SPEAKER 1: Good evening,
ladies and gentlemen.
Please find your seats.
Wow, you listened very well.
Thank you.
[CHUCKLES]
Welcome to Plaster Auditorium.
Isn't this a beautiful place?
[APPLAUSE]
I can't wait for you
to see the chapel.
If you've not gone just to stand
outside, you have to do that.
It just takes your breath away.
Not even going inside,
just the outside part--
unbelievable.
It is my pleasure to introduce
this afternoon's speaker, Dr.
Victor Davis Hanson.
Dr. Hanson is the Wayne and
Marcia Buske Distinguished
Fellow in History at
Hillsdale College.
He is also a Senior Fellow
at the Hoover Institution
and a professor of classics
emeritus at California State
University, Fresno.
He earned his BA
at the University
of California, Santa
Cruz, and his PhD
in classics from
Stanford University.
In 2007, he was awarded the
National Humanities Medal.
And in 2008, he received
the Bradley Prize
from the Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundation.
He's written for
numerous publications,
including the Claremont Review
of Books, The New Criterion,
and the Wall Street Journal.
He is the author
of several books,
including A War Like No Other--
How the Athenians and Spartans
Fought the Peloponnesian War
and The Second World War--
The First Global Conflict
Was Fought and Won.
Ladies and gentlemen,
please help me warmly
bring up Dr. Victor
Davis Hanson.
[APPLAUSE]
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank
you very much for coming out.
This is the 16th year
I've taught at Hillsdale.
And I live on a farm
in central California.
And I never tell
anybody where I'm
going, so my wife said
the other day, one
of our neighbors,
a farmer, said,
did he go to that
weird place again?
And when does he come back?
[LAUGHTER]
So I have kind of a stealth life
here that nobody knows about.
[LAUGHTER]
Have you ever asked yourself, if
you were to describe yourself--
and can you imagine
if you said, I'm
a nationalist compared to if you
said, I'm an internationalist?
What if your child
came home, instead
of saying, I major in IR,
international relations,
they said, I major in NR,
nationalist relations?
You can imagine the
pushback you would get.
What I'm getting at is
"nationalism" is not
a good word, at least
until the last two years.
That's kind of peculiar
because the word
comes from the Latin "natio."
And it was considered,
even in antiquity,
a progressive idea that, unlike
the Greek city-state where
people of the same language,
roughly the same traditions,
the same ethnic background
were politically fragmented,
in Italy they came up with a
new concept of unification.
And they thought
that that would be
a more equitable and successful
way of solving rivalries
between different people.
So what happened to the concept?
Woodrow Wilson, remember,
went to Versailles
in January of 1919
promising that people
who spoke the same language and
had the same ethnic background
and mostly the
same religion would
get to have their
own national destiny.
They would not be subject
to imperial rule by others.
So what happened?
I think very
briefly, the answer's
Germany, until the
French Revolution sort of
gave a catalyst to the
modern idea of nationalism,
the Congress of Vienna.
But the unification of Germany,
creating the largest country
in Europe warped the
idea of nationalism
because it was a little
bit different than
the other European countries.
And by that, I mean it was
involved in three wars--
the Franco-Prussian
War of 1871; it
invaded through Denmark,
Belgium, and France in 1914;
and, of course, it went into
Poland in 1939 on September 1
and triggered World War II.
But it wasn't just people felt
that Germany was aggressive,
but people felt that they
had redefined nationalism.
By that, I mean even
before national socialism
of the 1930s, there was
a movement in Germany
that said that Germans are
going to be defined by "blut und
boden"--
blood and soil.
And what that meant was,
you could live in Germany,
within the boundaries
of Germany,
you could speak German, you
could be a sixth generation
German, you could be a
Lutheran or a Catholic,
but you would not be
German if you didn't have
a particular racial ancestry.
And that goes back to the 19th
century when writers said that.
And how did that happen
in Germany and not France?
And the answer was that
in antiquity, Rome,
which was a multiracial
society like our own,
had incorporated most
of Western Europe
and, to some degree, northern
Europe, but not Germany.
The Romans felt that these
people were very fierce.
They were beyond the
Danube and the Rhine,
and they were
going to be let be.
You read Tacitus' essay
on ancient Germany,
"The Germania," and he says
they are very different people.
And what had been sort of
deprecatory in antiquity
was flipped upside down after
the unification of Germany,
as that we were better because
we're never mongrelized.
And that sort of discredited
the idea of nationalism,
because in Italy, Mussolini
said, we have "La Razza"
with two Z's.
It's kind of scary, because
that has a modern connotation.
And then Franco wrote a novel--
General Franco in Spain-- called
La Raza, believe it or not.
And they both
parroted the Nazi idea
that you couldn't be
Spanish and Italian even
if you spoke Italian or Spanish
and you lived here, unless you
had a racial essence.
And by the way, if you look
at the Constitution of Mexico
today, it does say that
immigration shall not
impair the racial
equilibrium of Mexico.
So what I'm getting at is there
is a strain of nationalism
that has polluted the otherwise
positive view of nationalism.
And it's too bad
because if you're
going to organize people--
people are not born homogenic.
There's not a homogeneity
that's natural.
So if you're going to
organize different people
under a political
framework, there's
a limited amount of choices.
You can use force--
force of religion,
like the caliphate
of the 14th century or the
Ottoman Empire caliphate
and force people to be
Muslims of all different races
and nationalities.
Or you can be the
Soviet Union and say,
you may be Chechnyan
or Ukrainian.
But you're a Marxist
Leninist first of all.
Or Yugoslavia-- as
long as Tito is alive
and says we're all Communists,
we're not Serbs or Bosnian.
If you don't use that
imperial coercion,
then you can do what Wilson
thought was a liberal idea.
You can allow people to
create national boundaries
based on their race.
And you can have
several of them.
There can be an independent
Serbia or Bosnia.
And you can have
this ethnic state.
And as long as it treats its
neighbors OK and Lithuania
treats Estonia OK,
there's no problem.
Usually that doesn't happen
very often in history.
And there's a third alternative.
And it's very rare.
And that is to combine
people of different races
and ethnic backgrounds and
creeds into one country
and not use coercion.
Rome pulled it off
for a few centuries.
And nobody has except us.
And so what unites people
in this audience that
do not look like each other
is a common national story--
the Constitution, the Bill
of Rights, the 4th of July,
the Gettysburg Address--
and the notion that
Faulkner or Steinbeck
or The Last of the
Mohicans does not
belong to any particular
race or creed.
It's an American idea.
It's the melting pot.
And it has to be worked
upon all the time,
because it's not a
natural phenomenon.
It's a construct that
we, in the melting pot,
will unite people by ideas.
And that means that Americans
can look like anyone.
None of you in this audience
can go to Japan and say,
I'm Japanese.
Even if you're legally Japanese,
you'll never be fully accepted.
Same is true of China.
I don't think Condoleezza Rice
could be chancellor of Germany
today.
I just don't think
it's going to happen.
We're the only country
that's pulled this off.
And the key to
this benign or good
nationalism is citizenship--
the idea that the American
citizen is unique.
And I'm very worried because
I think citizenship is eroding
and it's becoming meaningless.
And with it, nationalism
is disappearing
in the positive sense.
And it's happening in a very
strange way at two levels.
I guess we would call some of
us pre-citizens and some of us
post-citizen.
And what's common is we forgot
how citizenry developed.
It occurred for the first
time in the seventh century
in ancient Greece.
And you know the word
"politeai," a citizen.
You get political,
policy, even police.
And it was elaborated on and
institutionalized in Rome
as the "civis," the civic--
a "civis," civic,
civil, civilization.
And the idea is that
a particular resident
within these boundaries
was not a subject of a king
or dictator.
And he wasn't a wild tribesman
up in Gaul or Scandinavia.
He was a unique
person who could pass
on property to his children.
He could vote.
He could make his own laws.
And he had the choice when and
where to live and how long.
He was a free person,
in other words.
That seems self-evident now.
It is very rare.
There was nothing like
it in the Near East,
nothing like it in Sumeria
or Egypt, nothing like it
in tribal northern Europe.
It was a unique idea.
Nothing like it
in the New World--
Aztecs, no, Mayans, no.
But now what we're trying to
do, I guess in this country,
either by laxity or by
intent, is revert back
to pre-citizenship.
And it occurs it
at three levels.
The first is, we're blurring
the line between a mere resident
and a citizen.
We have about 60
million residents
in the United States--
largest number we've ever had--
that are not US citizens.
There's no problem
with 40 million
because they have green
cards and they're legal,
even though that's
a large number
to assimilate, intermarry,
and integrate into the body
politic--
something we should watch.
What we have, according
to the Yale and MIT
latest study, about 20 million
people who are here illegally.
And the strange
thing about it is
that the chief ingredients of
American citizenship that said,
an American citizen, and
only American citizen,
can leave or enter the
country as he pleases
or vote in an election as he
wishes or stay indefinitely
in the United States
due to his legal rights,
has been completely blurred.
Where I live in California,
or if you're here illegally,
you can go back across
the border as you wish.
In San Francisco, if
you're here illegally,
you can vote in school
board elections.
And the same is true in
some places in New England.
And as we learned with the
DACA and DREAMer program,
you can live here indefinitely.
And it even is a
little bit more extreme
than just equality
with citizenship.
Sometimes it's mere
discrimination.
A person in California who
is charged with a crime,
if the person is a resident
rather than a citizen,
is not subject to a
federal immigration law
to the full extent.
If you or I come into the
Detroit Airport from overseas
and we do not have a passport,
we're going to be detained.
If you are in Fresno county
and 500 other sanctuary city
jurisdictions and
you commit a crime
and you're here
illegally, you're
not going to be deported.
It's not going to happen.
You're given a
privilege, as it is.
If you're in California
and you are here illegally,
you're going to get a
license, just like a citizen--
but not quite just
like a citizen,
because a federal law
says for you to travel,
you have to have
proof of citizenship
to get a proper ID for
the federal transportation
authority.
So that means that all
the citizens in California
have to turn in their
driver's licenses next year
and reapply with a passport.
In other words, they
have an extra burden
to pay because residents had
an advantage of not having
to have the same type of ID
for their version of a driver's
license.
So in some sense, in
many of our states,
it doesn't really matter whether
you're a citizen or resident.
And you can see
where that's leading.
People who come from
different countries
and are here illegally,
they have no investment
to the same degree as we do in
our constitutional documents.
They don't really want to know
part of the national story.
Where I live, candidates
from south of the border
fly into the Central Valley
of California and campaign.
And people vote for them.
And they vote in
the United States.
You can see the problem
of a fragmenting society,
because what the
theme is, that we're
of various different races
and ethnic backgrounds.
And this is not
normal in history,
and we have to make
the extra effort.
But we're not making
the extra effort.
We're doing just the opposite.
But besides turning into a
country of mere residents,
we're also becoming
a country of tribes.
And by that, I mean the
idea of multiracialism,
that we're all of
different races
but we share a common
culture is eroding.
And now we're becoming many
cultures and many races.
Stanford University, you can
determine the racial background
of your roommate
before you enroll.
The same is true at
Claremont College.
There are places on
university campuses called
"safe spaces" that are
reserved for particular people
and of a particular race.
There are theme houses and
dorms where people segregate
according to their race.
Did anybody ask
yourself why, for years,
Elizabeth Warren and
other politicians
had railed against
white privilege.
If that were true, why
would Elizabeth Warren
choose to be a Native American?
In other words, culturally
appropriate another identity
which, according to
her own logic, would
put her at a disadvantage,
giving the ubiquity
of white privilege.
And the answer is that we have
returned to the "one-drop"
rule of the Old South--
that one drop, 1/16, allows
you to become in a minority.
So the reason that she said
she was a Cherokee person--
remember, the
Cherokee nation-- is
she wanted a careerist advantage
over someone else who chose
not to play that game.
And Harvard was only happy
to comply because the law
school bragged that she was
their first minority Native
American faculty member.
So what you can see is a
retribalization of America
at the expense of citizenship.
I went to a grammar school that
was about 90% Mexican-American.
And maybe it was
culturally insensitive,
maybe the melting
pot got too hot,
but we took people from
all over Latin America
and we made them into
American citizens.
And I've noticed--
I'm 66-- that when
I see some people
that I went to kindergarten
and first grade,
that they went
from Juan to Johns,
and they dropped the
accent on their last name.
Now in their 60s, they're
back to Juan again.
And they've added accents and
hyphenations to their name.
And what would be
the purpose of that?
The purpose is they get
a general impression
from the society
at large that there
is an advantage not to identify
just as a plain, old American--
that you have to be a member
of a particular tribe--
the LGBT community, the
Asian-American community,
the black community.
And you can see
where this is going.
70% of the country
self-identifies as white.
And the last thing
you would want
would be 70% of the country
to start identifying as white.
It would be the worst thing
in the world to happen.
But that's the
logic of tribalism
that leads to something like
Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia
or what we saw in Iraq.
So we have to be careful
of people blurring
the line between a
citizen and a resident,
and an American and
a tribal member.
There's another
phenomenon that's
just as scary that's going on in
this theme of pre-citizenship.
America was based on the
viability of a middle class.
If you read the essays
of Jefferson, he said,
when we pile up
everybody into the cities
and they're no
longer farm owners,
then we'll have two classes--
wealthy and poor.
If you read St. John de
Crevecoeur or you read Alexis
de Tocqueville, the
theme is the same,
that a solid, property-owning
middle class has advantages
over the poor because they're
invested in a particular place,
they showed a sobriety of
judgment to save their money,
they're stationary people,
they're sober and judicious,
they do not look to government
to the same degree as the poor.
And unlike the wealthy,
they don't have the power
or leverage to
affect government,
to act in the interests
of a small clique.
So there was this romance.
And it was easy to do because
90% of the country, as I said,
were agrarians.
We survived the
Industrial Revolution--
the middle class
did, I should say--
and it was transmogrified
into the American ideal
that everybody would own a home
and they would have a job that
would open a pathway
to upward mobility
and they'd have an
avenue to go to college
for self-improvement.
And out of that
matrix, they would
be independent and
autonomous people.
And all of us in the
middle class, then,
could tell the poor, we're not
going to redistribute money.
And we could also
tell the very wealthy,
and you're not going to be
a crony inside-capitalist.
What's happened, though,
we've psychologically
deprecated the middle class.
Our elites say that
the middle class
lacks the culture
of the wealthy,
with our snowmobiles and SUVs
and jet skis and Winnebagos.
And we don't have the
romance of the distant poor.
And that reflects something
that, in actual terms,
the middle class is threatened.
Homeownership peaked right
before the collapse in 2008
at 71%.
It's down to about 62%.
But unfortunately, that
doesn't tell the whole story.
The percentage of a family
budget that goes to housing
has gone from about 14%
in the 1950s to 44%.
So people, to the degree
that they can buy a house,
are spending nearly
half their income.
Wages, until two years ago,
had been frozen for 10 years.
The middle class didn't really
see an increase of their wages
for ten years.
It's gone up 3% under Trump.
But until then, it
had not gone up.
And when you talk about college
and upward mobility-- and this
is a very apropos topic
here at Hillsdale,
because the purpose
of this wonderful gala
is to raise money to help
defray the cost of tuition--
but we have an aggregate $1.6
trillion in student debt.
I don't think we're getting
much return from most colleges,
if you look at the
level of education
that a recent graduate shows.
But more importantly, there
were certain attributes
about the middle class
that allowed citizens
to be traditional and
to be participants
in the American story.
And one was, of course, people
got married quite early--
in their 20s.
The average age
until 1952 was 22.
Some of you got
married at 21 or 22.
Until just 2000, the
average number of children
was about 2.1.
It's now about 1.7.
People are on average getting
married at about 29 now.
I mentioned housing going
down and middle class wages.
And student debt,
about 5% of students
had student debt in the '50s.
And so think what we're doing.
We're telling young
people, you're really
not going to be
able to buy a house
and you're an indentured
servant to your former college
that you have this
$200,000 debt.
And they say, I can't
afford to get married.
I'm not going to have children.
I can't go to the suburbs.
I don't want to live in
a town like Hillsdale.
I don't want to live in a farm.
I want to be a hipster
in a urban environment.
And that's pretty
much the ingredients
of what you see on
the news with Antifa.
That's the profile.
So the destruction
of the middle class
then turns you into
a nation of peasants,
as we see in California.
One out of five--
and we're getting
close to one out of four--
lives below the poverty line.
And yet, we have
the largest number
of zip codes of people who were
in the most affluent counties
in the country.
We have the highest
number of billionaires.
But if you drive up to Stanford
University on any given day,
you'll see people living
in Winnebagos right out
in front of campus--
can't afford to buy a home.
And they're working for Google
or Facebook or Yahoo or Apple
with a market capitalization
of $4 trillion.
I submit to you that
that's not a good way
to create a stable American
nationalist patriotic country,
when you're destroying
the middle class.
So we don't want to be mere
residents or tribespeople
or peasantry.
But I'd like to suggest that,
on the other end of the scale,
on the elite side, there's just
as much danger to nationalism
and citizenship.
Our elite tend to
believe on the coasts
that they're not citizens
so much of the United States
as citizens of the world.
They like to be called
"internationalists"
or "globalists."
They do not want to be
known as "nationalists."
They have more faith
in the Paris Climate
Accord or the Kyoto
Agreements than they
do their own government.
They're ashamed of
the Second Amendment
when they go to Europe.
They feel that
trans-Pacific trade
is much better than negotiating
individual trade deals.
They love the World Bank.
They love the International
Monetary Fund.
They think the UN Commission
on Civil Rights or Human Rights
has more authority than does
the US House of Representatives.
And it's an old idea--
out of that, comes
a transnationalism.
That, just as globalization took
American free market capitalism
and spread it around
to 7 billion people
and gave us instant
communications--
instant travel, almost.
Anybody can get on
a phone and call
any of the other 7 billion
people in the world
almost quite easily.
But what did not follow
was American constitutional
government.
Most people said,
that is too strange.
It's too weird.
We don't want it.
And by that, they meant
they don't like the Second
Amendment-- "they" being
Western Europeans and most
of the world.
They have no problem
with late-term abortion.
They feel the government should
intervene and restructure
radically the
economy on the theory
of man-made global warming.
And so there's a lot of ideas
out in the globalized world
that are antithetical
to America's.
And we have a lot of
people in the country who,
in the Progressive
movement, feel
that we have to move beyond
Americanism and join the world,
just as we have
economically and culturally.
There's a second
thing that's happening
with post-citizenship.
And that's a formal assault
on the US Constitution
by the elite classes.
And by that, I mean we've now
had a second election in which,
as the framers envisioned, from
time to time, the candidate who
won the popular vote might
not win the electoral college.
It happened with George
W. Bush and Al Gore.
And it happened with Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, in both
cases, Progressives lost.
And given the Trump trajectory,
people are very angry.
And they think the answer
to it is to change either
the Constitution or
the accepted custom
and practice of
the last 100 years.
We mentioned sanctuary cities.
I would just say
that nullification
is a very common creed
now in the United States.
But it only goes one way.
You can nullify federal
immigration law.
But believe me, if the
people of Provo, Utah,
decide that within
their jurisdiction,
they want to nullify federal
handgun registration,
they're not going
to be able to do it.
If people in Bakersfield say the
Endangered Species Act does not
apply in Kern County, they're
not going to be able to do it.
It's a one-sided,
asymmetrical view,
sort of like South
Carolina in 1832 and 1833,
when they nullified
federal law and said
tariff policy doesn't apply.
It's a road to perdition,
as we know from 1861.
And yet it's getting
more and more common
that a particular
jurisdiction can defy,
and legally so, the
US constitution.
People want to return
to FDR's half-baked
plan of packing the court.
I don't know if
they think they're
going to get away with it.
FDR didn't.
But if you look
at court decisions
after the court-packing
scheme of the late '30s,
you can make the
argument that justices
tend to be a little bit more
progressive in fear that they
might either have more justices
or face mandatory retirement.
So there is an effort,
at least, to suggest
we're going to change
the nature of the court.
And even if we can't,
that's a message to you
conservative people
to shape up or else.
There's an idea
that, as you know,
every single candidate that
I know of, that I've heard--
and I checked today--
is in favor of abolishing
the electoral college.
People don't understand
what it was for.
It was for to give equal
representation to people
outside big cities and follow
the Republican model of Rome
and not the quite scary "51%
get what they want in any given
day" plan of ancient Athens.
And yet, that's very common.
In preparation for this talk,
I did a lot of research.
I didn't realize how common
it is, the progressive anger
at the US Senate.
And a common refrain is,
the people of Wyoming
have two senators-- each
represents 245,000 people.
We in California
have two senators--
each represents
20 million people.
That's not fair.
Let's make senators
proportioned on the population
as House members.
And I think we'll
see some of that.
In short, there's a formal
assault on the Constitution
because it hasn't given
the expected results.
And because the aims of the
Left are so exalted and noble,
they feel that any means
necessary are justified.
And finally, there's
an informal effort
to create something like a
post-citizen that doesn't have
to abide by the Constitution.
Have you noticed we still
have a Second Amendment.
But what does it mean if you're
in a rural part of the United
States and you go to Walmart and
they can't sell you ammunition?
In other words, social
justice warriors,
the cancel culture,
social media,
Hollywood, the foundations,
the universities--
all of them can put
such pressure on people
that they can't fully exercise
their constitutional rights,
even though their rights de
jure are still in existence.
If you're a cake
maker and you don't
want a particular theme
of a sexual orientation,
you can be coerced.
If you're Carter Page
and you're innocent,
but you represent an
unattractive candidate
or campaign, you can be
leveraged by a prosecutor.
Or if you're Michael Flynn,
you can be pled guilty.
90% of all federal
prosecutors win their cases--
all cases that federal
prosecutors do.
So we have to be very
careful that we're not
creating a situation,
while we still
have these personal freedoms
protected by the Constitution,
we can't exercise them.
I know as a professor
and fellow at Stanford,
I speak to a lot of students.
And I will guarantee you
that if you were students now
at Stanford, I would not say
the following because I wouldn't
get to the end of the speech.
If I said, I'm very
skeptical about abortion,
but I especially do not like
the idea of 8,000 instances
of infanticide.
We've got to stop it.
Half would walk out at that.
The other half would
come to the podium.
And who didn't come the
podium would come when I said,
I do believe that
climate changes,
but I either don't believe
that we're responsible for it,
or if we were
responsible it justifies
the radical transformations
in the economy
that people are calling for.
I don't think I could
finish that either.
And if I said I
live in a farm house
where I inherited
12 different guns.
I'm very proud of them.
I don't think that
would go over.
In other words, there's
a freedom of speech.
But if you were to try to say
that, you wouldn't be able to.
But if you don't believe me,
if you all put on red MAGA hats
and walk into Detroit,
see what happens to you.
[LAUGHTER]
And so there's
cases where we have
these constitutional freedoms.
But a minority of
the population that
has so much more
influence and resources
is able to create
a culture of shame
where we don't
dare exercise them.
And then de facto, it's almost
the same result as the people
formally and legally trying to
invalidate the Constitution.
Or if people don't want to
go out and vote in California
because they're afraid
to go to the polls,
it has the same effect as
a federal judge overturning
a plebiscite that happened in
two cases with gay marriage.
Let me just finish by
saying, what causes this?
You talk to people
overseas in Asia or Africa.
And they call it the
"Western disease."
And what they're referring to
is a clearly defined mentality
in the ancient world.
You can read it in
Plato and Aristotle.
You can see it especially in
Roman nihilistic literature--
Tacitus, Patroneas,
[INAUDIBLE]----
that suggests that
too much affluence,
too much leisure creates
a laxity, a "luxus,"
as the Romans called it,
where if you don't have
an existential threat, then
perhaps you have the margin
of error to indulge in
ideas that are detrimental
to yourself, even
suicidal notions.
Note that a country like
Israel is Western to the core.
But it's not as
advanced because it
knows if it were to experiment
with either pre-modern
citizenship or
post-modern citizenship,
its borders would be overrun.
It would cease to exist because
it lives in a sea of enemies,
unlike us and most
of Western Europe.
That's part of it.
But I would just end by
suggesting that a lot of it
is our educational system.
Because the people who are
crafting our laws the judges
who are overturning plebiscites,
the lawyers who are advancing
these legal theories,
the professors who
are teaching our
children all come
from an asymmetrical system.
And by that, I mean they
feel that they have reached
a point of wisdom and affluence
and leisure and comfort,
and that it's permissible
or, indeed, it's
desirable or necessary to
explain to people how unhappy,
how miserable they are, and that
they must change the system.
And the more that they
change the system,
you can see what's
happening-- whether it's
homeless people in San
Francisco juxtaposed to people
in Nob Hill or Pacific
Heights right next to them
as they walk across.
There's an asymmetry,
that we in the university
live one life, tenured,
affluent, and leisured.
And we tell indebted
students you
have to do this with no
ramifications of the ideology
affecting ourselves.
And so I think
that we could leave
by thinking there's
nothing better that we all
could do than to support
colleges that protect
the Constitution, they
advocate for the middle class,
they make a distinction
between residents and citizens,
and they're not just skeptical,
but they're adamantly
opposed to anybody who wants
to change the US Constitution--
the last great hope for
mankind and the only thing that
saves not just the United
States, but the world at large.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
I don't know if
we have questions.
SPEAKER 2: Thank
you, Dr. Hanson.
We now have time
for a few questions.
If you have a question,
please come up
to one of the microphones.
AUDIENCE: I have a question.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I hope
I didn't scare you with that.
SPEAKER 2: If you
have a question,
please come up to a microphone.
OK.
AUDIENCE: First of all,
thank you very much.
You were amazing.
We enjoy you both in your
articles and on television.
What is your feeling
about the last 10
days about this so-called
whistleblower issue?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
So-called what?
AUDIENCE: Whistleblower issue.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Whistleblower issue.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
Well, my wife called me.
She said, what are
you going to speak on?
And she said, you're not going
to speak on that, are you?
[LAUGHTER]
And then she sighed
and said, of course,
you will be stupid
enough to talk.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, very quickly, this latest
psychodrama, it's an a series,
isn't it?
The Emoluments Act, the
25th Amendment, Stormy,
the voting machines, Mueller.
So it's part of a series
to overturn not just
the 2016 election date,
but preclude the 2020.
And it's in a vein of
which I just talked about.
It's an effort to change the
Constitution, as it were.
But I think what
Nancy Pelosi has
done by going forward,
before she even
had read the transcript of
the call or the whistleblower
complaint, was
tactically very smart.
Because Trump has already
gone down 2 points.
Everybody's forgot
the UN speech he gave.
Very good speech.
And then, strategically,
very stupid,
because it accomplished
all at once
four or five things that she,
I don't think, anticipated.
Number one, it took out, for all
practical purposes, the leading
candidate, Joe Biden.
And you cannot mention Ukraine--
you can rail about Trump on
Ukraine, but at some point,
you have to mention Joe
Biden, even to say, well,
it doesn't apply to Joe Biden.
[LAUGHTER]
That in itself is--
so I think that he's taken out.
And he had the best chance
of defeating Donald Trump.
Second, the whistleblower
and the people
who put the
whistleblower up-- and I
say that because I read very
carefully the whistleblower's
complaint-- it's not written
by a normal whistleblower.
It's a legal document.
And two, you cannot impeach the
president of the United States
based on a whistleblower's
complaint with nine times he
or she says, I was
told, or I heard.
It's all hearsay.
I know the Inspector
General said there
was some firsthand knowledge.
I read it four times.
I couldn't find any
firsthand knowledge.
And third, you can't impeach the
president on anonymous sources.
They don't identify
those so-called staffers
who heard this call.
And, of course, even if
they did hear the call,
President of the United
States can bluster,
cajole, barter, horse--
That's what they do.
Can you imagine the phone
call about Barack Obama
and the nocturnal transfer
of $400 billion to Iran?
[LAUGHTER]
I don't want to hear about it.
But it's his right to do that.
And so what I'm
getting at is, we're
going to learn who
the whistleblower is.
And people are going to
ask the whistleblower,
have you ever met Adam Schiff?
And did you ever have a lawyer?
Did you know that the
whistleblower statute
was changed to allow hearsay
shortly before you filed this?
Have you communicated
with anybody in the DNC?
Those are going to be questions
under penalty of perjury.
And then, finally, I think Nancy
Pelosi thought that the news
cycle is predictable.
You go into impeachment.
It makes sense.
Trump might win the election.
Stop it now.
But it's not.
It's volatile.
And by that, I mean there's
too many known unknowns.
There's Michael Horowitz with
maybe a criminal indictment
of Andrew McCabe.
There's Michael
Horowitz maybe you
with a criminal indictment about
the abuse of the FISA court.
There's John
Huebner, who's going
all over the world trying
to find who interfered
against Trump, not for Trump.
And then you have John Durham,
who's doing the same thing.
So you have three prosecutors
who are looking at things
that we've never looked at.
Who knows what the
news will be like that?
We've only had 3
of the-- was it 12?
We have 9 more of these debates.
I mean, every time
there's a debate,
Trump goes up by 2 points.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
And so what I'm getting at is
that going after and trying
to impeach a president
on anonymous sources
and hearsay while you have
three prosecutors loose
and you have debates going
on with the New Green Deal
advocacy and reparation, it's
not a good formula, I think.
And I think the result will
be, after about three weeks,
she'll start to see that.
And then it'll be an
impeachment inquiry and not
a true impeachment.
If they were to vote on it-- and
I think Republicans very much
want them to vote--
30 or 40 House Representatives
were going to lose their seats.
Because where we are in
California, my district,
our Republican candidate
lost by 600 votes.
He won the election by 6,000.
And then voter harvesting by
Christmas, he lost by 600.
He's running again.
And according to the McClatchy
poll, he's 12 points ahead.
And he's really
hammering this against
the Democratic incumbent.
Thank you very
much, the question.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Dr. Hanson, it's
a privilege to see you.
I left Los Banos, California,
about six years ago.
And when I left a city of
35,000, the Ford dealership--
because I had a Mustang--
was down to four mechanics.
And they all left at noon.
You said in your book,
Mexifornia, that you wrote,
I believe, in 2003, you said,
"This state cannot figure out
whether it has become a promised
land based on cheap immigrant
labor or a looming nightmare of
unassimilated Third Worldism."
Now the reason I think
that's so critical,
I'd like to have more
comment on that from you
is because, as you say in
your book, what's happening
there is coming
to the rest of us.
[SCATTERED LAUGHTER]
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
That was a funny book
because the person who asked me
to write the article from which
the book came 20 years
ago said, can you
write how wonderful
illegal immigration is?
[LAUGHTER]
And I said, I can
write about it.
But it won't be wonderful.
[LAUGHTER]
So I think what we saw in
California in 2002 and 2003,
when I wrote that, is
happening all over the country.
And what changed--
and by that, I mean,
I guess in our business, we
all have this blood sport
where we go back and
look at YouTube comments.
Have you seen John
Kerry, Hillary Clinton,
Bill Clinton blasting
illegal immigration?
You should do it.
There's a great one
with Barack Obama.
He says, I'm not a king.
I can't give amnesty.
22 times he said that.
So what changed?
What changed is that people said
that in the Democratic Party
when there were 2,
4, and 6 million.
But when you have 20 million
and you have a second generation
already that's at voting age
of another 10 or 15 million
of US citizens, then that's
a powerful constituency.
And they look at
California, and they say,
wow, this was 32
years of Reagan,
Pete Wilson, Deukmejian,
Schwarzenegger-- never going
to happen again.
Supermajority in
both legislatures.
We went down from 53
congressional seats
to seven Republican.
So they look at Nevada, flipped.
New Mexico's flipped blue.
Texas and Arizona and
Colorado are next.
And that's a demographic shift.
So the Democratic Party
is for open borders
because they find
a lot of advantage.
The only thing that's
going to save us
is what we talked
about-- citizenship,
that we appeal to people who
are coming hopefully legally,
hopefully with skills, hopefully
through a meritocratic process,
hopefully in a diverse
manner so they're
from all over the world.
And we say to them,
you left your country.
You don't like Oaxaca.
You may think you like Oaxaca.
You may put a Mexican
flag on your car.
But you're here.
So that tells me you
did not like it there.
So we're here to help you.
We're here to integrate you and
assimilate you and intermarry
you and become one of us.
And if Trump can
make that argument--
and he can also make
the economic argument.
He could say, I've got
the lowest unemployment
in the history of the
Mexican-American workforce.
It's true.
And for someone who
lives in that area,
it's just absolutely astounding
to hear people come up to you
and say, I was on the roof.
They're paying me $19 an hour.
For the first time
in my life, Victor,
a guy came over and got
out of his car and said,
I'll pay you $23 if you get off
that roof and go on my road.
[LAUGHTER]
And he said, they want me now.
And so what we forgot
in the Republican Party,
are that the essence
of dignity is a job.
And when you get the
unemployment rate down to 3.7%
and you have employers
begging for workers,
that worker calculates that
and thinks, I have dignity now.
I have leverage.
I have some gratitude to
the person who did that.
So wouldn't that be ironic,
that through economics
and a new approach to
Mexican-American voters,
one based on citizenship
and "become one of us,"
the Democratic Party would
lose what they need to win.
And because they've so
alienated the working classes,
especially the
white working class,
they cannot afford to lose
40% of the Hispanic vote,
or even 15% of the black vote.
And yet, I think there's a
good chance they'll do both.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Question.
Since your book,
Carnage and Culture,
and what's happened today,
if you were to go back
or to look at what
you wrote then
and what is happening now,
what are the underpinnings,
in your opinion, being a
student of culture that gives us
a foundation or perhaps a
way or a path back to culture
that will remain as strong
as our Constitution intended?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Well, when you
say the West, Western culture,
really we have to be specific.
We're talking about
North America--
Canada, and the United States.
And we're talking about
Britain and its former empire
in most part--
Australia, Canada, New Zealand.
And we're talking about
continental Europe.
And then we're now talking
about westernized states,
such as South Korea or Taiwan
or Japan that have more
or less accepted the paradigm.
And out of 7 billion people,
there's about 2 billion
that are on that page.
And so that's helpful.
But what is worrying to me
is that while globalization
and westernization
has swept the globe.
So if I go to the Ukraine
or I go to Bolivia,
people have jeans,
they have a cell phone,
they're on Facebook, they seem
they're almost quasi-Americans.
That diffusion has
really weakened the West.
And by that, I mean
people think the West is
that X-Men movie I saw.
Or the West is that
cell phone, as I said.
Or it's that
particular rap song.
It's not.
It's a menu of constitutional
government, free speech, due
process, the protection
of private property,
the right to bear arms.
I think I don't want to be
too fanatical or too paranoid.
But I think that menu is
almost gone in Europe,
as I see it today.
And you can see what's
happening in Brexit today
when people had a plebiscite.
We do not want to be part
of this continental system.
It's different
than, we in Britain.
It's not the Anglo-Saxon,
Anglo-American tradition,
the transatlantic.
It's different.
We don't want it anymore.
It's anti-democratic.
It's against the
traditions of Britain.
And they can't get out,
because their own elites have
joined the continental system.
So what I most
worried about when
I wrote about
Carnage And Culture,
I use that word the "West."
And I know that there's been
bifurcations during world wars.
But what's really scary is that
we're going to an Orwellian
sameness in the West.
And the United States is
not completely against it.
Half of the United States
agrees with the trajectory
that Europe is in.
And they like the
European Union.
And they like the idea
that somebody in Brussels
can tell a Greek that that's
not a banana because it's not
6 inches long, or you
can't go to your beach
because one of our inspectors
saw plastic bottles,
so we shut it down.
They liked that
control, because they
feel that a special educated,
affluent class, mostly
on the coast of
the United States
and Europe in the
big cities, knows
far better than the average
person what's good for them.
And to the degree
that they're wrong,
they have a parachute by their
own influence and wealth.
But their bromides will never
apply to them, themselves.
And that's what's really
scary because the United
States was built on this middle
class "match word with deed."
And my mother was the first
female superior court judge
in Fresno County, and the second
female appellate court judge.
And I had a grandfather
that mortgaged his ranch
with very little money--
little, tiny farm-- and
put all his children
to college, and
two, in the 1940s,
for graduate and
undergraduate at Stanford.
And I remember her going
to the farmer's market
when she was an appellate
court judge, peddling
pears and plums with us
on Saturdays, out there
without an apron on.
And I'd say, well,
wow, Judge Hanson's
out here-- making
fun of my mother.
And she said, it's
very, very important
to remember that in America,
the elite get their hands dirty.
And I'm elite only in title.
I'm not part of that.
And that was very
important that we
realize that physical
work has dignity
and that people who
work with their hands
and are in the middle class are
the bulwark of this country.
They have a common sense that
is invaluable to this country.
We almost forgot
that until 2016.
And I'm not going
to get political.
But when Trump,
for the first time,
said our workers,
our vets, our--
I like the word "our."
I mean, he was ridiculous.
He went to West Virginia.
And Hillary had said, we're
going to shut you all down.
You're going to have to make
solar panels, essentially.
And he said, I love
big, beautiful coal.
[LAUGHTER]
What I'm getting at is
that I don't see that.
I see a Marxist paradigm between
workers and then capitalists
in Europe.
But what I see in
America was always
a reverence for
the working class,
just right from Jefferson
from the beginning
of the Constitution.
And we've really got to get
back to the idea that none of us
are above the idea
of physical work.
When you have somebody build
your roof or mow your lawn,
that's just as important
as what we're doing up here
in this stage.
And we really have
to get that dignity
and respect back
for muscular labor.
In this outsourcing,
offshoring, globalist economy,
we forgot that.
And I think we've been
saved at the last moment.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Should we
invite 1,000 Venezuelans
to live in each one of our
congressional districts
to remind us of the alternative?
SPEAKER 3: Should we
invite Venezuelans
to live in our
congressional districts
to remind us about socialism?
[LAUGHTER]
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Did
you hear the question?
I think we don't need them.
We have enough professors.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know how we are on time.
AUDIENCE: I very much enjoyed
your speech or whatever--
presentation.
You mentioned that the idea
of maybe the senators having
the same representation
as representatives.
Now, about six to eight months
ago, there was a writer--
and I think it was the Wall
Street Journal-- that predicted
that the Democrats would have
a difficult time in the future
ever getting the Senate back.
And I don't remember the logic.
And I was wondering if you
would read that article
or knew why he made
that assertion.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I mean, we
don't want to be philosophers,
but there is a mentality behind
all this if you think about it.
So the Democrats, when
they're in the majority,
they don't want filibusters.
Filibusters are
archaic and disruptive.
When they're in the minority,
they want to bring them back.
Believe me.
If Donald Trump wins a popular
vote and Elizabeth Warren
wins the electoral college,
the electoral college
will be the greatest
thing since sliced bread.
[LAUGHTER]
And the same thing
with senators.
If tomorrow we have 100
Democratic senators,
and they're going to say,
this is the best system
the Founders ever came up on.
So what I'm getting at
is that I don't really
take the Left at its word.
I don't think they have a
consistent philosophy, other
than we believe in
equality of result.
We're morally superior because
we have greater empathy.
And therefore, because we're
morally superior creatures
to you, any means necessary,
any inconsistencies
is allowable because our
aims are so much greater
than your greedy, individualist,
profit-mongering, selfishness.
And that's how they operate.
And therefore, when we look
at this impeachment circus--
and I'm talking about
people in my own family--
when you talk to them,
the details don't matter.
What all that matters
is these are people
who are out to help people.
And they're trying to oppose
people who are selfish.
And therefore, anything
that goes on is justified.
And that's been the story
of Progressivism and Leftism
since antiquity.
SPEAKER 2: We have time
for one more question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
You've been a historian
and studied history
over the millennia--
not your millennia,
but the world's millennia.
[LAUGHTER]
Is there any other
comparable time
in other civilizations that
went through what we're going
through now, and their outcome?
And how would you foresee
the United States in 10 years
compared to how other
civilizations have
worked out these problems?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Well, I think
the greatest treatise that's
ever been written on politics
is Aristotle's
Politics, because he
transcends the particular
case studies that he educes.
And what he just
assumes is, there's
always going to be a class
struggle or political struggle
between different groups.
And if I could reduce
that to a banality
it's, there's some
people who believe in
a equality of opportunity
and some believe
in a state-mandated
equality of result.
The people who believe in
the equality of opportunity
say this.
Unfortunately, we
weren't all born equally.
Some of us have more talent.
Some of us have better health.
Some of us have better luck.
Some of us had a
rich grandfather.
Life is unfair.
But let us go and do our thing.
And then we will have
social pressures,
like you people,
here, to give back.
Let me go make a lot of money.
And then let me choose to
help support Hillsdale.
I will do that.
I'm not a greedy person.
There's only so hot
that my shower can get.
And my BMW only go so fast.
I can't spend all that
I'm going to make.
But I want to do it for
a variety of reasons.
And that group is
usually attacked
by people for various reasons.
And Plato and Aristotle
were no dummies.
They talk about
psychological reasons--
that people get envious.
Envy and jealousy, Hesiod
said, are the two most
powerful emotions we have.
The other people say, we
can't trust those people.
They don't give in a way
that's rational or moral.
So we want to take
what they have
and distribute it to
the more noble people.
And that dichotomy is the
story of Western civilization.
And when it works, we keep
it within the boundaries.
And we have certain
ground rules.
You shall not
resort to violence.
You shall relegate politics
to a secondary level.
And you will absorb it
with nationalist pride
and collective patriotism.
But every once in a while,
Rome in the first century, when
we had a terrible civil war,
or the stasis at Corcyra
in Thucydides, or two or three
times before the Civil War,
but especially during the US
Civil War, or during the '60s.
I can remember being at UC,
Santa Cruz, in a lecture
just like this in 1971.
And Jasper Rose, a distinguished
art historian was lecturing.
And two people ran up
and tore the exhibits
he had down and stepped
on them and said, F
your bourgeoisie art.
At certain times,
we've had these people
who did not want to
play by the rules,
and sometimes on both sides.
And it's incumbent
upon all of us to say,
whatever our disagreements
are about this ancient divide,
we want to instruct
you why you're wrong.
And we want to do it
through persuasion and love.
And the people who don't want
to do that, unfortunately,
are going to have
to pay a price.
And human nature
being what it is,
most people don't have
very much courage.
So believe me, if we had
courageous university
presidents outside of Hillsdale,
and we had a courageous police
chief-- and the first time
an Antifa protester went up
on stage and hit somebody--
these people are not
rebels, believe me.
They're upper middle-class
kids that have all the career
ambitions of anybody else.
If you charge him
with a felony assault
and that was on his record,
that would be the last time
he ever did that.
There is such a
thing as deterrence.
But what we've had now is, we've
allowed this ancient debate
to get way beyond
the old parameters.
And it's starting
to get violent.
And it's starting to get absurd.
And it's starting to get nasty.
Because we don't have people
who are courageous enough
to step in and say that you're
not going to do that anymore.
There is a rule of law
and the Constitution.
Until we return to that, it's
going to spiral out of control.
And we just need one
or two honest people
to stand up and say, no more.
So far, we haven't found them.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
