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.

War’s Paradoxes II: From the Peloponnesian War to ‘Leading From Behind’

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by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

1. Why Did Athens Lose the Peloponnesian War?

It really did not in a way: Athens no more lost the war than Hitler did the Second World War between September 1939 and May 1941. Instead it was defeated in a series of wars (only later seen as elements of one long “Peloponnesian War”) against a litany of enemies — none in isolation necessarily fatal, all in succession and ultimately together lethal. Continue reading “War’s Paradoxes II: From the Peloponnesian War to ‘Leading From Behind’” →

War’s Paradoxes II: From the Peloponnesian War to ‘Leading From Behind’

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

1. Why Did Athens Lose the Peloponnesian War?

It really did not in a way: Athens no more lost the war than Hitler did the Second World War between September 1939 and May 1941. Continue reading “War’s Paradoxes II: From the Peloponnesian War to ‘Leading From Behind’” →

Not the Message, Not the Messenger, It’s the Voter: Part I

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by Bruce Thronton

FrontPage

Nearly 3 months after the presidential election the Republicans are still trying to fix what they think went wrong. A popular culprit is the Republicans’ alleged failure to communicate forcefully or persuasively a message that would move voters presumably receptive to conservative policies and principles. Continue reading “Not the Message, Not the Messenger, It’s the Voter: Part I” →

The New Age of Falsity

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by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery — even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of Americans long out of work. Continue reading “The New Age of Falsity” →

War Is Like Rust

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by Victor Davis Hanson

Tribune Media Services

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.

Throughout history, we have seen that war Continue reading “War Is Like Rust” →

California at Twilight

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by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

We keep trying to understand the enigma of California, mostly why it still breathes for a while longer, given the efforts to destroy the sources of its success. Let’s try to navigate through its sociology and politics to grasp why something that should not survive is surviving quite well — at least in some places. Continue reading “California at Twilight” →

The Age of Tokenism

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by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

It is a depressing characteristic of government today to loudly enact legislation and impose regulations of little utility, while neglecting to address the root causes of truly serious problems. We do not know to what degree a Sandy Hook or a Columbine is caused by improperly treated mental illness, violent video games, Hollywood’s saturation of the popular culture with graphic mayhem — or access, by hook or by crook, to semi-automatic “assault” rifles. But we do know that the latter play almost no role in Chicago’s horrific annual tally of 500 murders — and account for less than 1 percent of the gun-related deaths in the United States each year. Yet we also confess that taking on Hollywood, the video-game industry, or the mental-health establishment would be far more acrimonious and politically risky than demonizing the National Rifle Association. Continue reading “The Age of Tokenism” →

Wards of the State

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by Bruce Thornton

Defining Ideas

The biggest political problem the United States faces — runaway entitlement costs on track to bankrupt the treasury — is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Even talking about it can be politically dangerous, as the Republicans learned in November and during the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. They chastised Mitt Romney’s post-election comments about the entitlement “gifts” President Obama promised voters. And the Republican demand that tax-hikes be linked to spending cuts to avoid the “fiscal cliff” was demonized as “holding the middle class hostage.”
Continue reading “Wards of the State” →

Europe’s Wishes Came True

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by Victor Davis Hanson

Tribune Media Services

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly “war on terror” and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion.
Continue reading “Europe’s Wishes Came True” →

Women at the Front

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by Victor Davis Hanson

NRO’s The Corner

Ostensibly, there are really only two issues about the inclusion of women in combat units: one, apparently the nation believes that it will react to the future combat deaths or capture of women in ground units the same way it does to the loss of male soldiers, even in numbers commensurate with male KIAs — that is, society has evolved beyond the traditional chivalric notion of deference to “women” (e.g., on a sinking ship the men of our modern culture no longer feel any need to step back and allow women first crack at the lifeboats); and two, assuming there is no gender exemption for meeting physical requirements (e.g., SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, etc. insist that women meet the same physical requirements as their male counterparts), then there seems no reason why women should not be fully integrated into combat units. Continue reading “Women at the Front” →