The Cultural Left and 9/11

Author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza provocatively posits that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.

“The main agenda of the left today is sex, not the poor,” D’Souza said recently at the Heritage Foundation. “Abortion, contraception and homosexuality” come up at olleges around the campus, though there is nothing on “trailer park studies,” D’Souza told the audience.

He argues that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies—especially traditional and religious ones—and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world.

D’Souza forwards the thesis—in his new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—that the United States is fighting two wars, one abroad and another at home. “We can’t win one, without winning the other,” he told the audience.

He stressed the importance of staying the course in Iraq, so there could be a third choice for people in the region who currently have the option of either a “secular or Islamic tyranny.” D’Souza said that there was one percent coalescence between the left at home and the enemy abroad. Both wish to see the defeat of the United States, albeit for radically different reasons.

The Hoover Fellow described how conservatives now “threatened liberal politics”. He told the audience in a packed Lehrman Auditorium at the Heritage Foundation that though American liberals and Islamists disagree on 99% of all the issues, there is one where they both share a common interest—the defeat of American troops in Iraq.

For proponents of Sharia law it would stop the chance for a new form of democracy that would stand out in the region. For the left it would lead to a new Democrat victory for 2008, and a chance to move away from traditional America that does not share their permissive values.
In the “U.S., politics is teetering and it can roll back the gains of the left,” D’Souza argues. “One more conservative judge could mean a new generation of American conservatism.”

Liberals feel more threatened by Evangelicals carrying Bibles in the Oval Office, than by extremist forces outside the United States, D’Souza points out. He said that a U.S. defeat in Iraq would serve as a victory to the left, as was the case with Vietnam.

For liberals Vietnam was “not only a political but a cultural success” too. A whole generation swept into power following the defeat.

D’Souza noted that Bin Laden condemned the America seen in the Muslim world through U. S. popular culture. “Bush must highlight the Red America with values that are not radically different from that of the Islamic religion,” D’ Souza says. Noting that Bill Clinton addressed Georgetown University a few years ago, saying the Muslim world is still bitter about the first crusade in the late 11th century, D’Souza argues that the crusade Bin Laden claims to be fighting is that of a “modern, pagan secular crusade” that reflects American popular culture, and not the values of millions of conservative Americans.

After being asked whether an Iraq victory could be a turning point for conservatives, the former senior policy analyst in Reagan’s White House stated he believed it could be done, but should be by the next election to ensure no Democrat incumbent could undo the work of the Republican Administration so far. “It is impossible for the U.S. to lose that war…let me backtrack, there is one way: to lose it in the American mind,” he informed his audience.

“In America today there is a campaign to break American support,” with the notion that the war is “not worth winning,” D’Souza says.

Garreth Bloor is an intern at Accuracy in Media.