Trumped Out?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The new post-Mueller media narrative is “weariness” and “exhaustion” with President Trump’s tweets, his cul de sac Sharpie controversy, his ideas about buying Greenland, his unorthodox art-of-the-deal foreign policy that resulted in a plan to talk to Taliban leaders in the United States, and his firing of arch-conservative John […]
Is England Still Part of Europe?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review British prime minister Boris Johnson is desperate to translate the British public’s June 2016 vote to leave the European Union into a concrete Brexit. But the real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and […]
All in the Comey Family
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review By his own admission, the recently fired FBI director James Comey leaked at least four memos of private presidential conversations — at least one of them containing some classified secret material — variously to his lawyers and through liaisons to the press. In both phone calls and personal meetings, […]
Biden or Bust?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Pundits and politicos play the current parlor game of counting Joe Biden’s daily bloopers, signs of debility, or embarrassments. Unlike former “Apprentice” host Donald Trump’s exaggerations and narcissisms, Biden’s fantasies are not baked into an outsider candidacy that by intent offers as a radical change of policy, a tough […]
Victor Davis Hanson: World War II rages on in minds of world leaders – It profoundly influences them today
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News World War II ended 74 years ago. But even in the 21st century, the lasting effects endure, both psychological and material. After all, the war took more than 60 million lives, redrew the map of Europe and ended with the Soviet Union and the United States locked in a Cold […]
Strategika Issue 60: The Monroe Doctrine and Current U.S. Foreign Policy
The Monroe Doctrine: Guide to the Future Please read a new essay by my colleague, Williamson Murray in Strategika. The Monroe Doctrine, which purports to warn other states from interfering in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere, has supposedly remained a basic principle of American foreign policy since the first half of the nineteenth century. From […]
From Icon to Just a Con
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Most of us who came of age in the 1970s revered the university—even as it was still reeling from 1960s protests and beginning a process that resulted in its present chaos and disrepute. Americans of the G.I. Bill-era first enshrined the idea of upward mobility through the bachelor’s degree—the […]
Israel’s Good and Bad New Realities
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review One of the most radical changes in the labyrinth of the Middle East is the near cessation of the old formal hostility of the Arab nations to Israel. That does not mean that the destruction of the Jewish state is not still a commandment among hundreds of millions of […]
Victor Davis Hanson: Why are so many young people calling themselves socialists?
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News “Socialist!” is no longer a McCarthyite slur. Rather, the fresh celebrity “Squad” of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen – Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; – often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas. A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called […]
The Mythical Trump Hydra
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Many are the hissing heads of the polycephalic Donald Trump—at least according to the progressive Left and the NeverTrump Right, who see the president of the United States as some sort of mythical nightmare. Here are a few of his supposedly monstrous manifestations. Trump, the Profiteer Candidate Trump never really wanted […]
Trump — or What, Exactly?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In traditional political terms, there is always an alternate agenda to an incumbent president’s that reasonable voters can debate. In Trump’s case, two massive annual budget deficits — coming on top of the previous two administrations that doubled the national debt — seem fair game. No president for the […]
With The Old Breed
Victor Davis Hanson // Claremont Review of Books n the world of ancient Greece and Rome, collective reverence for the war dead helped explain why hoplites and legionaries fought so fiercely. The great themes of classical literature are often those of battlefield commemoration. Pericles’ majestic Funeral Oration, the lyric poet Simonides’ epitaph for the fallen […]
Progressive Democrats Renounce Their Former Selves
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review All politicians are “flexible.” If they are in politics long enough, many reinvent themselves ideologically several times over — given the perceived volatile mood of 51 percent of their constituency. But rarely have we seen an entire primary field of candidates scrambling to renounce all their past identities and […]
Victor Davis Hanson: What could sink Trump’s chances in 2020?
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News What factors usually reelect or throw out incumbent presidents? The economy counts most. Recessions, or at least chronic economic pessimism, sink incumbents. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were tagged with sluggish growth, high unemployment and a sense of perceived stagnation — and were easily defeated. The 2008 financial crisis likely ended any chance […]
Cosmic Injustice
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness One of the weirdest characteristics of our global politicians and moral censors is their preference to voice cosmic justice rather than to address less abstract sin within their own purview or authority. These progressive virtue mongers see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of the United States […]
The German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact: A Bad Deal, 80 Years Ago
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Some 80 years ago, on August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the […]
The Strange Case of ‘White Supremacy’
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Any majority population must be careful not to revert to pre-civilized tribalism and oppressing minority groups. The United States, like every other country that enjoys diverse populations has struggled from its beginning to ensure equality, sometimes unsuccessfully, and only at the cost of thousands of lives. While the United […]
How Robert O’Rourke Became ‘Beto’
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review A great deal of controversy has continued the past few days over Robert Francis O’Rourke’s longtime use of a nickname given to him at birth (albeit temporarily jettisoned while in prep school) — especially in the wake of his recent sensational and unfounded charges that Donald Trump is directly responsible […]
Why target Tucker Carlson? It’s part of the left’s war on the right
Victor Davis Hanson // The Hill The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have rightly shocked the nation. In our understandable collective furor over the senseless loss of life, all the old political divides are being revisited, now in a climate of often frightening blame, anger and distrust — from gun control […]
Will 2020 Be a Repeat of 2004 for Democrats?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Democrats by 2004 had become obsessed with defeating incumbent President George W. Bush. Four years earlier, in the 2000 election, Bush had won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Democrats were still furious that Bush supposedly had been “selected” by the Supreme Court over the contested vote […]