VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: American Paralysis And Decline OPINION VICTOR DAVIS HANSONCONTRIBUTOR February 29, 20247:01 PM ET “We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” So shrugged the ancient historian Livy (59 B.C –A.D. 17) of the long decline of Roman national character that, in his age, finally ended the Roman Republic. Like a patient whose medicine proves worse than the disease, Livy lamented that the Romans knew that they had become corrupt and lawless. But the very contemplation of the hard medicine needed for restoration — and the furious reaction that would meet the remedy — made it impossible
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We fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve. By Victor Davis Hanson April 10, 2023 The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself. Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side. The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore
Read more ... →VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The coup we never knew Victor Davis Hanson – Tribune Content Agency January 7, 2023 – 9:01 pm Did someone or something seize control of the United States? What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did President Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased? Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that
Read more ... →OPINION (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images) VICTOR DAVIS HANSONCONTRIBUTOR December 22, 20229:11 AM ET In a famous exchange in the “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” “Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion. During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable. Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal. Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and
Read more ... →Yes, there is a way. But is there the will? By Victor Davis Hanson December 18, 2022 Most Americans know something has gone terribly wrong—and very abruptly—with the United States. They are certain that our wounds are almost all self-inflicted. The current pathologies are not a result of a natural disaster, an exhaustion of natural resources, plagues, or an existential war. Crushing national debt and annual deficits, spiraling food and fuel costs amid “normal” seven-percent-plus annual inflation, bread-and-circuses entitlements, a nonexistent border, a resurgence of racial tribalism, pandemic violent criminality, and humiliation abroad—all these pathologies are easily cited as symptoms of a
Read more ... →VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images) VICTOR DAVIS HANSONCONTRIBUTORApril 01, 20219:29 AM ETFONT SIZE: There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently. 1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual
Read more ... →Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / January 21, 2021 The unanimously approved conclusions of the 1776 Commission’s report focus on the historical challenges of two founding documents and civic renewal. Pictured: The Liberty Bell located in downtown Philadelphia. (Photo: Drbueller/Getty Images) COMMENTARY BY Victor Davis Hanson@VDHanson Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com. The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and
Read more ... →nomenklatura – (in the former Soviet Union) a list of influential posts in government and industry to be filled by Communist Party appointees. To reserve important appointments for Party members. Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And then ask whether they enhanced or diminished such inheritances? Victor Davis Hanson – October 27th, 2019 Donald Trump is now in the midst of another coup frenzy that has the Left
Read more ... →By Victor Davis Hanson| June 16th, 2019F Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer. Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement
Read more ... →by Victor Davis Hanson Wednesday, January 16, 2019 Recently on CNN, former Republican politico and now Never Trump cable new analyst Rick Wilson characterized Donald Trump’s supporters as his “credulous rube ten-toothed base.” Wilson was not original in his smear of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. He was likely resonating an earlier slander of Politico reporter Marco Caputo. The latter had tweeted of the crowd he saw at a Trump rally: “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.” Was the point of these stereotypes that poor white working-class
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