VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Are you a history major? NICK: I am. I'm a history and applied
math double major. And a math? Yes, sir. What do you want to do? I'm not quite sure. Well, academia is not lucrative. Right. Well, I'm not
interested in academia. I farmed, and I had three kids,
and I lived in an old house. And I was making $25,000. And something told me-- one day, I spoke to
a business group. And they said,
you're either going to have to write books
or speak or do something because you're headed
toward poverty. Wow. That was really
shocking that somebody'd tell me that in my 30s. Wow. And he was right. So I started writing books. It was also because
of farming, right? Because someone came in
and wanted to publish your doctoral thesis, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was very odd. A man named Emilio Gabba--
he's a very famous classicist-- he just happened
to be in Berkeley. And I was farming. I had finished my PhD
thesis three years earlier. And I got a letter
out of the blue. He was a visiting
Sather Professor, which was one of the
top professorships. A very nice letter. He said, we're from the
University of Padua, and we would like to
publish your thesis. And I was on a tractor when
my wife gave me the letter. And he said, you don't
have to do anything. And then they published it. And it went to John Keegan. And the next thing I knew, he
read it and liked it and said, if you write another book,
I will write the foreword. So I wrote a book called
The Western Way of War about what it was like to
fight in the ancient world. And the next thing I know,
he wrote the foreword. And it sold very well. So for somebody in
their early and mid-30s, it was kind of unusual. Because I farmed for 20 years. And then I would
get off the tractor and go in and teach 25 miles
away, sometimes twice a day. So it was kind of a hectic life. I kind of like that, though. The best teachers I've ever
had in high school or whatever have always done something
else other than teaching. Yeah, you have to. But it was very schizophrenic. Because all of the things
that I was supposed to do at the campus was antithetical to
what I was doing in farming. You were supposed to be
very careful what you said. And it was very relaxed. And there were some pretty wild
characters out in the Central Valley on farming, stealing
your water or other farmers that would fight over a road
or who had the right to turn, or you're making
your turns to big. And it was pretty blunt. And then you'd go up there and
it was such a different change every day. You kind of had to be
John Wayne a little bit. Yeah. I wrote a couple books about it. So speaking of books,
you've got one coming out very soon on citizenship. It's called The Dying Citizen. And I'm an American
citizen, right? I was born a citizen. I didn't have to do anything
special to get that. Why is this idea important? Well, let me ask you. Are you shocked that
2 million people are scheduled to walk
across the Southern border? Absolutely. And without any ID,
no background check? And the first thing
they do is going to break federal
immigration law. And the second thing
they're going to do is break federal immigration
law by residing here illegally. And the third is,
probably, they're going to have ID that is
not legal to continue to. And this is all at a
time when all of us are supposed to be vaccinated. Or we're looking at
pictures of people landing-- and we all support
legitimate refugees coming-- but they are arriving in
bases without any requirement as foreign nationals
to be vaccinated by troops who have
a deadline that they have to be vaccinated. Or where I live, we have
school board elections now where people who are not
US citizens can vote. Or all of the traditional
privileges of citizenship-- only citizens could
leave the United States at will with a passport. That no longer applies. Citizens usually were
the people who were eligible for state services. That no longer applies. Citizens alone
could hold office. That is still there. It's the only one I can think
of that distinguishes you and I from a resident,
whether legal or not. They can vote, in some
cases, serve in the military. So I was curious about all this. And I tried to find out
why that was historically and what was so good
about citizenship. Because I would bump in where
I live-- most of the people I bumped into out in rural
Fresno County were not citizens. And I had no idea
whether they were legal or illegal residents. It was chaotic. There were castes, as it were. And I didn't have a
commonality with them because they just came
across the border. And then, when you look
at classical texts, the first thing you
see is a middle class. They're not envious of
the rich, and they're not dependent on
government, as the poor are. And they're not always
cajoling, as the rich are, to get quid pro quo concessions. Aristotle talks about
the [INAUDIBLE].. And yet, if you look at middle
class income, college, tuition debt, credit card debt, the
middle class is beleaguered. Especially under
globalization, the people in the interior of
the country, they didn't have the skills that
could be internationalized. And what was weird about
it is it has repercussions. The date people
are getting married has gone from about 23 to 29. The first child is
from about 24 to 31. The date when people buy
their first home-- so we're creating a prolonged, I
could use the term pajama boy or life of Julia,
those commercials we saw during Obamacare--
prolonged adolescence. And then I also notice that,
in this organic process, it was almost like the
migrations of the late empire. People were just
coming and going. And there wasn't a sacred
space, a familiar landscape, where people had a
chance to reiterate their customs, their
traditions, their familiarity with citizens. And yet that had been a hallmark
of classical Greek and Roman citizenship, to the point people
went to war if their borders were impaired, say, in Greece. And yet we've lost that element. Then the big bane of
citizenship was always a pre-civilizational,
pre-modern tribalism. So you and I have
nothing in common as US citizens,
only a superficial, say, we look alike. And we're going
to identify first with our racial or ethnic tribe. In other words, race is
essential, not incidental, to who we are. And that leads nowhere
but to Rwanda or Iraq or the former Yugoslavia. And yet that's what
we're doing right now. We're regressing
back to 1840, 1850. And we're all in
this woke movement. And then the second half of
the book, really quickly, is that there's an elite
concentrated effort to dismantle citizenship. And you can see it
with the rejection of the word "equality," which
means equality of opportunity, replaced by equity-- an equality of
result. Government is going to redistribute
income and advantage, often by race and gender. So what are they doing? How do they facilitate
that agenda? One thing is we have a
permanent administrative state. We always have. It started, really, during
the Depression with the New Deal and the Great Society. But now about 45% of Americans-- 40% work for the state,
local, or federal government. Then we have evolutionaries. You probably have seen
these, or you know them-- academics, lawyers, activists. And they don't like
the Constitution. That's a big issue
here at Hillsdale. So what do they want to do? They want to evolve beyond it. So we're going to get rid
of 180-year filibuster-- not in the Constitution, but
it's a custom and tradition. The electoral
college is 233 years. Let's junk it. The idea that a state like
Michigan or California sets their own voting laws,
even for national elections unless the federal government
wants to come in for women's right, suffrage, or
18-year-old vote. But we're going to
try to junk that. 150-year-old, nine-person,
Supreme Court. 60-year-old 50
states in the Union. I could go on. But when the system doesn't work
for the progressive mindset, then either change the
demography or change the rules or change the whole
constitutional apparatus by which we make laws
and elect officials. And then, finally,
in the book, I have a danger that I'm
really worried about. And that's globalization. It's an ancient idea
of cosmopolitanism, which is a Greek word for
"citizen of the world." But a lot of our elites,
our bicoastal elites, feel that whether it's
the Davos Great Reset project or the
International Criminal Court or a UN Commission
on Human Rights, should trump US sovereignty. They feel we're
sort of an anomaly. We're a weird people that have
Second Amendment or abortion laws, banning types of abortion. We need to get with it. And you can see that when Antony
Blinken, our current Secretary of State, says that the UN
should come in and investigate us for-- I could go on, but that's
a very dangerous idea. Globalization was wonderful
in giving Western consumer products, medicines
all over the world. But the idea that you
would take the next step and harmonize political
norms and institutions outside the United States
that are far inferior is really dangerous. Right. And I think there is
some sort of, perhaps, a loathing, I guess, of American
exceptionalism or something. They do. And there's a desire
to change things. Where do you think
that comes from? Well, Barack Obama,
you remember, he had said on two
occasions, I believe we're exceptional like
the Greeks or the British. In other words, everybody
believes they are. But he made no
effort to quantify that in a dispassionate,
empirical fashion. Do other countries
have due process? Do they have habeas corpus? Do they have a free market? Do they have rights
of inheritance? Do they have a rational
system of adjudicating natural phenomena or
scientific inquiry? Do they have gender equity? Do they have minority rights? No. Most of the 198 nations
in the world do not. But this hatred of
America, I think it comes from, to be quite
frank, from envy and jealousy. Because this country only
has 330 million people. It's not nearly as big as China,
either area-wise or population. It has 1.4 billion. Why is it so powerful? Why does it have
the largest economy? Why does one US worker at this
late date in American history still produce 40% more
goods and services than three of his
Chinese counterparts? And when they look
at popular culture, why are American music
all over the world? And they think, just
stop it, you guys. So they never make the
next step and say, well, maybe we should have
a bill of rights, or maybe we should have
a free market economy, or maybe we shouldn't
have government so large in our lives. Sort of like a
regression to the mean. Instead of rising up,
they're going to just bring us down is sort of the idea. I think Aristotle and Hesiod
and Tocqueville, all of these-- they all postulate the envy and
jealousy are the most powerful of emotions. And they can be
very destructive. Hesiod said there's a good envy. And that makes you see that
guy over there and say, he's got a Mercedes. This is the American attitude. You go over there
and you say to him, how did you get that Mercedes? He said, well, I
sold real estate. Wow, I want to be that. The British or especially the
continental European attitude or most places is
I'm going to go kick the door in on that guy. He must have done
something wrong. And I'm a better person,
and I don't have one. And that's why we're in a crisis
now with the woke movement because that's
one of its tenets, that the system is unfair. It always was. 1776 is not our founding date. It was always racist. It was always classist. And we need a complete
year-zero recalibration. Yeah. So I'm taking a
class, and we were discussing the fall of Rome. And I think, since
Rome is the model, I suppose, for citizenship
that we adopted and everything, I find it
also interesting, in Rome, citizenship was not birthright
citizenship like it is here. There was an essay
by a French scholar that postulated 240 causes
to the fall of Rome, whether it was inflation or too
much military spending or too little or Gibbon
Christianity that destroyed the martial
audacity of the Legion-- whatever it was. But I think one of the more
pertinent or compelling reasons was as it expanded from a
republic to a Mediterranean empire to a global
empire, pretty soon, tribalization, regionalization,
and the system broke down. And that's what's
very scary now, because we're seeing it in
a variety of manifestations. We're having a red
and blue state. People are self-selecting
geographically. And we're not having this
idea of the melting pot. It's been rejected in favor
of the salad bowl and, now, the woke bowl,
that says you have to be racist to stop racism. It's an absurd idea. And the idea that we're
going to check our DNA to find ethnic vitaes, look
how ridiculous it becomes. Ward Churchill is a Native
American, Elizabeth Warren with high cheekbones. Rachel Dolezal is
suddenly Black. Shaun King is as white as I am. And it's almost the reverse
pattern of Jim Crow. When I was a young
kid, you would hear stories of
African-Americans who were subject
to enormous racism, and they were mixed heritage. And they would,
say, pass for white. Now we have people
that are passing. And that should tell us
something, that the system then is not racially blind. And it's what
Professor Kendi says, that it's OK to be racist
to rectify prior racism. But the problem is we're
150 years from slavery, and we're 60 years into
affirmative action. And we've forgotten Martin
Luther King's content of our character rather
than the color of our skin. So we've got a whole
generation that grew up in an affluent, leisured
America, a multiracial America. But we're somehow looking
at the white middle class of the interior of the
country, and we're creating all these terms for them-- Joe Biden's chumps,
dregs, Obama's clingers. And I guess it's just a
mechanism, as we said earlier, that you don't want to be around
people of a different class. Class is something
that's mobile and fluid. You and I are in the upper
middle, middle class. Tomorrow, we screw up. Our children don't make it. They can be poor. And so that was a
dilemma for Marx when he looked at
states or nations that had a fluid upward mobility. Marxism never worked here. But once you calibrate race
into the equation, you say, I postulate that everybody
who is non-white-- we're going to get rid
of the old Black/white binary we were working on, the
legacy of Jim Crow or slavery-- but now we're going
to create a new word. And this is mostly Barack Obama. It's called diversity. And guess what? You can be a Punjabi immigrant
and farm 10,000 acres, but you are not white. You're diverse. You can be an
Argentine aristocrat. And you can be blue-eyed
and blond-haired. But if you have a
Spanish-sounding name and trill your name
and your name is Tony and you call yourself
Antonio, then you are diverse. And that can lead to
careerist advantages. And it's a new binary, but it's
completely divorced from class. The idea of the
Civil Rights movement where African-Americans
been discriminated so long and so
perniciously that it affected their
economic opportunity. That was what the EOC was, the
Office of Economic Opportunity. It's not that anymore. LeBron is a victim. Barack Obama is a victim. Anybody's a victim
if they can claim that they have some
meritorious, diverse background. This is why it was
very ironic for me, as I taught mostly minority
students my whole teaching life at California State, Fresno. And my message was Greek, Latin,
French, German literature, history, archaeology, art, and
your identity is irrelevant. And we're just going to
make you write and speak English better than people
on the East Coast and prep schools. That's what I would tell--
and I think we succeeded. We sent about 50 kids
to the Ivy League and professional schools,
classics or law, medicine. But some of the students that
I followed, it's very funny, they have retribalized. In other words, somebody I had,
if his name was Joe, he's José. If his name was
Lopez, it's now López. And they are, even though
they don't speak Spanish, they're retribalizing
because they feel that the woke movement,
if they don't, they will be deemed inauthentic
and suffer career-wise, or if they do, they will
be rewarded commensurately. And that's really
dangerous, historically. That's what Hitler
did with the idea that, even if you speak German
and even if you live in Germany and even if you
follow German law, you're not really fully
German because we're going to identify
you by the blood and soil of pseudo-Aryanism. And it was one tribe
identifying in a way that transcended shared nationhood. And we're starting
to see that now. It's really scary. What is the positive-- I try not to be a
negative person, it's very easy to be
a negative person. What's the positive takeaway? If you look at
this country, what are some of the positive
aspects you can see? When I was 19, I
lived in Greece. And I lived there
two and a half years and went all over
the Middle East. I have been to every country in
the Middle East, except Iran. And I look at the world-- South America, Asia. And here we're sitting
in this Student Union. It's immaculate. Our coffee is not polluted. There's nobody listening. There's no device
that I know of. There's a freedom of expression. And we take that for
granted, but it's very rare. And that's one thing. And then when you try to look
at that personal experience that we all share, that people
are not fighting or blowing up things, or they're not dragging
women off and putting them in a burqa, why is that? Why are we prosperous? Why are we free? Well, we have this
constitutional system of 232 years that
solved the problem how to divide judicial, executive,
and legislative power and checks and balances and
term limits for the president. And so the greatest threat
to any constitutional system is the absorption of power. We've stopped that. And we have a free market. And we have too much
government, too much taxes, we've talked about. But we still are the
freest place in the world. And we're the only multiracial
democracy that's ever worked. Everybody says, well, the
United States is racist. Nobody ever tries it. Brazil is the only one I know. It doesn't work very well. India can't do it. They've got all of these
caste systems and hatreds. Most countries are uniracial. If you and I decide tomorrow,
I want to be Japanese, let's go to Japan, they'll
never fully accept us. Because we don't look Japanese. Ditto China. Ditto Mexico. Ditto Tanzania. But this country has
redefined America not in the image of the
original settlers from Europe but as an idea. That's a very rare
and powerful doctrine. If we get to the specifics,
as a classical historian or military historian,
I always say to myself, what makes a society powerful? How do they project
power beyond-- and I don't mean just military--
cultural or political or social. There's only about six things. One is fuel-- transportation. In the horse age, do
they have big plains where horses can graze,
or they have wagons, or do they have
early steam engines? In our case, we're the largest
producer of gas and oil in the world. I know that Joe Biden's
cut 3 million barrels off, but we still are. If you look at food, in terms
of actual dollar amount, we're the greatest producer
of food in the world. And we're by far
the most productive. China is going to have
trouble feeding itself, not the United States. The United States will never
have problems feeding itself. If you look at education,
if you look at, say, the Times Educational Supplement
or surveys that come out of Japan-- not Americans--
and they look at the top 20 or the top 30 universities--
and they don't do it in terms of their English department
or their gender studies, these studies are calibrated
on their medical schools, their law schools,
their business schools, their engineering, especially,
math, computer, science-- the United States usually
rates about 17 out of 20 or 28 out of 30. And it's just predictable
when you read them. Caltech, MIT, Stanford,
Harvard, Yale, and then these big universities-- Michigan or University
of Texas or UCLA. And that's pretty much all of
the universities in the world. So even for all of our criticism
of education, education we're there. So you got food. You got fuel. If you look at military, I'm a
big critic of the $800 billion. It's bloated. I think our generals and
admirals have become woke. But our military is the
most powerful military in the history of civilization. And you can calibrate
that by any-- quality and number of
planes or aircraft carrier task forces or
submarine lethality. So it's just remarkable. And so when you look at
all-- and as I said earlier, we have the largest
economy in the world. And when you
calibrate that economy to the number of people
actually living in the country, it's pretty amazing. It's two or three
times more productive than China per person
in goods and services. So we have all the ingredients. And history says
to us our problem is not we're not going to
eat, we're not going to defend ourselves, we can't educate. We do it so well that we
don't even think of it. We're on autopilot. And we don't replenish it. I think all we have to do is,
like we did during the Great Depression or on the
eve of World War II, get serious and
say, we're coasting. We're on the fumes. We've got to
recalibrate ourselves to what citizenship is. And we'll be fine. And we're going through
a cultural revolution right now, not like
Mao's but something that could be dangerous. And yet it's really
because all of us are so affluent and
leisured and blessed. And it's not out of
dearth or poverty. We should remember that
a lot of civilizations decline, or they vanish,
not from barbarians over the horizon or
they starve to death but because people
no longer believe they're better than
the alternative, or they believe you have
to be perfect to be good. And Americans just gotta
get back to the basic idea-- we never made claims
that we're perfect, but we're better
than the alternative. And that's good enough. So I really like
that a lot, actually. I like that idea. So what are-- so you're
talking to a student, 20-something years old-- what are practical, if you were
to lay out Dr. Hanson's game plan for somebody, what
are practical steps that every day-- For a 20-year-old? Well, 21-year-old. But practical steps every person
can take to make a difference. I think the problem we
have with 20-year-olds is they have been sold
a bill of goods that they have to be cosmically
moral or cosmically politically correct or cosmically woke. And they neglect things
that are the ingredients of a successful and
productive citizenship. So every 20-year-old
should say to themselves, am I self-sufficient? Am I polite to people? Do I follow the
rules of civility? Am I fair to people? Do I judge people on the
content of their character? And then they have to say,
am I autonomous, as much as a 20-year-old can be? I do not want to be
dependent on people. I want to be productive. I want to be the person
people come to for advice. I do not want to go to other
people for subsistence. That was an idea that
Jefferson and what Tocqueville saw, that what made
America work, where they're the yeoman farmer. And they combined their
mind with their body. And they were not
a dependent class. And Tocqueville even talks
about prolonged adolescence. You don't want to live in
your parents' basement. At some point, you've got to
say, I'm going to be a citizen. And that citizen requires
that most-- not all, we're not demanding everybody--
but most citizens are going to marry, they're
going to have children, they're going to
buy a home, they're going to be self-sufficient
and, at a very early age, a person say that's
my trajectory. And it's kind of an
attitude of do no harm. But if you do the opposite,
if your own life is a mess and you're not able to
take care of yourself but you're judging people
all the way across the world, or you're living in Palo
Alto and you're saying, I can't stand those people in
Mississippi that you've never seen, then you're
cosmically woke, but you're personally
a liability. And so that, I think, is the
biggest problem that I have when I see young people. Because I'm a fellow
at Stanford University. I don't teach anymore
there, but I do interact with a lot of students. And they have this
misguided notion that if they have
a high test score or they lived in
the right zip code or they drive the
right car then that gives them sort of an exemption
from concrete reality. And they don't have any balance. So if you say to
an Ivy League kid, who is the epitome-- what would
you do if the lights went out? Do you know how to
change a circuit breaker? Do you know how
to use a chainsaw? These are all skills that the
average American excelled at. When George Patton raced
through Europe from August 1 to September 5, let's say,
of 1944 in the Third Army, people were curious,
how did he do it-- the occupied French
that were being liberated, the British,
even other Americans. He said, it's very simple. American kids grow
up fixing things. When our Shermans break down,
we don't send the transmission back to the factory. It's not fine-tuned by
some German technician. We get the kids that
worked on their model As. They love taking things apart. That Sherman is fixed. They're crawling over it,
and they're go, go, go. And then when we
hit the hedgerows, they want to make Rhinos. They adapt. So what he was
basically saying is that that generation that
came out of the Depression was very versatile, and
they were very imaginative. And they were very mechanical. And we've lost that. I think we've got to go
back to the idea there's going to be a lot of
people in this country who don't need to go to college. They can get a liberal
arts education on YouTube. They can get it on the internet. But they can be well compensated
with vocational skills. There's nothing more
impressive to me than a master cement person
or electrician or a plumber. And I try to do my own plumbing. But when I get outfoxed
by ancient pipes and I call a guy in, it's
like watching a maestro at an orchestra. And he's rewarded
far better than most of the professors I know. And what is wrong
with what he's doing? So I know that in the
'30s and '20s and '40s, we got the idea of
upward mobility BA, but I think in the new
postmodern 21st century, it's going to be, let's forget
the titles and the alphabet soup that follows your name and
look at what you can actually do. And I think that's exciting. Is that it? Yes, sir. I think so. Hey, that was good, Nick. Thank you. Thank you. It was nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
