Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.
Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military’s greatest defender.
Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets. Statistics of those killed in action, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, reveal that white males, especially those of the rural and middle classes, were demographically “overrepresented” in offering the ultimate sacrifice to their country.
When generals, active and retired, have become controversial, usually conservative America could be counted on to stick with them.
Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania.
1. Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves?
The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils?
Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized.
Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both. The law is optional, and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology. The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.
The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military.
Part Two: The Fear of and Reverence for the “Hoop Snake”
For the next week after that warning about hoop snakes on the prowl as veritable animal unicyclists, I looked hourly for hoop snakes—shovel in hand—but never found a single one or even their bike-tire like trails. Yet Joe Caron said he had grown up on the reservation and saw them hooping in packs a lot.
(I have a confession to make: Until 21, I remember this childhood incident as just folk ignorance—or maybe a wild pun on us? But one day in graduate school while reading about the Gnostics, I came across the ouroboros or “mouth biter,” a mythical Greek snake creature (borrowed from the Egyptians) that alchemists and Gnostic philosophers adopted as iconic, likely because of it transcendent “circle of life” message of the tail ending at and consumed by the head, or a reminder of death and rebirth. And I silently apologized to the long dead Joe the moment I saw that his mythologies were one with the ancients).
There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020.
Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.
So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.
Hoop Snake’s can put their tail in their mouths and roll like a wheel. Image by Alpo Barkfest
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part One: The Fear of and Reverence for the “Hoop Snake”
I don’t know when and how Joe Caron (I have slightly altered the name) moved to our farm in the 1950s, or maybe it was earlier right after the war before I was born. My earliest memories of living in our 800-square-foot house (My dad moved the ancient farmhouse to our place after buying it at an auction) were water shortages. We had an ancient pressure system in a 50-foot well, shared with two farm labor families nearby. (I think those memories are why when my present 90-foot well started failing during the last drought, I went down 440 feet with the new well and with eight-inch casing, even though the water table was 94 feet).
Of the two nearby houses, the Carons lived in one, and, closer to us, Carlos Silva (name also altered) occupied the other that my great-great grandfather and great uncle had once lived in—no more than 600 square feet in size.
Victor Davis Hanson with his cohost Sami Winc discuss the life and legacy of the Theban general of the 4th century BC Epamenondas and Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman.
