system and the bad ideas that support it. It’s not surprising that politicians resort
to this so often, there is not much else they can criticize without it coming
right back at them. It's not a problem to take a look at Obama or any politician, to be clear, it's how it's done.
What’s good about 2016? Sadly not much, beyond the
production quality, though I think the film was too long. At times I was
getting bored. The real problem with this movie is the message. As Gary North
sums up in his review:
[O]n the issues that really matter,
it is either wrong-headed or silent. On foreign policy, it is a defense of the
neoconservatives' version of Middle Eastern foreign policy. He devotes a lot of
time interviewing Daniel Pipes. Pipes is a major proponent of the
neoconservatives' interventionist Middle Eastern policy. On the real federal
deficit -- unfunded liabilities -- it is silent. On the on-budget deficit, it
ignores Bush and Congress. The deficit is a bipartisan disaster. To suggest
otherwise is not just misleading, it is deceptive. It raises hope where there
is none. "If only we will not re-elect Obama!" On the deficits --
on-budget and off-budget -- it makes not a whit of difference. There will be a
Great Default.
He fails to pursue the obvious --
the influence [of] Jeremiah Wright -- while he promotes his own peculiar thesis
of Obama as an anti-colonialist son of his absent father. I kept thinking,
"Anti-colonialist? If only it were true. If only his foreign policy were
not an extension of Bush's."
I recommend North’s
entire review be read. It’s time for
conservatives to stop supporting flawed efforts like this film. If your goal is
liberty, you are up against the system, against bad ideas, not any particular
individual. Unfortunately,
2016
perpetuates its own bad ideas while painting Obama as THE root of our problems, rather than the whole system. This
effectively whitewashes and protects the big government agenda, in a manner
intended to attract an audience of republicans, conservatives, and tea party
types. Sadly, it works.
