An evening with Victor Davis Hanson (updated 10oct18)

George Rebane

Last Saturday evening we loaded some friends in the car and headed for the Grand Sheraton in Sacramento to attend a fundraiser for Congressman Tom McClintock.  We’ve known Tom for years and continue to support him in our neighboring congressional district.  The evening featured a talk and Q&A with Victor Davis Hanson.  Professor Hanson is “an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets.”  He is also an award-winning, endowed senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

I have been a student of VDH for many years, and along with our friends, we were not going to pass up this opportunity to hear him in person.  Well, the lavishly catered evening turned out even better than expected.  We got there early and ran into the congressman in the hall, and after greetings and conversation who should walk up but Prof Hanson.  Tom greeted him warmly, graciously introduced me, and then left the two of us to chat.  We had a wonderful one-on-one for almost thirty minutes as we and the gathering crowd waited for the ballroom doors to be opened.

McClintock called the event to order, gave one of the best introductions that I have heard from a politician at his own fundraiser – a concise but warm welcome, proper summary of his guest's vitae, and mercifully short thank-yous to the event’s sponsors.  The good professor took to the podium and delivered a 30-45 minute talk that framed today’s national politics from an historical perspective, and then detailed the events and political tactics that have so split the country into factions that share few social objectives and no longer effectively communicate with each other.  After that, he took questions for about an equal period of time.  No one felt rushed, and there was plenty of time to delve deeper into the issues - a wonderfully cordial and informative evening.

It was no surprise to me from our private conversation and his invited talk, that the good professor’s historical interpretations and political observations flew in fairly tight formation with the Rebane Doctrine tenets published in these pages.  (In other words, we are both “alt-right” birds of a feather according to the local lefties who disparage yet track every word in these pages.)  I’ll conclude this report with a selection of Dr Hanson’s observations and talking points.

1. Obama’s administration was the most scandalized administration in recent memory.
2. Judge Kavanaugh’s rebuttal of Judiciary Committee Dems was on the mark, and of better ‘temperament’ than shown by Justice Ginsburg viz the Trump election.
3. The right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty has been thrown out by the Dems and the media with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
4. CA is now an Orwellian state in which the middle-class has the nation’s highest tax rate, 20% of Californians live in (official) poverty, with one-third of the nation’s poverty stricken taking up residence in CA.
5. “Those who rule in California are never subject to their own ideology.” (e.g. Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, …)  “They can afford to be liberal at someone else’s expense.”
6. “Fences work and have always worked.” Examples – Israel today, Great Wall of China, Maginot Line, Zuckerberg’s private residence, … .  (Fences are militarily known as fixed field fortifications, they are cost-effective and work only to the extent that they are also manned.  They are NOT a ‘build and forget’ part of any defensive infrastructure.)
7. CA has the best natural water resources, and has had the best waterworks in the world, which began deteriorating and proving insufficient for California’s growth in 1983 when further expansion was halted.
8. President Trump has “restored the idea of deterrence” and put in place the best foreign policy and team in recent memory.
9. The US is becoming, or has already become a tribal nation.
10. The new “Socialist Democratic Party” has replaced the former Democratic Party.
11. There no longer exists any visible ‘common ground’ in the national debate between the global socialists and nationalistic capitalists – i.e. the Great Divide is already forming.
12. There is a very slim chance that our electorate will see the light in time to pull the nation out of its death spiral into global socialism.

[10oct18 update]  VDH has summarized the Kavanaugh confirmation affair that also gives lie to the charge that President Trump somehow dissed Dr Ford in his speech recounting the distressed lady's dreadfully fractured testimony to the Judiciary Committee.  His piece - 'One Ford Narrative Too Many' - examines the entire episode from a larger perspective and is worth a read.

Comments

[Todd Juvinall]

VDH is a common sense man. I always listen and usually agree with his analysis.

[Bill Tozer]

VHD’s 12 points as related by Dr. Rebane are irrefutable. Yes, I throughly enjoy and concur with his writings and thoughts. I do like the fact that he moved into the old family house outside of Fresno and has his eyes and ears on the ground to what has happened to his road, his next door neighbors, his neighborhood, his state....not as someone living and writing inside the Beltway. Not a elistist, not a snob, as Dr. Rebane can testify.

I also found it refreshing that a group of 30 somethings revere him as a unparalleled military historian at a recent get together. A very pleasant surprise as the youngin’s ran circles around my knowledge by reading VHD’s books.

[Russ]

VDH is often a panelist on Fox News Ingraham Angle at 7 PM. His contributions are more insightful than most of the other panelist. We always look forward to his segments.

[Todd Juvinall]

Looks like the FUE is jealous he was not invited to meet XDH. These liberals are so nutty.

[Russ]

The FUE's readership must be lagging? When ever he needs to fire up the readership numbers he attacks RR.

[George Rebane]

ToddJ 333pm - Thanks Todd, I really do believe that he gives 'butt stupid' a new depth of meaning - really! When was the last time we heard an idea out of the FUE? Ideologically he is nothing but a cut & paste artist, no thoughts from the high vacuum between his ears.

[Russ]

VDH: The Case for Trump

Why America needed--and needs--President Donald J. Trump

In The Case for Trump, award-winning historian and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson explains how a celebrity businessman with no political or military experience triumphed over sixteen well-qualified Republican rivals, a Democrat with a quarter-billion-dollar war chest, and a hostile media and Washington establishment to become president of the United States--and an extremely successful president.

Trump alone saw a political opportunity in defending the working people of America's interior whom the coastal elite of both parties had come to scorn, Hanson argues. And Trump alone had the instincts and energy to pursue this opening to victory, dismantle a corrupt old order, and bring long-overdue policy changes at home and abroad. We could not survive a series of presidencies as volatile as Trump's. But after decades of drift, America needs the outsider Trump to do what normal politicians would not and could not do--a fact that explains the furor directed at Trump by the political and media status quo.

Available in March 2019.

[Bill Tozer]

I am hearing the phrase ‘post-modernism ’ more and more as of late.

VDH: Campus Chaos has come to Congress
“One belief of the university is the postmodern idea of relativist truth.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-hearings-campus-chaos-comes-to-congress/

[Barry Pruett]

Those are many of the reasons we’ll be leaving California in the future. My wife (born and raised in California) says all the time that this current state is not where she grew up. Thank you for your thoughtful insight Mr. Rebane.

[Paul Emery]

George
You summarize that Victor Davis Hanson believes the Obama Administration is the "most scandalized administration in recent memory." Does "recent memory" include Nixon-Agnew?

[George Rebane]

PaulE 158pm - I appears that he stops somewhere around the half-century mark. Probably since most Americans alive today don't even remember what happened 20 years ago.

[Paul Emery]

So George you believe he does not include Nixon-Agnew in his survey of "the most scandalized administration in recent memory."

[Bill Tozer]

Dr. Rebane. I am most interested to hear more on VDH’s point #10.

10. The new “Socialist Democratic Party” has replaced the former Democratic Party.

I am not convinced of that...yet. I have been wrestling for 20 months if the media is dragging the Dem Party father to the Left than where “mainstream” Lefties are or if the media is taking its cues from the Far Left. Or if all of them are part and parcel of the Leftinista Industrial Government Media Complex.

We have witnessed the media from the very second Trump was elected organize to oppose him. Pre and post Inauguration. Everyday, every issue, every breathing second the media has been the resistance...even to the point of their own detriment, their credibility, and the destruction of the nation....and 4th Estate. All enemies, foreign and domestic describes our lamestream media and their fakenews brethen.

I have always gone by the historical figures of the mid-20th Century to present that about 19-22% of the USA voters considered themselves real liberals (far left). Hit 24% once, but only for a brief period. Could be 30% now. Like the Women’s March, the leadership has been taken over by extremists and SJW’s, but does the rank and file go with the Jew hating, man hating, white folk hating, Age of Englishtment hating trash talk coming from the leaders? I hope not.

If VDH believes the Far Left Antifa/ Marxists gangsters have taken over the former Dem Party and the rank and file is going along, that is a big game changer. Any elaboration?

[George Rebane]

BillT 809pm - Mr Tozer, the Democratic Party is in more of an identity crisis than even the Republicans. The sorting out of whose ideology is more left or socialist is being played out also in the launch of the Progressive Party USA which claims to have calved itself from the Democrats. I'm not sure that VDH was not referring to the formation of the PPUSA. See also my 'What the Kavanaugh Confirmation ...'.

[Bill Tozer]

VDH: Epitaph for a Dying Culture.

An idea of retirement is not merely a house by the lake or a cottage on the coast to die in peace, but now a mental refuge in which we are at last free from 24/7 sermonizing and worry over thought crimes, both in person and electronically—a world in which a sermonizer on a computer screen or in a television set does not lecture us for perceived shortcomings without acknowledgment that he is more likely than not to also fail to meet his own standards of morality.

In other words, America is resembling the medieval Balkans, where spent traditionalists fled to the mountaintops, abandoned the plains of a dying culture to the new zealots who stormed in under the pretense of civilization.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/epitaph-dying-culture

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