Victor Davis Hanson: The Real Reset

 

Victor Davis Hanson thinks that things will get better. His column at American Greatness, “The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming” concludes:

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies. 

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked. 

Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the “color our skin.”

The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.

The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

I hope he’s right.  But if election integrity is not restored, all bets are off.  His full column is here.

# # #

VDH: Totalitarian Wokeism

 

Victor Davis Hanson knocks another one out of the park. His “Wokeism is A Cruel and Dangerous Cult” at American Greatness begins:  

Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past. 

Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness. 

Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. 

But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. 

Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden. 

One of the take-away quotes: "Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback." The full article is here. Recommended.

# # #

Hanson: The Decline of American Citizenship

 

In yesterday’s blog, I linked to historian Victor Davis Hanson’s essay on Cracked Icons of the Left.  Today I am posting on his message from Hillsdale College on his new course on The Decline of American Citizenship:

I wish to invite you to enroll in a seven-lecture course that I prepared with the help and under the auspices of Hillsdale College. It is called “American Citizenship and Its Decline,” and the online course is based on my latest book, the recently released The Dying Citizen.

Like the book, the course describes the current crises in America as symptoms of a far larger problem: the steady decline of the autonomy and political influence of the citizen.

The class describes the origins and history of citizenship in the West, reminding us that it is a rare phenomenon both in the past and the present—given the enormous responsibility placed on citizens to create and control their own government.

Citizenship then requires a large and self-reliant middle class—currently shrinking under enormous economic strains. Clearly defined and enforced borders are also essential to ensure a civic space in which citizens can nurture common customs, sustain traditions, and honor their own shared past.

Yet borders are now increasingly fluid as mere residence and citizenship seem often indistinguishable. Pre-civilizational tribalism—identifying by superficial appearance rather than through shared culture and values—is returning to America as so often the salad bowl replaces the melting pot.

These organic, bottom-up challenges are often matched by top-down stresses such as the growth of a huge permanent, but unelected, government of bureaucrats and administrators who combine judicial, executive, and legislative powers that overwhelm the citizen.

In addition, revisionists in law, the media, and politics seek to change the Constitution, long-held customs of governance, and political traditions for short-term partisan agendas, on the theory that a new changing and fluid Constitution must match an always evolving human nature.

Globalism is an ancient challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state. But in the age of instant communications and unprecedented concentrations of globalized wealth, so often elites seek to supplant American laws and independence with international organizations and often without the consent of the legislative branch or the assent of the governed.

The course ends, however, on an optimistic note that citizens still have it within their power to restore our traditions of empowered citizenship and return government to the control of citizens.

“American Citizenship and Its Decline” is free to enroll in, and you can begin the course today by clicking on the secure link below.

https://online.hillsdale.edu/landing/american-citizenship-and-its-decline

Like most of Dr. Hanson’s messages, his summary is helpful on its own.

# # #

 

Cracked Icons of the Left

 

Image credit:  Legal Insurrection

The inimitable Victor Davis Hanson provides a glimmer of hope in his American Greatness piece “Cracked Icons: The Corrupt and Mediocre Heroes of the Left are Imploding”:

With fits and starts, we are slowly returning to reality after four years of mass hysteria. Our media-deified, progressive icons are finally being exposed as the deceivers they always were.

. . .

He closes with “Basement Biden”:

Do we remember old Joe Biden from Scranton? He was the media fiction who hid his dementia in his basement for a year, spouting that Trump had wrecked everything and he would bring about decency, prosperity, an end to the virus, and “healing.” 

The Biden candidacy was one of the most cynical in American history. The unhinged far-Left adopted a befuddled Biden as the respectable veneer necessary to see their hard-core, but stealth socialist agenda finally enacted. Key to a virtual presidency would be virtual voting, as 102 million mail-in and early votes were never subject to the previous standards of authentication and statistical rejection rates of the past—rendering Election Day voting mostly a memory.

Good Joe was billed as the antithesis to the tweeting Bad Trump. Yet he clearly wasn’t. Even Joe’s tweets (e.g., “We are with you, Jussie”) were often more ridiculous.

Within days the “moderate” Joe Biden set in place policies that were guaranteed to begin wrecking the country, to send his polls down into the 30s, to ensure the likely wipe-out of his congressional majorities in 2022, and to make himself and the media who created his myth disliked, and the laughingstock of the country. Trump became unpopular when over 90 percent of media coverage was negative, and the Left concocted a never-ending circus of hoaxes, starting with Russian collusion; but Biden is disliked, despite an obsequious media and weaponized bureaucracies on his side.

We are in the first 10 months of a cognitively challenged president who is deteriorating geometrically not arithmetically, with a vice president in waiting whom the nation fears is more dangerous, even knowing Biden is half-senile. He may be reaching the point of embarrassment at which the media and Left no longer find him useful and begin leaking and staging his exit.

Single-handedly the Biden puppeteers have managed to restore the Trump record of achievement simply by doing the opposite of what Trump did, thereby ensuring their own failure and reminding voters of what once was working. 

Biden may end up with the most unrecognized achievement of the modern age: the radical transformation of leftwing Latinos into a conservative majority of fed-up voters—a development that will likely cause the Left to demand an end to open borders on the assumption too many Mexicans and Central Americans are ending up like wizened Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants.

We could add other fallen heroes of the Left who once saturated our recent air waves—Robert Mueller and his dream team that would rid the world of Trump, and the quartet of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They, by their dishonesty, prevarications, and careerism have almost single-handedly tarnished the reputations of the Washington-based intelligence and investigatory agencies. Yet now, the Left has no more need of them. They are already fading from the public awareness, as careerists who managed to erode support from all those who once most readily defended their own institutions.

The lesson of these fallen icons? 

They were deified for larger reductionist and anti-Trump agendas. Yet they were also always dispensable when their utility eroded, due to their mediocrity—of such a magnitude that even our American Pravdas could no longer continue to manipulate them for advantage.

Hanson further expands on “icons” Jussie Smollet, the Cuomo brothers, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, and BLM.  I hope he’s right (he usually is).  Full column is here.

# # #

Victor Davis Hanson: The Pillars of Our Civilization

 

Victor Davis Hanson is not optimistic.  He concludes his American Greatness essay “Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization”:

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system. 

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

His full article is here.  

# # #

Think Piece of The Day: Victor Davis Hanson

 

This blog is a huge fan of Victor David Hanson. His perspectives as a specialist in classical history always gets my attention.  In his column at American Greatness, ("Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds"), he starts off:

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

. . .

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

. . .

What are the lasting consequences of all this madness? 

The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call.  All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law. 

Do read the rest here.

# # #

Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

# # #

VDH: Radical new rules for post-America

 

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson identifies ten ways in which America is changing, “maybe permanently.” Below are his “rules” summarized as bullet points.  Click on the link to read his full article;  he elaborates on each rule, and it’s not a pretty picture.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.  

3) Racialism is now acceptable. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. 

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. 

6) Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it.  

8) McCarthyism is good. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. 

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity itself. 

VDH concludes:

Americans privately fear these rules, while publicly appearing to accept them.

They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.

The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it

VDH is an historian and scholar -- hardly a rabble-rouser.  For his full take on these scary rules, click here.

# # #

 

Big Brother is here

 

Victor Davis Hanson sees frightening parallels to our societal decline and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  His column at American Greatness (“Did Americans Come to Love Big Brother?”) concludes:

Under memory-hole rules, just as everything good under the prior administration is now “bad,” so everything bad under the new administration will be presented as “good.” 

Americans in the new calm of all good news, and no bad news, then will supposedly come to appreciate that our Ministry of Truth’s Wokespeak—our version of Orwell’s “Newspeak”—was for our own good. 

Will it be easier to sleep when President Xi Jinping smiles at us on CNN, when we read in the New York Times how Joe Biden is reining in Benjamin Netanyahu, and when MSNBC hosts a town hall with John Kerry and Javad Zarif to announce a new and improved Iran Deal? 

When you are tired, and stuck in commute traffic, would you rather hear yet another NPR theory about how the sinister Donald Trump never paid his taxes and made millions while in office—or listen to a softer, upbeat voice narrate how the Biden Foundation is helping needy, undocumented workers?

So will Americans, exhausted by Trump-Goldstein, at least confess that the Ministry of Truth’s new rosy fantasies are not as nerve-wracking and depressing as its old angry hate-Trump propaganda? 

In other words, too many Americans may come to resemble Winston Smith, the defeated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who at last accepts the false calm—in his appreciation that all the devilish enemies of the past have faded away and there is only the tranquility of media triumph: “Everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Full column is here.

# # #

 

 

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

 

Destruction, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836).  Image via Wikipedia 

The great Victor Davis Hanson published a piece at National Review Online, a site that I don’t generally visit. However, his essay, “The Fragments of A Civilization,” was linked on some of the aggregators, and it is worth a read.  He takes on Hillary, the Russia hoax, the Mueller investigation, the 2020 debates, Joe Biden’s virtual campaign, and more. His essay closes with:

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.

And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.

The full article is here.

# # #

Why this political nightmare never ends

image credit: medicalxpress.com

Victor Davis Hanson argues that the radical Democrats have boxed themselves in – they have no choice but to keep on their path to a “slow motion suicide” :

Democrats don’t talk up their alternate agenda because they know that more regulations, open borders, trade appeasement, banning fracking, and the green new deal, would be the very opposite of Trump’s plan and likely achieve the very opposite of Trump’s results. In this context, destroying Trump is not just the only viable trajectory for the Left, but it is also the only possible narrative. Again, to focus on the current left-wing agenda is slow-motion suicide.

The Democrats know that impeachment will not lead to a conviction. They accept that they are not gaining traction in the polls. They fear that Trump’s wounds heal quickly and what doesn’t destroy him can make him stronger.

So why continue? Again, there is little other alternative. Moreover, addicts do not act logically and the Left is hooked on Trump and cannot quit him. Finally, they hope to destroy Trump physically. He will be 74 in June. By the standards of senior medicine, they feel Trump is locked in a self-destructive cycle: little sleep, little exercise, poor diet, too heavy, too stressed.

Hanson’s column at American Greatness is here.

# # #

Victor Davis Hanson on impeachment and TDS

Gary Varvel cartoon via indystar.com

Historian Victor Davis Hanson’s article “Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?” has been linked on multiple web and blogsites. Here’s an extract via Fox News:

Democrats addicted to attacking Trump –

even if impeachment drive hurts them

. . . [N]o president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

. . .

The common denominator of all this petulance is exasperation over the inability to derail Trump.

Trump’s many enemies fear he will be reelected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become.

Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.

Full article is here.

# # #

The Fight of Our Lives: documentary

From the documentary’s website: The Fight of Our Lives –- Defeating the Ideological War Against the West examines the internal and external threats facing the West. The cast of distinguished scholars and experts trace the emergence of anti-Western ideas and movements, and their subsequent penetration into Western academia, politics, and society.

We bought the DVD and watched it at home. About 66 minutes. Among those interviewed are Niall Ferguson, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Victor Davis Hanson, Melanie Phillips, and many more; most readers will recognize quite a few of the commentators.

From Cynthia Cai’s The Epoch Times interview with the producer of the documentary, Gloria Greenfield:

Another scholar who contributed to the film commentary was Bruce Thornton, an American classicist at California State University Fresno and research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

“[Thornton’s] understanding of what he refers to in the film as the ‘therapeutic age,’ where feelings are the most important and there’s been a rejection … of taking any responsibility for their actions—I thought that was a very important notion that needed to be addressed in the film,” said Greenfield.

. . .

“Soon after the film came out, I received an email from a professor in Paris, who was so grateful for the film and told me that he was using it in his classrooms,” said Greenfield.

So, do you know any teachers or professors or colleagues who would be interested in organizing a screening or showing it in a local classroom? Check out the website here for lots more information. It's also listed at Amazon. 

# # #

The new "normal"? -- Victor Davis Hanson

Over the weekend, the historian Victor Davis Hanson posted an essay at American Greatness. With the progressive-liberal community constantly projecting their own fantasies and corruptions on conservatives, it is a relief to read VDH’s perspective. Here's a brief extract from his closing comments:

The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.

Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.

Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.

Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.

Full article is here.

# # #

When That Did Not Work …

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is always eloquent, and his column here at American Greatness provides a handy history of the Progressives' efforts to de-legitimize candidate Donald Trump, President-Elect Donald Trump, and President Donald Trump. Hanson starts off:

Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein—cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders—sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House.

When that did not work, B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized, with television and radio commercials, to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016. Their idea was that select morally superior electors should reject their constitutional directives and throw the election into the House of Representatives where even more morally superior NeverTrump Republicans might join with even much more morally superior Democrats to find the perfect morally superior NeverTrump alternative.

Hanson recites all the failed efforts -- “When that did not work” -- to rid this country of its duly-elected President.  The full article is here; it’s a good one to save for future reference. 

# # #

Optics and the mid-tern election

art credit: foxandhoundsdaily.com

[and yes, that's Janet Leigh in Psycho]

Here’s the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson on “Midterm Optics Are Bad for Progressives”:

For progressives, the looming midterm elections apparently should not hinge on a booming economy, a near-record-low unemployment rate, a strong stock market and unprecedented energy production. Instead, progressives hope that race and gender questions overshadow pocketbook issues.

. . .

The new caravan appears strangely well organized. The marchers, many of them young men, do not appear destitute. They do not seem to fit the profile of desperate refugees whose lives were in immediate danger in their homeland.

For many Americans, the would-be refugees may seem presumptuous in assuming that they have the right to barge into someone else’s country. Most Americans realize that if an organized caravan of foreigners can simply announce in advance plans to crash into the U.S. illegally, then the concepts of a border, citizenship, sovereignty or even a country itself no longer exist.

Then he considers the feeding frenzy around the Senate hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh:

Many Americans finally concluded that there was no reason to deny Kavanaugh’s nomination to the court. To find Kavanaugh guilty of Ford’s charges, Americans were asked to suspend the very ideas of due process and Western jurisprudence.

The furious demonstrations that followed Kavanaugh’s confirmation only made the optics worse.

Hanson concludes:

Every country requires a border and the rule of law. Due process cannot so easily be thrown out in a moment. There can be no Senate without safety and calm inside its halls. Powerful, privileged Washington officials should be the last to game a system designed to help the underprivileged.

Many are speculating that yesterday’s pipe bomb scares were yet another stunt - even a false flag hoax -- to change the subject, stifle reasoned debate, blame President Trump, and prompt another round of media hysteria. DC Whispers asks:

Who would send out these fake bombs and why? Who might have anything political to gain two weeks out from the Midterm Elections by staging a fake bomb hoax against noted Democrat politicians that then generates Establishment Media hysteria? 

Already the bomb reports has shoved the caravan story to the sidelines, at least for now. At any rate, the Progressives have overplayed their hand. I just hope independent and liberal voters see that.

UPDATE Oct 26:  FBI Arrest made in “Package Bomb” Scare; Fox News Source – 56 Yr. Old Male with Prior Arrests - and a Trump supporter.

# # #

Devin Nunes, a deplorable dairy farmer

photo credit: impactlab.net

Historian Victor Davis Hanson always comes up with insights on today’s headlines, and in his latest, he offer perspectives not only as a scholar and professor, but also as a California farmer. His column at American Greatness on “Counterfeit Elitism” starts off:

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

The rest of his article is here. It’s a long look at the insulated elites who know better than the basketfuls of deplorables.

# # #

Progressive vs conservative solutions

 

A. F. Branco cartoon at legal insurrection

Ever since their Feb. 2016 issue dedicated to “Conservatives Against Trump,” I have been wary of National Review online. But historian Victor Davis Hanson recently published an essay on “The Great Experiment” at the NRO website, and he concludes:  

The true test of conservative solutions is to see how things are after four years of a strongly conservative president, with at least two years of a Republican Congress.

. . .

Antidote One, of unapologetic progressivism under Obama, did not lead to an economically robust and growing America, one safer abroad in a more secure world, and more cohesive, united, and stable at home — at least if that truly was the leftist agenda rather than the more hushed opposite goal of more equal but poorer Americans, America as just another nation among many, and a cultural revolution aimed at accentuating rather than assimilating race, class, and gender identities.

We shall see if the subsequent Antidote Two, of unregretful conservatism under Trump, will provide what conservatism has always promised: greater prosperity, security, and unity.

The engines of prosperity are already revving up, yet we still see anti-Trump foot-stamping, temper tantrums, and hysteria on display in the media (see cartoon at top), in academia, in the entertainment industry, and in groups like BLM and Antifa. No unity there. Yet. Perhaps when take-home pay increases due to the tax cuts, some of the hysteria will start to subside. Anyway, you can read the rest of Hanson’s essay here.

# # #

Primal Screams and Mass Hysteria

art credit: MaliaLitman.com

We all had a good laugh over the anti-Trump “Screaming Helplessly at The Sky” temper tantrums last week, but in a sense, the Scream Fests are not funny. There is something on the order of mass hysteria going on here. It's a year after the election, and adults are still stamping their feet and wearing stupid pink hats and screaming in genuine outrage.

I’ve come across a few think pieces on the phenomenon. Victor Davis Hanson examines the various “hysterias and frenzies” we have been witnessing:

Human nature is prone to a herd mentality and the politics of excess. Groupthink offers a sense of belonging and reinforcement to most people. Democracies in particular in their radical egalitarian culture and exalted sense of self-righteousness are particularly prone to shared frenzies. 

Richard Fernandez, Mr. Belmont Club, summed up his take on the Primal Scream-a-thon:

What they were mourning was not some conservative's sublunar fallibility, but their own. Whatever happens now, the progressives have lost decades of "gains," not to the alt-right, which is nothing special, but to the realization of their own human frailty. 

  

Last summer, Dilbert / Scott Adams wrote about the “mass hysteria bubble” and how he defines it:

if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

I thought I would post these links, since we live in crazy times, and maybe we are not the crazy ones. All three articles are worth the read.

# # #

The Democratic party, Progressive outrage, and post-election fallout

image credit: highfieldtales.wordpress

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and classicist. He also contributes columns to PJ Media and National Review online. Although he started off in the NeverTrump camp in the now infamous Never Trump issue of National Review, I decided to give him another look today.

His column today (“A Party of Teeth-Gnashers”) is about the fallout from the election and what has become of the Democratic party and the Progressive agenda. Here are a few paragraphs:

After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed. What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of teeth-gnashers.

. . .

Progressive outrage should not be taken too seriously because it is not intended to be serious. When Barack Obama invites rapper Kendrick Lamar into the White House and announces that his “To Pimp a Butterfly” is the president’s favorite song of the year — whose album cover shows the corpse of a murdered white judge, with Xs in place of eyes, on the White House lawn, as African-American youth toast his demise with drinks and cash — do we really assume that progressives like Obama believe in stopping hate speech and imagery, or perhaps even believe in anything at all?

Donald Trump, to progressives, supposedly harmed the Constitution and threatened our democracy because he would not say, after the WikiLeaks revelations, that he would accept the outcome of the election if he thought it was rigged. Yet after Clinton’s defeat, suddenly irate progressives have lodged conspiratorial charges that voting machines (miraculously only in swing states Hillary lost) were supposedly rigged, that the Electoral College should be dropped, and that electors should be bullied to ignore their pledges. Did anyone ever believe their original outrage at Trump’s suggestion that election results might be rigged? Are we now to have recounts in Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, and all the close states Trump lost, and then on into spring more recounts of recounts, until the last count achieves the desired result?

The Democratic party leadership is no longer an alternative to corporate wealthy America, but is corporate wealthy America, albeit in a new garb of jeans and flip-flops, Silicon Valley–style. The small-business person, assembly-line worker, and non-government wage earner mostly now vote Republican. 

Progressivism is a pyramidal capstone of wealthy elites who have the influence and money to embrace boutique positions and the cunning to profess egalitarianism, all while they lead private lives that would otherwise be condemned as illiberal and apartheid-like. So affirmative action ends up providing high-cheekboned Elizabeth Warren entry into Harvard Law School, the same way that progressive investigative journalism is reduced to Politico’s “hack” Glenn Thrush (who asked the Clinton campaign to fact-check and approve his article), and in the manner that philanthropy is reduced to the Clintons’ piling up of millions by selling influence. We are a long way from Harry Truman’s working classes.

. . .

The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it.

Hanson is not completely sold on Trump, though, as you will gather if you read the rest here.

# # #