Theatrical release poster
by Peter J. O’Connell
Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time? Released: Aug. 2018. Runtime: 108 mins. MPAA Rating: PG-13 for strong thematic material, violence/disturbing images, some language, and brief drug use.
It’s no secret that Hollywood leans to the left politically and socially. From time to time, attempts to counter this tendency emerge, usually from three sources: certain “family-friendly” films, faith-based/ “Christian” films, and Dinesh D’Souza films.
D’Souza, an immigrant from India who became a naturalized American citizen, has since the 1980s authored numerous articles and books presenting a conservative viewpoint. In recent years he has turned to making political documentary films. His 2016: Obama’s America(2012) became the second-highest grossing such film ever produced in the U.S. His America: Imagine the World Without Herwas the highest-grossing documentary in the U.S. in 2014. In 2016 his Hillary’s America: TheSecret History of the Democratic Partywas claimed by some (including D’Souza himself) to have played a role in the electoral victory of Donald Trump.
NowDeath of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?, co-written and co-directed by D’Souza and narrated and edited by him, has gone into wide release, not the selected theatres release pattern usual for documentaries. D’Souza is not noted for subtlety, and Deathhammers home his message: America/Republican Party/Donald Trump good; mainstream media/Democratic Party/fascists and Nazis bad—and there are historical links between all of these baddies.
As in his previous films, D’Souza does his hammering with a mix of newsclips, historical reenactments, interviews, and ambulatory musings by himself. He begins by taking on the media with an amusing assortment of their shocked, sorrowful, enraged reactions to Donald Trump’s electoral victory. This is followed by D’Souza’s equating of Donald Trump with Abraham Lincoln (played by Don Taylor).
The GOP presidents sought to unite the nation. In Lincoln’s time the pro-slavery forces that dominated the Democratic Party fought to tear the country apart. Today the violent “antifa” movement and other “resistance” to Trump that emerged after his election is not really “anti-fascist,” as they claim, but an attack on the traditions of the nation itself—Constitutional rights, limited government, free enterprise, etc.
D’Souza continues the incendiary claims of his previous films that the Democratic Party, far from being the champion of minorities, is actually the fountainhead of racial and ethnic oppression. That party’s founder (according to D’Souza), Andrew Jackson, was a slaveholder who forced Native Americans onto reservations. His successor, Martin Van Buren, pressured minorities and immigrants into “ghettos” in the cities, where they could be controlled by corrupt Democratic bosses, The “ghettos” became “poverty plantations” equivalent to the actual plantations of the Old (and Democratic) South.
After the Republican victory in the Civil War, Democrats still sought to keep blacks oppressed through sharecropping, segregation, and lynching. The Ku Klux Klan served as that party’s “military arm” in this effort. Woodrow Wilson, a D’Souza villain, helped revive the KKK in the early 20thcentury through praise of the racist film Birth of a Nation. Later welfare state measures promoted by Democrats had the effect of maintaining the urban poverty plantations.
D’Souza’s claims become even more incendiary when he postulates links between the Democratic Party and the fascism of Mussolini and the National Socialism of Hitler. D’Souza carries quotes of FDR and other Democrats praising measures of the dictators and praise by the dictators of such policies as Jackson’s treatment iof Native Americans and the anti-minority eugenics promoted by progressives in the early decades of the 20thcentury. But D’Souza supports his claims through interviews with some noted scholars.
For D’Souza fascism is more likely to come from the “anti-fascist” resistance to Trump than from anything that the Trump administration might do, Toward the end of his film, D’Souza has a reenactment of the anti-Nazi work of Sophie Scholl (played by Victoria Chilap) in the faith-based German resistance to Hitler by the White Rose movement. He suggests that the resistance to Trump should be countered by such a movement supportive of American traditions.
Death of a Nationends with an African-American choir’s emotive and energetic rendering of The Battle Hymn of the Republic(Angela Primm, soloist), while scenes of American beauty (amber waves of grain, purple mountains’ majesties, etc.) in rich color fill the screen in a manner that might have seemed overly fulsome even in the 1950s.
Death of a Nation—sweeping smears done in corny ways or inconvenient truths expressed with sincere emotion? Each viewer will have to make that vote by himself or herself. And what that vote should entail, once having been made, is a lot more than just putting a thumb up or down.
Well said, Peter.
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