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 China is following the same path to regional hegemony that Japan did in the 1930s. A few weeks ago, Chinese president Xi Jinping offered a Soviet-style five-year plan for China’s progress at the Communist Party congress in Beijing. Despite his talk of global cooperation, the themes were …
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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| American Greatness Every generation, in its modesty, used to think the prior one was far better. Tom Brokaw coined “The Greatest Generation” to remind Americans of what our fathers endured during the Depression and World War II—with the implicit message that we might not have been able to do what they …
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Trump did not create the divide in the GOP policy world — he exposed it. The Trump victory and the Republican establishment’s mostly negative reaction to it have in matters of foreign policy called into question who is conservative, who not — and whether the old ideological rubrics …
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The time for pious American lectures is over. North Korea North Korea seeks respect on the cheap — and attention and cash — that it cannot win the old-fashioned way by the long, hard work of achieving a dynamic economy or an influential culture. Over the …
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review In Warsaw, the president delivered the antithesis to the fallacious, appeasing lecture Obama preached to the Egyptians. Obama’s Cairo Address, June 4, 2009 About five months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the president gave a strange address in Cairo. The speech was apparently designed to win over the …
Op-Ed By Victor Davis Hanson // Los Angeles Times Scotty Breneman fillets a yellowfin tuna at Dory Fisherman’s Market in Newport Beach, Calif. on July 25, 2015. (Los Angeles Times) As jobs that require physical work decline thanks to technological advances, life superficially appears to get better. Cheap cellphones, video games, the Internet, social media …
By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete. In various versions of the …
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review History has not been very kind to countries that enter a state of multicultural chaos. The United States is currently the world’s oldest democracy. But America is no more immune from collapse than were some of history’s most stable and impressive consensual governments. Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence …