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The observation is trite, but nonetheless true. It often takes an outsider to appreciate the value of the happy circumstances and good fortune we all too often take for granted. Dinesh D'Souza is one such person.
D'Souza grew up in a middle class family in India. When he was seventeen, he managed to attend a high school in Arizona as a foreign exchange student. He was so taken with the US that he enrolled in Dartmouth College in 1979, where he majored in English. Once there, he help found the Dartmouth Review, a Conservative gadfly publication that ultimately found itself embroiled in campus controversies. After graduation, he wrote for a number of Conservative publications and by 1986, he was on the White House staff for President Ronald Reagan. It was a remarkably far trip from India to the White House taken in a remarkably short time. Recently, the University of California at Berkeley came under criticism when students decided to issue white, rather than red, white, and blue ribbons in remembrance of the attacks of September 11. Ostensibly, red, white, and blue ribbons would be exclusionary. Fortunately, adults intervened and red, white, and blue ribbons will also be issued. D'Souza recognized the silliness and meanness of political correctness on campuses earlier than most. He became a conspicuous personality when he wrote Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience in 1992. There is no quicker way to be embraced by Conservatives and reviled by Liberals than to poke fun at the pretentious and closed-minded political correctness on college campus. Even the title of D'Souza's new book, What's So Great About America, causes irritation among some who question that there is anything of America worthy of emulation. D'Souza systemically plows through the conventional criticisms of America. While acknowledging that the US, like all human institutions is imperfect, over the last 200 years, the government and culture has proved to be self-correcting. One and a half centuries ago, it fought a bloody civil war to rid itself of slavery and forty years ago it largely rid itself of government sanctioned racial discrimination. In the last century, it also managed to play a pivotal role in defeating Nazism and in the collapse of Soviet Communism. D'Souza has been most loudly criticized for his treatment of slavery, largely because he has drawn from his own ethnic roots. D'Souza explains how his grandfather retains a strong animosity for white people, particularly the British. No doubt this feeling is explained by the arrogant and racist treatment his grandfather received at the hands of the British.
The copyright of the article D'Souza on Freedom and Virtue in Conservative Politics is owned by Frank Monaldo. Permission to republish D'Souza on Freedom and Virtue in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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