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From An Angry Reader:

Dear Professor Hanson,

You are a hypocrite.

You endlessly, in your writings and talks, decry people who say ‘if it ain’t perfect it ain’t good’, and yet you constantly moan about Obama just because he ‘wasn’t perfect’ and did some crooked things. You, sir, are a hypocrite. You could at least admit that both parties stink and that all politicians are liars.

By the way, you need to stop moaning about how ‘the elite’ should do more ‘hands-on’ work (I will soon start calling you Victor ‘Hands-on’ to reflect your obsession). Have you ever thought that maybe nobody wants to do those grueling back-breaking jobs for a dollar an hour, and that maybe some people want to get away from that life? Do you really think Donald J Trump, your hero, ever did a single day of hard basically unpaid work like that? Who would want that life if they could get a decent wage—or better rich—without breaking their back? Do you really expect kids to aspire to be fruit-pickers when they could be lawyers earning 200k a year working 5 days a week? I call BS.

Maybe you’re right in principle, but nobody is as principled as you who could or would want to do that. Also, lots of people in inner cities want to do that kind of manual labor or farm-work, but have no access or ability to do it because unlike you they don’t have a farm of their own. How the h*ll can they do what you want them to do when they don’t even have the social mobility to have access to the countryside? Heck, most people struggle just to pay the rent in the inner cities nowadays; most people are slaves to the state. I would rather be a real slave than have the fake urban ‘freedom’ (i.e. prison) that modern scum politicians have created for us.

Dan Smith,

Miami

_________________________________________________

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Dan Smith,

Calm down; your anger clouds all reason. Most politicians, but not all, are liars. While I agree that both parties lie, at this particular juncture in American history, nevertheless the two parties are not morally equivalent.

nstead they represent vastly different world views: identity politics versus the melting pot; illegal massive immigration vs. legal, measured, diverse, and meritocratic immigration; more taxes and larger government vs. lower taxes and less government; a therapeutic foreign policy vs. deterrence; less defense spending vs. more of it; curbs on expression vs. free speech. The antitheses are really quite endless.

Obama did not grow the economy (sluggish and always less than 3%). His rhetoric divided the nation. The world abroad fell into chaos. The debt doubled. Taxes rose. Health care deductibles, premiums, and copays skyrocketed. Programs like cash for clunkers, “shovel-ready” jobs, or Solyndra-like subsidies were embarrassing. The border was left open. Eric Holder was cited for contempt by Congress. Corruption—at the IRS, Secret Service, GSA, VA, and EPA—was commonplace. Reporters had their communications tapped. Unmasking and leaking were normative. Need I go on? Obama was an iconic president—fine; but there was no record of accomplishment and a great deal of deliberate polarization.

Donald Trump is not my hero; did I write that? He is a corrective to the Obama years. Few others were willing to take up that role.

Stopping illegal immigration and pro-growth policies might give entry-level workers clout with their employers, and allow wages to rise. The proponent of open borders is the proponent of low wages. “Fruit pickers” could once again be summer job seekers and entry level employment that soon led to higher paying and more skilled work, especially if labor is not cheap and accessible through illegal immigration. I think my writings have supported the idea that muscular labor should be more highly rewarded.

Do you not see that the opponent of illegal immigration wishes wages to rise and inner-city youth to be in demand as workers?

In a full-employment economy, employers could not ignore inner city youths, but would work with them to reenter the work force. I don’t see at all the morality of importing a half-million foreign nationals to work when we have millions of Americans who are not employed and have dropped permanently out of the work force.

Finally, no one is a perpetual victim. We all face constant pressures and personal tragedies. Claiming always of a stacked deck and blaming others or cosmic forces in general guarantee personal failure.

I’d like to engage your questions, but there are few coherent inquiries here.

Victor Hanson

Selma

Two First Quarter Cheers For Trump’s Principled Realism

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by Robert G. Kaufman//Strategika
 

Image credit:

Poster Collection, US 05889, Hoover Institution Archives.

The content and trajectory of Donald Trump’s foreign policy have defied the expectations of many of his supporters as well as his critics across the political spectrum. The President has moved a long way from his campaign positions of denigrating the value of America’s democratic alliances and renouncing America’s role as the world’s default power essential to deterring hegemonic threats in vital geopolitical regions. The President has fired Steve Bannon, the paladin of a sizable segment of Trump’s core constituency clamoring for American strategic retrenchment different in rationale, but similar in outcome to Obama’s Dangerous Doctrine that weakened America. Instead, Trump’s core national security team—Secretary of Defense James Mattis, UN Ambassador Nicki Haley, and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster—consider America’s military, political, and economic power indispensable to deterring and defeating global threats menacing to America’s enlightened self-interest.

What Trump calls “Principled Realism rooted in shared values” has not crystallized into a doctrine. Moreover, the president’s volatility and unpredictability—partially cultivated but also intrinsic—make any prognostications about President Trump an endeavor marinating in conditions and caveats. Yet Trump’s actions speak louder and more favorably about the substance of his national security policy than his often contradictory and confrontational words on the subject. Several core premises suffuse Trump’s principle realism.

To read more:  http://www.hoover.org/research/two-first-quarter-cheers-trumps-principled-realism

The Need For Missile Defense

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by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas

America’s great advantage when it entered world affairs after the Civil War was that its distance from Europe and Asia ensured that it was virtually immune from large sea-borne invasions.

The Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans proved far better barriers than even the forests and mountain ranges of Europe. At twenty-eight years old, Abraham Lincoln succinctly summed up America’s natural invincibility in his famous Lyceum Address of January 27, 1838: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”

In an age before air power, missiles, and napalm, Lincoln understood that no great power had the expeditionary power to invade and hold the vast North American continent.

So Americans began to assume that while they might fight frequently abroad and send expeditionary armies and naval forces around the globe, the fight would never come to them at home. America’s security cocoon was reinforced after the mid-nineteenth century when there was no longer any danger from either a neighboring Canada or Mexico.

The rare times in our history that enemies breached our natural defenses and hit our cities caused national hysteria—and yet never approached the magnitude of a serious invasion.

The small British expeditionary army that left the West Indies to burn the White House in August 1814 was under orders not to venture inland, but to conduct raids of terror and then leave. The Japanese never managed a serious attack. Their pathetic efforts at launching armed balloons to hit the west coast or to shell shoreline facilities by submarines inflicted almost no damage. Such pinpricks only further reminded the world of innate U.S. defensive advantages.

To read more: http://www.hoover.org/research/need-missile-defense-0

Of Allies And Adversaries: Donald Trump’s Principled Realism

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By Josef Joffe

Image credit: Poster Collection, US 06304, Hoover Institution Archives.

I. U.S. Doctrines from Washington to Obama

Foreign policy doctrines are as American as apple pie, and as old as the Republic. Start with George Washington’s Farewell Address: The “great rule” in dealing with other nations was to extend “our commercial relations” and “to have with them as little political connection as possible.” So stay out of Europe, and keep Europe away from us.

Echoing Washington, Thomas Jefferson promulgated the “no-entangling alliances” doctrine. John Quincy Adams decreed: “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” James Monroe told off the Europeans: Stay out, the Americas are for the Americans, North and South. Teddy Roosevelt doubled down by proclaiming the right to intervene in Latin America.

Harry S. Truman went global. The U.S. would support “free people who are resisting … subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” So did Dwight D. Eisenhower: He would commit U.S. forces “to secure and protect” all nations against “overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.” John F. Kennedy famously declaimed: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Read more: http://www.hoover.org/research/allies-and-adversaries-donald-trumps-principled-realism

A Lying Quartet

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By Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Rarely has an intelligence apparatus engaged in systematic lying—and chronic deceit about its lying—both during and even after its tenure. Yet the Obama Administration’s four top security and intelligence officials time and again engaged in untruth, as if peddling lies was part of their job descriptions.

So far none have been held accountable.

Those exemptions are likely because, in hubristic fashion, all four assumed their service to progressive noble agendas would justify any odious means felt necessary to achieve them. Continue reading “A Lying Quartet” →

The Progressive Octopus

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Politics lost, culture won.

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

It is the best and worst of times for progressives and liberals.

Politically, their obsessions with identity politics and various racial and gender -isms and -ologies have emasculated the Democratic party: loss of governorships, state legislatures, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

Democrats, for the time being at least, are now reduced to largely a coastal, big-city party. It can certainly pile up lots of blue electoral votes. And, thanks to California, Democrats can capture the popular vote, without necessarily winning presidential elections.

The old liberal idea that the new demography is progressive destiny did not work out as planned. When the Blue Wall crumbled; Hillary Clinton lost a sure-thing election. Large Latino populations in red Texas and blue California are not likely to turn either one into a swing state. Inner-city voters so far have not transferred prior record levels of turn-out and bloc voting to candidates of the Hillary Clinton sort. Identity politics did not ensure that the white liberals who created it were always exempt from the natural boomerang of their own ideology. Continue reading “The Progressive Octopus” →

The Strange Case of Confederate Cool

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by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much.

How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery?

To use a shopworn phrase, “It’s complicated.” Continue reading “The Strange Case of Confederate Cool” →

The NFL House of Cards

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By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

The Corner

The problem with the NFL is not just Donald Trump, but the greater dilemma that the league’s reason to be has become predicated on a labyrinth of lies.

The majority of the viewing audience is not young, hip, and loyal as hyped, but, even if fading, still largely reflects the majorities in red-state America that have no patience with gratuitous insults to the National Anthem and flag. The NFL apparently never grasped the political truism that you never insult your base and core supporters; sympathetic CNN talking heads and the solidarity of progressive political activists will not turn around sagging revenues, but will only contribute to them. Continue reading “The NFL House of Cards” →

Allegations of Foreign Election Tampering Have Always Rung Hollow

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by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Blaming foreign influence on an election loss has become a habitual practice for unsuccessful presidential candidates, but such allegations have never rung true.

On her current book tour, Hillary Clinton is still blaming the Russians (among others) for her unexpected defeat in last year’s presidential election. She remains sold on a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump successfully colluded with Russian president Vladimir Putin to rig the election in Trump’s favor. Continue reading “Allegations of Foreign Election Tampering Have Always Rung Hollow” →

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From an Angry Reader:

Dear VDH,

I faithfully read and enjoy your many commentaries on current events. But surely, as a historian, you should realize that Dred Scott was rightly decided, as I thought even in my youth. Even my reliably left-leaning constitutional-law professor colleague, who was shocked by my condemnation of Wickard v. Filburn, agrees with me on this.

Christopher Boorse

 

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Sort of Angry Reader Christopher Boorse,

Your “left-leaning constitutional-law professor colleague” I fear is sorely mistaken. If one accepts the narrow, amoral proposition that humans can be enslaved, and that chattel slaves are thus mere property of their masters to hunt down as they please, and as, American native-born, they still do not have rights and constitutional protections of citizenship, then I suppose Chief Roger B. Taney’s decision was consistently logical.

But I do not accept any of those legal or moral assumptions, and so cannot accept that slavery can be either legal or moral, or that humans can become the mere property of other humans, or that those born in the United States to others born in the United States are not citizens with legal protections.

The Dred Scott ruling represented the legal gymnastics of an ethically bankrupt mind—and was seen as such within a few years. Taney could easily have overturned Southern-state statutes, by ruling that slavery was an innate denial of the protections offered by the Bill of Rights for those born in the United States, or a violation of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence or that in legal proceedings and punishment slavery violated the cruel and unusual punishment prohibition clause. But he did not and so rightly suffered history’s condemnation.

Victor Hanson