Voices of Freedom - Interview with Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

An Interview with Victor Davis Hanson The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation The principles enshrined in the US Constitution have historically united us as Americans. We may have different customs, backgrounds or religious beliefs from our fellow citizens, but we share the values of freedom and the rule of law that are afforded to us as citizens.  Increasingly however, people are gravitating towards tribalism and identity politics, undermining the foundational beliefs that have traditionally brought us together. That division is sowing seeds of discord and preventing us from solving the country’s greatest challenges. Can America course correct? Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is scholar and author Victor Davis Hanson. He addresses that question and shares his thoughts on the events that will influence the US for decades to come.  Topics Discussed on this Episode: ·         How Victor’s experience growing up on a California fruit farm shaped his life ·         Victor’s path from farmer to academic and why he chooses to remain on the farm ·         The danger of identity politics and the move away from a multiracial single culture ·         The end game for the clash of cultures ·         How the revolutionary events of the past few years will impact the US ·         Whether American society is in the midst of decline ·         What gives Victor hope for the future of US and Western civilization  Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of several books and hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials about classical military history and its many lessons. Victor was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and a Bradley Prize in 2008.  He is also a member of the Bradley Foundation board of directors.        

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. I think that most of us would agree that one of America's greatest strengths is its founding principles as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The guarantee and protection of free speech, freedom of religion, economic freedom, they're all bedrock principles that have allowed the citizens of our country of very divergent backgrounds to unite, to live peacefully, and to prosper. Yet, more and more,

there's a sense that Americans are splintering, choosing tribalism over patriotism, which has really sowed a deep division and distrust within the country. Few have written or spoken more extensively about the dangers of strain from the founding ideals than our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Iliander Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's the author of many books and hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials about classical military history and its many lessons. Victor was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and a Bradley

Prize in 2008. He's also a valued member of the Bradley Foundation's Board of Directors. Welcome, Victor. It is great to have you. Thank you for having me, Rick. Victor, you have a really unique background for a scholar. Grew up on a farm in California. It's been in your family for generations. You still live on that farm and tend to it to this day. What was it like growing up there, and how do you think it influenced your worldview? When you're growing up on a farm, you don't think that it's such a great advantage. I grew up with my grandparents. I'm living in right now, I'm speaking from my grandparents' house who inherited it from their grandparents. And I'm hoping my dogs don't bark. But, you know, everybody has to work all the time. So come home from school, work on weekends, work.

And you get constant reminders of your grandfather tells you what it was like when they had the first Jubilee tractor. And then he tells you what your great grandfather was like. And your mother tells you not to shame the family and your father, that kind of stuff. So when I was 18, I kind of broke away and went away to college, and then I lived overseas and went to graduate school. And that took a time to appreciate when I was in the coastal elite, so to speak, at Stanford or the American School in Athens. I realized that I should come back here and not go elsewhere.

And that was because I was very close to my parents. I was very close to my, I had a crippled aunt that lived in this house with my grandparents. I took care of my grandmother from age 90 to 93. My wife and I did, took care of my crippled aunt for a year before she died. My mother died early. We took care of her. All of everybody died on the ranch here, but it was hard work. It was not a guilt culture. It was a shame culture. You didn't feel bad inside. You felt bad if you had vis tried to inculcate those values to my own children. That's been a little harder because the town is now 25,000. We're at the nexus of illegal immigration. So when I look at it, some days like yesterday when the pump went out, some pipes were leaking on the ranch. We have a dog that's dying. He won't eat And just, I have some trees that are dying. The almond price is

terrible. You feel like you just like to cash out and go live in a condo on the coast. But I never really seriously decided to do that. Fascinating. At what point, it must have been when you were a kid, did you decide that a career as a scholar would be the way you wanted to go and specifically to focus on military history and classics? Did you think about that as a young child? No. Well, I was always reading. I had brothers that were very athletic and they were very good students. And I was just different in the sense that I had very poor eyesight. They were 20-20. They were right-handed.

I was left-handed. They were very athletic and excelled in high school. I was mediocre. And out of that, and there were four of us boys, so they always wanted to have games two-on-two, and I always wanted to read. And then when I went away to college, my mother actually had graduated from Stanford and was one of the first women ever to graduate from Stanford Law School in 1946. And then she came back here and did not pursue a law group degree until she was 40. She eventually became the second appellate court judge in California that was a woman. But she had always told me, your brothers are good at math. One will be a biologist. One will be, was a writer and you can be a lawyer with me. And then I went to UC

Santa Cruz and I found out, I took a class in Western Civ and the professor, John Lynch was, he said, you know, you're very good in this particular area of essay writing, history, language. Why don't you study Latin and Greek? And I'd never even heard of it. It was my first semester. So I just, he said, but you can cram everything in, because I had taken all the requisites and advanced placement in high school, so I had no requirements anymore,

and I took for three years just Latin and Greek classes, nothing else. And then I went to Greece and studied archaeology in my junior year. And then I won a scholarship. Everything paid to Stanford PhD program. I never in my right mind thought there's no jobs for classicists. You could really help your parents out by being a lawyer. And so when I was 25, I got a kind of an early PhD.

Right when I was going to turn 26, I came back here, did not go in the job market. It wasn't a job market to speak of anyway. And for five years, I ran 180 acres with my twin brother. And then things got really bad. And my parents said, why don't you go back to academia? So I walked into Fresno State. I'd never really been on the campus. I'm 30 miles away, and I asked to teach Latin.

And they said no for three years. And then finally, they gave me one Latin class. Then everything worked out well. Five years later, we had a classics program and four professors. And it worked out well. But I fell into that. And I couldn't write for years because I was farming and teaching. And then all of a sudden, I said to my family, I'm an academic now.

I live on the ranch. I'll help you, but I cannot be a full-time farmer. And then I started having a lot of, even though we had eight classes a semester at the Cal State system. So it was a lot of work, mostly minority students. And that was kind of challenging because they were first generation in their family and teaching Latin and Greek and trying to justify that to the university, which required, you know, full time enrollment goal was difficult. So interesting. Victor, your studies have given you a true understanding of what freedom means and how the goal of freedom inspired America's founders.

I think in many ways, freedom defines what it means to be a citizen of this country, and it's historically united us as a country. Yet for almost a generation now, people have seemed to gravitate towards identity politics rather than viewing all of us as fellow citizens of a great country. What happens when people value tribalism over citizenship? Well, it doesn't have a good history. You can see that in the modern world, whether you look at this factionalism in Iraq or the bloody tribal politics of Northern Africa,

especially maybe in Central Africa, Rwanda. You can see it, what happened to the former Yugoslavia that imploded because of identity politics. We were always fortunate in that we said that we were not a blood and soil country. In other words, American, by 1960, you couldn't necessarily identify them in every case by their superficial appearance, but by a common set of ideals. And then, you know, a lot of things happened that could have been avoided. One of the things we did, we changed the idea of the traditional black-white problem we'd have with Jim Crow and then slavery in the South.

In other words, we went from the melting pot, assimilationist, integrationist, Martin Luther King, content of your character, not color of your skin model, first to affirmative action, which people widely supported. But then that gravitated into what we call de- or woke, and it's almost repertory. And at the same time we did that, we did some other things that were really injurious. We dropped civic education because we didn't want to champion a particular narrative, that is, so-called white European Western narrative, that had been essential to not the white part, but the European Western civ component of freedom, as you spoke about,

constitutional government, secularism, the idea of a free market economy, personal freedom, liberty, all that. And we didn't really teach people that. So we dropped civic education in the 70s. And then to finish the story, we destroyed our borders. So we used to have the idea that we were founded by immigrants. And that was key that they were diverse. They came from all over the world. They came legally. They came to be self-supporting.

The government didn't support them. They came with some knowledge of the system. And they understood that they were rejecting their own country, and they were, by their own volition, coming to a new... That ended with the massive immigration across the Southern border. The Democratic Party under Ted Kennedy in the 60s and 70s, they changed the immigration laws from an Americratic basis to family relations, as the barometer allowed people in. It became largely illegal.

It was not diverse. It was not meritocratic. People came with almost no knowledge of the United States. That would have been possible to handle had we had a Marshall Plan of assimilation and civic education, but we lost confidence in the 70s, 80s. And the result now is, Rick, in terms of percentages, we have the highest number of people who were not born in the United States, 16% of the population, and the history of the country, and we have 60 million people. And that's not calibrating how many came in under the Biden administration. So

that's an enormous task of assimilation, yet we're into the solid paradigm that everybody can... I guess what I'm saying is that multiracialism works under a constitutional system if you have a pledge that race is incidental, not essential to you all. But if you don't, you end up like a democratic Brazil or India, where they're just constant caste and fighting and chaos. And so once we went away from the multiracial single culture to multiculturalism and said, when you come in here or you are a

member of a minority, you can enrich us with art, music, food, literature, but we all agree on the fundamentals of American culture, the Constitution. We don't want the Mexican judicial system. We don't want the Eastern European idea of government. We don't want the Indian Catholic system. But once you said that that was illiberal and that each culture was equal and that there was no need to unite, then we have this factionalism. That the race then is compounding our problems because everybody feels that they have no allegiance to the founding principles

of the Constitution. These culture wars that are being waged now show that Americans have wildly different values and perspectives. And we've seen those differences play out at schools, at libraries, at youth sports, more. I mean, how do you see this clash of culture playing out? What's the end game? I don't think it's possible to compromise. I used to think that because I think the left is not the Democratic Party of old. It's not JFK, Harry Truman. It's not even Bill Clinton. This is the Jacobin Revolutionary Party that is controlled by the squad, by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren. The Obamas have become even more radical in their retirement. And they believe that the country was flawed at its beginning.

It got worse in its maturity, and it's now hopeless. And why do I say that? And that is because they feel that their agenda to fix it, and we've seen it in action at the border with crime in Afghanistan, foreign policy, the Green New Deal, all of that does not warrant 51% approval. And they will never get that agenda in through normal democratic processes. So what they do is they feel they have to do a couple of things that are injurious to the idea of America. And the first is they destroyed the southern border. So they're bringing in what they feel will be future constituents, if not under these new ballot laws, more immediate constituents

that will pay them at the polls for breaking and destroying the immigration system. Second is they want to change the system so they feel that it doesn't work for them after 233 years. And what do I mean by that? Harris, Kamala Harris has promised to pack the court. That used to be a very disgraceful notion in 1937 when Roosevelt tried the Judicial Reform Act, even as Democrats turned on it. And we've had a nine-person court since 1869 because we don't want every administration packing it and then the next one undoing it and repacking it. Yet that's what they want to do. They want to—when we let in states in the post-Civil War era, we were very careful not to politicize it. Yet that's what they want to do. When we let in states in the post-Civil War era, we were very careful not to politicize it. So Alaska was a conservative state. Hawaii was a

liberal state. They came in the 1959-60 cycle. Now they want to bring in Puerto Rico and change the constitutional status of the D.C. to get four senators immediately. They want to get rid of the Electoral College. We've talked about that, the Bradley Foundation, the National Voter Compact. They have no idea why the founders said so. There were a lot of reasons. They wanted to have a geographical balance so the big cities and their culture didn't dominate. They wanted to avoid a fraud by turning over the

voting through the electoral representation rather than a national plebiscite. They thought there'd be less fraud. I could go on, but they want to get it without constitutional remedies for which there are some. They do not want to go through two-thirds of the Congress voting to amend the Constitution. They do not want to have three-fourths of the states ratified. They don't think that'll work. So they're going around it with this compact and they want to pack the court. They want to let in new states. Now they're talking in theory, that the Senate itself is unfair because let's say Wyoming, a senator represents 250,000, California, where we are, it's 20 million.

So they think it should be like the House. So they want to alter this system to get a predetermined result. And that's very dangerous because there's going to be a lot of people who say you're not going to do that. The other thing very quickly is if they have captured the institutions, and I don't mean that in hyperbole, but I think you could say that entertainment, the corporate boardroom for the most part,

Silicon Valley, the media, K-12, academia, all feel that the progressive agenda is so morally superior that they don't have to go through self-audit or transparency. And whether it's on the transgender issue or whether it's on the abortion issue or any of these cultural hot issues, they just want to ram them through through the institutions that they control. So if you have a debate and the moderators, as we saw with the ABC debate, start fact-checking one candidate or demanding that they clarify or kind of massage questions, and then the next debate, the vice-checking one candidate or demanding that they clarify or kind of massage questions. And then the next debate, the vice presidential, they promise they won't do that.

You have an open forum. Then they go right back and break their word and start fact-checking one candidate. Then that destroys the institution. And I don't see how now we're going to have presidential debates in the future. And this was a reaction to what the perceived bias of the federal debate election, you know, debate government sponsored, or it was a private institution sponsored. So everything becomes revolutionary is what I'm trying to say. And we've seen that in the French revolution that was almost near contemporaneous with the American revolution. And it had a very difference. It led to Napoleon and we didn't. And I don't know why they would try to emulate that. Well, let's stay on that topic. You recently observed in a

column that we've had a rapid and very recent series of seismic events that are indeed revolutionary. October 7th, Gaza war, campus protests, COVID, border crisis, weaponization of government. And you wrote that the results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades to come. Elaborate on that. Well, there's two things I think that are symptoms of what I just talked about that we're not even addressing. One is we're witnessing the last 10 years, but especially the last four years, the greatest out-state migrations in our history, much greater than the Oklahoma diaspora or the peopling of the West. We've had somewhere between 10 and 20 million people leave the blue state model in New York, Illinois, California, take three examples, and they prefer living in places,

and I'm a California chauvinist, to be fair, are not as, I think, beautiful or as they used to be as opportunistic, opportune. So they're going to Tennessee, they're going to Nevada, they're going to Utah, they're going to Wyoming, they're going to Florida, and no one is going back to Minnesota or Michigan. The blue state model doesn't work. And that means we're having a geographical force multiplier of ideological differences. And that means that a state like California used to be, you know, Ronald Reagan, George Dick Mason, and then Pete Wilson. Then you had Jerry Brown and Gray Davis. Then you went back to Arnold Schwarzenegger. That was what politics was like. It'll never happen that way. And I think by the same token, I don't think Florida or Tennessee

are going to have a blue governor. And so what I'm getting at is the last time we saw that was a civil war where the issue of slavery was accentuated by a geographical component that made it almost possible to resolve. That's something that I think is very dangerous. The second thing is we've never had 120% debt of GDP outside of a world war. And so right now, the main budget is the entitlements with Medicare and Social Security, the main item of the budget. The second is the interest on the national debt.

It's over a trillion dollars larger than the defense budget. My colleague Neil Ferguson pointed out, I think, first, although others had said so in the past under different circumstances, that any time a nation's interest on their debt exceeds their ability to defend themselves, they're slated for oblivion. And we're having terrible problems with the military in terms of recruitment and stockpiles of weapons, really the type of weapons we have. The strategic responsibilities are not matched by our wherewithal.

So I think debt and this red-blue intensification. And then finally, as a professor, and I still teach at Hillsdale on occasion, and I'm teaching right now World War II course at Pepperdine, I haven't seen a generation that is so unfamiliar with its past or its constitution. I know that all professors say that, but if we were to go on a campus today and go to a protest and we ask people to name five of the Bill of Rights, they couldn't do it. If we ask them anything about the Constitution, Article 1 to it, they could not do it. If we ask to name four founding fathers, they can't. So if you're ignorant of your past, and you feel that you're present, and you're so brilliant, and you are all-knowing in the present,

then you're arrogant and ignorant, are all-knowing in the present, then you're arrogant and ignorant, and that's a really terrible combination. Troubling. And you talked about debt and deficits. It's really troubling that neither party is talking about that either. Neither party. Both George Bush, I mean, he was in a war, but he nearly doubled the debt in eight years. Barack Obama did double the debt. Donald Trump was on a trajectory, had he been there four years more, to have almost doubled the debt.

And this is geometrically, not arithmetically, because the debt is getting bigger. And it looks like Joe Biden in four years spent almost, I think he did spend more than Trump in four years, or he will. And we had the Simpson-Bowles Commission that Obama established to his credit, and it was run by Republican Simpson and Democrat Bowles. And they had a three-tier, very simplified tax code. It wasn't radical at all. It was a 20-year plan how to reduce the deficit and get into where we were under Clinton and Gingrich when they had three years of a balanced budget at the end of the Clinton term. And I was looking at that the other day, Rick, and if we had followed that, in other words, if Obama had not dismissed the

commission, but accepted the proposal of the commissions that he established, we would be next year in a balanced budget situation and starting to pay off. I remember that commission's work and it really never did get any traction whatsoever, which is too bad. Victor, you often talk about the decline of civilizations and you've studied that. Is our society today in the midst of a decline in your view? Yeah, it is. It doesn't mean that it's permanent or everlasting at all. But if you look at certain barometers of the population that we use as historians to calibrate its civilization's vitality, one is inflation. Athenian currency redheads because they began on their silver coins, putting bronze interiors inside. And then when the protruding portrait of a character on the coin started to wear, that was the first thing you saw, the copper red underneath. And the same thing with Diocletian

and the wage and price control, price controls. So I think the debt is a good sign when you get up to over 100% of annual GDP. A second thing, and we don't remark about this, but fertility is a very important sign. And we've gone from about at the millennium 2.0, which is almost reproductive equilibrium, it's about 2.1, 2.2, to about 1.6. And so we are shrinking and we are aging as a society. And nobody's talking about that. Partly it's due to economic causes, that the middle class has been really strapped. Partly it's due to a change in culture. AOC said she never wanted to have children because they would come into a world

where the planet was warming. But whatever the reason is, it's something to think about. And we don't talk about it in the abortion issue. We always talk about abortion in terms of pro-life or pro-choice, understandable. And we don't use the word abortion. We use the word reproductive rights.

What we're really talking about is deproductive rights. That is the right to not reproduce ourselves and to, I guess, not produce ourselves into extinction. And that can happen. And I think that's really the thing. And then the final thing is, if you look at Rome or Byzantium or various New World kingdoms, if you don't protect your borders, it's an old idea. I know that in the postmodern world, it's kind of passe. But if you're Rome and you can't protect the Rhine and Danube, you're in trouble. When Byzantium cannot protect the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, which they had done for a while, they're in trouble. And so you've got to be, I guess the word is, you've got to be modest and say that whatever your paradigm is, that you can't

spread it all over the world. It'll dilute and dissipate. You've got to have a unique culture within defined borders and they have to be protected and immigration's got to be measured diversely. Let's try to end on a high note. You hinted at the beginning of that question that you thought this might be reversible. Yeah, I think it is. Can we reverse the decline? And what gives you hope for the future of Western civilization? Well, as a classicist, there's a pessimistic strain.

And you look at the late republic and early... You look at the poems of Catullus, the satires of Juvenal, the biographies of Suetonius, the fiction of Petronius, and there's a common theme, and that is when a society reaches a level of affluence and leisure, then they forget the essentials, food, housing, and then they struggle, and they become more urban, less agrarian, and the middle class starts to shrink, what they call Latifunia, corporate concentration of land, all of that. And so that's something to worry about. And then we have this other strain in the more modern period of what I'd call the German nihilists. They're not stupid people. I don't agree with them. But if one reads Hegel

or Nietzsche or Oswald Spengler, they take up that classical theme and say the West cannot handle personal freedom when it's combined with market capitalism because you get so much money and leisure that you get an enemy. Unless you force people or you educate them of the dangers of having too much leisure and too much ability for, I guess you'd call, optional spending. And you can do that. So why am I optimistic? In the past, there have been periods like that in the thousand-year Byzantine Empire or the thousand-year Western Republican Empire that were avoided. And how do you avoid them? Religion is one thing. It teaches us that there's something more to our corporal existences and transcendence. And more importantly, your transcendence depends on

how you treat people and how, to the degree you're a moral person in the here and now. And that's a very valuable. And there is some evidence that people are starting to look at religion in a different way. There's also people who, I think in the United States, I don't want to call them cultural dropouts, but there are certain people who say, and I think it's half the nation, Rick, they just say, I'm not angry, but when I look at what the Oscars or the Tonys or the Emmys have become, or when I look at the athletes at the NBA not standing for the flag, or when I look at what a first-run movie from Hollywood is like, I just don't want to be a part of it.

They kind of culturally ostracize them, or they're dropouts, and they're forming a counterculture. And you can see it in the exploding home school movement. You can see it in the alternative University of Texas's new civic program, University of Austin, the expansion and vitality of Hillsdale College. So there's a swing back. And the college presidents, I've noticed that on October 7th, the anniversary of the massacres, we were told that the campuses were going to explode. They didn't. And I think a lot of people said, we're not going to allow it to happen. I'm talking about liberal college presidents. So I think there is the DEI,

the idea that you're going to have a Soviet commissar system that's going to monitor businesses and force them to do things that are contrary to productivity and profitability. I think they're in retreat all across the corporate world. We've talked about the ESG movement. I think they're in retreat all across the corporate world. We've talked about the ESG movement. I think that is in retreat. I do see that young people, especially I'm teaching a class, even though they're not as informed as past generations, they're very earnest and they know something is wrong and they know that they're not going to have social security as we did, or they know that they can't buy a house as we did, or they know that their middle class existence is much more threatened, or that the idea of having children is under assault, or the idea of two sexes. And they're resisting that.

So I am optimistic. This is a very self-correcting society. You know, we've had the Civil War. We've had the Great Depression. We've had the crazy 60s culture. We came out wounded every time, and sometimes we come out stronger. So I am optimistic. Fantastic. Victor Davis Hanson, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Thanks for your dedication and courage as we all try to navigate these difficult and stormy times. So thank you.

Thank you. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.