If you’ve listened to someone often enough, you might already know what they’re going to say before they say it. This is not necessarily a criticism – heaven knows, it’s true of me on many subjects (talk to my wife and adult children). But sometimes the monotony repetitively takes you to some unacceptable opinions. This is my predicament with Victor Davis Hanson (VDH). It is well-known that Hanson is an unflinching supporter of Donald Trump to such an extent that any Trump criticism is heavily muted, when there’s ample grounds to be critical from any perspective, while other of Hanson’s views appear newly adapted to momentary Trumpisms and the meandering and muddled political movement that has recently come into being around him. It’s disturbing to me.
For the record, I am not new to VDH. I own and have read many of his books, attended to his commentary on Fox News, and have been an avid listener of his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, among others. I am well-versed on VDH’s positions; however, the Trump boosterism of late has been taken to absurd lengths.
How absurd? The movement attached to the Trump banner is a protectionist one, an opponent of entitlement reform, near isolationist in foreign policy, and will turn on a dime at the behest of the latest self-serving political burp of its leader. So, if DeSantis stands in the way, Trump will dust off the Left’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich and charge the Florida governor with the sin that he’s out to get your Social Security, and the legion of Trump parrots soon erupt in unison. If, as in 2016, Jeb Bush stands athwart Trump’s path, bash the Bushes, their “forever wars”, and the ill-defined “establishment”, going so far as to come close to imitating the abuse of returning Vietnam vets by anti-war activists. Trump’s loathing of John McCain, for instance, approaches those spittle-laced lows when he said, “He [McCain] is not a war hero” and “I am not a fan of people who surrender”, quite a statement from a candidate for commander-in-chief and later an occupant of that office. The fact that many vets remained loyal to this man is unfathomable.
John McCain’s courage, braving attacks over the skies of North Vietnam, refusal to be released ahead of his fellow Americans in the Hanoi Hilton, and torture at the hands of his communist jailers deserves more than “I am not a fan of people who surrender”. And all this coming from a man who benefited from five draft deferments. Go figure. The behavior hasn’t daunted Hanson’s Trump-praise.
Hanson’s silence over Trump’s protectionism is absolutely befuddling from a man of such a stellar academic background. There’s simply no recognition of the potential devastation that tariffs and other trade-protectionisms has wrought. His commentary avoids the role that homegrown government regulation, taxes, and union favoritism at all levels has played in hallowing out America, creating the Rust Belt. Reagan disbanded PATCO (the air traffic controller union) and fired its striking air traffic controllers; Trump masks the unions’ complicity in their own demise by patronizing them with a blame of foreigners.
Any Econ 101 student knows that a foreign company doesn’t pay a tariff, but apparently not Donald Trump or Hanson, if Hanson’s silence means anything. We hear plenty about “globalization” and “bi-coastal elites” from Hanson but nary a word about Trump’s blathering economic incoherency. Let me set the record straight, even if Hanson won’t: when taxed, companies are pass-through agencies – the new taxes (tariffs in this case) descend on the consumer, and always will, always with price increases, sometimes with fewer choices, and many times with the loss of jobs in other sectors. It’s a classic example of self-inflicted foot-shooting. Remember Smoot-Hawley? Look it up.
Then, how do you reinvigorate blue-collar work, a key interest of Hanson’s – and mine? Start by cleaning your own house. Answer this question: Why are American companies fleeing our shores? Or maybe this question: How is it that an illiterate peasant from the Chinese outback is more appealing than an American with generations of advanced cultural and human capital? The answer lies in more than labor costs. Hint: the first flight of American fabrication was to destinations below the Mason-Dixon line, thereby escaping the clutches of the AFL-CIO and the big-government and big-tax/regulation Democrat regimes above it.
Or, how about the devastating effect of our fascination with college-is-for-everyone? Taxpayer grants and student loans, with taxpayers on the hook, were fire-hosed to make it happen. Consequently, working with one’s hands became construed as placing a person barely above the apes in evolutionary development. It’s all so crassly dopey. Yet, the practical corollary to the largesse is a turn to the labor of semi-literate Chinese peasants so Americans can enjoy student loan debt, Sociology and ****-studies courses, their meth and the dole in depopulating neighborhoods, or extended adolescence in a growing number of failures-to-launch. Education in America is as much a disaster as Detroit. All of it homegrown.
In this respect, though, Hanson can be spot-on in his condemnation of the condition of our schools, K to grad school – but, Victor, please connect the dots. Tariffs and protectionism will do nothing but mask this glaring deficit. If you care about expanding opportunities in the “dirty jobs” sector and making the made-in-America chant more than a cover for union featherbedding, I suggest that we make our bed, clean our room, and, by God, make ourselves competitive rather than wallow in perpetual whinerhood. And it begins with classical curriculum, classical instruction, accountability, and the rejection of government as helicopter parent.
Speaking of government as helicopter parent, Trump has staked his name to hostility to entitlement reform, and particularly the two biggest ones, by far: Social Security and Medicare. They’re both headed to insolvency – Medicare first, soon followed by SS. Trump, as Hanson prostrates in silence, is waiting till we saddle every American child with unrecoverable future debt, or we can no longer defend ourselves with the two domestic fiscal behemoths gobbling up more and more of the nation’s purse. And to think that it’s only a cynical ploy to buy the votes of the seasoned citizenry with fiscal foolishness and outright lies. The Third Rail of Politics had better be reformed or we’ll have to get used to an America with the military gravitas of Canada. Reform is not an option.
No area is more infected with Trumpisms than in thoughts about America’s role in the world. In this respect, Trump’s “America First” chant has morphed into a cover for a new isolationism on the right. No issue exposes this new feature on the right more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a historian, Hanson must realize, in the current circumstance of a hyper-aggressive Putin, that the parallels with 1939 Europe are straightforward. Yet, Hanson dismissively expresses a quick and offhanded support for Ukraine as he muddles this backing with the new right’s pessimism about Ukraine’s longevity and our dwindling military stocks.
The incoherence should knock a sane person over the head. The lack of Ukrainian endurance could be a self-fulfilled prophecy by the incessant complaint about our “dwindling stocks”. More than the Ukrainian drain of our own military readiness, unwittingly, the new right is admitting that our superpower status is a joke. It’s an admission that we can’t defend our interests and supply a country the size of Uganda in their fight against being gobbled up. It’s 1938-9 Czechoslovakia and 1939 Poland all over again.
The Soviet Union kept the communist North Vietnamese in the field for a couple of decades, and we can’t aid a Uganda? What makes people like Hanson think that we can defend Taiwan against the #2 economy in the world with the largest army and navy? Ineluctably, this line of argument is a quiet admission that the “pivot” to face the CCP threat is a suicide mission.
Actually, Ukraine is a wakeup call. Stopping one leg of the new Axis in Ukraine is directly tied to stopping the other leg in the Pacific. Don’t think that for a moment that Xi and his minions aren’t watching our enfeebled internal debates about Ukraine. Instead, we ought to be alerted to getting our act together by injecting steroids into our defense industrial complex and conforming our defense capabilities to the new reality of “quantity has a quality all its own”, and stop grousing about our lack of 155 munitions. We can do that, first, by stopping our deficit-spending-till-bankruptcy, and restraining our utopia-searching and robbing-Peter-to pay-Paul domestic fiscal schemes. Our fiscal balance sheet can only tolerate so much greenie nonsense, equality-mongering, and blank checks to the elderly and everyone else “oppressed”. At least Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to call the AARP “greedy geezers”. Instead, with Hanson and Trump, we get fiscal insanity. Come on, Victor, speak up, make sense.
Making sense is what we need at this stage in our country’s history, and all-to-frequently we aren’t getting it. The reign of incomprehensibility even affects the language that we use to discern the difference between liberal and conservative. Check this out: Hanson labeled as “liberal” conservatives who are still conservative but weary of Trump. His charge that National Review is “liberal” is particularly stunning. One can only conclude that Hanson’s distinction between liberal and conservative hinges on a person’s or organization’s stance toward Trump. So, Victor, which one of these articles in the July 31 issue of National Review is “liberal”?
• “Family Policy Meets Deficit Politics: For solutions, consider the supply side”: a call for the use of conservative economics (supply side) to assist families.
• “Throwing Off China’s chains”: a defense of those in and outside of Communist China who risk their lives – many already lost them – to resist the tyranny.
• “Our Chosen Chains: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom”: an article on the debilitating effect of modern media, especially social media, on ourselves and our children.
• “The Restrained Roberts Court: Pace their critics, the justices respect precedent”: a retort to the leftist complaint that the Robert Court is “activist” as well as a defense of originalism, the conservative jurisprudence.
• “Supreme Modesty: Conservatives have saved the Court from itself”: the piece speaks for itself.
• “Elite Universities’ Affirmative-Action Reaction: Biased admission practices are no way to address historical injustice”: a defense of the Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned racial favoritism in college admissions.
• “A Year after Bruen: The current Second Amendment test leaves questions”: the article defends the Court’s protection of the Second Amendment in recent cases but admits there are problems that still need clarification.
Et cetera.
A conservative position is manifest in every issue. I’ve been a subscriber since the early 1980’s.
The same is true for National Review Online. Don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself (https://www.nationalreview.com). The woke would go ballistic. But here’s the crux: on the whole, the magazine is no fan of Trump and is mostly pro-Ukraine. I can only conclude that since Hanson is at least modestly pro-Ukraine, the decisive factor for being “liberal” is whether one is a Trump fan or not. If you can’t countenance Trump’s appalling behavior, narcissism, incessant capacity to make foes of friends, and gross immaturity to blame others for his own misfortunes, you must be “liberal”. What?!
I’ve had enough of Trump after voting for him twice. Am I now a “liberal” by Hanson’s metric? Funny, I don’t think and feel like one.
For want of a better explanation, Hanson appears to have fallen victim to presentism, what I call the tyranny of the present. Strange for a historian of antiquity. In the minds of many people, current happenings and concerns are of overriding existential import, more so than anything else … ever! Some people get caught up in the cognitive and emotional fevers of the moment, like a social contagion. Today, the personage of Trump looms large … undeservedly so. Trump is too small a vortex to cram the actual meaning of conservative/liberal. Trump is only the fascination of the moment. He too will pass. One more GOP election disappointment to add to the growing list ought to perform the cure.
Hanson shows little awareness of it.
RogerG