Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Presidential campaigns are like galleons sailing into port, their metaphorical Election Day destinations. Some arrive there first, others not at all.

The news cycle is the propellant wind, their own campaigns the ship and its sails, and the candidates the captains on the bridge. Sometimes, no matter how tall the masts and huge the canvas, the wind blows against them or is all but nonexistent. Then the campaign ship stays in the doldrums or goes backward in the polls because of the headwinds — even despite brilliant rigging, clever tacking, and an adroit captain’s seamanship.

Right now, Trump’s ship has been hit in succession by sudden headwinds and violent storms of impeachment, the contagion, the lockdown, the tragic killing of George Floyd, and both the ensuring peaceful protests and violent looting, rioting, and arson. The result is that his voyage to port has nearly stopped. Even warped polls suggest that in the past few days he has caught little wind in his sails, while Joe Biden, asleep at the wheel, lets his crew ever so slowly capture a tiny breeze or two and drift ahead.

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Author and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “The Brian Kilmeade Show” on Wednesday that the left has “hijacked” the protests over the death of George Floyd in order to stage a cultural revolution.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”

Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being: Reason.

Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence such as the wearing of eyeglasses, and he made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

Moammar Qaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.

The current Black Lives Matter revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.

In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.

In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples. 

As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it. 

Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Not long after a number of generals and admirals recently weighed in with renewed criticism of the president in orchestrated unison, presidential candidate Joe Biden seemed giddy at their effort. After breezily asserting that “this president is going to try to steal this election,” Biden then charged additionally that Trump might not depart peacefully after losing the election .

In other words, according to Biden, Trump would either steal an election, claim he won, and then not leave after really losing it, or he would clearly lose it and then refuse to vacate the White House.

But Biden bragged that he was not worried, now that retired generals had “ripped the skin off of Trump,” and thus could be counted on as muscle by the new president Biden:

I was so damn proud. You have four chiefs of staff coming out and ripping the skin off of Trump, and you have so many rank-and-file military personnel saying, “Whoah, we’re not a military state. This is not who we are.”

Biden then offered the warning, “I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

I recently wrote about a number of retired high-ranking generals and admirals, none running for office or currently serving in the Trump administration, whose strident criticisms of the present elected president were setting an unfortunate precedent.

Many disagreed. There are certainly arguments to consider on both sides. But rarely have I read an attack that is wholly disingenuous, so poorly written as to be incoherent, and mostly adolescently ad hominem, of the sort leveled by one Jim Swift of the Bulwark.

Swift says I am a hypocrite (“hypocritical criticism wrapped in a history lesson”) for criticizing current strident political attacks on an elected president, given that I had not previously objected to Generals Mattis, Kelly, and Flynn serving in the Trump administration. (“So much for keeping the military out of politics.”)

But surely even Swift can see the difference between a retired general serving in a government and a general blasting a president while in retirement and not in government. Mattis, Kelly, and Flynn probably all have differing political views. They did not necessarily serve the Trump administration to advance their own or Trump’s political agendas; perhaps they aimed to serve the country if so asked.

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The following article is from my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see things clearly.

The Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) ranks as a fiercely independent newspaper, much like the Swiss people themselves. The high-quality Zurich newspaper is no fan of Donald Trump. It is, therefore, noteworthy that the NZZ views with alarm for the journalism profession recent events at the New York Times.

In its opinion piece, the NZZ wonders whether we are seeing the “end of the newspaper as a place of free thought and the beginning of a moralistic culture of denunciation.” In doing so, it contends that the New York Times would be no different than the “right-wing media” that it often criticizes as being overly partisan instead of purely objective.

The NZZ’s case in point: The forced resignation of James Bennet, the opinion editor of the NYT. His sin, apparently, was publishing a guest commentary by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) entitled “Send in the Troops.” Cotton’s piece endorsed a military intervention against the sometimes violent protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Cotton cited the Insurrection Act, a federal law dating to 1807, as the legal basis for such a military intervention.

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What began as a call to remove the statues of some Confederate leaders has escalated into a full-on debate over whether getting rid of historical monuments is really helping support racial equality or simply erasing a part of American history. 

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, put the debate into historical context.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The ancient Greeks created new words like “paradox” and “irony” to describe the wide gap between what people profess and assume, and what they actually do and suffer.

Remember the blind prophet Teiresias of ancient drama. In the carnage of Athenian tragedy, he alone usually ends up foreseeing danger better than did those with keen eyesight

After a catastrophic plague and endless war, ancient democratic Athens was stripped of its majestic pretensions. Soon it was conducting mass executions — on majority votes of the people.

Throughout history, revolutions often do not end up as their initial architects planned. The idealists who ended the French monarchy in 1789 thought they could replace it with a constitutional republic.

Instead, they sparked a reign of terror, the guillotine, and mass frenzy. Yet the radicals who hijacked the original revolution and began beheading their enemies soon were themselves guillotined.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

General David Petraeus wrote an impassioned article in the Atlantic this week about the need to change the names of military bases that for over a century have been named after Confederate generals and to recalibrate iconic remembrances such as statues commemorating Robert E. Lee at West Point — points of reference he reminds us that have been central in his own experience and career.

His relevant points were twofold and ostensibly rational: Commanders such as Bragg and Benning (Petraeus proposes the renaming of other eponymous bases as well) were not especially effective commanders worthy of such majestic base commemoration. In some cases, as Petraeus notes, they were not even highly regarded by their peers. No one, certainly, would wish to defend the worldview of a Braxton Bragg. And, as Petraeus put it, as “traitors” they fought for an ignoble cause that perpetuated slavery. (Of course, the logic of renaming should then apply to the northern California community of Fort Bragg, also named after the unattractive Braxton Bragg — an idea to which some in the Democratic California legislature failed to win over the town’s mayor in 2015).

I think Petraeus is in many ways correct about his anguish. Yet, the bases were named not so much to glorify overt racists as for a variety of more mundane, insidious reasons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — from concessions to local southerners where many of these bases were to be located, to obtain bipartisan congressional support for their funding, and to address the need in the decades-long and bitter aftermath of the Civil War to promote “healing” between the still hostile former opponents.

We should note that not all Confederates were quite the same in terms of our current moral reexaminations. General Longstreet differed from, say, a General Nathan Bedford Forrest, not necessarily on the basis of their undeniable respective competency or even clear culpability in perpetuating the war, but on their quite different efforts at postwar outreach and healing. But then again such assessments would be to assume that we are all mortals and not deities.

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