Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) by Dinesh D'Souza

CHAPTER ONE
     
    INNER COMPASS
     
    Starting today, we must . . . begin again the work of remaking America. 1
    —Barack Obama, inaugural speech, January 20, 2009
     
     
     
     
     
    T he American Era, 1945–2016. This could well be the title of a chapter in a history book a generation or two from now. A future historian, contemplating the American era, might express surprise that a nation so young and robust, a nation whose power and prosperity was without rival in the history of the world, lost its preeminence so quickly. Previous great powers did much better. The Roman era, for instance, lasted nearly a thousand years; the Ottoman era, several centuries; the British era, nearly two centuries. Who would have guessed that America, the last best hope of Western civilization, would succumb this easily, pathetically, ignominiously. For future historians, the most incredible fact might not be America’s decline and fall but the manner of it. Ultimately, history may show, this fall was achieved purposefully, single-handedly. It was all the work of one man, a man who in two presidential terms undid a dream that took more than two centuries to realize.
    I believe in the American dream. Born in India in 1961, I remember sitting on the floor of our verandah as a boy, thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica , reading about the great empires from the dawn of history. In every case there was a rise and a fall, as the Romans, then the Ottomans, then the British, and finally and ironically the Soviets all ended up on the ash heap of history. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his 1897 poem Recessional , “is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” But there was one exception to the rule, or so I thought, and that was America. America wasn’t so much an empire as it was an ideal, an ideal of freedom and prosperity and social decency, a dream that “all men are created equal” and entitled to a “pursuit of happiness,” a universal dream, one that even a boy in Mumbai, on the outskirts of world power, could aspire to. And thus I conceived my own dream, the dream of coming to America. I wanted to move from the margin to the center, to be close to, if not involved in, the great ideas and decisions, the decisive movements of history. When I served as a policy analyst in the White House, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong aspiration. Finally, I thought, the dream is becoming real in my life. And it has been.
    The dream started, of course, with the founders. Two and a quarter centuries ago, the American founders gathered in Philadelphia to come up with a formula for a new kind of country. They called it the Novus Ordo Seclorum— a new order for the ages. The founders were convinced that if this formula were adopted, the new country would over time become the strongest, the most prosperous, the most successful nation on the planet. They were right. America today is the richest, the most powerful, and the most culturally dominant country in the world. Not only is America a superpower; it is the world’s sole superpower. Americans live better, and have more opportunity, than their counterparts in other countries because they have the good fortune to be born and living in the United States. Historically this was also true of the citizens of other great powers: the Romans, the Ottomans, and the British all lived better, at the height of their empires, than did people in other countries.
    But those empires ultimately declined, lost their dominance, and became irrelevant in the global arena. If Americans today are aware of anything, they are aware of the precariousness of their position as an economic powerhouse and world leader. Let’s remember that America has only been a superpower for a couple of generations, since World War II, and America has only been the sole superpower for two decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. So far, America has been the shortest-lived superpower in world history. And