Victor Davis Hanson
The Western world—Europe, many of the former British Commonwealth nations, the U.S., and Westernized allies in Asia—is still the envy of the world. Its aggregate economies make up more than half the world’s GDP. Nevertheless, while its population is only 14 percent of the world total, the top fifty countries on the basis of per capita GDP, per capita income, and average life spans are mostly all Western, along with a few petro-nations and tax havens.
Getting to the West is the goal of millions worldwide.
During the Biden years, 10-12 million illegal aliens swarmed the southern border to enter the U.S. The U.S. now has a record 16 percent (53 million in rough numbers) of its resident population foreign-born. In a given year, perhaps 7-8 million illegal and legal non-Western aliens seek to enter Europe or the U.S.—mostly from non-Western countries that are often hostile to Western nations.
In terms of military power, a relatively unarmed Europe alone devotes roughly the same amount of resources to military readiness as does China. The U.S. spends more than Russia, India, and China together on defense.
So why then does it seem that the West is in a spiritual, cultural, and psychological crisis, if not decline? Only Western athletes seem to trash their own nations at international sporting events. Students the world over flock to European and American universities, where they are schooled in anti-Americanism and so often spearhead anti-American demonstrations. Less than half of registered Democrats poll as feeling patriotic.
Why do our marquee immigrants, representatives like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib, or New York mayor Zohran Mamdani voice such strident criticism of their adopted country—and assume their invective will be welcomed rather than damned as ingratitude?
Western media traditionally highlights the sins of the Western past and present, with little effort to emphasize its achievements. The popular culture, from Hollywood celebrities to professional athletes, to marquee public intellectuals, is assumed to be not just left-wing but openly critical of the United States.
Rarely do Western higher education and the media remind Westerners of their material bounty, longer lives, freer and more prosperous and lavish lifestyles. Instead, they are spoon-fed from grammar school through college with the supposed Western culpability for imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
Few students know anything of the dangers of flying over occupied Europe in World War II in a B-17 or what Americans suffered from the Japanese on Okinawa, or the benevolence of the Marshall Plan, or much about the 16-20 million Chinese who were butchered or starved to death by Japan between 1937 and 1945. But they were taught chapter and verse the horrors of Hiroshima as World War II was reduced to the dropping of the two atomic bombs, the Japanese internment, or the Dresden/Hamburg fire raids.
Why do so many celebrities vow to leave the United States every time a conservative president is elected, and yet why do so many welch on their promises, or quietly traipse back after a few months abroad in voluntary ostracism?
So, the question arises, why does the most privileged demographic in the world—those residing in Westernized countries—adopt the most suicidal worldviews and embrace a cult of self-loathing?
Do Westerners not ask themselves why everyone seemingly in the non-West wants into the West, or why Western countries are wealthy even when not blessed with natural resources (e.g., Switzerland, Japan) while non-Western nations endowed with unimaginable natural wealth are impoverished and dysfunctional (e.g., Libya, Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, etc.)?
Do Westerners not understand that the exceptional nature of their 2,500 year-histories that saw the creation, enhancement, and expansion of consensual government, free-market capitalism, protection of private property, personal freedom of expression and speech, religious freedom, rationalism and the scientific tradition, allowance of dissent and self-critique, and civil rights provide the greatest degree of safety, prosperity, leisure, and happiness for their populations?
Discussion (5)
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Professor Hanson, I am a new subscriber, and joined because I found your videos addressing how the Ancients influenced our American Founding Fathers when forming our new nation. I found it fascinating that so many of our founders could read and and write Greek and Latin! Your comments and insights are invaluable; I am always impressed how many people are still thoughtful, measured, and interested in learning about the classical ideas you teach. I am hopeful that our generations of millennials and Gen Z will grow in their understanding and wisdom as they acquire more years in our wonderful country - and hope they come to appreciate western civilization as much as I do! Thank you for your consistent messages!
Thank you for your time and effort in educating Americans to the very real dangers of the former Democrat party, that's now so radicalized it's turned into the Demon’kraut party. Espousing NAZI ideologies and Confederate ideologies. INVADE’igrants are what you're speaking about. The West was invaded! Not with military but just as devastating with fake immigrants who are in actuality INVADE’igrants. Immigrants, like my formerly German wife, come to America and change, then learn the language to better fit in and assimilate bc they love this culture. INVADERS demand change and force that change often at a huge cost to the host civilization. My wife is from Berlin and every single one ofher friends had been RAPED by these INVADERS. Praise God she was not. The West, has been INVADED! It's been no less devastating to the body politic than an actual invasion would have been. Because of this new influx of Islamist into American cities, the Ds are now Satans mouth piece, every single policy they back seems to come straight from the desk of Satan himself. How sad is that?
Yeah, and the ingratitude and hypocrisy of loathfilled U.S, citizens will be on full display this summer for the U.S. Semiquincentennial. If the right has a tendency toward xenophobia, then the left has its equivalent of oikophobia in spades. I can tell you whom I would trust during an invasion... My bad -- we were invaded under the xenophilic Biden, and the left indeed took the other side.
The undermining of our illustrious 2500-year legacy is very widespread within the public K-12 schools. It extends even to the subject of Geometry. Textbooks currently in use make no mention of Pythagoras or Euclid. The theorems of geometry are not derived as a learning exercise but instead are treated as yet another thing to be memorized. Thus, the Pythagorean Theorem is one of thousands of vocabulary- and symbolic topics with no mention of the man who spent 34 years learning from Egyptian and Babylonian astronomers before returning at age 56 to form a cult-like religious movement based on simple geometry and what might be thought of as the first study of number theory. Nor is the logical structure imposed on geometry by Euclid 200 years after Pythagoras mentioned in current textbooks. Einstein described Euclid's efforts as a "magnificent structure". It is a marvelous example of a logically organized deductive study. Instead, students are left with the notion that mathematics is simply memorization. This is an insidious misdirection. The proper study of geometry can arm the student with simple tools that allow novel problems to be addressed. Future employment will favor those who can solve such problems and will find little for those who rely on memorization of existing results. The faddish AI claims are not wrong when they are limited to recalling past analyses.
Terminal ingratitude. Knowing much, but incapable of discerning what is real--enduring and important--vs contrived.