Victor Davis Hanson III | The Biden Administration

[Music] victor thank you so very much for joining us i'm very keen to talk again because frankly what happens in america is so important not just for america but for the rest of the world and particularly for australia as a free and democratic country in a very very troubling era the the last time we spoke america was in the midst of the tumult of the counting of votes for the u.s election a lot's happened since then can can you give us a feel uh with a bit of hindsight what are you what are your thoughts on the whole business of the storming of the capitol building and the aftermath as it's unfolded well what we did was during the covet crisis we under our constitution the states have the singular responsibility to setting their own voting protocols and procedures even in a national presidential elections quite a strange system but in march there were a lot of challenges at the court level and at the bureaucratic level and the result of that was for the first time in american history we had 65 percent of the votes were brought were conducted through mail-in and what we call early voting voting over a period of days and the unfortunately the uh authenticity problem should have been greater but it was less so that an unusual election a rare absentee ballot was about on on average about four or five percent were rejected for you know improper signatures no signatures no address but this time it dipped all the way down to a half of one percent and because 45 000 votes to determine the electoral college in strategic states there was a donald trump of course [Music] persisted sometimes with hyperbole and said it was a landslide it wasn't a landslide victory for by him in any means but it was close and out of that frustration he persisted perfectly right to the democrats had done it but beyond the selection of what we call the electors and to make a long story short he was trying to galvanize support with about a hundred thousand people in washington very peaceful but he did say i want some of you to walk over and protest the capital and that's where the controversy lies uh apparently there were already people there about a thousand of the hundred and thousand but they seemed to have been separate they had planned to be there anyway and protest the actual selection or i should say uh ratification of the elector votes which would have been the final uh procedure to not to confirm joe biden's victory and there was violence at that point because it's the sacred heart of democracy in america there was just a conundrum five people died that led to hysteria anger some of it righteous some misplaced but there was an immediate effort to impeach donald trump even though he only had 15 days in office then we did something we've never done before we impeached on uh 90 of republicans resisted it but it was in a partisan vote of a president for the second time we'd never done that before and then more mysteriously we've never had an impeachment indeed we're not sure you can do an impeachment without the chief justice presiding over the proceedings he refused justice roberts refused to participate and then to make it even more bizarre we had a senate trial after he was a private citizen in which he was acquitted that was all unique getting back to the january 6 we don't know what happened and i say that not in a partisan fashion because we were told five people died trump was responsible for the murder of a police officer who was killed by supposedly a trump demonstrator and they they acted on cue from the president but now when the investigation is still in medius rabis but from what we know the officer did not die violently not at all he had a stroke or a heart condition or maybe a react an allergic reaction to pepper spray in the air but he was not killed by a fire extinguisher blow to the head and even the new york times has said that now second it was not an armed resurrection of all the people who were arrested in the capital all culpable of breaking the wall and should be punished unlike most of the riders all summer not one firearm has been found among any of them so the idea they were armed is for they did not blame they did not bring police ties and a handcuff of members of congress those ties we now know were the property of the capitol police that were there on a building and finally we don't have the name we usually have the name of a police officer within 24 hours and shoots an unarmed protester we don't have the name of that officer who shot one of the trump supporters and finally of the five people who died four of them were trump supporters three of them non-violently through medical emergencies and incidents and the one who did die was shot while unarmed breaking into the capitol that what i just told you transpired over about 30 days of investigative reporting and so it was a terrible thing to happen trump was probably reckless in thinking he could rev up a hundred thousand people without consequences but the media left-wing narrative that he ordered an assault on the capitol by armed insurrectionaries who killed a police officer is not true and that's important john because he left under a cloud of suspicion but as you know he just spoke to the cpac organization the other day and he was almost treated as a returning hero and that's because information came out about that and the country and we'll get into that probably later but the country was promised that joe biden would be a return to normality and it turned out he's not old joe biden from scranton pennsylvania he's a very hard leftist person whose legacy he thinks will be to implement the agenda of barack obama and so i think the atmospherics the landscape of all of what's going on is that joe biden was barack obama's understudy and was considered a lightweight professional apparatcheck now he's in office he's not going to be able to have more than one term he's got cognitive issues but i think he feels that he doesn't want to fight the left he wants to institutionalize the most radical agenda in american history and go down in history as one who who actually did what barack obama promised but failed to achieve so it's an alarming picture that that we get from the mainstream media in a sense your deep insights are hardly less reassuring but for different reasons this inability to seek to find the things that americans have in common we see it in every western country again i say this is a as a friend and admirer of things american down through the ages and the inability to rise above the things of divide and recognize the things that should unite are greater goes to the very heart in this country of of uh the new president's inaugural address it was painted as a very finely crafted speech very long on touching all the right uh touchstones one of a better word of of healing of pulling people back together yet the early actions as a former politician undertaken by the new president did not match the rhetoric it didn't seem that there was a willingness to say why did so many americans vote the way they did why are so many americans feeling alienated isn't there a real probability that many americans now feel we were described as deplorables and it's evident we are now really regarded as deplorables rather than we've actually been heard and our concerns are now going to be taken into account i think you're i think john if i may you're even being charitable in your sober and judicious description it's even worse than that that joe biden has a 50 he doesn't control the senate uh legislative in the sense it's 50 50 and only by the intervention of kamela harris as vice president will he get anything through and more importantly he was supposed to widen his lead in the house and he's down to about six seats so he's got the smallest margin in the house and people thought because of those realities he would reach out to the middle but as i said earlier he seems to think that it's a very dangerous thing to take on the media social social media silicon valley professional sports entertainment hollywood that cultural nexus is frightening in the cancel culture as well so what he's doing is he's decided that he's going to open the border he's going to go after fossil fuels stop pipeline construction use subsidized wind and energy wind and solar even though the united states is now the largest producer and exporter in the world of gas and oil he's going to dial that back and he's going to do this without going through the legislature the congress he's going to do it by executive fear he's already had an array of cultural issues from transgenderism he's backed off from the trump idea that you're biologically one gender or another it's important because female sports the united states are increasingly dominated by biological males that have so-called transgress to the opposite sex i could go admit he's resetting the the iranian israeli arab dynamic i think he's going to reset the china dynamic so he's he feels that he doesn't have the legislative of support or even the american support public support but he has the office of the presidency and he has the left and it's it's levers of influence behind him and he's got four years to act so he's a man in a hurry and i think we're going to see some radical thing the key thing to watch for is there's two or three senators that live in constituencies state constituencies that are not uh entirely democratic especially joe manchin in west virginia and senator sima in arizona and if they follow that agenda they're in danger of never being elected again so and they can't lose one senator and so that's one thing to watch the other is will they really end the senate filibuster and allow senate business the deliberative body to enact legislation 5150 with the vice president's intervention if they do that they their supporters have promised to uh admit puerto rico and washington dc as as a state and give four immediate left-wing senators to the cause they want to pack the court from nine to 15 justices to nullify the trump conservative advantage and i think they'll probably move to get rid of the electoral college and go just to a percent plebiscite which would favor the large cities so they have a very ambitious agenda and it's hanging in the thread right now by about one or two senators whether it will be enacted or not i can't help wondering uh i noticed george schultz who died recently sadly just before he wrote a diet wrote an article that appeared in australia warning that that the the printing of money effectively very low interest rates the assumption that somehow the american greenback would always be the dominant currency these were a very foolish set of assumptions one of the things that strikes me is that with this left-wing agenda that's now so prominent i mean america's economic recovery had a lot to do with cheap energy and what have you all of that's being put at risk the blowout in the debt the enormous amount of debt field liquidity in the community must be dangerous economically and one wonders how quickly it will become apparent that that that socialism is a disaster economically it's just so strange to me as an australian seeing america walk away from what has made it so prosperous and which will in fact create more of the very problems they say they're trying to solve disparity for example between opportunities that older people have had and that younger people have economic reality must bite soon yeah i think what we've got ourselves into we owe 30 trillion trillion dollars in aggregate national debt and we're running two trillion dollar deficits and why this has not imploded is that we have de facto as mets of the world with zero interest rates in other words that one or two percent fed rate does not cover uh the rise in inflation which is still low so basically we're borrowing all of this free money and we're paying for it by not paying interest to people who have pass books so it's a one way of looking at what we're doing in america is a multi-trillion dollar transfer of wealth from the parsimonious middle class pass book holder who's not familiar with wall street or real estate market puts say a hundred thousand dollars in their life savings and was accustomed to getting five percent return maybe five or six hundred a month for the retirement that they're getting nothing in fact they're losing the value and that money is going uh into it's kind of a stimulus program to cheap interest for mortgages cars but also for the national uh that as a result of national debt i don't think that's sustainable because at some point if we do get inflation we're going to have to raise interest rates if we raise interest rates the debt cost will crowd out so much in in the budget that's one great worry that we're all having here the other is of course when we try to dissect how we had the lowest peace time in unemployment um since the late 40s and we look at lowest minority unemployment in history just a year and a half just a year ago to tell you the truth it was in january of 2020 we can see that trump's deregulation and energy development and trying to have tax incentives to bring back capital united states were kind of a trifecta that created a huge economic boom of untapped labor and capital that was on the sidelines during the obama administration felt you know this is a friendly government and i'm going to get in why i can and enormous amounts of capital were used in a muscular fashion that's stopped right now the only thing that we in america are confused about is that when you print that much money and we have two trillion dollars that that's just been allocated in debt and another trillion that was budgeted but has not yet been spent and you let out 330 million people from lockdown with their appetites of pent-up demand they haven't gone to the restaurant they haven't gone on a vacation they haven't bought a washer a car and they've got a lot of money i think you're going to see an artificial boom for 12 or 15 months followed by a sharp correction whether that and how that affects the midterm election is everybody's guess now yeah you of course are an eminent historian it strikes me that we are determined not to understand history not to allow it to interfere with what we want to do even when all of its lessons scream at us that in the end higher levels of indebtedness cost you your freedom yeah i mean the the great classicist michael grant an englishman that i had as a professor but he was also a great popularizer but what people fail to remember about grant was that he started out his career as a very narrow scholastic academic numismatic system news missmatics he was an expert on ancient cornidge and he wrote his books based on an examination of extant corneas from greece and romans showed that when the gold and silver content dissipated and they were veneered with copper for example uh then that was a indication that the society fifth century athens fourth century asian third or rome in the second century third century a.d whatever the period under discussion was that the society was in crisis because the first symptom is that they print money or in that case they coined coinage with metals that could not back up the value of the coinage and they did so for usually what the poet juvenile said bread and circuses massive entitlements of free food for urban populations and then free entertainment uh to make sure that people were not restless and i i think that's pretty much says the story of society societies don't uh are not murdered usually very rarely are they invaded and destroyed they usually commit suicide and if you want to know one of the reasons why they do it seems to be that they are physically irresponsible and uh once you start doing it it's very hard i don't i can't think of a leader the skills that would be necessary to tell the american people we're going to have to have not just a balanced budget but a surplus budget you're going to have to have no cost of in uh no cost of living increases in your social security or you're going to have to have much more verification for workers compensation or something i don't think that our political climate today it would be allowable you'd be called a racist you'd be called cruel and heartless the media the social media it would be almost impossible and that was one of the attractions of trump that people said he's not just a renegade he doesn't care he can say anything to anybody anytime anywhere and we need that sort of chemotherapy to deal with this existential metastasized cancer yeah well that's uh you just hit on something there you know there's all that terrible balance that has to be formed if you're really going to put some shots back in the locker for the next economic downturn if i can put it that way you you know you've got to find a balance between raising taxes and promoting economic growth but in fact what the western world not just america now seems that their communities are intent upon both increasing debt and restricting growth and it has to end in tears there's no other way of putting it but you've just hit the nail on the head no one has an appetite to step up and say this has got to stop much less our society seem to have reached a point where we don't want to hear yes i think when i was growing up and we under the uh johnson and nixon administration the ford administration the classic american bromides when we were in periods of recession or threatened recession was to increase the national debt a little bit have a budget deficit and increase government spending of course well we're doing all of that now and so we've done this so for so long and at such costs that it's sort of saying that when the burglar comes through the door your your revolver's empty you've already used those bullets in times when you didn't need to do that like shooting your gun off in the air then you're you're defenseless when you're in extremis and that's what we've done we have no more stimuli if we get an arrest session because we're we're so indebted and we have such huge deficits and we have such huge expansion of federal spending that i don't know how that was the reason that trump resonated with so many people he was very simply and bluntly said we can increase american productivity by producing natural gas that's clean burning and reduces our carbon imprint is very efficient and we can lower the price of oil and we're not going to be involved in optional military engagements in the middle east to the same extent that will save money will save on heating energy costs commute costs and his whole plan was at every aspect of the economy in a very business-like manner of i guess reflecting his own career how can we save money and be more efficient and it was very funny people never caught on to when he was criticizing the woke culture and it was always never in terms necessarily of ideology but what a drag on the economy this is almost as if he was saying one of the reasons the soviet union didn't work is you had a common sore over your shoulder saying don't do what's economically rational because it's not ideologically permissible and so that that's one way of looking at the this wokeness in the western world is it it's an economic drag it's diverting large amounts of capital and labor and talent into non-productive areas i think when you have the president of france mr macron lecturing us on the dangers of political correctness and wokeness we're in pretty bad straits because as an academic i unfortunately had to suffer through the works of foucault and lacan and derrida the french book and now they're getting it back in spades from us so if we can paint a broad picture here what we have it's loaded with ironies in a way we've got the west generally speaking across the board eating out the capital that's been bequeathed to it from previous generations if you like economically morally i'd say even spiritually frankly and we're confronted now by having uh you know our real leadership globally the liberal sort of democratic order headed up by the americans the sort of unilateral arrangement threatened by really the rise of all sorts of other powers around the place you know you've got russia you've got iran you've got north korea you've got china they have none of our lack of conviction about their own culture and their own objectives going forward and here's the great irony in many ways one of the great threats is that communism in china it seems to me with china's with chinese characteristics as they put it they've embraced enough of the capitalist model the loathed capitalist model that so many in the west dislike now even though it's made them prosperous and comfortable to become very powerful it's one of the great differences between communist china and communist russia during the cold war era where will america under biden go you touched on it a moment ago but as an australian this is of enormous interest and potentially concern the view he's been that he will hold the line on china that's the media line that we're getting um there's some real disquiet that he might undo some of the powerful things that trump gets no credit for but which were very effective in the middle east but where will in your view victor america go under biden in terms of global leadership for one of a better word and the rise of china in particular well he'll use platitudes that the world was stable before trump came because of the bipartisan um establishment the council on foreign relations the atlantic alliance all that stuff but the fact was what got trump elected was it was completely unstable and then piecing china with the idea that they were going to respect or outreach as magnaminity rather than see it as contempt to be exported proved to be completely fallacious it didn't work we know that they said they told us that at every periodic communist congress so i i think whether i'm a little bit pessimistic here john i don't want to depress your audience but even if we had uh an optimistic view of what joe biden wanted to do i'm not sure at this late day he could do it by i mean just look at the people around him one of the a prominent congressman eric swallow was caught in an amorous relationship with a chinese agent while he was on the house intelligence committee hunter biden was given a complete pass even though in his own laptop communications it was pretty clear that he was involved with chinese interest and siphoning money off to the biden family not in the millions but approaching a billion dollars and then when you um when you look at uh members in the cabinet or members in the corporate world and their ties with china and i'm just throwing out names here whether it's the disney corporation or the la lakers or goldman sachs but the the the key institutions of america are run by establishmentarians that if you were to say them wait a minute you're an american and your economic livelihood should not uh collide with america's patriotic interest you're the inheritor of okinawa or bella wood or antietam a lot of people died to give you this this that would be considered lunatic and so we have so many people that are compromised by china i'm speaking as a member of the stanford university community just this last year stanford reported that a visiting neural scientist professor was actually not just attached to the communist party but was actively working for the chinese military we had another uh research project about facial recognition that was developed at stamford that went in uh parts of it were used by co-chinese researchers to help surveil the wagers we had 65 million dollars that was given to stanford university that was not reported as legally required by the department of education that was in some ways tainted by companies in china that were connected with a chinese communist party so it's going to be very difficult for australia for the united states for the uk for the eu to have a muscular independent autonomous attitude toward china when so many of our elites are compromised and they don't and worse yet they don't see that they're compromised they say it's a free market we're just exploring profitability we're improving improving productivity global harmony when you have bill gates the second or third wealthiest man in the world say to the united states i'm so tired of you harping on china's handling of the virus so far it's been pretty good let's not go back there when we know that they lied about the origins the transmission of the virus the communability that and they infected and probably polluted many people uh ideology ideology-wise in the world health organization but for somebody to say that or michael bloomberg to say that china is not autocratic as he himself is in charge of bringing western capital to jumpstart companies that are connected with the chinese communist party he's about the sixth wealthiest person in the united states very influential and for president so gosh when you have a party and and one person is running for the two at one point the two contenders were joe biden whose family was connected with china and michael bloomberg who had made billions in china and was making billions in china at the time it's almost like it's orwellian it doesn't make any sense yeah one of the things that's puzzling is just what china's objectives actually are presumably they seek enormous recognition as a major power around the world but what does that mean you have to dominate the region if you want to be influential in the world traditionally their tactics that they're using now would be seen as bullying and rejected by the rest of the world but one of the problems is that in a world that's awash with debt it's hard to say no you can't trade because governments are so desperate you know to build their economies again i think you and australia are sort of the canary in the mine you're in a very unique historical position to instruct the rest of us of the dangers because you went through it with japan from 1932 to 1941 with their so-called greater east asia co-prosperity sphere that was kind of reified in this final form in 1940-41 but and de facto had been there remember what the japanese said they went to countries in asia and they said the west is spent there is no netherlands now it's occupied by germany there is no such thing as france it doesn't exist anymore southeast asia is ours the breadbasket of asia the dutch east indies and their oil is ours and the only uh obstacles are an appeasing britain in singapore which we'll shortly deal with and a isolationist america pearl harbor which we'll shortly deal with but the point i'm making is they created a climate where the message was it's very dangerous for you asian countries and neighbors of japan to think that you're going to get sucre and help from a distant enemy that's not willing or willing or able to protect you so i think what china's been saying to you in australia and to south korea and japan and even more so in the case of taiwan but also the philippines so your area of the belt around china that we are destined economically to corrupt the west which is decadent and our military to catch up with the west and you were in a very precarious position to think that the united states much less europe is going to come to your aid and so you better make a deal with us now you know we're not going to humiliate you it's just a working relationship in which we'll buy your products or your natural resources but you're going to come under our ideological domination eventually and be happy about it because history says that when an ally whether it's czechoslovakia or ancient plateau thinks that a distant a distant friend is going to come to their aid it doesn't happen so what we in the united states who knew that was happening we were trying to reassure japan it's good to rearm because we're you're not the japan of 1939 you're a democratic sober country we want you to rearm we want australia we want to come to your aid we want to have a want you to be on a de facto under a nuclear umbrella if it if it if it comes down to it we are pledging the cities of the united states to protect sydney and tokyo and seoul that's what we've always pretty much that was the deal we're going to renew that that's what trump did but if you're a globalist or uh or even a naive globalist then uh you would say that china we treated china badly or we didn't we didn't give them room to grow or we misunderstood what they were trying to do or they were spectacular in their recovery from the vi i've heard all of that here it's very dangerous because the chinese are very patient and they're insidious and they feel that ultimately our system has only one good thing going for it and that's free market capitalism which they have adopted in some ways but the the downside is freedom and liberty and constitutional government and they feel that they can go by that and they even have a cynical disrespect for us because they say they say to themselves oh you talk so much about transgendered issues and gay rights and radical abortion and the oppressed and human rights but we have a million people in a re-education camp based on the religion the wagers we destroy the culture of tibet we surveil our own students our own people we harvest on occasion organs if we need them from people who are still alive we do all sorts of things uh we've corrupted the entire nba lebron james will give a lecture to your own people about how you're not quite fair and judicious but he won't say a thing about us because we've got him with nike with a billion dollar contract over the lifetime of that contract so they they see that is with contempt that we really don't mean it and we can be bought off and that's very dangerous when an enemy no longer not just doesn't fear you but doesn't respect you and i think that's what we're getting to in the west when they go back to beijing they say these people are so self-righteous they're so sanctimonious but believe me you write them a check and we can get what we want out of them and the next step is that will be reified with i think a scarier scenario of armed force if need be so i've raised i'm very worried about taiwan to take the first example because everybody thinks they're just going to wake up one morning and there's you know amphibious craft on the taiwanese beaches it's not going to work that way it's going to be slowly to curtail their airspace their their sea space to tell foreign powers you can't go in here without threats of losing something here and then working within the ch the taiwanese system and so to present them with a fate to complete that it would be sort of as we saw in world war ii with some states that that 1940 france could not resist to that even if it had wanted to yeah well that's very sobering to come back to something i talked about earlier um all of this surely happens because people refuse to learn the history of their own culture and we now self-loathe it so what you're seeing is frank ferruti i think would put it in relation to something that happened in australia is a furious attempt to delegitimize the past in order to ensure that particularly young people think oh we're an illegitimate culture ourselves we have no standing we are actually low lives look at what we've done we're the inheritors of a bad tradition and there's no explanation of as you've alluded to the great price that's been paid to give us freedom and to give us what we have that's rubbed out so in this whole question about history there's extraordinary debate in america over the so-called uh 1619 project uh you know and and whether america is an oppressor that's always been oppressive and cruel or whether in fact it it has a creed that's been self-correcting and has allowed it to identify areas where it doesn't live by its own ideals and then step up so you i think have been involved in the 1776 commission and its report can i ask about what that report is and indeed uh what its key findings were well it was a very strange thing because it was a it was created after trump lost the election and it was there was the idea that we had a very brief time but we were not going to be academics scholars and university people had already refuted the 1619 project claiming that america was to be defined when the first african person was brought as a slave to the north american shores we said that has happened throughout history everywhere but what has not happened is a constitutional republic like the americans created in 1776 and 1787 when the constitution was wrecked so what we wanted to do was get everyday people some lawyers professionals some politicians some young activists and write a report that's that's sort of sort of said this is what the world was like in 1776 here were the intellectual traditions of the west that the united states adopted modified change incorporated and this was the system that they created and the big issue was slavery and of course what we said was there was no evidence that any of the founders even though there were way bones uh ever supported slavery the issue was how to get rid of it and keep 13 colonies because there were some southern colonies that would not join the union and so slavery is not mentioned in the constitution except in one phrase of three-fifths shall be counted for the purposes of the census who were serfs or slaves and what that compromise illustrated was the southerners wanted both ways they said our slaves are not citizens or real people but you're going to have to count them to give us people in the house of representatives and the founders said we're not going to do that and the south came back and said well we'll join if you give them three-fifths credit out of that transmogrified the idea that everybody in the united states considered africans from the very beginning less than a whole person which was completely false so we tried to rectify the historical record and then we the two most quoted people in our report believe it or not contrary to media accounts were frederick douglass the great african-american uh civil libertarian and [ __ ] abolitionists during the civil war and then martin luther king so what were the premises or the ideological uh foundations upon what we worked i think they're very familiar to your audience in the west in the west we said we don't have to be perfect to be good we're we're human we're not gods we're human so we have we're born innately with human frailties biases uh evils if you will but only under a constitutional system of free speech and protected discourse can you be self-reflective and self-corrective so the story of the west is one of constant improvement based on the sacrifices of reformers and patriots of the past the second thing we said was in this report the second assumption that we made was that we don't use the standards of the present to go back in history and treat it as if it's a melodrama whose role is to pick and choose bad guys and good guys we look at history as a tragedy of uh sophisticated europeans coming in ships fighting indigenous people and we used to look at it and saying what do you do when people are living 200 people to a square mile in eastern europe and they come the united states and there's one person per 200 square miles and the former have the ability to go where the ladder is and the latter don't have the ability that's tragedy but we don't do that anymore we call it let's go back and look at the settlers on the way down the oregon trail and let's call them all evil and when you destroy individuality you're saying wait a minute maybe one settler was brave and one was bad or if we look at people in a particular time in the united states let's say the roaring 20s were they all evil white people if you when you start to do that you destroy the concept of individuality and i think that's that's what we try to suggest we should not do and what i mean by that specifically is there were not a bunch of old white men founders there was a brilliant polymath name benjamin franklin self-educated there was a heroic general who was one of the most magnanimous leaders with the world scene in george washington there was an absolute brilliant person alexander hamilton probably from the caribbean with not all white blood but was a was almost a boy genius so there was a a particular time of fifth century athens if you will of europeans who had come to the to north america and they were in one place at one time and that synergy created the declarations that's what we're trying to remind people but when you have a host that doesn't believe that anymore and you have immigrants we have 50 million people who are in the united states now who are not born here and we're bringing in about a million a year we were until recently not often under illegal auspices but when we the host don't say to them whether you like it or not you rejected your homeland for a reason you left oaxaca state in mexico for a reason and you wanted a better life or more secure life or more prosperous or more free life it's our obligation to teach you how to be an american we don't do that anymore and so then we get angry when people don't know who george washington was or they don't know what the senate or constitution is the fault though is not in the stars it's in us we lost our confidence in our own system if i was a pessimist determinist history historian i would say that historians like tacitus or novels like petronius they said when you get to a certain level of luxury and security prosperity you get laxity and decadence and you take things for granted you forget the building blocks that allowed you to have that wealth and and leisure and you have to go back if you can and just rediscover what made you that way before you it all collapses can i pick up on i hear what you're saying um can i pick up on something that's been was right there at the beginning with the founding fathers the importance of small freeholders living on the land now you're somebody who uh you know we have a slight parallel here you pursued academia i was involved in politics but both of us have kept our rural roots i'm talking to you from an australian farm to you in an american farm i'm on the farm right now i am too i am too uh and i could say to our american friends you'd be surprised how similar what we do here and how it looks is to much of the midwest of america yeah uh even much of the machinery is the same but can you just tease out what influence you think the massive urbanization we've seen in the west has had on our national attitudes and character if any yes one way of answering that john is to ask about the peculiarities in the american constitution and by that i'll just i could go on i'll give you two examples why do we have an electoral college and not use a direct vote in other words we vote for uh electors within states and so a wyoming or in idaho or utah or kansas or nebraska become places where candidates actually go rather than just forget if we had a popular vote the candidates would fly down the east coast to from boston to miami and then they'd go to los angeles and san francisco and that would be it there'd be no reason because they have as much population as everything in between so the founders didn't want that so they had the electoral college system the second thing is why in california do we have 40 million people and two senators in a hundred person senate so my representation is 20 million of us get dianne feinstein but why isn't in wyoming when you have 40 400 000 people there's two centers two hundred thousand and you can see there has to be a reason this is what drives a left so angry and the reason was the founders were steeped in the history themselves as farmers but they were steeped in what i would call agrarianism from rome and greece and and the renaissance and what was that story in virgil's georgics or echelons or hesiods works in days it was this that when you're out on a farm there's nobody else you're responsible for getting your water you drank where your sewage goes to fix uh your team up your horse or fix your car you have to and as far as security goes sometimes and this is true of me today if i call a sheriff it can be an hour i'm not in town so i look at across the room over here and i have 14 guns from my great great grandfather down where each person contributed a 12-gauge a 10-gauge a 20-gauge a rifle of 30-odd six war veterans came back with a 30-40 craig or springfield 19 they're all there and the answer is why are they there because they felt they had to defend their family and it was their responsibility and then and and more importantly the founders said you know what other profession do you have to combine the mind with the body so you look out and you want to plant an orchard you devise every strategy of planting is it going to be 20 by 18 is it going to be 18 by 16 you understand which variety which uh cross pollen that doesn't do any good unless you're physically able to go out there and do it so it was the idea that mind and body you had an idea is worthless unless it's reified it's it's it's turned into reality and farmers have to do both if you're a brilliant farmer but you're not physical it's not going to work if you're a brute and you have no mind or no reason it's not going to work so it was a rare combination and it was this a sense of autonomy and what the greeks called al tarkaya economic self-sufficiency so the idea was not that they had to be necessarily a majority although aristotle's politics remember said the only type of the best type of democracy is one of small farmers and the middle classes were central to the rise of greece and rome but the point in our life was the the founders knew that they would be outnumbered the rural people jefferson said i worry when the cities are piled up with people that will lose our character but the idea is you needed some of them you needed a guy from wyoming to run for congress you needed a guy from kansas to come into the congress and say you people are crazy you're all dependent you don't have no idea where your water comes from you don't know where your power comes from you don't know what you can't tell a carrot from a tomato you've got this crazy idea that you know you just push a button and the steak comes out of the refrigerator let me tell you something and those type of cranky dissonant voices were absolutely critical so i'm worried that we're in this post-modern world where these young people feel that they want to go prep prep prep and take a test and then go to harvard yale or stanford and then get branded like a cow with a ba or a phd from a tony university and then they go into high tech or law or insurance and they've never been out in the real world and when you put those people in control of government it it's not just it's not just scary it can be out cruel and amoral because some of them have no idea uh if i said to some of the people that are governing my future which way does the wind roll what phase of the moon are we in when the south wind blows in central california should you watch out or not and why do the birds seem to nest always about five o'clock uh in the evening and these types of questions i was brought up with and um i'm afraid that you become kind of a odd person out in a a mass urbanized society and that's what i think it threatens the entire west because it's antithetical to our origins that's a really interesting set of insights i had the great privilege of leading uh a party that had its genesis in rural australia known originally as a country party than the national party uh and i as you were talking i was just reflecting too about the sheer shift in numbers of people who are involved in agriculture so when the party was started 100 years ago probably fully a third of the people who had a job in australia owned a farm or worked on a farm or were directly involved in agriculture and the production of food and fibre it would now be i suspect at most two two and a half percent so you've had a staggering drop off in the number of people who have any real contact and understanding of in particular the point you made the extraordinary requirement for a farmer to uh to be able to use their body and their brawn uh but to back it up with true thoughtfulness and i mean you've got to be everything from a businessman through to you know a tax expert through to a uh you know a mechanic and uh and a vet veterinarian all wrapped into one and we know in this country that the numbers of people involved in agriculture are dropping even more quickly now they continue to drop sorry because of modern technology it won't be long before you don't have somebody on a tractor we have a john deere now that steers itself it's all on auto steer not long before you won't need anybody in the cabin to even turn it round at the end of the run i'll take a a tiny little segue there for for listeners who haven't heard it you gave an unbelievably interesting lecture on world war ii and why it still matters and as i understood it your essential thesis there was that what should have been a nasty little series of border skirmishes turned into an utterly dreadful and murderous war because nations particularly germany and japan overestimating their own strength and believing that the west wouldn't stand on principle and didn't believe in itself it could be easily overtaken and so these things just got out of control and really it was in the end one man leading one people that still had backbone that secure the freedoms we have today uh that was churchill and britain of course britain in the war from the first day till the absolute end of the war nearly exhausted itself but we owed a huge debt which is not to take anything away from what the americans did once they entered particularly in the pacific australia wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for um roosevelt and the americans engaging themselves after pearl harbor but that that that the point you make about being firm in defense of a set of things that you yourself believe in is something that we do seem to have lost sight of yeah i think so i got criticism for the second world wars by some in america because i made the statement i think we in america look at the totality of the war and we said we had the largest army almost as large as the soviet union but britain and our allies are real allies 12.2 million and then we we produce more goods and services than all of the combatants on both sides put together more airframe we look at all that okay and we fought in every theater and every mode in the air under the sea on the sea on ground or asia okay we got that but the fact of the matter was that the war started because the united states was isolationist and let aggression go and britain under stanley baldwin in particular but neville chamberlain appeased people and the soviet union were active collaborators with the molotov ribbon top track that's one thing we got to remember the second is britain was the first country to declare war on on it was in the war on the first day and it was there on the last day of the major belligerence on both sides it was the only country to fight the entire time it was the only country to fight alone germany and mussolini it was all alone from basically june 20th until the invasion of the soviet of 1940 until the invasion of the soviet union so it was extraordinary and then when you look at the tank production the the aircraft production the manpower of the british empire including your country it outpaced the third reich nobody would believe that today but you look at the statistics of industrial production oil aviation it was not even close so it was a it was a an amazing achievement that we sometimes uh overlook i think so i was trying to make that point uh that britain really was of all of the of the allies was the most far seen and i think that was that was exactly right and uh a couple of things about world war ii and i owed great debt to a great australian scholar jeffrey blaney because he wrote a book about the causes of war and he made a very simple observation that was profound and i don't want to mischaracterize his formulation but he said that war is sort of like a laboratory experiment it takes place because you have to prove something that you're not quite sure about but it shouldn't have hap to happen wars occur when people don't know the relative strength of everybody involved and they don't know the relative strength because of isolationism or appeasement or collaboration so what he was saying about world war ii was absolutely brilliant he was saying if you look at the gdp of the soviet union or britain or the united states or the available manpower or the industrial pro uh production or the brilliance of uh british science and radar and sonar or americans in mass production you would have to be crazy if you were germany and and italy and japan given your limited resources and your limited record of industry to ever take those three on so why did they do it well they did it because the three projected a sense of either eagerness to collaborate or eagerness to appease or eagerness to just wash your hands and they made a profound miscalculation but the problem with war is that miscalculation cost 65 million people including 50 million that were innocent civilians world war ii was basically a story if you look at the terms of the dead of germany and japan killing people who were unarmed and those are the lessons that our young people should be learning but aren't um jeffrey blainey a very famous australian well into his 90s still hail and hearty still writing and you'll find a conversation uh listeners between he and myself um on this uh the site but he um he said something that i think you might understand and want to respond to in that conversation it's very interesting um about universities he said we worry about what happens in the universities but the problem is they're producing the academics who then teach our children in primary school you yourself recently said all and you're an academic has worked in universities of course most your life and you said and i quote all the ingredients for civilizational status delayed or non-existent marriage and childbearing massive unsustainable student debt ideological indoctrination without learning and superficial credentialing credentialing sorry originate in the university plainly you have real concerns about what is happening in our universities now given their great historical importance and the contribution they've made to our well-being i find it amazing that they are so smugly defensive of the role that they play and the way in which in this country anyway they are endangering the public faith and trust uh that people place in them and the taxpayers fund them for because they seem to be determined to push things like critical theory and now it gets out of the um the the sort of humanities causes and even starts to inflict you know the the straight mathematics of science and all the rest of it people say how is that to be well post modernists and critical theorists actually reject science this thing's got out of hand they have and i think the speaking especially at the font of this pathologies here in the united states and so we gave the university of a pass because we felt that they had produced such astonishing breakthroughs in science uh medicine engineering computers and we were willing to give the humanities and the social sciences a past and they sort of parasitically piggybacked on that achievement but now we have 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt and that has meant a whole generation is not marrying as you say or not buying a house not buying a car not having children and the university doesn't have any moral hazard and by that i mean they assume the federal government will come in and give them a blank check and guarantee those loans and then they jack up the rate of inflation the rate of tuition each year higher than the rate of inflation the administrative bloat is enormous the teaching loads have gone down their curriculum is ideologically you know perverted so how can we react to that there's a few things we could do we could say to the government get out of student loans if stanford university's got 20 billion dollars endowment or harvard's got 50. they have adequate sums to say to their students you come here and we will give you a student loan and we will guarantee it and that would put them that would give them hazard and i think that they would cut their their cost and say can we really afford to hire 10 more provosts or deans of equity and inclusion that are non-academic and add that to the bill of the bill to that student who then might default on our loan we could also get rid of tenure it's the only profession that i know of in the western world where people have a blank check basically to say to do anything and not be audited we have something called post-tenure review it's not serious so i would replace that with five-year contracts i think that would be enormously helpful i don't know about your country but what's been really deleterious is the rise of the education industry credentialing in the university where you after you get your bachelor's degree then you go into the school of education to get a credential for a year to teach k-12 and they say well we're gonna and that's where the ideological indoctrination takes place if we just said to the student you can go there if you want to get credentials but if you want to get a master's degree in history an academic subject or biology or math that too will be equally fine to allow you to teach in a public school i think the students in mass would gravitate towards something interesting that would help and finally i don't know why we're all unique in the western world because we have these huge preeminent western uh private universities but i don't think that their endowments any longer should be tax-exempt and they're they're almost neo-socialists and yet they expect harvard to have 50 million or princeton to have 20 or stanford to have 20 in another little school to be broke and so on onto their own precepts either they should share their endowments or help out the poor schools if they're not willing to do that then they should go on at their long on their own they should not get tax exempt status and i don't know why an 18 year old and fresno gets on a forklift and works his entire life has to pay taxes to subsidize a private university that's training somebody and won't come out at least 27 28 in debt but then with a degree so i would i would stop the government's role entirely earlier this on this question of education earlier this year in your country a high school teacher in massachusetts boasted on social media and i quote very proud to say we got the odyssey by homer removed from the curriculum this year you know why should the person on the street care whether or not the great texts of western civilization are taught in schools do you think it makes a practical difference to the nation i do i i wrote a book about a co-author called who killed homer about that very topic once 20 years ago we you and i can talk and we can say it's very important for a country to be self-reflective to self-corrective to be empirical but that's a dry platitude when you have a 15-year-old mind that picks up the odyssey and they see that this man wanders all over all over the aegean and the mediterranean and he he meets every type of challenge a cyclops sirens calypso series and each one tests a particular element of his education and training and his essence and then when he finally returns home who's there to help him the suitors the aristocrats of ithaca no they're all praying on his sustenance and destroying his home he's got yumayus the loyal swineherd the servant the slave who is more noble than any of the aristocrats and he's got his loyal wife penelope who's not just keeping the house in order why he's gone but she's outsmarting these males so odyssey is the second thing that was produced in western civilization after the iliad probably 20 or 30 year time span between the two if uh but what the west was saying is this is a very exciting adventure story in fact it's the stuff of cartoons and and you know adventure movies it's been done so many times but at the very beginning if you read this you will understand how self-reflective that the issues of women the issues of the poor the issues of what what you do when the danger is overwhelming all of these issues will be discussed torn apart recon recalibrated in a very self-reflective self-critical so i i think it's it's invaluable to have a a repertoire of 20 or 30 of these works it's not a lot to ask of a student to know something about the divine comedy or the iliad or the odyssey or sophocles or virgil or boethius whatever and there's no set canon but when you you get these authors you can see them in a context you understand metaphor and simile and the vocabulary and the beauty art artistry as well as the lesson and very few pieces of literature do that i don't find very many in my own time that do that at all yeah i once heard a a conservative say a conservative somebody who does not believe that everyone who's gone before us is an idiot or evil in other words you know yes i think i think the conservative says exactly that he says whether we like it or not human nature is fixed and just because we have uh computers or improved diets you really cannot change human nature you can make it better and modulate it through culture but you have to start with a premise that uh concer conservatives like margaret thatcher i think said human nature is conservative it's predictable and it it responds to enticements and potential punishments and men are born into the world sort of self-interested greedy they have a soul that can be appealed to but it's fixed and literature teaches us and history that teaches us how to deal with human nature thucydides first thing one of the first things he says in history as long as human nature remains constant my history will be of some value he knew that the peloponnesian war thousands of years later 2600 years later 2500 years later would not be necessarily the most important thing for people to read but his story of human nature would simply because we would be like him we would be unchanged and i think that's very important to him to remember yeah it strikes me at the brilliance of alexander hamilton and his role in in the founding of your nation uh as has has now been discarded uh he he plainly understood the need to recognize human nature in particular its capacity for uh mob rule to dominate the minority and the checks and balances that he wanted to build in to maximise freedom personal autonomy and what have you and minimize the chances of it being lost to the mob all washed out and it does strike me that one of the things that order sober us a little bit is to recognize that because human nature doesn't change in our smugness and assuming at the moment that we know right from wrong and we of course draw the line of virtue between one group and another now that's behind this polarization we see and if you belong to another group you're simply not virtuous and the more you run that line the more you have to pump up your own virtue do we really think that future generations will not be unbelievably harsh in our judgment on us given the harshness that we've applied ourselves to those who have gone before us anyway it's a rhetorical question no no you're absolutely right when we look back at the satan witch trials or the reign of terror in 1793 the jacobin takeover or we look at the mccarthy period we don't say to ourselves well they they had reasons to do that and so i i don't know why the council vote movement won't suffer the same consequences since it's got the same ingredients opportunism careerist aspirations surveilling snooping forced confessionals and so we're not going to get an excuse that's a very good question i've thought about it so much that we we in our smugness think that we're going to be praised because we're diverse or we're enlightened or we're woke but i don't i don't know what a futurable generation will say will they say that you took a million children and aborted them every year and some of them at least a few thousand and why they were alive as they came out the birth canal will they say to us uh wow you destroyed people's careers you you use this internet to surveil them and then you uh you invaded their privacy a person was just simply reading a novel on the online and all of a sudden an ad popped in and obliterated the screen what kind of values is that so all the things that we take for granted i'm not sure when you look at the hollywood outfit or as a future generation say well let me just look at 2021 and i want to go back and look at casablanca or i want to go back and look at the bridge over the river kwai or any of those movies or lawrence and let me just compare you to them and we're going to be found wanting in so many areas yeah it's a challenge it really is it's deeply concerning um i do meet i really do a lot of people now who see through this mess and that includes a lot of young people who haven't lost that desire to champ at the bit and build a better world and it'd be very easy for them to fall into despair and we don't want that to happen we want them to say to learn these lessons to say look this is hopeless we want to do it a better way how do we encourage them how do we not end if i can put it this way onto a pessimistic note about the future of the west how do we say to young people in particular who understand a bit of history who in this country they're often people who have had a different educational experience outside the state controlled ones and they they've got an inkling that actually our foundations were pretty remarkable and that we ought to be building on them not destroying them let's offer them some hope victor yeah i i'd like to i i think it's very exciting in history because these are cyclical processes that one generation if i could use go back to the farm one immigrant comes in he lives in a shack he builds his farm his son sort of has a nice car but he doesn't he builds a bigger barn in his home the third generation doesn't know the grandfather and blows it and goes broke that's sort of what happened in athens that's happening here so our generation the baby boomers i think was that third generation that wasn't self-indulgent and ruined the capital that it inherited from the world war ii generation that was brought up by people who built the country but it's very much exciting much more exciting to be back in the restoration generation the first generation so i think we can tell people look at what you can see look at what your parents people like me inherited and look what they did with it and don't do that and you can reconstruct this country and this society and this civilization on the premises of first generation that you're starting to rejuvenate rebuild and what would what do we mean by rejuvenate rebuild you're going to follow constitutional principles you're going to restore the family you're going to have reverence for the past you're going to get away from that you're going to be tolerant of people's heirs you're not going to judge a man good or bad by his worst qualities but by his better qualities you're not going to go back in history and cancel people out because they don't fit your contemporary ideas of morality all of these are exciting things to think about and restore and i i agree with you i see all of these young people and there are millions now that are saying you know what this idea of staying single until you're 35 and then maybe living with somebody and then having all these degrees on behind your name and then trying to network there are a lot of people say i want to go get a house i want to raise children i want to believe in something i want to make a community safe i want to have a moral tolerant society and and it may not be quite the same cycle as those who created the west in these cycles of first generation but i think it's very exciting i have two children that um are in their 30s and they're married and have children they have homes and i'm always amazed when i talk to them how they are increasingly more traditional and conservative than i am and they're saying that you don't know what dad you have no idea what our generation's is facing and whether it's big debt or increased house price they take it on with a gusto and they really want to be better than than us that's not going to be hard to do but uh i think that uh i think it is exciting i have enormous hope with people 18 to 35 i just think that they're they're going to do something that's going to restore the west because simply because they have no choice jonathan sachs found he did a major project before he died very fine gentleman and he moved around spent a long period of time moving around england and he said to me that two things that interested him about young people was that many of them felt they hadn't been given a moral compass so their substitute was to find an older person in their life that they admired and then emulate them he said the and he found that dismaying that we haven't handed on a narrative but good that they're smart enough to realize it and to find a substitute i think that was the perspective he was putting i'm not wanting to misrepresent him so the other thing is though they know that it isn't going to be as easy for them and i think my sort of final remark there would be that they need to be very careful we know in australia 80 of young people now have climate change anxiety now i'm a farmer i'm worried about climate i don't dismiss the importance of climate but one thing i know for absolute certainty after years in public life is that catastrophism and self-loathing uh and a sense of despair and anxiety will never get due to a frame of mind where you say we've got a challenge let's let's go out and confront that challenge and deal it at rationally sensibly and courageously you'll just go for emotion and uh destruction every time and i it really worries me yeah i was discussing that very anxiety last night on a television show and it was about the virus no sooner has the vaccination and miraculous fashion been created within 10 months and we now are having 80 million vaccinated and we have another 100 million with antibodies and we all have to be absolutely careful about mutants strains that could be dangerous but as the caseload per day and as the deaths are falling dramatically the official class is paranoid it's it's it's saying to all of us beware you have to wear masks even if you're vaccinating if you have antibodies you can't change and i was asked to respond to that i thought for a second because it kind of took me by surprise as a military historian i remember what george patton said he said when he was told that the third army is not going to be able to fight the vermont given their superiority and tie he said never be let you yourself be a captive of your fears and and i think that's important and the other great a general in american history ulysses s grant in that terrible summer of 1864 when his subordinates came to him and said robert e lee is going to do this and he's he's a he's going to do this and he's going to do this and what are we going to do and he said i am sick and tired of hearing what lee is going to do to us i want you to think about what you're going to do to lee and i think that's the attitude we have to have it sort of defiance i'm sick of the virus i want to know i want to know how we're going to kill it and i want to get as many vaccinations and as best strategy but we have to have confidence we're going to defeat it and get back to normal rather than as you say be a captive of all these anxieties it applies to climate change etc that's why there's certain people in our society in the west and ellen musk even if they're a flawed individual you have to admire them they look out at space or they if there's climate change then i'll build an electric vehicle and some of these people in our society i have enormous uh confidence in because they have that patent grant defiance and you know it's like danton audacity audacity to julia das so always more audacity well i think too of the issue of character and i had the privilege of speaking to dan crenshaw as a republican a young republican uh member of congress from texas and he said something that i thought was very revealing and he said that you know he picked it up in his ears with the seals he's obviously a very brave man but he said in public life because it's so acrimonious and so dirty and nasty now he is determined not to give offence to the best of his ability and doubly determined not to take it and i think for young people especially in an age of social media there's a brilliant insight in that but what you've had to say is really encouraging and thank you for your relentless drilling down into reality uh and then drawing such valuable lessons i i've really enjoyed the conversation and i hope many others do as well thank you for having me again john appreciate it say hello to your audience thank you all the best thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you 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Channel: John Anderson

Views: 339,059

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, American decline, china relations, us economy, victor davis hanson, vdh, vdh john anderson, vdh interview, victor davis hanson interview

Id: Zg6pgXXMJCk

Length: 76min 2sec (4562 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021