2018

The Trump Paradox

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Today, Jim Geraghty writes snidely: VDH writes, “The hostile reaction to Trump is a sort of proof of his success.” Does it follow, then, that if Trump was widely loved, it would be proof of his failure?” Geraghty creates a false either/or binary. The hostile reaction against Trump does largely arise from […]

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How Did Shane End Up?

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In director George Stevens’s classic 1953 Western, Shane, a mysterious stranger and gunfighter in buckskin with a violent past, rides into the middle of the late-1880s Wyoming range wars between cattle barons and homestead farmers. The community-minded farmers may have the law on their side, but the open-range cattlemen

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The Costs of Presidential Candor

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Predictably, Donald Trump was attacked both by the establishment and the media as “crude,” “unpresidential,” and “gratuitous” for a recent series of blunt and graphic statements on a variety of current policies. Oddly, the implied charge this time around was not that Trump makes up stuff, but that he

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Did 1968 Win the Culture War?

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Fifty years ago this year, the ’60s revolution sought to overturn American customs, traditions, ideology, and politics. The ’60s radicals eventually grew older, cut their hair, and joined the establishment. Most thought their revolution had fizzled out in the early 1970s without much effect, as Americans returned to “normal.”

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The Mad, Mad Meditations of Monsieur Macron

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Almost everything French president Emmanuel Macron has said recently on the topic of foreign affairs, the United States, and nationalism and patriotism is silly. He implicitly rebukes Donald Trump for praising the idea of nationalism as a creed in which citizens of sovereign nations expect their leaders to put

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Even California Cannot Defy Nature Forever

Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal California has been clouded under a blanket of smoke for weeks. Stanford University, where I work, sent students and faculty home early for Thanksgiving. The campus is more than 200 miles southwest of the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that just incinerated the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Paradise, and yet the

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The Progressive Synopticon

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness In the post-election aftermath, Republicans are wondering about how they can capture that missing 2-5 percent of the electorate that lost them the House of Representatives. Could they pry away 40 percent of the institutionalized Democratic Latino vote on delivery of a full-employment economy of rising wages? Can they

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Strategika Issue 55: The Structure of World Power

The Structure of the Contemporary International System Please read a new essay by my colleague, Joseph Joffe in Strategika. A monopoly obtains when one firm is free to set prices and output while keeping ambitious newcomers out of the market. The best example is Standard Oil in the late 19th century. Ruthlessly undercutting competitors, the

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GOP failed to fight Dem’s health-care scare tactics in midterms

Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill Exit polls showed that health care was the top factor in motivating voters in the 2018 election. Democrat candidates successfully stoked fears that the Republicans would end coverage of pre-existing conditions. Despite repeated assurances from President Trump that pre-existing conditions were safe, almost 60 percent of voters said they trusted the

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Maybe We Could Use a Civic Hippocratic Oath

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness A mob of protesters associated with the radical left-wing group Antifa swarmed the private residence of Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the night of Nov. 7. They yelled, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!” The mob’s apparent aim was to catch Carlson’s

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