‘America: Imagine the World Without Her’ movie review

By Mark Jenkins,

At the start of “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” Gen. George Washington is killed by a British sniper. He’s one of the few targets that takes a direct hit in conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s scattershot movie.

The polemical documentary is a companion piece to the author’s new book, which bears the same title. The movie version was written and directed by D’Souza and John Sullivan, who previously collaborated on “2016: Obama’s America,” an under-the-radar box-office hit two years ago. This follow-up should also sell tickets, but it’s unlikely to convert any D’Souza skeptics to his viewpoint.

The writer, who narrates, hasn’t actually crafted an alternate-history fable in which the British quashed the American Revolution. He quickly abandons that intriguing but messily open-ended premise in favor of an argument with the American political left. He lists some of their claims against the United States — that it’s racist, expansionist, imperialist, colonialist and so on — and then sort of refutes them.

For those who resent the left, “America” provides some rousing moments. D’Souza includes a clip in which U2’s Bono, known as an advocate of Third World anti-poverty efforts rather than a proponent of First World superiority, calls the United States “a great idea,” and praise from the likes of de Tocqueville, whose opinion of this country may be a little dated. (He died in 1859.) The movie ends with an arena-rock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“America” is less successful as a debate, since it isn’t one. D’Souza controls the conversation, and thus goes unchallenged when he tries to make real-world points with make-believe scenarios. To rebut the notion that capitalism is rapacious, for example, he includes a segment on Delish Dinesh, an imaginary burger joint with a tiny profit margin. But if fiction is allowed, what’s to stop Chomsky from dreaming up a cappuccino chain, Noam’s Foams, that earns huge returns by exploiting the Third World?

D’Souza sketches harsh portraits of such right-wing bogeymen as Hillary Rodham Clinton, community organizer Saul Alinsky and, of course, Barack Obama. Yet the movie often arrives at uncontroversial conclusions. Conceding that slavery was wrong, and that his cherished America sometimes slipped into empire-building mode, D’Souza suggests that the United States is a good country that has done some bad things.

This is, quite probably, what most Americans believe. And that includes any of those progressives who, D’Souza supposes, would rather live in a world in which the United States was never born.

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