By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Trump seems radical only to the radicals who aim to take America far, far left. There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Remember when Obama and Hillary cozied up to Putin? And recall when the media rejoiced at surveillance leaks about Team Trump? The American Left used to lecture the nation about its supposedly paranoid suspicions of Russia. The World War II alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had led many …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Eight years of a fawning press have made the Left reckless. The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that there are certain laws of the universe that operated independently of human concerns. Call Nemesis …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The public no longer believes that privilege and influence should be predicated on titles, brands, and buzz. Establishment furor over the six-week-old Trump administration is growing. Outraged New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared Trump’s victory to disasters in American history that killed and wounded thousands …
by Victor Davis Hanson//Defining Ideas After the election, Democrats could not explain the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton, who would be, they thought, the shoo-in winner in November. Over the next three months until Inauguration Day, progressives floated a variety of explanations for the Trump win—none of them, though, mentioned that the Clinton campaign had …
By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review If the economy grows during Trump’s administration, his opposition will dwindle. “Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties.” — Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch When Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981 amid negative economic growth, roaring inflation, and high unemployment, his critics immediately grew emboldened and …
How a lifelong New Yorker became tribune of the rustics and deplorables By Victor Davis Hanson//City Journal Winter 2017 At 7 AM in California’s rural Central Valley, not long before the recent presidential election, I stopped to talk with an elderly irrigator on the shared border alleyway of my farm. His face was a wrinkled …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring. The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Insight often comes not from an Ivy League degree but by way of animal cunning, instinct, and hard work. “Cleverness is not wisdom.” — Euripides, the Bacchae At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: …
by Victor Davis Hanson// Defining Ideas Throughout the course of the 2016 election, the conventional groupthink was that the renegade Donald Trump had irrevocably torn apart the Republican Party. His base populism supposedly sandbagged more experienced and electable Republican candidates, who were bewildered that a “conservative” would dare to pander to hoi polloi by …