The Classicist: The Dying Citizen Part 2

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Classicist, a special episode, part two of our two-part series with Dan Mahoney and Victor Davis-Hansen discussing Victor's new book.

It's out.

It's not forthcoming.

It's not looming.

It is out right now, The Dying Citizen.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

Victor 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.

Dan Mahoney, dear friend for 40 years, is the professor emeritus at Assumption University, and he's a senior fellow at Real Clear Foundation.

Dan's got some terrific number of books that he's written.

The most recent one, you'll find it on Encounter Books, is called The Idol of Our Age.

And Dan will have a really important book coming out in May of 2022.

Encounter again is the publisher, and that's titled The Statesman is Thinker, Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation.

We're going to pick up the second part of this conversation between Dan and Victor right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show The Classicist.

I hope folks listen to episode number one, which would have been broadcast a few days ago, about 45, 50 minutes with Victor and Dan Mahoney discussing the dying citizen.

Dan, as we did the first part, I pass the baton to you, and you pick up the conversation, maybe where it had ended, or take it on to a new area.

Take it away, Dan.

All right.

Well, I'm going to...

pick up where we left off, but then move on to a related area.

Victor, when we left each other last time, you were talking about seeing some promising Mexican-American students who had in your classics program and honors program, who had been opened up to this shared wisdom and learning made possible by an encounter with great books and the classics, would then go on to graduate students and lamentably you would see they were re-tribalized in decisive respects and no longer had the same openness and affection

And you have in your chapter three of your book entitled Tribes,

you discuss how tribalism has paradoxically become respectable, that it was no longer seen in many elite circles as the backward reactionary and pre-civilizational notion that it is.

And I think central to your discussion in that chapter is that there's a fundamental difference between multiracialism, which envisions an inclusive and common culture for many races and people, and this tribalization that in important respects denies the characteristic of multiculturalism that in important respects denies both common humanity and the possibility and prospects for liberal education.

With that, by way of background, let me say I was really taken by your discussion of your relationship to students when you first founded your classics program at Fresno in the 1980s.

And your remarks resonated with my own experience of liberal education, the way it brings, as we say today, diverse people together.

Let me read a quotation.

Students' tribal affiliations disappeared in Greek class.

Being white, brown, or black meant nothing with studying Sappho or Hesiod.

Homer was no more or less foreign to a Mexican-American student than to me, a Swedish-American professor.

There was no such thing as cultural appropriation.

And as you point out, for these young students who are introduced to the enduring wisdom, and writing and thought of the classics, they became part of their cultural legacy to be passed on to their children.

And in other words, there really is something universal about what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said.

So I asked you about that.

And we could tie that to then students go.

Unfortunately, these students didn't get to continue in graduate school with you.

And they...

and they went to programs that even approach classics if they study classics in a more multi-cultural and repudiating way.

We see this with this fellow in the classics department at Princeton who now wants to turn the classics major at Princeton into an assault on classical texts and classical wisdom.

And you, I'm sure, know that the Princeton faculty recently voted to eliminate the requirement that classics majors study, not just gain proficiency in, but even study Greek or Latin.

So let's contrast those two experiences.

You might say the initial kind of liberating experience that you so eloquently highlight in the book with this

closing off of the possibility

of commonality, of common wisdom and common insight that accompanies academic and intellectual retributation.

Yeah, and I'll just say very quickly a preliminary and the last two issues of New Criterion, I address what you're talking about, this Dan L.

Perata at Princeton.

And then I have an obituary about three classicists in this issue for Roger Kimball.

But I also co-authored with John Heath, you know, 23 years ago, Who Killed Horn.

You could see then where we were going to be now, that they were trying to destroy the discipline.

I think they have.

What I saw with people of different ages, and I mentioned the book that we had one woman in a wheelchair who was in her late 80s, very wealthy, prominent person in Fresno, and yet she became best friends with a Southeast Asian young girl about 19, to the extent that they went shopping together and they were friends and on an equal basis.

And so it was a great equalizer that because nobody had had any Greek or Latin and it was a merocratic experience, that mutual challenge across race and gender and age, it just made everybody feel that they had something in common other than what we would call now their tribal affiliations.

But I also, I have to be careful how I said that.

I've also, when I was watching this, tribalism in this new spurt at the universities in the 80s and 90s, I also felt that it was a product of a sense of inferiority.

In other words, people who had either come here or were poor or were a race that was a minority, whatever the reason, whether self-inflicted or the result of bias from others, or I didn't really care.

But there was a sense that they looked at their tribe.

And I had grown up with this because the San Joaquin Valley was the locus class of the Steinbeckian Oklahoma diaspora.

So it was a pretty rough area when I grew up.

because the so-called Okies fought with the Mexicans and fought with the third generation or other whites.

And a lot of their their braggadachio and anger and tribalism came from the fact they were not only treated terribly, but they didn't have the same levels of education.

They were not status conscious in the sense that their churches were not Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, but Church of Christ or Church of the Holy Redeemer or something.

And so I thought, with all that in mind, I noticed that once a student could master Latin and their elocution, their diction, their grammar spoken and written was so improved up to the point where I had, within four years, I would have Mexican-American students that were better spoken than faculty members.

And it was odd, though, that a lot of the criticism that came from them was not from the so-called white people at the university, small though they were becoming, but it was from the Chicano studies, the La Raza activists, the professors.

Who do you think you are?

Don't you know you're La Raza?

And so as they became more educated, they shed their tribal identifications because they had a natural confidence, a meritocracy that made racial identification or ethnic tribalism irrelevant.

But it becomes more essential to somebody the more they feel that they can't be competitive.

When this is all part of one of the arguments in the book that it's so tragic when we look at these minority aspirations or the white working class aspirations, and they're always going to war with dependency and the therapeutic view that says you'll never make it because the system is racist.

You don't have the skills because they're always going to meet a wealthy white person that's going to put you down.

But if you trust, give your allegiance to me, I will fight for government programs and give you more support, all of that well-known tragedy.

But if you could educate people, if you could just say, we're not going to go give all this money to the inner city of Chicago.

We're going to put in five Latin academies in the inner city where people are going to wear uniforms they're going to speak perfect english and we're going to teach them latin as well as pride in their own culture but we are going to insist that when they come out of there they're going to get a 12 years that's comparable to the menlo school in menlo park or andover and i think you could do that yeah and yet nobody would want to do that That would involve having confidence in the ability of minority students and others to excel, to become fully competent, to become fully self-respecting.

I mean, one of the paradoxes that comes out in your book is that our progressive elites really

are wedded to, in a way, denying the, to deny the agency of the so-called victim class.

They are.

They are.

And as I explore the exegesis in the book, on that chapter on tribalism, and I really put a lot of the blame on the wealthy white bicoastal class.

I can't find in my own experience or in literature or even I even would, you know, would read Jungian psychology, but there is about that late 19th century idea of projection.

But you do get the feeling that the more you're around academics who are very affluent and well-situated, it applies to corporate people and especially the media as well, that

They like this patronizing, and Jack, I know we've discussed this before, so this is not an attack on Catholicism.

I'm just using some medieval metaphors, but they like this idea of indulgence or penance, where the more left-wing they can sound and the more they can encourage tribalism, and the more they are authentic, and the more they can march out and chant BLM, then somehow the less incumbent upon it is to put their child in a public school or to join a PTA with poor people or minority people, or to associate socially with with people that they have signed some abstract document that forgives all their sins.

And now, why do they do that?

Is it because of their affluence or their culture that has shielded them from the real world, or do they have an innate racialist sense that people can't do it?

And that's one explanation.

The other is, and because we're trying to find explanations, because it's a bizarre idea that these very, very wealthy white people in the Bay Area or in Bel Air or Beverly Hills or Malibu do not really want to be around poor people of any race, but particularly people who are not like themselves.

And the other thing is I think they feel that they have a sense of power that I am granting, like the Lord of the Manor, I'm granting to you peasant the right to farm 10 acres in a shareholding.

capacity, but

you have to, in exchange, give fealty to me.

Because, you know, what else explains this irrational hatred of black conservatives or Hispanic Hispanic conservatives by the white working class.

You can see it with Black athletes who choose not to be vaccinated because they've already had COVID.

They just zero in on them and they're angry, angry.

Or they're angry at blacks who have maybe not had a vaccination rate as high as whites.

And I used to have this discussion with my colleagues Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell at the Hoover Institution.

Shelby wrote a book on white guilt.

And Tom would talk about the same question.

And they would just quote chapter and verse to me the letters of anger that they get from white liberal grandees and elite.

And they do not like the idea that anybody would be autonomous and that would not need their help or, in fact, resent their help or would see them for what they are.

Yeah.

Thomas Chatterton Williams recently had a column about...

covering Tom Soulswork and he pointed out that, you know, he in the past just sort of wrote it off.

You know, he's a smart guy, but he's a conservative.

I have nothing to learn from him.

And now that Chatterton Williams has become sort of dissident and refuses to buy into the, you know, the self-loathing multiculturalist project, he's been reading Tom's soul and he realizes that there's a treasure of riches here and

a great deal of independence of thought and civic courage.

And, you know, you mentioned those two men.

They're so talented and so insightful and so accomplished.

And yet the people who are sort of the guardians of ideological correctness, I suppose, don't even think of them as authentically black.

I don't know.

I know I've been at Hoover since 2003.

And I think in the second year, Tom called me up and said, let's have lunch every two weeks.

So we did.

And then Shelby would come up from Monterey and we would do it once a month, three of us.

And we did that for, I mean, Tom is almost almost 91 and Shelby has had a couple of health issues, but we still do that once a year.

But my point is that when we had these conversations, we never really talked about race as in the sense of they're black and I'm white.

We never talked about it.

And then when people would come up to me

and they would say, I want to talk to Shelby or Tom and you talk to them and why are your two friends black and you're not as friendly with other people?

It was all by accident.

I hadn't even thought of it.

And then I finally, one person I wasn't particularly fond of, I said to him, because they're the most capable people here and they're most interesting and they're the most independent and they're the most liable to say what they think without fear of repercussions.

And I don't know.

Yeah, their virtues are eminently universal virtues.

They are.

And I don't know where they, maybe the element of being a minority in the 1950s had something to do with it, but it surely didn't result in the same consequences to other people.

They were unique.

And so, but the point is I'm making that it was always somebody on the left that wanted to find a racial explanation.

It wasn't just enough that you could say race is incidental.

It doesn't really matter.

And you can really see that with these white people, that this sort of, when I was growing up, they made fun of people who quote unquote tried to pass.

When I was in grammar school, there would be immigrants from northern Mexico that had more Spanish and indigenous blood, and they would never be Jose, they'd be Joe.

Or they would always be Louis, not Louise.

And that was great.

They assimilated and they were easier to assimilate because they were more resembling the majority population at the time.

But the point is, there was an idea that there were career benefits and this...

majority population had been insensitive.

But now when you look at it in the opposite direction, you can see that the same forces are at work.

So why would white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired Elizabeth Warren deliberately try to con and fabricate a Native American identity?

Or why would Ward Churchill, a racial dozel, or that woman who said she was black?

And this happens all the time.

And it's because they...

They're so cynical, they feel that now

if you can have some minority feed days, it has the same entree that in the past being white did.

And so people are trying to pass in a way that they never did before for minorities or and they did for white but the principle is still the same it's sort of an idea of a racialist idea of advantage and it's really an indictment in both cases sometimes of the society at large well just as i said in my opening remarks that your book shows that the multiple efforts to push forward post-citizenship has restored the worst forms of pre-citizenship and tribalism.

I think it's saying anti-racism in its various forms has instantiated a very ugly form of race consciousness where everything is racialized to the point that the most admirable human accomplishments or the most grotesque crimes, everything is interpreted.

through this category of race in a way that no longer allows us to speak of heroism or talent or achievement or something that depends on those sturdy virtues of the self-respecting citizens.

That's exactly right.

And it reminds me so much of the Soviet Union.

And I would used to read Eastern European Communist.

There was a great classicist in the Soviet Union, Andreev, who wrote about some of the areas I was interested in.

And I would read his translated Russian articles.

But he struggled under the ideological blinders that said said everything in the past had to be adjudicated on the degree to which some figure, whether it was Spartacus or the Spartan Helots, reflected class struggle or who was ideological.

And I was interested in the Theban general Paminondas, his military innovations, his democracy, but it was always when he was mentioned that he was the liberator of the Helots, which he was, but it was always in contemporary Soviet terms.

And that's why the Soviets...

And it wasn't reducible to that.

No, it wasn't.

And that's why all, and when I did a lot of research for a recent book, The Second World Wars.

And when you look at Russian accounts of World War II, up until about 1995,

they're completely worthless because every single blunder or every single stupid decision is always contextualized as an ideological, this was for the people versus the capitalists exploiters.

Even the Germans were not so much racist as capitalists.

The French students of totalitarianism have a phrase for that, the language de bois, the wooden language.

Yes.

Whenever you read Soviet scholarship, by the way, I think there were some sort of out-and-out Leninist Stalinists who just drank, breathed, wrote in the wooden language.

But I think there were others like this classicist you're referring to who had things to say, but you'd have to navigate through the ideological yeah and that's what that's exactly what this burden on race is.

We're going to go back and turn the tragedy of history into melodrama and pick winners and losers, not on their shared ordeal and a pre-industrial people, you know, where they had no appurtances or technology or medicines, but we're going to say that person is.

good and that person is bad based on my contemporary beliefs about race or class, not class, but race and gender.

So William becomes a Sherman may have liberated all of these slaves in the march to the sea, and he may have destroyed the fabric of the deep south.

And he may have come up behind Lee's army in a way that would force Lee to surrender, who otherwise had not lost Richmond.

But

he said to

an aide that he used the N-word, and therefore he's all of that doesn't matter.

And that's where we're going to.

And it's very Soviet.

Moral proportion, utterly.

Let's go to the unelected,

one of your post-citizen categories.

I must say, I was just delighted.

You begin with an epigram from Henri de Bolstac, one of the great French writers, and translated, it reads, the bureaucracy, the gigantic power set into motions by dwarfs, was thus born.

I gotta say, that was as good an epigram for a chapter as I've read in a long time.

But your chapter deals full, chock full of information, but it also is connected to your larger theme about citizenship, an unelected

administrative apparatus or oligarchy to use the ancient Greek category.

More and more

threatening classical citizenship.

At one point, you refer to the ascendance of a virtual, unelected aristocracy or rigged oligarchy.

that exercises power in a manner that does not reflect consensual government.

And I should add, because I feel like picking on him, you have two utterly revealing quotations from the ex-conservative never Trumper Bill Crystal, in which in one, he says, well, I'm going to side with the deep state against the Trump state, you know, the deep state, the resistance, you know, that fake anti-totalitarian language against the elected state.

I prefer legal measures, but.

if they're not available, they won't be available.

The other one was, well, the American people are so disappointing by caring about these things they shouldn't care about that maybe we just need limitless immigration and we can replace this people with another.

I can't think of two quotations that reflect an attitude of contempt for the American people or they are or posit, you know, the self-subsisting rule of contemptuous oligarchy.

But, you know, a lot of our friends at Claremont, they talk a lot about the administrative state and the progressives.

And you draw on some of of that quite well.

But it seems to me it's something more is going on here, that it's an attitude of contempt for consensual government.

It is.

And I think ostensibly, when we look at the symptomology, it's contrary to the Constitution because we were forfeiting or we're handing over or we're delegating power from elected officials to these permanent 2 million employees, but especially the people in the Washington Beltway.

And we're essentially contravening the Constitution by giving them all at once legislative, executive, and judicial power.

So if an EPA person comes out to my farm and says, Victor, that low spot in your orchard collects water.

I'm going to test it for nitrogen.

I said, well, what gives you the right to come out onto my property?

Well, there's an inland waterway law.

I said, yes, but that's for canals and navigable rivers.

Well, we've interpreted it here, i.e., we're now legislators.

And then we are going to be executives and we're going to enforce that new act.

And then if I object, he said, well, then we're going to fine you and you're going to have to sue us.

And they have all the power of the court.

So they're judge, jury, and executioner.

And they're not accountable.

And then I think part of it is that.

post-Napoleonic French technocratic society in the 19th century in France where we got the word bureaucracy, but the idea that you're going to have experts because officials revolve in and out of office and they don't have the expertise we were told in the modern industrial, post-industrial age to solve problems.

So they have to depend on not just staffers, but these experts.

James Comey, they're going to rely on James Comey because he's got a lifetime in justice, Department of Justice and the FBI.

We're going to have to talk to old Jim Clapper.

He really knows stuff because he's been in the military and the intelligence community for years.

Got to talk to John Brennan, two administrations, good John Brennan.

And there's

good old Bob Mueller.

We're going to bring him back because he was FBI and he knows all of the intricacies.

And, you know, we got to listen to Mark Milley because he's been in every type of office.

And what we're doing in the process is we're never asking them ourselves, does the person have character?

Does the person tell the truth?

If he does not tell the truth, do we have institutions and mechanisms of the citizen to hold him accountable?

So when James Clapper says, I gave the least untruthful answer when he lied about NSA monitoring of citizen, or John Rennan lied to the citizens when he said under oath, we have not had collateral damage and drone assassinations, or we do not at the CIA tap the staff computers of cinders, which both were lies.

Or James Comey says, this really got me angry because I've had some questions with the IRS and I can tell you that if you tell the IRS I have no memory or I don't know, as Jim Comey did 240 times, five times under oath, you'll be in big trouble.

Or when Robert Mueller says, well,

the twin catalysts for your investigation with a steel dossier infusing GPS, you want to talk about that?

I have no idea.

I don't know anything about them.

And so, and in Mark Milley the other day, you know, I have operational control when I subvert the chain of of command and tell subordinates that before you operate nuclear procedures, you go through me.

But I don't have operational control, as is stated in statute, when somebody wants to know what went wrong in Afghanistan.

But I do have it when I want to call my counterpart in China and warn him of a possible attack if that arises.

And so these people are independent operators and they're absolutely untouchable.

And they have more power than representatives or senators or governors.

And it seems to me that the conceptual government, that's so much a part of the civic order, as you stress in your book, it depends on what my late friend Roger Scruton used to call mutual accountability.

If you have an administrative state or a deep state, and you gave wonderful examples here of people who are essentially not accountable,

and there is no room in a civic order for officials who are not accountable to a self-governing population.

There's a wonderful phrase in Tocqueville when he's talking about the importance of local self-government, a government close to where to people's competences.

And he says, you know, if things become too distant, you've got these unelected bureaucrats.

And he says in French, we have sugar

and administrée, but pas citoyen.

We have subjects and administrated people, but not citizens.

And that's it.

You know, the lack of accountability means

you have officials who have responsibilities, but aren't accountable.

They're no longer part of a civic order.

No, and he uses that, he talks about prolonged adolescence in two or three passages.

And he's really good on suggesting that you do not want the state to assurp the right of the parent or the community to inculcate virtue and education.

And you don't want people to be permanently dependent on the government in the way that, as I said earlier, Pajama Boy was in that ad about Obamacare.

And then Tocqueville, you're quite right.

Tocqueville's thing is, you know, some of this paternalism is good with parents with children, but this is a kind of paternalism where you never let anyone grow up.

Yes.

And he says that, and the other corollary to what he's saying is that the agrarian then gives up.

control as a local parentis to these people.

And you have to be very careful that anybody who will educate you or prolong your adolescence then will have power to do so.

And that will mean a larger government that will take care of all of your needs.

By the way, I think this occurs in your book in the section where you're talking about pajama boy and jewelry.

You point out this was Tocqueville's nightmare.

It is, it is exactly what he said.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me ask you a question.

There was a in your chapter called The Evolutionaries.

And for readers, these evolutionaries are parts of the political and intellectual class who wish to move beyond the framers' ideas, assume that all of that is in the past, no longer relevant, outdated, sufficiently progressive.

And as Victor said before, they want an equality of result democracy, this new use and abuse of the beautiful word equity.

So this chapter is, and they also somehow believe human nature just evolves.

So the old requirements, the tough-minded requirements of free government are forgotten.

Very, very good chapter.

But you had a deeply personal passage where you were talking about your experience at Stanford.

Now, the Hoover Institution is on Stanford's campus, correct?

Yes.

And you were saying that you were, this kind of actually were talking about the speech indoctrination that's increasingly mandatory on campuses like Stanford.

And you, you know, with the particular pronouns and the full apparatus of ideological clichés we've talked about.

But here's what you wrote: you said, certainly as a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, I have learned that I cannot talk or write freely and dispassionately about certain topics, really important topics, I should add, illegal immigration, global warming, identity of politics, abortion, affirmative action, Donald Trump, or policies concerning COVID-19 quarantine without campus or student and faculty efforts to restrict my free expression or threaten me with career reprisals.

In general, over the past three years, anywhere from 62 to 71% of Americans have expressed new fears of personal and career repercussions for speaking candidly.

How can we have a civic order and consensual government without the elementary ability of people to exercise human logos, speech and reason, as Aristotle called it.

Yeah, you can't.

And I was writing that because the Stanford Faculty Senate filed complaints against three of us, Scott Atlas for supposedly disseminating false knowledge about the efficacy of masks and social distancing.

And when he said something, it was quite prescient that natural immunity was comparable to vaccinations and that we would eventually defeat the virus in the sense that it would be vestigial, but people would acquire either through vaccination or natural immunity, but not necessarily all by vaccination.

God probably underestimated the separation.

He did.

He was very, and yet he was censored.

He says 27 times greater from having COVID.

Yes, and he was censored.

A letter from the medical school, I think it had 100 people attacked him.

He was personally disparaged.

And the same thing happened on another matter to Neil Ferguson and I.

And they just focused on the three of us.

And eventually, because we chose to answer the charges both in print and person, they relented.

And the people making the charges, one of them was an Antifa sponsor on campus.

Another person had disseminated, the same person had disseminated anti-Semitic literature.

So they weren't necessarily an impressive group of civil libertarians.

But my point by that was when we looked for not people emailing us privately and many did you've got to stand up you've got to we didn't have any overt people and yet i i won't mention any names i've had people who would say to me well if you didn't say that they wouldn't go after you why don't you just calm down or

maybe you should just let us or maybe we should just kind of prune your expression and it got to the point even before this that one or two times a week, or sometimes a little bit more, I would do Fox, still do.

I don't get paid.

I'm not a Fox contributor by desire.

But when I'm up at school working, I would hop over to the Stanford Studio, which is extended to all faculty and Hoover people.

And then all of a sudden I was told, well, you can't use the you and only you, not the MSNBC faculty and the CNN faculty who say some of their most outrageous things.

I was in their so-called green room listening to them, you know, rant about Russian collusion and impeachment and all of these supposed realities.

But they would say to me, we want you to write out in advance what you're going to say, and then we're going to approve it.

And then Fox would call me up and say, Victor, this is just insane.

Who's doing this?

And then I would complain and they'd say, okay, okay, that we went over a little bit.

And then the next time.

Yeah, Victor, if we had more time, I think we could talk about what this.

You know, there used to be an American consensus in favor of the First Amendment, at least on the protection of political speech.

And now that that's gone, and you're describing it very well, both in your book and right now, this raises grave questions about the status of civic freedom in the United States.

It does.

It does.

I mentioned in the book very quickly, American Civil Liberties has just renounced its former position.

It's now an indoctrination center.

And remember, the left were the self-appointed guardians of the First Amendment.

They're not now.

They dislike the First Amendment as much as they do the second.

It's hate speech, and they suspend elements of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment on campus if you're accused of quote-unquote sexual harassment or assault.

So it's the university and the left.

These are not classical liberals or even liberals.

These are people who are hardcore, progressive, left-wing.

I don't want to go any further than that without more controversial adjectives, but my point is the left has given up all defense of free speech and expression.

It's called hate speech now, and they feel they have a right to monitor it for political advantage.

They no longer have confidence in our civilization idea that the logos, the exercise, Aristotle calls it the exercise of speech and reason to understand the advantageous and the just.

And if we if we give up on that, we've abandoned philosophy, we've abandoned civic life, we've abandoned consensual government.

It's so much is at stake.

Let me end by asking you, I mean, your chapter on globalization is very powerful, and you show all the twists and turns, the people who want us to globalize, but the NBA stars who are silent about totalitarian repression in China.

I thought one of the most interesting points you make in that chapter, besides a defense of territorial democracy against this mythical and abstract and non-existent citizenship in the world is that the whole process seems to have begun as an effort to Americanize the globe, but it has ended up making us less American, globalizing America.

A very suggestive remark.

Could you flesh that out for the audience?

Well, people thought that globalization in its first incarnation was wonderful, and it was.

I mean, we gave medicines and technologies to people in Colombia jungle and to people on the Mongolian border that got eyeglasses and sulfur drugs and what have you.

And then the next incarnation in the late 90s was that we were going to have a uniform popular culture.

There was going to be a new American informality, you know, flip-flops and jeans and tie-dyes and then the technology to accompany it, cell phones and iPads and CDs and podcasts.

And now we're in the third and last stage, and that is we're going to have this political harmony, what Klaus Schwab calls the great reset.

We're going to have a world elite and what Anthony Blinken means when he says he's going to invite the UN to adjudicate whether we're racist or not.

Okay, so that was pretty predictable.

But what I was suggesting is you start to dilute your culture under globalization and your politics, then it gets weaker.

It's like stretching a rope or a...

a rubber band, the center will eventually crack.

Sort of like the British Empire in 1854 starting to take over the world and then Dickens is writing, you know, David Copperfield about its nerf center at London, or the Kremlin's got soldiers from Egypt all the way up to Finland and yet it's a dysfunctional society in Moscow.

And so what we're doing is we're lecturing the world about

the superiority of American culture.

And we've got 158 bases and we've got a quarter million troops and we've got 40,000 diplomatic personnel.

But Chicago is more dangerous than Kabul.

And the borders of Afghanistan are pretty much comparable to our southern border.

And if you're in Afghanistan and you're a Pashtun

first, you're not a Pakistani or an Afghan.

And that's sort of what we're doing.

So we're trying to tell everybody about this liberal idea.

And we're going to have a gay pride thing on the embassy and a George Floyd mural in Kabul and a gender studies.

But when you look at that, what's happening in the United States?

We're tribal and our military is not under civilian control completely.

And our borders are frontiers just as much as Central Asia are.

So what I'm trying to suggest is that when we tried to take that effort and capital and labor and money and impress upon the world our system.

First of all, we didn't really know what it was.

It was weakening as we were trying to extend it.

And second, we didn't have enough resources to do that.

We're also extending the worst part of it.

The worst part of it.

Our multiculturalism, transgenderism.

I remember, remember the crowds in Tin Mount Square in 89?

Yes.

They were holding up the Gettysburg Address and the Statue of Liberty.

They were appealing to our civic tradition at the service of anti-totalitarianism.

And, you know, the other paradox is we want to spread America to the world, but at home, we teach oikophobia.

We teach people to hate home.

We do.

And we have that French crazy Macron who's telling us we don't want, and he calls it racialization.

We don't want American racialization in France.

This is the incubator of Foucault and Derrida and Lacan.

And they're now telling us, well, we may have exported a lot of these bad ideas, but you stupid idiots took them seriously.

Well, all my French, you know, conservative, conservative liberal friends say they're glad Macron is doing that, but somebody needs to remind them that the disease first came from Paris after May 68.

Yes.

I guess there are defenses.

It was all considered a wordplay game, and you idiots in America took it seriously.

But yeah, we're applying it to the polity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, my friends, that's about all the time we have here.

Sorry to interrupt, but this particular podcast and part one that preceded it, this has been just a really wonderful and illuminating discussion.

I think, Dan, I may have talked myself out of the job here with Victor by having you on.

You're a terrific interlocutor.

So thanks very much, Dan, for joining us.

Let me just tell everyone listening, buy the book.

This is the book for the moment, but it's also a book for anyone who wants to know what it means to be a citizen, a free, self-respecting citizen.

Must reading.

Thank you very much, Dan.

I really appreciate that.

Yeah, well, very true words.

Victor, I did mute myself, even though you took some digs at Holy Mother Church.

I did not.

I did not.

I said the operators of the church.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

So, a few closing notes here.

First, I'd like to remind our listeners that VictorHanson.com is where you should visit regularly.

You'll find all the links to everything Victor does, but there's a tremendous amount of content that's original that Victor writes exclusively for VictorHanson.com.

Subscriptions are very, very affordable and reasonable.

Heartily, heartily recommend you do that.

For Dan, encounterbooks.com, please visit there and consider purchasing his really important 2018 book, The Idol of Our Age.

And then also, if you go to Real Clear Public Affairs, you'll find a motherload of links and original works on civics.

And Dan, that's where Dan's very involved with creating a lot of that content via the Real Clear Foundation.

As for myself, I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

So if you'd consider visiting centerforcivilsociety.com, or if you'd like to subscribe to the nifty little weekly email newsletter, I write, Civil Thoughts, very simple civilthoughts.com.

For those folks who listen on Apple, iTunes, thanks.

Consider leaving a five-star review in appreciation for the wisdom that Victor shares.

And if you'd like to leave an actual message, do so.

We read them.

I'm going to read here one as we close out this episode of The Classicist.

It's Sarah Ritter who wrote, To be treasured, quote, cannot say enough how we cherish the culturalist and traditionalist shows Professor Hansen's esteem for the American people and heritage is evident.

If only my son could study with him when he enters university in a decade or so.

I don't know, Victor, if you want to be

in front of a classroom in 2031, but thanks, Sarah Ritter, for your kind words.

Thanks, Dan Mahoney, for joining us on this episode and the traditionalists to discuss this truly important book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

And Victor, thank you as ever for sharing your wisdom through the podcast.

Folks, it's also shared through the book.

As Dan recommended, please consider purchasing it.

So we'll be back again next week with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Traditionalists and the Classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Thanks very much for listening.

Thank you, and thank you, Dan.

Thank you.

Really enjoyed it.

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