Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security.
In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented. It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern era, when there were no clearly defined or secure borders, and nomadic peoples migrated as they pleased.
Stranger still, illegal aliens were at times given precedence over citizens—as immigration law was simply discarded.
Without IDs, illegal aliens boarded U.S. flights, while the government ordered citizens to obtain more secure “real” IDs.
Some 8,500 veteran soldiers were drummed out of the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccinations. Yet 10 million simply walked across the southern border into America, without a care from the Biden administration whether they were vaccinated, ill, or had criminal records.
Any American citizen pulled over for speeding with an invalid driver’s license, while trafficking eight illegal aliens without identification, would be jailed and charged with felony counts. Not Abrego Garcia—the violent spousal abuser, M-13 gang-member, and previously deported illegal alien. He was neither arrested nor even cited by the officers who pulled him over.
One of the great hallmarks of Roman civilization and subsequent Western civilization was its ability to create large cities by importing clean water, removing waste through sewers, and collecting garbage from the streets. Even in the age before microbiology, ancient and premodern city planners knew the connection between cleanliness and epidemics and how to lessen disease through sanitation.
But in the last two decades, our major cities have been de-civilizing. Citizens are told not to flush non-biodegradable plastics down their toilets, both to preserve the environment and to ensure municipal septic systems work properly. They are reminded to pick up their pets’ excrement on sidewalks and in parks. For purposes of collective health, they are taught not to urinate, spit, or defecate in public areas.
Is all that for naught? After all, our mayors and city councils in our biggest and most iconic cities simply destroyed centuries of such health protocols and allowed tens of thousands of homeless people with impunity to inject, urinate, defecate, and fornicate in or on storefronts, streets, gutters, parks, and sidewalks. The stench, flotsam, and jetsam have utterly transformed American inner cities. Central Seattle, Los Angeles, parts of San Francisco, Portland, and Washington, DC, now resemble medieval London or Paris—as if a millennium-long knowledge of basic public health was simply ignored or mocked. In truth, the centers of America’s big cities are spaces where public health protocols are no longer enforced, where all the ancient and hard-won rules of civilization no longer apply. It would likely be safer to walk through Dickensian London of 1850 than to take a nocturnal ride on the New York subway.
Another hallmark of Western civilization was the creation of a judiciary that gave the state the power to enforce laws, ensure justice, and deter criminals by swift punishment, unaffected by ideology, bias, bribes, and personal vendettas. From the law codes of Justinian to the American Constitution, ascendant civilizations rose with a codified legal system applied uniformly, disinterestedly, and fairly.
Not any longer. Ideology has turned the American legal system into a commissariat of sorts in which relativism is now the norm. Vandalize a Tesla in a blue state and, like the South of old, the laws will be lightly if even enforced and applied selectively. No one seriously believes that Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis were interested in real crimes rather than concocting them to destroy a presidential candidate and thus warp the political system. In contemporary America, it was far more likely to suffer a jail sentence for walking peaceably but unlawfully in the Capitol than for torching a federal courthouse, historic church, or police precinct in the summer of 2020.
From the ancient world to the medieval city to the modern era, universities were catalysts for the advance of science, medicine, law, politics, and the humanities. Their civilizing missions were predicated on two unquestioned assumptions. One, unlike prior superstitions, inductive reason would guide intellectual inquiry; examining all evidence would lead to general conclusions rather than cherry-picking data to “prove” predetermined dogmas.
Today, DEI, the Green New Deal, and the “critical theories”—legal, race, and monetary—in the university start with deductive reasoning and then warp evidence to support such faith-based dogmas. If any of the current violent pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic campus protests were instead directed at reducing abortion, ensuring that biological men do not compete in women’s sports, or banning racial preferences, the protestors would have long ago been arrested, expelled, or deported.
Tribalism was a premodern obstacle to civilization. It remains so in many parts of the Middle East, where it is routine to hire, promote, retain, and reward on the basis of kinship and bloodlines. In America, we were supposed to have a singular meritocracy, civilization’s effort to ensure that those with the most expertise and experience were charged with the most important tasks and responsibilities to ensure the safety and welfare of the majority. Race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation were neither rewarded nor punished.
Instead, we here, too, returned to premodern tribalism and race quotas, regressing to precivilization ideas that we owe our allegiance first to those who share a superficial appearance rather than to the body politic at large.
Finally, civilizations were often judged by their physical infrastructures—whether iconic, like the Parthenon, the Pantheon, medieval cathedrals, or modern towering skyscrapers, or practical by their roads, aqueducts, government buildings, and water and sewage systems.
But by that standard, too, we are decivilizing. Future generations will be amazed at California’s decaying high-speed rail to nowhere. Tens of billions of dollars and over a decade after the start of construction, there is still not a single foot of track laid, but instead only half-finished massive concrete overpasses that now resemble half-destroyed Mycenean palace walls. The nearly one-billion-dollar, half-finished, five-year-old Obama library resembles an oversized Stonehenge monolith.
In California, we do not just blow up dams, the brilliant work of a now-forgotten earlier generation. Instead, we use public bond funds, voted by the citizens to build new dams and reservoirs, to destroy them.
The more California requires lumber for new homes, fuel for its 31 million vehicles, and energy for its 15 million homes, the more the governor and legislature decivilize the state by shutting down timber companies, forcing oil refineries to flee the state, and closing nuclear power plants and fossil fuel generation, while witnessing replacement, new-age battery-power generation plants blow up into flames.
When preventable fires consume whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a paralytic government has no clue how to rebuild the work of past generations. The city government of Los Angeles proved uncannily efficient in ensuring such conflagration—canceling preventive brush clearing, the mayor junketing in Africa during fire season, reservoirs left empty, hydrants that did not work—but cannot rebuild, only destroy.
Why is America decivilizing?
In part, our mediocre schools have not produced competent stewards to maintain and expand the sophisticated infrastructure and ethos of a prior, far more capable generation.
In part, the sheer richness of our inheritance lulled our Lotus-Eater generations to consume what they inherited rather than reinvest it, given that since birth they had been insulated from the elemental and unchanging human and natural challenges to civilization.
And in part, a nihilism arose that despised the hard work of civilization and instead romanticized the wild—clueless that natural man, without the bridles of civilization, is a very dangerous beast, as we so often and lamentably see today.
PBS, NPR would you offer Victor Davis Hanson a regular speaker/commentator slot on your channels? That would truly offer American citizenry “free public broad-casting” – i.e. broad range of high quality intellectual reasoning.
Spot on. Thank you.
What Jim said: Please offer your services to President Trump to guide him with your wisdom……
Great insights on what is taking place in America today. Unfortunately, I see this in my grandchildren today and it seems there is no way to impress upon them these truths.
Thank you for this astute and comprehensive observation Dr. Hansen. It is a breath of fresh air to get a clear view from someone who has witnessed this downfall in dismay. We watch in horror and do our best to warn others with impunity, and to teach the coming generations with futility, because of the so-called “progressive” agenda flooding our schools, media, and culture. We vote with our consciouses and deeply held values to be gaslit, and lied to by greedy and amoral politicians. There are too few left to question or repel the current culture. I feel like a dinosaur in a tar pit.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.” Psalms 33:12
“Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” Proverbs 14:34
America is decivilizing because it has become a secular nation.
Thank you humbly for writing this wisdom!
I hope many people read your wise words,
and truly take your words of wisdom to heartT!
Incredibly precise and accurate accounting of how the Left is destroying 250 years of US history, dedication, and sacrifice by so many of our past generations! Through unceasing lies, stupidity, hate and delusion, it can all be lost so easily!
Just like educators use our children as guinea pigs for their graduate degrees, the globalists are using the public at large for their experimentation. The only solution is to resist and resist strenuously. Hanson as always is right on. Civilization is at stake.
Mr. Hanson,
Blame Mr. Trump for his uncivility year in and year out.
This is the product of fifty years of radical Leftist pernicious subversion of our institutions and the effete response by Republicans. Even now, the Republicans with majorities in both houses are incapable of passing the legislation that can correct a lot of these problems.
It is this lethal cocktail Leftist activism met with a limp wristed response that has led us to the abyss. Lincoln would have put these sinister radicals posing as judges in irons. Instead, we try and reason with an equally biased “supreme court” whose judges espouse their prejudices openly. It’s incomprehensible and disturbing.
What is needed to save our Republic and civilization is the iron will of our founding fathers, to face down the enemy within, dangerous tyrants intent on our subjugation. These are neo-Confederates leading a judicial conspiracy to undermine the Republic. We debate and investigate ad nauseum when decisive action is required.
President Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.” (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, 1821)
The neglect of our spiritual selves, individually and collectively, has left only the baser instincts to animate our political adversaries who have reverted to political tribalism. Its contradictory and contrary nature fuels its libertine, intolerant, collective recklessness as it screeches about liberty, tolerance, individuality and freedom. There’s a disturbingly emotional driven purposeful suspension of discernment that has attained Pavlovian conditioned response within the Democratic Party. Many have left it seeing the contradictions, mendacity and indecency that pervades its inner core but now even its outer, visible and flamboyant “devil-may-care” bearing and demeanor. Its ugliness has surfaced and its wrath, perversity and covetousness are lashing out at everyone for not agreeing with them nor going along silently anymore.
This should come as no surprise after years of negative indoctrination has turned the current generation into the society that Prof. Hansen describes. The question is whether or not this movement can be stopped and reversed.
I suspect that there may have been too much water under that bridge to be optimistic about a recovery or resurgence of a positive and productive society. It would require severe re-education and hardships the degree of which would be unacceptable to the masses.
Be they chosen or imposed a major reversal will eventually occur and it won’t be a pleasant one.
I fear one of the potential outcomes of the “evolution” described by Mr. Hanson is an increased likelihood of civil war in the United States. I’d be curious to know his thoughts. In the meantime, thank you once again, Mr. Hanson, for your insights and your stellar writing.
Sir,
Thank you for this clearly laid out explanation. I wonder who is responsible for this and why have we allowed it? Is there really aa group of global elites who sponsor this in a cohesive manner? And how do we stop it.
First of all, it so nice to read good writing – concise and precise. Another skill of the past going by the wayside.
It is not only the cities seeing the collapse of civilization. I have lived many places in my over half century of life – suburbs and rural towns. Some, if you drive a few miles more from any of those places, you are in the country side. Each one is worse than its past. There are places 40-50 miles out from the closest small city, even in once beautiful farm land areas (likely run by corporations now), where you see bridge underpasses and such with graffiti. Who is doing that way out there? What message are they bringing? All of it seems very coded – it means something to someone nefarious, I’m sure. And much of it has started within the last five years. It is quite sad seeing a beautiful country side marred by graffiti – it never pairs well with nature. All of these markings could easily be cleaned/painted over, but local governments do nothing. We expect nothing so we get nothing. We vote for fools; then we let them trample over us and never hold them accountable for anything. As you say, we selfishly take advantage of what our past fathers have built for us and just let it rot. It is our own fault as a collective. What fools are we.
Who is John Galt? Or rather, where is he?
Professor,
Well and truly done! We may be decivilizing as a society, as you say– but keep in mind that the United States is the world’s largest guerilla base with an estimated 500 million firearms in private hands. It may take 10 years or so, but the criminal illegals that Biden invited in will be dealt with– one way or another. We’ll go so far and no farther.
Professor, you can add “Climate Change Rants” to the list. “Climate Change dogma” requires the deindustrialization of Western Civilization which would not create the very wealth which the left desires to share among themselves.
I suggest, in an attempt to save our civilization we need to become inhumane to become more humane.
Immigration: build the damn wall. Stop all immigration both legal and illegal for 2-3 generations to let the people come together.
The homeless: Make Slavery Great Again.
The Judicial System: Make Robert Barnes the dictator of Judicial Reform.
Tribalism: Set at least one example – deport IIhan Omar.
Infrastructure Boondoggles: This is a tough one but the way Trump is acquiring a plane from Qatar for his new AF One is a good example.
Anytime a human system runs open loop without serious consequential feedback… well I refer to the USAID fiasco.
Thanks to VDH for your wisdom, Im not american but I used to wow on the tv everytime I watched an american movie, the cities looked like a dream, I’ve visited LA, SF, NY, vegas and others, the declining in safety & beauty is outstanding, I really hope you guys could appreciate what many of outsiders see in the US, ideology just destroy what great men have built, dont let the blind “lead” the path
Institutionalizing American ideals should not be a national suicide pact. Common sense must prevail along with a core cullture.
While I found your post a compelling and fair presentation of the facts of the decivilizing of America, I would add one note of dissent to your description of the mediaeval university. As I learned it, in addition to being places where difficult questions could be asked and scholars were free to discuss and debate those questions, those institutions also attracted a criminal element,. This was due in part to the understanding that all students were deemed to be studying for Holy Orders and had clerical immunity from the King’s justice and, at best, could only be tried in ecclesiastical courts, which had no provision for a death penalty.
That is a profound dissection of our country. I wish you were the border czar. I am in Houston,TX
Sadly, Britain is decivilizing too. Even the leafy, white-stuccoed residential streets of London’s affluent Chelsea are no strangers to street crime involving machetes; the public realm in much of the capital is vandalised, dirty and litter strewn; anti-social behaviour is disliked but tolerated. Police officers are nowhere. There is a broader reluctance by most to take a lead and call out poor conduct. Are citizens fearful of being judged ‘judgey’?
VDH,
It’s as if we have forgotten what is knowable in the world.
It seems as if limits to what is knowable has been placed on us by the way we educate both young and old in this country.
It seems that we used to be aware of the wide range of material options to consider.
Essentially everything that is relevant, important for consideration good or bad, right from wrong is lacking in us.
Superficiality has taken over the minds of the majority Americans.
What I find amazing is how those that should know the pitfalls of “nihilism and romanticizing the wild,” our educators, doctors, lawers, judges, elites, the credential class, have embraced it.
Is it selfishness?
This group lacking the awareness of how important the limits are on the material options we need to consider is unacceptable.
The analysis of why America is decivilizing is correct.
What he get wrong is that Trump is part of the problem, not any part of the solution.
Wow, another excellent expose of our collective foolishness and refusal to hold elected “representatives” accountable…..
Please offer your services to President Trump to guide him with your wisdom……
Wonderful consision of our problems and their sources. Yet the result is academic. What solutions do you judge to be most effective and practical?
This is one of Victor’s most powerful recent essays. Rooted in his historical knowledge of civilizations, and the fall of said civilizations, the facts cited and analysis are spot on.