Author: victorhanson

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

The modern art of a community organizer seems fairly simple.

The proverbial agitator identifies a particular aggrieved racial, ethnic, gender, or class group that believes equality of opportunity must guarantee equality of result.

Then he “organizes” the victims by claiming that their ostensible failure to obtain parity can only be due to systematic racism, sexism, and bias by the supposed callous establishment majority (usually emblemized as callous white, male, heterosexual Christians). Myth is useful (e.g., “hands up, don’t shoot” or “one in four women on campus suffer sexual assault”). Continue reading “Community Organizing America” →

What Obama doesn’t understand about human nature.

Deterrence makes someone not do something. A parent promotes good teen behavior not just by providing cars and smartphones, but also by the explicit specter of graduated punishments that an adolescent does not wish to repeat, and thus chooses instead to abide by the house rules.

In terms of world affairs, a clear display of overwhelming military strength, and the real probability of being willing to use it, remind would-be aggressors not to start stupid conflicts — given that the possibility of winning something through war is overshadowed by the risk of losing far more. A world where everyone knows the unspoken rules as well as the moral and material relative strength and weakness of the various nations is a safer place for all involved.

Or put another way, deterrence, in the famous formulation of the 17th-century British statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, means that “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” Translated, that means that nations do not go to war just over Czechoslovakia, but that other nations are not swallowed up like Czechoslovakia.

Continue reading “The Mother of Peace” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

California has given us three new truths about government.

One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse state services become.

Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc.

And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it.

California somehow has managed to have the fourth-highest gas taxes in the nation, yet its roads are rated 44th among the 50 states. Nearly 70 percent of California roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition by the state senate. In response, the state legislature naturally wants to raise gas taxes, with one proposal calling for an increase of 12 cents per gallon, which would give California the highest gas taxes in the nation. Continue reading “California, Leading from Behind” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Comparing great things to smaller ones, is Donald Trump, in spirit, becoming our version of Napoleon Bonaparte?

For a decade and a half Napoleon wrecked Europe. He hijacked the platitudes of the French Revolution to mask his own dictatorship at home and imperialism abroad. Yet today, two centuries after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he remains an icon for many in, and a few outside, France. Why? How could geniuses like the novelists Victor Hugo and Stendhal acknowledge Napoleon’s pathologies and the damage that he did to the early 19^th century European world, and yet enthuse that he made the French feel both politically and morally “great”? Most French even today believe that he did. Continue reading “Is Trump Our Napoleon?” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with overwhelming popular goodwill and solid majorities in both houses of Congress. He chose not to translate that political heft into passing “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e., open borders and amnesties) or more gun control.

He opposed gay marriage. He warned that he could not use presidential fiats to grant amnesty, close down Guantanamo, or remake the EPA in his own image. He borrowed as never before, in vain hopes of kick-starting a natural recovery that he would soon abort through his own anti-business jawboning, more regulations, growth in government, and tax increases. Continue reading “Liberal Nihilism in a Nutshell” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

President Obama talks a lot about the scientific method. On climate change, he has often invoked the idea of a great divide between those on the progressive left, such as himself, who believe in “settled science” and thus a looming man-caused climatological disaster, and those, presumably on the Neanderthal Right, who are slaves to superstition, ideology, prejudice, and self-interest—and thus deny that the planet is rapidly warming due to inordinate human-induced releases of excessive carbon.

Obama’s view of science is reductionist. Continue reading “Our Superstitious President” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?

Next year the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law. The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.

Then comes 2017.

If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decide to follow the Obama modus operandi?

Consider a number of issues, starting with immigration. Continue reading “Transitioning to the Post-Obama Era” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Clingers 1.0: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Clingers 2.0: “Certain circumstances around being the first African-American president that might not have confronted a previous president, absolutely.  … If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc., which unfortunately is pretty far out there and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials, what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me and who I am and my background, and that in some ways I may represent change that worries them…. If you are living in a town that historically has relied on coal and you see coal jobs diminishing, you probably are going to be more susceptible to the argument that I’ve been wiping out the economy in your area .… I think if you are talking about the specific virulence of some of the opposition directed towards me, then, you know, that may be explained by the particulars of who I am.” Continue reading “Bitter Clingers 2.0” →