Almost Common Sense
INDEPENDENTS DAY:
Wakening the American Spirit
By Lou Dobbs
237 pp. Viking $24.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
Lou Dobbs has written a passionate and thoughtful critique of our government and its power over average citizens. Arguing that Washington has become distant and detached from the interests of you and me, he proposes that we stop being sheep and take back control.
One doesn’t need to agree with every jot and tittle of his book to understand that a disconnect indeed exists between the governed and the governing, the servants and the served. In fact, one doesn’t have to agree with any of his arguments to understand that Dobbs presents his case clearly and readably. There are no eye-glazing passages, so thoughtful readers of any political bent can finish the book easily without recourse to No-Doz. But if you are tired of hearing him rant on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight about illegal immigration or the “war on the middle class,” that’s too bad. He apologizes for neither, arguing that the issues are so important that he is compelled to keep up the drumbeat.
But he presents his case in a civil, non-bomb-throwing way. “Neither party honors the legacy of its past, nor represents its partisan adherents in any meaningful way,” he writes, largely because both are “dependent upon the financial largesse of Corporate America and the influence of special interests.”
His concerns with America’s direction go beyond the immigration and “war on the middle class” issues for which he is so well known on CNN. “We are a superpower on the edge,” he writes. The Soviet Union “collapsed under the weight of a central government that exceeded all bounds of reason in its budget excesses,” primarily because of the arms race. “The Soviet Union quickly disintegrated...American leaders who doubt the certainty of consequences and sometimes surprising onset of those consequences are utterly delusional and derelict in their guidance of our nation.”
In other words, let’s be careful, or we will fall off the same cliff the U.S.S.R. did. It’s a sobering thought.
One of the major points of contention people have with Dobbs is his stand regarding illegal immigration. But he simply argues that the government should enforce its laws or change them, and that the “political contest that has resulted from our immigration and border crisis produces great passions and every bit as much heat as light.”
Independents Day is intended as a call for the citizenry to rise up and set America on a proper path. If the Republican and Democratic parties fail in their responsibilities in 2008, he writes, Americans should form an independent movement.
This points up two issues I have with the book. It’s fine to conclude with a stirring call to action. In a less stable, less complacent environment, Independents Day might be the equivalent of Common Sense in hardcover. But today, most of us are too smug and set in our ways to step out of the mainstream and become true independents. That requires money and organization, as well as a unity of purpose that is by definition likely to elude any independent movement.
The other is the focus on 2008, as though the issues will not still be with us in 2012 and beyond. Yes, they are important now, but in twelve months they will still resonate, and 2008 will be old news.
If one or the other party does not embrace populism in 2008, “an independent movement will embrace populism and give egalitarianism and our working men and women full-throated expression in the 2008 elections.” He could be right, of course, but he lacks convincing evidence, and wishing won’t make it so.
One minor annoyance is that Dobbs occasionally tries to make himself the issue. “The establishment media has often labeled me a populist—an angry populist,” he writes. Readers may want to shake him and say, “You’re not that important, Lou. Stick to the real issues.”
This generally solid book concludes with an index and a modest set of notes that document his sources. A few of those are 80- and 90-character web addresses, however, that no one is ever going to type. Someone should whisper “Tiny URL” into Dobbs’s ear.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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