The Conscience of the Conservatives?

A quick trip around the blogosphere finds critics calling Dinesh D’Souza’s “How Obama Thinks” in Forbes “shameful,” “a new low,” and “crazy.”  To be sure, D’Souza has his defenders, most notably Newt Gingrich, who recently told the National Review Online that the theory posited by D’Souza, which connects the president’s worldview to Barack Obama Sr.’s “anticolonialism,” is “the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” No matter whether one thinks that D’Souza proposes such theories because he actually believes them or because he simply wants to sell books (and Forbes wants to sell magazines), the better question to ask is why he—and many other Americans—find the argument so compelling.  In other words, how could Barack Obama be president and yet so seemingly anti-American?

In fact, in another time of nascent conservative political activity, a similar question was asked half a century ago in the 1950s when Robert H.W. Welch, Jr., the founder of the John Birch Society, famously accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being “a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”  Like D’Souza, Welch wondered how America could have fallen so far so fast.  As he said in a 1957 speech, “Our defensive strength in proportion to the force of a known enemy, our moral leadership throughout the world, and our very security itself have toppled from great heights into a sticky morass where the footing grows less solid every day.”  A fundamentalist Baptist born in rural North Carolina in 1899, Welch attended college at age twelve and then spent two years each at the Naval Academy and then Harvard Law School before starting his own candy company (he actually invented the Sugar Daddy).  As Welch saw country after country fall to the communists in the wake of America’s success in World War II, he slowly began to connect the dots.  In 1952 Robert A. Taft, whose conservative bona fides were impeccable, lost the Republican nomination to Eisenhower in a deal engineered by Richard Nixon that also put Earl Warren on the Supreme Court.  Two years after Eisenhower’s election, Republicans lost eighteen congressional seats because, said Welch, the popular president deliberately withheld his support. 

Beginning in 1954, Welch wrote the first draft of a long letter to conservative friends, which he revised and distributed as his thoughts evolved.  Eventually known as The Politician, the manuscript’s accusations against Eisenhower (he was either a stooge of the communists or an actual agent) made headlines, much as D’Souza’s argument has today.  Welch backed away from what he wrote—not because he stopped believing that Eisenhower was treacherous, but because the scandal it created was hurting the efforts of his nascent John Birch Society, founded in late 1959.  And just as D’Souza’s article invites conservatives to take sides, Welch’s accusations—both about Eisenhower and the larger conspiracy he saw—gave conservatives a chance to back the establishment or to put stock in a theory that might not be so implausible. 

What appealed most to Welch’s supporters was how, in one fell swoop, The Politician laid bare the facts.  One correspondent in 1959 praised Welch, saying “I have read the introduction and first chapter and agree completely.  The facts and conclusions are not new to me, but I am extremely grateful to have them actually written where they don’t get lost and blurred.”  A newspaper editor from Kansas told Welch, “Four of us here have read your Eisenhower book.  Generally speaking, the facts are not new to us but you have certainly marshaled them very effectively.”  On the other hand, detractors could not imagine Eisenhower as a conscious agent or a communist stooge. William F. Buckley, Jr., who would eventually become Welch’s conservative nemesis, read The Politician and wrote, “I for one disavow your hypotheses.  I do not even find them plausible.  I find them—curiously—almost pathetically optimistic.”  But by 1959 Welch and Buckley had a history:  Welch had given Buckley $1000 to help found National Review in 1955, and another $1000 two years later to help keep the magazine going.  Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because of Welch’s extensive conservative network, Buckley added, “Improbable though I believe your reading of events to be, it is really no less improbable than my own.”

Laying out a unified theory of Obama’s inexplicable decisions and America’s concurrent demise is what makes D’Souza appealing.  From approving foreign offshore drilling, to increasing taxes, to supporting the “Ground Zero mosque,” to the gutting of NASA, D’Souza provides a rationale for actions that appear to weaken, not strengthen America.  Painting Barack Obama, Sr., as an anticolonialist whose writings have been channeled by his son to bring justice to imperialists—that is, Americans—D’Souza can fit everything with which he disagrees into a single worldview.  Of course, those on the left have made similar arguments:  for example, the historian William Appleman Williams spawned an entire field of diplomatic history that viewed American foreign relations through the lens of capitalism, concluding that the United States was not only responsible for the Cold War, but it also relied on Wilsonianism—or the power of middle-class democracy to reshape the world in its own image, warts and all.

In the end, however, such unified theories typically find more traction with conservatives than liberals.  Hilary Clinton’s infamous “vast, right-wing conspiracy” sound bite notwithstanding, conservatives from Welch, to General Edwin A. Walker, who in 1961 used JBS materials to indoctrinate his troops and believed that Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson were all “definitely pink,” to Newt Gingrich himself.  All essentially turn to Occam’s razor both because this is what makes sense and, equally important, this is what resonates with many Americans.  Liberals may pillory D’Souza, but they should also consider why his ideas strike such a chord in the hearts of those who despair for their country.