The Party of Snobbish Elites
A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy — minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation — protected their […]
Obama, a One-Man Revolution
In his “fourth quarter,” he feels free to ignore popular opinion, the rule of law, and Congress. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the […]
The Timid Generation
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan caving in to North Korea. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Aristotle thought courage the preeminent virtue. Without it, there could be no morality. Virtue becomes a mere abstraction, a high-sounding platitude that is easy to live by in one’s sleep. The present generation may […]
Autopilot Nation
Conservatives lament, and liberals brag, that Obama has fundamentally transformed America. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Six years of slumber later, a surging America finally is transcending even the effects of hope and change. For the last few years, most Americans have tuned out their president’s no-time-to-profit rhetoric. They just kept slogging […]
Fantasyland, U.S.A.
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia One way of reinventing reality is to warp the meaning of words. No president in memory has waged such a war on the English language as has Barack Obama — changing the meaning of vocabulary to hide what he fears might otherwise be unpopular.
The Seductions of Appeasement
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Before World War II appeasement was a good word, reflecting a supposedly wise policy of understanding an enemy’s predicaments. Sober Western democracies would grant tolerable concessions to aggressive dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan to satiate their appetites for more. With such magnanimity everyone would avoid a nightmare […]
Are Drone Strikes More Defensible than Torture?
Democrats are hypocritically silent about Obama’s policy of targeted assassinations. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online There are lots of hypocrisies surrounding the recently released executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. But they pale in comparison to the current Democratic silence about President Barack […]
Sloppy Thinking About ‘Torture’
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Torture is one of those topics that often overwhelm sober reason with lurid emotion. Even people who usually are clear-eyed and rational sink into sloppy thinking and incoherent argument when it comes to torture. Peggy Noonan’s recentWall Street Journal column about the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation […]
Epitaph for Hope and Change
Obama has fundamentally transformed America, all right — but not as he intended. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online A perfect storm brought into power Barack Obama, a previously little-known Illinois community organizer. He had at best a mediocre record as a state legislator and rookie senator. Yet he quickly dazzled the liberal […]
The Campus as California
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Campuses are becoming the haunts of the very wealthy and the poor, with little regard for any in-between — sort of like California. Let me explain. Lately lots of strange things have been in the news about college campuses — from the Rolling Stone’s mythography [1] of the […]
America Continues to Thrive
Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.” Apparently, late 19th-century observers could not quite explain how the […]
Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Once again Hillary Clinton has given the Republicans some suicidal soundbites they should stash away for 2016 in the likely event she is the Democratic candidate for president. A review of some of her recent statements reveals that Clinton is not just entitled, money-grubbing, unlikeable, unpleasant, and unaccomplished. […]
Lying for the Cause
If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive […]
Ripples of Ferguson
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media There is some blame to go around in nearly all racial confrontations. Why the body of Michael Brown was left in the street for hours seems inexplicable. The apparent chokehold that contributed to the death of Eric Garner, with the benefit of video hindsight, does not seem to […]
The End of Feminism
by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.” Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that […]
War Clouds on the Horizon?
A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. […]
Liberalism in Ruins
Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government […]
When the Law Is a Drag
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media In the Ferguson disaster [1], the law was the greatest casualty. Civilization cannot long work if youths strong-arm shop owners and take what they want. Or walk down the middle of highways high on illicit drugs. Or attack police officers and seek to grab their weapons. Or fail […]
For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law
The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those […]
The Forgotten Americans
Obama’s coalition is held together only by his personal mythography. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Political analysts still are arguing over why the Democratic party was washed away in the midterm election. Since 2008, ascendant progressives had been crowing over a fresh mosaic of energized minorities, newly franchised immigrants, single young urban […]