Victor Davis Hanson: COVID-19 and the Lessons of History | Hoover Virtual Policy Briefing

[Music] good morning good afternoon or good evening depending on where you are watching this and welcome to the Hoover virtual policy briefing series I'm bill Weiland the Hoover institutions Virginia Hobbs carpenter Fellow and journalism and host of Hoover's area of 45 podcast and our recently launched Goodfellows broadcast that airs on Wednesdays for more than a century the Hoover Institution has been collecting knowledge and generating ideas that support freedom and improve the human condition our work has profoundly impacted public policy initiatives here in the United States and around the world we're excited to be able to connect virtually with you to showcase the important work coming out of the institution these policy briefings are an opportunity for you to hear directly from some of our nation's top scholars on the pressing issues facing the world during this difficult time as we confront the challenges brought on by kovat 19 conversations like this had never been more important we hope you enjoy and find value in these discussions which will now begin as a reminder we will be taking audience questions and encourage you to submit yours at the Q&A button located at the bottom of your screen just look down on the bottom of your screen where it says Q&A tapping your question and we'll try to get to it toward the end of the broadcast today's briefing is from Victor Davis Hanson the Martin an ileus senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution his focus is classics and military history he is a best-selling author and has written or edited 24 books the most recent of which is the case for Trump Victor Davis Hanson has been awarded both the National Humanities medal and the Bradley prize Victor you're a better man than I if I had that medal I would have it hanging around my neck 24/7 how are you today my friend very good thank you for having me thanks a interesting question I think before we get into the policy side of things Victor a lot of us are watching this from population centers around the country around the globe cities and suburbs and exurbs where we know the difference that has occurred the past couple weeks life has come to a standstill it's eerily quiet you Victor are coming to us from a family farm your fifth generation farmer I might add but you're right about 15 miles outside of Fresno I think I'm curious as to what difference you note in an agricultural community in this kind of situation well I think there's a sense that life can go on and it will go on because agriculture by definition is at least the production side is a little bit of a solitary existence and so when I'm looking out here at almonds or I'm looking down at a grape vineyard or a plum orchard or I see trucks going by constantly headed toward the coast or even in the East Coast with chickens and eggs and beef there's a sense that agriculture is really important and people are looking to it to make sure that food is delivered to people who are sheltered and at home and that there's not as great a danger part because of population population density and as I said Fresno County is is a big County it's got over a million people 1.2 million but we've only had a little over a hundred cases two deaths and the other rural counties that I live near Kings County Tulare County Kern County they are analogous they have far fewer cases per million residents and far fewer lavallee so it's not the it's not the feeling of being in battle that we had say at Stanford University before they shut down Victor here we are in the year 2020 over half of Americans have been told to stay at home business have been told by government who's a central and who's not people have been told to keep their distance from each other and there's no foreseeable end to this maybe the end of April maybe the end of May June July who knows when there's one curious about Victor if you go back and look at a virus that struck the United States in 1957 the Hong Kong flu we could we could use a politically incorrect term back then called the Hong Kong flu but the economy did not shut down in 1957 when we went through that strain if you go back to 1918 Victor President Woodrow Wilson he did not hold daily press conferences to talk about the influenza epidemic Congress did not do massive spending bills in response to at the economy did not come to a halt why are we doing things differently in 2020 Victor as opposed to 60 years ago and a century ago there's a variety of reasons one is were a much more technologically sophisticated interconnected population so we we do it because we can do it we have television and the way that we're communicating over the internet right now so people are inure to that and they want instant information we're much more affluent population where we all feel that we're gonna die in their late 70s or 80s in our sleep that was a much more tragic society they were the case of the so-called Spanish flu they were in a war which would kill about 50 million people 60 million the United States would lose about 128 thousand almost half of them to the flu and that was part that was considered part of the tragic existence and people didn't have control over their medical their hygienic their economic circumstances to the degree that they feel that they do today it was also a more tragic than therapeutic society where people were were used to a more physical existence I'm speaking in this house that's been in my family for a hundred and forty five years and they have kind of a history and I grew up hearing my grandparents talk about the 1918 flu and they quarantined themselves out here but they were completely self-sufficient they had their own water their own to eat your own food and they just didn't go very many places and there was never very many places to go then and I remember that the stories of my aunt who went out to swim once in 1922 at 7 she got polio and she ended up over here in the corner crippled for the rest of her life she stayed in this house till she died in 1980s and I can remember the 1957 flu I was four or five years old that's one of my first memories that we had a tent in this house and we had a humidifier and we were all sort of told to breed this era so we wouldn't die but and I remember that everybody thought penicillin was a miracle drug so we had Doc Nilsson who drove out in a car and then we went out and we rolled up our sleeve and he gave us a shot and I don't know whether it helped for the virus I should say I know it didn't help for the virus but we felt that penicillin was still a magic drug you know Victor's the day's the day's just kind of come one after the another now in this situation I get up in the morning I have breakfast i watch Governor Cuomo give his briefing I have a light lunch i watch gavin newsom give his briefing I have a light dinner I watched President Trump do his briefing each day just seems to be a continuation of the past you're a historian Victor you've looked at societies and you and all the times of looking at the question of discipline in this society is there any model we should be looking at for how long a country especially a country that values civil liberty and freedom how long the society can go on like this well I mean when we've been in similar situations world war two if you remember the Japanese internment and the paranoia and that didn't come I mean that came from sober and judicious and liberal minded leaders like earl warren and FDR they later regretted it but at the time there was a panic that gripped the nation and even we we look back fondly at the productive history of world war ii but that was not a sustainable situation to have that much of your gdp devoted to military production right and i can and i can tell you that if this thing continues the way it's charted by some of our modelers the the price will not just be economic it'll be in human lives because i'm you're already starting to see even out here social breakdowns i can tell you that within my circumference there are people who are opening illegal barber shops out in the barn and there's people there's an illegal daycare center right down the street there are canteens that are supposed to have take-out food and they're serving food with people sitting down and I talk to a lot of people from of a lot of different varieties of life and their attitude is sort of like the 1950s that life was okay it wasn't great but I'm not going to destroy my children's livelihood on the basis of some edict and I'm going to try to navigate around it and there are people who when you go to the store here and a person that's told one paper towel one toilet paper one hand cleanser and they walk out with to the clerk is in a dilemma because she says if I don't if I allow them to do it they at least let me charge them and I can get the money from them but if I say only one they'll just walk out with two and it's a minor misdemeanor that's not going to be prosecuted so there's already a frame of the society and I think that because we're such a diverse country and we have the same diversity as Europe does South Dakota is not Louisiana Central Valley is not San Francisco New York is not North Dakota or South Dakota and we need to be a little bit more flexible and while the states if not the counties to be a little bit more liberal in the way that they adjudicate the perceived danger to their subset populations it's a victory you mentioned models the University of Washington has been doing a model on this and revised its numbers today it's now suggesting that we're going to hit a peak mortality number this Sunday which is good news that means we're coming to to the hump in this thing we're gonna go downhill after that here's my question Victor there one of two ways to look at that either people can look at the glass half-full saying that you know we we behaved we kept our distance and we're keeping this thing under control or conversely pictre people could look at this and say you know here's another example of well you want to use the phrase fake news lack of institutional confidence scientists told us this would happen and it didn't which of these two do you think is couldn't prevail the half-full argument or the half-empty argument well I hope it's half-full because there is a logic to the shut because if you're shut down and you're getting paid at least some of the population is and you feel that this is a sustainable proposition and you're not aware of the effects on other people in the self-employed because you're closed in and then you think that the numbers have to be ever increasingly more optimistic you have to get not 2.5 percent LaValley rate but at 1% or half a percent or you're not going to go out until it's ninety nine point eight like a flu year then that becomes a logic of its own that drives reality so what I'm worried about is that you have to be we have to realize that it's not a dichotomy between the economy and the coronavirus it's between lives and lives and we're gonna lose a lot of lives to suicide substance abuse anxiety and stress and neglect the doctor's appointments neglected surgeries if we don't allow flexibility and people to go out and as far as the modeling goes this is the first epidemic as a historian that I can think of when the modelers had no accurate information whatsoever about the denominator the number of people who actually have it that's only based on those who were ill or feel that it exposes and took the effort to go get tested and most people believe and that's a model in itself that that's a tenth of the actual case numbers it's very important because then that adjudicates the lafalot e rate per caseload and then people say well we it started out one percent now it's 2.5 i'm oh my gosh but it's bound to go down when we have more data people who have antibodies or inactive cases and even the numerator the number of people who are dying is subject to interpretation because a lot of people with Co committin physical issues and challenges are being listed as dying from the virus rather than with it so there's so much uncertainty and that's reflected in the inability of the modelers to be correct we're not going to have 2.2 million people die as Imperial College and Neil Ferguson said I don't think the Washington Mall would want to go back to their initial data I don't think the modelers have convinced gavin newsom three weeks ago to say that by the end of this month twenty-five million Californians will have a case of Cove in nineteen and given the Litella rates that would imply a million are gonna die or I don't think Mike DeWine in Ohio should have said on March 12 that he thought a hundred thousand people had an active case when in fact there were about five there were about a hundred who had tested positive maybe five hundred that that might have had it but he said it was doubling every six days based on his health commissioner or health directors modeling and that would give us today twenty four days later one point six million Ohioans and probably forty thousand dead and as I looked at the statistics yesterday they have a little over a hundred dead and about five thousand cases so there is a downside to modeling the modeling is that it's we have to be careful that when you make a model it's not just a construct it has consequences and so far I'm afraid that the media has suggested the consequences are always good because the pessimist serves two purposes the pessimists warns us what could happen and therefore we get a little hysterical and take the necessary measures they didn't when he's found to be incorrect he says if I hadn't have done it you wouldn't have taken these measures and then if he's right then he's sort of a grim person who was accurate the optimist suffers a lose-lose situation if he says the modeler is exaggerating that data is incomplete the when he's found to be correct everybody said yeah but it was only because of the pessimists if people change their behavior that made your optimistic assessment possible and if he's wrong given life and death they say that they had optimist well you're a murderer because you said it wouldn't be this many dead and because of you people were not cautious so we've got to keep in mind the psychological landscape that these models are given there consequences when somebody tells Western governments the 2.2 million Americans are likely to die and that had a lot of ramifications and they didn't do that your larger point in 1918 1957 they didn't I'm not saying they didn't have the statistical knowledge to make these models or the data retrieval abilities but they didn't have confidence that they were all-knowing and they didn't have computers and things like that so they were much more humble about their own data and the ramifications for public policy for those just tuning in I'm Bill Whelan and this is the Hoover Institution is virtual policy briefing with Victor Davis Hanson Victor you mentioned Western government rahm emanuel the former mayor of chicago and before that Bill Clinton's chief of staff famously said never let a serious crisis go to waste you've been watching government you've been watching what's going on in Congress you've been watching what California has been doing statewide and locally tell us what you think government has done well in terms of this crisis but also what would alarm you in the way of civil liberties for example do you would you be concerned that maybe a state like Rhode Island which is just very upset that New Yorkers are driving through it on the way to Massachusetts could we see a situation where maybe a state wants to shut down its borders because it was to keep people that thinks they're sick out how far do you think this will push us on the civil well I think we're in a crux right now because we reacted as we did after Pearl Harbor very rapidly to a very difficult situation in which the Chinese Communist government lied about the nature of the birth of the virus the transmission rate of the virus the infectiousness of the virus the spread of the virus everything about the virus and that those on truths were echoed by the World Health Organization so that when we had the travel ban of January 31st the World Health Organization the Chinese government said it was unnecessary because you couldn't really transmit person-to-person as they'd said a couple weeks earlier given all that and given all the acrimony and the CDT see test kits didn't work people who are told to wear masks not to wear masks not to work in we're getting to a point where there is starting to emerge a consensus that what we're doing now has reduced the infectiousness but we're where we're at a crux is this is not a sustainable situation and we're going to have to either have regional regional choice that people can modify the protocol or we have to realize it if we don't get these antibody tests we have no idea of the degree of herdmen immunity so we'll just go out and then we'll start the infectious process again and we'll be able to justify this six or seven trillion dollar hit in the economy I guess on the rationale well we gave us breathing time we didn't get the hospital's overcrowded and we have the medical systems intact for the second or third or fourth wave but each time we shelter and in space and then we don't get out we don't develop herd mentality and then we'll go out again and again the only rationale I can see that's been given is that we're buying time for either anecdotes or vaccinations but it's not a sustainable situation the cost to the economy and human lives will eventually and I think eventually in terms of the days where rather than months persuade people that we don't have a choice but to to gradually be careful well wear masks proper hygiene don't go to a sports event maybe but otherwise you've got to get back to work I'm rounded before we go to audience questions you are listening to Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution if you want to learn more about Victor's research and the research of other Hoover fellows please go to our website and that is Hoover org WWV org now let's take some audience questions let's begin with Kevin Emma who writes to Victor quote to my knowledge after every significant crisis such as war the economy sees a post-war boom given the interpretation that we are in a war with the same historical rule of no I think it will I think once you're in 1919 or 1946 or even Athens after the war there was a lot of research that I did earlier on on my career that showed that all the pessimistic appraisals that Athens was worn out were false that it actually had a boom after the Peloponnesian War and I think the answer is that people feel they survived something and they haven't they've been starved for social action or travel or restaurants so then they indulge their appetites and agree even beyond what they did before the crisis and then economists can argue whether that makes up for the low or not but there are so there are also some auxilary criteria we should examine we're reaching a point in the summer where we're gonna have record low fuel prices so driving getting in a plane will be very cheap in a way it's never been we have almost zero interest rates now you can argue that we're making a vast redistribution of money from passbook holders that are used to two or three or four percent on their money and they're getting it at zero and that lost revenue is going to be given to people who borrow money by zero interest but whatever view you take of it it's going to be an economic stimulus and then we have the government I guess the logic of the government has been that we've lost six or seven trillion dollars of liquidity both through the stock market and lost GDP and that was real money that disappeared and therefore they have to if I could be still crude Neanderthal like and say they printed money but they infuse cash into the system and they claim it will not be inflationary because we late it's replacing at least temporarily lost capital but I'm the point of all that when the answer is that there are going to be stimuli after this crisis that I think will really accelerate it and then what's very important is what was the situation before the crisis world war two there were a lot of people who said you know what we had a second recession depression almost in 38:39 where we had 16% unemployment we had negative GDP it's going to be like that again and they were very worried but in our case we went and into this by creating 7 million jobs so when we lose 7 million jobs we're back to this status on teh quo of 2016-17 so we had a strong economy and that Willie was important Viktor Greg and Chris if written variations of the same question which is what is our relation going to look like with China moving forward what's going to look like a year or two from now well China's success was built on the following assumptions that they were going to outsource rote labor you could outsource rote labor to China and they were going to produce quality merchandise in a manner that was consistent with world norms and world more mercantile and trade protocols and when they didn't do that with dog food or drywall or pharmaceuticals and people said well that was an abuse or that was an aberration but it didn't endanger the paradigm and there was a naivete that said well we can outsource our pharmaceutical industry to China because the richer it becomes it's going to become more liberalized we have 360,000 students in the United States we have 20,000 people flying in per day they are becoming liberalized and that someday Shanghai and Peking vjing are going to look like Paris and San Francisco that's inevitable they'll be democratic and liberal minded that's not going to happen and the reputation of China was destroyed during this and now I think the general global perception is when is the next whoo-ha virus ie a corona virus number not two but three coming out of Wuhan and when will it get nine ten hours to San Francisco Los Angeles Paris they've lost their international credibility because they lied about every aspect of the virus they contaminated the World Health Organization it's lost its credibility and I don't think it's gonna it's going to be a sustainable proposition for an American company to produce ampicillin only in China I think it's going to have connotations that they're not national or nationalistic or patriotic and those won't be dirty words like they were in the past so I think things are going to change I think that's why the Chinese are so worried and that they're engaged in this propaganda campaign that they've weathered the virus better than anybody that they're helping other countries because their international reputations at rock-bottom right Victor Edward writes quote have the effects of the pandemic changed our relationship with our treaties with other nations meaning are they redefined with new partners or changing partners well obviously people are starting to look at things in a different way and one of them is Taiwan we always thought well let's just not talk about Taiwan we know they're democratic and they play by the rules but they're small and they endanger our relationship with this rich and growing 1.4 billion person China but now we look at it and we say you know what they played by all the rules they were transparent they protected their population they allowed people to voice dissension they are a model of what China should have been and why in the world do we have to feel guilty about our support for Taiwan I think the same is true of Japan and South Korea so I I see a lot of those countries being far more afraid than they even were before the crisis of China and far more amenable to a closer relationship with the United States in terms of Europe it's it's a little bit more problematic because we will lecture that European Academical ISM under the eaves guidelines was sort of a model almost as if the model in the West will be a transnational organization that runs on solar and wind power it relies on soft power and it has no borders the Schengen Agreement and within a nanosecond during this early crisis the borders closed and for a while Germany and other countries in the north were not willing to send medical supplies to the south and we had this sort of anti EU cret creed that a country where people were dying with no money couldn't get money from people who had money when they were not dying as much and when you add all of that together with the pre-existing fit fissures in the EU the north-south financial crisis with Spain and Italy in Greece the east-west / immigration with former Eastern European countries brexit and then the fights that many EU - NATO countries had with us over funding of the Alliance I think the EU is taking a big hit I don't know who you called the to paraphrase Henry Kissinger right now do you call the President of the EU and as he speak for Italy or is he speak for Greece does he speak for Germany I don't know they haven't sorted that out and I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure on the EU to revert more to a model of the original European Common Market that to stop trade barriers encourage free trade within European nations but don't have a EU grandi in Strasbourg trying to tell a person in Crete how many inches of banana has to be to be a banana that type of central control I think is discredited Victor quarry has a question for you hello dr. Hansen do you think this will create a generation similar to the golden generation will this crisis affect the toughness of our current generation well I mean when we talk about the greatest generation with we characterize that by two seminal experiences they went through a depression from 1929 to 1939 that was a decade and then they fought a war that cost the world seventy million people and almost 500,000 Americans I don't see this crisis lasting as long as those two crises are taking as much life from a much smaller population what I do think it will do is give a dose of reality to the average American in this sense there is an existential fact of life that when you get up in the morning whether you you're gonna live the next day depends on the food you get the water you drink the sewage that's disposed and the fuel that warms your apartments or right now what is important to you is not Michael Bloomberg financing Chinese companies half of whom were communist to get them Western liquidity for them to be viable and to get a big cut out of it and then to lecture us that China is a consensual Society or farmers don't have enough gray matter and they don't have the technical skill of people like himself that is irrelevant right now in fact it's less than irrelevant it's dangerous given the naivety of that thinking that empower the Chinese what we want are people that know how to drop something in the ground like Michael Bloomberg said was easy and didn't take grave mater it takes a lot of gray matter and whether you eat tomorrow in Manhattan depends on somebody over here in Hanford getting that crop to market and a trucker from Bakersfield driving all night and then a stock boy and man and hadn´t working at that supermarket so I think there's gonna be a much greater respect and honor for muscular labor and for people who we felt were the losers of globalization they didn't know how to code or they didn't understand that there was a global market I think they were gonna see that if you want a ventilator or you want a pharmaceutical or you want a head of lettuce then you're gonna rely on America and that for maybe just maybe you didn't think was that important to the global economy and you thought the global call me was everything when it turned out when you looked at the global economy whether it was the EU model or the World Health Organization's help for you or China's role in it it wasn't too good and what was good was the guy driving on all night on the interstate and the guy out there picking working on a potato harvester or the young kid you know that's willing to go into the grocery store and stand there with a thousand customers every day and be exposed in theory and sell you things I think that's gonna be very positive before I read this question I'd like to remind the audience Victor Davis Hanson has written a lot of remarkable books those times one of which was published in 2017 it's called the second world wars now the first global conflict was fought in one and I mentioned that because it ties in the next question Victor which comes from Kevin he writes quote can you draw a comparison to the dark days of World War two in terms of combat deaths and how the leaders back then did a better job of communicating with the public about the sacrifices required then and now and how we can better carry on today yeah I think so what was the secret to Roosevelt's successes he had that gift that these cities attributed to Pericles and Themistocles they called it the prone area of foresight so he wakes up on December 8 and he's told mr. Roosevelt the zero was a much better plane and anything we have it's better than the Wildcat it's better than the p40 and by the way our torpedoes are substandard the long term torpedoes deadly and by the way they have more carriers in the Pacific than we do and by the way they're just about ready to take over all the European orphan colonies whether it's Indonesia they've already taken over Southeast Asia they're gonna take Singapore we cannot save the Philippines and Roosevelt was able to say yes but this is what the United States was capable in World War one we took two million people in a year and a half and landed them in France without losing one in the middle of a world epidemic and we eventually produce more munitions than did our allies put together of France and Britain we can do that again and this will be an for the the unused capacity that way compression he knew that and he was able to nurse us along Americans and say this is what we're gonna do then Midway he never said that in Midway was the end of the war he said this is basically the end of the beginning and then they're going to be more and more setbacks but as we proceed we're learning or on a learning curve we have more assets and you know what a strange country that we're fighting in 1939-40 whether we can build a two-bit carrier like the wasp or the Hornet that's about eighteen thousand eight nineteen thousand tons and then suddenly we wake up and forty two and say oh by the way we're producing 27 fleet carriers each one thirty percent bigger than the wasp and we're gonna pay for it and everybody says well how are you gonna pay for it and we're gonna say well everybody was sort of sheltered at home during the Depression and now they're working 20 hours a day and they're creating real wealth and we're gonna build one b20 for every hour we'll run and by the way we're going to invent in a new b-29 that has 50,000 new parts and the cockpit alone it's just a different attitude of confidence I think that's what we have to do that after we get used to this virus and what we've done it'll be time to to go out and conquer it I'm really amazed at all these people that we thought had lost the American spirit they're experimenting with ventilators they're experimenting with off-label drugs they're in a competition to see which person can get the vaccination first it's starting to happen like that and it's it's pretty amazing and I just went down to a market and I was talking to a guy said how long have you been here and he said I said I've been six hours I said oh you're gonna be done - he goes no no I have eight more hours and I he said I said are you gonna get the virus because I don't know I said they're gonna put a plastic barrier tomorrow this is you know ninety days into it and rather than damming everybody that he hasn't had a plastic berry he's looking forward to it so there's a lot of people that still have that spirit from that generation after we have a question from Donna who writes quote a huge fan for starters VDH I live in California considering the homelessness in California etcetera why is California not ended up like New York I heard there's very good question immunity we probably had it since the fall based on flu-like symptoms reported is this possible that's a very good question and here at Stanford University John Yannone DS and Michael loved it a number of epidemiologists and statisticians and bio fitting to figure that out because it does not make sense we have half of the nation's homeless about a hundred and fifty s 180,000 homeless we have one third of all of the nation's people in public assistance one out of every three Californians who is admitted to a hospital has diabetes or pre-diabetes which is a risk factor for koba 19 we have been Laura's lowest number of nurses per 100,000 population lowest number of doctors we have the lowest number of hospital beds almost in the nation per thousand population with 28 percent of the population lives below the poverty line level 27 percent were not born the United States you put all of that together and people looked at California and they said it's not in a situation to resist an epidemic and more importantly LAX SFO San Diego San Jose had these direct flights from China and they're bringing in five six seven thousand a day of the 15 to 20 thousand are in the United States 23 direct flights in this period from SFO alone to from to and from Wuhan and so people thought wow it's gonna be terrible Gavin newson I think three weeks ago said 25 million people are going to have the virus that would mean a million dead were a little bit halfway over his predictions I don't think we're gonna have 25 million we have about 17,000 but known cases probably a hundred and seventy thousand so everybody wants to know what happened was it california's warmer not really the South is warmer at this time of the year and they're suffering these are because we're less dense than New York maybe but why would we have twice the population of New York and 1/10 the death toll or 120th 130th the caseload and a lot of people thought women let's look at this a different way maybe that flu that he got and the flu that she got in November and just maybe November December or in January in February we were exposed to the first wave and while we didn't get herd immunity we got a lot of people maybe 10 or 15 percent of the population got that flu that the CDC said was not influenza a flu shots did not work on it and it might not have been the flu we were we were told we had 16 outbreaks of influenza even though that the CDC did not test very many of them all we were told is those who did get tested it was not influenza A might have been B where I'm getting out is desperate for explanation of the inexplicable and for those who say well we had shelter in place but the day that the governor enacted that within two days I think it was ten other states and within three days New York did it so I don't think that I think was helpful but I don't think that explains the California paradox and we don't know what the answer is hopefully with this new anti by test antibody testing from these Stanford doctors we'll know very quickly Viktor Kenneth wants you to break out your crystal ball here's this question what effect will this crisis have on the November elections both President and Congress let me add Victor that may be an interesting angle we'll pursue here is how does Trump have now have to calibrate his message but also Joe Biden because you look at the history of challengers who knock off incumbents Victor they don't get the job by saying coulda woulda shoulda they have to offer agendas of their own so how do you think this is affected in the election whether we like it or not this virus has been weaponized and by that I mean every decision is what a massage or modulated in the media either pro or against Trump for the left the hard left they see it in the manner creasing Li that it will do what Robert Mueller and impeachment did not in other words it'll show the world what they have been claiming all along at Trump is a nap and the economy his only signature issue they feel will will crash and then they will win and the right says this was a existential threat but it's probably not the existential threat that killed 116 in 1957 or maybe not even in 2017 that killed 60,000 we can handle it we've got to get back quicker and the economy will recover in time for the election that's whether we like to admit that arithmetic of death that's what it is and that color is almost everything that a person says so I never thought we'd get to the level of politico's ation when a president says the anti-malarial drug seems to work and we have anecdotal evidence the CDC is taking us seriously they're going to test and then that becomes a either Trump was inspired and save lives or our Trump as a quack doctor Trump killed will kill people but that's the level of political discourse that we've descended to and Joe Biden I think he thought that he would it seemed logical he had moments of enfeebling us on the campaign trail he did well against Bernie Sanders net last debate and people thought you know what Joe will go back to his home he'll rest he's 77 and then he will do an FDR fireside chat and antithesis to the daily Graham bumptious Trump and his sobriety will impress people well he started off teleprompting and then Hauk and next temporary and they try both in the neither work so he didn't not he didn't provide at least in temple and comportment and assurance and anecdote to trump but more importantly he started with a false premise that Trump had rejected all his medical advice anti-assignment scientist just like he doesn't believe in global warming the Paris he'll do the same thing but actually Trump has accepted almost all of the recommendations from science and that put Biden in an untenable situation to disagree with Trump but by extension he's disagreeing with science I'll give you one example so Trump issues a travel ban on January 31st against all of these suggestions of China the world community even and the World Health Organization and some of his own advisers like Anthony Fauci had switched they said it wasn't Edison now it's necessary he does out immediately Biden feels he did that I have to be against it so he says that was miss you know that was in a faux beacon races and that's what he was referring to but then all of a sudden it works it stops the twenty thousand coming and then the next day Trump has a ban against Africa because they were having connecting flights ten days later Europe connecting flights Biden sort of mumbles can't have that either and then he's in a dilemma how do I explain that I criticize something that night now endorse well I meant that he used the word Chinese virus that was what I meant well he didn't mean that so now he's saying well I would have done I would have had the ban but I would have done it earlier and so what was that mean you would you would have had President Biden would have said I don't want to be xenophobic and racist so I'm gonna stop all Chinese people come in and on January 10th but I won't call them Chinese how's that it gets into the fantastical and the surreal so what he needs to do it is just being pure people look at Trump and when Trump does something well follows advice or rejects bad advising says I would do the same thing and the long run he would do as well as being Pavlovian and his attack on every single thing that that Trump does in the same the same thing about criticizing bi and he loses his his train of thought his sentence structure but sometimes he's very clear and so people can't say well he's demented they can say he has bouts of it and we don't they seem to be increasing but you don't want to say he can't string together of spins because sometimes you can you got to be empirical and all these things if you can okay Victor we have one last question that comes from Timothy he writes dr. Hanson I am reading your book a war like no other and you speak to how the Athenians emptied their treachery and pulled back from defending their farm lands and responses to the attacking Spartans a strategy to write out the war that appeared to be an unsustainable strategy for them how do we convince Americans the response to kovat 19 can't rely on government handouts long term or not trying to restart the economy it's a very good point I think the questioner is worried that we're creating a culture that we did not intend that the longer that Americans are sheltered at home and the longer that we have some compensation will we'll lose the the cause and effect relationship that you go out and work and then that creates capital and money and when you stay home you're not creating goods and services you and the country at large or impoverished and you can't just print money and so and you create a culture of complacency and you get a fear of the virus what you want is a since the defiance you're going to say well as soon as we get these antibodies testing we're gonna see that this damn virus does not kill you know three out of every hundred it probably kills one or two out of every thousand if it's like the flu then damn it we went through the 2009 and the 2017 flu our grandparents and our parents survived 57 and that's what we're gonna do and then you know what with this cheap gas and this interest I'm gonna go out and really get back into it that's the attitude you got to have right I'm worried that the longer that we get into this attitude the more complacent we become an unless no more timid the more frightened we become and you can start to see it some when I start to see certain areas that I go out to people or even though the the rates of death have not met the modelers pessimistic expectations people are becoming more pessimistic because the media focuses on the young man who was 22 years old who suddenly died in three days rather than the person that was much more typical it was 86 and had congestive heart failure and diabetes and that's the scarify rare exception is sensationalized in the way that the normal tragic caseload is not and so I think we have to to be that way but we don't we have to let counties and States adapt and be fluid as you mentioned and then that will that will create confidence in optimism we if we hear a governor or a bold mayor or a world county board say you know what we're going to to be hygienic social distancing mass but we're gonna go out and work and others will fall suit and we'll have a chain reaction Victor I've enjoyed this conversation I'm certain the audience has as well this is your policy briefing though my friend and so it's only appropriate that you get the phone of work all I can say is that we've all been here before we've dealt with a57 we built were the two thousand nine we built with a two thousand seventeen and eighteen I know that the experts tell us that a coronavirus is different because it has the potential to be much more infectious and much more lethal but we're not the same people we were in 2009 or even 17 we proceeded a geometric rate as well we're better connected we have better information we have more medical protocols we have a worldwide Nobel Prize trace right now to find not just a vaccination but effective anecdote and I think that geometrically we're getting better than the viruses who should be confident about that Victor thinks about for a great conversation have a good day my friend thank you for having me that's it for today's virtual policy briefing we hope you enjoyed the conversation with redoubtable Victor Davis Hanson the Hoover Institution is doing these twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays in fact our next virtual policy briefing will be Tuesday April the 14th at 11 a.m. Pacific time 1:00 p.m. Eastern time the subject is covin 19 in national security and the guests will be secretary Condoleezza Rice think you've heard of her Condoleezza Rice is a senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution she served as a 66 secretary of state of the United States the second woman and first african-american woman to hold the post and effective this September Secretary Rice will be the next director of the Hoover Institution and we're all very excited about that here on the farm you could join Tuesday's briefing at the same link you signed in on today and if you'd like to see more a fellow analysis other than a coronavirus go to Hoover dot org where we've set up an entire section dated solely to the Cova 19 research thanks again for taking part of the briefing stay safe stay healthy stay strong we'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 300,463

Keywords: COVID-19, Victor Davis Hanson, history, flu, pandemics

Id: WK43a--m4g0

Length: 50min 2sec (3002 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020