Is the American Elite Really Elite?
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The public no longer believes that privilege and influence should be predicated on titles, brands, and buzz. Establishment furor over the six-week-old Trump administration is growing. Outraged New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared Trump’s victory to disasters in American history that killed and wounded thousands […]
Presidential Payback for Media Hubris
by Victor Davis Hanson//Defining Ideas This article is reprinted from Defining Ideas, an online journal at the Hoover Institution. To read the original article click here. Donald Trump conducted a press conference recently as if he were a loud circus ringmaster whipping the media circus animals into shape. The establishment thought the performance was […]
The Metaphysics of Trump
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Paradox: How does a supposedly bad man appoint good people eager to advance a conservative agenda that supposedly more moral Republicans failed to realize? We variously read that Trump should be impeached, removed, neutralized — or worse. But until he is, are his appointments, executive orders, and impending legislative […]
‘False Documents’
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The Wall Street Journal wrote an unfortunate and misleading op-ed today on the new protocols on illegal immigration issued by the Department of Homeland Security — epitomized by the Journal’s weird sentence, “Mr. Kelly’s order is so sweeping that it could capture law-abiding immigrants whose only crime is using […]
Why the Central Valley votes more conservative
By Victor Davis Hanson// San Francisco Chronicle Photo: Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg Voters living in 85 percent of the country preferred Donald Trump, but he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. Not long ago on a farm south of Fresno, I watched a poorly paid mechanic in silence repair a gate’s hydraulic ram as easily […]
VDH Ultra
From an Angry Reader: You are most definitely wrong, California could go it alone. They are after all the sixth largest economy in the world. If secession is in their future the US Federal government would be more likely to fall into chaos than California. We need them more than they need us. As for […]
The Labyrinth of Illegal Immigration
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Navigating self-interest, ideals, and public opinion in the debate about illegal immigration. Activists portray illegal immigration solely as a human story of the desperately poor from south of the border fleeing misery to start new, productive lives in the U.S. — despite exploitation and America’s nativist immigration laws. But […]
VDH Ultra
02/23/17 From an Angry Reader: Prof. Hanson: First, as an aggressive moderate, I believe any talk of California secession is simply a waste of time and idiotic. But saying “California” supports secession is equally absurd. One third of the population reflects nothing close to a majority, not to mention the small poll sampling, and it […]
Trump’s Team of Sort of Rivals
The Corner The one and only. By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The selection of the multitalented and independent thinker Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser is inspired and reifies Trump’s past statements that he likes outspoken and independent advisers. McMaster is best known for his counterinsurgency work in Iraq, but prior to […]
VDH Ultra
02/22/17 From an Angry Reader: VDH, Read your piece LA Times this a.m., then another in National Review. Big, sweeping rhetorical claims and attendant slamming- mostly about progressives trajectory. Your type of policy wonk rap is common and toothless. Evidence specific? Not. Easy to see why you’re just a fellow. DeToqueville…read his work recently? CRD […]
Seven Days in February
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Trumps’ critics, left and right, aim to bring about the cataclysm they predicted. A 1964 political melodrama, Seven Days in May, envisioned a futuristic (1970s) failed military cabal that sought to sideline the president of the United States over his proposed nuclear-disarmament treaty with the Soviets. Something far less […]
VDH Ultra
02/21/17 From an Angry Reader: Victor David Hanson’s latest rant, “Obama left the president with monstrous mess (2/17),” is in its unmitigated slam at our “last president” not the least bit surprising, both in its orientation as well as in its patent bias. While it’s a fool’s errand to try to defend much of Obama’s efforts in foreign affairs, […]
The End Of Identity Politics
by Victor Davis Hanson//via Defining Ideas (Hoover Institution) Image credit: Barbara Kelley Who are we? asked the liberal social scientist Samuel Huntington over a decade ago in a well-reasoned but controversial book. Huntington feared the institutionalization of what Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier had called “hyphenated Americans.” A “hyphenated American,” Roosevelt scoffed, “is not […]
The Three-Headed Hydra of the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Trump has inherited a matrix of problems that primarily stem from Iran, Russia, and ISIS. The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration’s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle East. What makes the Middle […]
The Deplorables Shout Back
by Victor Davis Hanson//American Greatness Struggling rural America proved disenchanted with the country’s trajectory into something like a continental version of Belgium or the Netherlands: borderless, with a global rather than national sense of self; identity politics in lieu of unity and assimilation; a statist and ossified economy with a few winners moralizing to lots […]
Tear down this dam?
By Victor Davis Hanson // The Hill Oroville dam, the tallest in the nation, is currently in danger of structural failure. Thousands living downstream from its desperate cascading water releases are evacuating their homes in Hollywood disaster-film fashion. Something premodern and apocalyptic like this was not supposed to have happened in a postmodern California of […]
The Oroville Dam disaster is yet another example of California’s decline
By Victor Davis Hanson// Los Angeles Times A year ago, politicians and experts were predicting a near-permanent statewide drought, a “new normal” desert climate. The most vivid example of how wrong they were is that California’s majestic Oroville Dam is currently in danger of spillway failure in a season of record snow and rainfall. That […]
The Uses of Populism
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The economy, academia, immigration, and the environment could benefit from Trump’s unorthodox approach. Populism of the center (as opposed to Bernie Sanders’s socialist populism) has received a bad media rap — given that it was stained in the past by xenophobic and chauvinistic currents. Who wishes to emulate all […]
California Goes Confederate
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Threatening secession is far from the only thing that the Golden State has in common with the Old South. Over 60 percent of California voters went for Hillary Clinton — a margin of more than 4 million votes over Donald Trump. Since Clinton’s defeat, the state seems to have […]
Make Haste — Deliberately
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review If Trump shows that his actions are a reaction to past extremes, his changes will win public support. The emperor Augustus who oversaw the transition from the nonstop civil war of a collapsing republic to the Principate — with all the good and bad that such a transition entailed […]