Dinesh D’Souza as a Comprador Intellectual: Punditry, Media and Neocolonialism

Abstract

The neo-conservative movement in the United States has strong intellectual origins. Many of its founding members were radicals – heavily influenced by Leon Trotsky – who eventually became disillusioned with the New Left and the Counterculture movement (Stintson 2010). Thus, a growing number of college professors and other scholars eventually gathered into a group that began in the 1970s to lobby Republican governments. Neoconservatives shifted to the right, but they never moved away from Trotsky’s internationalism. Thus, they began to embrace a neocolonial perspective in their intellectual struggle against Soviet Communism. They enthusiastically supported American military interventions abroad. Their influence grew significantly under Ronald Reagan. One of the younger members of the neoconservative movement, Dinesh D’Souza, was fascinated by Reagan’s political style. D’Souza would go on to develop an academic career, and in his writings andmedia appearances, has consistently praised Reagan’s legacy (D’Souza 1999). Neoconservatives, in turn, also began to mold their movement with many of Reagan’s principles, most notably unregulated capitalism. By the 2000s, the neoconservatives in American policy were hegemonic in the White House, and George W. Bush’s administration employed many of its representatives as advisors and executives. It is fairly certain that the neoconservatives’ intellectual influence was a significant driving force in the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (Vaisse 2010). The Republican candidate John McCain lost the election in 2008, and neoconservatives naturally did not have the same influence as Socialism and Democracy, 2020 Vol. 34, Nos. 2–3, 61–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2020.1828700