I DON'T find it at all difficult to understand how Barack Obama thinks, because most of his beliefs are part of the broad consensus in America's centre or centre-left: greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, universal health insurance, financial-reform legislation, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and so forth. Dinesh D'Souza, on the other hand, appears to have met so few Democrats in recent decades that he finds such views shocking, and thinks they can only be explained by the fact that Mr Obama's father was a Kenyan government economist who pushed for a non-aligned stance in the Cold War during the 1960s-70s. Since the majority of Democrats don't have any Kenyan parents and have no particular stake in the anti-colonialism debates of the 1960s-70s, I'm not sure how Mr D'Souza would explain their views. In any case, Mr D'Souza's explanation of Mr Obama's views doesn't make any sense on its own terms. This, for example, is incomprehensible: "If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more." Come again? Progressive taxation is caused by...anti-colonialism? Message to American billionaires and the people who write for them: many events and movements in world history did not revolve around marginal tax rates on rich people in the United States.

In other words, while I don't have any trouble understanding how Barack Obama thinks, I have a lot of trouble understanding how Dinesh D'Souza thinks. And if I were to try to understand his thinking using the same methods he uses to interpret Mr Obama, I might look to his Indian background, which is where he says he gained his insight into anti-colonialism. Mr D'Souza notes simply that he grew up in Mumbai, but a more complete accounting is that his parents were members of the Christian community in the state of Goa, which was colonised by Portugal. The last name "D'Souza" is a common family name in West Africa, where it indicates that the family is descended from the slave-trading coastal mixed-race elite. In India, however, it indicates that the family likely belongs to the Roman Catholic Brahmins, Hindu Brahmins who were converted by missionaries beginning in the 17th century. Interestingly, the Christian community in Goa retained a Hindu-style caste system, with Catholic Brahmins continuing to discriminate against Catholic dalit or "untouchables", whom they refer to as mahara or chamaar. Elite Catholic Brahmin households in Goa sent their children to Jesuit schools (like the one Mr D'Souza attended) and often spoke Portuguese at home, referring to the main local native language, Konkani, as the lingua dos criados ("language of servants").

Goa remained a Portuguese colony until it was annexed by India in 1961, which happens to be the year of Mr D'Souza's birth. Many Goan Christians did not welcome the annexation, fearing they would be subsumed in the Hindu-Muslim mega-state. A later source of anxiety was India's affirmative action (or "reservation") policies, which set aside university slots and civil-service jobs for people from recognised historically stigmatised groups, known as "scheduled castes and tribes". Beginning in the early 1980s, when Mr D'Souza was off studying at Dartmouth, these affirmative-action policies engendered widespread resistance among India's elite classes, who were terrified of losing their privileged status in a colossal country where hundreds of millions of indigents might overwhelm the available spots at top schools (and reduce their kids' chances of, say, going to Dartmouth). Goa itself has set itself up as a redoubt against the reservation policies: it has the fewest scheduled castes and tribes of any Indian state. This is largely because elite Christians have refused to acknowledge discrimination against the Christian dalit, or to allow them to be recognised as a scheduled caste. Pope John Paul II rebuked Indian bishops for these practices on his visit to Goa in 2003.

In 2000, Mr D'Souza wrote a book called "The Virtue of Prosperity" that included an unusual defence of nepotism and elitism in education. As Tim Noah wrote at the time, in this passage, Mr D'Souza explicitly argues against equality of educational opportunity:

[F]or the state to enforce equal opportunity would be to contravene the true meaning of the Declaration [of Independence] and to subvert the principle of a free society. Let me illustrate. I have a five-year-old daughter. Since she was born—actually, since she was conceived—my wife and I have gone to great lengths in the Great Yuppie Parenting Race. At one time we even played classical music while she was in the womb. Crazy us. Currently the little rogue is taking ballet lessons and swim lessons. My wife goes over her workbooks. I am teaching her chess. Why are we doing these things? We are, of course, trying to develop her abilities so that she can get the most out of life. The practical effect of our actions, however, is that we are working to give our daughter an edge—that is, a better chance to succeed than everybody else's children. Even though we might be embarrassed to think of it this way, we are doing our utmost to undermine equal opportunity.... Now, to enforce equal opportunity, the government could do one of two things: it could try to pull my daughter down, or it could work to raise other people's children up. The first is clearly destructive and immoral, but the second is also unfair. The government is obliged to treat all citizens equally. Why should it work to undo the benefits that my wife and I have labored so hard to provide? Why should it offer more to children whose parents have not taken the trouble?

Most Americans wouldn't have a hard time answering the question of why the government ought to guarantee all kids a good education. "Because it's not the kids' fault that their parents aren't rich PhD's" pretty much covers it. (Another reason: because, unlike India, we have the resources to do so.) So why would Mr D'Souza perform the moral contortionist's act necessary to justify elitism in education as integral to a "free society"? Well, here's an explanation modeled on the one Mr D'Souza provides for Mr Obama's views:

If Mr D'Souza grew up amongst a tiny hereditary elite desperately trying to protect its privileged status in a huge and bitterly poor third-world country, that would explain why he wants to make sure disadvantaged children are denied the educational opportunities his daughter receives.

What about his weird instinct to dredge up the irrelevant topic of anti-colonialism in explaining Barack Obama's run-of-the-mill center-left political agenda? Using the same phrasing:

If Mr D'Souza hailed from a tiny Westernised elite that allied itself with the European colonialist project against the national independence movement of his own country, that would explain his monomania about anti-colonialism.

It would, however, be unfair to explain Mr D'Souza's views this way. First of all, I'm no expert on Indian history or the caste system in Goa, and the description above may be just as shallow a caricature as the one Mr D'Souza provides of post-colonial East African politics in his inflammatory article. Specifically, I know no more about Mr D'Souza's family's political views than he does about Barack Obama's father's (about which he appears to know strikingly little, given the wealth of information available on the subject). Maybe his parents and relatives come from a low-caste Christian background; maybe they were staunch supporters of the Indian annexation of Goa. More important, anybody who wants to know "how D'Souza thinks" is free to look up what he's written in books and articles over the years, just as Mr D'Souza could criticise the views of Barack Obama by referring to things Mr Obama has said and done.

It's not entirely useless to investigate people's backgrounds as a way of understanding their thinking. Mr D'Souza has surely been shaped by the milieu he grew up in and the political ideology that structures it, and Barack Obama was clearly shaped by the experience of growing up partly abroad, with a mixed-race identity that had links to middle-class white America, to black America, and to Africa. I've certainly been shaped by growing up Jewish on the East Coast, Sarah Palin was shaped by growing up Christian in Idaho, and so forth. But I think we do better when we criticise people's ideas and programmes on their own terms, rather than seeking out mysterious causes in their childhoods. There's no need to search for abstruse reasons why an extreme movement conservative like Dinesh D'Souza might oppose raising taxes on the rich or defend privilege in access to education. And it's not surprising that a centrist liberal like Barack Obama thinks people earning more than $250,000 per year ought to be paying more taxes. In fact, that conviction is shared by a majority of the American electorate. If Mr D'Souza finds it bizarre, it's not Mr Obama who's out of touch with America.

(Lexington has more.)