The Biggest Problem Facing the West | Guest: Victor Davis Hanson | Ep 403

[Music] hey guys welcome to relatable so excited i know i say that every time but i truly am so excited about this conversation with victor davis hansen he is a senior fellow at stanford university's hoover institution he is also a military historian and he is just a fascinating person today we're going to talk about how postmodernism and moral relativism have affected not just our view of our country but also foreign policy and i learned so much from him in this and it is going to not just kind of teach you why american foreign policy is the way that it is and how we got to the place that we are but it's also um going to make you think about your world view in general and the world view that is being taught in academia and is being perpetuated by corporate america and in the media and he also leaves us with some wisdom and some advice that i found like really courage uh inspiring and um just very fortifying and i know that's something that we all feel like we need so again just so looking forward to you guys hearing this conversation and uh sending me all kinds of positive feedback about it because i know you're gonna love it so without further ado here is victor davis hanson thank you so much for joining me first i think well i think a lot of people listening and watching know exactly who you are they have watched your interviews you are a guest on fox news a lot but i'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the hoover institution and the mission of the institution and what your role is there first yeah well it's 100 years old and the institution was founded by herbert hoover in 1920 and originally for the first say 45 years it was an archival library centered in the middle of the stanford campus and its purpose was in hoover's words to collect all of the documents that he could find in his food relief efforts to feed the the impoverished and famished after world war one and then to discover the roots and origins of the russian revolution so the practical effect was he brought back millions of documents from war-torn europe in 1919-2021 and then he got a lot of the white so-called white russians that's the term for the anti-red russians and to put their papers at hoover and then for the next oh 50 years uh the tower was built the iconic tower was built in 1947 but the point was it would be going to be an archival library for the issues of war revolution peace and then he had a mission statement that the institution was going to promote limited government free enterprise and human freedom sometime in the 40s to the mid 50s that changed or i should say it was augmented to a research center with fellows and then it made it hoover was in a constant war with stanford university stanford being very liberal he been very conservative at various iterations of the institution that had degrees of autonomy and then subservience and finally it was worked out he felt right before he died in the in this late 60s with the appointment of a very young dynamic glenn campbell and the story of the institution for the next 60 years until 2015 were two 30-year directors glenn campbell john rayson who created the the current milton friedman robert conquest tom soul shelby steele conservative uh trademark and now because stanford has got silicon valley money and it's so huge and it's as you know the liberal left has become the progressive hard left there's a constant struggle to remain autonomous with a lot of pressures in stanford and that's where we are today yeah i've always wondered about that when you think of stanford you don't really think about conservative values and there are many of you who hold such conservative values that come out of the the hoover institution could you talk about how you got involved with the hoover institution and a lot of you a lot of people listening know your story but for those for those who don't can you just tell kind of a brief summary of how you got to have the voice that you do and how you kind of got plugged into the circles that you're in now well i graduated with a phd in classics at 26 and 1980 from stanford and then i had grandparents and parents that were not able to take care of this farm so i had a brother who was going to medical school and the two of us came back and we farmed the 180 acres i did that full-time for about five years and then in my late 20s i went to cal state fresno the nearest campus and started the latin greek classical studies ancient history program that got pretty big i did that for 21 years and wrote books on history classics agrarianism modern and ancient farming and op-eds i started right op-eds uh in the 90s and then somewhere after 9 11 i i became a regular columnist for national view so i did that for 20 years and i was appointed uh to the hoover institution 2003 2002 and three and i did both i was a professor of classics and i went up to stanford which is about 180 miles from where i'm speaking at my farm and then i transitioned in 2004 completely and i've been there oh for the last 17 years at the hoover institution and i my responsibility is to as i was told my contract is to write commentary on political events try to produce scholarly books every three or four years and in addition books that appeal to popular issues try to do your part as a hoover citizen at retreats the donor and overseer class and promote funding for hoover and then finally have institutional support so i run the largest task force at the uber institution called the military history working group and we and i edit along with my managing editor david berkley something called an online magazine called strategica and the purpose of that group is to bring about 40 scholars world over of all different political persuasions and to discuss contemporary crises china the middle east taiwan iran in the context of history what does history have to tell us about these particular crises and you can find that every three weeks online under the rubric strategica and that's exactly what i want to talk to you about i i saw an interview that you were a part of in a documentary and i i watched this several months ago and as soon as i um started watching it and listening to your answer you were talking about how the post-modern world view has affected liberal foreign policy in particular under barack obama and i found what you were saying so fascinating that i immediately jotted you down and said okay i want to talk to victor davis hanson about this because i i had never heard it talked about in those terms obviously we know as a conservative perspective we hear the apology tour uh by barack obama and how he kind of desired to lower the ranking of america and kind of do away with what they might call the myth of american exceptionalism or american greatness but i never thought about it in terms of kind of this larger postmodern movement or world view can you talk about that what post-modernism is and how it's kind of affected in particular liberal foreign policy over the past couple decades well we all know what modernism and that was reaction to traditional and classical western civilization so it meant in art you could you could paint something like jackson pollock that had nothing to do with what your eyes saw or in poetry you didn't have to rhyme or have a poetic vocabulary or in school you could bring in subjects you know like sociology or anthropology that weren't part of the classical curriculum so it meant it was a reaction against the mores of the last 2500 years people would have sexual congress that were not married uh people who were outside the nuclear family would have viable alternatives except post-modernism just means after modernism and what was different about post-modernism they didn't just reject traditional america they rejected the means of adjudication the whole system so they said to the modernist your problem is you're reacting to traditional we don't believe there are facts we just think a ruling largely white class created a system and called it rational but it was rigged because it's not based on truth because there is no truth truth is what any particular person says and it becomes truth only when they have power so it was a revolutionary but entirely nihilistic uh idea and it came from you know frederick nietzsche and hegel and the german neolis but it also was imported first to france michel foucault in the 1960s and 70s lacan derrida now it's here in the university and this woke culture that we see is a manifestation and how that works out practically as it says to americans you know you think you have a constitution it was basically you've been fooled it was just a bunch of white slave owners who rigged a system and called it truth freedom declaration of independence but it perpetuated their oppressions and then they would say you know you think you're better than uh other countries or that your safety or prosperity or freedom is preferable to that in venezuela but that's just because you've artificially defined those words giving them false definition who's to say that something's not better so it's a very dangerous ideology because it doesn't it doesn't reflect reality the people who promulgate it are usually very white very wealthy very privileged and they don't live by it in their own lives i mean they put their kids in private school they wanted to go to the ivy league they were professionals they make a lot of money they have beautiful homes so they really do believe in concrete realities and hierarchies and privilege and they mask all that by saying that people who do not have privilege the white working class in particular they despise which lacks the culture of the wealthy and the sympathy of the poor in their eyes they lob that on them they say you have privilege and that virtual signals an exemption they seek from their own privilege [Music] all right guys got to take a quick break to tell you about annie's kit clubs they 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techniques while expressing their creativity so go to annie's kit clubs.com ally save 75 off your first shipment that's annie's kit clubs.com ally to save 75 off your first shipment that's annie's kit clubs.com alley [Music] and how do you think this affects this kind of view affects foreign policy how did it affect some of the decisions in your mind that barack obama made in his so-called apology tour even the iran nuclear deal what some people would call appeasement towards hostile foreign powers do you think that that did have an effect on obama's administration and the policies that he pushed forth oh yes and that's a good question it affects it in so many insidious ways from the pragmatic to the ideological let's take the ideological it basically says when we look at the middle east and we see that israel is a constitutional republic a democracy it honors freedom we can't really say that because those reflect artificial values that we put importance or value on that are not fair to other alternative systems i.e the palestinians or the saudis or the libyans and therefore we have no right to go into that area and judge one group over the other and therefore if anything we have to apologize to people in the past because our dynamic economic system was built on exploitation and colonialism and imperialism are the only legacy and so that's one problem but in a very superficial sense it sends the signal to our opponents that we are very weak in the sense that they can use our own absurdities as weapons against us i'll take a good example from foreign policy if we know that the chinese sort of corrupted the world health organization to lie about the origins and the nature and the transmissibility of the covet virus and if we know that china has a million wagers in camps or destroyed democracy in hong kong or destroyed the culture of tibet it doesn't really matter because then they come back to us and say you know what you're just a typically racist western country and you oppress chinese students and every time you find a so-called quote-unquote chinese military attitude on your campuses that's just an excuse for your blanket condom condemnation of asian people just like the 19th century yellow peril so our enemies look at this and they say wow we're just going to mimic the um the complaints of the of the left and they take it seriously and it disarms them and so now in the biden administration we're losing sort of that that edge or that desire we had to stand up to china's uh crimes and it's very i mean it could be it can enter the realm of the absurd when bin laden was at his peak he and uh dr zawahiri wrote a book and i mean there was a book published by raymond ibrahim all of their collected writings and they were accusing us believe it or not of decadence because we didn't have campaign finance report we didn't sign on to radical global warming ideology so they just read american newspapers and said half the country is trying to eat itself alive we're going to join that cannibalistic attack on the west and so self-criticism and self-reflection is really important for society we're the only culture civilization the west that does that but sometimes it gets to excess and turns from constructive criticism to cannibalistic self-hatred yep and joe biden actually recently explicitly said that um he had a he had a phone conversation with jinping and that he kind of had to understand that you know that he has different priorities that it's culturally different that china you know the reason that they are doing what they're doing with taiwan or hong kong or the uyghur muslims um it just has to do with different priorities of the regime it has to do with you know different cultural norms and i was really alarmed to hear that but i'm afraid that there's a lot of people in charge a lot of people in what you might call the elite class that doesn't disturb them at all and they're perfectly fine with that kind of mentality and they actually think that america weakening or kind of going lower on the totem pole will be better for the whole world what do you think the consequence is if america does continue to go down this path of kind of shrinking and trying to lessen our power in the name of i don't know tolerance or intersectionality well we we don't appreciate the fact that the reason that you or i can when this epidemic ends can get on a plane and there's going to be common rules and regulations how it lands and takes off and the safety requirements it must meet or how we get on a cell phone and who we communicate with asia or latin america or how what or is legal or legal in trade the whole system of global cooperation is based on westernism after world war ii and western technology and the enforcer if i could use that term of this system is to be frank the united states economy which is the largest in the world it's almost in some terms of measurements twice the size of the chinese economy and we do that with one uh fourth of the population so it's an it's an astounding achievement and we're critical to make the world work when we doubt ourselves as you pointed out and then other people see you know what the united states doesn't really believe in itself it doesn't really believe in the system and we're going to take advantage of it and we know how to take advantage of it we just emulate the left's hatred of the system and then they're kind of befuddled they don't know quite what to do they don't want to be called racist or sexist or homophobes or nativists or xenophobes and so they become paralyzed in the case of china and joe biden there's two things going on very quickly one is that our elite are bipartisan washington to new york elite and silicon valley to hollywood elite so many of them are compromised by china whether it's the nba who can't say a word right an objective objection or it's hollywood who calibrates their pictures on the on the orders of chinese to eliminate black actors that they deemed too dark and wouldn't be acceptable to the liquid chinese market or the biden family itself joe biden's son hunter who still has interest in china i can't believe he still retains interest in the chinese communist sponsored company or it's mr blinken the secretary of state who has had a lucrative career in chinese investment all of them are compromised either financially or ideologically and what was unusual about trump to break that cycle i guess the only person who could do that was someone who was not only not part of it but was a little bit uncouth i accrued out loud and just said i don't really care i'm gonna go into this glass store of hypocrisy and break everything up and of course he wasn't re-elected and then people said well we stopped that and they're now even more emboldened they were then before he came so i'm not optimistic that we're going to have the wherewithal to resist the chinese in the way that they need to be resisted i've been interested to see other countries like australia and france kind of criticize the united states for the kind of self-loathing mentality that a lot of people in the elite class have taken on or our softness against china or unwillingness to call out china does that surprise you at all that some of these more what you might consider progressive countries are actually stronger in their stances on some of these positions than the united states is you know it doesn't and i can explain why very briefly there's two or three reasons why they have a long colonial and imperial history that other than the philippines at the turn of the 20th century we have not really had and so when we start to become woke or radical and we did it in the 1930s they get scared because they're worried that we would become not the stabilizer enforcer of um the post-war order but rather ourselves sort of a revolutionary society that might join their enemies or critics and saying you know what we're woke now we reject our own western past we're no longer a western country and you guys colonized asia and africa and you still uh have influence in india and north and we we're not we're free of that we're a revolutionary societies and and they're afraid secondly because they're very dependent upon us they have asymmetrical trade with us they do not until trump came along the vast majority of the nato allies did not meet their two percent defense contributions more do i think eight do now out of uh 23 countries but my point is that they for practical reasons they say you know what the us has to be firm it has to be a protector our role are the ancient greeks they're the ancient roman they're the muscle and the economy we're the philosophers we're gonna ankle back them make fun of them tweak them but we just we only can do that if they stay firm they're the parent or the whiny juvenile but when the parent acts like a hippie then the juvenile says wait a minute who pays the bills who enforces who tell and that's where we are right now they they don't they're scared stiff and they're scared stiff because if america goes hard left it could in theory be as critical of them as as it is itself and they don't want that to happen you know that's interesting i've never thought about it in quite that way and it doesn't seem to be that it's just kind of our more woke allies like france and germany and australia and canada that you're saying that they rely on american exceptionalism or american strength but they like to use america as a punching bag i guess to gain their own woke points and the same thing with the nba the same thing with a lot of major corporations they depend on the american economy obviously america being the strongest country in the world but at the same time they know that they'll gain points both here and abroad by bashing america as systemically racist and you know an enemy of social justice or whatever it is is that kind of what you're describing yeah i think you described it very well i i would call it the court jester syndrome where once the court is stable then they hire a jester to come in and make fun of them on the pretense that they're not going to be dangerous enough to disrupt the workings of the court so we have in this system market capitalism free enterprise and the protection of private property and that's makes us that makes uh mark zuckerberg or bill gates or any of these leftists very wealthy and then they have court jesters these are the people in the universities that make fun of it and they kind of amuse it they go they sign under the new green deal they do all these left-wing things but in the old days there was an area where you couldn't intrude upon you didn't go in and break up monopolies like you know facebook they thought they could control their their capitalist juggernaut and control the court gestures i don't think they can anymore because i think that joe biden administration is hijacked by elizabeth warren and aoc in the squad and i think pretty soon the woke wall street woke silicon valley woke nba all of these institutions are going to have to deal with real socialist agendas that i don't think even their you know their protections that they have from the consequences of their own game plan or all the ideology is going to help them and we'll we'll see about that but yeah it's very dishonest and it works on the transatlantic sense in the same fashion they view us as monolithically capitalist and productive and strong with all these aircraft carriers and this huge domestic consumer market and then they can kind of make fun of it up to a point and up that point has been reached now because when they look at the writing and they look at the name changing and the statute changing uh top lane and the school they think this is crazy wait a minute we've got a reign of terror in the united states this is like the jacobin takeover the french revolution and these people don't understand that if they change this country we're not going to have a market we're not going to have protection we're not going to have we went too far and making fun of it and now we're starting to see you know actually conservative so eastern europe especially is worried they're much more conservative than we are and now as you point out people in the uk france these people in southern europe they're very scary because it's not just france going left-wing it's this huge economic and military power and when they look at retired generals who start lecturing about as david petraeus did about taking down statues or accusing donald trump of being an insurrectionist or a mussolini or hitler-like that gets them even more scared my god they think the pentagon is becoming a national liberation army and so i think they're very terrified yeah and it seems like as they should be they seem to have a more clear perspective on what's going on here in america than we do i don't really see an about face by these corporations and by the establishment media to say oh we're we've caused or we've helped at least exacerbate some of the chaos and the division and the weakness that we are seeing precipitated throughout the country and so we're gonna we're gonna stop or we're gonna you know start criticizing the violence or we're gonna start you know calling uh antifa and blm what they are i don't really see that kind of correction within the united states in corporate america and in in in the media do you think that at some point they will wake up that's a very good question they did not wake up in 1917 when lennon said to all of the uh russian aristocrats that wanted to abandon the czar and did and try to make a deal to be saved and to augment and abet the bolsheviks or the karinskyites the legitimate socialist uh opposition to the czars they all thought they could deal with lin and linden's attitude was you give a capitalist rope and he'll hang himself because they're greedy so i think the left's attitude is we don't want to preserve market capitalism we want to take over these big corporations and make them state-run enterprises and wake them up or have them woke sources of jobs and money for us and i don't think the corporations quite understand that so maybe they're going to fail and be as they did in venezuela and cuba and outsmart themselves or maybe they're going to wake up as they did in france in 1793 and you know ropes pierre ended up on the guillotine or maybe in as they did in the 60s they thought they could handle the 60s revolution and finally they realized no we can't we got to elect a guy like ron ronald reagan so there is a push back right now but what's different is that we've never seen with this electronic octopus the control of our means of accessing information communicating social media facebook twitter google and all of that is controlled by the left so it's much harder to gauge or calibrate whether this grassroots push back can be sustained or how big it is but you're starting to see people on the left people who've been fired from newspapers actors that can't get jobs people have been cancelled out for one word they're starting to murmur that this is not sustainable because the left is starting to eat its own and they've been eaten and they don't want it right and it's interesting because a lot of obviously these people on the left who are advancing these causes and these goals they you know they're soft towards socialism and communism but isn't the combining of corporate and governmental power also a form of fascism and these are the very same people who say that they're standing against the fascists who they say are the conservatives or the trump supporters yeah that was the paradigm that that fascism did in europe in the 1930s whether it was in spain or or italy or germany that is they went to the industrial class what they called the industrial class they said look we're going to give you all these markets and you're going to have a monopoly on and you're going to make a lot of profits because we have an expansionary agenda overseas but we don't want communism we don't want leptism we don't want freedom we don't want unions we don't want any of that but you're going to have these and they all signed up for it and notice that there are no unions in amazon i mean amazon said that they wanted to promote workers rights and that mail in balloting was wonderful and then we find out that jeff bezos is trying to crush a union movement in uh alabama by outlawing trying to outlaw my old mail-in ballots which he said can't be verified he sounds like a right-wing reactionary but they're starting to see that this deal they made with the left that gave them monopolies and cartels an absolute exemption from you know federal jurisdiction or oversight they think the left is a little bit more ambitious than they signed up for the left wants to control them and you really saw that after the last election when mark zuckerberg and his his companies and twitter they were kind of saying well we're going to slant the news and not report about hunter biden and deep platform occasionally donald trump but we're not going to cancel them out because if we do that we're kind of a state-run organization we're going to lose half the country our market and yet the obamas came out biden came out hillary came out all of these left-wing politicians said shame on you to give donald platform uh 70 million twitter followers and a huge facebook audience you're responsible for all these so then like a night of the long nights we woke up on i guess it was january 11th and they had destroyed parlere and then earlier they had de-platformed they being twitter and facebook trump for life and notice the argument they used it was the 1960s racist uh lunch count owner or landlord who said to african americans we're not infringing on your right to check into my hotel or any hotel you're not you can go to any launch just don't go to mine you know i i own it i have a right to say you know the first amendment doesn't cover me i just don't want you in my lunch counter i don't want you in my hotel but you know drive a hundred miles somewhere else and the the courts and the country said no that's not realistic and so we should they are playing that role of the racist 196 they're saying to trump or to the parlier people or to us they're saying you know what we believe in free speech but we don't believe in free reach so if you want to commit communicate over twitter just go get yourself another twitter but don't use ours and then we say okay we'll go to parler and guess what one o'clock in the morning on the 11th of january they shut it down and you can't get it on any app or any phone and that's really scary because that gets back to your point about state run fascism all right got to tell you guys about fund rise if you're looking to truly diversify your portfolio rather than just have your traditional mix of stocks and bonds and mutual funds then you need 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absolutely well there there are so many other questions that i have for you but i do so appreciate your insight if you could just leave people with maybe one tip or one piece of advice you know the average person kind of feels powerless in the midst of all of this um do you have any you know wisdom or i don't know a little bit of optimism or hope for people who are just worried about the direction the country is going and what they can do i do i would say don't become depressed or dishearten but remember that we are in a period where the universities k through 12 the foundations professional sports hollywood entertainment wall street and silicon valley they control our culture our wealth and our power and their woke but they don't have 51 percent of the people and for them to wake up and return to normality and and honor the bill of rights it requires all of us even though we're one wink one bad word one good word one facial expression from getting canceled we don't care we're going to say what we want when we want how we want and the more that we do that it's sort of like a glass a screen and we have a big illusion on it and we need to take a sledgehammer in that famous apple commercial and throw it right through it because there's nothing there because it's not based on ethics morality or logic and we can just you know there's no logic in saying you can't name a school after george washington he's a racist can't you can't do that because if you do that you have no country so we're going to say yes we can we're going to name whatever we want and then override that you call me that thing in the world has no effect on me when we start to do that sort of like that famous lawyer joseph welch in the mccarthy hearings of the 1950s mccarthy would come like the modern left and say i have a list here of all these people that i'm going to go after and he would do things like that make up stuff kind of like the blacklisting the lincoln project and others have engaged in and finally the army council said have you no decency senator mccarthy and as soon as he said that it was weird it just it destroyed the illusion and mccarthy was rendered what he was kind of an alcoholic has been demagogue and i think we could do that with a lot of these woke people you have no control over me i'm a free person say what you want it has no effect on me i don't care what you say about me in the new york times i don't care what you say about me at the local school board i'm going to continue and once we all do that in unison it's our problem just to finish is remember the ease of fable about the mice get together and they say you know these cats are picking us off one by one this bad cat and we never know he's coming he's so stealthy so clever and so they the mice get together and say ah we got an idea we're gonna go put a a collar with a bell on it around that guy's neck and so every time he comes he'll be so loud we'll just he's irrelevant we can scramble them plenty of time and then one person in the crowd says ah who's gonna bail the cat and no one's willing to be the bell beller of the cat but we need a lot of them yes yes that is so good thank you so much that truly is encouraging and i really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us we'll make sure that people know where to follow you and support you and the hoover institution thank you so much for talking to us today yes you

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Id: eiq98TGJRtI

Length: 38min 22sec (2302 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021