D'Souza & the Violent Right

In his newest book, The Enemy at Home, Republican ideologue Dinesh D'Souza calmly explains that liberals in America caused 9/11, whereupon he recommends that we do to liberals what we are doing to terrorists: fight a war against them.

While he never comes right out and says that Americans should kill liberals, D'Souza's book shuttles his reader swiftly to that conclusion. By defining liberals as a "hidden" second front of terrorism, D'Souza's book invokes a very simple, widely held idea in America: that "War on Terror" means first and foremost, "kill terrorists." Thus, The Enemy at Home gives intellectual legitimacy to a widely accepted, rapidly growing Republican tendency to frame national security in terms of killing Democrats.

But the significance The Enemy at Home extends beyond military issues, touching on the key distinction that divides the public sphere in contemporary America: violent right vs. progressive left.

Dinesh D'Souza is a paragon of the "violent right"--a new breed of pundits who seek to control public debate by framing all issues through an authoritarian logic of violence.

The counterpart to the "violent right" is not, as many erroneously conclude, a "violent left," but a "progressive left"--a new wave of thinkers with the shared goal of opening up political debate by framing issues in terms of participation.

Of course, the mere suggestion that D'Souza's book paves the road for actual violence against liberals in America will, most likely, be met with cries of disbelief from the media luminaries who propel him to best-seller status. "He does not say that we should kill liberals!" they will shout. "It's you liberals who are violent, not us!" they will say. And by reading the critique or D'Souza as itself evidence of the "enemy at home," the Malkins and O'Reillys of the airwaves are complicit.

At stake in these inevitable objections, however, is not so much the specifics of D'Souza's rhetoric than the power to define the core frame structuring political debate in this country...

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