Editor's note: This is part two of a two-part series.
In his new film, Death of a Nation, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza exposes the Democrats’ “big lie” that conservatives are fascists and racists.
In the film that is igniting a national conversation about the long-hidden history of the Democratic Party, D’Souza argues that the policies of Democrats and progressives are the intellectual heirs of slavery and genocide, and that their policies helped inspire Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
In an exclusive interview with Townhall, D’Souza laid out his case.
One of the most striking things revealed in the film is that the Democratic Party was behind slavery, is linked to the Ku Klux Klan and has a long history of racism, and yet Democrats and progressives today say Republicans are racist. What is going on here?
D’Souza: Progressives have dominated the telling of the American narrative. Progressives are the ones who write the history books. Progressives are the ones who typically make the films. I’m sort of a stray dog in that field.
Now, these guys have gone to great lengths to camouflage the crimes of the Democratic Party and pin them on someone else. And that someone else varies. It could be just generically America. It could be generically the white man. And it could be, and frequently is, the South.
Now, this is a historical distortion. When (President Abraham) Lincoln named what he called the four bad guys of slavery, three out of four were northern Democrats.
And then after the Civil War, the Democrats lost the slave plantations so they had to come up with something new and so they invented white nationalism, or what we call today, white supremacy.
The Democratic Party used white nationalism as the glue to hold the party together, especially in the South.
Recently, President Donald Trump has been talking about the historic low unemployment rate among African-Americans. Polls have noted a substantial rise in the percentage of blacks that favor the Republican Party. What is happening here?
D’Souza: A lot of things are going on simultaneously. The first is what I call the education of Kayne West, which has been carried out in part by Candace Owens and others. It’s very significant because you have a major public figure publicly breaking with the Democratic Party and doing so while there is a massive campaign to bully him and force him to submit to Democratic orthodoxy.
I have said publicly that in 1860, the year before the Civil War, that no Republican owned a slave, not that no Republican in the North owned a slave, but that no Republican in the country owned a slave.
By the way, the statement I just made is in no textbook. It’s never appeared on the History Channel or Wikipedia, and yet it’s evidenced by the simple fact that today – it’s now been over two years since I made it – not one single credible counterexample has been presented.
The “plantation philosophy” is the argument that the Democratic Party’s elite have been exploiting minorities and poor people for two centuries by keeping them on “plantations” – Native Americans on reservations, African-Americans in inner-city ghettos, Hispanics in inner-city barrios, etc. Would you expand on this?
D’Souza: Well, my book on this is called Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party. It tells the story that has never been told, which is that the plantation as an idea and an institution that continued to define the Democratic Party almost 200 years after it was birthed.
It’s not widely known that the Democrats invented the ideology of the plantation. The network of cotton plantations that employed in 1830 two million slaves, and in 1860 four million slaves, corresponded with the rise of a new party, the Democratic Party, which promptly became the defender of the slave plantation.
The second (phase of the plantation) is the invention of the northern urban plantation, which was intended for immigrants. This was aimed at white immigrants – Irish, Italians and the Jews. The idea was to round these people up and find leaders who would deliver a collective body of votes to the Democratic Party which would keep crooked Democratic Party bosses in power.
Stage three is what I call the nationalization of the plantation. The idea was conceived by Woodrow Wilson and the progressives of the early 20thcentury but carried out by Franklin Roosevelt. He’s the one dolling out patronage, he’s the one who is creating a national form of ethnic dependency (through the New Deal).
And then we come to stage four, which is the stage of today, and that may be called the multicultural plantation. And the concept here is the Democrats want to organize their entire party along the lines of ethnic identity politics. Now most of it is based on race and ethnicity, ghettos for blacks, barrios for Latinos, reservations for Native Americans, but it also includes things like feminist identity, gay and transsexual identity. It’s identity politics carried to its ultimate point.
What kind of suffering has this caused for people in America, especially minorities, and what kind of dangers do the Democrats pose to America?
D’Souza: The danger is the one that Lincoln foresaw and warned against – the reduction of all of America to a plantation.
Lincoln accused the Democratic Party of trying to do that. In other words, trying to extend the slavery principle, not just in the South, but to extend it in the North as well.
I think we see in today’s Democratic plantation many of the same features as the old slave plantation. There are important differences. For example, on the old plantation, blacks were forced to work. On the multicultural plantation, the Democrats prefer that people don’t work. Why? Because then they are more dependent, and the Democrats are in a stronger position to supply their basic needs in exchange for the mindless habit of voting for Democrats.