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.

Lying for the Cause

victorhanson

If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true.

Continue reading “Lying for the Cause” →

Ripples of Ferguson

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Police tape in front of smoldering remains of Prime Beauty Supply in Ferguson in the aftermath of riots. Photo taken on 11/25/14 by R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com.
Police tape in front of smoldering remains of Prime Beauty Supply in Ferguson in the aftermath of riots. Photo taken on 11/25/14 by R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com.

There is some blame to go around in nearly all racial confrontations. Why the body of Michael Brown was left in the street for hours seems inexplicable. The apparent chokehold that contributed to the death of Eric Garner, with the benefit of video hindsight, does not seem to square with the de facto exoneration of the officer involved. In contrast, there has been absolutely no credible evidence that the unfortunate shooting of Michael Brown was not in self-defense.

Continue reading “Ripples of Ferguson” →

The End of Feminism

victorhanson
Image credit: Duke University
Image credit: Duke University

by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas

California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.” Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that wish to receive state funds or financial aid must adhere to this standard when investigating charges of “sexual assault,” a phrase redefined to include behaviors once considered boorish or insensitive, but not legally actionable. The California law follows on the 2011 Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’s “dear colleague”letter that instructed schools investigating sexual assault complaints to use the “more likely than not” or “preponderance of the evidence” standard of evidence rather than the “clear and convincing” one.

Continue reading “The End of Feminism” →

War Clouds on the Horizon?

victorhanson

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors (Photo: Senior Master Sergeant Thomas Meneguin)
U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors (Photo: Senior Master Sergeant Thomas Meneguin)

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before.

In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored.

The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power shifted, decline for some nations seemed like opportunity for others.

Continue reading “War Clouds on the Horizon?” →

Liberalism in Ruins

victorhanson

Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

By Elizabeth Cromwell
By Elizabeth Cromwell

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Continue reading “Liberalism in Ruins” →

When the Law Is a Drag

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Photo via PJMedia
Photo via PJMedia

In the Ferguson disaster [1], the law was the greatest casualty. Civilization cannot long work if youths strong-arm shop owners and take what they want. Or walk down the middle of highways high on illicit drugs. Or attack police officers and seek to grab their weapons. Or fail to obey an officer’s command to halt. Or deliberately give false testimonies to authorities. Or riot, burn, and loot. Or, in the more abstract sense, simply ignore the legal findings of a grand jury; or, in critical legal theory fashion, seek to dismiss the authority of the law because it is not deemed useful to some preconceived theory of social justice. Do that and society crumbles.

Continue reading “When the Law Is a Drag” →

For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law

victorhanson

The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.

(John Gress/Getty)
(John Gress/Getty)

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.

Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls.

Continue reading “For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law” →

The Forgotten Americans

victorhanson

Obama’s coalition is held together only by his personal mythography.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

President Obama rallies the faithful in Wisconsin, November 2012. (Scott Olseon/Getty)
President Obama rallies the faithful in Wisconsin, November 2012. (Scott Olseon/Getty)

Political analysts still are arguing over why the Democratic party was washed away in the midterm election. Since 2008, ascendant progressives had been crowing over a fresh mosaic of energized minorities, newly franchised immigrants, single young urban women, greens, gays, and — less often mentioned — upscale professionals and the 1-percenter super-wealthy.

Continue reading “The Forgotten Americans” →

Meet the Snobocrats

victorhanson

Jonathan Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses is thematic of the last six years.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Photo via NRO
Photo via NRO

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.

Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.

Gruber apparently thinks such deception is okay because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.

Continue reading “Meet the Snobocrats” →

Explaining Away Obama

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia

Photo via PJMedia
Photo via PJMedia

The only mystery about the last six years is how much lasting damage has been done to the American experiment, at home and abroad. Our federal agencies are now an alphabet soup of incompetence and corruption [1]. How does the IRSever quite recover [2]? Will the Secret Service always be seen as veritable Keystone Cops? Is the GSA now a reckless party-time organization [3]? Is the EPA institutionalized as a rogue appendage of the radical green movement with a director who dabbles in online pseudonyms [4]? Do we accept that the Justice Department dispenses injustice or that the VA can be a lethal institution for our patriots? Is NASA now a Muslim outreach megaphone [5] as we hire Russia, the loser of the space race, to rocket us into orbit?

Continue reading “Explaining Away Obama” →