I will show in this book that the mainstream Republican critique of Obama is no less problematic than the liberal hosannas. Obama is not merely the presiding instrument of American decline, he is the architect of American decline. He wants America to be downsized. He wants Americans to consume less, and he would like to see our standard of living decline relative to that of other nations. He seeks a diminished footprint for America in the world. He detests America’s traditional allies, like Britain and Israel, and seeks to weaken them; he is not very worried about radical Muslims acquiring a nuclear bomb or coming to power in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. He is quite willing to saddle future generations of Americans with crippling debt; he has spent trillions of dollars toward this end, and if he had been permitted, he would have spent trillions more. He has shown no inclination, and has no desire, to protect America’s position as number one in the world; he would be content to see America as number 18, or number 67, just another country seated at the great dining table of nations. The strength of my thesis is that it is completely congruent with who Obama is and what he does. We don’t have to assume that he is always getting results opposite to what he intends; we simply have to see that he intends the results he is getting. He emphasized in his inauguration speech his goal of “remaking America”—and he is doing it, recognizing that in order to remake America he must first unmake America. The only question is whether Americans approve of their country being diminished and downsized, and whether they want to give Obama another four years to finish the job.
While the evidence is overwhelming that Obama’s actions are accelerating America’s decline, I can understand the reluctance of Obama’s supporters, and even some of his critics, to believe that this could possibly be his objective. Never before in American history have we had a president who seeks decline, who is actually attempting to downsize his country. Presidents are elected to protect and strengthen their country, so why would a president weaken it? We cannot answer this question without understanding Obama himself, his background, and his ideology. Without such understanding, we are vulnerable to all kinds of crazy theories. I am certainly not one of those who say that Obama hates America, or that Obama is a traitor, or that Obama is a Manchurian candidate who is being manipulated by some secret cabal. Not so—Obama is doing these things because of who he is, because of what he believes. He subscribes to an ideology that says it is good for America to go down so that the rest of the world can come up. He wants Americans to be poorer so that Brazilians and Colombians can be richer. He thinks it would be beneficial to us and to the world for there to be many rich and powerful nations, with no single nation able to dominate or dictate terms to any other. Obama is a visionary for global justice. He wants to set right the ship of the world that, in his view, has been tilted to one side for nearly five hundred years, ever since Western civilization began to colonize and rule the nations of Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East.
So the key to Obama is his ideology, his inner compass. Here, however, we face an obstacle. Many conservatives and Republicans don’t know Obama’s inner compass, and there are some who don’t want to know. “We don’t really care what his background is,” they say. “We are not interested in his underlying ideology.” These conservatives fancy themselves as hard empiricists, carefully scrutinizing what Obama is saying and doing. Yet politics is a complicated business, where people say one thing and do another, where elected officials make strategic retreats so that they can advance their agenda under more opportune conditions. How can we tell the man’s principles from his compromises? How can we predict where Obama will take us if he is given a second term?
A recent incident confirms that Obama has a hidden agenda. In late March 2012, Obama met with outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. The subject under discussion was America’s missile defenses. Obama thought he was speaking just to Medvedev; he didn’t realize the microphone was on. “This is my last election,” Obama told Medvedev. “After my election, I have more flexibility.” Obama urged Medvedev to give him “space,” adding that he needed it “particularly with missile defense.”
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What can we make of Obama’s remarks? Obama was saying that he wants to give the Russians more concessions, especially on missile defense, but he didn’t want to have to defend such actions in an election year. The White House rushed to cover Obama’s comments, saying that he just wanted negotiating flexibility. The incident undeniably shows Obama’s concern that he cannot get re-elected if he actually tells the American people his second-term agenda.
We need to know the man’s core beliefs to figure out that agenda. Peggy Noonan, who served with me in the Reagan administration, liked to say that even when Reagan wasn’t around “the idea of Reagan ruled.” What she meant is that we could all tell what Reagan believed in a given situation. We knew his compass, and it could guide us on specific issues even if Reagan were not consulted. Knowing a president’s compass is a great advantage, not just for White House staffers but for the American people; it explains what a president is doing and what he intends to do.
All of this seems obvious, so why do some on the right refuse to examine Obama’s ideology? I believe the reason is fear. These conservatives are scared of two words: “Africa” and “black.” They are scared of being portrayed as racists if they go down this path. Thus when Newt Gingrich suggested that “Kenyan anti-colonialism” was responsible for Obama’s actions, there was visible discomfort even among some conservatives. I could literally see it on their faces. They wanted to change the topic, to talk about health care, or the Solyndra case, anything except Kenya and anti-colonialism and black, black, black. This fear is understandable, and even noble. It is based on a desire to assess the first African-American president on his merits, to eschew any kind of a smear strategy. But the fear and qualms are misplaced.
I am the source of Gingrich’s “Kenyan anti-colonialism” remark. He made it after reading my
Forbes
cover story on Obama. The story, titled “How He Thinks,” was adapted from my book
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
. In that book I drew on Obama’s own autobiography, as well as his early actions as president, to advance the theory that the president is driven by a Third World, anti-American ideology that he got from his Kenyan father. While my thesis was embraced by Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and several other leading conservative figures, some of the conservative intelligentsia distanced themselves from it. For these pundits, “anti-colonialism” is a foreign word and “Kenya” a part of the “dark continent,” and the thesis seems consequently tainted by racism, as if Obama was more African than American.
These apprehensions are based on a failure to understand the anti-colonial ideology. I know the term “anti-colonial” is obscure to most Americans. I have frequently considered substituting some other term, perhaps even coining a new phrase. But “anti-colonial” is the term that is used around the world; it is the way that this movement and ideology have been described over many decades. There is no getting away from it, and if Obama succeeds in remaking America we will become much more familiar with it.
Contrary to conservative suspicions, anti-colonialism is not some weird African thing, but rather an immensely important global movement. Anti-colonialism is the most powerful political force in the non-Western world in the past 100 years. Moreover, anti-colonialism has been exported to the United States—it arrived here as a consequence of America’s close involvement in the last and bloodiest of the anti-colonial wars, the Vietnam War. Consequently, anti-colonialism is now embedded within Western liberalism, and you can learn its main principles at most leading colleges and universities. A familiarity with these principles is essential to comprehend the world we live in today. If you want to understand anti-Americanism around the world, you cannot attribute it to just Islamic radicalism; that can only explain anti-Americanism in the Muslim world, but not in Asia, Africa, and South America. This anti-Americanism is part of a larger anti-Western sentiment that derives from anti-colonialism.
Let’s explore some of the main tenets of anti-colonialism, drawing on its leading thinkers. “The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too,” writes Frantz Fanon in
The Wretched of the Earth
. Born in Martinique, Fanon fought in the Algerian revolution against the French; Obama says that in college he relished reading and quoting Fanon. Fanon adds, “For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries—Latin America, China, Africa.... Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.” These facts, Fanon concludes, lead to a “double realization—the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due, and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay.”
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As we see from Fanon’s analysis, the core idea of anti-colonialism is theft. In other words, anti-colonialists believe that the wealth of the world has not been generated through work or effort or creativity. It has not been earned, but rather stolen. The rich countries became rich by invading, occupying, and looting the poor countries.
A second tenet of anti-colonialism is that exploitation continues even after the colonizing powers return home. This type of exploitation is sometimes called “neocolonialism.” The basic idea, outlined in Kwame Nkrumah’s book
Neocolonialism,
is that economic exploitation outlasts political exploitation, with former colonial powers continuing their economic piracy of their former colonies.
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In other words, there remain powerful economic forces within the rich countries, such as banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and oil companies, that rob and exploit poor people, both within their own countries and across the world. Anti-colonialists demand that the stolen wealth be redistributed, not merely within the rich countries, but also from the people of the rich countries to those in the poor countries.
Anti-colonialism is not primarily about race. As the African writer Chinweizu puts it in
The West and the Rest of Us
, “We suffered indignities under colonialism not because of our color, but because we had become a powerless and conquered people.”
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Chinweizu recognizes, of course, that over time colonialism developed an ideology of national chauvinism and ethnic superiority. After all, when the British and the French established colonies around the world, they recognized they were white and the people they ruled were black, yellow, and brown. It was irresistibly tempting for the West to believe that race was the cause, or at least the distinguishing mark, of its economic and military predominance. In practice, a racial distinction was everywhere evident between ruler and ruled. But Chinweizu’s central point is that the British didn’t take over Kenya or India because the natives there were black or brown. Rather, the British established colonies all over the world to rule them and benefit from them. Thus exploitation, not racism, is and always has been the central issue.
Thirdly, it is a core belief of anti-colonialists today that America has replaced Europe as the main perpetrator of global theft and exploitation. Ali Mazrui notes with irony that “the United States, though a child of revolution late in the eighteenth century, has become the father of imperialism.” The Palestinian writer Edward Said, one of Obama’s teachers at Columbia University, adds, “America began as an empire during the nineteenth century, but it was in the second half of the twentieth, after the decolonization of the British and French empires, that it directly followed its two great predecessors.” And Aimé Césaire in his
Discourse on Colonialism
insists that American domination is the worst kind of domination. It is, he writes, “the only domination from which one never recovers” because it involves “the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that . . . our human spirit has still managed to preserve.” America is “the machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples.”
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Anti-colonialists seek radical change to remedy the situation. “Revolt is the only way out of the colonial situation,” writes Albert Memmi in
The Colonizer and the Colonized
. Memmi argues that colonial exploitation is bad for both the colonizer and the colonized. “Colonization distorts relationships, destroys or petrifies institutions, and corrupts men, both colonizer and colonized.” Memmi notes that colonialism “is a disease of the European, from which he must be completely cured and protected.... The cure involves difficult and painful treatment, extraction and reshaping of present conditions of existence.” What is needed is what Fanon terms “a world of reciprocal recognitions.” Chinweizu writes that since “European rule was entrenched ... by means of a western Christian culture, a western political power structure, and a colonial economy,” anti-colonialism “involves measures against all three.” Chinweizu calls for a redistribution of political, cultural, and economic power. We must, he writes, “make the fruits of the earth available to all right here on earth.”
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In terms of policy, anti-colonialism is a massive program of global reparations. Anti-colonialists want rich people to pay up so that poor people can improve their living conditions. Their definition of rich people, however, is not millionaires and billionaires. It is a global definition. Since the vast majority of Americans are rich compared to people in Asia, Africa, and South America, the anti-colonialists want to see a diminution in the American standard of living, even for the American middle class, so that people in Addis Ababa and Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi can see their living standards rise. Moreover, anti-colonialists want more than wealth to be spread around; they also want a global redistribution of power. Consequently, they wish to see America lose its preeminent position in the world to make way for a rough parity among nations. They seek a multi-polar world in which power is shared by many nations—a world similar to the one that preceded colonialism. For such a world to exist, America must shrink and other countries must expand.