Victor Davis Hanson - Danube Dialogues by Danube Institute

[Music] victor davis hansen uh welcome um uh you're talking to john o'sullivan the president of the danube institute here in budapest and this is the latest of our danube dialogues which we've been doing really since the lockdown started now obviously we are going to talk about a number of things but i'd like to begin um with your earlier life now we'll be saying i will not be listing all of the decorations and experiences professorships and academic posts you've had um we'll be putting up those up on the screen later but i think it's fair to say that you're both a distinguished academic a classicist a historian a novelist and but also a working farmer on a family farm and i think that probably distinguishes you from most academics in the united states and it certainly distinguishes you from most academics in europe today um so do you think the fact that you have been uh and are a farmer has added a kind of a depth and a difference to the work you do distinguishing it from those of your colleagues in academe i think it has when i try to think of things i don't try to look at them as perfect or awful but what what's better than the alternative that was valuable when the trump i didn't approve of trump all that much in the primary but compared to the alternative uh as practical matter and that comes from he was preferable by far and i think that comes from the idea that you're never going to get a perfect plum crop i never got a perfect raisin crop i never was able to get a perfect uh peach harvest but you do you do all the things that you can to get it good enough to survive one more year so that's practical and then you have a sense of continuity i'm living in the house here behind me that i was born at and i'm the sixth generation to live here was built in 1870 by my great great grandmother out here in central california and there's an idea that you each have a duty to continue a tradition and that that carries over to your view of politics culture and society that we all have local customs and traditions without which the civilization can't continue and i think that's something that's very important and in peril right now i think the other thing uh true about such lives is that you are um also meeting a lot of people on a regular basis you know them as old friends family connections um who have nothing to do with academia and who have a very different like to some extent different outlooks and that too surely is an important element i think in a full life i'd say so i think most of the people i see here that i'll see today and that i saw tomorrow because we're on a kind of a lockdown i haven't been to the stanford campus they won't let us go to our offices where i commute and have an apartment but i'd say that 9 out of 10 people i've seen don't have a bachelor's degree the last 90 days that i grew up with and they're very bright people they're very capable people truckers mechanics clerks i just talked to a local highway patrolman i know very well who comes by and your degrees or what you've written are they're just oblivious nobody cares so you're judged about what how you talk and what you do and how you treat people and there's no hierarchies hierarchies can be good but it's good to be in places where hierarchies are natural in other words you're judged as deserving respect or not by the way you conduct yourself and not what your resumes say i think that's the problem with a lot of academics they have a certain sense that their past accomplishments are first of all much more important in their own mind than they are in others and then second that they can make an argument from authority rather than from reason or logic actually just before we came on screen i saw a program from new york news program something happening just now in which a young woman claiming to be highly educated is addressing the cops who are keeping order on the edge of this sort of no-go area that's been established by the semi-revolutionaries denouncing the cops as uneducated stupid don't even have a college um even a college degree so to speak uh a non-college degree and um sneering at them now i think i probably don't need to ask you what you think of that but what do you think that kind of thing is having uh is making what kind of impression is that making um on most people watching the programs yeah i think there's two impressions the most obvious is that there's a stereotype that the antifa and antifa affiliated and the college-educated protesters are pampered upper middle class so there that generation has 1.6 trillion dollars in aggregate student debt and i think that's a lot of it because they're not marrying they're not having children they're not buying homes and their sort of life of julia pajama boy prolonged adolescence and then they get very angry and they talk in a certain way their addiction their tone it turns people off and so most americans sympathize with the cops both black and white who are being yelled at by these people the second thing is i think some people realize the reasons that civilizations have police is not just to protect us from barbarism but to protect the barbarians from us and by that i mean if they do done the defund the police and people like the woman that you're referencing goes around getting in people's face and doing things there will be a reaction and it will be a vigilante or an unlawful reaction so traditionally throughout classical cultures the rise of a state monopoly on force was designed to stop uh tribal feuding blood feuding vigilantism and i think the left doesn't understand that they want to get rid of the police and then they think they'll be in control but when they start doing these things and we saw that yesterday in st louis with a man and his wife that were armed and went out in their lawn and said we're going to prevent you from going into our home and they would have and a lot of people in the protest may have been hurt so i think the left has forgotten that the police protect them from the natural reaction to them i will just ask another question about farming uh the economist j.k goldbraeth who came i think from a canadian rural background had worked on the farm and he said that having done so no other work ever really seemed like work again do you think that's true and do you think that it's um in a sense explains in part at least your productivity which is enormous yeah i think so i mean it's the one thing that combines your muscles and your mind uh and there's a big difference i spent most of my summers because our farm wasn't uh big enough to support all of us i had cousins and brothers so a lot of us worked on other farms so when you you're going up and down pruning or thinning tree after three or picking as you're doing something for somebody else then it becomes can become rote labor but when you're doing it for yourself and you're thinking and you're looking at each individual vine or each individual tree as you prune it or you pick it and you you analyze what you did right and wrong it's a different experience it's almost sort of like cutting the hair off some dog that you don't know versus trimming your own dog and that's a big difference and so i never when i was farming and i you know i'm 66 so i don't get out there as much but when i'm working on my own place and doing for myself and my family and for people who are going to follow me it doesn't seem like work at all and it's it's a very strange thing where you can think and use your muscles and that the greeks were very cognizant of that with this idea of balance or what they called toll miss on that you had that just muscular labor could be brutish and just intellectual thinking could be a feat so they tried to combine the two well both your parents were highly educated people um but and your siblings have gone into other aspects of academic life i was wondering um why it was you went particularly into classical scholarship and and really have developed other people's interests in classical scholarship in america and elsewhere to a very great extent well i was very lucky that i had i lived on a farm with my grandfather never went to college and he had three daughters and he mortgaged his farm in the 1930s and 40s and sent two of them to stanford one was crippled from polio and she wasn't able to finish but she went to san jose industrial college so all three of them were educated because he didn't have any boys and he thought i'm going to need bright independent women so and my father was kind of a football war hero but he did get a master's degree as well and so then they came back in in this very isolated place so i was always encouraged to read and to leave the farm for a while but always to come back and then the other thing is uh very quickly uh classics became for me a refuge and that by that i mean i had brothers are very athletic and they were very bright but i tended to be i was the only one in my family was left-handed i wore glasses and they thought i was not quite a party or i didn't i wasn't a social and maybe that was part of it but by the time i got to college i met some very good professors uh and they said if you're pretty good in greek and latin the first time i took them i was 18 and if you wanted to continue you could pay your entire graduate school and so for me as i kept getting drawn into it what i didn't realize at the age of 26 when i had a phd it was sort of you know i was pretty good in languages that the degrees were not in history or archaeology but classical philology and that included things like as you know from english education greek and latin composition so i had a smartass uh brother who said to me uh being able to write in latin and greek is sort of like a dog that can dance on its hind legs we're surprised that it happens but we don't know the purpose of it and i don't know if he got that quote from somebody so i didn't know so i didn't use that education i farmed for five years and then i went to a local university that was 30 miles away from where i'm speaking cal state fresno i started they had no classics program and they didn't really want me and i taught some latin and then next thing i knew some people entrusted a position to me and then i spent 21 years there teaching mostly poor mexican and southeast asian kids and the diaspora of the oklahoma dust bowl latin and greek and then i retired at 50 and we had six professors so it was a very good program well we think when we're talking about the classics we think of the greeks and the romans and the is the israel is israelites as being sources of our own civilization they helped shape it um and i wonder um about how that works when you read a dialogue with uh plato of plato um or a comedy by aristophanes um or a speech of ciceros um do you feel that we in our civilization um are in this in the same traditions um in a way that's not true for other civilizations the indian one for example or the chinese um um in what sense are they the people in the past um plato cicero um and the others um what sense are they us today i think the big difference in western uh humane studies and greece and rome in particular is this idea of self-criticism or self-awareness or a critical consciousness and by that i mean a play of say take less estrada is immediately attacking the idea that women might not have as good ideas about this disastrous politician whereas men or antigone has the moral high ground over creon and sophocles play or in agamemnon this sort of deep swamp i mean um in the iliad agamemnon and menelaus are sort of a deep state and they have uh powers that they really don't deserve but they got them through their authority or their lineage as opposed to achilles who's a meritocratic outlier and so what i'm getting at is in all of this literature there is a sense that the author is looking at the world as i could get into plato and aerosol but it would take all day and then they're trying to tear it apart and they're trying to analyze it and they're trying to do it though within acceptable parameters by that i mean uh they understand grammar and diction and genre so if there's a if they're plato it's going to be in a dialogue and that's going to be an accepted genre if it's aristophanes it's going to be about 1200 lines there's going to be choruses catabolists all that if it's going to be a sophocline or escalating play there's going to be about four choruses and two or three characters and same if it's and all of these will be in meter whether they're iambic pentameter or troches or in the case of epic dactylic examiner so what i'm getting as you you get into a genre and you feel comfortable with it and yet it's going to be new so it's both reassuring but it's also exciting i think part of the problem is when we pick up a poem today or a history or not we have no idea what to expect there are no rules there are no there is no accepted grammar anymore addiction or you can see the f word the s word you can see anything in print and it's jarring whereas they thought that their ideas should be jarring i think our problem in the modern world is our ideas are trite or conventional or they're stereotypical and the genre doesn't exist so that that's been i think my biggest uh pleasure in reading classics that they're so self-critical the other final thing is they don't seem to [Music] uh self-censor themselves i think in the modern world and at times in the west especially during the reformation or counter-reformation even during the renaissance people said things and they worded them in certain ways for an effect on an audience all authors do that but in the ancient world there's a sense that you want to capture reality and other people will say yes that's right and then you're not going to self-censor yourself so even cicero we ended up getting killed and who was very mindful of the effect of his words in the political situation and his own safety was pretty much unbridled if you read his philippics or you read democracy's attacks on philip or just what ucidity says about human nature they're not thinking oh my gosh i judge this group or i said something that this person could take as illiberal or i said something about women or i said something about the aristocracy that they don't really care they're empirical they try to capture the world as they see it and then let you deal with whether it's nice or not um you mentioned antigone i can't help reflecting that that's a play and several other ones which have been adapted by modern playwrights the most celebrated adaptation i think is by the french playwright jean onwy who presented it in paris in 1944 under the nazi occupation it carried on through the end of the occupation and i think played on until 1948 and then went to broadway um that's um i think a powerful adaptation there are differences between him and the and sophocles but still it's powerful in and that means until 1948 at least and sometime after that we in the west understood and grasped there was a common uh thread from their world to ours which with only minor adaptations made perfect sense and and i would say illuminated moral conflicts in all our hearts any comment on that play that was a reassuring fact that when we were forced with authoritarian governments that were not moral but had the power to issue edicts and enforce them or when we were captives of particular biases based on gender or ethnic affiliations we could go to these texts and see a discussion of them and so we were reassured that we were not it was both reassuring and humbling because i think part of the problem with modern society when you don't know these texts is you think you get up in the morning and discovered something new and you haven't and then it's reassuring in the sense you can go back and find people who probably were more brighter than you were because they weren't bothered with all this clutter of technology and ideology it was more empirical and they looked and they have answers and then finally they saw the world as sort of delineated or limited and there was only 30 or 40 or 100 ideas that they went over and over the individual and society birth versus merit what causes wars how do you end them and these main issues were sort of discussed again and again in different genres comedy drama oratory rhetoric epic whereas today we think that the world is amorphous and there's it's just out there limitless and we're all we're going to try to absorb it and we can't and so we don't have anybody who tells us in universities there's only about 15 or 20 or 30 great questions that you all have to deal with in your life and we're going to explore them with these and instead somewhat somebody comes up i think the best selling is how white people should talk right now a book on white racism and i can i just looked a little bit at it and it has no no awareness of that issue throughout 2500 years of learned examination as a matter of fact you wrote a book called who killed homer and on the demise of classical education when i was still at the sixth form at school a lot of universities had serious classical departments they mostly disappeared um in recent years not everywhere and what happened to produce this and maybe our culture wars uh are as bad as they are because in a sense we've taken away a substratum of understanding which we derive from being aware of the bible and being aware of the classical authors yeah well i think that book was written in co-author with john heath in the 90s during the reagan and elder bush wars i think everybody thought they had survived the tsunami the bill bennett and bello and etc etc but i think no one in their right mind saw that it was a dormant volca volcano and would explode 20 years later much worse fashion and so the point in that book was that the classics and indeed learning in the university was threatened at two two ends one was mandarism that we had created this narrow or narrow and narrow specialization that was evident in publication and so-called peer review and we were getting experts who felt they were safer and more authoritative the more and more esoteric they became because their their turf was smaller and they could master it all and that was turning off students because they had no ability to relate to the real world and i would find that out when i was interviewing professors to teach to mostly poor kids i would say things like how far is sparta from athens and why do you think the mice and we neon world fell and what's the difference between the parthenon and the temple of aphis they had no answer they always wanted to get back to their thesis which cared about and that thesis was such a nature that it wouldn't allow uh enrichment in other areas and then the other one was of course ideology and there was a sense that if you were going to be relevant rather than to appeal in a populist fashion to people who were unaware of the classics and could benefit it it was you were going to get in the race class engender and the irony was that you were going to be progressive and left-wing but you would you would adopt an obscuritism a fukodian vocabulary that made you an elite and that's what it was all about it was just the mirror imaging of the old standard narrow philologists but with a new jargon posing as if you were left-wing that we predicted that the whole field would probably implode 20 years ago more 22 years ago i think it has the enrollments are way down the departments are being disappearing and then the main schools they've disappeared in the sense that they no longer if i were to interview a phd in classics from harvard or yale i would this i would give him a greek and latin test before i allow him to teach because i have a feeling that he wouldn't be able to pass it because if you look at the curriculum it's the rhetoric of gender and the cult of transgender isis and stuff like that that takes away critical hours they're necessary to master history philology epigraph epigraphy numismatics all those old disciplines and that's that's tragic and so a lot of us feel i mean i i i we wrote that to warn people that we not be correct and i think now it's i can't even pick up the book i just feel like it's kind of depressing but there are cases of course of schools which have um made a tremendous effort to revive uh small i'm talking schools here high schools uh as much as universities maybe more so try to take poor kids in and give them a thorough grounding in the classics and i mean i have a an unanchored not particularly logical feeling that that's a very very good thing um although how can i possibly justify that and how can you justify it in uh when it doesn't seem to lead to any any great success in life or uh or most and most of them presumably will not have an interest sufficient to become serious scholars well i think there's a and i think we mentioned at the end of the book that if it was to survive it had to be carried on in almost a resistance fashion or underground fashion so the homeschooling moment movement was very important a college like hillsdale where i teach a month for the last 15 years i think they have six classes in that small college of 1300 students so there's places islands in the stream that deliberately try to be contrarian to the movement because they feel that they can encode better in a better fashion students and these students will be forced multipliers of traditionalism because they're better educated and it is true that when at i see students at stanford that come and talk to you at the hoover institutions the ones that have traditional majors in literature or philosophy or language or history tend to be much better educated whatever their ideology is than this the hyphen studies people the environmental studies the black studies gender studies the conflict studies the peace studies those studies therapeutic educations and curriculums don't give you the basic skills of logic grammar uh oral and spoken and written fluency so there's four well-educated people but there are some very well educated young people and and that's why i think there is a traditional or conservative movement today when in theory there should not be because they do not have access to hollywood entertainment music the media foundations the university all of the traditional organs of expression and cultural exposition and all that aren't controlled by the left and yet there is still a vibrant conservative answer to that i think it's because these people in that movement have been better educated there's something interesting i mean you probably know this quote but um paul getty the great oil investor was once asked why he employed so many classics graduates and he said very simply they sell oil and he didn't quite know why but they did before we leave this though i'd like to talk a bit about your book carnage and culture what was it about the west that may enabled us to survive when after all the greeks and romans inhabited a small archipelago on the edge of asia and um none of the uh and although um obviously there were some successes and some natural advantages we didn't seem to have much of a hope against the great civilizations of asia when we go back to the to say the time of the birth of christ yes in that book i try to suggest that some of the hallmarks of western civilization dissent that chauvinism of a middle class that manifestation manifested in infantry uh protection of private property uh constitutional government rationalism the idea of looking at science without the blinkers necessarily of religion that could be oppressive to scientific inquiry free expression i i listed 15 or 16 things that when they apply to the battlefield whether that would be manifested in sophisticated weaponry or close discipline or leadership that was accountable to political and authorities but also to the rank and file or logistics the ability to sail from barcelona to mexico city rather than the aztecs going into barcelona from mexico city all of that gave the west an edge it didn't mean that they could win all the time because usually whether they were in the new world or in africa or against the the forces of islam they were outnumbered often they were trisected with religious factionalism orthodoxy catholicism protestantism the european continent was always fighting west against west but it did mean that they didn't have to have a napoleon or they didn't have to have an alexander the great or they didn't have to have just a superior weapon like greek fire but they had a system of logistics and discipline and leadership and empiricism that would allow them all things being equal they would win and i think a lot of people got very angry at the time i wrote it but i think this the the story of the west its ability to dominate culture of the planet and to implant its civilization throughout the world kind of bears that out most of the historians that were critical said well this didn't start to the 18th century or it didn't start to the industrial revolution and look at islam but i think it as you pointed out if you look at places like thermopylae that the last stand that lasted for three days or set their victories at plateau or salamis or what alexander the great did or caesar and even in the crusades there was always an ability to project power not always rational power or moral power but military power beyond their homeland in a way that reflected a dynamism that wasn't predicated on a particular inspirational leader i think there was also the ability to convert people to wanting to be like yourself and it wasn't all founded on conquest and slavery but and that has become truer um as the west has got older it's been able to win people over to wanting to be in some sense or other western i think that's why islam especially is so angry at the west because they see it as insidious because we don't have those hierarchies and whether it's our popular fashion or levi's or familiarity between the sexes or music when you go to the arab world you see that that's very attractive to people in a more repressive society and that that's absolutely true and i'm reminded of a lot of passages in caesar's gallic war where tribes people come and you can see it in a lot of plutox lives too of roman conquerors where they're ex they're told that they will have the benefits of habeas corpus or their kids will wear purple togas and be in local senates and they might even be able to go to rome and then of course by the second century most of the roman emperors are not italian they're spanish or north african so my i guess my point is that it's a very insidious culture and that reinvents itself irrespective necessarily of race or hierarchy and a lot of opposing systems find that very um incendiary it can be very corrupting too if it's not if it's not disciplined because as we see on the streets in one sense these protests are multiracial they're multicultural they're informal they're some of them are spontaneous some are not but some of them are anarchical and lord of the flies destructive yes um before i leave this topic um i'd like to ask where you would put in this history of the west um the cities paris london and philadelphia and which important city have i left out of that list those are the inheritors of i guess we would say rome athens and jerusalem and by that i mean they were all the beneficiaries of that welding in the ancient world of athenian genius and spontaneity and the city-states constitutional government but an impractical system that had no uniformity or no word in the vocabulary like nation or nation and then a roman consensual government that tried to include popular expression but not in a demagogic fashion and that was solved through a tripartite the idea came from the greeks but it was not implemented widely of a legislative executive and judicial branch that had a buffer between the people and that's where we get to philadelphia and that and paris and london i think all of those enlightenments saw that maybe with less less residents in paris given the nature of 1793-4 but nonetheless they did see that the athenian model was not going to be practicable of democracy and there had to be a constitutional republican model and then there was this this idea that christianity could be incorporated and enriched by classical learning because there was there was an impoverishment at least not enough evidence in the gospels or the original words of christ to formulate a systematic and successful church so when the church turned to questions of what happens when you die and you were not baptized or what how many sins does it take uh to go to hell and can you be forgiven all of these practical questions were not in the original uh doxology so they turned to neoplatonism and aristelian thought to combine uh christianity with with classicism and that that's manifested in all three of those cities but i think the big difference is just to finish there is a line between london and philadelphia and what became washington that's somewhat separate from france in paris and that's highlighted by the vast difference between the scottish and british enlightenment what burke said about the french revolution what our founding fathers would later say a decade later about france and the difference i think as they as they saw it was that the british and anglo-american tradition was an equality of opportunity of chance and then the resulting inequality would be natural but it could be ameliorated by charity philanthropy government here and there whereas the fran french revolution like what we're seeing today in the united states was systematic totalitarian we were going to ensure a quality of fraternity egalitarianism of result and that would require a degree of coercion death destruction violence for the unwilling and that was the french model and that's that's still there in some ways that we see in continental europe in a way that's much different than in the british domains of former commonwealth in the united states let me now ask you about a switch from the past to the present and and to america my impression is that the american educated class wants to erase history and start again why do you and i'm not just applying that to the left wing of it there's substantial elements on the right i think that would like to do the same and i wonder where that impulse comes from well i think what happens i think tocqueville talked about it is that the more a society that's constitutional and western becomes leisured affluent and closer to its goals of eliminating let's say inequality the more that it gets obsessed with equality and the more that is free the more that it feels its own three so what we're seeing is not looting of beans and rice and staples it's adidas and louis vuitton bags and what we're seeing are not people that are going up in the maki in the sierra or the rockies to fight out the revolution they're these very uh snarky young kids they get up and as you say in the policeman's face and yell and then when they're arrested they sound like stuck pigs oh my god this can't be happening to me it's not fair how dare you he yelled so it's it's a sense that we've never made more progress of racial equality and of economic justice and the closer we get to this ideal of the founding fathers and see it reified the more people get impatient and angry that it's not perfect and so we've got this idea in the left we have to be perfect or we're no good at all and so we go back now with every good man and woman of the past and we only concentrate on their bad side not their good and there's no sense that jefferson has a long ledger of wonderful things from the declaration of independence to uni founding the university of virginia to his philosophical thought to his practical emphasis on a bill of rights but we just talk about slaves and we don't say that we never say there were thousands of slave owner owners south of the mason-dixon line but there were very few that were like jefferson and so i don't know how it's it's an unstable situation because nobody can be perfect and you're already seeing uh as we saw in the french reign of terror and we saw in the cultural revolution in china what burns these these fits of madness out is they start to get too close to home so we see a man who's a black lives matter advocate a lawyer on the left and now he's out with an ar-15 in st louis because they're coming after him or we see this chop this seattle occupation zone and suddenly people are being killed and they're complaining that the police didn't get somebody out there in time even though their directive is that there should be no police so when that starts to endanger the middle class so that a liberal soccer mom calls 911 and gets a busy signal or dan abrams who has a reality tv show about police cops like and a big critic of trump during the russian collusion hoax when they cancel his show or when they they say to liberals who are very proud of their phd from the woodrow wilson school and suddenly they have no woodrow wilson school pedigree that gets close to home and then that person will say to the revolution well there is a wilson bridge and there is a wilson center in washington and there's a will are you going to do this or hey stanford you just sent us a big letter about our ill liberality but leland stanford who funded the university used asian labor in a very callous fashion to build the fortune that was dedicated to his son's name are you going to change stanford and then they start to draw back it's easy to change father sarah's name but not so much stanford but the logic insists that you do that and i it'll start to burn out the question with all these things we know that they're minority populations but it doesn't mean they fail the bolsheviks were successful it requires everybody according to their station to say that's absurd stop that and a lot of people are in this for their careers they're trying to get rid of a superior they have personal grudges but we can't go into a say them witch trial like mentality but to do that requires a lot of people to be fired and to lose their jobs and we all have these rationalizations you know i so many people will say well i would write out i would write back to the president or i would object to my chairman or i'd write an op-ed but you know i'm supporting my nephew and i have a sister-in-law who's got a very ill illness that i help and if i lose my job and that's understandable but it takes people to call their bluff because they are a minority so what are we witnessing at the moment is it on the one hand a kind of spreading anarchy without a logic um or is it a kind of revolutionary choice between on the one hand the america of the 1788 constitution um with its freedoms and its the bill of rights and the recognition of the idea of americans as being independent people self-reliant who live under the law on the other hand is it going to be a constitution imposed on us as a result of these changes in which what you have is a kind of a an interventionist government of a quasi-socialist kind which uh in a sense regulates economic and other relations between different groups of americans defined racially perhaps or sexually or whatever they seem to me to be two different things the anarchy or so to speak the choice but of moving to a new america how do you see it i think they're not uh antithetical but they're complementary i see the lord of the flies anarchy as the means to obtain the goal that you articulated that and that goal you articulated is very well known among the foundations and the university departments and the corporate world and a lot of those people a lot uh want to see an america that is an equality result more like a of a radical form of the eu or france in the 18th century but the actual foot soldiers the looters the burners the arson they're just turned loose and told generically that any person of the past who's white or male or christian is fair game and tear him down and then out of that chaos the people who uh feel that when the revolution is is it is over when joe biden is elected because that's the immediate objective is to get with trump and get joe biden across the finish line even if you have to carry him across and then there will be a 1944 swap as we saw with truman and henry wallace when everyone knew roosevelt would not last more than three months and then we get in that hardcore progressive very articulated aoc type of agenda through a vice presidency and that is you we all know what it is it's packing the court getting rid of the electoral college maybe redefining the senate to be proportionally represented um the new green deal reparations wealth tax abolishing ice open the whole thing but the actual foot soldier is more into the carnival and the the violence and being young and attacking signs of authority and they're they're being used there's no doubt about it i have a number of questions i'd like to pursue you on this um some people i mean first of all the nature of the revolution i mean we have what we see now is a development that is the climax of 20 to 30 to 40 years of ideas being spread via the universities in the universities um of a very critical kind those ideas were so to be manufactured i could give you a list of them such things as races anything that anybody perceives as race white people car the only people who can be racist because they're the only people with power um all um any differences between groups have got to be the result of of discrimination rather than differences of taste and aptitudes and so on we could go down the list but those are the ideas that spread through the universities and into the rest of society the graduates who awoke and now at middle level maybe higher positions in corporate america um how come all of this happened under our radar uh or let me put it another way how come it happened despite the fact that some people i would say you were one of them i think i was another um were warning about this and yet our political leaders the ones we sympathize with either didn't see it but certainly didn't do anything about it i think that after the the war with the gi bill and the vast expansion i mean california's expanded had the largest university system in the world 23 campuses the california state university 300 000 plus students the idea was that if you credential somebody and you subsidized that then you were going to get an educated pop the great books idea we're all going to be educated but what we didn't see is that there was nobility and vocational training and you could read and you could be an auto didact and mechanic or a welder and that there you could have expertise and that should be well compensated but we glorified this credentialing process and and confused it with education so you got a ba but we never said we always said we're going to quantify your admission with sat we're going to be scientific and merocratic but we never said after four years we'll give you an exit sap test to see if you learned anything because that then all of a sudden we were told you can't do that because that would be arbitrary in a way that it wouldn't to select people to go into the university and so i think what happened was we got a it's we started to expand this population and we got into areas that were not academic humane areas there were philosophy biology mathematics physics foreign languages suddenly became a vocation so all of a sudden it was theories of nursing or theories of business management all of these could have been done in other venues they always had been we could have had trade schools we could have had professional schools that were not connected directly with the university and so those people within the university outnumber the academics and then the admissions was the idea was well because you get branded with a yale or harvard like a cow and that opens passageways and that hierarchy works down to places where i taught fresno state if you get a cal state degree and you live in selma california you can be eligible for these great jobs you won't have to get dirty you'll get a retirement you can stay in an air-conditioned office the problem was that we let in all these people from non-traditional groups and we didn't really start in k through 12 to prepare them they got there and i can i can remember the date it was somewhere in the middle 80s when i was teaching and i realized i looked at my class of humanities of the western world and out of 50 people i would say 20 could not read and they were all of groups that if i said that they couldn't read i would be fired so when i started to give d's i would get people from the admissions or the equal opportunity officers call me and say hey victor this guy's the first guy in his family to go to school you just gave him a d if you flunk out his whole world is you've got to help us and what do you want to do turn out a bunch of white and asian graduates only so we had people that we were trying to incorporate and so what i would do is i used to start with homer iliad virgil aenead oh maybe euripides bockeye or medea then i'd go to the cities herodotus and then into libby and then that was the first part of the ancient humanities course then renaissance and i found out people could not read it so i would have people come in i say would you read out loud the first page of the iliad and i would time them and that would take them an hour to read 40 lines because every word i can remember one person says what is a buckler i have no idea what a buckler is and then four years later they had no idea what a shield was and then four years later they didn't know what protection was and so then to accommodate that new group we had to come up with this idea that uh there was endemic racism that you mentioned there was endemic sexism there was an endemic isms and ologies everywhere and that had prevented or the advance of people who otherwise would have made it so then we started getting these indoctrination videos three hours six hours nine hours to teach you what words you could not say it was all built on the idea that a large group of students felt that they were unhappy and they were angry because they had been given an opportunity they had been given money they had been given an admission but they hadn't been given the preparation and therefore by any standard they were not doing as well as a kid from atherton that went to prep school or the immigrant from china whose parents were making him study six hours a day and they had to come up with an exegesis and all of these academics gave them one that everybody was guilty of microaggressions and systemic racism and there we are that's where we are today so the university should have been much smaller and vocational education should not just have been expanded but its reputation should have been enhanced so that we in a society when we're stuck on the side of the road and a guy comes and fixes our car or we're in a quarantine in manhattan and out of nowhere a guy comes with a new washing machine and knows how to wire it that's a very impressive well compensated skill deserving of respect in a way that one of these whiny protesters as a lecturer in philosophy maybe not but once you consider this credentialing as an entree into success then that's what started it now let me now ask this question because you wrote you're one of the fewer academic students public intellectuals who's taken a strong position in defense of donald trump you've supported him do you see donald trump as a response to the situation you've just described in the large social sense um or is this situation the revolution now a response to him what what role does he play between these two events well if he didn't exist i guess the answer would be he'd have to be creative because he did two things that got him nominated and winning the electoral college and one of them was the issues and one of them was the delivery system the issues were we had an open border and that was driving down we have 50 million people who were not born in the united states probably 20 million here illegally and that was driving down wages for the industrial belt of the united states in between the two coasts then we had an asymmetrical situation with china in which the attitude of washington was they're going to win anyway we might as well profit with them before they get hegemony and uh forget outsourcing and offshore that doesn't bother us we're living in manhattan were living in atherton and then the other issue was we were involved in the middle east and i supported the iraq war i think a lot of people did but afghanistan libya syria and our elite could not tell us in a cost-benefit analysis that all the blood and treasure was worth regional stability or u.s interest we weren't achieving either and so that was the third signature issue along with the border and trade and then finally he said larry summers and obama wrong we can reindustrialize the united states it was done by other people our own elites but we have cheap electricity we have a good infrastructure we have a good workforce why can't we build things and not uh the europeans or the japanese and so that issue they were there and he harvested that discontent the other side of the equation of course was he said essentially both explicitly and by inference you guys haven't won 51 since george h.w bush did it in 81. you've lost five out of the six popular votes i may not win the popular vote but i will win in a way that romney lost dole lost mccain lost george w bush lost the popular vote the last time they won was really when they unleashed that rather uncouth lee out water remember you remember him and i do and then we have boston tea party commercial the tank commercial the willie horton and the idea was i'm gonna i'd rather win ugly than lose nobly and so the democrats kept calling the these republican gentlemen candidates uh racist ill liberal phil granny off the cliff put your dog on top of your car and they didn't reply and the locust classicus was milk around me in that 2012 debate with candy crowley when she hijacked the question and became a partisan and we wanted a reagan moment when he grabbed the microphone and said how dare you but he didn't and so trump came along and said you may not like me but i'm going to give it back double what you've been taking for these and we're not going to have any bob dole noah mccain no romney that we're not going to reply in kind when they attack me i'm going to reply with mega tonnage and that was an appealing message at least it has been for four years so it was a methodology was a response to previous events and the ideology was as well he didn't create create that on its own that's why it's so dangerous for the left and for the republican establishment because they think they can get rid of trump and then that will disappear but it won't because people want somebody to defend the united states and its traditions no matter how callous he has to be they prefer he be polite but they understand that politeness cannot be effective sometimes and then they want these issues addressed trump now looking at trump's revolution and in some respects he wasn't the best man to do it he um you might have had a more eloquent person who was able to in a sense lay out the arguments for what he was doing more effectively although he did have a unique and effective way of addressing the american people but um do you see what he's doing here um reflected in any way in europe um in brexit britain with uh with um uh um boris in hungary with orban in poland with um the law and justice party because of course a lot of people on the left in america would say that and some people and would say it in europe as well are these distinct phenomena or are they are they similar outbreaks of the same kind of reaction no i think they're similar i think trump understands europe because uh he's not an international star globals he tries to make sense of it in terms of his own political calculus and what he sees in europe is a socialist utopia that doesn't work and that is a synonym for german power and hegemony and he thinks that eastern europe is dictated to from germany on illegal immigration and culture and southern europe is dictated on matters of finance and written as uh lectured on matters of brexit and were lectured on matters of nato uh contributions and that's basically a synonym for germany and that's why germans hate him so much and he is not fond of germany that's one thing the other thing is that when he looks at europe he's not he's he supports constitutional government but he believes that the only alternative to putin or to the chinese is a confidence in western traditions and because of this it's kind of an escalating idea of pathe mo pathe malthos with learning comes through pain and he looks at eastern europe and he sees that they were the blood grounds of world war ii both from the germans and the russians and then the communist tragedy and that they did not have the luxury of experimenting with this sort of social revolutions and license that that was uh apparent and he wasn't the first to do that remember donald rumsfeld calls a storm when he used the term old europe and new europe old europe was more like us he said europe was not and so trump looks at uh the country you know hungary and poland and czech the czech republic slovakia romania and some of the balkans no doubt and he he gets terribly criticized because they don't have the freewheeling cultures and democracies perhaps as the west but he says these are the only people who are custodians of religion of order of tradition of custom and they're better representations of western civilization despite their occasional authoritarianism than these other people who were selling out their own legacy for contemporary and fleeting advantage so yeah he and his supporters seem to do that it's very difficult as you know to make that argument because you're hit in the united states with that you're racist and alt-right uh victor orban aficiondo all of that so it's difficult but i think he's been very good doing it well a final question victor i think we both agree that we're in the middle of a very serious crisis we can't see exactly where it's going to end up but there are two elements therefore is um donald trump dropping the ball is he making mistakes at the moment that will lose him the election how can he set that right and on the other side if he does indeed lose the election can you offer conservatives and traditionalists any kind of hope for an america introduced under a biden administration to answer your first question he's about where he was on election day or i should say at this point in 2016 about 10 to 12 down and he closed to two down and so that and he did and he's ironically right where obama was as far as popularity in june at least not july but june of 2012 when romney was pulling much higher and obama so i'm not too worried at the this early day about the polls his dilemma is this though he had this booming economy and he and that was a recovery from impeachment and impeachment was a recovery from ukraine and ukraine was a recovery from mueller and he recovered from mueller 25th amendment and what he sees is like a cartoon character roadrunner he always gets out of the clutches of these psychodramas so when he this started and the the economy tanked he said well the violence did it but i'll get out and then remember that he was up to 50 in the gallup poll just six weeks ago because he had fauci here and berks here and he looked like he was in control of the economy his forte and then the looting start and the riots and he was slow to react because his advisor said this is a a no-go zone and the problem was that when he did start to react and see that was this unsustainable violence he was in a dilemma that he didn't realize that he was in and by that i mean this was the first riot in my experience looting mass panic where the police chief of seattle the mayor of minneapolis the governor of new york was on the side of the protest and they were warning the president if you bring in federal troops in the manner that george h.w bush did to quell the violence after rodney king in l.a and colin powell chairman was very happy to do that we will resist and so the adviser said you know what you do not want to send a federal 101st in there and get in a fight with it was that was unprecedented and then the chairman of the joint chiefs basically said i won't do a photo op with you it's political we've never had that that's what joint chiefs do they're used by presidents for good or bad they do it all colin powell was a past master but four of them came out and not only said that that was wrong but said it in such a way that joe biden said that they would be on his side if he wanted to remove trump if trump supposedly wouldn't leave and then we had 12 of the most esteemed admirals and generals come out and that was unprecedented that was contrary to the code of military justice article 82 and they said he was mussolini they said that he should be gone sooner and better they said there was no there was a very small number of violent pro they said all of these crazy things and the result of all that was he he said wait a minute i will substitute what needs to be done and i can't do it because i can't trust the military and i can't trust the blue states so i will do it rhetorically that was a bad mistake so what did he do he said i'm going to clean up seattle they better watch out in minneapolis because that's unsustain and everybody's on this base and the swing voters said uh make it all go away and he's not making it all go away he's just talking about it and i want it all to go to way and i will vote for trump if he makes it all go away but if he doesn't i'm going to get in a fetal position and go like this and say go away and maybe if i vote for biden they'll he'll appease them and they'll just say he's one of ours so they'll stop and that's where he is i think after he realized that now what he's doing he's trying to get bar on one side and maybe cuccinelli and maybe his national security is gonna i hear he's gonna start giving press conferences like he did with the covid and address the nation and say here are my limitations but this is what i'm going to do i'm going to indict the sobs that cause the violence barr has a hundred and today 200 tomorrow he's going to say we are controlling the border he's going to say if those states will not follow federal law and state law they're not going to get federal funds from me and cut them off he said there's a monument that's a federal monument i can protect it california cannot lock down yosemite that's a federal park it's not a state jurisdiction so he can do things that give people the confidence that is this thing naturally i think it's going to naturally burn out that he's in control but he hasn't done that yet and the result is that he's not captured the swing voter and he's actually lost i think the untold story he's lost two to three percent in his base because i've had so many people call me and say if i'm going to go out on a limb for this guy at a cocktail party or if i'm at work then damn i want us i want him to go out and do something i don't want to see any more tweets i don't want to see joe scarborough tweets i don't want to see any of this cul-de-sac stuff i want him to stop it and if he does that he will get those two or three back and he'll win the swing voter let me just add one little quota he can do that because the ship of state the campaign so to speak with its sales and that's the news cycle he's had headwinds you know locked down virus looting mueller of impeachment but now there is a change there are tailwinds in the horizon and by that i mean the vibus will wane the economy is already starting to come back biden is non-compos mentes he's not able to function and he's running a stealth campaign and they're going to have to bring him out especially if those polls for trump get up to 45 44 then biden will be forced to go out if he's forced to go out quite tragically he's not going to be able he came out yesterday and he actually read the prompts as well as the the answer to questions that were canned it's not such a bad scenario and if we had this conversation in october i think we they'd be neck and neck if he were to lose that is predicated on how you define loss that is if he can't regain the house as he loses the presidency and they were to win the senate the first thing they do would be get rid of the filibuster the second thing they would do would be to enlarge and they could do it legislated if it's not in the constitution they would enlarge the supreme court to 12 or 16 justices and almost immediately packed that with liberals that would radically change the united states the next thing they would do it was probably i think they have the votes in the states to eliminate the electoral college they would do that i don't know whether they would be able to get the votes to eliminate two senators from wyoming or montana in the sense that every senator will be proportionally voted so california would get 30 maybe montana would get one but they would try that they would try structural changes to change what they feel is a rotten system and i think the rest of us being depressed and seen that the republican establishment the never trump group many of our most distinguished voices have failed us and the trump movement failed they would retreat into sort of a monastery of the mind they would say themselves national football league they're all kneeling the coaches need to turn it off music i don't want to hear any more propaganda television i can't take it anymore i'm not going to go to the movies send my kid to yale or i can't do it anymore and there would be a small rump state that would congregate either psychologically mentally or geographically into polls of resistance sort of like the medieval period waiting for french to come or the renaissance or something because i'm i'm very depressed about that possibility i don't see the republican elites they gave us the argument that trump was an aberration and that they were the sober and judicious custodians of conservatism but this was their moment they could have come out in the senate in the house and said we are not in the 244th year of this republic going to tear down columbus or washington or jefferson or rename things as if you know this is the french revolution but they've been quiet except for tom cotton and a very few voices lindsey graham a few of them but i don't know why they're they're scared or they think they won't be reelected or they think trump is going to lose and take them down but we don't have a political conservative establishment anymore i mean all the names john that you and i and others used to reference with uh relish and we all got along with and i'm talking about jonah goldberg or george will or bill crystal or david from or once in a while we would go to the drudge report whatever that venue is the weekly they either don't exist anymore they've gone over to the other side so there are no reference of the conservative movement they're very few that's when people in the white house on occasion i've talked to them on the phone and i try to tell them you're orphaned and you have to create your own institutions because they're not going to be there they keep thinking that one day bill crystal's going to wake up to his senses and see that between trump and anarchy trump is preferable or the drudge report will suddenly go back to where it's not going to happen and they have very few venues maybe two i i even see in fox news that they only have two or three fox shows left that are conservative in the sense of supporting what trump's trying to do and then uh there's rush limbaugh and talk radio and there is the genre of talk radio but i don't see very and a few foundations and organizations but boy i have to be very careful what i'm saying but when i look at my own institutions of hoover institutions or aei or heritage i don't see them in the traditional the old traditions of a young tom soule robert conquest milton friedman edward the those people are not there anymore and so it's a very lonely feeling and uh you know i feel like a i don't know a constitutional republican in france around 1793 and we're all in line or perhaps a roman living in southern england at the time when the legions go home no i know that feeling very well in fact i've had it most of my life but i think that i'm probably temperamentally a bit more optimistic uh than you in this but because i do think that um the the problems on the right are the problems of an insurgent right which has got to make its way in the world as you say it doesn't have the backing of the kind of leadership structures in fact their enemies in many respects but as a result of unless those leadership structures develop their own followers they're going to have to turn to our followers so to speak and we'll see what happens well this has been a fascinating conversation it's ranged very widely i'm very grateful for it i hope i hope events prove us both pessimistic and wrong thank you very much victor so optimistic that he he will win in the fall and that the majority of people would agree with us well i hope so too but thank you very much thank you thank you you

Channel: Danube Institute

Views: 63,300

Rating: 4.8790751 out of 5

Keywords: Danube Institute, John O'Sullivan, Victor David Hanson, Danube Dialogs, Trump, vote, conservative

Id: gHiqrnx7Nq0

Length: 71min 48sec (4308 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020