VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, an end to optional interventions that will not likely, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, result in U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region, and a belief that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, drive, and work in; our non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so passé. 

Read the full article here

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “The Ingraham Angle” Monday that the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has parallels to other mass movements throughout history, including the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in Communist China.

Watch the interview on Fox here

Ed Driscoll // PJ Media

Most people today assume that our understanding of WWII is largely complete, thanks to the enormous quantity of books, TV series such as ITV’s classic 1970s documentary The World at War, the myriad of documentaries that aired in the early days of the History Channel cable TV network, and the unending series of movies produced by Hollywood, particularly when compared to its predecessor, WWI. But classicist historian and fellow PJM columnist Victor Davis Hanson does yeoman’s work unpacking the events of 1939-1945.

Starting with the plurality in the title, Hanson’s 2017 book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won emphasizes the disparate nature of the War’s myriad battles. Hanson also explores the enormous difference in mindsets between the leaders of the Axis and Allied powers. He makes plain their difference in desired outcomes right on page three, when he notes, “The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.”

Curtis LeMay Repurposes the B-29

The Allies were also able to improvise and adjust tactics far more easily than the Axis, Hanson writes:

The same asymmetry was true at sea, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Allied leadership made operational changes and technological improvements of surface ships and planes far more rapidly than could the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine. America adapted to repair and produce aircraft carriers and train new crews at a pace inconceivable in Japan. The Allies—including the Soviet Union on most occasions—usually avoided starting theater wars that ended in multiyear infantry quagmires. In contrast, Japan, Germany, and Italy respectively bogged down in China, the Soviet Union, and North Africa and the Balkans.

Read the full book review here

Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News

Democrats are waging war against traditions and the Constitution.

Several of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates favored the abolishment of the Electoral College. Or, as once-confident candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it, “I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College.”

Furor over the Electoral College among the left arose from the 2000 and 2016 elections. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, won the popular votes. But, like three earlier presidents, they lost the Electoral College voting — and with it the presidency.

The Founding Fathers saw a purpose in the Electoral College. It ensured that small, rural states would retain importance in national elections.

Read the full article here

The State of This Union is (Remarkably) Strong

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Ralph Peters in Strategika.

For years, I was a guest commentator on a business-news show whose host was surprisingly literate. We covered global affairs and shared useful exchanges. But this well-schooled, worldly man had a massive blind spot he shared with a significant number of conservatives: He detested the European Union (EU) obsessively and leapt on every shred of negative data from Brussels as proof that the EU was, finally, this time, at last, truly and belatedly doomed.

Read the full article here.

The Status of the EU: A Frustrated Empire Built on the Wrong Assumption

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Jakub Grygiel in Strategika.

As the Preamble to the 1957 Treaty of Rome stated, the purpose of the then European Economic Community was to “lay the foundations of an ever-closer union” among Europeans. This phrase became interpreted as a call for a progressively tighter political merger of the member states, with the European Union as the latest embodiment of this purpose. The problem with this progressive vision, however, is twofold: first, it is never fully achieved as the final objective remains always on the horizon and, second, it is grounded in the belief that a common market can create a unified polity. 

Read the full article here.

The Moribund EU

Please read a new essay by my colleagues, Andrew Roberts in Strategika.

What is the point of the European Union? Only a few years ago such a question, especially coming from a British Brexiteer such as me, might have been written off as simply provocative rudeness from an ideological foe. Today, however, in the light of the EU’s incapacity to meet the strategic challenges posed by China’s aggressive foreign policy, the health challenges posed by COVID-19, the economic challenges caused by the global lockdown, and the budgetary challenges posed by Britain (its second-largest net contributor) leaving, it is legitimate to ask what the EU is really for at this stage of the 21st century.

Read the full article here.

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.

Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.

In the past, it was to Biden’s advantage to postpone his selection of his female-mandated vice presidential running mate, given the lose-lose choice of either picking a woke young African American female who may polarize swing voters while spending the next three months being vetted in the fashion of California Representative Karen Bass’s Scientology and Fidel Castro issues, or selecting a vetted, but off-putting former National Security Advisor Susan Rice or Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who does not especially like Biden and would be seen as hovering and rummaging about as an impatient president-in-waiting.

Biden, remember, is one of the few primary candidates in history who promised in advance to pick a running mate on the basis of gender and, as events would dictate, and by inference, race as well.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.

The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb. Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America. Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.

At the present increasing rate of police defunding, homeless encampments, the emptying of jails and prisons, the green-lighting of rioting and vandalism, the flight of the wealthy, the revolutionary change to Skype/Zoom tele-working, and the exodus of upper-middle-class liberal families to safe houses in the New York and New England countryside, once beautiful New York City is in danger of becoming the nation’s aneurysm. That is, after the “recovery,” it and other blue cities may be seen as permanent weak veins and arteries prone to sudden fatal hemorrhaging that could implode at any moment, and thus may become metaphorically tied off, as the country reroutes around them.

In the old days of 2019, tolerant Americans more or less accepted that finely crafted statues of sometimes less than inspiring and formerly illustrious (to some) heroes were part of our history. For example, integral to California’s rich historical culture were its missions, acknowledged by Father Serra’s numerous eponymous streets and statues. No one in his right mind believed that renaming a mall named Serra at Stanford University would help mitigate the weekend murder rate in Chicago or the endemic poverty of illegal aliens in my own neighborhood.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, at Hiroshima on August 6, and Nagasaki on August 9.

Each year, Americans argue about our supposed moral shortcomings for being the only nation to have used an atomic weapon in war.

Given the current cultural revolution that topples statues, renames institutions, cancels out the supposedly politically incorrect, and wages war on America’s past, we will hear numerous attacks on the decision of Democratic president Harry Truman to use the two terrible weapons.

But what were the alternatives that Truman faced had he not dropped the bombs that precipitated Japan’s agreement to surrender less than a week after the bombing of Nagasaki and formally on September 2?

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

We know where to watch in the next few weeks but have no real idea what we will be watching. Yet pundits, the media, and the Left seem giddy that their polls show a Trump slump, as if they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from 2016. But in truth, the news cycle over the next three months may well favor Trump — a scenario his opponents no doubt deem preposterous in these dog days of August.

1. The virus. The coronavirus is like an out-of-control grass fire. It dies down only to flare up without much predictability — making fools of yesterday’s experts, proving them yet again today’s geniuses, only to render them idiots tomorrow.

Trump’s polls climbed in May when it looked as if the vicious virus was waning. But after the public relaxed its guard, or protesters gathered for much of June in massive demonstrations that were politically correct mockeries of social distancing, masks, and disinfects, or the virus got its natural second wind, it caught fire again — and abroad as well.

Read the full article here

The following article is from my colleague, Paul Roderick Gregory, in The Hill

The known details of the so-called Steele dossier point to a peculiar ambiguity. To expert analysts, it always appeared to be low-quality political opposition research. Yet, it turned American against American, paralyzed our government — and may be the greatest Russian disinformation coup in history.

On Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed published the dossier. Supposedly written by an ex-MI6 agent turned consultant, Christopher Steele, it charged, among other offenses, that President-elect Trump was a longtime Russian agent and a pervert to boot.

Trump’s many opponents rushed to adopt the dossier as a road map to Putin-Trump collusion. 

At about the same time, the FBI was interrogating a 42-year-old Russian national working in Washington. The interviewee, Igor Danchenko, admitted to being Steele’s primary source for the dossier. The “clueless” Danchenko confirmed that he had collected the dossier’s “raw material” from talking with drinking buddies. For purposes of the dossier, Steele would transform Danchenko’s “sources” into high-level Kremlin insiders.

Read the full article here