Victor Davis Hanson | Trump, China and Black Lives Matter

[Music] professor hansen is the martin and illy anderson senior fellow in classics and military history at the hoover institution at stanford in california he's one of america's most published and respected public intellectuals he's written dozens of books on warfare and classical history and his latest books are a history of world war ii and also an account of donald trump's coming to power victor thank you very much for joining us from rural california yeah all week from cold to northwest new south wales thank you can i ask to open the batting so to speak in world history terms are we now at some sort of major tipping point going through a traditional period when an old order is being establi replaced by a new one in your view well the old order i think has been replaced and it's analogous to the post-war decolonization of the british empire and the the emergence of a new engaged america but this is i think a little bit more dangerous because we were embracing globalization and i think people very naively thought that everybody was on board with the western paradigm of consumer capitalism transparency individual rights constitutional government respect for minority opinion tolerance and diversity of religions and that's and that did not prove true and one of the catalysts that was this coveted um contagion because we learned very quickly that china was neither transparent or sincere and many of the world international organizations have been warped by chinese influence and then we learned that getting from san francisco to shanghai and 16 hours which we had praised for 20 years was maybe not such a good thing because the virus was leaving wuhan on direct flights of san francisco and los angeles at the time when the chinese government was forbidding flights from muhammad domestic destination so the virus reminded us that it's very hard to globalize along this the assumptions and presumptions that we thought would happen under globalization some of us were very skeptical but we were drowned out and i think now i think we don't know what's ahead of us and so we're in a circling pattern a period of uncertainty but i don't think there's many advocates of unchecked globalization in the united states at least i'm sure that's true everywhere some of the work that the henry jackson society in britain has done on the dependence of the five eyes nations which of course are britain america new zealand canada and australia and their dependency upon chinese manufacturers and materials and what have you for their supply chains is really deeply concerning it's going to be very very difficult to unwind that dependency without shooting ourselves in the foot it seems to me even in the case of australia where australian farmers you're a farmer i'm a farmer australia exports a higher percentage of its food production than any other country in the world because we have such a small domestic population we would appear to be as self-sufficient as any nation in the world in terms of food production and yet we're not we're dependent on certain key chemicals and so forth now from china same to even to a greater degree there's the same apprehension we keep talking about returning industries to the united states especially protective equipment medical supplies pharmaceuticals strategic materials military applied technologies but what we're learning is that our education system has been in decline and the so-called stem graduates or the people necessary to ensure us not the not the original research but the next level of operational research we don't have enough graduates and we're not competitive yet unless we you know in re-engineer our universities and it's going to be and a lot of our corporate magnates feel that they want to move back but they're going to lose capital they're going to lose bank accounts and it's making it very hard to do so and one of the problems we're having in the western world is with the rise of progressive government and its emphasis on race class gender issues the chinese are much more brilliant in terms of propaganda than we are so by any measure of classical liberality the chinese are very reactionary they have a million as you know people the wagers and concentration camps if i could use that term reeducation count they've silenced democracy extinguished it in hong kong they've destroyed indigenous culture and tibet in terms of mercantilism they're an international trade outlaw they bullied their neighbors and i think we're going to learn that either out of black city or worse are responsible for a half million deaths from covet and yet and yet when this crisis arose when we had a travel ban they were very effective in suggesting that we were racist this is a very undiverse society saying that we are a racist and every time that we try to make a concerted effort to push back they use that left wing you're racist you're insensitive it's the yellow peril again and they've really infiltrated the united states entertainment industry hollywood and even the nba the nba is very vocal in their criticism of supposed social activism and things in the united states and yet when china crushed hong kong they pretty much silenced all of their players in fears they would endanger that six billion dollar and growing nba market in china so they're a very insidious rival and i don't think yet we have any imagination of their potential and their capability in terms of propaganda and messaging that's a very chilling perspective to come to the question of education two comments firstly in relation to the stem subjects as an australian looking america we still see this remarkable capacity for innovation uh you know you still dominate the patent markets uh uh applications and what have you the impression you have is that in those stem subjects america's still very strong you're saying that though that there's been a shortage of graduates in that area if you haven't got the people you need to keep the technology edge i think what i was trying to say is that when we look at the quality of engineers that are being trained at caltech stanford mit they're the best in the world but the next tier of people who translate abstraction into operational efficacy we have about 70 percent of foreign students are necessary or because we just we've had a radical readjustment the last 50 years in higher education and we're not a lot of our most talented people unfortunately have been going into wall street finance and law and to a lesser degree in the humanities and we haven't we haven't for the ambitious programs we have and for the sophisticated innovation that we develop we're not utilizing it in a way that's self-interested because we're so dependent so when we say we want to become autonomous from china a lot of our more informed scholars i know if i write something like that in an op-ed i get a call from a very distinguished person off the record and says victor we don't have or we only have 20 30 of the phds in electrical engineering or you know nano technology that we need and we're very dependent on foreign students and we've got to be very careful that we this divorce is done in such a way that we're not punished in the short term so it's something that i think we're all aware of and um it's kind of frightening how china does not is not competitive with the western world and absol in pure research but it is more than competitive in translating that pure research into viable products and innovative designs consumer product and part of it is it's not just that they're renegades and they don't follow patent and copyright law but they have the fusion of the government the private sector to the degree that we can call it a private sector and then the whole machinery of government and um they understand american politics i think much better than americans do sometimes and that's that's very frightening so uh and the other side the second question on education seems to me is the non-stop uh stem areas the humanities if you like it seems to me that right across the west for 50 60 years at least now there's been this relentless attack on the institutions uh of our own freedom this undermining and reinterpretation of our history that has left people actually in a state of self-loathing of western culture and part of that has been an incredible naivety i would put it to you about what communist communism has actually visited on the world whenever it's been uh trialed yes that's a very good point you know in the ancient world uh people from thucydides to plato to aristotle and in the roman world some of the nihilists like swatonius or petronius and even in this and then our critics in the german world nietzsche and hegel and whatnot they spotted these two characteristics of western consensual government market capitalism that it creates so much wealth and it's so efficient in providing material bounty for its citizens and yet it also protects individual expression that if we're not careful and we don't have the breaks so to speak or the bridles of family religion tradition community then we can be you know we can we can become decadent and we give into excess and part of the problem in the crisis of the post-war western world is in the english-speaking world in particular but also in europe we were very affluent we were very leisured and we pushed the boundaries of of freedom without any uh historical reminders that we were destroying the community the religion the traditions that said yes that's free and you're you're legally free to do that but i wouldn't say that or i wouldn't do that because it's injurious to the body politic and so that was something that it's plagued western civilization for a long time since its beginning that that irony and then we in the west with a decolonization movement and the united states is radical change in immigration we brought in people throughout europe and the former british commonwealth and in your country and in our country that we felt uh we were going because we're the only civilization the western paradigm is the only civilization that says we're about ideas we're not about blood and soil anybody can come to australia and if they embrace australian ism and western tradition there's there's australian if even if they're from china or from africa as an australian we have the same concept unfortunately that is a very fragile concept and it depends on the host having confidence in its own values and saying you came here you voted with your feet it's our duty to instruct you to assimilate you to integrate you and to embrace our culture doesn't mean that we say in the west oh we don't want your food we don't want your music we don't want your fashion we don't want your family we say that can all enrich our core values but we're not going to change constitutional government free speech and the whole the whole paradigm and unfortunately with people coming so rapidly in such numbers to enjoy the bounty of the western paradigm and then we have this cynical elite that we just talked about we didn't prepare people to acculturate and then we it was worse than that we said that equality not freedom is our only value and it's a quality of results so if you're not equal when you get to australia let's say from the philippines or china or south america or you're not equal when you come up from oaxaca mexico to california then we're culpable because we did something wrong because you're you have less money and the old paradigm was it would take this was a very ambitious project it might take two or three generations and we were we weren't going to condemn the host because they didn't provide instant parody but it's we're in revolutionary times now because we're not assimilating integrating our immigrants and our elite is completely intellectually and morally suspect yeah i i sympathize entirely with your views i find them very very concerning can i pose to you that just perhaps china's handling of covert 19 and the extraordinary i know i agree with you when you say that they are they probably understand our democratic systems better than us goodness only knows how and where they've been in you know peddling influence and we've been very conscious of that now in australia nonetheless i would say the way they've handled covert 19 and the belly coast reaction that we've had from them on issues such as a proper inquiry into covert 19. do you think that may yet serve as a as a massive wake-up call and if so is it in time can we turn this around that's a very good question and it's something that i read deeply about and try to think and talk to people where i work and i i would say it's ambiguous i think you're absolutely right that trump is no longer in the united states a voice in the wilderness about warning about china everybody is now trying to outdo each other in concern and worry about china and uh we we've kind of broken through the chinese taboo we now can say what you're doing with the wakers is wrong and what you're doing to hong kong is wrong whereas before corporate and university interest in a very strange symbiosis silence i know as a pop an op-ed columnist when i wrote critically of china i would get a call from the consul in san francisco with the prop and so and that's good i agree with you but i think we're in a second very critical phase now because i think if i should be so bold to imagine the chinese response it was something like this oh my gosh this virus has ruined our brand it's united our enemies it's woken up the western world to what we were planning to do and now we've got indigenous people within our system that are angry we've got japan south korea australia philippines our neighbors we've got the united and that's good but i think now they're becoming a little bit more machiavellian and i from what i'm reading about china it's more if i could put words into their mouth is yeah we screwed up and the virus went out and maybe our narrative that came from wet market it wasn't quite right and it came actually from the wuhan lab and maybe or maybe not it was an engineered not for a weapon maybe but maybe for a vaccination but we don't really care so what we screwed up now what are you going to do about it in fact what are you going to do about because we cannot it can happen again and if a virus can shut down the entire western world and with a quarantine that's never happened under any other plague ruin the economy caused the biggest power in the history of civilization to fall on its knees and internal divisiveness the united states that's something we should consider because it achieved far more goals even though it was nihilistic or accidental than anything we had done in the past with our propaganda and now we've got a deterrent proposition that anytime the united states or the west tends to galvanize against us we can have some dissident general on spec say you know what there might be a virus loose in a province of china so i think it's pretty scary because i think now after their their own initial uh apologies if i could say it wasn't much of apology but their defensiveness has now been transmogrified into a new assertiveness and they're starting to realize that they're not going to be apologetic at all and they're going to be more on demand because they feel they've found a weakness in the entire social cultural and political matrix of the west that they had no idea about and this virus is really explosive i think how would you um uh in that context what you say is very chilling uh respond to those who would say well china still needs the west uh they can't produce semiconductors they can't prosper without trade i suppose all you know it still depends on us having the willpower in the west to pull ourselves together doesn't it and that's what's perhaps the biggest question of all can we reinstitute belief in ourselves and that's where the black lives matter's protests come into it the deep self-loathing of our culture seems to me to be almost impossible to turn around now it's very difficult because just as just this in the last 48 hours in the united states we've had a moderate writer for the new york times resigned and suggests that the climate there was so anti-semitic and divisive and sensorous that she couldn't even write anymore we've had a number of prominent black entertainers voice uh uh nick cannon who's a entertainment host voiced some anti-semitic racist things that i i i mean that you can't even imagine but but then he basically said i'm african-american i can do what i want i'm not going to apologize so there's a new assertiveness there and i think what people are saying in the united states we've we've now transcended from we want equality and we want proportional representation and if we don't have proportional representation we call it disparate impact there has to be an implicit bias somewhere or we would have the same number we being people of color would have the same number of brain surgeons at stanford as as others but we've gone beyond that now and what i think people make a mistake they think that black lives matter is a sophisticated marxist organization they're not interested in class they believe that oprah or lebron james is just as much a victim as somebody in the inner city it's a racial and it's a racial movement and its ambitions transcend black nationalism of the 1960s it's saying that 30 percent of the united states is going to go by the one drop role of the old confederacy we're not white and therefore we're superior and we we don't share in this legacy of racism slavery oppression that people who are white it's absurd somebody could come from any other country and we don't know what their pigmentation is we don't know what their dna is we don't care but i think we have to be very careful because this is not a liberal movement this is not a marxist movement drawing on the traditions of the even the soviet union this is a weird racial angry movement and it's deep down it's it has an element of racist racism in it that's getting more and more pronounced and you can see the reaction of the progressive white liberal class in the united states they feel that the crocodile is going to eat them last but it's going to eat them and they're trying to appease it they just fired the head of the san francisco museum of modern art a very distinguished art historian for the crime of saying i'm not going to forbid white artists from being displayed their work because i don't believe in reverse discrimination they fired him and when you take teddy roosevelt statue down from the museum of natural history the pressure is there and what it requires is all of us here in the united states and indeed the western world because something analogous is happening everywhere especially in the english-speaking world is we have to say no we're not ashamed of our traditions you don't have to be perfect you don't have to be perfect to be good we don't measure somebody by their bad characteristics alone we we measure them up with a great good they did and millions of people owned slaves but millions of them were not like thomas jefferson that were aware of the complexities and the immoral issues involved but we're not getting enough of those voices because right now they feel that there's a nexus between corporations with money that depend on emerging markets and the universities and they've just in the case of china so in the case of black lives matter and this cultural revolution they have been welded together this is a it's a very ugly phase indeed it seems to me that one of the great problems you've got uh is indeed as you say it is actually in itself the re-emergence of racism it's a racism that says whites are morally inferior and culpable for ills all over the place and yet there must be many many middle african americans who are themselves deeply disturbed by this i mean there are many many you know wonderful gracious and frankly middle class african americans now for whom america has not been such a terrible place as i understand and when martin luther king was active or only around 30 of african americans were middle class on middle class incomes it is now close to 60 percent no one denies that there are problems because all human beings are subject occasionally to being racist there's no doubt about that it flows every which way i was a member of parliament for many years i saw racism directed against whites but i saw racism directed against minority groups by other minority groups it's it's an ugly aspect of human nature that we ought to seek to correct but you don't correct it with hatred and you don't correct it surely with denying in this case some actual facts that in many ways there must be many african-americans for whom america has been a land of hope despite what has happened to their might have happened to their forebears i i think there has some of the most eloquent critics of the black lives movement and this new racism have been shelby steele and tom soul colleagues of mine at the hoover institution as well as senator scott and uh john mcquarter we have and then the middle class as well and i think what's happening though is for a lot of the african-american middle class they don't know which way this is going to end up they don't know whether black lives will ultimately be successful and and push this agenda down america's throw and then they'll be punished and so they're like in some ways the white middle class they're they have their finger in the proverbial error just as the mob during the reign of terror in 1793 and they don't know whether robespierre is going to guillotine all of them or he's going to get guillotined himself so there's a waiting period but they are privately i think most african-american and i live in an area that's about 90 percent mexican-american i can tell you that the vast majority of mexican-american people are appalled by this and so the left says that there's a monolithic white and non-white population and they say that because by the 1960s and 70s their agendas of larger larger government less less individual freedom more and more spending more and more therapeutic was not working and there was the reagan revolution and so they they again saw that they needed new demography and new messaging to re-constitute the demography of the united states both through illegal immigration and through new uh anti-martin luther king messaging not integration not intermarriage not assimilation but separatism and we as the white liberal patriarchs will mentor you into our political movement and i think a lot of people don't like that and they're they're starting to rebel the problem is that in the republican party the official uh political uh organization in this country that supposedly espouses and protects conservative traditional thought they were not sensitive to these issues so they traditionally john mccain mitt romney supposedly are most progressive they only got eight to ten percent of the african-american vote if any major candidate were to get 15 of the african-american vote that would mean that the entire progressive project blows up under our electoral system that means that a democrat could not get enough votes in milwaukee philadelphia pittsburgh detroit and columbus ohio to balance the conservative surge in the rural parts and would lose those states donald trump achieved the inexplicable when he broke that blue wall because he got about 10 percent of the black vote and he got a huge i guess we would call it reagan democrat ross perot populist nationals vote but if there was a poll yesterday that said he had 15 of the black vote and that would suggest that defunding the police and dismantling the police the wages of that insane policy fall most heavily as we're seeing from these epidemic of shootings in places like chicago and new york on the inner city and once people realize that what they say to their leaders and their community organizers and what they do in the ballot box could be a different thing and if you were to get 15 as this poll suggested that would be a watershed event but a lot of what we're talking about and at least as far as this country and maybe indeed the world the subtext is the 220 election so how you interpret the contagion how what your views are on the quarantine what your views are on the violence it's all predicated on to what degree does that impair the re-election possibilities of dom from i know that's a reduction statement but i can tell you that talking to people on both sides that's where we are now and a lot this next hundred days are going to be something that we've never seen before yeah i can quite believe that and i'd love to come to that in a moment can i ask you a couple of questions first uh presumably it's not just intellectual elites and you know newspaper editors and so forth who are at the forefront of backing this movement in many ways there must be serious money and no doubt some of that comes from seriously wealthy white elites does it it does that's one of the strangest things i think that's happened throughout the western world it's i know i followed australia and europe and it seems similar to the united states that much of the great money that was made in finance and high technology in our country silicon valley is left-wing and progressive and when you look at our forbes list of 500 billionaires now not millionaires but billionaires almost all of them are progressive so the great moneyed institutions in the united states about microsoft the bill gates fortune or the warren buffett portion or the zukerberg facebook or the google fortune or the apple fortune or the mike bloomberg media fortune whatever fortune we look at all of these people feel that they have done so well in the united states that their theories of utopia can now be imposed quite on democratically on less woke people and they feel that they're never going to be subject to the ramifications of their own ideology so if they want in california open borders then they have walls around their own home if they want to stop irrigation transfers not stopping drinking water transfers to the bay area if they want very high power rates they can afford it they live in a pretty temperate climate on the bay area in the bay area but not others out in the desert or where i am and so that's been a very dangerous thing in the west that in the old days the the so-called robber barons or the great 19th century magnets that built my country in your country there was always a sense that the system allowed them to do that that they were very gracious and they had some gratitude that freedom and a constitutional system and the protection of property and a tax code allowed them to be prosperous and thereby to lift everybody up with them and then private philanthropy was something that religion and community and tradition urged them to give back but i think what's happened now that idea is completely gone and this new progressive billionaire class feels that whether it's climate change or whether it's racial relations or whether it's high density mass transit congested living that they have the answers and they're going to impose them on others we got a glimpse of that unfortunately from barack obama because in a series of statements that were quite astounding he laid out a philosophy incomplete though it was he said you know it's time to share the wealth he pointed that a person said now is not the time to profit at some point you've got to know when you've made enough money and don't need any more and you didn't build that most notoriously you didn't build that business the government did and that ideology really sent investors into the shadows and in part i think psychologically explain our sort of static inert economy until 2017 but it also reflected this new idea of these of these different billionaires they're a very different group than what i remember the wealthy being uh as a young person and i see them very closely at stanford university if i write a column that's critical of them i will get a call from one of them and if i ever meet one of them and i do on occasion what do you do with a guy with cutoffs and flip-flops and a t-shirt and he's worth five billion dollars yeah it's an insidious it's it's an it's a very bizarre social matrix and i'm very worried about those guys so you're a you know a great student and writer of uh classics uh and and of history let's turn then to what perhaps uh what we might learn from history uh the earlier democracies failed they ate themselves out from within greece rome um what can we learn uh from from uh that history you know democracy is not something that has a guaranteed survival we thought it might have back when the berlin will wall uh you know the end of history and all the rest of it but history real history shows us it's it's not secure it needs to be nurtured are we in risk at risk in fact are there those who have given up on democracy or is it just that we need a wake-up call well it requires a great deal of investment to be an athenian citizen or citizen of ancient thieves or a member of the roman republic a great deal of uh time and commitment and traditionally these democracies were associated with a viable middle class and there's a chauvinism in greek and roman literature about the 10 acre farmer or the small business person and the idea is that they were the complete citizen they used their head they used their muscles they were responsible for their own defeat and failure they were autonomous and what they warned about is when you have great concentrations of money and a few hands the aristocracy was not merocratic but based on birth or you had a bread and circuses one million people with no means of support by the second century in rome then you were not you were not democratic it wasn't going to work you had too many people that wanted subsidies from the government and they thought that the rich were going to pay and the rich's their biggest occupation it seems like from forensic speeches of the ancient world is how to hide their wealth and they were not and how to indulge themselves as we see in a lot of roman imperial literature so what i'm worried about is that here in our country we have middle class kids with 1.7 trillion dollars in aggregate student debt yeah except no moral hazard for issuing these loans as they jack up in tuition above the rate of inflation until 2017 we hadn't had a rise in middle class wages in about 12 years and we had a static we had unemployment about six to seven percent for a number of years and so if you don't have a viable middle class then you're not going to have the core constituency for consensual government and that what it turns into is the lower classes wanting subsidies from the government and the wealthy using their power and influence to get exemptions and that's what's happened i'm speaking in a state that was once a model for the united states california in the 1970s on terms of freeways housing reservoirs recreation power power plants it was by far the best state in the country and we've lost about 10 million middle-class people have fled and they have been replaced by enormous amounts of wealth in silicon valley and then enormous amounts of poverty we have the highest poverty rate in the united states 21 percent one-third of all welfare recipients live in california we have a terrible homeless so that california is a canary in the mind what can happen the other thing that comes to mind you touched on it a moment ago it was the french revolution which seemed to me to be the you know an earlier example of just how ugly identity politics can ultimately be think of four great revolutions uh over recent centuries the french the american the russian and the maoist revolution only one produced freedom what can we learn it seems to me that america's increasingly looking like i think you might have made this comment yourself it certainly looks to me increasingly like like france before the revolution which of course turned into a complete disaster unlike the american revolution this incredible emphasis on there's the detachment of virtue from um from the classic understandings of virtue if you like and the right and wrong and what have you and it's realignment with people and causes so you get into a situation where the world really is a battle between uh good people and evil people if you just get rid of the evil people everything will be all right it always seems to me to be a very dangerous mistake that conservatives don't make they're the one group who understand human nature never changes we're all a mixture of the good and noble and the poor scum tendencies to want to do the wrong thing but is america able to learn something from understanding its own origins and its own revolution versus the french model or are they determined are we reaching a point where we're going to replicate the terrible mistakes that that through france into a mess that's the subtext of all of the discussions that we have every day in this country whether they're on television or debates on talk radio or in the op-ed columns or in local and regional and state elections that it's basically two paradigms the french revolution the maoist the bolsheviks versus the american revolution and the code words throughout history are always the same when you start to hear equality rather than freedom and liberty and you hear internationalism the bolsheviks were always talking about an international bolshevik president those mao's asian model pan-arabism baptism was another one and the french said they were going to sweep all of europe into a french revolutionary commune and whereas the united states was always that we have a particular problem in the united states and we're going to solve that and within our borders we're going to not we're going to not presume that we can go out and slay dragons that was sort of the idea of america and we're going to if we give people freedom and liberty then we have confidence in human nature that we have non-governmental uh agencies operations traditions that will inculcate virtue and the person who makes money rather than take it from him or or define how much he can make with deleterious consequences on the economy when you do that is that we can encourage him and uh persuade him to give back and that was a pretty good model american universities were all product of that and we have the largest private philanthropy philanthropy in the world europe doesn't have anything comparable to harvard yale princeton uh stanford caltech duke of these private endowed universities but when you get into this revolutionary year one mode where you're going to be holistic and systematic and we're all going to wear mouth suits and i'm not i'm not exaggerating that's what we are in the united states these people want to tear down and replace all of our statuary they want to replace the very date when the united states was founded from 1776 to 1619 and that way it's almost uncanny how close it is to the year zero uh movement in the french revolution and they had a cult of the supreme being black lives matter is almost a deity now and i i'm again i'm not exaggerating we had the chief ceo of chick-fil-a who said that it was time for everybody to take a knee and wash the feet of african-americans and then he got down on his knees and he shined the sneakers of an african american raptor and we have uh in the uh colonnade of the u.s capitol nancy pelosi puts on a kinte cloth supposedly symbolizing you know the aristocracy of africa and the pre-colonial past then taking a knee and it's almost a religious experience and it is it is um it's very scary and this will be a test of the american traditions and resiliency and the constitutional forethought of our founders because we've we've had a civil war before and anytime when these ideological differences polarize or crystallize around geography it gets very dangerous we saw that in 1861 but what were happening now in the united states and i think it's maybe somewhat similar to you in australia but we have two cultures that were beneficiaries of globalism from boston to washington and from seattle to san diego and then maybe a little blue spot around the great lakes or atlanta but that culture is antithetical to the other culture yep i can tell you at stanford all my colleagues have never been to bakersfield or fresno but they've been to shanghai and tokyo and when i go to the east coast they've all been to london paris but they've never been to youngstown ohio yeah and they don't care we have two different cultures and they're they're very angry at each other and one was a loser of globalization and one was a winner and uh a lot of what we're talking about i i think was nobody thought donald trump was going to win it was supposed to be a 16-year regnum of obama and hillary and then when he won they thought he really didn't think he would win he really wouldn't go through with these policies of energy development questioning optional wars in the middle east getting tough with china bringing industry back a populist naturalist middle class and it wasn't just that they were opposed to it the democratic party was very scared this was the first time a republican elite had actually talked about jobs and had a following among lower middle class people that might even as it seemed to transcend race if we had this conversation in january of this year we would probably be talking about a sure trump win and how he was able to create a class coalition that transcended race it was and i think there's no surprise that the reaction to this contagion and the lockdown have been have been aimed at that at stopping that effort or cancelling it let's uh explore that in a moment but before we do can i ask a question as i look back at and i don't pretend for a moment to have read much of the federalist papers for example nonetheless when you look at the incredible intellectual depth of the and the extent of the thinking and the writing that took place amongst america's founding fathers they were profoundly influenced by what might be called a a christian world view of individuals uh the the sultanates an idea the dividing line between good and evil is not in fact between man and woman or black and white captor and captive it lies somewhere across every human heart so the great experiment was to maximize freedom but underpinned by deep awareness of that excess power excess influence excess money would go to people's heads because we're fallible pride would undermine everything that's all washed out of the system now hasn't it as you said it's almost the david hart a good heart idea from brexit with the somewheres and the anywheres those who still have some attachment to traditional values worldview their own community uh to their uh their faith versus those who have become international citizens and have frankly uh become quite contemptuous of people who hold traditional values and that seems to me to be the most massive shift in america and yet you still have the impression you've alluded to it that in middle america in a geographical sense there there may still be some residual strength some understanding some for one of a better word some good old-fashioned horse sense and realism i think that's a very good point the totality of the federalist papers when you look at what especially hamilton was writing about was and jefferson in his own way there was a great distrust of cities jefferson said when we all are piled up in cities we're going to lose this country and when we look at writings like john deere crevice letters from american farmers or even later by what tocqueville saw toolville saw democracy in america is founded on the agrarian and the person who was not uh subject to popular fad and camp independent guy on his farm and that was that was sort of the essence of the american uh experiment and that tran that you know that transcended into the industrial revolution when we had auto workers and small tracked homes and independent families and these suburbs all throughout the middle west and they saw that and the institutionally this country has some very weird quirks i don't think you have them or europe housing the electoral college was designed so we wouldn't have a national referendum where people would just visit the bay area or la or in the past just the cities and we had we have two senators in every state but wyoming only has 400 000 450 000 people one senator is is worth 250 220 here in california my vote i have 20 million percent of it and that was by intent to balance the popular demagoguery or the the danger of that and we could go on and on but within our constitution there is a characteristic balance and check balance and check between the three branches of government and within the states a federal system that is not radically democratic they they opted for the roman republic and not the athenian democratic model which they were terrified about and so what's scary now is that when you distill the black lives antifa progressive agenda and you look at what the elites are saying at the universities they have an agenda and it's anti-founder in other words they want to seriously within four years repeal the electoral college they want to make senators popularly elected they want to expand the number in the house of representative they want to increase the supreme court from 9 to 12 or 16. and the locus classicus of all of that is we've got to give more people direct power without constitutional checks and balances and they want people i guess i'll just finish here by saying they don't see anything unique about a citizen a citizen to them as a resident a person comes across the border illegally he's a resident he pays his payroll taxes he's just as american and he should vote he should have all the constitutional protections of a citizen and that's what they're encouraging it's it's i've used that word too much but it's insidious it's every aspect this revolution is 360 degrees 24 7 it's it's a little it never sleeps so victor then to come to the next few months as you've said the next hundred days will be uh of breathtaking uh uh significance uh for for america and for the world quite frankly um i think you wrote that uh it was almost uh the surprise was not that trump won it was that it took so long for something like that to happen i suppose another way of putting that is to say trump's not the problem trump was the re the product of the problem uh and uh you know that i think you also described him uniquely as perhaps chemotherapy uh you know the patient was in such a bad way we had to take on something very tough and unusual that we knew might be unpleasant how do you see it now as as you sit there i see it's saying pretty much the same way i've used the tragic hero from soviet league and tragedy analogy or the great western of john wayne and the searchers or shane or high noon that he's a person without military or political experience he's uncouth he can be very crude and his he came in with a certain set of skills or no investment in the bipartisan establishment and therefore no worry about what they thought of him and he wanted to get an agenda and yet he's now learning that even before these cri these three crises that the more he was succeeding the more people hated him and the people i talked to around him and i've talked to him too and it seems that he i think he has to be aware that when this is all over people are not going to like him and they're never going to like him and he's never going he's going to be a gunfire that people say you used a gun to clean up the town now will you leave and that's the dilemma of where he is but he can do some he can do a lot of good still and he's done a lot of good and if we had not had that type of person at this late date i don't know what we would have done and what it means in foreign policy is that he would he's talked a lot if you if you distill what he's saying is that he does he's very skeptical of europe he's almost suicidally pro-australian pro uh british he wants to be pro-canadian and he really believes that the anglo-speaking world and the traditions of england especially that we all share are unique and neat and yet to say that in this climate is suicidal because it is a demagogue as being racist it's not he's trying to say that all of us of every race have a lot to learn from the british system and and so i can and he's very pro-japanese he's i guess what he's sort of like he reminds me of the uh a phrase that solo bar solo was not a good guy in roman republican history but he said no better friend no worse enemy if he thinks you're a friend of the united states i think that there's no better president to come to your aid if he feels that i think and i'll be candid i think he feels for a variety of historical and contemporary reasons that germany is now not an ally of the united states it is a a de urea ally but it's not and so i feel that that relationship on both sides is is seriously in jeopardy and i mean permanently unless something's done and i that's tragic but he feels that and and yet i feel that his relationships with our traditional allies britain especially but australia especially and he wants to be that way with canada and japan and south korea have never been taiwan have never and israel have never been better and i think when you go to these countries a lot of the times people recognize that at least privately but you know when the left the left has a minority of the demography still but it controls the foundations it controls the media the universities the popular culture of hollywood so it magnifies its importance it's got a much bigger megaphone that's certainly true in australia around a third of australians now self-identifies left-wing and that's up considerably on what it used to be but it means that two-thirds do not yet virtually all of the public commentary the people with the megaphones come from that particular perspective and have a great deal of say um the future of um just to on this issue of um american attitudes towards trump i recently met an american from the east coast and she started to almost froth at the mouth at the mere mention of trump's name and listed an unbelievable set of uh real and imagined uh ills she said to me then how do you feel about it as an australian and i said well one thing i will say is that he had the courage to call out the chinese were much closer to china than you and obama did nothing about the militarization of the islands that are not in chinese territory uh and at that point she immediately backed off and it was quite interesting said yes i will give you that although it was a very interesting remark or insight the left is in a dilemma because some of them had been solitary voices complaining about human rights hong kong tibet and obama was not interested in that at all his asian pivot was not anti-china it was pro-china and trump came along and he empowered those people so it's very funny to see people who are now coming out of the woodwork on the left and they all have to throat clear before they make their statements and they say well you know i hate donald trump and he's no good just what you're talking about but he allowed us to speak about chinese human rights violations and so that that is that's something that's important but what what you're also describing is in the united states a lot of us i know that i've had a lot of friends and family that don't speak to him anymore because i wrote a book on how trump won and they have created a climate that it's not socially done if i were to put on a maga hat make america great and put american sticker in my car and drive to town i'd be in trouble that being said some of the people who shout at me might in fact when they get into the ballot box vote and i think that's the big unknown how many of them in the fall uh i talked to a person yesterday mexican-american fellow law enforcement and i said so who are you voting for trump i said well you have you ever been contacted he said yes i said who do you say you're voting for he said biden and i said why he said because if i text if they text me a a question i'm going to be on some list yeah and i'm going to they're going to go after me and that's not that's not crazy anymore in this climate so it's there are little telltale signs we had a congressional a special election for somebody who was removed from congress in a plus 12 democratic sea about two months ago and we had a conservative mexican-american candidate was down in the polls supposedly by eight points and he won by ten so it actually happened here last year with a re-election of scott morrison as prime minister he was given no chance the polls all got it wrong even the u.s study center no one there seemed to call it right in relation to trump and you've got this quite distinct reality now that a lot of people simply won't tell you what they really think that in itself is profoundly troubling we now feel obliged not only to hide what we really think but to deny it in public and so my final question you've been very generous with your time a decent middle american worried about their country just wanting a return to some degree of civility what advice would you have for them because the same will apply in my country well i i think and this is kind of contrarian or counterfactual or i don't think that appeasement and and a basement work anymore in other words uh i think people like yourself who said to the american well he's been pretty good on china we need to be a little bit more assertive and we we need to have people in middle america that say you know what i'm not going to defund it please i'm sorry i'm just not going to do it and you know what i'm not going to allow you to tear down father nipio sarah's statue and if they stand up they don't need to do it acrimoniously or rudely but they have to be much more forceful because you mentioned these revolutions they all had one thing in common they started out with a minority of the population the jacobins were a minority the bolsheviks were a minority the maoists were a minority and everybody said they're going to devour their own and they did and they're and they're going to dilute their message and they did and they're going to be suicidal and they were but they won at least for a time because nobody spoke out against them either in fear or because they thought they had no chance and we're going to wait and see what happens in november to finish and there's three or four things that we don't know what's going to happen either the virus is going to wane if it wanes by november trump will be elected if the lockdown stops and the economy starts to show real signs of recovery he'll win if joe biden gets out on the trail and he seems to be cognitively this you know impaired in some degree trump will win and if if trump has a greater degree of discipline and his expressions he'll win if that does not happen he'll lose and so it's a we're all waiting to see which of those four or five factors will play out and how they will play out but they're on everybody's mind and they govern every every policy decision every editorial uh interpretation of them we we just unfortunately everything is weaponized in this country i've never seen anything like it and i grew up in the 60s and it was not even that was not like this it's scary but civilization i really believe is in is on the brink because if these forces come to full power um they're going to be taking names and they're going to they're not going to want um a union of thought they're not going to want they're not going to be gracious about their victory they're not going to want unity and healing they're going to hunt out and eradicate their opponents that's what cultural revolutions always do and they'll do it again well on that very sobering note but very very important note can i thank you very much indeed for your time i've enjoyed it immensely and i appreciate your very deep learning and understanding it's been terrific thank you for having me appreciate it enjoyed it thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new releases [Music] [Applause]

Channel: John Anderson Media

Views: 1,022,872

Keywords: BLM, Victor Davis Hansen, Racism, Globalisation, Coronavirus, Geopolitics, History, China, Politics, Trump

Id: zT7CrEoqoSU

Length: 59min 40sec (3580 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020