Shane Dale

Political science professors: I have a must for your future booklists.

Earlier this summer I had the privilege of reading What's So Great About America, by Dinesh D'Souza.

Don't scoff ÷ the title is a bit misleading. It's certainly not a "rah-rah," flag-waving, feel-good book that comes to the simple conclusion that everyone else is simply jealous of the United States. Rather, it's a collection of incredibly well-researched arguments against America's harshest critics, domestic and abroad.

D'Souza, an Indian immigrant and former policy analyst in the Reagan administration, makes some remarkably thorough counterpoints to the criticism of America by Islamic fundamentalists, European and Third World academics, as well as multiculturalists and cultural conservatives here at home ÷ that even the world's most respected scholars would be hard-pressed to refute.

In the second chapter, D'Souza makes a compelling argument in favor of Western colonialism, observing that his own homeland of India would not be as economically and culturally strong as it presently is without the unwelcome former occupation of the British.

D'Souza writes that once England pulled out of India in 1947, "The Indians could easily have cast off their suits and ties and returned to ancient tribal modes of government. The Indians could have outlawed the English language and required all education to be in Hindustani or one of the native dialects. But the Indians did not do any of these things. They decided on their own, and for their benefit, to continue doing many of the things that they had learned from the British."

While multiculturalists would likely agree that the Westernization of non-Western nations has led to little more than oppression and intolerance, D'Souza contends that Westernized countries are better off in nearly every measurable way than they were before. For example, "if sub-Saharan Africa were to sink into the ocean tomorrow," writes D'Souza, "the world economy would be largely unaffected." He goes on to say, "The prevalence of poverty, repression, civil war, AIDS, and other horrors recently persuaded UN secretary general Kofi Annan to term sub-Saharan Africa, Îa cocktail of disasters.'"

My favorite chapter is titled, "The Reparations Fallacy: What African-Americans Owe America." The title may sound racist until one realizes that D'Souza is more well versed in the history of American slavery than most Americans ÷ black Americans included ÷ could ever hope to be.

He points out that had the framers of the Constitution attempted to abolish slavery in 1776, America would never have come into being. "(The framers) produced a Constitution in which the concept of slavery is tolerated in deference to consent, but not given any moral approval in recognition of the slave's natural rights." In this way, he contends that the Constitution allowed for slavery to be abolished in the future, making it "a document that transcended its time."

D'Souza makes a sorely needed observation on the history of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Ask any high school or college student what it was all about, and most would likely reply along the lines of, "Well, it was a racist and demeaning decision by the government to deny the humanity of slaves by counting them as less than a whole person." But that simply isn't true, and D'Souza is happy to give us misinformed youths a brief history lesson.

"The South wanted to count blacks as whole persons, in order to increase its political power," D'Souza writes. "The North wanted blacks to count for nothing ÷ not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the antislavery majority in Congress." And what's more, he says, "It was not a proslavery southerner but an antislavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise." In essence, by limiting slaves' representation, the north was more effectively able to argue in favor of abolitionism. Even black abolitionist Frederick Douglass praised the decision.

D'Souza also observes that Americans of all backgrounds have had ancestors who were slaves at one point in history. Additionally, many slaves were sold out by their fellow black Africans, who were opposed to abolition due to the money they stood to lose from the absence of the slave trade.

Many academics will likely argue that the goal of political science courses is to give students an alternate view to the pro-American way of life. I would contend that, in today's academic climate, most students are exposed to nothing but these so-called alternatives. In other words, What's so Great About America is an alternative to the alternative.

D'Souza's work is nothing to fear. Put it on your booklist, and consider your students lucky.