Ten Paradoxes Of Our Age
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution The 21st century is reminding of us of some uncomfortable truths. Abroad, recent controversies over the rise of Chinese mercantilism, the specter of Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons, tensions in the European Union, the calcified Palestinian question, mass migrations, and the resurgence of Islamic terrorism all offer a […]
Europe’s Vanishing Calm
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Europeans claim to be building a new democratic culture but the governing elites of the European Union consider voters little more than members of reckless mobs. AVIGNON, France — The Rhone River Valley in southern France is a storybook marriage of high technology, traditional vineyards, and ancestral villages. High-speed trains […]
Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential.’ Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens. Donald Trump blusters nonstop. He offers contrasting messages about whether, on any given day, he might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. His […]
The Good Populism
Victor Davis Hanson // The New Criterion Populism is today seen both as a pejorative and positive noun. In fact, in the present age, there are two sorts of populism. Both strains originated in classical times and persisted in the West until today. One in antiquity was known as the base populism. It involved the […]
The Scandal on the Other Foot
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Consider the following alternate reality. Imagine that it is now summer 2024. A 78-year-old lame-duck President Trump is winding down his second term, basking in positive polls. His dutiful vice president in waiting, Mike Pence, is at last getting his chance to run for president. Imagine also that Pence […]
California and Conservatism
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review I share some of the sentiments of Jay Nordlinger’s Corner post expressing confidence that some day in the future there may be hope for California conservatism. That’s why I continue to live in the house that I grew up in, despite vast changes in the nature of the rural community I […]
The Post-War Order Is Over
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire. Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much […]
The Great German Meltdown
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany’s neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939—and increasingly in […]
U.S. Has Leverage in Dealings with Iran and North Korea
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review America and our allies have several ways to deter the rogue nations. There has been a lot of misinformation about both getting out of the so-called Iran deal and getting into a new North Korean agreement. The two situations may be connected, but not in the way we are […]
The Trump Rationale
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review His voters knew what they were getting, and most support him still. Why exactly did nearly half the country vote for Donald Trump? Why also did the arguments of Never Trump Republicans and conservatives have marginal effect on voters? Despite vehement denunciations of the Trump candidacy from many pundits on […]
How Democracies End: A Bureaucratic Whimper
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness One strange trait of the die hard NeverTrump Republicans and progressives is their charge that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. Trump, as is his wont, says a lot of outrageous and weird things. But it is hard in his 16 months of rule to find any proof that […]
The Miraculous Image Rehabilitation of Former Republican Presidents
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review It’s an evergreen media strategy for disparaging the sitting GOP executive. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, many in the media considered him a dangerous extremist. Some reporters warned that Reagan courted nuclear war and would tank the economy. He certainly was not like the gentleman Republican […]
The Nature of Progressive Insensitivity
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Why do so many famous social-justice crusaders turn out to be racist and sexist? Former vice president Joe Biden is back in the news yet again. For a second time, he seems surprised that poor residents of the inner city are capable of doing sophisticated jobs: We don’t […]
Why Trump Is A President Like No Other
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific […]
5-09-18 Angry Reader
From An Angry Reader: Wow. You are a moron. How is it, that Comey’s memos, which were his that he wrote, as an FBI agent, which were still his, once he was fired from his FBI job, by an obstructing president, “leaking of classified material”?? How can the man’s own memos, that he wrote, which […]
America The Weird
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution On first glance, America does not seem that exceptional. Like China and Russia, it is a superpower. And, also like those countries, it is huge territorially. It shares many affinities with Europe. And, like China, Japan and Germany, the United States is an economic powerhouse. And yet, it is […]
The Trump Land Mine
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency. Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the […]
05-02-18 Angry Reader
From An Angry Reader: Fake Claims. WE HAVE A CONGENITAL LIAR AS A PRESIDENT. HE HAS SCAMMED THE US WITH TAXES AND BANKRUPTCY. HE IS A SERIAL ADULTERER AND SEXUAL PREDATOR. EVEN AS I TEXT HIS BUSINESSES ARE PROFITING FROM MY HARD EARNED AND MEAGER INCOME. HE IS A NARCISSIST AND EGOTIST. AND YOU CRITICIZE […]
If Only Hillary Had Won . . .
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Leakers and lawbreakers rewarded with Clinton-administration jobs — and the American public none the wiser about deep-state corruption There are lots of possible counterfactuals to think about had Hillary Clinton won the presidency as all the experts had predicted. The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic […]
The Double Standards of the Mueller Investigation
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers. The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck. In one direction, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong […]