Which Dream Will Prevail in America?

Dinesh D'Souza speaks at the Nixon Library. Which dream will prevail in America. Will it be the American dream or Obama's dream?

The American dream is a dream that goes back a couple of hundred years when a bunch of guys got together in Philadelphia and they came upon a formula, a recipe for a new kind of country. The American founders believed that if this recipe were adopted, this new country would become over time the strongest, the most successful, the most prosperous country on the planet. And so it has been. Here we are America and we are on top of the world. The idea that America is based on a unique formula, this notion is called American exceptionalism.

By the way in 2009, President Obama was asked, 'Do you believe in American exceptionalism?' He gave a very odd answer. He said, 'I believe in American exceptionalism' but then he added this, 'Just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believed in Greek exceptionalism.' What Obama was saying, the plain meaning is if everyone believes they are exceptional then clearly no one really is.

It's kind of worth stepping back for a moment and asking what is exceptional about America? I want to mention a couple of things very briefly. What would happen if you were to come to my native country of India; what if you lived there, worked there, stayed for many years, maybe even took Indian citizenship, could you actually become Indian? No. Why not? Because to be Indian you need two things; brown skin and Indian parents. Being Indian is a function of birth and blood. And so it is in most countries in the world.

But in America, no. In America, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews and today the Koreans, the West Indians, you can come here and it sometimes takes a couple of generations but you can in fact become American. You become American by assimilating to a way of life, to a constitution and a rule of law. That's one aspect of American exceptionalism.

Here is another by the way, America is a country founded on entrepreneurship, on trade, on business. To say this is something that may seem sort of pedestrian but historically the entrepreneur, the merchant, the trader, have in almost every culture been reviled, been looked down upon. Confucius says that the noble man knows what is virtuous but the low man knows what is profitable.

For me the American dream is not merely a dream of economic opportunity. There is economic opportunity in America. What is remarkable to me is how well ordinary citizens have it in America.

There is a material allure to America. But when I think of my own life what has mattered most to me in coming to America is that here is a country where I get to write the script of my own life. Here is a country where my destiny isn't given to me, it's constructed by me. Here is a country where my life is more like a blank sheet of paper and I am the artist. I think this is why young people around the world are magnetically drawn to America because America represents the self-directed life. This is the core of the American dream.

And then we have on the other side of it a different dream. This is indeed Obama's dream. Before we get into Obama's dream I do want to point out that there is a common view even among conservatives, even among Republicans, that the problem with Obama is that he is a bungler. He is an amateur in the title of a recent book. He tries to do x but he gets y.

This has produced a whole set of conservative punditry essentially lecturing Obama on things like, Obama, don't you realize that confiscatory taxation does not product economic growth? Oh Obama, don't you realize that by blocking oil drilling in America you aren't going to create jobs? Oh Obama, may we advise you that Assad, the dictator of Syria, or the Mullah's in Iran are not our friends. Obama, you should wake up to the fact that if we slash our own nuclear weapons this will not inspire the Iranians to do the same.

Now you can begin to see why people get conspiracy theories about Obama. He's a traitor. He's a secret Muslim. He's a Manchurian candidate.

I would like to offer a little different theory, and that is that Obama subscribes to an ideology that wants to reduce America's influence in the world. He wants to cut America down to size. He doesn't want America to be number one. He would be perfectly happy if we were number 18 or number 37.

Why does Obama want to reduce America's footprint in the world? Because he believes we've been stepping on the world. This is his ideology. What Obama really wants to do is redistribute power globally. He would like to see many countries on the world stage -- Brazil, India, China, Russia, all vying for power. No single superpower calling the shots. Obama's dream is not America's dream.