The Myth Of Progress
By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas President Obama is fond of using the phrase “the arc of the moral universe,” a line derived from Martin Luther King Jr’s longer quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” King, in fact, lifted the often-used sentence from earlier Christian ministers. […]
Why We Are Sick of Washington
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online John Kerry just announced to the graduating class at Northeastern University: “You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.” Of course, Kerry himself never believed in a “borderless world” — any more than when, in Trump-style, he once ripped President Bush for allowing “unpatriotic” outsourcing. […]
Trump or Clinton — a Hobson’s Choice?
What do conservatives do when there is no conservative candidate? By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online I watched Donald Trump serially blast apart all my preferred candidates — Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — as if for sport they were sent up in succession as clay pigeons. And now the November […]
Obama’s Gift of Immunity to Trump
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media It is now old wisdom that Barack Obama created Trump—as in the idea of a national pushback to Obama’s out-of-the-mainstream agendas and the unconstitutional way in which he pursued them. Forgotten is the insulation that Obama has also provided for the excesses of Trump […]
Protesters Have Jumped the Shark
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online ‘Jump the shark” is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything — […]
Trump: Something New under the Political Sun
The predictions about Trump have been so wrong because none of the normal rules apply to him. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Columnists assured us that Donald Trump’s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News’s star anchor […]
The Nihilism of Sanctuary Cities
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media There are an estimated 300 or so jurisdictions — entire states, counties, cities, and municipalities — that since the early 1980s have enacted “sanctuary city” laws, forbidding full enforcement of federal immigration law within their jurisdictions. Most of these entities are controlled by Democrats […]
Setting the Record Straight on Britain, America, and World War II
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online While in London last week, President Obama waded into the upcoming British referendum about whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union. Controversy followed his lecture about the future of the Anglo-American relationship should Britain depart the EU. Obama also implied that without an EU, […]
World War II Amnesia
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Seventy-seven years ago, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, triggering a declaration of war by Great Britain and its Empire and France. After Hitler’s serial aggressions in the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, the Munich Agreement, and the carving up of Czechoslovakia, no one believed that a formal war […]
What Do the Trumpsters Want?
There are many reasons to oppose Trump. But those aren’t the reasons being cited. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Count the reasons to oppose Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. His conservative credentials are thin, recent, and often haphazard. His brash style will likely alienate more voters than it […]
21st Century California Reverts Back to the Wild West
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media I grew up listening to stories of turn-of-the-century rural Central California from my grandfather Rees Alonzo Davis (1890-1976). He was the third generation of the Davis family to have lived in my present house—great nephew of Daniel Rhoades, who had walked into the High […]
The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history. No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is […]
The Contradictions of Diversity
Whereas the Founders prized unity, 21st-century America has embraced diversity. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Diversity is a neutral term, no more positive or negative than its array of antonyms such as homogeneity and uniformity. Iraq is certainly diverse. So is Syria or the Balkans; Japan and South Korea are not. Yet […]
Is NATO worth preserving?
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Donald Trump recently ignited another controversy when he mused that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete. He hinted that it might no longer be worth the huge American investment.In typical Trump style, he hit a nerve, but he then offered few details about the consequences of either […]
White versus White America
White elites are the main reason Donald Trump’s campaign hasn’t sputtered and failed. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Why do the angry white poor and working class support the unlikely populist Donald Trump — a spoiled bully who made and lost fortunes in part by gaming the system, who seems to take […]
The Next President Is Going to Be Hated
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media Everyone hates the sourpuss who says the party is over. The next president will have to tell the American people that a reckoning is on the horizon—and that it is not going to be pretty. President Obama has created lots of mythoi about the […]
The Politicization of the English Language
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Last week, French President Francois Hollande met President Obama in Washington to discuss joint strategies for stopping the sort of radical Islamic terrorists who have killed dozens of innocents in Brussels, Paris and San Bernardino in recent months. Hollande at one point explicitly referred to the violence as […]
How America Lost Its Groove
President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton all had a hand in it. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Deterrence is lost through lax foreign policy, an erosion of military readiness, and failed supreme command — often insidiously, over time, rather than dramatically, at once. The following random events over […]
A Nation of Laws—Sort Of
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media Any fair reading of State Department and general federal government laws regarding the use of classified information by federal employees makes it is clear that Hillary Clinton violated the law—both by improperly setting up her own private server, and then by sending information through […]
Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic […]