Democracy, Euphemism, and the British Empire

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.
Who is Victor? Some of you may be first-time listeners.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is a classicist, a military historian, farmer, best-selling author. His most recent bestseller is The Dying Citizen.

And he houses his content and his brilliance and appearances at victorhanson.com. We'll talk about that a little later.

Many of you listeners who sent in questions, and we have a few today to discuss, and we'll start off with some about to elicit Victor's views on democracy as a thing. What are its upsides?

What are its downsides? And we'll get to those questions and more right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, my friend. I hope you're well today.

So, let's get to the questions, though. Victor, I have two questions.
One's got a little prologue to it, and the other is a little more simple, but they both are about the nature of democracy.

And the more simple one is from Daniel Heil, and he says,

He asks up front: Does democracy align with human nature?

It seems that everybody wants something for nothing, conservatives don't want to pay for their tax cuts, everybody wants entitlements, social security, Medicare costs are skyrocketing, etc.

So does democracy align with human nature? And let me get the other question related sort of is from Alan, who, and here's his little preamble.

Victor is a fan of open, consensual, democratic societies. He used to talk about this a lot before, but not so much now.
That may be because the U.S.

is clearly no longer open and is not so consensual and democratic.

Or it may be because he conclusively proved the value of those societies in his book, The Second World Wars, where the ostensibly soft, free societies trying to follow a moral code somehow beat the ruthless, tyrannical societies in which all actions, including torture, were allowed and in which decisions could be made by fiat without endless debate.

But some writers question this narrative.

Professor Hoppe, for example, I'm not sure who that is, Victor, but I'm sure you know, in Democracy, The God That Failed, shows that a monarchy is in many ways better.

Or going back further in time, Frederick Hayek's The Road to Serfdom also lists ways in which a democracy cannibalizes itself to destroy the very things it was meant to protect.

So here's the question, Victor. My question is just to ask Victor to revisit the question.
We've heard that he thinks

we heard what he thinks are the strong points of the open democratic model. But it would be interesting to hear what he thinks are the weak points.

So, Victor, the weak points of democracy, does democracy align with human nature? What are your...

There's a whole

discussion of this. So in Herodotus' history, there's a discussion when the Persian king asked various wise men which is the best form of government.

oligarchy, democracy, monarchy. Of course, you know what they say, monarchy.

And then there's a long discussion in Aristotle's politics about four types of oligarchy and four types of democracy.

His point is that they have gradations based on the size of the property qualification. There's Plato's laws and republic that discuss it.
And then in the modern context, everybody from Machiavelli to

Tocqueville. I should say the post-classical era.
And the consensus is this:

that the problem,

everybody wants a liberal society in the sense that liber, in Latin, you can be free, and that

is best achieved by a constitutional or what they call consensual system, the consent of the governed.

But the problem is if there is not, going back to Montesquieu or Tocqueville, and this was in the ancient world, and this is the great criticism of Athens, if there's not checks and balances on the everyday whims of 51% of the people, then they become what the Greeks called an aklos, a mob, not a demos.

And so our founders knew that. And so they switched gears.
So we don't have a Greek philological concept of democracy as the ancients knew it in the Athenian form.

They used a Roman word, res publica, the public thing.

And they looked at the Roman system where there was representative government rather than direct democracy.

And so I guess the answer to that is the people elect officials, and when they get in fits of hysteria and they elect bad officials or

they go into excess and try to go beyond the officials, referendum, et cetera, then there are ways to slow that down, not to nullify the will of the people, but in our system, we have the

Congress of popularly elected representatives that represent the people and senators who are popularly, not originally, but now popularly elected that represent the states.

And that tends to slow down things. And then we have vetoes.
You can override vetoes and impeachments, etc.

And the whole purpose is to tell the people you are in control, but you're not on any given day going to execute Socrates.

or you're not going to go in on any given day and wipe out the Melians or the Middle Enians, or say you're on Monday, you're going to wipe them out on Tuesday only some of them.

So that's that, and that is because

if you read classical warnings from Aristotle, Cicero, people are human and human nature is unchanging. And they have this hysteria, this fit when they're mob-like.

I guess it's genetic or instinctual. You feel safety when more people want something.
So the Russian collusion hoax, everybody bought into that. You know, it was the McCarthy period.

I have in my hand the name of 209 people,

uh, or now it's Loyleo. So, they get into these fits, and so you have to check and channel that to make sure that it's a genuinely safe thing to do.

And we do that with a variety of checks and balances. And the other thing that they warned about was

eventually democracy imploded because it's a human tendency to vote for things

for you

that other people pay for. So, in Athens, you can see a gradual degradation from the early fifth century down to the mid-fourth century.

And by that, I mean people are starting to pay in the fifth century to go to the theater.

I want to go watch Sophocles. You take off work.
Here's some money. And then later in the fourth century, well, I have to vote.
I have to walk into Athens. Well, here's some money.

Or I have a bad leg. And I claim that it was, you know, a war.

Here's some money. And so finally, these systems become broke or they either become broke or the population becomes listless.
That's the classical view.

And they often couch it in terms of the human body aging. So it's a robust young teenager.
And they would say in 18, 20, and then it's a conflicted adult after the Civil War. Then we hit our heyday.

the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century and then we're starting to be old in the 60s and 70s and now we're joe biden like

You know, and

there's a different, I said that on Mark Levin show, I think it was on August 14th. I said, we're no longer a republic anymore.
I think I said we're in a transition to a radical democracy.

And I got attacked for that. There was a guy, I don't know who he is, Robert Smith, and he said something to the effect that Victor Hansen said that it's finished.
That's a good philological reminder.

You don't, if you're going to attack somebody, you should read what they wrote rather than what you think they wrote. I didn't say it was, we're finished.
I said we're in a transition.

And what do I mean by a transition to a radical democracy?

We're trying to overturn the filibuster, trying to get rid of the electoral college, trying to make a national voting law, trying to pack the court, trying to bring in more states to get senators for a particular party.

We have empowered the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the DOJ to have judge, jury, executioner powers.

We're trying to destroy Election Day where only 30% of the people now vote through early voting and mail-in voting for one reason, under the cloak of COVID, because there's less mechanisms to stop voter fraud.

And to the left, voter fraud means voter restriction. So they feel that anybody under any circumstances should be able to vote, including people who are not citizens.

So we're in that classical trajectory. I don't know exactly where we are, but we're transitioning to a radical democracy.

And after that, you get a correction.

And unfortunately, if you look at the original people who threw out the Tsar, the white Russians or the Kerenskyites or the Mensheviks, and you look at that transition to Bolsheviks to Stalin, or you look at the Girondists and the people that threw out the Bourbons and then they transitioned into the Montagnards and then to the Jacobins, the Committee of Public Safety, and then we get what?

Napoleon, Thermidors, and then Napoleon. And the same thing with Weimar.
So we're getting into this chaos and there's going to be a correction.

And I hope that that correction is constitutional and moderate rather than some crazy

person that says this is unsustainable. Yeah, the correct correction, if there is such a thing, doesn't happen unless there's a proper leadership.
I'm a real leader, I think strong leader.

And by strong leader, I'm not meaning Mussolini or Hitler.

but uh just in the as you mentioned you know the soviet union there weren't a lot of people who involved in team uh lenin team stalin who who overthrew the government they they faced a bunch of of weaklings but if there had been strong leadership it's just not going to yeah you're going to have to have a person that comments so the other day when this stupid

you know we've talked about that this $300 billion giveaway right before the election of Joe Biden's to students to shore up his base.

Because remember, students had said they had no confidence in Joe Biden, 70%.

And he needs them to vote for his candidate.

So he gives them $300 billion in debt relief, doesn't care about the people who didn't go to college that are going to pay part of it, doesn't care about the people who were scrimmed and paid.

We talked about that, paid them off or never took them out. But when you think about it,

what were the comments?

One of the first comments was a, i guess she was cnn and said this is racist because african-american women owe more than the average person it takes therefore and see that's the logic that you need a leader to say well then don't take them out

or maybe african american women took out graduate more graduate loans and undergraduate or

maybe

other people decided they had different avenues and they didn't trust the federal government or the university, so they tried to get two jobs. But that blanket exegesis like that, designed to

raise tensions and based on this

diversity, equity, inclusion mantra, you need somebody to say, no.

This is not going to be racially based. We're left-wing people.
We believe in people not paying their debts, but we're not going to now further compound that folly by having racial categories.

So, or the same thing with open borders. We're not going to do it.
You can't have a nation. Look at what's happened to Sweden.
Sweden is in turmoil. Look at what's happened to Germany.

It's in turmoil. We can't go there.
But you need somebody to say that. Ron DeSantis is not trying to do that.
And you can see that he is because

the left now is almost getting to the point where they hate him as much as Trump. But you need to do that.
constantly and say, we're not going down there. Call me anyway.

I wish that DeSantis would say things like, Call me any name you want. It makes no difference to me.
Right. Because after they, I mean, there's no currency left in racist.
What does that mean?

It means nothing. It's one size fits all.
Except to reverse racism. I mean,

if Martin Luther King came back and he walked into Stanford University, he would say, Wow, you've got a segregated safe space. Right.
You've got a segregated dorm. You call it a theme house.

You've got a segregated graduation. What the hell

did you do?

And they'd say, Well, you know, this is better. And he'd say, Well, this was not the content of our character.

It's the color of our skin. They said, Yep, that's who we think you were, Martin.
Yeah,

he'd be an Oreo by

the standards of the leftist radicals. But there's a limit to this.
I think everybody should realize there's a limit where it hits the wall of the unsustainable.

And this race thing is right now at the point

where if you tell students you can't come to this dorm as they did in Berkeley, you can't come in the front door or you can't study in this safe space because based on your skin, or I'm going to go,

a guy's dating a girl and the girl says, oh, I'm going to go to my graduation and you're going to go to yours because we have different skin colors. That's not sustainable.

And if you see people, we talked about that with this violence that's inordinately, at least according to demographics, committed by about six percent of the population african-american males and no one no one is willing to say anything about it the causes or the corrections of it then it's not sustainable and the downtowns are not sustainable and a lot of these

spending 30 trillion 31 trillion dollars is not sustainable So there's going to be corrections and they're not going to be in our hands. Right.
Because the civilization doesn't work.

It starts to peel off and erode. It already is that.
It's already happening. And you can see it already with the Hispanic world.

And they felt that their futures were intermarriage, integration, assimilation,

upward mobility through the middle-class trajectory. At least half of them did.
The other half relied on government and noblesse oblige from the wealthy white bicoastal elite.

But the dynamic Hispanic voter is already done with it. He doesn't want to identify essentially as someone who's brown.
He thinks that's incidental and not essential to his character.

That's already starting, and that's why you should expect a lot of demonization of Mexican-American leaders by wealthy white people.

Well, Victor, you mentioned philology before, and we have a question related to that. And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. I'd like to make a quick pitch for two things.
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So Victor, Chuck, Chuck, listener Chuck, sends this a little prelog.

prologue, whatever. I am simultaneously fascinated and perturbed by the left's attempt to control perception of provocative issues by altering language.

Orwellian newspeak is not new, but it seems to be used progressively more frequently in today's contentious political climate.

Current examples might include referring to those who support abortion as pro-choice, referring to January 6th as an insurrection, or the recent debate about whether we're currently in a recession.

Not to mention the relatively new demands related to personal

pronouns, but that's somewhat of a special case. Most recently, we've been told that what the FBI did in Mar-a-Lago was not a raid and shouldn't be referred to as such.

The right doesn't seem to be as effective in using language to influence malleable opinion, although I was encouraged by the recent use of the word groomer to describe those who would indoctrinate young children with respect to sexual issues.

Dr. Hansen, given your background in philology, can you talk about the impact of word choice on, quote, moving the Overton window, end quote?

Does whether or not we call it a recession really impact how people perceive the economic environment? Can you share examples from history where linguistic sleight of hand was used successfully?

That's from Chuck. Victor?

Well, a good example is this new one, Minor Attracted People, map.

That's for pedophile. Pedophile is an exact word.
It's from Greek paidia. paideon and philia phile

and it means you love children and that's what a pedophile does he tries to have sexual converse with a child underage but that's what discriminatory especially to the gay community apparently because they seem to be behind this minor attracted people meaning we like young attractive pre-sexual boys and girls i suppose and uh

so what does that mean that means that's going to butt up against legislation and then legislation is going to be considered what discriminatory who are you to say that I can't have sex with a 12-year-old?

So that's how it starts is what I'm getting at when you change the language.

This gas prices, that was called what? A transition?

A transition? That was a transition to a better future of batteries, I suppose. And then we have transitory for inflation, just transitory.

This is what we just talked about it, Jack.

Segregation is called safe spaces, theme houses, separate graduations. So yes, the caller is right that

the right is way, way behind the use of language.

And Orwell explained that pretty well in Animal Farm and a couple of essays on the English language and also in 1984 about how totalitarian systems on the left do that. And it's always to

disguise their fascism by being for the people. You can do anything for the people, just like Nancy Pelosi is for the children.
All you have to say, we're doing this for the children.

Then you can make up anything you want. The Locus Classicus is book three in Thucydides' history when he has a digression on the stasis or revolution at Corsaira, modern-day Corfu.

And he said words had to change their meaning.

And what he was basically saying is extremism takes over, and the person who is moderate is a sell out.

And the person who is bloodthirsty and extremist is committed. And he says that this is a natural part of the loss of common traditions, protocols, moderation.

And it's in our society. We've seen it in the Soviet Union.

And usually what they do is they say people who are enemies of the people are crazy. So they diagnose them with medical problems and they incarcerate them.
And they do that. increasingly in China now.

I suppose they'll start doing that here too soon. But yeah, the left is always historically from the very beginning, the master of words changing their meaning.
And

when you say pro-choice, I mean, pro-life just means you don't want to abort a fetus. Pro-choice means you have the choice to abort a fetus.

And

notice the word fetus.

You,

I mean, that itself is a politically conditioned word. It's a baby, because we know that science now has

been able to suggest that very

young fetuses are conceived children are viable from the very beginning, whether they're in a test tube or very quickly out into another,

they can be an egg, can be fertilized, and then they can be put in another womb. But the point I'm making is the left will never use the word baby, never, never, never.
It's always fetus.

Fetus is something inanimate for them, and that's very important. And a fetus for them is somebody who leaves the birth canal and is aborted in the birth canal.
That is a fetus.

And they know that. And I don't understand why the Republicans, when they're letting, they're seeding this issue in the midterms about, well,

they just keep creating these 10-year-olds who need abortion. There's always a backstory to all of these.

And they denied them, except in our federal system, there's no law that a person couldn't leave a red state to a blue state. That's what happens.

But nevertheless, they try to scare people, but the Republicans don't have to scare anybody. They just say, this is a party that is not the majority of abortions.

It's not even a great minority, but there are occasions 10, 12, 15, 20,000 of these

with a murder. You just take a viable fetus.
Had that fetus been outside the womb, it would be perfectly able to live on its own, and you kill it.

And then we call that a fetus and an abortion when it's not.

And not that I'm not going to get into at what point it isn't murder, because that's a whole different discussion, but I'm saying that most people, left and right, can agree that when a fetus is in the womb in the birth canal, then you abort that.

That is,

that's murder. Yeah.

And then left and the right is not talking about that. Do you know who did talk about that, Victor? Not to bring this down to to an abortion discussion, but

on the debate after the infamous Hollywood,

I can't even remember the term, but Trump first, the final debate with Hillary Clinton, where he went after her on abortion and partial birth abortion.

I kind of think that played a role in saving the day for him and winning him the election.

No, it's hard to remember a Republican candidate ever talking so forcefully and baldly about what this act was. And I think it shocked a lot of people into voting for him.

And we're going to be able to do that. Well, it's just, I'm not talking as a moralist.
I'm not giving my own views. I'm just saying as an outside political observer.

Anytime the discussion hinges on underage girls that are raped or incest, and they're forced to have a child of that monster, and the discussion is not on that person in the womb as a living soul,

and the genes don't make them evil. But nevertheless, when that's the issue, the Republicans lose.
And anytime the issue is

they are killing

babies that are viable. Right.
I don't know where that viability is, but for a majority of Americans, it apparently means that if there was an induced birth, the baby would be alive.

And that has gone from nine to eight to seven to six to five, and I think even to four months. Right.
And so that's the discussion.

That's what we're really, that's the subtext of the whole discussion. And the left is much more effective in saying we are the party that's protecting a 10-year-old from

her sick grandfather who impregnated her than the Republicans are effective in saying, and you're also the party that destroys or crushes the skull of a little baby as it leaves the birth canal.

They're both, I know, I understand their characters, I understand all that, but that's the issue. And why? Because in every single one of these issues, but especially abortion,

and you look at the

right is outraised, it's just outfunded. And when you start looking at these particular races, J.D.
Vance, Blake Masters,

Dr. Oz, and you ask why they are being outspent four to one, three to one,

it's not just because they had contentious primaries, but because

the left-wing money is pouring in on abortion. Right.

Huge amounts.

And people people have to realize that, that the party of the very wealthy, the party of dark money, the party of ruthless expenditures to sabotage campaign is not a bunch of old white guys on the golf course on the 18th green plotting to warp an election.

It's a Mark Zuckerberg, it's a Mike Bloomberg, it's Bill Gates. That's who's doing it.
And they have more reason, and George Sorrell, they have more resources than the right.

I think a lot of people in the right and conservatives still think that because they're champions of free market capitalism, that they have people who are the most successful at it.

And maybe the middle class is the most successful at it, but it's terms of mega wealth.

The Democratic Party is the wealthy party. They are.
That's the reason I can't get, I can't tolerate them. They're just very, very wealthy, spoiled people that are in that party.
Right.

By factors, but it's just exponentially more so than

available money on the right. It's a type of money, too.
It's the type of money. The great fortunes in America on the left,

not always, but they come more from different types of activity than on the right.

The right, there's still a lot of money in the right that is from farming, transportation, construction, real estate, assembly, et cetera, oil, gas, mining, timber.

the money on the left is law media tech you know what I mean it's right and finance investment it's a different type of money that's divorced from the earthly earthly pursuits and it tends to be much more

in much greater magnitude and in much greater neglect of how people have to live right and people in general there's a Malthusian strain that runs through leftist philanthropy it's uh you look at gates and particularly Warren Buffett, who's still many on the right, Jennifleck, too, because he's the sage of Omaha.

But his estate, he's an older man. He's over 90, I think.
When he kicks the bucket,

he's dumping about $100 billion

into funding what? Abortion. It's crazy.
Anyway, Victor,

we've got another question or two we're going to try to get to in the limited time we have on this particular podcast. And let's talk about governance.

You mentioned moderation before, and this is an interesting

observation and question from Karen.

She writes, when I was younger, I started listening to Rush Limbaugh, who I greatly admired.

And one day it occurred to me, for the most part, Rush objected to every single item the Democrats put forward, every single one. And I had to ask myself, can the Democrats be wrong 100% of the time?

With the possible exception of my husband, no one is wrong 100% of the time. I wish I had a rim shot

sound effect here. Couldn't there perhaps be just a modicum of a good idea in there somewhere? My question has to do with the inability of the legislature to reach a compromise.

To me, it's essential and not a sign of weakness. Our legislature functions like two teams playing tug of war, and the winning team gets to make the rules.

Hey, it's good to be king, but maybe not so good for the country. So anyway, Victor, what do you?

It's just, I think it's what are we getting back to an original conversation about the maturity of democracy and the aging process so if you and I were having this conversation in 1945 55 maybe even I don't know 60 we would say

if a guy's out there on a roof and he falls off you got to have workman's comp

disability and if you're gonna if you're an employer and you know

you're a cement contractor and you have a guy that gets there at eight and he lay he's on his knees till five and then you call him up on Saturday and Sunday and said, I need you to work, then you might want to have a 40-hour work week with something called overtime.

Or if he gets there at six in the morning, I mean, he's got a life to live, maybe eight hours is enough. So these were the issues.
Social Security was another one.

And the Democratic Party of old was a working class party and they said there's enough wealth in this country. that we can protect working people, muscular people.

And they achieved that agenda. They really did.
It was got to give them credit. They did.
And if you look at the deficits as a percentage of GDP, they were not, even after World War II, they declined.

And I think you reached sort of a golden era, right, with JFK.

And then after that, with the Great Society,

the whole scenario changed. It's not any longer, we're going to give people

quality of opportunity and we're going to give the working people

the same types of conditions and landscapes that wealthy people have. Then it was suddenly, well, there's still poor people and we're going to eliminate poverty by equality of results.

We're going to take from these people and increase tax and give to these people. And we've gone beyond what we can do.
We've done all the workers' comp and the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week.

health, all that. So now we've got to do affirmative action.
And we've got to give cell phones to people. And we've got to do this.
And we've got to do this.

And what you do is you innervate the population and at that point the democratic party ceased to exist and now it's a progressive jacobin revolutionary party right and it's its sole goal is to say our mission is to stamp out all inequality as we perceive it

and we do not care what causes it because we only accept one reason and that is racism, sexism, genderism, whatever. But it has to be culpability.
It can't be inheritance. It can't be work ethic.

It can't be chance. It can't be health.
It can't be thousands of extraneous that make me different from you. Can't.
It has to be somebody's an oppressor and somebody's oppressed.

And we're the adjudicators of the Democratic Party. Right.

And when you get down that road, there's always the exemption. And

we're the executors and we're the adjudicators, but we need the exemptions because we're morally superior.

So I'm John Kerry, and this is what we're going to do for climate change, but I got a jet over on my Gulf Stream.

Or I'm Barack Obama, and when climate change is coming, and we're going to zone all of these, but I need Martha's Vineyard in my Hawaii estate.

And I'm Gavin Newsom, and we're going to do this and this and this about health care, and we're going to do this, but I got to go to the French laundry.

Or I'm Paul Pelosi, and I have to get a big gas guzzling Porsche and drink while I'm driving and danger people's health and then show a little car that I gave gave the highway patrolman to get a reduced sentence.

But my wife is for egalitarianism and equal treatment of everybody. And that's how it works.
It always has.

You know, Victor,

the Democrat of 1960, looking across the aisle at the Republican in 1960, I don't think would say, I hate that guy. I want to control him.
I want to see him.

You could argue, you know, Hubert Humphrey was kind of a loudmouth and he had some crazy ideas, but he didn't hate people he was kind of like jerry ford

or he was kind of like old bob michael the speaker of the minority yeah perennial minority leader nice guy they were

you can argue that you know there wasn't really the country was drifting to the left before reaging yes but it wasn't like it is now it wasn't the society worked i can remember you'd go to any small town i would used to visit in my teens and i understand that there was a few wealthy guys, the city attorney, the guy with 500 acres, the car dealer.

I understand that. There was inequality and all that stuff.
But it was, there was no crime. There was no, there was, race was becoming incidental.
There was upward mobility. There was good jobs.

There was, if one person wanted to stay home and raise the children, they could.

And a lot of that was

Republican efforts to keep the free enterprise private property system intact after the assault on it during the New Deal. And a lot of it was the Democratic Party was not into Marxist ideology.

They had rid themselves of commies

and they were trying to think of agendas for the working class. And that is completely over now.
Right. Well, Victor, we have one more question, and that has to do with Winston Churchill, a question.

And I'm going to ask this right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So Victor, the final question of, and we thank all of our listeners who sent in questions.
Alan asks this.

Victor has expressed his admiration for Winston Churchill in the past. I assume that's true, Victor.

How does he see the quote-unquote special relationship continuing with the present and future administrations following the treatment of allies in the Afghanistan withdrawal and post-Brexit issues?

Victor, your thoughts on the special relationship between America and England?

Well, the special relationship exists in half of America and maybe 45% of England.

By that, I mean, I'm not just saying white people, but people of an older generation that understood the creation and role of NATO.

They understood that Britain in World War II, for example, was the only nation to declare war in the first day

and the only nation to fight to the last day of all the major belligerents.

And they understood that partnership won World War II, and that partnership gravitated toward the United States that took up the British role in the post-war order and gave us the modern so-called rules-based orders.

They understood that relationship.

But there was in Britain, they had open immigration, and they have a lot more problems of integrating, assimilating, and intermarrying than we do.

And they had this great disconnect that they were alleged to be the nexus of racism that spread their neo-colonial imperialistic oppressive system all over the world.

But with the collapse of that that system in the late 40s and 50s and early 60s, it turned out that,

you know, Britain, get out of Nigeria, Britain, get out of India, Britain, get out of Pakistan, Britain, get out of Jamaica, Britain, get out of Ghana, and take me with you.

And they had open-door immigration, and they've got a large number of people who have not been assimilated into the traditions of the British nation.

And then there had been a big

effort in Britain and, you know, Scotland especially, to and Ireland to redefine the United Kingdom as European.

And there was this same group that said, wait a minute, we're British and we're unique, whether it's we never joined the continental system in World War I and World War II. We fought against it.

We fought against Napoleon. We're different.

And that is now also, I think, a minority of the population, or at least half, maybe less. And over over here in the United States, the same is true.

There's people that are conservative and traditional, and they pretty much feel that when you're in a jam, you can trust the British people.

We always have, we've always come to their aid, they've always supported us, they've been wonderful in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then there's the other people who say, you know what, they're run by a bunch of old white guys, they're racist, but sexist, you know, we'll just skedaddle from Afghanistan, screw them, that type of person.

And it's hard. So the special relationship exists from half the nations on either side of the Atlantic.
And whether it is inert or whether it is active depends on whether the Labor Party is in power

or the Democratic power. If they're both in power, then there's kind of an ideological similarity, but it's not based on the old system.

It's based on, hey, you can be a partner, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party can be a partner to a new vision of European globalism.

So that's not, but when you have the Conservative Party in Britain and the Republican Party, then yes, that relationship still endures.

Churchill embodied it. He was half American.
Right, right. And he understood that.
And he understood both the power of the United States and the dangers of the United States.

And he was the one that explained that we could not win World War II

without the United States, but a fully engaged, fully mobilized United States within British dominance in the world. And it did.
It's kind of like Tolkien's ring.

I'm not saying that we were evil, but you had to use the United States in his view. But when you use the United States,

you were going to cede complete leadership to it by 1943, 44. And he did.
And he understood that.

And then his views that that he wanted to sustain maybe a commonwealth that would gradually give independence rather than radically just break off.

It was completely out of dated as far as America and Roosevelt were concerned. Roosevelt, in many ways,

insulted Churchill and tried to triangulate by being friendlier to Joe. And I think at one point he said, just let me handle Uncle Joe.
He likes me a lot better than you, Winston. Right.

Right.

So said the president to the greatest mass murderer before Mao Zedong,

20 million, and he got a lecture from FDR about the beauties of the Soviet Union, I guess. Yeah, and

was assisted in Meneva's foreign policy

decisions by

Alger Hiss. By the way, Victor,

two thoughts quickly. Going home every day from work in New York City, when I lived in the Bronx or high school, I was on the Jerome Avenue line.

And Jerome Avenue is named after Winston Churchill's grandfather, who was from originally from Brooklyn, but they named one of the major streets in the Bronx after him. So that's a little tidbit.

But, you know, I think one of the things that struck me as hurting this relationship in recent years was when Barack Obama went over to England and lobbied against Brexit and told the British people, you know, if you guys pass Brexit, you, England, are going to the back of the line when it comes to America's trade relations.

I think he actually won Breck, but Obama's obnoxiousness. Remember, he was also his obnoxiousness, he gave the Queen, what didn't he give her like an I to

one of those Apple devices filled with his speeches, but as a gift. And he, I think he removed, didn't he remove Churchill's bust?

Yes, he did. Yeah.
Say, Charles Kronhaber had gotten that controversy. Yeah, he did.
And then he lied about it. And

he blasted people who said he did as liars and character, but he did. He did, yeah.
So I think he really played a role in

harming this further. I think everybody should understand that about Barack Obama.
Just as an aside very quickly,

he was the one that took a inert, harmless word diversity and he empowered it and redefined it as non-white. And his purpose was to say,

it's not a black, white country of 88, 12. It's 35, 65.
Anybody who is not white has a claim against against the majority, and I'm the avatar of those grievances. That's what his whole point was.

And he did a lot of bad things.

The apology tour, and he unleashed the real Michelle against us. Never been proud of this country until Barack, downright mean country, raised the bar on me.
Just the

politically calculated whines of an upper middle class, privileged and entitled person who had gained the system from her education to her employment in Chicago.

And all she had to do was utter one word of gratitude.

I was a middle-class person in a multiracial society in Chicago. I got affirmative action going to the Ivy League.
My thesis was unreadable, but it was approved basically about how

white people hurt black people at Princeton.

And it was just a whole ended up at some job making like $350,000 a year. I mean, I'm not sure.
You got to give David Abserv credit.

At that campaign, they had unleashed her in the primaries and in the general, and she was going to lose him that election.

And he got a hold of her and he said, listen, you're not going to go out and freelance anymore.

You're going to stand by Barack's side and you're going to say what a wonderful country this is and how you want to help everybody's lives and you're not going to talk about race.

And then when he did that and she corrected, then she was no longer the issue. And then when she got in there, he said to her, and now you're going to be therapeutic, Miss,

you're going to be America's kind of working mom,

Vogue, you know,

type of person. And they'll love you and you'll write little homilies and stuff like that.
And don't go back there.

And every once in a while, she'd say, well, you know, I was at a store and some white woman asked me to reach up. and get a package, you know, that kind of stuff.

Or I worry every day that my children could be gone out and murdered, meaning white supremacists or, you know, like in Jesse Smollett fashion or driving around the Obama estate in Colorama waiting to attack the Obama children when we know who would attack the Obama children, if statistics are in the indication.

Oh, yeah. Well, let's.

Well,

that said, my friend, and everything else you said today, and I want to thank our listeners, Victor. I know you feel passionately about them.

Also, this podcast has been growing significantly, remains often in the top 10 news podcasts in America, and that's because folks are coming and listening and staying, and

I'd stay too, and because of the wisdom Victor shares four times a week and now five, on occasional five when he actually interviews somebody, which I think has become a regular weekly feature of this.

But that said, I do want to read one comment that we got from

Apple Podcast, just talking before about FDR

kissing up to Uncle Joe Stalin. And this one's titled Whitaker Chambers and Witness.

And this is from Bill Stewart in Jefferson, Texas. He writes, my wife and I never miss a podcast.
I don't know how you have the time to do all you do and tend to practical matters on the farm.

I'm reading Whitaker Chambers Witness for the second time. being reminded of the seminal work by seeing that this is the 70th anniversary of its publication.

I would love for VDH to discuss Chambers and the forces he was up against in his determined effort to alert America to the insidious threat of communism. Thank you, Bill Stewart.

And I think, Victor, that would be a welcome topic for a podcast. He was a wonderful pro-stylist and essayist.
People forget that, how he was probably one of the best masters of English language.

in the modern conservative movement. And then

because he was sort of an ungainly person,

he took a lot of left-wing elite hits that were aimed at his sexuality implied and his,

you know what I mean? His slovenly fat, rotten child. Slovenly fat, rotten cheap.

And it was all juxtaposed to the aristocratic, blue-blood, handsome, dignified opponents in the State Department like Alger Hiss. Yeah.
Well, I recommend

I've sent witness out to probably 30, 40 people. I think it's one of the great, great books of our time.
And there's also, if you're a Whitaker Chambers fan, you can find it on some used bookstore.

Ghosts on the Roof, that's a collection done.

The late Terry Teachout put that together a few years ago.

And Victor is right. He is just one of the most beautiful writers.
There's a couple of pieces in that book from the masses, the communist magazine paper that he used to write for the fiction works.

And Chambers is just stunning with the English language. But we'll do that on a future podcast.
Bill, thanks for presenting, you know, offering this idea.

Thanks, everyone, who listens and who rates the show on Apple. We're close to a perfect five-star rating.
Really appreciate it. Victor, thanks, my friend.

All right, well, thanks so much, and we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Thank you, everybody.