Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner Alternative View #4: Paleo Putin Wait a minute. Putin is a dictator, yes, but have we recently cut off all dictators? Xi? The Saudi royal family? Castro, Inc.? The ayatollahs? At least Putin does not desecrate Christianity. At least Russians do not make apologies for their own country. Who fought […]

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner There are four schools of conservative thought in Ukraine. Alternative View #1: Realist Deterrence Putin is a thug—period. Putin violated global norms. Putin is getting thousands killed for some stupid irredentist dream of restoring a lost Russian Empire. So, he must be deterred. He must be stopped. He must be

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner Have We Learned Anything from Ukraine? 6) We have a 79-year-old impaired president and a vice president who is cogent but scarier. The former was nominated by the Democrats’ late primary season terror of woke candidates, the latter was the woke payoff for Biden’s nomination. Both nonentities likely convince Putin

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner 1. We Have No Border An open border is destroying the United States. Just under two million illegal aliens crossed into the United States from the most impoverished areas in the world. They arrive in large part without English, capital, skills, high-school diplomas, background checks, vaccinations, or COVID-tests. They arrived

Victor Davis Hanson Deterrence Deterrence is the classical effort to scare somebody off from attacking you, or your interests—without a major conflict. It is hard to obtain and predicated on being predictable in reacting to aggression, while remaining unpredictable in the level of violence employed. Deterrence can be lost by ennui and becoming transparently passive,

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner The 1619 idea was designed to provoke, not instruct, and, of course, make Ms. Jones “controversial.” 1619 would have vanished with easy refutation—except the New York Times sponsored the ruse. And the rest is history. The powers of relativism were invoked (e.g., “who is to say that one date is

Victor Davis Hanson Education is a zero-sum game. Every decision to read one book entails not reading another. For every language mastered, yet another is shorted. What to study is as important as studying anything at all. Ars longa, vita brevis. Woke is many things—Marxist, nihilist, cruel, incoherent, and especially careerist and grifting. But we

Victor Davis Hanson Historian’s Corner IV. The Republican and Democratic Splits There are quasi-religious and bitter schisms in both parties. On the Right, national and cultural populists vie with shrinking establishment, libertarian, and pre-2016 Republicans; on the Left, radical Jacobins and Socialists versus the Manchinian remnants of the old Democratic Party. But the divisions—ignore the media