Victor,
I do enjoy reading your articles and watching you comment on TV. In your article (the west is sick of the new woke Jihadism) you ended with the following statement “Yet the more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent”.
I thought about that statement, but I see the utter hate exhibited daily by the democrats and feel there is next to no chance of changing their loyalty to the party of the radical left. I wonder if the post WW2 period 1946–2008 was an anomaly/very unique time for our country. While those veterans may have had political differences, they knew they had something in common. They showed that they care for our country while in office but unfortunately, they are no longer around.
I would ask, what will bring our country together so that at least we can tolerate each other as so many of those bonds have been broken?
Very Respectfully,
Damon Zdunich
Dear Not Angry Reader Damon Zdunich,
I think your point about generations is well-taken. Many of those born between 1910 and 1930 for the most part came of age during the Great Depression (25% unemployment; -9% GDP), only to become part of the over 12 million Americans who joined the military in World War II to fight and defeat Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy—and then again to win the Cold War against Soviet global communism.
In some sense, we have not won unambiguously a major war since. So, Americans of that era shared those common experiences of dearth and hardship and real existential danger—and came through it quite stronger and more unified for the shared sacrifice necessary to prevail. In other words, the men and women of that generation were quite confident in their abilities to restart the country, ensure the defeat of existential enemies, and engineer postwar American preeminence.
So, politicians and presidential candidates like John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and George McGovern shared similar experiences of being posted overseas in the wartime military. Senatorial stalwarts like Paul Douglas, Daniel Inouye, Philip Hart, Lee Metcalf, and others proved genuine heroes in combat. A liberal historian Ira Shapiro wrote a good book about the tail end of that generation in the Senate, The Last Great Senate.
It was no accident that both can-do Democrats and Republicans agreed to fight the Cold War, to start NASA and go to the moon, to build the interstate highway system, and to seek equal opportunity for all Americans. What happened?
They gave birth to my Baby Boomer Generation, beneficiaries of a rapidly expanding economy, easy access to higher education, and a level of leisure and affluence unthinkable in the 1930s and 1940s. The bipartisan consensus broke down with Lyndon Johnson’s vast growth of government and the explosion of the administrative state. The 1960s cultural revolution and the anti-war movement introduced polarizations not seen since the Civil War. The effort to provide equality of opportunity was transformed into a vast government project of deficit spending and new more intrusive federal powers to ensure a coerced equality of result, as the Great Society and Vietnam War impoverished and divided the country.
The old Democratic and Republican Parties’ consensus—led by war veteran presidents like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy—ended. Universities became indoctrination centers. Civility gave way to “let it all hang out” and “do your own thing.”
The culprits for our decline and mutual hostility? History’s usual suspects—not dearth and bone-breaking work, but affluence and leisure.
What would bring us together? We saw some unity after September 11, when for a year or so, the country came together to combat radical Islamic terrorism that had done what the Nazis and Japanese military had not—slaughtered thousands on the U.S. mainland.
Currently, we are on the threshold of a number of existential dangers: a $36 trillion federal debt, swollen with an additional $1 trillion in deficit spending every 90 days. We are up to 123% percent of GDP and pay out $1 trillion a year just to service what we have borrowed and squandered.
Our enemies are becoming more powerful and uniting in their common hatred of us—especially China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Old allies like Israel are in mortal danger, and once-solid allies like Turkey harbor a visceral dislike of the U.S. The nuclear club is expanding, while our own military is short 45,000 recruits, short munitions, and short of talented leadership as we witnessed in Kabul.
We have no border—and no idea what to do with either the 11-12 million immigrants that the Biden administration welcomed across a destroyed border—without legality, legal audit, health checks—or some 20-30 previous illegal aliens.
100,000 thousand Americans die from fentanyl and opioids each, drugs deliberately sent to America by Mexican cartels across an open border and manufactured with the aid of communist China.
I could go on, but you can see the dark clouds gathering of a huge storm about to break upon us and we will proverbially either hang together or hang separately.
Let us hope for the former.
Sincerely,
Victor Davis Hanson
Discussion (8)
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That is v cool!!!
I agree, we have failed to pass our society, culture, morals, way of life on two too many of the generations that follow. I fear the same thing will happen to us that happened to Rome.
I always enjoy reading the angry and non-angry reader when they come out. I also love how you guys read one or two comments every episode on the podcast. Recently, I had a comment of mine read at the end of a podcast, and it had prompted VDH to go on a rant for about 6 minutes. To ALL at the VDH site and podcast, thank you for making your fans feel appreciated!
The Greatest Generation failed to pass its values to its children, the Baby Boomers. That's where the break occurred. It has only gotten worse as those people grew up, had children of their own, and spread their foolish ideas.
An observable difference also between the generation(s) that grew up in the years prior to and surrounding the great depression were tied by a kind of umbilical cord to a more, as VDH likes to describe, a muscular world while the grandchildren and those later became 'educated', earned degrees in fields of purported higher education but all the while losing touch with the earlier more muscular world of their grandparents and those who came before. As education more and more narrowly defined, skills of the muscular world became more and more blurred.
Rome's great century did not begin until 100AD. That is approximately 500 years after Rome was founded. This country is still young and is making some childish decisions that will bring much needed educational pain. The cookie jar eventually runs out of cookies. Leisure and affluence usually lead to hard times. I feel strongly that we can get past them, but there will likely be some serious learning that will ensue.
For me it's far more dire. One of our political parties, and a portion of the other in my opinion are not loyal to the people of the United States. They engage in corruption to line their pockets with money. Military officers and high ranking government civilian officials rotate right out of government into seven digit private sector jobs employed by those whom they formally regulated. Millions and millions of government employee union members conducting corruption for the deep state and the result; is that the suburb surrounding Washington DC where government servants live, has become the most expensive ZIP code on the planet. The leftist media is owned by billionaires who benefit in exchange for favorable laws and regulations. Underworked and lavishly overpay Academia that indoctrinates children, exists from literally trillions of dollars of student aid that is unscreened beforehand, and uncountable for afterwards. And throwing open our borders to flood our nation with the uneducated and the unskilled to maintain their power by diluting our vote. I doubt that even a foreign invasion could ever reconcile the many to find common cause with these enemies within.
Wow! Not exactly the patriotic, flag waving posting of a past generation on the day before July 4th -- Independance Day. Today's problems - a massive national debt, intransient foreign adversaries, the nuclear card, and myriads of border issues are unlike anything presented to past generations. Especially when faced through the eyes of newer generations who've been handed such affluence without the struggle. The dark clouds are rapidly surrounding our world and it'll be a guaranteed bumpy ride ahead. Fasten your seatbelts. Bruce McClelland Tucson