TEN GREAT THINGS ABOUT AMERICA
BY DINESH D’SOUZA

America is under attack as never before—not only from terrorists,
but from people who provide a justification for terrorism. Islamic
fundamentalists declare America the Great Satan. Europeans rail
against American capitalism and American culture. South American
activists denounce the United States for “neo-colonialism” and
oppression.

Anti-Americanism from abroad would not be such a problem if
Americans were united in standing up for their own country. But in
this country itself, there are those who blame America for most of the
evils in the world. On the political left, many fault the United
States for a history of slavery, and for continuing inequality and
racism. Even on the right, traditionally the home of patriotism, we
hear influential figures say that America has become so decadent that
we are “slouching towards Gomorrah.”

If these critics are right, then America should be destroyed.
And who can dispute some of their particulars? This country did have a
history of slavery and racism continues to exist. There is much in our
culture that is vulgar and decadent. But the critics are wrong about
America, because they are missing the big picture. In their
indignation over the sins of America, they ignore what is unique and
good about American civilization.

As an immigrant who has chosen to become an American citizen, I
feel especially qualified to say what is special about America.
Having grown up in a different society—in my case, Bombay, India—I am
not only able to identify aspects of America that are invisible to the
natives, but I am acutely conscious of the daily blessings that I enjoy
in America. Here, then, is my list of the 10 great things about
America.

America provides an amazingly good life for the ordinary guy:
Rich people live well everywhere. But what distinguishes America is
that it provides an impressively high standard of living for the
“common man.” We now live in a country where construction workers
regularly pay $4 for a nonfat latte, where maids drive nice cars, and
where plumbers take their families on vacation to Europe.

Indeed newcomers to the United States are struck by the amenities
enjoyed by “poor” people in the United States. This fact was
dramatized in the 1980s when CBS television broadcast a documentary,
“People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor
during an ongoing recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the
documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration.
But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite
effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest
Americans have TV sets, microwave ovens, and cars. They arrived at the
same perception that I witnessed in an acquaintance of mine from Bombay
who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States. I
asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “I
really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”

America offers more opportunity and social mobility than any other
country, including the countries of Europe: America is the only
country that has created a population of “self-made tycoons.” Only in
America could Pierre Omidyar, whose parents are Iranian and who grew up
in Paris, have started a company like eBay. Only in America could
Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, become a leading
venture capitalist, the shaper of the technology industry, and a
billionaire to boot. Admittedly tycoons are not typical, but no
country has created a better ladder than America for people to ascend
from modest circumstances to success.

Work and trade are respectable in America, which is not true
elsewhere: Historically most cultures have despised the merchant and
the laborer, regarding the former as vile and corrupt and the latter as
degraded and vulgar. Some cultures, such as that of ancient Greece and
medieval Islam, even held that it is better to acquire things through
plunder than through trade or contract labor. But the American
founders altered this moral hierarchy. They established a society in
which the life of the businessman, and of the people who worked for
him, would be a noble calling. In the American view, there is nothing
vile or degraded about serving your customers either as a CEO or as a
waiter. The ordinary life of production and supporting a family is
more highly valued in the United States than in any other country.
Indeed America is the only country in the world where we call the
waiter “sir,” as if he were a knight.

America has achieved greater social equality than any other
society: True, there are large inequalities of income and wealth in
America. In purely economic terms, Europe is more egalitarian. But
Americans are socially more equal than any other people, and this is
unaffected by economic disparities. Tocqueville noticed this
egalitarianism a century and a half ago, but it is if anything more
prevalent today. For all his riches, Bill Gates could not approach the
typical American and say, “Here’s a $100 bill. I’ll give it to you if
you kiss my feet.” Most likely the person would tell Gates to go to
hell! The American view is that the rich guy may have more money, but
he isn’t in any fundamental sense better than anyone else.

People live longer, fuller lives in America: Although protesters
rail against the American version of technological capitalism at trade
meetings around the world, in reality the American system has given
citizens many more years of life, and the means to live more intensely
and actively. In 1900, the life expectancy in America was around 50
years; today, it is more than 75 years. Advances in medicine and
agriculture are mainly responsible for the change. This extension of
the life-span means more years to enjoy life, more free time to devote
to a good cause, and more occasions to do things with the
grandchildren. In many countries, people who are old seem to have
nothing to do: they just wait to die. In America the old are
incredibly vigorous, and people in their seventies pursue the pleasures
of life, including remarriage and sexual gratification, with a zeal
that I find unnerving.

In America the destiny of the young is not given to them but
created by them: Not long ago, I asked myself, “What would my life
have been like if I had never come to the United States?” If I had
remained in India, I would probably have lived my whole life within a
five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married
a woman of my identical religious and socioeconomic background. I
would almost certainly have become a medical doctor, or an engineer, or
a computer programmer. I would have socialized entirely within my
ethic community. I would have a whole set of opinions that could be
predicted in advance; indeed, they would not be very different from
what my father believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny
would to a large degree have been given to me.

In America, I have seen my life take a radically different course.
In college I became interested in literature and politics, and I
resolved to make a career as a writer. I married a woman whose
ancestry is English, French, Scotch-Irish, German, and American Indian.
In my twenties I found myself working as a policy analyst in the White
House, even though I was not an American citizen. No other country, I
am sure, would have permitted a foreigner to work in its inner citadel
of government.

In most countries in the world, your fate and your identity are
handed to you; in America, you determine them for yourself. America is
a country where you get to write the script of your own life. Your
life is like a blank sheet of paper, and you are the artist. This
notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly
powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young
people especially find irresistible the prospect of authoring the
narrative of their own lives.

America has gone further than any other society in establishing
equality of rights: There is nothing distinctively American about
slavery or bigotry. Slavery has existed in virtually every culture,
and xenophobia, prejudice and discrimination are worldwide phenomena.
Western civilization is the only civilization to mount a principled
campaign against slavery; no country expended more treasure and blood
to get rid of slavery than the United States. While racism remains a
problem in America, this country has made strenuous efforts to
eradicate discrimination, even to the extent of enacting policies that
give legal preference in university admissions, jobs, and government
contracts to members of minority groups. Such policies remain
controversial, but the point is that it is extremely unlikely that a
racist society would have permitted such policies in the first place.
And surely African Americans like Jesse Jackson are vastly better off
living in America than they would be if they were to live in, say,
Ethiopia or Somalia.

America has found a solution to the problem of religious and
ethnic conflict that continues to divide and terrorize much of the
world: Visitors to places like New York are amazed to see the way in
which Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus, Irish Catholics and Irish
Protestants, Jews and Palestinians, all seem to work and live together
in harmony. How is this possible when these same groups are spearing
each other and burning each other’s homes in so many places in the
world?

The American answer is twofold. First, separate the spheres of
religion and government so that no religion is given official
preference but all are free to practice their faith as they wish.
Second, do not extend rights to racial or ethnic groups but only to
individuals; in this way, all are equal in the eyes of the law,
opportunity is open to anyone who can take advantage of it, and
everybody who embraces the American way of life can “become American.”

Of course there are exceptions to these core principles, even in
America. Racial preferences are one such exception, which explains why
they are controversial. But in general America is the only country in
the world that extends full membership to outsiders. The typical
American could come to India, live for 40 years, and take Indian
citizenship. But he could not “become Indian.” He wouldn’t see
himself that way, nor would most Indians see him that way. In America,
by contrast, hundreds of millions have come from far-flung shores and
over time they, or at least their children, have in a profound and full
sense “become American.”

America has the kindest, gentlest foreign policy of any great
power in world history: Critics of the U.S. are likely to react to
this truth with sputtering outrage. They will point to longstanding
American support for a Latin or Middle Eastern despot, or the unjust
internment of the Japanese during World War II, or America’s reluctance
to impose sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime. However one
feels about these particular cases, let us concede to the critics the
point that America is not always in the right.

What the critics leave out is the other side of the ledger.
Twice in the twentieth century, the United States saved the world:
first from the Nazi threat, then from Soviet totalitarianism. What
would have been the world’s fate if America had not existed? After
destroying Germany and Japan in World War II, the U.S. proceeded to
rebuild both countries, and today they are American allies. Now we are
doing the same thing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Consider, too, how
magnanimous the U.S. has been to the former Soviet Union after its
victory in the Cold War. For the most part America is an abstaining
superpower: it shows no real interest in conquering and subjugating the
rest of the world. (Imagine how the Soviets would have acted if they
had won the Cold War.) On occasion the America intervenes to overthrow
a tyrannical regime or to halt massive human rights abuses in another
country, but it never stays to rule that country. In Grenada, Haiti,
and Bosia, the U.S. got in and then it got out. Moreover, when America
does get into a war, as in Iraq, its troops are supremely careful to
avoid targeting civilians and to minimize collateral damage. Even as
America bombed the Taliban infrastructure and hideouts, U.S. planes
dropped rations of food to avert hardship and starvation of Afghan
civilians. What other country does these things?

America, the freest nation on earth, is also the most virtuous
nation on earth: This point seems counter-intuitive, given the amount
of conspicuous vulgarity, vice, and immorality in America. Indeed
some Islamic fundamentalists argue that their regimes are morally
superior to the United States because they seek to foster virtue among
the citizens. Virtue, these fundamentalists argue, is a higher
principle than liberty.

Indeed it is. And let us admit that in a free society, freedom
will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes the
freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. But if freedom
brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. The
millions of Americans who live decent, praiseworthy lives desire our
highest admiration because they have opted for the good when the good
is not the only available option. Even amidst the temptations of a
rich and free society, they have remained on the straight path. Their
virtue has special luster because it is freely chosen.

By contrast, the societies that many Islamic fundamentalists seek
would eliminate the possibility of virtue. If the supply of virtue is
insufficient in a free society like America, it is almost non-existent
in an unfree society like Iran. The reason is that coerced virtues
are not virtues at all. Consider the woman who is required to wear a
veil. There is no modesty in this, because she is being compelled
Compulsion cannot produce virtue, it can only produce the outward
semblance of virtue. Thus a free society like America is not merely
more prosperous, more varied, more peaceful, and more tolerant—it is
also morally superior to the theocratic and authoritarian regimes that
America’s enemies advocate.

“To make us love our country,” Edmund Burke once said, “our
country ought to be lovely.” Burke’s point is that we should love our
country not just because it is ours, but also because it is good.
America is far from perfect, and there is lots of room for improvement.
In spite of its flaws, however, the American life as it is lived
today is the best life that our world has to offer. Ultimately America
is worthy of our love and sacrifice because, more than any other
society, it makes possible the good life, and the life that is good.



Dinesh D’Souza’s best-selling book What’s So Great About America has
just been published in paperback by Penguin Books. He is the Rishwain
Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Email:
thedsouzas@aol.com