Listen in as Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss New York City’s new DA’s serious-crimes-only policy, Chicago teachers union’s Covid excuses for not teaching, the luxury of being Blue Americans, and is the end of Progressivism imminent?
Menu
To draw on Victor’s house analogy, our elite are like Victorian aristocrats who could no longer afford to keep the manor going so they lived in one wing while the rest of the house crumbled into ruin. The capital our elite lost is not money but practical governance. So how did they lose it? Well, Progressivism comes from theory-based critiques of the Victorian and Post-War orders. That these critical frameworks have at least something to them is shown by Victor’s use of Marxist categories like class, economic system (CA is Medieval, Fresnoians are the heirs of the Theban Hoplites), an holding of the means of production to critic our current mandarins. The problem with a critique, however, is that it is only useful for exposing problems within a system; it is not itself a system. Marxism avoids this by proposing a better system for understanding human history and the trajectory of civilization. With the gross failure of that system in the last century, Progressivism is left without a coherent system to propose (post modernism fails on grounds of internal inconsistency). Thus, it cannot govern. Sooo… Is there a way for Conservatives to understand Leftist criticism and respond to it with practical refinements of the current system without rejecting any real insights tout court?