Will Trump Ride Off Into the Sunset?
Victor Davis Hanson // The Patriot Post
I once wrote that whenever Donald Trump exits office, he will likely leave as a “tragic hero.” Over two millennia ago, the Athenian tragedian Sophocles first described the archetype in his portraits of an angry and old but still fearsome Ajax, and heroic but stubborn and self-fixated Antigone.
In the iconic John Ford Western “The Searchers” and in a host of other films from “Shane” to “High Noon,” we have seen stories of these sorts.
The legalistic but impotent town council, the idealistic but outgunned sodbusters or the incompetent posse in desperation turns to unconventional deliverance. They suddenly need a John Wayne as a scary Ethan Edwards, or a mysterious gunslinger like Shane.
But to call in such Manichean outsiders is to admit that the status quo of a sober establishment has failed.
A new Putin worse than the old Putin?
An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill
Vladimir Putin is mortal. Russia, sooner or later, will have to navigate the transition from his 20-plus years of rule to someone else. It now appears that “sometime” could come as early as January 2021, if ill-health rumors denied by the Kremlin should prove to be true.
But do not be hopeful for a democratic Russia, whenever it happens. Putin’s inner circle would preserve the Putin system even without Putin; Russian voters would have little or no voice in the matter. It would be a process closely “managed” by a coterie of Kremlin insiders. They will not (and cannot) allow a democratic Russia that offers a variety of candidates with different electoral platforms.
The Kremlin has a historical precedent for managed transition — namely, the 1999-2000 transition from President Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. A key building block of the Yeltsin transition was the grant of immunity from eventual prosecution for the outgoing president and for his family. A second key ingredient was enforcement of the agreement by a credible guarantor. That guarantor happened to be the security services, headed at the time by one Vladimir Putin.
An Election Day Bridge Too Far
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
No wonder half the public is concerned about irregularities in the 2020 voting.
No wonder they would support Donald Trump’s skepticism, once a reputable legal team quickly, publicly, and transparently presents to the nation justified concerns about constitutional violations in changing state voting laws and documented accounts of computer glitches, inexplicable late arrivals of ballot troves, and systemic efforts to prevent transparency — all at a level that reasonably could question the authenticity of the final vote count or even serve a dire warning of things to come
Voting sanctity was not just questioned by Trump. It became a recent issue in 2016. Then-Green Party candidate Jill Stein was used as a surrogate by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment — to the chagrin of her own supporters — to sue in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to overturn the 2016 election. The charge was deliberate voting-machine irregularities, for which there was not even much anecdotal evidence.
When that failed, the Left went full Hollywood with a media blitz to convince the American people that the election was a fraud and the electors had to do their “patriotic” duty to overturn the mandates of their own state — and reject Donald Trump.
Victor Davis Hanson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 106
Donald Trump, Counterrevolutionary
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Until Donald Trump’s arrival, the globalist revolution was almost solidified and institutionalized—with the United States increasingly its greatest and most “woke” advocate. We know its bipartisan establishment contours.
China would inherit the world in 20 or 30 years. The self-appointed task of American elites—many of whom had already been enriched and compromised by Chinese partners and joint ventures—was to facilitate this all-in-the-family transition in the manner of the imperial British hand-off of hegemony to the United States in the late 1940s.
Our best and brightest like the Biden family, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg would enlighten us about the “real” China, so we yokels would not fall into Neanderthal bitterness as they managed our foreordained decline.
We would usher China into “the world community”—grimacing at, but overlooking the destruction it wrought on the global commercial order and the American interior.
We would politely forget about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uyghurs. Hollywood would nod as it put out more lucrative comic-book and cartoonish films for the Chinese markets, albeit with mandated lighter-skinned actors.
The Disinformationists
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
A republic is not just a nation of laws. It also relies on its good-faith watchdogs, such as honest pollsters, the media, and bipartisan institutions.
We still didn’t know the final result of Tuesday’s presidential election as of Wednesday night. But there are lots of reasons to worry that something in America has gone terribly wrong.
Many of the mainstream pre-election polls predicted that Donald Trump would lose in a landslide. He did not — to the shock of a host of propagandists.
A CNN poll had Trump down 12 percentage points nationally entering the final week before the election. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late October claimed Biden was leading in Wisconsin by 17 points. That state’s voting ended up nearly even. YouGov’s election model showed Biden prevailing with a landslide win in the Electoral College. Progressive statistics guru Nate Silver had for weeks issued pseudo-scientific analyses of a Trump wipeout.
Hanson: Elite media and pollsters ‘culpable’ for erosion of trust in institutions
Interview with Victor Davis Hanson via Fox News
Victor Davis Hanson: Election a choice between rule-changing and respect for constitutional norms
Victor Davis Hanson // Bozeman Daily Chronicle
In traditional presidential campaigns, the two major parties offer contrasting ideas and policies. The Democratic and Republican candidates barnstorm the nation to make their cases.
Not this year.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden is more or less a virtual candidate, mostly communicating from home via Zoom. He offers few detailed alternatives to the first four years of the Trump administration.
Instead, Biden is running on the idea that Donald Trump caused the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession, and that he’s responsible for violence in the streets.
But Biden rarely offers contrasting visions of what he would have done differently than the Trump administration — or, for that matter, major European countries that are now in worse economic shape and fighting another coronavirus spike.