Death of a nation : plantation politics and the making of the Democratic Party

Death of a nation Plantation politics and the making of the Democratic Party

Dinesh D'Souza, 1961-

Book - 2018

Who is killing America? Is it really Donald Trump and a GOP filled with white supremacists? 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.

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Subjects
Democratic Party (U.S.) > History.
Welfare state > United States > History.
Plantation life > Southern States > History.
Published
New York : All Points Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Dinesh D'Souza, 1961- (author)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Released in conjunction with the political documentary Death of a nation: can we save America a second time?
Physical Description
xvi, 318 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-307) and index.
ISBN
9781250163776
  • Preface: On Gaining and Losing a Country
  • 1. Introduction: Who Is Killing America?
  • 2. Dilemma of the Plantation: The Antislavery Founding
  • 3. Party of Enslavement: The Psychology of the Democratic Master Class
  • 4. Urban Plantation: Martin Van Buren and the Creation of the Northern Political Machine
  • 5. The Plantation in Crisis: How Democrats North and South Fought to Extend Slavery
  • 6. Progressive Plantation: White Supremacy as a Weapon of Reenslavement
  • 7. The State as Big House: What FDR Learned from Fascism and Nazism
  • 8. Civil Rights and Wrongs: LBJ, Nixon and the Myth of the Southern Strategy
  • 9. Multicultural Plantations: Expanding the Culture of Dependency
  • 10. Holdouts: Democrats and the Problem of White People
  • 11. Emancipation: How American Nationalism Can Save the Country
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review by Library Journal Review

One of today's most controversial conservatives argues that the Democratic party is destroying the foundations of America, creating a paternalistic culture that recalls the Southern plantations of yore. Now there's an analogy to ponder.

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