From An Angry Reader:
In your recent article you are off base, friend. Every day that passes proves Trump to be unfit in so many ways.
I figure a Trump believer to be either embarrassingly uninformed or purely hypocritical, willing to push a conservative agenda regardless of flag bearer. No doubt you are the latter…
If conservatism was more about fairness instead of protecting the wealth of the very rich, I might even go for that. Minus the current “leader”, of course.
Stop defending him; you clearly are too intelligent to believe he is worthy.
Bill Sellars
Reply from Victor Davis Hanson:
Dear Angry Reader Bill Sellars,
Is “friend” sarcastic? I don’t recall ever meeting a Bill Sellars. Congratulations, you met one of the angry reader criteria: ad hominem (“you are the latter….”) but are to be commended for omitting the usual exclamation marks, capital letters, and profanity.
In the fashion of Barack Obama’s “clingers” and Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” in your contempt, you are writing off half the country who voted for Trump. I have a number of friends and family members who voted for Hillary, and never resorted to the sort of ad hominem that you and the Left routinely embrace.
No candidate runs solo, but always against someone else. Hillary on every issue—higher taxes, more regulation, restrictions on gas and oil development, open borders, identity politics—was, to paraphrase Obama, on the wrong side of history. She was enmeshed in scandals, shamelessly breaking the law with a private server, destroying documents, trafficking in classified documents. The Wikileaks trove revealed the depths of corruption between her campaign and the sycophantic media. She and her husband had created a net worth of over $200 million, largely by leveraging her political career and offices to earn huge speaking fees, and donations to the foundation, which they manipulated as a source of free travel for themselves and sinecures for their hangers-on. Hillary is “very rich”, and her trajectory started at the beginning of Bill’s Arkansas career, when she leveraged her husband’s governorship to manipulate the cattle futures’ market, earning $100,000 on a $1,000 investment, at odds of over a billion to one.
The “very rich” are mostly liberals. Try looking at counties by per capita income and then look how they voted in the last three elections: your “very rich” are very liberal, largely because they have the capital and income to exempt themselves from the logical consequences of their own ideology. A case in point is socialist Bernie Sanders—with a million-dollar-income, three tony homes, and a wife under investigation for improperly arranging a sweet-heart loan (and she was instrumental in evicting the disabled from the new campus she purchased on her road to bankrupting her college). Why are Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street predominately progressives?
Conservatism is about three things: 1) respect for past traditions and customs and emphases on family, religion, and communities, 2) a growing market economy in which free market capitalism creates wealth that enriches everyone—in which one tolerates some inequality because the vast majority is not poor, rather than one being impoverished like everyone else (cf. Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, 3) a deterrent foreign policy that believes peace is a dividend of bad people being afraid of the consequences of their natural desire to try something stupid against stronger better people.
The Republican Party is mostly a middle class and upper-middle class party; the Democratic Party is now the domain of the subsidized lower middle classes and poor, and the hyper-rich. It despises the middle class for lacking the romance of the distant poor and the middle classes for their supposedly crass and tasteless culture.
Stop stereotyping: you may be too smart to mouth such ossified liberal talking points.
Vic Hanson
Discussion (9)
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Hah, this one has been Inbox-sitting for months. Oh how I wish my significant debating abilities could put a glove on VDH! Thank you for speaking for millions of us fairly well-to-do, but now rendered financially enslaved to the Federal Leviathan to pay for the romantic and plentiful poor. How I wish taxation, regulation and overall encroachment upon the lives of the moral-sell-out, uber-rich amounted to much more than a small nuisance handled by their little people.
Ah, Dr. Hanson, another elegant comeback! Thank you for your clear logic and articulate restraint. Keep 'em coming - so many of us are nodding our heads and high fiving each other as we read your writing.
Hello Mr. Hanson, I am trying to learn more about the conservative perspective and your online persona appears to be an enthusiastic apologist for conservatism. Let me state that from the outset that I hold contrary views about the path for the future of our country (cf. overturn Citizen United, support Universal Healthcare). Hopefully this discussion can avoid ascribing labels and civilly concede defensible points where due. I am curious to learn how the ideology of conservatism aligns with respecting past traditions of our culture and at the same time, evolves as the culture does. Regarding the assertions “Conservatism is about three things:”… “1) respect for past traditions and customs and emphases on family, religion, and communities” Would conservatism respect states rights to protect slave-owner property rights today, if slavery had not abolished in this country? “2) a growing market economy in which free market capitalism creates wealth that enriches everyone—in which one tolerates some inequality because the vast majority is not poor, rather than one being impoverished like everyone else (cf. Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela,” Does conservatism embrace federal and state subsidies to US farmers that provide isolation from global price fluctuations or is there a limit to free market policy? Tolerating some inequality does not sound like an autonomous ecosystem, but rather an artificially managed system that will likely benefit a few actors and not all. “3) a deterrent foreign policy that believes peace is a dividend of bad people being afraid of the consequences of their natural desire to try something stupid against stronger better people.” Does conservatism maintain that deterring communism in Vietnam War was the correct foreign policy, considering today’s normalized relations with that country? Finally, I have a request for some follow-up information regarding “Try looking at counties by per capita income and then look how they voted in the last three elections”… could you provide some sources for this dataset? Respectfully, Matthew Faulkner Oakhurst CA
It also seems that a hard core elite perhaps influential in the Democratic party have a terrible hatred for America and everything American. Including those persons who are proud of America.
I feel a huge disconnect reading your reply to this angry reader. Can you explain or direct me to an overview of your definitions for class in the US? What would you consider middle-class? lower-middle class? upper-middle class and hyper-rich? To me, places like Colorado, Virginia, N and S Carolinas, to have huge swathes of what I think are "middle-class" who are living much better than majority of people in Silicon Valley in terms of roads, schools, health-care, houses...despite pre-tax income levels.
Great definition! "Conservatism is about three things: 1) respect for past traditions and customs and emphases on family, religion, and communities, 2) a growing market economy in which free market capitalism creates wealth that enriches everyone—in which one tolerates some inequality because the vast majority is not poor, rather than one being impoverished like everyone else (cf. Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, 3) a deterrent foreign policy that believes peace is a dividend of bad people being afraid of the consequences of their natural desire to try something stupid against stronger better people." Sounds like "common sense conservatism" to me.
Another perfect rebuttal of liberal group think nutured by a heavily biased Progressive media. Hard to call them Liberal as they are not. Hopefully it will enlighten some who read it. They are however our fellow countrymen. Deservinbg a respectful disagreement with sound reasoning which Victor so often provides. Much appreciated.
Another Progressive hoping for socialism and hoping conservatives are banned from his socialistic state. I don't know why I am even wasting my time writing a response to such nonsense.