The Trump Bump

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By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

No one knows how long Trump can stay on message. (He turns out to be an effective teleprompted speaker who, unlike Obama, can go off the script for brief moments without stuttering and seeming confused.) No one knows how long he can continue to take on taboo topics in different and often innovative ways. No one knows how long Hillary Clinton’s triad of misfortune will persist — the endless drip, drip, drip scandals of the Clinton Foundation, e-mails, and intelligence negligence, veritable days of disappearance from the campaign, and incoherent messaging that vacillates between promising more of Obama and explicitly promising change from his status quo.

But right now Clinton’s problem is also one of momentum. Should Trump next week pull close to even in the swing-state polls and do so for 2–3 weeks, then some of the missing 15 percent of the Republican establishment will decide to swallow their pride and board the Trump train before it leaves the station. as they ponder the rare possibility in 2017 of a more conservative presidency, Supreme Court, and Congress. It may not be the sort of conservatism that they want, but it’s certainly better than what they were likely to get otherwise.

At that point, Trump may have an even chance of winning, given that he could replicate Romney’s base, perhaps draw 3–5 percent more of the minority vote, pick up another 2–3 percent from the so-called alienated Reagan Democrats, and assume that Hillary will not enthuse the Obama base to the same degree as in 2008/2012. Continue reading “The Trump Bump” →

The Virtue-Mongers

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If you playact being shot by the police, cry “racist!” on Twitter, or denounce capitalism, you, too, can feel good about your capitalist’s privilege.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

In an affluent postmodern society of nearly unlimited freedom and opportunity, elite celebrities, pampered athletes, comfortable academics, conniving politicians, and careerist journalists find it hard to prove that they are still relevant in a revolutionary or rather cool sense.

In medieval times, privileged sinners found absolution for their guilt through more formal contractual penance. Churchmen consulted books of penitentials that prescribed precise medicinal doses — donations, pilgrimages, fasting, and a host of other sacrificial acts — to offset particular sins to get them right again with God. The key was to find a way to keep enjoying sinning and still get to heaven on the cheap.

In our atheistic and agnostic society, inexpensive, loud, and public virtue-mongering has replaced church penance — with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, Al Sharpton, network anchor people, NPR, the New York Times, and such acting as the new bishops who can dispense exemptions.

The wealthy, the influential, the intelligentsia, and the cultural elite all broadcast their virtues — usually at a cut-rate rhetorical price — to offset their own sense of sin (as defined by feelings of guilt), or in fear that their own lives are antithetical to the ideologies they espouse, or sometimes simply as a wise career move. Sin these days is mostly defined as race/class/gender thought crimes. Continue reading “The Virtue-Mongers” →

The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t

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Technology hasn’t changed the core of who we are, and history proves it.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

In today’s technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much.

Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles, but human nature, geography, and culture are nearly timeless. Even as ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and challenges remain.

Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago.

Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely that in another 50 years the story will remain about the same.

The Middle East in 1966 was going up in flames, just as it is today — and in many of the same places. The Syrian government was overthrown in a coup. The Saudis, Jordanians, and Egyptians were involved in a civil war in Yemen. The Egyptian government executed Islamists charged with planning a theocratic takeover. Continue reading “The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t” →

Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies

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The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism. Continue reading “Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies” →

Imagine There’s No Border

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A world without boundaries is a fantasy.
By Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal

Borders are in the news as never before. After millions of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The concurrent suspension of most E.U. external controls on immigration and asylum rendered the open-borders pact suddenly unworkable. The European masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise to become European in values and outlook—protocols that the E.U. essentially discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the continent’s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.

A similar crisis plays out in the United States, where President Barack Obama has renounced his former opposition to open borders and executive-order amnesties. Since 2012, the U.S. has basically ceased policing its southern border. The populist pushback against the opening of the border with Mexico gave rise to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump—predicated on the candidate’s promise to build an impenetrable border wall—much as the flood of migrants into Germany fueled opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Continue reading “Imagine There’s No Border” →

Diversity: History’s Pathway to Chaos

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America’s successful melting pot should not be replaced with discredited salad-bowl separatism.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls, and myriad other African, Asian, and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus, and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.

Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish, or Vandal identities.

The propaganda of history’s multicultural empires — the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British, and the Soviet — was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological, or royal advantages of unity, not diversity. Continue reading “Diversity: History’s Pathway to Chaos” →

Trump 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 . . .

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By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

There was always only one sensible position on immigration: ensuring that legal immigration was meritocratic, diverse, and measured to facilitate rapid assimilation and integration — while ending illegal immigration entirely through a mixture of new border fencing/stepped-up patrolling, increased visa and refugee scrutiny, employer fines, and rapid deportation of those who committed serious misdemeanors and felonies, had no work history, were always on government support, or who had arrived within the last one to two years on the scent of amnesty.

No one knows how many of the supposed 11 million (an ossified figure from the 1990s) here illegally, in contrast, have never been convicted of a crime, are employed and not on state support, and have proven residence, say, beyond four to five years. Perhaps 70 percent of the proverbial 11 million might fit that qualifying category? Continue reading “Trump 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 . . .” →

The Nine Lives of Donald J. Trump

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Whatever his faults, a Trump victory is preferable for the Republic.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Seasoned Republican political handlers serially attack Donald Trump and his campaign as amateurish, incompetent, and incoherent. The media somehow outdid their propaganda work for Barack Obama and have signed on as unapologetic auxiliaries to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and openly brag that, in Trump’s case, the duty of a journalist is to be biased. We have devolved to the point that a Harvard Law professor teases about unethically releasing his old confidential notes of his lawyer/client relationship with Trump.

Conservative columnists and analysts are so turned off by Trump that they resort to sophisticated metaphors to express their distaste — like “abortion,” “ape,” “bastard,” “bitch,” “cancer,” “caudillo,” “dog crap,” “filth,” “idiot,” “ignoramus,” and “moron.” Some of them variously talk of putting a bullet through his head given that he resembles, or is worse than, Caesar, Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. Derangement Syndrome is a more apt clinical diagnosis for the Right’s hatred of Trump than it was for the Left’s loathing of Bush. Had such venom been directed at leftists or minorities, the commentators likely would have lost their venues. Continue reading “The Nine Lives of Donald J. Trump” →

Where’s The Letter From Democratic Security Officials Opposing Hillary?

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By Victor Davis Hanson//Town Hall

A group of 50 conservative foreign policy elites and veteran national security officials of prior Republican administrations recently wrote an open letter denouncing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

They cited especially his lack of character and moral authority — and his “little understanding of America’s national interests.” Particularly bothersome, they wrote, is Trump’s inability “to separate truth from falsehood.”

The letter stated that Trump’s one-year campaign of blustery rhetoric suggests he could be as reckless in deed in the White House as he has been in word on the campaign trail.

Is there a like group of past Democratic wise men and women who can commensurately “police their own” and so warn us about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton?

Unlike Trump, Clinton already has an actual political record as a former U.S. senator and secretary of state.

If there were such a group, the heart of their letter might read something like the following:

“We the undersigned who have served in prior Democratic administrations will not vote for Hillary Clinton. Continue reading “Where’s The Letter From Democratic Security Officials Opposing Hillary?” →

The Great Regression

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Today, it seems that Orwell’s 1984 would better have been titled 2016.

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Technical progress is often associated with moral and political regress, a theme as ancient as Hesiod’s seventh-century b.c. poem Works and Days.

In 200 b.c., not a male could vote freely in Hellenistic Greece, but the so-called Antikythera analogue computer could predict astronomical cycles in a way unimaginable 250 years earlier in Periclean Athens.

The uncanny ability to craft the great dome of Hagia Sophia did not imply that the people of Constantinople in a.d. 537 had retained many freedoms from the impoverished Roman Republic of 700 years earlier.

We are in such a period of rapid breakthroughs in technology, consumerism, and scientific advancement — equally matched by cultural, social, and political ruin.

Take the question of free speech. Fifty years ago leftist student activists — without iPads and Facebook pages — fought for “free speech areas” in university plazas where they could voice unpopular and even uncouth expression.

Not today. Continue reading “The Great Regression” →