Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Almost every national Election Night reveals the same old red/blue map. The country geographically is a sea of red. The coasts and small areas along the southern border and around the Great Lakes remain blue atolls.

Yet when the maps are recalibrated for population rather than area, the blue areas blow up, expanding to smother half the country — a graphical metaphor for the dominant cultural influence of city over country.

Ideological differences are now being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and foreign policy. Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural. Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban.

Gone are the old New Deal Democratic coalitions of New England and the South, or the 19th- and mid-20th-century Republican alliances between the farm belt and the mid-Atlantic states.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

America will weather its current hysterias. 

But the tensions and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.

In our time, the media has now vanished—kaput, no more, ended. 

Within a few hours, it goes from a Ministry-of-Truth love session with Joe Biden to a steaming verbal assault on the president’s press secretary—without a shred of awareness how ridiculous they appear in their passive-aggressive schizophrenia. The only constant is that reporters unapologetically seem to jettison their principles and professionalism to calibrate what they say and do by whose politics they support. They would prefer to be entirely discredited under a Biden presidency than be real journalists during a Trump Administration.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The distortions in the campaign and voting that we saw on November 3 will likely be child’s play compared with what will march through Georgia next January.

If recounts don’t change the November 3, 2020, result, the January 5, 2021, Georgia senatorial election becomes a black-swan event like none other in our age.

Incumbent senators rarely have runoff elections. Even if they do, states almost never have two senators up for reelection at once — and never both in runoffs. While control of the Senate has sometimes hinged on the outcome of one senatorial race, rarely has the fate of the nation hinged on two — from the same state.

In January, we will discover whether the Republicans hold the Senate, or whether Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris announce that it is past time to junk many of the very rules by which America makes its rules.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Where has the coronavirus gone?

Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in post-election headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors, and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off.

Whatever one’s views on the virus — whether it remains an existential threat or, contrarily, prompts overreactive lockdowns that are more harmful and maybe even deadlier than the virus itself — nothing much has changed since Election Day.

Or did viral perceptions suddenly change? The pandemic certainly no longer serves as an election lever to demagogue President Trump as a veritable killer.

States such as California are under a nearly complete lockdown. Draconian measures will abbreviate Thanksgiving gatherings in a way unprecedented in U.S. history. Yet elites such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have violated the quarantines they themselves have endorsed.

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Victor Davis Hanson // The Patriot Post

I once wrote that whenever Donald Trump exits office, he will likely leave as a “tragic hero.” Over two millennia ago, the Athenian tragedian Sophocles first described the archetype in his portraits of an angry and old but still fearsome Ajax, and heroic but stubborn and self-fixated Antigone.

In the iconic John Ford Western “The Searchers” and in a host of other films from “Shane” to “High Noon,” we have seen stories of these sorts.

The legalistic but impotent town council, the idealistic but outgunned sodbusters or the incompetent posse in desperation turns to unconventional deliverance. They suddenly need a John Wayne as a scary Ethan Edwards, or a mysterious gunslinger like Shane.

But to call in such Manichean outsiders is to admit that the status quo of a sober establishment has failed.

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An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill

Vladimir Putin is mortal. Russia, sooner or later, will have to navigate the transition from his 20-plus years of rule to someone else. It now appears that “sometime” could come as early as January 2021, if ill-health rumors denied by the Kremlin should prove to be true.

But do not be hopeful for a democratic Russia, whenever it happens. Putin’s inner circle would preserve the Putin system even without Putin; Russian voters would have little or no voice in the matter. It would be a process closely “managed” by a coterie of Kremlin insiders. They will not (and cannot) allow a democratic Russia that offers a variety of candidates with different electoral platforms.

The Kremlin has a historical precedent for managed transition — namely, the 1999-2000 transition from President Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. A key building block of the Yeltsin transition was the grant of immunity from eventual prosecution for the outgoing president and for his family. A second key ingredient was enforcement of the agreement by a credible guarantor. That guarantor happened to be the security services, headed at the time by one Vladimir Putin.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

No wonder half the public is concerned about irregularities in the 2020 voting.

No wonder they would support Donald Trump’s skepticism, once a reputable legal team quickly, publicly, and transparently presents to the nation justified concerns about constitutional violations in changing state voting laws and documented accounts of computer glitches, inexplicable late arrivals of ballot troves, and systemic efforts to prevent transparency — all at a level that reasonably could question the authenticity of the final vote count or even serve a dire warning of things to come

Voting sanctity was not just questioned by Trump. It became a recent issue in 2016. Then-Green Party candidate Jill Stein was used as a surrogate by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment — to the chagrin of her own supporters — to sue in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to overturn the 2016 election. The charge was deliberate voting-machine irregularities, for which there was not even much anecdotal evidence.

When that failed, the Left went full Hollywood with a media blitz to convince the American people that the election was a fraud and the electors had to do their “patriotic” duty to overturn the mandates of their own state — and reject Donald Trump.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Until Donald Trump’s arrival, the globalist revolution was almost solidified and institutionalized—with the United States increasingly its greatest and most “woke” advocate. We know its bipartisan establishment contours.

China would inherit the world in 20 or 30 years. The self-appointed task of American elites—many of whom had already been enriched and compromised by Chinese partners and joint ventures—was to facilitate this all-in-the-family transition in the manner of the imperial British hand-off of hegemony to the United States in the late 1940s.

Our best and brightest like the Biden family, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg would enlighten us about the “real” China, so we yokels would not fall into Neanderthal bitterness as they managed our foreordained decline.

We would usher China into “the world community”—grimacing at, but overlooking the destruction it wrought on the global commercial order and the American interior.

We would politely forget about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uyghurs. Hollywood would nod as it put out more lucrative comic-book and cartoonish films for the Chinese markets, albeit with mandated lighter-skinned actors.

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