Now I'm using the King's English with bullshit: not as in worthless or disreputable, and not as just an adjectival grunt of disapprobation modifying the word reactionary. I mean it as in false.
I'm not saying Dinesh D'Souza isn't at core a petulant and pea-brained ideologue, but there are a few things to consider about his latest book The Enemy Within, a summary of which is nicely provided by Alan Wolfe in the brutal Times review making the rounds:
At first Dinesh D’Souza considered him “a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.” But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D’Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.” Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he “has not launched a single attack against Israel.” We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses “a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him.” Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with “every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated.” But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, “and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers.”
[…]
Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D’Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not … Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.
It's true that long-running religious zealots such as William F. Buckley and Ann Coulter do have a semi-acknowledged sympathy with Islamism for its violent enforcement of piety and bronze age standards of private and public behavior. (Coulter has a knack for carefully weighing the options of today's hysterical culture warrior: Should we convert all the wogs to Christianity, or just adopt their method of dropping walls on queers?) But D'Souza, up until now, has been more of a secular cold war triumphalist of Indo-American vintage. So what's up with this about-face? How did he arrive at coloring Osama a misunderstood freedom fighter so long after the Red Army skedaddled from Afghanistan?
I have a theory.
Like so many other conservatives with interests in journalism and think tank sinecures, D'Souza got his start at Dartmouth College, and more specifically, on the editorial board of The Dartmouth Review.
You may remember this outside-campus newspaper for the headlines it generated outside its own pages: the destruction of a mock shanty town erected on the Dartmouth center lawn to protest South African apartheid; its frequently updated and ever-expanding enemies list of leftist professors; its enduring crusade to reinstate the long-forgotten Dartmouth Indian mascot; etc.
Well, one of the undisclosed ironies of this paper is that a good number of its editors, spanning years and probably decades, are not actual conservatives. Or at least they're not as conservative as the Review would have them appear. (One friend of mine jumped masthead and washed up at a prominent liberal monthly.)
Indeed, many write for it because the prose has always been leagues above that of the campus daily and other school-funded magazines and because the gig guarantees future placement in more restrained journals of traditionalist opinion.
Why, then, do Reviewers — and presumably ex-Reviewers — ham it up? I think this has to do with getting swept up in the collective momentum of a national corp of wing-tipped wingers, all of whom channel Papa Buckley, and thrill at the chance to write a humor magazine where they're the only ones in on the jokes. (Very Skull and Bones.) Also, isn't there something terribly in loco parentis about redoubling an unpopular conviction at the precise moment its object — be it turning back the clock on political correctness or the latest fad of multiculturalism or even the decay of a third world ancien regime — has been lost?
D'Souza strikes me as the platonic ideal of this mindset, except that he's older, dumber, and enjoys a cushy enough position at the Hoover Institution, which means he's got more to lose. Maybe self-hatred — never forgiving himself, say, for the demise of Ronald Reagan — plays a stronger role in his case. Like Coulter, he begs the question of whether or not he buys into his own bullshit (and here I'm using the farm definition of that multipurpose term). But unlike Coulter, D'Souza comes from a proud and self-satisfied tradition which all but brandishes a sign reading, "Wah Hoo Wah, No Fucking Way."