Introduction

Victor Davis Hanson: [00:00:00] He didn’t use the full force, the full wherewithal that was at his disposal for the first four or five days. He’s been shocked. He’s been shocked at the Ukrainian resistance. He’s been shocked that NATO is now talking more like Winston Churchill, the Neville Chamberlain. Uh, the German chancellor gave a stunning speech that he basically repudiated everything that Germany has stood for for 30 years.

It’s terrific to welcome

John Anderson: Victor Davis Hansen. Back to this conversation series. He’s the Martin and Iie Anderson Senior Fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California. Professor Hansen has also, uh, several other prestigious academic posts.

He is, uh, an historian of both ancient and modern history with a special emphasis on the history of warfare. He also has [00:01:00] his own podcast, the Victor Davis Hanson Show, where he speaks at length about global and American affairs and cultural issues, his latest book, the Dying Citizen, how Progressive Elites, tribalism and Globalization Are Destroying The Idea of America has just been released and I certainly commend it.

We’ll turn to it shortly. Well, Victor, a million, thanks for coming on again. We agreed to talk about, uh, this very, very important book, the Dying Citizen, the last time we spoke to, uh, push It Along a bit in Australia because I think it ought to be read as widely here as it ought to in your country. Uh, but of course in the meantime, the world has really reached a very dangerous place in terms of the Russians, Ukraine, and let’s not leave China out of it, and how we might respond.

In fact, your book is entirely relevant to what we’re, we’re looking at. I think you, you’ve got. The world now dividing. [00:02:00] You’ve got two massively authoritarian and very threatening, uh, countries, uh, giving us a choice between a new authoritarianism dominating the globe, uh, versus what might be called the citizenship model of the West, where, uh, we’re in danger of giving up that citizenship voluntarily.

Your, your book says it. Its name says it’s all the dying citizen. So these are worrying times. But if you don’t mind, I’d just, I’d really like to get your views, uh, on the most pressing global issue at the moment. That’s obviously, uh, uh, Russia and the Ukraine. It’s clear that Putin has aspirations to annex the Ukraine in some form or another.

It seems like a throwback to 19th and 20th century attempt by empires to reclaim historical territories.

Ukraine, Russia and Putin

John Anderson: What do you think is Putin’s game? Why is the Ukraine [00:03:00] such an important prize? And we’re plainly in very real danger if we’re not already in a cold war of being in one, possibly a hot war in, in coming weeks.

If this is mishandled, I know that’s a big issue, but I’d love your feeling, uh, your, your, uh, insights.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I, I think Putin feels that the postcode Cold War era didn’t work out for Russia the way that he had envisioned it. And by that, he means that he does not have the wherewithal to be on the stage, same stage as superpowers like the United States in China.

And he thinks he could be. Should he reclaim most or much of the a hundred million people he lost in population when the Soviet Union evaporated and the 30% of the territory, and when he looks at the map, He sees Ukraine, it’s rich in natural gas, it has precious metals, it’s got Europe’s most fertile pharma, and he thinks that this is central to these IDI dentist [00:04:00] plans to reclaim, as you said, this sort of Russian empire.

And the how that goes about, he looks at Georgia or he looks at Eastern Ukraine or crime mayo. And the degree to which he acts immediately is predicated on the status in the west and the status in the west. And that includes Japan and Australia, South Korea, as well as at the eu, nato, and the United States and Canada.

It depends on whether the world price of oil is high and he’s rich in petrol dollars and we’re paying out the nose for energy that we can’t or won’t produce ourselves. It depends on whether NATO is at each other’s throats or they’re following the German lead of not meeting their, uh, Their defense obligations to spend 2% of their budgets on, uh, military readiness or Germany is conducting something like this.

Nordstrom two pipeline. And also will the American president, if the American president is begging Putin to pump more oil when he won’t, [00:05:00] or when he’s asking him to lay off 16 entities when the Russian hackers are disrupting a pipeline in America as they did in January. But he’s begging him not to stop or forcing ’em not to stop, but just divert a little bit his attention to other, uh, other entities.

When you have that situation falling in Afghanistan, then he feels opportunistic and he feels the west either can’t or spent or won’t defend its own interest. So I’m gonna go into Ukraine, I think what. Uh, in this particular instance, what’s fooled him is that he didn’t count on the response because of these things I talked about, but it was so embarrassing to NATO in the United States and the West that he so flagrantly went in to kill people and, and wrecked that country.

He didn’t use the full force, the full wherewithal that was at his disposal for the first four or five days. He’s been shocked. He’s been shocked at the Ukrainian resistance. He’s been shocked that NATO [00:06:00] is now talking more like. Winston Churchill, the Neville Chamberlain, uh, the German chancellor gave a stunning speech that he basically repudiated everything that Germany had stood for for 30 years.

You know, we’re gonna produce energy, fossil fuels, no Nordstrom pipeline. We’re gonna re-arm, we’re gonna have 2%, we’re gonna meet the 2%, everybody should, and it was no green anti-American boiler plate. I wish our own president would emulate that, uh, speech. And so Putin now is, he’s befuddled, he’s confused, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t erase the point that he has the ability and the potential to crush Ukraine if he puts all of his resources there.

And that’s what he’s gonna be doing in the next, next week. And now it’s just a race between a belated west in effort to send javelin missiles, which by the way, I think is the most effective weapon in the world now in terms of cost, efficacy. 200 and [00:07:00] thousand plus 80 for the, for the charge or the, the bullet, so to speak.

And then you can take out a tank at two and a half miles with, you know, fire and forget. So it’s a very valuable but expensive commodity. And we have not give them an enough. Donald Trump, uh, reversed the Obama decision not to give them that, but we, but we still haven’t given them up. And I don’t know why the west didn’t pour it in November and December and January, because when you see those columns, John, of, you know, 40 miles of Russian material on trucks and tanks coming in to destroy Kia, you would think they would be easy targets, but not easy targets if you don’t have enough anti-tank weapons.

And so now we’re in a race to supply them. And that has finally brought a response from, um, Vladimir Putin. He’s a student of history and he knows that no. Uh, invasion can put down an insurrection unless the borders are closed. We had trouble in Iraq because of Syria and [00:08:00] Iran supplies. We had co uh, trouble in Afghanistan because of the Pakistan open border.

We had problems going back to Vietnam and Korea. Korea with China, um, Afghanistan, uh, as well with pa, the Pakistan border, but also in the case of Vietnam with Southeast Asia and the Ho Chi Min Trail, as you remember from the Australian contribution. So he’s looking now and he says, I can, I can destroy this independent country and absorb it, but not if NATO wakes up and they use their four corridors of, you know, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and pour these weapons in.

That can nullify my advantage. So now he’s threatening the use of nuclear weapons, uh, vaguely, but. Not, you know, not ambiguously, so to, to nato. And he doesn’t, and he’s, he feels he won’t be able to win, I think, if he can’t close the borders.

European Resilience

John Anderson: So you’re painting a picture that actually this has proved much more difficult than he expected because [00:09:00] surprisingly, you, Europe has very belatedly, but nonetheless, quite surprisingly stepped up.

I mean, Germany’s turnaround is something to behold. Who would ever have thought, frankly, that they would do it? Uh, but, uh, am I hearing you say that he will probably succeed in the Ukraine, but that his broader objectives of putting, uh, much more together after that and somehow prospering it from it now looks pretty blunted.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I think the next five days will tell whether he succeeds or not, and that will be predicated on how quickly these weapons are in the hands of Ukrainians that know how to use them. I, I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the world supply of javelin missiles and American shoulder fired anti missile, uh, shooters are now on the way to Ukraine.

I think that all of the NATO countries, the United States, probably you, in Australia, you’re emptying your stocks [00:10:00] and you’re pouring everything in there. It’s, it’s up to 15,000 I think. Javelins and they’re so expensive that, you know, a lot of these countries don’t have a lot of them. And so if they come in time and, and they can make the difference, then Putin will be stymied along with the sanctions.

But I think he thinks they won’t because he’ll threaten people who are supplying them. But more importantly, he feels that if you and I have this conversation a month from now, John, that he will be successful and that we will not be talking about the rough time he had the first five days or six days, or the deaths and the destruction or his unpopularity of the sanctions.

But he, in his calculus, he will be thinking, they’ll say, oh my God, flatter Mo Putin in the 21st century just swallowed an entire country and he did it in less than three weeks. And what are we gonna do? Because he’s got his eye on. The Baltic states, he’s gonna be pressuring every Russian speaking former [00:11:00] republic.

He’s got his eye on it. What are we gonna do? And so that’s what, I don’t know if that’s accurate in reality, but that’s what, what his impression is that the aims will be so beneficial to Russia that he’s willing to, what he considers these, you know, these detours or cul-de-sacs on his way to get there that were now enmeshed in.

And then our euphoria that he didn’t win like he did in Crimea or Georgia or uh, east Ukraine. He didn’t win in the first 72 hours, were euphoric. But I think if we stand back, uh, you know, it’s sort of like the Polish Army fighting very heroically the first couple of days in Poland. And then they were surrounded by three invasions plus the Soviet Union and they collapsed.

And so I. I am cautiously optimistic, but when I hear people, some of my colleagues say, Putin will be disgraced. He’s embarrassed, he’s broke. There’ll be a coup of an oligarch. A general will come in, [00:12:00] they’ll remove him, or there’ll be millions in the streets of Russia. I don’t see that every time he went into Crimea and, um, Georgia, there was a huge uptick in his popularity.

They weren’t as bad the first three days as this, but if he can turn this around, and I hope he doesn’t, and I hope these weapons come there, and were, and were very forceful. It’s

John Anderson: interesting to contemplate, you know, the Russian economy is, uh, only a tiny bit bigger than the Australian economy. We’re just 25 million people we’re, we have a lot of debate here about our one shot military as a senior military guy referred to it himself the other day.

You know, we need to do a lot more, but we might come back to that in a moment. In the meantime, here is an economy that has benefited. From, uh, and will continue to benefit if they can find a way to trade from the West’s confused policy on energy. I would’ve thought, now, as I understand it, under both Obama president’s, Obama and Trump, America became energy self-sufficient.

Uh, fracking was [00:13:00] allowed if I’m, I think I’m right in saying Obama at once. I said, thank God for fracking us, helping us reach our environmental objectives.

Ballooning Energy Prices

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump was late. He, he didn’t open Anwar up the Alaskan, uh, reserve that’s got about a potential of a million to 2 million barrels a day that was closed.

And he did stop federal new leasing of federal lands for natural gas. And he was ambiguous. They had committees and they had about Keystone, but it was not greenlighted. But because the price of gasoline got so high and he was under. The pressure. He sort of said, well, if the Rackers want to do it, I won’t really stop them.

But we never got up to this incredible 13 million barrel. So when Trump came in, he opened the Anwar field, he opened new federal leases on new lands for gas and oil. He greenlighted. Uh, [00:14:00] Keystone. And then more importantly, he told banks and lending agency that he wanted them and they, they were to lend to frackers and horizontal drillers.

And then he went and told them that you’re heroic people. And the result of the jaw boning and these policies were that we had an incredible surge in which we became the largest, uh, natural gas producer and oil producer in the history of civilization. We were, we were on our way to 13 and a half, 14 million barrels of oil alone.

We were energy ins. Uh, we were energy self-sufficient. If you look at, you know, we were exporting and importing, but the, the, the net total was we were producing more than we were consuming. And so it was a, it was a stunning success. And then in addition to that, I think we sometimes forget this, he said to the Germans almost right when he came to the office, that famous confrontation when he is talking to the NATO members, and he says, Germany has no business with this Nordstrom too, and we’re gonna [00:15:00] sanction it, but we have a carrot.

We are gonna open up new federal lands and we will have billions of cubic feet of natural gas. And we’ll, we’re gonna have liquified natural gas ports and we can send it a lot of it to you. And what we can’t send to you we’re really high on this Crio Greek Israeli pipeline, the so-called East Med project that was gonna send another whole, uh, slew of natural gas through Italy.

And so he was trying to find ways to break this log jump. And when people came back to him and said, that’ll cause global warming, or the Turks won’t like it, or the Russians won’t, he didn’t. It was oblivious. So when he left office, Here in the United States, gas was very cheap. It’s, it’s doubled in price in California, doubled.

And we’ve never paid, I’ve never in my entire life paid $5 a gallon, which we are paying now in California. So it was a stunning achievement, and Biden came in and his [00:16:00] candidacy, and then his transition and his presidency was in the hands of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the, I think the Obamas and the squad, and they all were John Kerry Radical Green, uh, advocates.

And we, we’ve lost almost 3 million barrels. A lot of this was tragic because it, it really meant that it was a contributor to this 7.58% annual inflation that we’re suffering. It was a contributor to sort of bad relations with Canada. When we renegged on the, uh, The Keystone pipeline that would’ve given us Alberta oil.

It was, uh, it showed that we were weak when we were begging Putin and the Saudi Royal family, both of which had been targets of sort of virtue signaling criticism from, uh, Mr. Biden. So, uh, if he had just said, you know, these are all my achievements and plagiarized Trump’s work, and I, I would’ve preferred that everybody would’ve, and then he could have taken credit for what was very [00:17:00] successful, but he wasn’t interested in pragmatism.

It was ideology ruled everything. So, my

John Anderson: my point out of all of that, yeah. I take what you’re saying, um, is, is though that once again, the West, in this case its Leader America, the most powerful of the western nations, has weakened itself in pursuit of ideology rather than pragmatism and recognizing what’s really happening at the same time as it set in train, um, uh, factors that.

In a way strengthened Putin’s hand. You know, high energy prices played right into Putin’s hand. He did, I would’ve thought so. He, here’s the rub in a way for, for, for what you call liberals. We, what we might call in Australia Greens to so pursue energy policies in, you know, because of their concerns about climate that they place at risk, the liberal global order and [00:18:00] increase the chances of us tipping over into a world that’s dominated by authoritarianism.

That would be the worst possible outcome for everyone, including people worried about climate, I would’ve thought, because there’s no evidence that the Chinese or the Russians give Tani about, um, uh, uh,

Victor Davis Hanson: uh, about emissions. Not really. The past has subsidized green groups in the west. They love green groups, and the Chinese have as well.

Biden's Growing List of Problems

Victor Davis Hanson: And you know, I think you summed it up pretty well tonight is the president’s state of the union address in a few hours and he’s got a big problem because his green energy protocols and which override pragmatism and there so war on fossil fuels, the open border, the inflationary, new modern monetary theory policies, the Afghanistan, the woke movement, the political politicalization of the military.

Now they’re not domestic issues anymore, John. They have foreign [00:19:00] policy ramifications as we see in Ukraine. So the. The American people are saying, wait a minute, if our border is open and 2 million people invaded, how do we have the intellectual heft or integrity to go over there and say to the Ukrainians, you’ve gotta secure your border.

If we have this inflationary policy and we’re printing 2 trillion a year and we have 30 trillion in debt, how can we engage in a successful financial war with China or Russia who have surpluses? If we are begging Putin for energy, and Europe is dependent on his gas and oil, and he’s. You know, these rich in petro dollars that are flowing in, in the billions every day with this increased price.

Why are we deliberately not using the resources we have that are greater than either Russia or China’s? And if we want to have a military that deters people like Putin, why do we get get out of Afghanistan the way we [00:20:00] did? Why is Mark Milley, our Chairman of Joint Chiefs, saying that our existential threats are the Twins of climate change and White Rage, or Lloyd Austin, our defense secretary saying white supremacy, rather than battlefield efficacy being our, our prime consideration and cutting the defense budget under, um, oh, he, his first budget, uh, Biden suggested we cut the defense budget.

So what I’m getting at is that this woke green, whatever you want to call it, initiative that’s not unique to the United States has. I think you are suggesting it has foreign policy ramifications. It weakens the west, and when you start to collate what the Chinese and the Russians say, it’s pretty clear that they, they like what we’re doing to ourselves and they say that we’re decadent.

We’re at too affluent, we’re too pudgy. They have all different mechanisms and metaphors and similes, but. Uh, and you know, we have, we as conservatives have to be very, very careful because we know that [00:21:00] what they are saying, there’s truth to it. But we don’t want to in agreement with them by any mechanism or means or any, any methods suggest that.

Uh, therefore, because they’re right that we’re in a, in a cannibalistic mode, they have a right to take advantage of it. I think a lot of conservatives will say, well, we’re decadent and Putin was right. We’ve destroyed our deterrence. Putin was right. It’s none of our business. Let him go in there and that’ll show everybody what happens.

And, you know, maybe there won’t be pride flags in George Floyd murals, at least in Ukraine. Well, that’s the wrong attitude. We’ve gotta find a mechanism to say, yes, Putin in China saw how weak we are, but we’re going to go full bore. Correct those, those vulnerabilities and determine, it’s sort of like during the.

Uh, world War I when, uh, world War II in the United States, we had the America first, but we were, uh, there was a lot of isolationism. But after Pearl Harbor, [00:22:00] uh, The criticism, there were two types of isolationists. There were the people who said, we warned you that you were, you were kind of a socialistic country and you were not.

And then, and they were incorporated into really the leading spokesman of war against Japan. And then there were the Charles Lindbergh people who said, uh, we don’t want to get involved, or, and they became irrelevant. And so I think conservatives have to not confuse what’s at stake. It, it reminds me it’s the foreign policy here in this country, John.

It’s the foreign policy equivalent of the, the ranker over the election. We all know that in 2020, the laws and the key states that determined the electoral college outcome were altered. And they were altered in an unconstitutional fashion by court edict and bureaucratic fiat against the constitutional prerogatives of state legislatures who had laws.

And the result was, we had 102 million. Ballots for the first time, 64% were mailed in [00:23:00] or early voting. We’ve never had that before. The error rate went down and that was, that was catastrophic for Trump. But I don’t think you can make the argument from that, oh, well, the ballots were rigged, or the computers were communicating with China, kind of a Sidney Powell, Linwood, Kraken.

And to do that and say, well, on election day, all the computers were, these conspire had weakened that, that legitimate, that legitimate criticism. So I hope that conservatives and their anger at how we’ve been, uh, wep, uh, warped by wokeness and political correctness, don’t let that anguish, uh, Channel into sort of, uh, well, let, let Putin do what he wants, or he is, at least he’s Christian or something like that.

We’ve gotta be very careful, I think.

Is Europe Beginning To Take Defence Seriously

John Anderson: Yeah. I’ve heard, uh, you know, a, a little bit of a hint from some American conservative commentators that are sort of, let’s just retreat the overtones of that isolationism again, uh, as, [00:24:00] uh, that that would be a disaster globally. Can I put an Australian perspective on this that I find quite interesting?

Um, uh, a couple of days ago, a very interesting poll, he revealed that, uh, two thirds of Australians are truly shocked by what’s happened in the Ukraine, and it’s been a giant wake up call. They see it as a, a, a serious threat to global security, but three quarters see China as an even greater threat. So in a sense, I think they’re starting to see clearly that we are at a very dangerous tipping point globally, as I see it anyway.

Can we just tease up, Putin must have been very surprised. In fact, I’m very surprised where I sit in Australia that the Europeans have got their act together a bit in Germany and particular has been prepared to really take some big risks, you know, with the pipeline, the gas pipeline, um, being suspended, saying they will [00:25:00] double defense spending, that their military is not ready.

They want to get it into shape. What I’m really driving at here is that it seems to me that if there’s one thing that Americans, I take it still broadly agree on, is that China is a number one threat. They’re agreed that China is a problem for years. I think, uh, a lot of thinking Americans have said the Europeans and NATO need to step up and do more for themselves.

Is there a prospect that they will do that? And leave America in particular, free to focus on keeping the Pacific stable.

Victor Davis Hanson: That would be the hope. And there’s a great euphoria here on both sides of the aisle. People are, are making grandiose claims that now Europe, uh, is taking defense seriously. And that Putin has been a great gift because all the jaw, jaw boning of, uh, presidents Clinton and Obama and Bush, and Trump could not [00:26:00] achieve as much as, uh, in, you know, 12 or 16 years.

Then, uh, Putin did in just a week. And that’s, there’s some truth to that. But let’s wait two months from now, John, and let’s, heaven forbid, not hope, but. Keep up with the possibility. Dreadful though it be that Putin takes Ukraine and he’s bragging that he absorbed not a Crimea or an Eastern Ukraine, but a whole country.

And now he’s on the borders of, you know, once again, he’s on the borders of Poland and Uran, Romania and Hungary, and he is very close to Austria and Czech Republic and, and Germany. And at that point, what will be the, the reaction when he says, you’re very cold next winter and I’m not gonna, and you want my natural gas.

And oh, by the way, I have decided that you cannot, you cannot have this particular type of offensive weapon in your NATO country and after his performance, if it’s successful in Ukraine, it’ll be, see if, it’ll be [00:27:00] curious to see if the Germans either are able as, as a richest nation in nato, in the second largest in its population, or they able to say no, we.

We’re, we, we adhere to what we told you a year ago or three months ago. Our army is determined to repel you. If you come in, we have NATO allies and, uh, we don’t need your energy. We don’t want it. I don’t know if that’s gonna be possible for them to reverse a 30 year mentality in a matter of months. I hope it is, and I think the United States can do them a great service by helping them.

But you make another very good point, and it’s been very, it’s been widely, I’ve been very surprised how aware Americans are of it. It breaks down left on right here. The, the, the left says to people, the existential enemy is Ukraine. Ukraine, Ukraine and Russia. I mean, the Russians in Ukraine and these crazy conservatives are still talking about the real threat is China [00:28:00] and.

The conservative says, well, Putin, we have to deal with him. But he only has 140 people, 40 million people, and his economy is small, is one 10th the size of nato and, uh, NATO’s aggregate economy. And NATO has a billion people. So if you look at wherewithal China versus Russia, it’s China. And the problem we have with this on the conservative side is that Russia is a very primitive propagandist.

Uh, you know better than I do, John, in every Western movie. The villain these days is a white Russian with gaps in his teeth, covered with orthodox tattoos, with a bad accent pitted against some Hollywood, uh, young starlet. But, and so it’s easy to, to see how primitive and caricatured Russia prop Russian propaganda efforts are.

China’s a different story. China’s insidious. They, [00:29:00] they have really tapped into the woke agenda and you dare criticize them. And on Monday they will say, you’re racist and you’re continuing a long Western tradition of the yellow apparel or Japanese IMP prison camp during, in War ii. And then on Tuesday, some C E O A, Michael Bloomberg or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, uh, a Jamie Diamond or somebody in Wall Street will sort of subtly say, you know, the Chinese aren’t bad.

And then on Wednesday the NBA or Hollywood will say, well, we have a huge market, or we have endorsements, or they’re working well with us in joint ventures. So it there, there’s just so much more. Devious and effective propagandist and p more powerful that I think you’re wise. That we have to be very, very careful by thinking that once Putin is contained, were, were home free.

And in China, you, they’ve been very brilliant in their reaction to Ukraine. The first moment they came out with ostensible support, [00:30:00] and then they scanned the horizon shock of the European and the American and the other Western response, they pulled back from Putin a little bit, but not enough to put them in a position, not to go back and, and approve of him if he wins.

And so now they’re sitting on the sidelines, uh, giving mixed signals, watching the pulse of the battlefield. If he loses they’re, they’re going to say it’s outrageous. And we warned him not to do this and we don’t agree in this territorial acquisition. But if he wins, they’re going to fault the west for it and say, this is, uh, he, he had a right to go into Ukraine because of.

Uh, Russian speakers and you know where that’s gonna go with, uh, vis-a-vis Taiwan.

John Anderson: Do you buy into the theory that the Chinese would be watching very, very closely, uh, that Western reaction and then, and you’ve got a division between those who think we’d better keep the global order in some sort of condition so that we can trade.

That’s our prosperity key. And those who say no reunification’s, so important, then we’re [00:31:00] now so advanced and so powerful that we can do it. So you’ve got that tension between the two, obviously of great interest to us in Australia. We don’t want Taiwan to be this regions Ukraine. Uh, the Chinese, uh, you know, they really have, it’s been an extraordinary game.

They say they always respect other countries, territorial sovereignty. They’ve sat on the fence. They’re the one people that Putin could not ignore if they were to say pull back, you know, and the, and the civilized world ought to note that. The Chinese are the people who have the power to do it, and they haven’t used it further than that.

If you stop and think about it, the rest of the world is prepared to wear the pain, at least for now of sanctions. What does China do? Say, well, we’ll buy your wheat. We’ll buy your oil. We’ll buy your coal, another a hundred million tons of coal, which ought to be noted by the greens, uh, so that they know what we’re really

Victor Davis Hanson: dealing with here.

The Chinese Perspective

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I think China, on the one hand, as you point out, they are worried about public opinion to the degree that [00:32:00] affects their, uh, Their accessibility to western markets and infiltrate western universities and western military alliances and ports and their silken road and all that. That’s all predicated on the nice happy face China that has been unfairly maligned by Western elites.

That’s their, their view. But on the other hand, they cannot condemn Russia because that’s exactly what they are planning to do in Taiwan. They feel that a country that has native speakers on their borders has innate ties. It’s. Supersede any international law about a country that def declares themselves independent.

They don’t think Taiwan is independent. Russia thinks that Ukraine was never independent. They feel they’re, they have the same language, the same culture, and their tools of the West to weaken them. And so they’re gonna have to, they’re gonna be subtle about it, but they’re gonna eventually and [00:33:00] ultimately side with Russia and Ukraine and hope they win.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re doing more than just wishing their, their win, because they’re gonna go into Taiwan maybe sooner or later or later and sooner, we don’t know. But eventually they’re gonna try to go into Taiwan and they can’t be on record that, that would be contoured international law.

And they would resent that. And I, it’ll be interesting to see. Uh, what will be the lesson militarily from Ukraine? How long the Ukrainians last, and if they’re analogous to how long the Taiwanese would last and what would be the effect, um, uh, of sanctions on China? Because after all, it’s easy to say an oligarch can’t pull up his huge, uh, yacht into, you know, Barcelona or the Pyres, or, it’s easy to say that you’re gonna deny.

Uh, a general, an ATM when he is on, you know, vacation in France. But it’s quite another thing to tell [00:34:00] the, the Chinese with all of that money and all of that influence that they can’t do this and they can’t do that. When you have so many joint ventures and investments, students, athletes, actors, the whole cultural apparatus of the west is so invested in China that I just don’t think we would be very effective trying to do to China.

What we’re doing pretty successfully with Russia. Russia’s so small and it’s so despised anyway, but China is both playing the, uh, the, the marginalized person card, but they’re also so powerful, uh, compared to Russia. You paint

John Anderson: quite a bleak picture. Just as a matter of interest. We’ve all been, um, taken by the courage and determination of the Ukrainian people.

Ukraine, Taiwan And The Fighting Spirit

John Anderson: It is worth remembering. Uh, that it’s a place where there’s a lot of corruption and in fact, despite all of their natural wealth, that corruption seems presumably lies at the heart of the reality that the [00:35:00] average Ukrainian has even lower income, uh, uh, streams than the average

Victor Davis Hanson: Russian. Yes, absolutely.

They’re poorer than the Russian. Uh,

John Anderson: despite all of their natural resources, all of their natural advantages, they don’t have

Victor Davis Hanson: points way to Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You know, I think there’s a big. Not that people thought they would roll over, but they thought they would be analogous to, here in the United States, people thought they’d be analogous to the Crimeans or the Georgians or Ossa.

In other words, they would fight for a while. But given their corruption and given that they have some of the most lucrative, uh, assets in terms of farmland, metals, and, and fossil fuels in Europe, and given they haven’t utilized them to the benefit of the people and given they have interfered, I mean, we’re talking about Alexander Binman and the whistleblower were responsible for the impeachment of a president on the grounds that he’s somehow suspended aid for a while to Ukraine to investigate [00:36:00] the Bidens when subsequent news shows that he was the only president in history who demanded that Ukraine get offensive American made weapons, and B, what he thought the Biden consortium.

It was doing with Ukraine was, was underestimated. We know now from the investigations of, uh, John Durham and the laptop of Hunter Biden, that that corrupt government was interfering in the politics of the United States going way back to 2012 when Joe Biden was vice president. So given all of that baggage, I don’t think anybody thought, you know, that Ukraine would capture the hearts and minds of Americans, and yet it has.

And so it’s testament to the people. And uh, there is a sense too that, and I, maybe you feel it in Australia, John or your listeners do that, that example of Zelensky and the citizens of Kiev, I think it’s telling [00:37:00] Westerners that you have wrong priorities. The world doesn’t revolve around Jay-Z or the Super Bowl.

Bowl halftime show, or what Oprah says this or what. Uh, bill Maher, a comedian at night says, and you’re, you know, you don’t really, you’re, you’re a vacuous, superfluous culture in many ways. And there’s only existential things that count a secure border united population, a readiness to defend your values and beyond apologetic, if they’re better than the alternative.

I mean, you don’t have to be perfect to be good. And the Ukrainians far poorer, far more, uh, disadvantaged in some sense than we are, are showing a, a level of courage. I think a lot of Western leaders and their, and their, uh, elected officials are saying, I wonder if we would do that. Given the postmodern status of our population and our popular culture.

So I think that it’s, it’s a wake up call that maybe the woke, you know, oh, you didn’t, you weren’t born in 1776, you were born in 16 nine. [00:38:00] Oh, you can’t put up a statue of Lincoln. Oh, we gotta tear down J for, oh, we’ve gotta rename Father who, nio Sarah, um, Boulevard or something. All of that is superfluous when it gets down to it.

And Ukrainians are reminding of us that

John Anderson: there’s a, you know, there’s an old iron law. I would’ve thought, uh, that, uh, conviction will overcome, uh, self-doubt and self-loathing anytime. And as you say, all of these massive attacks we’re seeing on our history now look like attacks on history, but are actually attacks on our culture, leaving our young people thinking, well, you know, why would you stand up for a dreadful nightmares culture like this?

But to, to come to the time and ease for a moment. Um, they’re different, of course, to the Ukrainians. It’s a highly successful democracy. Very prosperous place population, roughly the same as Australia, a wealthy country, as I mentioned. Um, would they, would they inspire us with their willingness to stand up for their citizenship?

Victor Davis Hanson: We’ll come to citizenship in a moment. [00:39:00] Yeah, I think they do. I think they do. I think what’s happening to the west is that it’s very ironic is that the established west, the Anglo speaking west, the former British commonwealth in the United States, and then the countries that comp, that make up NATO and the EU with the westernized democracies and democra in Taiwan and South Korea and Japan.

Uh, the heart of the, if you think, if you look at all of those Western countries, the heart of it was traditionally in Washington, London and Paris. And yet at the core of the West, there’s the greatest degree of agnosticism. Timidity uncertainty. And I know that you suffer from those same symptomology, but you’re still a frontier country.

You’re right near China. You have no margin of error. You’re very rich, uh, one of the richest continents or nations in the world naturally, but you don’t have a large population. [00:40:00] You’re, and that makes you a target by China. So there’s still a garrison mentality among many Australians that you don’t have that margin of error that Europe and the United States has traditionally.

And the same is true of Taiwan. The same is true, uh, I think of South Korea for a while longer, Japan perhaps. But I, I think Americans in Eastern, I mean, um, what I’m getting at John is Western Europeans are going to get inspiration from Eastern Europeans that don’t have that level of affluence and historical protection, or from southern Europeans like the Greeks.

And the same thing is true of the Americans when they look at Australia. And the same thing is true of the Japan, Japanese, when they look at Taiwan or South Korea. So I hope that these, I guess Donald Rumsfeld got in trouble for calling old Europe and New Europe, but he was trying to make that point 20 years ago that when you, you’re up against it and you have existential enemies in your neighborhood [00:41:00] and they’re very clear about what they want to do to you, then it’s very hard to worry about the ethnic makeup of the diversity program at your university.

It really is. Or whether you should, uh, put a homeless person in a permanent shelter or a tent. I mean, this is what we’re obsessed with in the West and in countries that don’t have the margin of safety that we do or the level of affluence and leisure, can’t afford to do that.

John Anderson: Well taken. Well, that’s a, a, a very useful segue, I think, into, uh, what you’ve been writing about the dying citizens.

If you stop and think about it, it occurs to me that if you look at the Ukraine and you contemplate what the Chinese might like to do with reunification, what they’ve already done in Hong Kong, it’s a denial that you like of the people’s sovereignty of their self-determination by authoritarian regimes that don’t respect the individual and don’t have a system of common law because they don’t have an idea of the universalism of, uh, of their, of their population.

If you like that all people, uh, if you like, born [00:42:00] equal, even if you get unequal outcomes in life, there should be subject to a common law. Um, on the other hand, I think in an, in essence, what you are arguing that the, the title says it all, the Dying citizen, um, in the West were giving up voluntarily our citizenship.

The Dying Citizen

John Anderson: But can we explore this for a while? What do you mean by citizenship and why is it a citizen different? If you like to a subject.

Victor Davis Hanson: It is a very late concept, John, we Civilization is 7,500 years old. It starts in the Near East, but it didn’t appear citizenship until about 2,500 years ago. In the seventh and eighth centuries in Greece, I wrote a book called The Other Greeks, trying to explain the economic basis of it.

But essentially it was a revolutionary idea that residents that had either been serfs or slaves or subjects or peasants took it upon themselves to create their own government. And they [00:43:00] were given rights, they failed inalienable rights, and they had responsibilities to perpetuate them. So property from that from was theirs.

They could pass it on, they could invest in it when they were 80 years old, and the idea that their children had a legal right to it. And so it was a rule of law for everybody regardless. Uh, at least there were. Uh, there was a movement to get rid of property qualifications very early on and people were going to be equal, uh, not on the back end, but on the front end.

And so that idea waxed and waned throughout the west. And my point was that if you look historically through that odyssey, there were certain, I, I guess they would call them organic challenges or pre-modern challenges. And then there were contrived or constructed or post-modern challenges, and I kind of divided that book in two and the, the organic natural.

Status of man was not to have a middle class, to have a [00:44:00] Lord and a serve a master in the key peasants around the walls. That’s the story of mankind. But in Greece, we did have a middle class, there was a word for it, the meso. They were the hop lights of the foul lengths. They were the, uh, voters in the Ecclesia and they owned about 10 acres of farmland and they controlled their, their own method of production.

If I could use that Marxist term and then, In addition to that, they said they were not just residents, they just didn’t come and go into Attica or Argos. They had borders. And borders meant that they didn’t have the arrogance, that they could spread these ideas everywhere, that the more that they diluted from the center, the more they spread, they diluted themselves.

So they said, this is. Thieves and inside will have theban democracy and outside. And the Athenians can go radical or what a globalist, whatever they want. But we can’t, we can’t influence and, and if we try [00:45:00] to, we’re going to dilute it. So a border was very essential. And then third, people gave up their tribal identities.

I mean, we say Greeks, but they had all sorts of tribal identities. As, as you know, the word tribe is a Latin word from the three groups that were pre-state. But once you give up your affinity to your so-called first cousin, and you replace it with an abstract loyalty to the state, Then you have a meritocracy, and we don’t, you know, I, I go to the Middle East and I’ve said that a lot, but I often ask people in such a wealthy country as yours in, you know, Libya or Algeria or Egypt, what’s wrong?

And I usually get the same answer. We hire our first cousins, Victor. We, we don’t hire the best person. We’re loyal to our particular tribe or clan. And yet here what I’m getting at is all of those distinctions that, that birth citizenship, in this post-modern age, were losing the middle class by every economic data point.

We know that were losing [00:46:00] borders, were becoming mere residents, and we’re becoming tribal. We’re re tribalizing. And so that’s what I, I’m very worried, if you ask an American 30 years ago, I am a resident, what can I not do that as citizens can do? The citizen would say, well, you can’t leave the United States.

Without a passport. I’m sorry. You don’t have that right. If you leave the United States, you might not get back. That’s gone, at least in the southern border. You people come across all the time. The person said you can’t serve in the military, only citizen that’s gone. The person would say, you can’t in enlist or affect or participate in a US national campaign that’s gone.

They would say, you cannot vote in an election. And we know now that New York said 800,000 illegal aliens will vote in the next municipal that that’s starting to be gone and we’re only left at, I can think of only one distinction. A non-citizen cannot hold office and we’re already having that challenge and so.

Once you blur [00:47:00] that distinction, then you’re tribal and you have no middle class. You’re not gonna have nationhood or, or citizen citizenship. And then I mentioned that there, there was constructed elite top-down efforts, and that was, uh, the rise of, of permanent class of government. And you have that in your country, judge, jury and executioners, uh, legislative executive judicial powers within a non-elected bureaucracy that war against a citizen with an enormous powers that citizen lacks.

Uh, there’s evolutionaries in your country as ours. These are people who feel that the original founding principles or passe gotta get in our country. Get rid of the filibuster, get rid of the electoral college, get rid of the 15 person Supreme Court, get rid of the state’s, right, to establish voting laws.

And then finally, I. And this is probably the most dangerous, this global cosmopolitanism that wealthy elites on the coast feel that their first allegiance is to some type of international body. [00:48:00] Um, wouldn’t it be good if the International criminal court could adjudicate American military behavior?

Wouldn’t it be good as Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken said, if the UN Commission on Human Rights could, could run an inquiry to see if we were systemically racist. Uh, and what do you end up with when you do that? You end up the W H O World Health Organization controlled by China, assuring us that the virus was, uh, not transmissible or, uh, parroting the Chinese line.

Or you end up with Vladimir Putin. Now that the, uh, rotating chair of the security council Yeah. On this

John Anderson: issue, you actually write, uh, in your, in, in your book, page 269, that one threat. You’ve just been talking about this, uh, to citizenship comes not from foreign countries curtailing our liberties, but from Americans themselves, Britain’s Australians everywhere, deliberately widening the idea of citizenship to include the peoples of the entire [00:49:00] world.

Uh, David Goodhart and his book called Them the Anywheres as opposed to the somewheres and the anywheres are quite profoundly dismissive of the common people and their ideals. I think they’re ignorant. They don’t think they know what’s good for them. Don’t global events at the moment, uh, in some ways, uh, shock us into realizing how ridiculous this is.

'Global' Citizens

John Anderson: I mean, how to be global citizens. What’s the role of a global citizen? If in fact, uh, the authoritarian regimes that have no regard for citizenship at all, only for power, where do you fit into that if you desert the ideals that made. Western societies, the

Victor Davis Hanson: envy of the world. Well, if you don’t have any roots or values or knowledge of your past, why would you fight for anything?

And when we look at these Ukrainian interviews, at least the ones being aired in the States, there’s a common theme that all of these people, men, women, children, the elderly, they all say things like this. [00:50:00] My father fought in world, uh, grandfather fought in World War ii. This was my home. I left Wall Street to come over here and fight.

Um, this is where I live. These, this is my language. This is my soil. So you can, you can see that. Traditional citizenship has galvanized that. Nobody is saying, well, you know, if Ukraine is lost, I can just set up my Zoom business in Germany, or I can move over to Poland. I mean that people obviously will do that if it’s lost, but they’re not on record to suggest that that’s going to be an incentive to save Ukraine.

So all citizens, I think at least that the traditional protocols are of any value when we look back at them, what makes a citizen is a, a sense of place. They know their neighbors, they know the history of where they’re living. They, they have a loyalty to the past. They don’t want to let down the people who gave them [00:51:00] something and died are no longer with them.

There’s a shame culture. I know that I’m living in a house that’s, uh, I’m the fifth generation here. It’s was built in 1870, which is very early, I guess, for California. But I have memories not just of my mother living here in this room. When she was a little girl, she told me about it, and not just her father, but her father.

Who was alive when I was telling me that his grandfather, whom I seem to know, even though he died I think in 1920, and I was born in 53, but I feel like I should keep it up or I should fix things even though I should. Half of me says, oh, I just moved to the coast and sell out. But the other half says that, well, you were given something to preserve and there’s a particular shame culture.

Would you wanna be found wanting by your ancestors or, and those are all ridiculed today. But they were traditionally throughout time and space, very important, whether in Greece or Rome or Renaissance, Italy or, [00:52:00] uh, during the, in, even during the enlightenment. This idea that a Western citizen has roots and loyalties and patriotism and.

Nationhood that makes ’em distinct. And I guess the left feels that after World War I or World War ii, patriotism was a bad word, or nationalism was a bad word, but they haven’t replaced it with anything international. Marxism or internationalism or cosmopolitanism has a, i I, if anybody will show me the, the, uh, the fruits of that, of that project, I’d be curious because when they tell me, well, internationalism allows free trade and allows commerce on the seas, I say, no, it doesn’t.

The US Navy does take away the US Navy and you’ve got the Pirates and the Red Sea everywhere, take away nato, and you’ve got chaos. So it’s still nations and partnerships and alliances, not internationalism.

John Anderson: And at the heart of that, surely is this idea that [00:53:00] all cultures are equal, uh, when in reality they are not.

Some have plainly established. On very different grounds, I would say in the west. Uh, you know, they, they’re the sort of Judeo-Christian idea of the dignity and worth of every individual in the eyes of a higher authority. Whether we agree with ’em or like them or are clever than them is irrelevant. We have to have a, a, a reasonable degree of respect for them.

And all of that’s being washed out. But they, uh, you talk about the hollowing out of the middle classes, my understanding is that real wages in the United States are flatline now for something like four decades. Yes. And that the increase in consumption’s been debt financed. Yes. We’ve had a series of

Victor Davis Hanson: re Sorry.

Yeah, well go ahead. Four decades of static, but 12 years of actual real decline. Well, this is really

John Anderson: frightening when it comes to the heart of, I think, Uh, the cultural problem for those who say, ah, you can [00:54:00] be a, um, a personal, uh, progressive and liberal, but an economic conservative. It’s not working out that way.

Victor Davis Hanson: Not working out that

John Anderson: way at all. No, because if you stop and look at it, the problem of flatlining real wages has been made much worse by inappropriate responses to something that should never have happened if people hadn’t lost their moral compass, which was the great financial crisis. Covid has accelerated it and

Victor Davis Hanson: inappropriate responses, knee

John Anderson: jerk reactions playing to populism on climate change.

I’m not saying I’m a climate change denier, I’m not, but what I am saying is, sound policy is a world away from bad knee jerk policy. They’re turbocharging this terrible problem of the squeezing of the middle classes while the T-shirt had, uh, billionaires. Team up almost like a new Cleary. Uh, as I think, uh, Joel Potkin puts it with the greens, with the activists with [00:55:00] in the background of weak government and technocrats to say, we’re not gonna give up our lifestyle.

They are becoming richer and richer every day. Asset prices continue to explode. People can’t, young people can’t get into homes. My Australian listeners will know that I talk about this quite a lot, but the squeezing of the middle classes and almost a sort of, um, uh, Marie Antoinette desire to say, well, just let them meat cake because we’ve gotta get on with saving the

Victor Davis Hanson: plant.

Elites & The Declining Middle Class

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. We see that in California. Where’s the leadership from? People who ought to know better? Well, you mentioned culture and religion and things of that sort, and when you were very, very wealthy. I. It’s a natural tendency, a natural human arrogance to conflate your ability to make money or to be very successful with infinite wisdom and, and entitlement.

And a lot of these people feel that reason, pure reason or per your logic and their own brains [00:56:00] got them where they were. So they don’t believe in a transcendent soul. They don’t believe in a hereafter. And how that manifests itself in the real world, they love humanity in the abstract, let’s save global warming.

Let’s have a policy. But the, the humans before them, they have no concern for, uh, there’s no sermon on the mount. Worry about the hungry and the poor. And you can really see that tote, uh, totemic. Example is John Kerry. He’s always worried about the fate of mankind, but he’s willing to be culpable to destroying gas and oil production as he jets around in this private jet, and that will destroy the livelihoods of millions of Americans it is now as we speak.

I know people that, uh, Second generation Mexican-American people I met today that said that they can’t fill their gas for $5 a gallon and they can’t go do their landscaping or their work. If they have to [00:57:00] pay $6, they won’t be able to do it yet. John Carey is worried whether Vladimir Putin will be a partner and believe me, he will be a partner and into restricting emissions, cuz that’ll mean, uh, more oil for him and less for others.

So I think it’s partly that arrogance. And then finally the real world manifest manifestations of what you’re talking about when you lose a middle class and they’re not viable. You can see it in this country, 1.7 trillion in aggregate student debt and tuition rose higher than the price of an. Have annual price of inflation.

And the mor, the federal government, eliminated this moral hazard. So the universities just loaned and loaned and loaned. The federal government said, we’ll loan, we’ll back it up and back it up. The students pay supposedly, or to pay, uh, their tuition debts about 50 to 60, 70,000 per student. And there were, there were ramifications of that.

The age when Americans get. Married has [00:58:00] gone from 23 to, to about 28. The, the age when they have their first child has gone all the way up into their early thirties. The fertility rate just in 25 years has gone from 2.1 to 1.7. The age when they can buy a house is gone up to their middle and late 40 thirties.

And, you know, we’re back up to a high, uh, inability to buy a house. We only have about 63%. We were up to 64. I think now we’re 62%. I’m gonna correct myself, uh, that our homeowners, and I think this is true of the Western world in general, it’s sort of what Tocqueville said in democracy in America, that you would have a prolonged adolescent when there was not an economically viable system of free market capitalism that allowed.

The middle class to, to thrive and to profit and to have property pass it on a home. Then they would become wards of the state life of Julia [00:59:00] Pajama boy here in this country where they expect, you know, they just want to, if you remember the pajama ad that the Obama administration ran a guy in his pajamas sometime, I guess midday is drinking hot chocolate and he’s urging everybody to vote for Obamacare.

But, uh, the Ukrainians can’t afford to do that and other people can’t. And it’s, it’s a lotus eater narcotic for Western societies. This strange phenomenon with grown men, young men that are not. Plugging into the economy or they feel they either cannot or they’re, they will not man up to it. Go get a job, get married, have children, buy a home.

You know, that’s culture. And the culture then reflects the economic inability. They justify it and they, they say it’s great, but really it’s just a, an artifact or reaction to the fact as you point out, that economically it’s getting very hard to do.

John Anderson: It raises the question, how long can you opiate the people?[01:00:00]

I mean, ultimately, uh, the French Revolution showed that, uh, people will break out in extremely ugly ways and if they’re not careful, land themselves in an even greater mess. Um, as I look at America and I think of its very proud tradition of, um, Individualism of people accepting their responsibilities of working hard, the so-called Protestant work ethic, all of the things that they talked about, talked about so long ago.

Surely that’s latent to some, some degree. Please tell me it is. Uh, people like you and, and I know Jordan Peterson, uh, other media outlets like The Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro, they’ve got audiences now on the tens of millions of America, uh, around America and indeed around the world. Um, the National Review recently reported that millions of parents across the country are fighting back against the spread of critical race theory, and that’s had political implications in America by protesting its presence in their schools.

At at least you’ve got a culture or sometimes in [01:01:00] Australia, it seems to be impossible to move anyone, but the point really is, do you think this can change anything? I know Jordan Peterson, I don’t wanna put words in his mouth, but in a recent conversation, he said to me, you know, this is where you will change opinions.

Now, you won’t be able to do it through the mainstream media. They won’t concentrate well enough. They’re too interested in conflict. They’re too lacking in professionalism. There’s only a very few high quality journals left that explore ideas. But you go online, the very thing we’re doing here, I mean, I’m unashamedly trying to inject a higher quality of reason and debate into the public arena because I don’t think you can get good public policy without it.

But I guess the question is, how optimistic are you that in view of everything that’s happening? I mean, I mentioned that Australians have got a surprising handle on where the real dangers, they understand how dangerous Ukraine is, even though it’s so far away. They understand that China’s an even greater danger, which shows you that the elites haven’t been totally successful in hoodwinking, the people.

How do you see [01:02:00] it in America unfolding? Are you optimistic that perhaps there can be a turnaround?

Rogan, Shapiro & The 'New Wave'

Victor Davis Hanson: I’ve been more optimistic than I ever have been the last five years, and for a variety of, uh, indicators. I’ve never seen the left. So paranoid. They tried to destroy, who’s not really conservative. He’s a, he is a empiricist moderate Joe Rogan.

He’s got a larger audience than Al, than all the network news combined. And for one word or inarticulate expression than, or they misrepresent him. They try to destroy him. They’ve tried to destroy Jordan. Jordan Peterson. They are so paranoid that they censor Facebook, Twitter. They looked at what happened with the Canadian truckers here and they stopped GoFundMe.

In other words, they think to themselves, we own all the institutions of communication and influence. Wall Street Media, Silicon Valley, K through 12, academia, the foundation, sports, entertainment. And yet these stupid people are still not with us. And they look at this [01:03:00] midterm and if you look at some of the polls, they’re.

There’s an old truism in American politics that the Republicans on a generic question can get within minus five. When a person answers, who will you vote on the ticket? The person with a Republican or a Democratic affiliation, if they say Republican, but there are only five down than the Republicans usually win because they have greater organization and and turnout.

Right now it ranges from anywhere from plus seven all the way up to plus 12, depending on the poll. So you’ve got record anger, the Republican party ins making. Uh, inroads in minorities, uh, here in the San Joaquin Valley of California. I’ve never seen anything like it talking to, uh, Mexican American second generation Americans, they sound like they’re a mixture of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

They don’t want anybody telling them that they have to pay for transgendered operations. They don’t believe in abortion on [01:04:00] demand. They do not want people coming across the border into their communities that have criminal records. They don’t understand why they have to pay $5 a gallon for a San Francisco pie in the sky dream of some wealthy person.

So, and then we look at the midterms, and unlike 2010 or 1994, where the Republicans made enormous gains in a, a first term presidency, they started way down, John The house is almost even. So when they talk about 30 or 40 seats, That’s not winning. You know, that’s like winning 70 when you’re 30 down and if you lose four and the Senate’s already even, they lose four or five seats.

And essentially within months, I. This progressive agenda will stop and it will have to hinge on either a court ordered agenda by a liberal judge or an executive order by Joe Biden. And unlike [01:05:00] Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who had enormous care, charismatic influence and abilities, there were very articulate, they were young, they were dynamic, and they had unpopular agendas.

But by the sheer weight of the personas, they were able to push these agenda through. Joe Biden is a very old and infirm 79, and he, he was never, uh, eloquent and he was always petulant. And those, those traits unfortunately have been accentuated. So I don’t see a good future for them. I, I look around the party and I say, Nancy Pelosi is 81.

James Clyburn, the, the majority of whip is 82. I think Chuck Schumer’s 74, they don’t have a lot of youthful. Uh, energetic leadership. And when you talk about a Ben Shapiro or Joe Rogan or any of these grassroots people, they, uh, it’s very funny. They don’t reference their bas PhDs, MAs journalism degrees, even though [01:06:00] many of ’em are highly educated.

Their appeal is their performance, whereas the left of all ideologies, they are the most, uh, antiquated. And they hire and they reference by their, the school they went to, their certification, uh, seen. I work for the New York Times. I have a PhD in journalism from Columbia, this kind of stuff. So they’re ossified, they’re calcified, and the real dynamic fluidity podcast videos.

Talk radio, it’s kind of the, it, it thrives because it’s sort of like in the arena, thumbs up and thumbs down, and the popular audience reacts to it. And I grew up with this idea that all these sixties people were, you know, they’re marching on the Pentagon, marching on the capitol, marching on, uh, the TV station.

Well now they’re all in those places and their idea of a revolution is become a kind of a Stalinist [01:07:00] bloated apparat Check on the mayday dais as you watch the, the missiles on Mayday parade. And they’re like the Soviets. They’re old, they’re tired, they’re intolerant, they’re paranoid. That’s the left. And I think in the West, and the energy now is with the right part of it’s because youth are always rebellious against the orthodoxy.

But part of it is that, um, They’re very afraid of what the left wants for them. The left does not believe in civil liberties anymore. In fact, it believes in the opposite. It believes in the powers of the fbi, the cia, the nsa, to spy, to surveil, to use powers of government for superior moral means. They feel they want the tools so they can enact a, a superior moral vision for us.

So I think I’m very optimistic. I have never seen anything, and I, I speak to you as I know that I’ve come on before John, and been a little bit pessimistic, but things are rapidly changing here. And Ukraine is sort of, uh, a wake [01:08:00] up call on a lot of fronts here in the United States. I was listening to a senator today who has voted against every energy and, uh, initiative and I, and he was asked on the radio, deliber, are you going to support fracking?

And are you, and he said, I’ve always supported fracking. What are you doing this to me? I mean, he just blatantly lied because he felt that to reveal his true intentions was a suicide packed in November.

John Anderson: Uh, what are, what sort of names should we, uh, in other parts of the world look to, uh, as rising stars politically in America?

We have a great interest in this. We want America to pull itself back together. I mean, we’re great believers in the free world. And you are still the dominant player.

Victor Davis Hanson: No, uh, I think on the political scene there’s a lot of, uh, there’s a lot of dynamic people, I think whether Trump runs or whether he gets the nominations.

Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton, [01:09:00] Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio’s matured a great deal from when we last saw him. And, uh, Ben Shapiro, obviously Candace Owens, uh, Jordan Peterson’s very influential. Joe Rogan. These are all people who made it on their own talents. It wasn’t an old boy network that said, you know, your Yale dean calls CBS vice president to get you a job.

So they’re, they’re bureaucratic people. And, uh, in each of these fields we’re talking about, when I look at academia and I see who are the innovative people who are challenging orthodoxy, say, where I work at the Hoover Institution, and they’re people who are pariahs and you know, Neil Ferguson, the historian, not the, uh, the Oxford epidemiologist modeler, but he’s become very influential and he is becoming more and more conservative.

Andrew Roberts, who’s a visitor, the the biographer, uh, Scott Atlas, who was ridiculed and defamed [01:10:00] is, uh, very inspirational because all of what he said about our medical protocols has been, Con confirmed and what he warned us about was right, even though he was destroyed and and smeared. So there’s people that I work with, Tom Soulless, still active.

I’m, I’m very proud to have their association, even though they’re considered eccentric or outliers. But, uh, I, I think there’s a lot of, of reasons to be happy. And one of the, in our country, this will. We will succeed or fail in the degree to which, whether it was wise or not, opening our borders and destroying the immigration policy.

We have led in 50 million people now who were not born in the United States, and we have a lot of people who are Hispanic, African-American, and mixed heritage who have been told by the Democratic Party that you will be a victim and we will identify the victimizers of you and they’re white, [01:11:00] male, Christian, heterosexual, uh, middle class people, and that that message is boomeranging.

And so, We’re seeing astronomical changes. Uh, I, I’ve never in my own community, if you had told me that 45% of the Mexican-American vote voted for Donald Trump or that Californians, would we call a school board by 73% of leftists, and I shouldn’t say Californians, John, I mean San Francisco liberals, and here in state, we voted to maintain Prop 2 0 9, which forbid the use of race as a criterion for admissions and hiring in California.

So I think part of it is that we can’t take credit for it on the right. This is the first administration and my memory that was unapologetically socialist or hard left, and they wanted the reigns of power, and they got it legislatively, judicially, and executively. And what did they do? This has been the greatest disaster of any first [01:12:00] year president and memory.

Every single issue is underwater. Every single issue has failed. The people. Whether they’re left or right, black, white, male or female, they say, I can’t afford gas. I have $10,000 in the bank. That’s all I have. I get zero interest. It’s declined in value by seven or 8%. I don’t know anything about real estate.

I can’t even buy a house. I don’t know how to invest in the stock market. I only have a passbook account. I just heard that story the other day. They go in and buy plywood. I put some plywood on this home. A year ago, John. It was $7 for four by eight sheet of ply, five eight inch fly, uh, plywood. And I was told by the roofer, guess what, Victor?

We’re in luck. We got plywood for $55 a sheet. Wow. It’s not 90, it’s not 90 anymore like it was a few months ago. 90. Wow. These are astronomical changes. I flew over the Port of Los Angeles over the weekend. I’ve never seen anything like it. John, [01:13:00] there were ships, they looked like, um, a checkerboard, just these huge tankers, cargo ships all backed up because the port is dysfunctional and I guess covid mandates or, or high price, labor, whatever the particular or regulations on the part of California.

And so as we were. Turning in this, it was a prop plane. We also looked at the train yard and it was scattered with trash where people had been looting. The Union Pacific trains coming out of the port. And I said to myself, this is what, this is the face of chaos. And it was chaos incurred in one year, and it was self-induced, it was suicidal, it was cannibalistic, and everybody’s seen that.

So we have a gr I hope we don’t blow it. We have a great opportunity on the traditional side. Just tell the people, this is why you’re dissatisfied. We agree with you. And here are is a protocol or an agenda or contract that will, [01:14:00] that will fortify your worries and institutionalize changes. So we never get back to this, this, uh, terrible place we have been in.

On

John Anderson: the issue of blowing it, it does.

Living In An 'Emocracy'

John Anderson: Uh, there, there’s an aspect of this that really concerns me. You mentioned Neil Ferguson, his wife, a Hersey Arley says that we’re in danger of no longer living in a democracy, but in an democracy where everybody emotes and confuses as Thomas. So puts it thinking and feeling.

I think feeling is thinking. We must, I think, avoid the trap as we push against the left. That’s is strangely unacquainted with facts, data, reason and reasonableness not to fall into that same trap. We want to argue the facts and not deny our own commitment to recognizing the worth and dignity of even people we vehemently disagree with.

I think that’s been so alienating in our culture and it’s one of the great Achilles heels of their progressives, their nastiness. We’ve gotta avoid falling into [01:15:00] that trap, it seems to me. Do you, do you have a

Victor Davis Hanson: view? I do. I, I think that we have to do two things. As I look at the. I, I try to look back at ancient revolutions in Greece and Rome, or what brought the jacobins to power, or what brought the Bolsheviks to power.

And I think there’s, there’s two lessons. People have to be courageous and forthright and honest to oppose that, and they can’t sit by the sidelines or the minority will seize power and destroy their culture and their nation. But by the same token, I agree with you that in their zealousness to defeat that danger, they can’t alienate people.

Trump's Putin Comments

Victor Davis Hanson: And I’ll give you an example of what I mean. And I voted for Donald Trump. I’m a big supporter and we’ve talked about that. But the other day, he gave a speech to cpac. It was a good speech, but at one point he said, Putin is a genius, but he gave a whole. Preface [01:16:00] about all the bad things Putin did. And he meant to say that Putin had figured out us, and therefore he was a genius and we were appeasing and weak, and therefore we were dumb.

But as it came out, he didn’t use a qualifying adjective. And so the, the headlines, the next nanosecond was Trump calls Putin a genius, his own president, dumb. Whereas if he had just said, Putin is one of those evil geniuses, one of those dangerous geniuses, and if he had just said, Biden is acting tragically dumb or unfortunately dumb.

So we, we, on the, the, the right and conservatives have to be very, very careful given the media is against us and the popular culture to be very careful in the, the words we say, the expressions we use, and it’s much better to be quiet. And smiling and [01:17:00] carry a club than it is to be angry and loud with a twig.

So my, I guess my advice to conservatives is the more that you can be civil, the more forceful you can be, and the more that you want to go down a cul-de-sac and argue and scream and yell and, and, uh, smear somebody, the less clout you’re gonna have. And I would rather have a lot of clout and not pick fights, uh, that are gratuitous.

Well,

John Anderson: the whole idea of citizenship, I think, is that we do accord every one of our fellow human beings, a degree of appropriate respect and dignity. And you’ve been very generous with your time, but I actually want to just read in something that Roger Kimball wrote about your book, because it summarizes what we’ve been talking about, and I think I’m just keen for people to pick it up and read it.

Uh, he says that, uh, you’ve shown that political freedom is inextricable. From the life of citizenship and [01:18:00] citizenship is not a given. It’s an achievement and an achievement, moreover, that must be tended to survive. Most of history unfolded without citizens only subjects, surfs, slaves and sycophants, and just as there were ages before citizenship.

So we can see from our own experience that citizenship can decay and fail. Those are, I think, um, very powerful words and a great summation of, of, of the ideas that you are so effective at getting across. And I’m certainly trying to get across myself as an Australian who believes in the dignity of all and, and the idea of people coming together in a democracy hanging onto their freedoms, recognizing that they own their freedoms, and we only surrender such freedoms as we need to for the common good by consent to government, whereas we live in a world that wants to

Victor Davis Hanson: reverse that.

Very fragile, and you can see that with a con.

Summing Up Our Times

Victor Davis Hanson: I I, [01:19:00] if somebody had told me five years ago that Justin Trudeau would declare a martial law and seize the assets of people, many of whom were protesting peacefully and take their trucks away from them, I would never believe it in Canada. But on the other hand, if somebody had believed, had told me five years ago that during the covid lockdown until recently in my own hometown, if you were a small mom and top flower sh store or shoe owner, you would be shut down by Walmart who sold.

Shoes and flowers would be wide open, and that decision would be made by an unelected bureaucrat, and it would have the force of law. I wouldn’t have believed that. So we’ve gotta be vigilant because we have to realize that we’re an aberration historically. And contemporaneously citizenship is, is there’s fewer demo democratic or constitutional governments in the world today than non constitutional governments.

And that’s a natural order of things for men [01:20:00] to be too busy or not equipped to handle the burdens of citizenship. And we can lose it any time, even in your country. And I know I get this third hand because I’m not, I’m not in your country, but it seems to me that you suffered the same perils and challenges that we did with the lockdown and that you, you went after people, um, that might have had, let’s say a very severe case of covid with a high antibody level.

And yet they either were worried about getting a vaccination because of the reaction or I don’t know. But here in the United States, as in Australia, we had people who might’ve had one vaccination but not the second, or they chose not to get a booster, or they were just so, they had very high levels of antibodies.

And yet, We, we stripped away their constitutional rights and more importantly, we demonized them. We said they were subversives, they were gonna kill us. They were, we, we made them second tier citizens. I, I went into [01:21:00] New York with a restaurant and I had the two Moderna shots and a, a case of Covid and a very high antibody level, and the person that was ahead of me was talking to me in line and he was, Asking me, have you ever had an antibody test?

I said, yeah, doctor gave it to me without my knowledge, and it was 2,400, which is very high. And he said, mine was off the scale too, but he said, let’s see what happens. So he went ahead of me and they would not let him in to eat. And they said, no, you can’t get in here. You don’t have a, even though natural immunity we find out later, was as pha as as effective, uh, in most cases as the vaccination.

And these, these decisions were not made in a democratic fashion. They were made by an Anthony Fauci or Mr. Collins at the C d C. So Covid like Ukraine have been wake up calls. I think, uh, to us all that what we inherited is very, very tenuous, fragile transitory if we’re not careful. [01:22:00]

Conclusion

John Anderson: You’ve been very generous with your time.

I, I deeply appreciate it. Uh, and let’s press, press on wherever we can seeking with reason. With firm politeness, with respectful engagement to push it back against the enemies of freedom from within and without. That’s what we now confront. So I, I really

Victor Davis Hanson: appreciate your time. Well, thank you. And I have, uh, high regard for your show, John and I, I’m always delighted to come on and talk to your audience.

Thank you. Did you enjoy this episode? We cannot get good public policy out of a bad debate. If you value vital conversations like this one, please, like, share some, subscribe, and join the conversation.