Death of a Nation
Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party
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3.7 • 93 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Now a major motion picture!
Who is killing America? Is it really Donald Trump and a GOP filled with white supremacists? In a major new work of historical revisionism, Dinesh D’Souza makes the provocative case that Democrats are the ones killing America by turning it into a massive nanny state modeled on the Southern plantation system.
This sweeping alternative history of the Democratic Party goes back to its foundations in the antebellum South. The slaveholding elite devised the plantation as a means of organizing labor and political support. It was a mini welfare state, a cradle to grave system that bred dependency and punished any urge to independence. This model impressed northern Democrats, inspiring the political machines that traded government handouts for votes from ethnic immigrant blocs.
Today's Democrats have expanded to a multiracial plantation of ghettos for blacks, barrios for Latinos, and reservations for Native Americans. Whites are the only holdouts resisting full dependency, and so they are blamed for the bigotry and racial exploitation that is actually perpetrated by the left.
Death of a Nation's bracing alternative vision of American history explains the Democratic Party's dark past, reinterprets the roles of figures like Van Buren, FDR and LBJ, and exposes the hidden truth that racism comes not from Trump or the conservative right but rather from Democrats and progressives on the left.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's long enslavement by a racist Democratic Party drags on, according to this contrarian right-wing jeremiad. Bestselling conservative pundit D'Souza (The Big Lie) surveys Democratic racial politics going back to the 19th century, when Democrats championed Southern slaveholders before Lincoln and the Republicans crushed them in the Civil War; the party, he continues, then engineered the South's system of segregation and condoned it through the New Deal and into the 1960s. Even Lyndon Johnson's landmark civil rights legislation, he insists, was just a cynical ploy that created an "urban plantation" system that traps black Americans in cultures of poverty, violence, and dependence on welfare handouts from government "overseers" in exchange for Democratic votes. D'Souza makes cogent critiques of the Democratic Party's history of sponsoring slavery and racism, the excesses of left-wing reactions to Trump, and the commonalities in logic between left-wing identity politics and the rhetoric of white nationalists such as Richard Spencer. But his central comparison of the welfare state to slavery is more hyperbole than analysis, and his over-the-top vilification of everything Democratic he paints Franklin Roosevelt as a "fascist" who "castigated wealthy Republicans and conservatives in the same type of language that Hitler used against the Jews" makes much of the reading experience akin to viewing the United States in a fun-house mirror.
Customer Reviews
An important eye-opener
I urge potential readers to ignore critics who resort to dismissing this work as conspiracist, racist, a false history or various other forms of verbal chaff. Understand these dismissive tirades for what they are and who launches them—partisan guardians determined to keep you from thinking for yourself. Read this work and challenge its assertions on your own, form your own opposing arguments if you can.
There is little doubt that many conservative readers will find this book’s arguments appealing and compelling while it will largely be ignored by the ‘progressive’ left—which is too bad. The left has taken a path for more than a century of ignoring and suppressing its own history and culpability in creating the social problems they claim to be the best at solving. Respectful openminded individuals on the left would do well to face the truth about their party’s actual documented history that D’Souza recounts here. If they do, it may unsettle their world view and perhaps engender greater tolerance of the Americans they now seem to universally mischaracterize and openly loathe.
D’Souza’s thesis can seem strained at times. Drawing similarities between various periods of the Democratic Party’s platform and relating them all back to the Southern plantation culture (and politics) is useful but occasionally distracting from his solid thesis. That is, the plantations, that were universally owned and operated by democrats, were a pervasive system of oppressive dominance and exploitation by a privileged class over a subjugated class that each successive Democratic Party platform and political strategy since shares many disturbing similarities. Might have been more readable and powerful if he had coined a name for this plantation culture, like, “toxic culture of dominance” or “dominance hierarchy” or “collective exploitation” or something similar, rather than the shorthand he chose—labeling each period and strategy as an updated form of “plantation.” I found myself stopping at times to make my own substitute for “plantation” to test if I agreed with the analogy. This helped me digest the message without being distracted by odd images created visualizing “urban plantations” or “immigrant plantations.”
In spite of these minor problems the thesis is strong and compellingly illustrated with facts and primary sources from the left’s own heroes and pioneers. The exposed true history of the left’s consistently destructive approach to public policy and managing a false narrative and bold lies about its own dark past would be good for all Americans to be aware of.
Here he comes again
With ANOTHER big golden hit
The Truth At Last!!
A real eye opener. A must read for all Americans to learn how the real “system” works. The real enslavement of minorities, of racial politics, perpetrated by the Democrats. Lots of footnotes to fact check. We’ve been had...bamboozled by the Dems!