Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Most Americans were as indifferent to the unexpected loss of our Olympic women’s soccer team as they were once excited about their World Cup win.
In between was the team’s nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg—becoming more pinched and scowling the more she is tuned out.
BLM co-founder and self-avowed Marxist Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The last in Topanga Canyon, surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence.
On your Dealing with Chaos podcast, you encouraged readers to weigh in on why the ruling elites seem hellbent on engaging in every counterintuitive measure imaginable to the success of the country. I’ll take my shot at it:
1. Marxism is the foundation for their beliefs: attack the system, break the system, blame the system, take over the system. Previously they were satisfied with a long-term approach, the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. Due to Covid, George Floyd, and other unusual situations, they have seen the exposed jugular of America, and made a decision to go on an all out attack to end the battle earlier than was previously imaginable. Their greed, lust for power, and hatred of the opposition has fueled them to go “all in.”
2. Thomas Sowell has said that you can only judge a person’s effectiveness when you know what it is they are trying to do. We are often puzzled in that the actions of the woke elite seem to all be in the opposite direction of American success and stability. However, the pieces of the puzzle come together if you make an assumption they are actually trying to ruin the country as it was constituted. Once this assumption is in place, then every single action makes perfect sense. America will be brought to heel, exceptionalism will be a thing of the past, borders will be eliminated, and the country will simply become a small part of the global world they so admire.
3. I believe the ruling elites have historically loved the country, although I think Barack Obama was an exception. Now though, it seems the Joe Biden’s, Nancy Pelosi’s, and Chuck Schumer’s of the world have come to hate America. How do we know? You can see it obliquely in their language, but where it really shows is in their actions. Every action is specifically intended to the detriment of America, and to their acquisition and maintenance of power, with the one-party state of California being the model for a one-party United States of America.
Okay, as a nutshell version, these are my thoughts. Thank you Dr. Hanson for everything you do. I literally check your website every day for new content, and am much smarter and well-informed for it. It’s like going to college back when they taught content!
Professor Hanson, I’ve found so much value in listening to your podcasts and I wanted to say thank you. As a 30 something conservative living in Brooklyn, New York, where the streets ooze with woke-ness and my neighbors exist almost entirely to virtue signal over lattes, I spend my time jogging through our parks and listening to the clarity and sanity that your work provides and yet is so absent from the local or national dialogue . It would be easy to identify the political steps taken by progressives as motivated by nefarious intentions though I hold on to hope that people genuinely would like to see America prosper. I think rather the answer has to lay at some distant crossroads of the Twilight Zone. Progressives may have started with low resolution reflexive sympathy as their guide, but some mixture of arrogance, greed, post-modernism and neo-Marxism has hijacked their minds. There also seems to be an overwhelming lack of knowledge of human history, even that of the not too distant 20th century and zero humility. The magic ingredient of course is ignorance. As you’ve often said, in such a wealthy leisured world (bestowed upon us by our ancestors and the same systems and institutions the left claims to want to tear down), people simply are not looking hard enough at the world around them. Thank you for all that you do!!