The Costs of Presidential Candor

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Predictably, Donald Trump was attacked both by the establishment and the media as “crude,” “unpresidential,” and “gratuitous” for a recent series of blunt and graphic statements on a variety of current policies. Oddly, the implied charge this time around was not that Trump makes up stuff, but that he said things that were factual but should not be spoken.

Trump’s tweets and ex tempore editorials may have been indiscreet and politically unwise, but they were also mostly accurate assessments. That paradox revisits the perennial question that is the hallmark of the Trump presidency of what exactly is presidential crudity and what are the liabilities of presidential candor?

Concerning the catastrophic California Camp Fire (150,000 acres) and the Woolsey conflagration (100,000 acres), which in turn followed prior devastating California fires in spring and summer of 2018 (perhaps charring 1 million acres in all), Trump tweeted: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Read the full article here.

Did 1968 Win the Culture War?

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Fifty years ago this year, the ’60s revolution sought to overturn American customs, traditions, ideology, and politics.

The ’60s radicals eventually grew older, cut their hair, and joined the establishment. Most thought their revolution had fizzled out in the early 1970s without much effect, as Americans returned to “normal.”

But maybe the ’60s, not the silent majority, won out after all. The world a half-century later looks a lot more like 1968 and what followed than what preceded it.

Most of the political and cultural agenda from that turbulent period — both the advances and the regressions — has long been institutionalized. The military draft, for good or bad, has remained defunct. There is greater transparency in politics, fewer smoke-filled rooms. Disabled children, once ostracized or dismissively labeled “retarded,” are now far better integrated into society and treated more ethically as special-needs kids. The rights of women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community are now widely accepted.

Yet lifestyles have been radically altered — and often not for the good. Before the late ’60s, most Americans married before having children; afterwards, not so much. One-parent households are now far more common.

Read the full article here.

The Mad, Mad Meditations of Monsieur Macron

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Almost everything French president Emmanuel Macron has said recently on the topic of foreign affairs, the United States, and nationalism and patriotism is silly. He implicitly rebukes Donald Trump for praising the idea of nationalism as a creed in which citizens of sovereign nations expect their leaders to put the interests of their fellow citizens first and those of other nations second. And while critiquing nationalism, Macron nonetheless talks and acts as though he is an insecure French chauvinist of the first order.

The French president suffers from the usual dreams of some sort of European “empire” — Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler . . . Brussels? He probably envisions a new Rome steered by French cultural elites whose wisdom, style, and sophistication would substitute for polluting tanks and bombers, and who would play Greece’s robed philosophers to Europe’s Roman legions: “It’s about Europe having to become a kind of empire, as China is. And how the U.S. is.”

But aside from the fact that the immigration-wary eastern and financially strapped southern Europeans are increasingly skeptical of northern European imperial ecumenicalism, can Macron cite any “empire” in the past — Persian, Roman, Ottoman, British — that was not first and foremost “nationalist”?

Read the full article here.

Even California Cannot Defy Nature Forever

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Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal

California has been clouded under a blanket of smoke for weeks. Stanford University, where I work, sent students and faculty home early for Thanksgiving. The campus is more than 200 miles southwest of the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that just incinerated the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Paradise, and yet the entire Bay Area has been buried under collateral haze for days. I am a fifth-generation native Californian and remember many horrific Sierra Nevada fires, but never anything remotely comparable to the blazes of 2018.

Here in Fresno County, in the San Joaquin Valley, positioned between the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada mountains, the stagnant air for weeks has remained as polluted as China’s. When the normal northerlies blew, we were smoked in from the Camp Fire, 250 miles to the north. When the rarer southerlies took over, some of the smoke from the 100,000-acre Woolsey fire in the canyons of Malibu arrived from 230 miles distant.

July and August were nearly as incendiary as November. The huge, 450,000-acre Mendocino County conflagrations, the horrific Shasta-area Carr fire (nearly a half-million acres), and the nearby Ferguson fire in the Madera foothills all combined to make the air nearly unbreathable for two months throughout the Central Valley. Yet Californians in the irrigated center of the state were the lucky ones, breathing smoke rather than seeing fires overwhelm their homes and communities.

Read the full article here.

The Progressive Synopticon

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

In the post-election aftermath, Republicans are wondering about how they can capture that missing 2-5 percent of the electorate that lost them the House of Representatives.

Could they pry away 40 percent of the institutionalized Democratic Latino vote on delivery of a full-employment economy of rising wages? Can they win over 20 percent of the African-American electorate on the basis of more jobs and less competition from illegal immigrants?

Can Trump tone down his ad hominem invective and tweeting to reassure an additional 10 percent of independent and middle-class suburban women that his national security agenda, free-market prosperity, traditionalism, law-and-order, and national sovereignty policies ensure greater tranquility, safety, and opportunity—even if they are not packaged in the manner of his more mellifluous and vacuous “presidential” predecessor?

No Escaping the Culture Wars
Republicans, in deer-in-the-headlights-style, appear shocked that they are increasingly prone to winning the vote on Election Day only to lose it in the ensuing weeks when absentee ballots and what-not filter in with astounding Democratic majorities. Someone is spending a lot of money to get the absentee voting ballot out, correctly marked, and returned. And whatever that “lot” is, it is killing Republican candidates.

Read the full article here.

Strategika Issue 55: The Structure of World Power

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The Structure of the Contemporary International System

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Joseph Joffe in Strategika.

A monopoly obtains when one firm is free to set prices and output while keeping ambitious newcomers out of the market. The best example is Standard Oil in the late 19th century. Ruthlessly undercutting competitors, the company ended up controlling 90 percent of refined oil flows in the United States. The United States never had that kind of overweening power in the international “market.” It may have come close to unipolarity in the 1990s when its mortal rival, the Soviet Union, had committed suicide. Yet the contemporary world is no longer unipolar. Neither is it bi- or multipolar.

Read the full article here.

 

Seeking Stability in the Structure of Power

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Seth Cropsey in Strategika.

The global strategic landscape is moving away from the primacy that America achieved over the last century. New terrain includes the possibility of great power competition, a return to the bipolarity that policy-makers in the immediate post-Cold War said must never happen again. Current sentiment in the U.S. illustrates that there are worse possibilities than bipolarity.

Read the full article here.

 

The Vagaries of World Power

Please read a new essay by my colleague,Nadia Schadlow in Strategika.

By traditional measures—military strength, economic wealth, population size—the United States remains the world’s preeminent superpower. Its economy continues to expand; it deploys the largest military in the world; it is home to a growing population; and American laws and capital flows encourage a vibrant ecosystem for innovation.

Read the full article here.

GOP failed to fight Dem’s health-care scare tactics in midterms

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Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill

Exit polls showed that health care was the top factor in motivating voters in the 2018 election. Democrat candidates successfully stoked fears that the Republicans would end coverage of pre-existing conditions.

Despite repeated assurances from President Trump that pre-existing conditions were safe, almost 60 percent of voters said they trusted the Democrats on this issue. This likely provided part of the margin that switched the House from Republican to Democrat control.

If Republicans had hammered home the statistics of health-care coverage, they could have torn down the propaganda that pre-existing conditions could cause one-quarter to one-half of Americans to be denied coverage.

Although the subject of pre-existing conditions attracts a sympathetic following, relatively few voters are actually at risk of denial for pre-existing conditions. Here’s why:

Read the full article here.

Maybe We Could Use a Civic Hippocratic Oath

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

A mob of protesters associated with the radical left-wing group Antifa swarmed the private residence of Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the night of Nov. 7. They yelled, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!” The mob’s apparent aim was to catch Carlson’s family inside and so terrify them that he might temper his conservative views. Only Carlson’s wife was home at the time. She locked herself in a pantry and called police.

During the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrators disrupted the proceedings and stalked senators. Later, a mob broke through police barricades to pound on the doors of the Supreme Court while Kavanaugh was preparing to be sworn in. Their agenda apparently was to create such confusion and disorder that the nomination might be postponed.

Hollywood celebrities habitually boast of wanting to shoot, blow up or decapitate President Donald Trump. Apparently their furor is meant to lower the bar of violence so that Trump fears for his personal safety and therefore might silence or change his views.

Read the full article here.

The Present American Revolution

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The revolution of 1776 sought to turn a colony of Great Britain into a new independent republic based on constitutionally protected freedom. It succeeded with the creation of the United States.

The failed revolution of 1861, by a slave-owning South declaring its independence from the Union, sought to bifurcate the country, More than 600,000 dead later, slavery was abolished, a Confederacy was in in ruins, and the South was forced back into the United States largely on the conditions and terms of the victorious North.

The 1960s saw efforts to create a new progressive nation by swarming democratic and republican institutions. The sheer force of a left-wing cultural revolution would supposedly transform a nation, in everything from jeans, long hair, and pot to rock music and sexual “liberation.” It was eventually diffused by popular weariness with the extremism and violence of the radical revolutionaries, and the establishment’s agreements to end the Vietnam War, give 18-year-olds the right to vote, phase out the draft, expand civil rights to include reparatory action, legalize abortion, radicalize the university, and vastly increase the administrative state to wage a war on poverty, a war on pollution, and a war on inequality.

Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite. The problem for today’s leftists is that they are not fighting Bourbon France, a reactionary Europe of 1848, or Czarist Russia, but an affluent, culturally uninhibited, and wildly free United States, where never in the history of civilization has a people attained such affluence and leisure.

Read the full article here.

Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity politics tribalism.

According to this progressive orthodoxy, being female, gay, or minority trumps everything else. But, of course, no one believes in such mythical notions of solidarity, least of all progressives themselves.

White women were expected in Michigan, for example, to vote against a sterling African-American senatorial candidate John James, whose résumé was far more impressive than his victorious opponent, incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow.

There was no such thing as minorities on the collective barricades when it was a matter of defeating California congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, first-generation child of refugees, Asian, female, former Stanford student body president, and Yale MBA in her singular bid to unseat a seven-term white male Democratic incumbent.

Read the full article here.