The Traditionalist: The Dying Citizen Part 1

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Traditionalist.

Indeed, it's a very special edition of The Traditionalist.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

More on me later.

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

He's the author of The Dying Citizen.

That's not the forthcoming Dying Citizen, as we've been mentioning for weeks and weeks.

It is now out.

The Dying Citizen, the subtitle is How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

Those of you who feel the fingernails on the blackboard, hearing my voice, guess what?

There's good news.

Someone else is going to take over the baton for this conversation with Victor about this very important book.

This is the first of two podcasts that will be dedicated strictly to discussion of the dying citizen.

I'll tell you about them right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the traditionalist we are discussing today and in our next podcast, The Classicist, Exclusively The Dying Citizen.

I'm a very lucky man.

Not only am I my friend Victor, but a friend of Daniel J.

Mahoney, Professor Emeritus at Assumption College.

And Dan is here.

to discuss with Victor this very important book.

Let me tell you a little bit about Dan before we hand over the intellectual aspect of this conversation to him.

And Victor, Dan is a senior fellow at the Real Clear Foundation.

He received his doctorate at Catholic University.

He's written a ton of books.

One of them is Bertrand de Juvenal, the Conservative Liberal, and the Illusions of Modernity.

Dan is, I think it's fair to say, the world's top scholar on Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

One of his books is The Other Solzhenitsyn, Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker.

And three years ago, Dan wrote a book that Encounter published, very widely acclaimed, The Idol of Our Age, How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, and in the Encounter on Deck Circle, Dan's next book, that's out next in the spring 2022, The Statesman as Thinker, Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation.

Dan, he writes occasionally for National Review, regularly for Law and Liberty, and of course, Real Clear.

Dan, it's a great great privilege and honor to have you my dear friend from for 40 years and victor to uh engage in this really important book so dan i think it would be best to get this started by you giving an overview of the book you're reviewing it for national reviews and maybe a synopsis of your review and then you've got half an hour to uh talk with victor about why this book is really vital and important.

Well, this book really is vital and important.

And I would say that it has the great merit of combining a very searching and accurate and provocative and compelling account of our present situation with a really deeper reflection on the nature and crisis of citizenship.

And that one that draws on Victor's longstanding reflection on the intellectual and moral foundations of Western civilization beginning in the Greek world.

I noticed upon reading this book how many of the themes that Victor had introduced in his 1995 book, The Other Greeks, is present here.

So it draws on a rich reservoir of theoretical, historical understanding and learning while very much, I think, illuminating our situation.

The dying citizen, I think we have to be very careful.

The dying citizen is not the dead citizen.

Citizenship still lives, if more and more residually in the United States.

But if we really understand what citizenship is, citizenship in a bounded territorial community, if we understand,

as I think, as Victor DeVesans points out so well, that the citizen is not the mere resident.

somebody who makes it to American territory and then by default becomes a citizen with no attendant responsibilities or belonging to a larger civic order with rights and responsibilities.

But citizenship is a demanding, it's a noble ideal.

It has a rich heritage and history, but it's more and more coming under assault from a mixture, as Victor points out, I think, so well in the book, of tribalism, what he calls the pre-citizen.

You know, the various forms of dependency, tribalism.

Of course, we have tribalism today, and we can talk about this in the form of identity politics, a kind of perverted theoretical re-articulation of tribalism.

And also, I think one of the great strengths of this book is it shows the meeting point, the way in which

the contemporary idea of the post-citizen, the citizen of the world, Victor notes, one of the final chapters, that that phrase was used by

Dionagius the Cynic in the fourth century BC.

It's a very old idea.

The Stoics had a version of it that I don't think they really thought it could be applied politically.

But today,

every schoolboy or schoolgirl learns that it's the proper thing to be as a citizen of the world.

Being a citizen of the United States is outdated, reactionary, undesirable, etc., etc.

But as I was about to say, I think one of the great strengths of this book is it shows that the drive to create the post-citizen in many ways has restored all the problems associated with the pre-citizen, dependency.

tribalism, the erosion of political liberty and citizenship, et cetera, et cetera.

And again, to come back to my earliest point, I think one of the great merits of the book is how it combines really immense learning about Western civilization, beginning with the Hellenic expressions of citizenship and bounded territorial communities, with a very searching account of our crisis today.

And for now, let me just say that I thought the most interesting and important and pertinent theoretical and practical issue raised by the book was this sort of erosion of the idea of middleness.

Victor draws on a tradition going back to the Greek polis

that gained theoretical articulation and maybe the greatest political book of the Western tradition, Aristotle's Politics.

And as he points out early in the book, Aristotle understood middleness, to maision in Greek, but especially in its political form, the middle-class political order, the middle-class politeia, polity regime.

This was the political order that avoided the servitude and dependency of the poor, extreme poor, but also the grasping.

In Greek, it's the pleionexia, the greed, the grasping for power, for resources of the rich.

So a middle-class order allowed property-owning, self-respecting citizens who also bore arms, according to Aristotle and the Greek tradition.

You know, that that was really a model of what the citizen was, a kind of self-respecting autonomy, not radical moral autonomy, but civic autonomy.

And in multiple ways, Victor shows how that ideal, which was renewed in a modern setting, in a more commercial and perhaps less agrarian society by the American founders.

It was certainly described very beautifully in Tocqueville's Democracy in America in the 1830s and 40s.

And that ideal is under assault, practically.

A wonderful discussion of the book of California, where there are all sorts of enticements and entitlements.

and privileges for the very rich and the poor, but where the middle is being crowded out.

We go from Aristotle's politics to know, sort of the lived reality of contemporary California.

But in any case, I think there's some great stuff on this issue.

And let me ask Victor at this point,

perhaps if he could articulate a little bit more what's at stake in the preservation of a hardy,

property-owning, non-dependent middle class in this country.

You know, what you call, I think, very strikingly, the agrarian ideal as opposed to the serf or the peasant.

So let me throw that out there as a way of sort of getting an entrance into the book.

Well, thank you, Daniel, and thank you for the nice synopsis.

We can see what happens by negative example when you don't have a robust citizenship in these contemporary issues.

If we had autonomous citizens that were not either living paycheck to paycheck or didn't have a lot of burdensome debt.

And I think I said in the book, half of the population dies with less than $10,000 in net worth.

Or

they had been products of vigorous civic education at the high school level.

I think most people feel that 50 years ago or maybe 60 years ago, when you graduated from high school, you knew far more about the constitutions and the duties in the civic sense.

of a citizen than you would now after graduating from college.

And so that's been long.

But if we had these economically autonomous and well-educated citizens

that participated in government, then I think they would be making arguments why we do not want an open border.

They would say, you know what, citizenship has to be concerned with Americans first.

And we have all of these shortages of health care or transportation system.

And for each person you bring in illegally, you don't extend the same courtesy to somebody who's following our rules, who's in India or Korea, waiting legally to come in with professional skills.

So you're undermining the law.

And if you undermine the law in the abstract, and then you undermine it concretely by allowing people's first act as American residents is to break the law, then you've shaken the entire respect for the law.

And citizens then won't have any confidence in it.

I think they would also say that citizenship and if we're going to be a muscular nation that is protected from foreign and domestic, enemy, you have to have deterrence.

And part of the problem of Afghanistan, aside from the issue, whether in a cost and benefit analysis, whether it was worth staying another year, three years, five years.

I think most people wanted to get out quicker than sooner.

But nevertheless, the way we did it lost ourselves deterrence.

And we have learned from citizens that whether it was World War II or during the Cold War, when you lose deterrence, and the citizen will pay an increased price later on.

And we could have got out of Afghanistan in a manner that wouldn't have been so disruptive.

I think also the energy question would have been better posed.

Joe Biden has reduced the oil output by about 3 million barrels to the point he's begging Saudi Arabia for additional pumping.

I think a citizen would have said, well, wait a minute, the most cherished ideal is autonomy, what the Greeks called autarkea, economic self-sufficiency.

I know that free market economists sometimes berate that, but the idea that America has its own fuel and it doesn't need to go into an optional war in the Middle East, or it can't be leveraged by oil producers like Russia in the way that Germany is, or it doesn't have to make an argument to people who have been hollowed out by globalization why they should serve on the front lines in Iraq or bomb Libya or something.

That was an enormously important asset that citizens would recognize.

I think they also understand innately that

for all of the challenges to race and tribe and citizenship in our past, that this give and take, the nature of the American Constitution with checks and balances, the amendment process, the judicial branch, we had more than enough mechanisms to deal with problems of inequality in the political sense.

But I think they were also growing very wary, and they would be able to articulate that much better were they in a more enviable position that with equality of result doesn't and should not follow equality of opportunity, because to do so would mean a federal government that would have to be so overweening, so large, so expensive, so massive, that it would exurp the right of liberty and freedom of the individual citizen to force them to be equal, as Aristotle said, not just in politics, but in every other aspects of somebody's life.

So a lot of these issues, I guess what I'm saying, Dan, is because today's citizen is not well educated about what their history and customs are, especially history is important.

Most students today have no idea what Normandy Beach is.

They couldn't tell you what Pickett's charge was.

They have no idea what the Missouri Compromise.

They don't know anything about their customs and traditions or history.

So therefore, they very, in a very facile way, attack them or trash them without any idea of the ordeal of pre-industrial peoples that gave them our freedom and influence today.

And if they were that aware and if they had a little bit more in economic viability and sustainability, then they wouldn't be sort of winking and nodding at encroachment of government for the poor, thinking, well, I'm going to get some too, or they wouldn't be so impressed in the celebrity sense or the popular cultural sense with people who have titles, the bi-coastal elite, especially the wealthy.

And I think that they'd be a lot more outspoken.

And you can see that.

Go ahead.

Yeah, it seems to me that one aim of your book, at least implicitly, is to recover, you might say, the moral self-understanding of the citizen, that the very idea of citizenship has come under systematic assault as being morally illegitimate.

You know, that global citizenship or a kind of this abstraction of the people from nowhere is somehow morally superior to the concrete loyalties, responsibilities, duties, rights of the active citizen.

And from what you've just been saying and what you argue in the book is that that's really to get everything backwards or upside down.

But it seems to me that From that flows ingratitude.

You're talking about people not knowing their history, not knowing our debts to those who fought for our our freedom,

riches in Normandy, or, you know, this bloody civil war that put an end to chattel slavery.

You know, Abraham Lincoln's no longer the great emancipator.

You know, we honor BLM Marxists rather than Frederick Douglass.

You know, so I take it, and you also had, I think, a very nice passage that I highlighted in my own review of your book where you talk about the American heroism and how capacious it was, how had it had room for so many people and

has been able to accommodate what we might call multiracial heroism.

You know, I mean, America is perfectly open to recognizing the Jim Thorpes and the Booker T.

Washingtons and the George Washington Carvers and the Frederick Douglasses and the Martin Luther Kings.

But maybe you could say a bit about this because it seems to me that this civic ignorance does go hand in hand with two things.

One is ingratitude and the other thing is this zeal for repudiation.

Roger Scruton has a great phrase, he calls it the culture of repudiation, which says a lot about our present situation.

But it seems to me that if you're ignorant and ungrateful, you're much more open to repudiating that which deserves respect or the heroes who deserve esteem and admiration.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And even as I try to point in the the book, where does the ingratitude and even the ingratitude, I should say, and the ignorance derive from?

And I think a lot of it is that

we have so many people today, unlike 100 years ago, that are not rooted or that they don't know anything about muscular labor or the outdoors or they romanticize nature, but they've never been afraid of nature and what it can do.

And they're completely insulated.

And they have this very warped as a result value system.

So we really do think in our society that if you take out $100,000 and you're going to major in psychology at, you know, Cal State, L.A., that

that is a path to upward mobility, to moral certainty, to prestige and status.

Whereas if you decide to open a 7-Eleven and you master the sciences of accounting and finance and inventory and salesmanship and security, that is not as prestigious.

It's not as looked upon.

And so I think a lot of it has to do with the post-war magnification of the university, the role of the government coming in and subsidizing these loans, and the corporations and government requiring a particular certificate that the university offers.

And then that process, as it went hand in hand with urbanization and suburbanization, we have produced an entire group of people who have a pajama boy life of Julia idea of what is success.

And yet, if somebody from the outside would look at this from another century or another country, they'd say, you know, the emperor has no clothes.

These youth don't know how to, they don't know how their car runs.

They do not know what way the wind blows at what time of season.

They're artificial creations and what they do, what they're branded as or what their certificate says they know is a social science pseudo-science.

It's not knowledge.

And as a result of that, they're very insecure.

And they feel that,

well,

you can really see it in the careers of people like AOC.

You know, I was an honor student and I have a master's in international relations and I was a scholarship winner and I was a science fair winner.

And yet when she has a map, she can't identify any of the countries of the Middle East.

She also couldn't identify the three branches of the American Constitutional Order.

She could not.

And yet, it's almost like a cattle brand.

You get your cattle brand or your membership card into what we call the elite or the pseudo-elite.

And most people don't even get into it because it's expensive.

It's still governed by things like your zip code and who you know.

But we've been sold a bill of goods and we've lost all respect for the dignity of labor.

So when I see some guy on a D9 caterpillar ripping up an orchard for 11 hours in a row, or I was this morning going over into a Dodge truck shop and watching these guys just tear apart complex transmissions and engines and doing this.

And then I say,

what is the value of that compared to the types of students?

I think a quarter of them have no business in college and yet they're going to go in debt where these young people that were doing this are not only fulfilling a valuable service, but they're going to be more autonomous.

So I think

we have this crazy value system that anything that's muscular or that can be outsourced, as I say in the book, or offshored overseas, then you're a loser.

You didn't code.

You didn't go to the fracking fields.

I think Kevin Williamson, my former colleague at National Union, has said that explicitly, that these guys are losers in between the bi-coastal elite.

And they should move somewhere else.

Yes, get in your.

Yeah, in your U-Haul.

Just there's your U-Haul.

Get in it.

And the strange thing is that the people who did have skills in finance, media, academia, insurance, celebrities, professional sports that benefited from this new $7 billion marketplace, they had their worth exaggerated in domestic terms.

And these are our new heroes.

And these are these people that give us lectures at the Emmys or the Tony's or the Vanity Fair Ball or the Obama 60-year birthday party.

But when we really look at them and we say, do they know anything?

Is what they do absolutely essential to the survival of the Republic?

It isn't.

And so to get that citizenship back, I think we're going to have to start really

recalibrating who is important and who is not and what type of activity is valuable.

You know, when people talk about the virtues in politics, they often rightly bring up prudence, you know, the Greek phronesis, you know, political judgment.

But there's another Greek word you're well familiar with, the matis, you know, that kind of cunning, that kind of ability to make, you know, Odysseus had it, you know.

And it seems to me that these people who lead these rarefied lives, you know, with speculative finance where you are sort of cut off from the direct experience of life and all that, it's very hard for those people.

to value the civic virtues because I guess you could say the material preconditions for them, the getting your hands dirty, working hard, valuing the concreteness of being an autonomous, property-owning, responsible economic actor and political citizen.

It's just, it's not a world they have any experience of.

And I think I agree.

I think there's openings, and I said in the book also for the conservative movement in general, perhaps even if the Republicans would be a little bit more populist, that a lot of minorities who still are on the upward mobile path, who still drive trucks, are

the white working class that used to be democratic, but people who engage in physical labor, when they are lectured to by the so-called Karens of the world or these vaccination police, and then they say to you, well, hell, I almost died.

I had COVID.

I have antibiotics, or my daughter had COVID.

Why does she have to get vaccinated?

And they ask these pragmatic questions and they're not answered.

And they're hectored.

And they're hectored by these beneficiaries beneficiaries of capitalism and they're talked down to.

And it's quite amazing that we may see in this 10-year shaking out period that the Republican Party could be a party of what the Democrats were under Harry Truman or something.

Not that they would be the same,

but you can really see that the Republican establishments getting very, the old Republican establishments getting very uneasy with the idea that you would welcome in Mexican Americans or African Americans or working white class on the basis of labor and practicality and earthiness and

not being talked down to by elites in the way that the Democratic Party is.

That's what Lincoln used to talk about, the value of labor.

He did.

He ended up a property-owning democracy.

And that's one thing I came away from your book with an enhanced appreciation.

Sometimes this talk about the market economy or capitalism, it's necessary.

It's part of our nomenclature.

It's a little abstract because it abstracts from the moral and civic qualities that make the market order estimable.

And so I think your distinction between the agrarian and the peasant, just reminding us that If we're going to defend a free economic order, it's got to be an economic order that allows, certainly doesn't work actively to undermine those moral and civic qualities that have been at the center of the Western ideal for 2,700 years.

And so sometimes these

libertarians or the Never Trumpers, you know, when they talk about, you know, oh, the right's turning on capitalism and all that.

That may be true of some elements of the right, but.

I think maybe there's a recovery of this sort of older understanding that the market economy has to be tied to a certain kind of agent.

I think it has to.

And I think Republicans and conservatives are much better at it than the left is.

And I can remember in 1983, when I was full-time farming, we had gotten $1,400 a ton for raisins.

And due to...

the recession, that was Paul Voeckler's effort to stop the runaway inflation, which had become stagflation and 12%, 14% interest rates.

But also the new EU had been subsidizing dried fruit and dumping it on the world market at about half the price, so that about 40% of the export market had been taken from American farmers.

Now, these were mostly NATO members who were being subsidized militarily, and yet they were destroying the raisin market, among the fig market, et cetera.

And so they had a guy from the national

government, the Reagan administration, and there was something called the national or the Raisin Administrative Committee, RAC, and he came to Fresno and some people, I was in my 20s, late 20s, early 30s in these years.

They said, well, Victor, will you go with us to talk to this guy?

So a bunch of farmers, we went up there.

And so I said to him, how can it be in our interest to see the price go from 430 to 420 in one year?

That's $2,000 an acre.

And everybody is going to be really essentially, so what does that mean?

And I said, that means when you get on the tractor, you're going to pay the bank about $15 an hour to pay for your tractor driving because you're going to lose $1,500 an acre.

And he said to me, I can never forget it.

He said, you don't know anything about economics.

Please explain.

He said, well, there will be a survival of the fittest and somebody will make it on $400 a ton and the consumer will get a big break.

And the European Union will not, that will not be sustainable.

So it's a win-win-win.

I said, yes.

The people who will make it under $400 are the larger growers that have vertically integrated operations, trucking, packing, merchandising, brokerage, and they will be able to sell.

And then the price will not go down to the consumer.

It will just be recalibrated to the people who are doing that, will take a bigger cut, not the supplier.

And there's no way in the world that the EU cannot continue that indefinitely because they have no defense budget.

And he just scoffed at.

And that's exactly what happened.

And as I look out the window right now, there are no such thing anymore as small growers of dried fruit here.

It's all wiped out and it's all part of a corporate military.

His answer is a perfect example of this sort of demoralization of the argument for the market economy.

It is.

It's like Bolshevism.

You don't care about the effect it has on real people as long as you move forward with the historical process.

And that's never been the American defense of commercial society, a market order.

It hasn't been that this is good for people, free people.

It is.

Let me ask you about the treatment of residents and tribalism.

You have some very interesting discussions.

Really struck me that how immigration has changed in America.

And I don't mean simply the contemporary valorization of illegal immigrants, the Orwellian, undocumented, but People used to come to this country, as you put it, as a bargain, that you come, and you quoted a letter from uh president teddy roosevelt where he says we don't want to discriminate against people on basis of race or creed but there's a bargain you come here and you get rid of those old primary identities you become an american and you're part of the civic community and you rightly say that's harsh in a way but it's a bargain that worked and then you compare that to a situation today

where people not only come in and you have activist groups like la Raza who understand immigrant communities in a very racialist, anti-civic way, and then you have incompatible, as you rightly say, with citizenship.

And then you have, of course, an immediate access to the welfare state and to various entitlements that undercut these ideals you speak about so well of autarky, of civic responsibility, of property owning, of responsibility in the broadest sense.

So the context really has changed that we're no longer welcoming people to be citizens.

We're welcoming them to be residents who think tribally.

And perhaps you could say a word more about that, because I think it's a very striking way of posing the dramatic transformation in how we think about immigrants and the country.

And also, I would just add, as you point out very beautifully, the country they're coming to increasingly loathes itself.

So they're not coming to the last best hope on earth, to quote Lincoln.

They're coming to, you know, somehow a uniquely exploitative and oppressive society, according to our elites.

Yeah, I think in the past, it had a lot to do with why people wanted immigrants and to the degree that they thought about it consciously.

And many did.

I mean, the average citizen did.

And they felt this country had a very small population, a very large territory.

And like an onion, each layer expanded the pool of immigrants that was necessary from British Isle English and Welsh and then to Western European then Eastern European and then Asian or Latin American etc etc but up until about 60 years ago the ideology was the same and that was legal immigration is really good for us because we the host can

assimilate them, integrate them, intermarry, and within two or three generations they're indistinguishable.

But even in the first generation, they have as many rights as a first generation person as somebody does as the sixth.

And this is a natural draw for kind of industrious risk takers that were maybe for class reasons or maybe for accidents of birth.

Their talents were not recognized where they were, but because they got here and it was an open arena, they did very well.

And so there was the idea they also reminded us, you know, and I when I was growing up, my father and grandfather and everybody would say, Look at that Japanese-American farmer.

Or they would say, Look at that guy from the Punjab over there with that orchard.

My God, that guy works hard, and I've got to keep up.

In other words, I wish I could farm like that guy could.

But the idea that people came with a little bit more desperate circumstances, and so they looked at they were starting from zero, and we had been a little bit complacent.

So that has changed from why do people come today?

Why do we want want people to come illegally, especially?

That's about half the people.

And I think the answer is it's usually for self-interest.

The corporate state wants meat packers, they want landscapers, they want chefs, they want maids, they want cheap labor and they don't really care about the effect on the citizen population.

And we know that the Department of Commerce for years has showed us how that drove down wages.

And then we know the Mexican government sends people here because they want remittances, about $60 billion to Central American Mexico per year, the largest source of foreign exchange.

And they feel that therefore that elite does not have to have a social justice, a welfare, whatever term we use for their own people, where the Americans' social justice will subsidize their expatriates with health Medicare or Medi-Cal or whatever legal or educational or housing needs are necessary to free up $300 or $400 a week to send back to relatives in Mexico.

So Mexico likes it.

They like the safety valve idea that rather than marching on Mexico City, they go to America.

It's that sort of reverse Frederick Jackson-Turner idea.

And then we, as I said, the corporate world likes it.

The left, the mainstream Democratic left, says, you know, Until the Trump election of 2016, they kind of liked the Electoral College.

They said the blue wall was impenetrable.

And they said, we have flipped California.

We have flipped Illinois.

New York has been flipped.

They will never be Republican again.

But more importantly, it's not just California.

It's the American Southwest near the border.

It's New Mexico and Colorado and Nevada and maybe even Georgia and next Texas and Arizona.

And so the more people that come, they not only expand the need of the welfare state, i.e.

our power, but they can flip elections.

And they have.

Here in California, we'll never have a governor like Reagan or Duke Mason or Pete Wilson or even Schwarzenegger again.

And then finally, the La Raza group said, you know,

the more people that we have that look like us, the more we can have a constituency whose tribal fides is the main driving force in how they vote or how they look at the world and America politically.

And you put all of those vested interests into a matrix in which most people in the university who form public opinion or the media who form public opinion or the cultural left in entertainment and they are very critical of our country and you tell all these people who are coming in for these different reasons all self-interested oh and by the way the moment you come from oaxaca state and you put one toe onto u.s territory did you know you're a victim and you're not a victim of that racist largely conquistador pedigree government in Mexico City as an Indigenous person.

You're a victim the moment you come of white people in the United States.

And we're here to properly apprise you of that fact.

And so if you thought of a way to screw up immigration, you couldn't do any better than what we've done.

You know, I have a friend, Peter Scary, who teaches political science at Boston College here in Massachusetts.

And he wrote a book on the Mexican-Americans in the 90s.

But I don't remember all the details, but I remember him discussing this dynamic where he says, you know, the parents come legally or illegally, but they're well disposed to the country.

They actually are quite open to those those traditional virtues that you and I have spoken about.

But there's in a generation or two, the kids go to college and to paraphrase, they, you know, major in Chicano studies or in some sociology and they're taught that

they ought to have an adversarial relationship to the country they've come to.

So, you know, I mean, there's a bit of a caricature, but it's also a real phenomenon that

people can come with sympathy for the American Enterprise and by the next generation or two are taught the stance or attitude of the of the victim i think that's exactly right and one of the reasons after 21 years at cal state fresno in the classics department that i started a program i got very disillusioned because originally the sort of paradigm was almost all of our students even then were Mexican-American or sometimes Mexican national, sometimes illegal.

But they would come in

and they were full of energy and excitement about being in the United States.

Many of them, or most of them, were not born in the United States.

And then they would tell me that their parents were traditional and didn't like the idea they were studying Latin or Greek rather than, you know, plumbing.

So I would always, I would talk to some of the parents.

They were very fine people.

And I would try to convince them that maybe that this wonderful classical education would be like putting your kid in Andover or prep school, but here free at Cal State Fresno.

And then the student would do very well, and then they would go to graduate school, either in classics or law or medicine or education or something.

And then they would get jobs and then I would follow them.

And what would happen would be a re-tribalization.

So a guy I knew as Joe Lopez was now, you know, Jose Lopez with an accent mark or a guy named George Martinez was Jorge Martinez.

And even the accent changed.

And they were now telling me that their parents had been naifes and had been exploited, even though the parents never thought they did.

Every time I met a parent, he would say, I'm so lucky not to be in Oaxaca or Michokan or Chiapas.

But they and the university would then, in their infinite wisdom and sophistication of having this education, would look back and say, you know, my parents were kind of suckers.

They were really exploited.

And I have a duty for my people.

And I don't know who their people.

I'd always say, who are your people?

You can hardly speak speak Spanish anymore, if at all.

And who discriminated against you?

This was before what we're seeing now.

It was always had to have an adjective before discrimination, you know, implicit, insidious.

the forerunners of microaggression, because it was never overt.

They could never tell me, how did you come to our program and how did you suffer?

You had free tuition, you had scholarships, you had individual attention, nobody ever mentioned race, you were the majority in the classes.

Just tell me why you're so angry and they couldn't and then finally i in a reduction sense i said i'm not angry because it was a investment it's a career move it's like having a membership card in the old soviet union you had to because if you didn't you would be called a sellout or you felt your career upward trajectory would be aborted because you were a sellout.

And remember, I'd always tell them that white liberals hate most of all minorities who are self-sufficient and don't feel they owe anything to a white liberal's advocacy for affirmative action or separatism or something and it was very discouraging to have these students come back and almost not all but a lot of them reflected this culture of separatism tribalism and it was very injurious i thought to the idea of citizenship because their first identity was no longer being an american it was a superficial affinity with people who looked like themselves.

Well, now this is Jack again.

Now we come to the part of this wonderful conversation where I have to interrupt it and say this is essentially the end of the first half of what's been a terrific conversation so far between Dan Mahoney and Victor Davis Hanson about the dying citizen.

This is the traditionalist, one of the three podcasts under the Victor Davis Hansen show umbrella.

We will take up part two with the classicists that will follow in a couple of days when you're listening to this.

I would like to remind our listeners a few things.

VictorHanson.com is Victor's website.

There's a ton of original material there, which you can read if you subscribe to it.

I'd say the vast majority of what Victor writes is privileged and exclusive, and it's at victorhanson.com.

So please visit the site.

and subscribe.

It's very affordable.

You'll also find a link.

If you haven't bought the dying citizen yet, you'll find a link there.

If you go to encounterbooks.com and search for Daniel Mahoney, you'll find a link to his great book, The Idol of Our Age, How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.

And as for myself, Jack Fowler is the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

We have a groovy little newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, subscribe, centerforcivilsociety.com, check out what we do there.

So, Dan, thanks very much.

Victor, thanks very much to our listeners.

Thank you.

We will be back with the second part of this terrific conversation on the dying citizen on the next episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thank you.

Thank you.