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.

Ten Commandments of the Supreme Court

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

What is sacrosanct? Whatever advances progressive causes.

1) Right to Left. The majority of post-war Republican Supreme Court nominees, who were initially perceived as conservative, turned liberal on the bench (Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Earl Warren), or went from right-wing to center-right or centrist (Warren Burger, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts). Perhaps the pressures of approval from the liberal social and political culture of Washington, D.C., becomes finally overwhelming. Or justices sense that the liberal media and historians will praise and memorialize a “maverick” who “grows,” “matures,” or “evolves,” while dismissing a “recalcitrant,” “hard-core,” or “reactionary” justice who remains a strict constructionist. A conservative president perhaps realizes that he will get more praise from the Left than blame from the Right when his malleable nominee bolts and become progressive. The ongoing liberal political reassessments of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in part came from their nominations of Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter. Or perhaps as we age we all tire a bit and cave to popular pressures and prefer “to just get along” in our sunset years. Controlling the culture — and the threat of ostracism from it — is a powerful tool in massaging political ideology.

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Deport the Deplorables?

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Deport the Deplorables is a slogan of popular culture, found on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and internet postings. But now the mini-industry of deplorable/deportable sloganeering has made its way into more elite circles.

With just three words, the phrase “deport the deplorables” sends two popular messages: one, get rid of undesirable American citizens who voted for Donald Trump and who were properly written off in 2016 as deplorables by Hillary Clinton. And, two, by implication, don’t deport the illegal aliens who broke U.S. immigration law. Or put more succinctly, foreign nationals who crash our borders are innately superior people to citizens of the working- and middle-classes who voted for Trump.

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Why Europe Gets No Respect

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Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution

After the recent G-7 meeting, some European nations such as France and Germany expressed anger that their views were given short shrift by Donald Trump—displaying fits of pique memorialized in a now infamous photo of standing G-7 leaders who were leaning into a surrounded and sitting Trump. “International cooperation,” huffed an unidentified senior French official, “cannot depend on being angry and on sound bites. Let’s be serious.” The former British ambassador to the U.S., Peter Westmacott, sniffed, “Trump is readier to give a pass to countries that pose a real threat to Western values and security than to America’s traditional allies. If there is a ‘method to the madness,’ to use the words of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, it is currently well hidden.”

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Reciprocity Is the Method to Trump’s Madness

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The president sends a signal: Treat us the way we treat you, and keep your commitments.

Critics of Donald Trump claim that there’s no rhyme or reason to his foreign policy. But if there is a consistency, it might be called reciprocity.

Trump tries to force other countries to treat the U.S. as the U.S. treats them. In “don’t tread on me” style, he also warns enemies that any aggressive act will be replied to in kind.

The underlying principle of Trump commercial reciprocity is that the United States is no longer powerful or wealthy enough to alone underwrite the security of the West. It can no longer assume sole enforcement of the rules and protocols of the post-war global order.

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The Strange Career of White Privilege

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Rich whites invent minority pedigrees to gain advantage while they condemn poor and working-class rural whites as racist.

You hear the phrase “white privilege” nonstop in America these days, as the slogan has transcended the campus and entered popular culture.

Historically, the term apparently refers to the original European settlers who came to the United States and later equated the protections of the U.S. Constitution solely with their own majority ethnicity and race — a tribal and chauvinistic mindset that still governs politics and immigration the world over, from China and Japan to most African and South American countries.

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History’s Bad Ideas Are an Inspiration for Progressives

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

What we now consider stupid and dangerous ideas of the past, progressives see as useful in the present.

Even liberal historians usually label as disastrous two decisions by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration: the adoption of the Earl Warren-McClatchy newspaper inspired plan to intern Japanese-American citizens and the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937—better known as FDR “court-packing scheme.”

The latter was a crazy scheme to remake the Supreme Court, given that Roosevelt wanted no more judicial interference in the implementation of the New Deal. And yet he had no recourse until slow-coach judicial retirements opened up new appointments of compliant progressive justices. In the interim, the convoluted proposal would have allowed Roosevelt to select a new—and additional justice—to the Supreme Court for every sitting judge who had reached 70 years, 6 months, and had not retired. And in theory, he could pack on 6 more judges, creating a 15-member court with a progressive majority.

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The Left Can’t Come to Grips with Loss of Power

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

There’s no better explanation for the current progressive meltdown.

Key Trump administration officials have been confronted at restaurants. Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) urged protesters to hound Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations, or department stores.

Progressive pundits and the liberal media almost daily think up new ways of characterizing President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant, or buffoon. Celebrities openly fantasize about doing harm to Trump.

What is behind the unprecedented furor?

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Angry Reader 07-03-2018

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From An Angry Reader:

I was hopeful to find insightful conservative thought for a change, however I was disappointed to find yet another partisan albeit under the guise of an academic. Your ideas are not original nor interesting in terms of advancing our country. Instead, all of your work seems to revolve (devolve?) to the standard conservative playbook. The west is truly doomed if this is all our thinkers can come up is replacing old rightest ideas with old leftist ideas!

You provide the same old shtick and are not solving any problems. Your life must be really boring. Oh yeah, you are a historian. Of course.

Sincerely

Frustrated moderate engineer

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Dear Angry Reader and frustrated moderate engineer Steve DiGrazia,

I am afraid that your disagreements are not really over ideas that are not original or do not serve the public interest, but largely your anger is because they conflict with you own—despite your self-described epithet “frustrated moderate engineer,” whatever that exactly means. The ideas expressed here are pretty centrist: smaller rather than larger government, lower rather than higher taxes, secure not open borders, the melting pot rather than the salad bowl, a tragic view of human nature, not one therapeutic, deterrence rather than appeasement, and so on.

But I fear your letter descends into incoherence—odd for an engineer who normally deals with laws, facts, and data. After lamenting that the above is the “old standard conservative playbook” you finish with “replacing old rightest ideas with old leftist ideas,” which makes no sense: I’d like to replace “old leftist ideas” with traditional ideas that have worked for centuries and do not lead to a Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, or North Korea. And just when I thought you scored a respectable 1 or 2 on the Angry Reader scale, you zoom up to a 5 with the inevitable ad hominem at the end: “Your life must be really boring. Oh yeah, you are a historian. Of course.”

Actually, I am blessed by living on a farm part of the week, and at Stanford the other few days: it gives one a scale by which to calibrate academic madness; in comparison to academics, farmers are mostly sane.

Sincerely,

Non-frustrated historian

History as Nothing Much at All

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Former CIA director Michael Hayden recently tweeted a picture of a Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with his commentary: “Other governments have separated mothers from children.” The suggestion was that industrialized death on an unprecedented scale was somehow similar to the temporary detention of children once their parents have been detained for violating federal law.

Actor Peter Fonda recently advised the following about Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller: “Don’t let the pedophile Stephen Goebbels Miller near those girls separated from their parents.” Comedian Kathy Griffin has asserted that the Trump administration is “quite pro-Nazi.”

Fonda perhaps lacks the subtlety of a Bill Kristol, who implies rather than sledgehammers the Nazi comparisons. When Michael Anton, a writer whose articles often appeared in The Weekly Standard, went to work for the Trump administration, Kristol reduced Anton to the status of an infamous Nazi lawyer: “Carl Schmitt to Mike Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.”

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Progressives Should Back Up Their Rhetoric on Immigration

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Liberals, invite illegal aliens to live in your communities.

There are lots of short-term solutions to address the wave of immigrants who have swarmed the border in an effort to enter the U.S. illegally.

Why not use the thousands of currently half-empty residence halls at American colleges and universities to help house families from Central America and Mexico who await adjudication of their asylum claims?

The federal government could contract out to universities such as UCLA, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, and large public universities in Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico to offer migrants temporary summertime shelter and sustenance. Law schools could offer pro bono legal counseling, and medical schools could offer health services.

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