Dinesh D'souza What's Great About America Analysis

Dena Nguyen
Professor Sondey
Writing 37
22 November 2013
What’s Great About America: Fallacies and Hidden Agendas
Dinesh D’Souza, a distinguished writer, is infamous for persuading his audiences to accept his views through clever use of fallacy. When he first began his public career at Dartmouth College, he was already known as “Distort D’Newsa” because of his conservative stance, which greatly affected his arguments. He rose to national fame when he served as a policy advisor for the conservative Ronald Reagan. In his essay What’s Great About America, D’Souza effectively argues his view that America is great, with partial truths. Instead of glorifying America’s successes, he focuses on hot-button issues and undermines liberal opinions.
D’Souza’s use of rhetoric and his method of telling the readers what they want to hear help him achieve his goal of presenting America as a model nation. D’Souza, however, has an ulterior motive. He uses red herring, a fallacy in which he presents an irrelevant topic in order to divert attention from the real issue, as he presents patriotism as a distraction from his real agenda. His agenda is to persuade his readers that liberals have an inaccurate, unrealistic, and deceptive perspective. Liberals actively strive to change our nation for the better. This often leads to their directing of attention to America’s flaws in hopes of inspiring movements to eliminate these flaws. D’Souza personally believes that such attention to failure degrades our nation; therefore, he makes it a point of emphasis to disprove such criticism. By establishing the subjects of his essay as patriotism and liberalism and providing
He presents facts but withholds certain information to give the overall essence of truth within his paper. Liberals believe poverty is an issue in America, a view that casts a bad light on the country. This is why D’Souza attacks that argument in his essay. D’Souza first states, “Critics of America complain about the scandal of persistent poverty in a nation of plenty, but the immigrant cannot help noticing that the United States is a country where the poor live comparatively well” (D’Souza 2). If we look at this statement, we would assume it is true that our poor enjoy considerable welfare and countless support systems. There are, however, households living on less than two dollars per day, which D’Souza implies is plenty. He sugarcoats the facts in order to create misconceptions that readers would believe. He understands and takes advantage of people’s laziness, knowing they do not want to be asked to change because things are bad. D’Souza provides a comparison of America to other countries, strengthening his readers’ trust in the validity of his argument. He describes poverty-ravage third world countries, then compares them to America in asserting, “Here is a country where everything works: The roads are clean and paper-smooth; the highway signs are clear and accurate; the public toilets function properly; when you pick up the telephone, you get a dial tone; you can even buy things from the store and then take them