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.
The nihilism of the protests movements, the drop-outs’ human wreckage, the end of the draft and American involvement in Vietnam, and the ‘silent majority’ reaction to hippiness, all ended the Sixites, albeit in the 1970s. George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972 marked the beginning of the end of the age of protest. Both the right-wing insurance agent and the aging professor, like the silly Dionysiac outfitted Teiresias and Cadmus in Euripides Bacchae, now wore paisley and bell-bottoms, and viewed Deep Throat, but otherwise America was on to taste and the good life.
Listen to Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler as they discuss Critical Race Theories and the Left, new evidence from Hunter’s laptop, Trump and 2024, and the 4th of July.
The Sixties were, as the late, great Peter Collier and the astute David Horowitz wrote, the work of a “Destructive Generation.”
Some of the best minds of the conservative movement who lived through those wasted years chronicled their excesses—the narcissism, the selfishness, and the legacy of free love, drugs, and radical chic resistance. All that and more were passed on to two subsequent generations, who inherited the “free that and free this” of the Sixties—but not the educational and moral instruction that ungracious and pampered radicals had received by being raised and taught by the Greatest Generation.
This Fourth of July holiday we might pause for a moment from our festivities to ask how we collectively lost our minds over the last 15 months—and are we yet regaining any semblance of our sanity?
A pandemic caused by the leak of a Chinese-engineered virus and its coverup was cause enough for nationwide madness. But the spread of COVID-19 was followed by a nationalized and often politicized “flatten-the-curve” quarantine that soon ensured a stir-crazy nation. Tens of millions saw no people, and heard nothing human other than what was fed to them through television and computers. No wonder they grew paranoid, conspiratorial, and angry, and soon forgot the therapeutic nature of personal interaction and the shared humanity of being in the physical presence of others.
Armed insurrection—a motley mob riot with no leaders, no firearms, no plans, and resulting in five fatalities, four from natural causes and one shot while unarmed by an unnamed police officer.
Assault—anything but 120 days of rioting, looting and arson, $2 billion in damage, 25 killed, and 14,000 arrested.
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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Two.
Here are the last two of five observations about our current woke racial mania.
4. What were race relations like before the death of George Floyd? Did stats show that of the millions arrested each year by police, unarmed blacks were disproportionally lethally shot? Does a systemically racist country in the last twelve years elect both a black president and a black vice president? Does a racist nation canonize affirmative action for 55 years that provides reparatory preferences to those who are nonwhite as a means to ensure equality of opportunity in reaction to the past racism of those mostly now dead?
Does a contemporary racist country strive to achieve minority unemployment in 2019 of 2.5 percent for Asian-Americans, 3.9 percent for Latinos, and 5.5 percent for African-Americans? In a systemically racist country, why do so many ethnic groups out earn the per capita household income of the purported oppressive majority of whites, in some cases by $20,000 per year? Why in popular culture are media racial imposters, such as a Ward Churchill, an Elizabeth Warren, a Rachel Dolezal, or a Shaun King mostly whites faking minority identities when it is said to be a purported disadvantage?
