by Victor Davis Hanson Read the original article in Defining Ideas here. Tribalism is one of history’s great destroyers. Once racial, religious, ethnic, or clan ties trump all considerations of merit and loyalty to the larger commonwealth, then factionalism leads to violence, violence to chaos, and chaos to the end of the state itself. …
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The United States and the world appear to be reliving the language, politics, and global instability of 1968. Almost a half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart. The Vietnam War, a bitter and close presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, …
By Victor Davis Hanson//American Greatness It is not healthy for a society to live two lives that are antithetical, as America has been doing in recent decades. Disillusionment with government and popular culture arises at anger over two entirely different realities. One truth is politically correct and voiced on the news and by the government. …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites. The Left-Wing Trump Haters About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental. The hard-leftist …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The new abolitio memoriae Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive …
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Divisive identity politics are fading in favor of a shared American identity. The startling 2016 presidential election weakened the notion of tribal identity rather than a shared American identity. And it may have begun a return to the old idea of unhyphenated Americans. Many working-class voters left the Democratic …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning. The wars between Trump, the media, the deep state, and the progressive party — replete with charges and counter-charges of scandal, collusion, and corruption — are merely symptoms of a much larger fundamental and …
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 …
By Victor Davis Hanson//National Review First sketches of a list, starting with tradition, populism, and American greatness Donald Trump is hated by liberal Democrats because, among other things, he is likely to reverse the entire Obama project. And, far worse, he probably will seek fundamental ways of obstructing its future resurgence — even perhaps by …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Nations are collections of human beings, and human nature has not changed, despite Obama’s pleadings. For the last eight years, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Susan Rice have sought to rewrite the traditional approach to foreign policy. In various ways, they have warned …