by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Navigating self-interest, ideals, and public opinion in the debate about illegal immigration. Activists portray illegal immigration solely as a human story of the desperately poor from south of the border fleeing misery to start new, productive lives in the U.S. — despite exploitation and America’s nativist immigration laws. But …
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//American Greatness Struggling rural America proved disenchanted with the country’s trajectory into something like a continental version of Belgium or the Netherlands: borderless, with a global rather than national sense of self; identity politics in lieu of unity and assimilation; a statist and ossified economy with a few winners moralizing to lots …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The economy, academia, immigration, and the environment could benefit from Trump’s unorthodox approach. Populism of the center (as opposed to Bernie Sanders’s socialist populism) has received a bad media rap — given that it was stained in the past by xenophobic and chauvinistic currents. Who wishes to emulate all …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review If Trump shows that his actions are a reaction to past extremes, his changes will win public support. The emperor Augustus who oversaw the transition from the nonstop civil war of a collapsing republic to the Principate — with all the good and bad that such a transition entailed …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Trump’s often unorthodox style shouldn’t be confused with his otherwise practical and mostly centrist agenda. By 2008, America was politically split nearly 50/50 as it had been in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats took a gamble and nominated Barack Obama, who became the first young, Northern, liberal president since …
The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review I think concerns expressed that Trump treat Mexico and President Peña Nieto with dignity and respect are well-taken and wise. But part of the problem inherent in Trump’s pushback is that the present relationship has become asymmetrical for so long that merely returning …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens. One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas. Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few …
By Victor Davis Hanson // Town Hall California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s. A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million — not nearly 40 million as it is today — the 99 used to …
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The shells of our institutions maybe survive the 2016 campaign, but they will be mere husks. The infamous neutron bomb was designed to melt human flesh without damaging infrastructure. Something like it has blown up lots of people in the 2016 election and left behind empty institutions. After …