Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

When Normalcy Is Revolution

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Trump’s often unorthodox style shouldn’t be confused with his otherwise practical and mostly centrist agenda.

By 2008, America was politically split nearly 50/50 as it had been in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats took a gamble and nominated Barack Obama, who became the first young, Northern, liberal president since John F. Kennedy narrowly won in 1960.

Democrats had believed that the unique racial heritage, youth, and rhetorical skills of Obama would help him avoid the fate of previous failed Northern liberal candidates Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Given 21st-century demography, Democrats rejected the conventional wisdom that only a conservative Democrat with a Southern accent could win the popular vote (e.g., Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore).

Continue reading “When Normalcy Is Revolution” →

Our Game of Thrones

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The Corner
The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

The Trump administration’s flurry of reversing the earlier flurry of Obama executive orders and the Left’s hysterical response is proving a sort of strategic Game of Thrones.

Trump’s opponents believe that they are bleeding him from a thousand nicks. Without the requisite political clout, their ultimate goal is to drive crazy uncomfortable Republican establishmentarians and force them into a fetal position where they beg for it all to just go away, turning on their own first rather than their adversaries. Or they wish to create such universal chaos that bend-with-the-wind federal judges go with the flow and start issuing endless injunctions in a way they rarely did with Obama’s executive orders. Continue reading “Our Game of Thrones” →

The Democrat Patient

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Ignoring the symptoms, misdiagnosing the malady, skipping the treatment

If progressives were to become empiricists, they would look at the symptoms of the last election and come up with disinterested diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses.

Although their hard-left candidate won the popular vote, even that benchmark was somewhat deceiving — given the outlier role of California and the overwhelming odds in their favor. The Republicans ran a candidate who caused a veritable civil war in their ranks and who was condemned by many of the flagship conservative media outlets. Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won. Continue reading “The Democrat Patient” →

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Four Fonts
for Victor Davis Hanson

When young I thought all wealth came from the soil,
forests, seas and mines.
My finest early lines
were blessings on our farmers and their toil.

I’ve praised the fishermen, the loggers too.
Noble, the miner’s soul
digging the earth for coal,
for iron ore that builds a penthouse view.

I’ve praised the trees for papers that we read,
much credit to him too
machining every screw
that knits together everything we need,

the roughneck drilling for our gas and oil.
I still think all our wealth comes from the soil.

Great essay, Tim Murphy

Trump and Mexico

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The Corner
The one and only.
 by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
I think concerns expressed that Trump treat Mexico and President Peña Nieto with dignity and respect are well-taken and wise.
But part of the problem inherent in Trump’s pushback is that the present relationship has become asymmetrical for so long that merely returning to a normal 50/50 give and take will inevitably cause hysteria. Given political realities in Mexico, Peña Nieto must push back, but such natural patriotism should not disguise the fact that Mexico depends on the U.S. far more than the U.S. on Mexico — a fact privately conceded by all leaders on both sides of the border.
For decades Mexico, a country richly endowed with natural resources, climate, weather, and geography, has failed to make necessary reforms that might have offered its own citizens the security and prosperity that would have made their emigration unnecessary. This lapse most recently was largely because a ruling aristocracy saw advantage in seeing mostly impoverished and indigenous citizens from Oaxaca and southern Mexico, at great risks to their persons, leave their country.

Continue reading “Trump and Mexico” →

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From an Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Bill Anderson

Hi
I know it is a job but ….
He is awful. Why he writes this tosh and why anyone would read it is beyond peculiar, Try to get him seen. Even for bozo right wing ideologues there are limits.

Best Wishes 

Bill Anderson

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Bill Anderson,
You do not specify a particular column, but apparently are just angry in general at “right wing ideologues.” Also please define “awful”—as in you do not agree with the conclusions, or you find the argument illogical?
Again, the problem with the Left (cf. the latest rants of Madonna, Ashley Judd, the SNL writer, etc.) is that in place of an argument we get only invective (“tosh,” “bozo,” “awful,” etc.). Worse still is the thematic condescension, as if being for “equality” and “fairness” ensure virtue and thus allow the writer like yourself to indulge in cheap smears and to vent rather than reason. Using archaic Anglicisms like “tosh” is not a good way to reach the proverbial masses, your apparent constituency.
As for you other two points:

Continue reading →

Fake News: Postmodernism By Another Name

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by Victor Davis Hanson//Defining Ideas

After the election, Democrats could not explain the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton, who would be, they thought, the shoo-in winner in November. Over the next three months until Inauguration Day, progressives floated a variety of explanations for the Trump win—none of them, though, mentioned that the Clinton campaign had proven uninspired, tactically inept, and never voiced a message designed to appeal to the working classes.

When a particular exegesis of defeat failed to catch on, it was mostly dropped—and then replaced by a new narrative. We were told that the Electoral College wrongly nullified the popular vote—and that electors had a duty to renege on their obligations to vote for their respective state’s presidential winner. Continue reading “Fake News: Postmodernism By Another Name” →

Prosperity Is Destiny

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 By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

If the economy grows during Trump’s administration, his opposition will dwindle.

“Ten thousand cuts an awful lot of family ties.” — Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch

When Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981 amid negative economic growth, roaring inflation, and high unemployment, his critics immediately grew emboldened and sought to ankle-bite him at every turn: Reagan purportedly had created homelessness all by himself; Reagan was on the verge of ensuring a “nuclear winter” and a “day after” desolation from a likely nuclear exchange, given his nihilistic tough stance against the Soviet Union.

After dismantling the air-traffic controllers’ union, Reagan had supposedly endangered the lives of plane passengers and ruined the idea of unionism itself, replacing it with “let them eat cake” indifference. Continue reading “Prosperity Is Destiny” →

Trump and the American Divide

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How a lifelong New Yorker became tribune of the rustics and deplorables
By Victor Davis Hanson//City Journal

Winter 2017

At 7 AM in California’s rural Central Valley, not long before the recent presidential election, I stopped to talk with an elderly irrigator on the shared border alleyway of my farm. His face was a wrinkled latticework, his false teeth yellow. His truck smelled of cigarettes, its cab overflowing with flotsam and jetsam: butts, scribbled notes, drip-irrigation parts, and empty soda cans. He rolled down the window and muttered something about the plunging water-table level and whether a weak front would bring any rain. And then, this dinosaur put one finger up on the wheel as a salutation and drove off in a dust cloud.

Five hours later, and just 180 miles distant, I bought a coffee at a Starbucks on University Avenue in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, the spawn of Stanford University. Two young men sat at the table next to me, tight “high-water” pants rising above their ankles, coat cuffs drawn up their forearms, and shirts buttoned all the way to the top, in retro-nerd style. Their voices were nasal, their conversation rapid-fire— politics, cars, houses, vacations, fashion, and restaurants all came up. They were speaking English, but of a very different kind from the irrigator’s, accentuating a sense of being on the move and upbeat about the booming reality surrounding them. Continue reading “Trump and the American Divide” →