Republicans in Chaos
The GOP’s implosion was entirely avoidable, if anyone had read the signs. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition. After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so […]
The Origins of Trump Nihilism
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media During the most recent Detroit debate, even a reformed “inclusive” and “presidential” Donald Trump still was crass and vulgar. (Has a candidate ever crudely referred to the size of his phallus, and in our sick world is that a Freudian admission of doubt, or […]
Log Cabin Candidates
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Which presidential candidate was born the poorest? Whose log cabin birthplace was the most ramshackle? Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth well over $100 million, largely due to years of leveraging their government service to pull in astronomical speaking and consulting fees from Wall Street, foreign investors […]
Donald Trump: How to Fight Him
What Cruz and Rubio need to do now. Both Donald Trump and his opponents are up against the constraints of time. Trump wants to run out the clock; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want overtime. Trump does not want any more Texas-debate–style fights with Rubio and Cruz, and yet he still has four more debates […]
Obama: The Lamest Duck
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media President Obama is boxed in a state of paralysis—more so than typical lame-duck presidents. His hard-left politics have insidiously eroded the Democratic Party, which has lost both houses of Congress and the vast majority of the state legislatures, state elected offices, and governorships. Obama […]
The Tough Choices of Overseas Intervention
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban. As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then […]
Iraq: The Real Story
Donald Trump’s account of the Iraq War is all wrong. Why aren’t his Republican opponents saying so? Donald Trump constantly brings up Iraq to remind voters that Jeb Bush supported his brother’s war, while Trump, alone of the Republican candidates, supposedly opposed it well before it started. That is a flat-out lie. There is no […]
Weimar America
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media 2016 is a pivotal year in which accustomed referents of a stable West are now disappearing. We seem to be living in a chaotic age, akin to the mid-1930s, of cynicism and skepticism. Government, religion, and popular culture are corrupt and irrelevant—and the […]
The Return of Appeasement, Collaboration and Isolationism
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services World War II broke out when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. A once preventable war had become inevitable — and would soon become global — due to three fatal decisions. Most infamously, the Western European democracies had appeased Hitler during the late 1930s in hopes […]
Venezuela on the Potomac
Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you’re Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he […]
Speak Loudly And Carry A Twig
By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result. The recent splashdown in the Straits […]
Hillary Clinton’s Dead-End Campaign
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination—if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that […]
In Search of Fixes for a Fossilized Economy
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015. While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied […]
America’s Balkan Values
White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak […]
Hillary and the Suspension of Disbelief
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJMedia In a September 2007 congressional inquiry about the ongoing surge in Iraq, then Senator Hillary Clinton all but called Gen. David Petraeus a liar. After Petraeus gave a cautiously optimistic—and prescient—appraisal of the growing quiet in Iraq, Clinton curtly dismissed him with the literary term […]
The Regrettable Decline of Higher Learning
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning? American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else. Colleges still wear the […]
Lessons From California’s Drought
By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Image credit: Barbara Kelley By the end of 2015, it had begun raining and snowing throughout California after fifty months of drought. Meteorologists had long forecasted that the cyclical return of the so-called El Niño Southern Oscillation—the episodic rise in temperature of a band of ocean water that develops in […]
California of the Dark Ages
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between. Or rather, as […]
Forget Trump but Not the Trumpsters
Memo to RNC: Stop ridiculing Trump and look at what voters see in him. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online A disclaimer: Trump is not my preferred candidate. I hope he does not win the Republican nomination. But I understand why millions seem to be mesmerized by his rhetoric. I certainly wish that […]
Either Carry a Big Stick—Or Shut Up!
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJMedia Western culture is deservedly exceptional. No other tradition has given the individual such security, freedom, and prosperity. The Athens-Jerusalem mixture of Christian humility (and guilt) and the classical Socratic introspection combined in the West to make it a particularly self-reflective and self-critical society, in a […]