‘They want to change the system rather than work within the system,’ Hanson says of Democrats
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.
Our Summer of Cultural Suicide
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.
Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.
Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws — such as the need for thrift, moderation, and transcendence.
Take professional sports. Over the past century, professional football, basketball, and baseball were racially integrated, and they adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA, and MLB had become global multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
Then hubris ensued.
Angry Reader 08-01-2020
I was really impressed by the article you wrote that was published in the east bay times today. Mostly impressed by the enourmase size of the piece of shit that you are. Inciting violence from the “silent majority” is one of the most irresponsible things one can possibly publish.
FUCK YOU.
Best Jon Viera
Dear Angry Reader Jon Viera,
Within such a brief note, you included a lot of the usual Angry Reader pathologies—the tired emphatic capital letters, sarcasm, grammatical errors, misspellings, scatology, the F-word, and untruth. If you can cite anywhere in the article you referenced that I called for, or incited violence, you would have cited the passage verbatim, since you seem fond of quotation marks. In fact, you cannot, because I wrote no such thing. I have never advocated violence. Like millions of others I have been appalled at the riot, ruin, injuries and deaths we are seeing on the streets of America and those who have abetted it. There is going to be a backlash and pushback from Americans who are confused by and growing angry at the looting, arson, destruction, and random violence of Antifa and BLM. But the reaction will likely be manifested in either one of two ways—at the ballot box or a sort of disengagement from popular culture—or both.
Best, Victor Hanson
Angry Reader 07-31-2020
Hello Professor Hanson,
First let me say, I am a regular reader and viewer of yours. I relish your take on the important issues.
This evening on Tucker Carlson Tonight with Brian Kilmeade 7/16/2020 you used some imprecise language that caused both me and my bride of many years great distress because she is currently teaching and I taught briefly a few years ago.
The subject was Teacher’s Unions demands for among other things defunding the police, Medicare for all, blah blah, and not working until their demands are met. What specifically offended us was the imprecise language you used in saying that it was the Teachers making these demands as opposed to the Teacher’s Unions.
Please differentiate between the Teachers and the Teachers Unions in the future because not all teachers agree with the liberal democrat party line toed by the unions. It sounded to my wife as if you were saying the Teachers were getting paid for not working and want to keep it that way. That is the furthest thing from her mind. She is called to teach and even at a point approaching retirement rather than phone it in, she expends a great deal of imagination and creativity to provide a challenging educational experience for her students daily.
Your attention to this matter will be greatly appreciated.
Respectfully,
Joe Cox
Dear Not So Angry Reader Joe Cox,
I think it is permissible in a brief 3- minute interview to reference “teachers,” as a generic in the manner we do “steel workers”, “administrators”, the “military”, etc. without adding specifications—with the understanding that most realize that not everyone fits into that category. But they are useful generalities: most teachers are in liberal unions, at least until recent court cases, and most tend to be more liberal than conservative. Most professors are too. Most auto workers believe in strong union agendas. And most military, at least among the enlisted and mid-officer ranks, are more conservative.
I am a teacher; my son is a teacher; my son-in-law is a teacher; my father was a teacher. All of us at various times were / are represented by teacher or professor unions, and all probably were at odds with the official union messaging, and our views were probably in a minority among their union peers. When I say “academics”, and I do use that term, I assume most think that I am an academic who does not agree with the majority of the profession, and that there exist also voices out there who don’t either. Obviously, if most teachers felt like your spouse, then the unions would reflect that common-sense perspective; but they are overwhelmingly leftwing, either because teachers are too, or because too many teachers shrug and are not interested in showing up for union voting, or do not have time for the hassle of opposing such a monolithic and well-funded force.
Thank you for your well-written and professional note.
Respectfully,
Victor Hanson
What Antifa Won’t Tell You
The following article is from my colleague, Paul Roderick Gregory, in The American Mind
Observers of the demonstrations, statue toppling, and riots that followed the police killing of George Floyd on May 25 could not help but notice a distinctive pattern of protest. Legitimate demonstrators stood on the frontline, while stones, Molotov cocktails and other objects were hurled from the rear. Police could not move against the true offenders without breaking through the frontline. At universities, protesters appeared like clockwork armed with signs to disrupt “unwelcome” speakers. These actions all speak to a high degree of coordination and control.
The public has learned to associate these tactics with Antifa (a group whose name stands for “anti-fascist”). Images of Antifa demonstrations show a mostly young, male, and white membership, often armed with police batons. They appear at demonstrations, fight with their opponents, and deny speaking platforms to their enemies. Antifa’s reach is world-wide as it captures the imagination of Millennials.
Yet, almost universally, Antifa is described as a makeshift network of organizations united by a common ideology. Sympathetic media characterize Antifa as a loose network of autonomous activists operating without a control center. Is this true?
Victor Davis Hanson says violent protesters made ‘Faustian bargain’ with Democrats
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told Fox News’ the “Ingraham Angle” that it appears as though violent protesters have made some kind of “Faustian bargain” with Democrats that will result in the party being owned by those taking to the streets.
Waiting for the Counterrevolution
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
W e are in the midst of a revolution, a cultural and racial one, that seeks to refute the past, damn the present, and hijack the future. So far, however, we have only heard from one side, the revolutionaries and their enablers themselves.
Those trying to reject and then reboot America are small as a percentage of the population, but their tactics are diverse, and their frightened abettors and closet appeasers numerous. The result for now is that, as with most cultural revolutions, a tiny percentage of the population seems to be ascending, given that there is no real organized resistance other than isolated and disgusted individuals.
The cultural revolutionaries are a tripartite group.
On the front lines are the shock troops. For the most part, middle-class urban and suburban white kids, many of them in college, graduated, or dropped out, make up Antifa and its affiliates. They seem to organize the statue toppling, graffiti, and vandalism, as well as the violence at the demonstrations. They show up in ridiculous black-clad Road Warrior outfits, fitted out with cobbled-together hoodies, bicycle helmets, knee pads, and various sports-equipment armor, and occasionally with testudo-like umbrellas and assorted fireworks, rocks, bottle, and bats. All that is a psychodrama far more interesting than showing up at Starbucks at 5 a.m. to start the day’s machinery.
Where Are the New Heroes of the Revolution?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Since late May, the United States has been convulsed by a cultural revolution unlike any seen in its recent history. Statues have been toppled, often without any logic or consistent grievance. Institutions have been renamed, again without coherent consistency.
Christian iconography has been a common target. Television shows have been taken off the air; particular corporations boycotted; professional sports recalibrated into social activist spectacles.
If there is any common denominator to this madness, it is apparently that the past was toxic, and erasing it in the present will make for a more just and united future.
For example, because of the glorification of the imperialist and spoiler of native paradise Christopher Columbus, his statue in Chicago must be removed nocturnally by the order of the mayor—in order to restore peace of mind, social justice, and calm. That act of iconoclasm will rectify things in the present, and thus there will not be another 500 annual homicides in Chicago.
But once names are replaced and commemoration destroyed, what exactly follows the erased?
Trump’s Reactive Engagement
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
The United States and indeed the Western world face four quite different challenges on the horizon: China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. All these threats were analyzed at length in the 68-page U.S. National Security Strategy assessment of December 2017, written by then–national-security adviser H. R. McMaster and his staff.
The encompassing theme of that blueprint was dubbed “strategic realism.” In popular parlance it may have been better known as a new “Jacksonianism” — defined loosely as something like the self-composed epitaph of the Roman strongman Sulla found in Plutarch’s life of the general (“No friend had ever surpassed him in doing kindness, and no enemy in doing harm” [οὔτε τῶν φίλων τις αὐτὸν εὖ ποιῶν οὔτε τῶν ἐχθρῶν κακῶς ὑπερεβάλετο]), or perhaps the reactive principle enshrined in the motto of the Stuart dynasty of Scotland, Nemo me impune lacessit — “No one provokes me with impunity.”
One overarching goal of the NSS white paper was to synthesize U.S. and allied interests while isolating enemies and winning over neutrals — and all in the context of a new domestic paradigm of enhancing the economy of the American interior while securing the nation’s borders. That assessment of continued, though recalibrated, engagement abroad explains the considerable increases in U.S. defense spending, the preservation of some 800 military bases and installations, the steady deployment of 170,000 active military personnel overseas, and the assignment of 30,000 State Department officials outside the U.S. Isolationist powers simply do not commit such massive resources outside their borders; declining nations “in retreat” do not allot such forces to protect the interests of so many allies. The aims of restoring economic vitality in the U.S. interior, pressuring China for reciprocal trade, and establishing a secure southern border and energy independence are not just campaign props, but foreign-policy assets that allow America to extend its strategic reach, if need be, well beyond its borders and on its own terms.
Victor Davis Hanson: Not your parents’ revolution — how today’s anarchists differ from 60s protesters
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News
In the 1960s and early ’70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country’s attitudes on race, class, gender and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were likely the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience.
Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of 1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground) bombed dozens of government buildings.
The ’60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music and high divorce rates to the war on poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action and race/gender/ethnic college curricula.