From and Angry Reader:
Dear Professor Hanson,
Evidently you are a supporter of Donald Trump. If I read your essay on this subject correctly, you seem to be implying that, unlike the false elitism of the Washington Beltway, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, we should look to the real basis of brilliance and repute in a “demonstrable record of moral and intellectual excellence.”
Do you seriously mean to say that Donald Trump’s life has such a “demonstrable record”? A man who cavalierly treats women as objects for his sexual pleasure and lies at the drop of a hat we are to believe is a man of high moral character? Or one who has trouble constructing a sentence using a vocabulary of more than 100 words (everything is just “fantastic”) demonstrates intellectual excellence?
The problem with Trump is not so much his policies, about which reasonable people may disagree, but his character flaws. As David Brook recently commented, Trump is “ripe to be played” by foreign leaders like Putin who are smarter and more wily than he is. But Trump has such a fragile ego that he is likely to react to being played in his typically childish, immature way by lashing out at everyone and anyone he thinks is disrespecting him. He never takes responsibility for anything, always blaming others for his own mistakes, and he does not know how to accept and deal with criticism in a rational way. He also suffers from what, as you classicists know, the Greeks called hubris. And you know what hubris leads to: tragedy.
Let’s just hope that the tragedy ends up being his personally and not ours collectively. With such a man having access to the nuclear trigger, we should all be hoping that we somehow manage to survive these next four years without a tragedy of monumental proportions.
Sincerely,
Sanford G. Thatcher’
P.S. I attach a short bio so that you know my background.
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Sanford G. Thatcher
Frisco, TX 75034-5514
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu
“If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.”-John Ruskin (1865)
“The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.”-Walter Bagehot (1853)
“Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”-Ambrose Bierce (1906)
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Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:
Dear Angry Reader Sanford Thatcher,
There is no need to attach your biography in our new age of populism; the persuasiveness of your argument should stand or fall by what you have written rather than the authority of your CV.
As you know, I certainly did not equate Trump with proof of non-elite moral excellence; rather I explained his election through the widespread anger at political and media elites that was aired through his populist candidacy.
I voted for Donald Trump when there was a binary between his agenda and that of Hillary Clinton.
There is some truth in what you have written about Trump’s rhetorical crudity and his past behavior, but, of course, the Clintons were a virtual crime syndicate—she using her office to leverage cash for the Foundation (a sinecure for unemployable Team Clinton politicos between campaigns) and Bill’s speaking career. Of course, when she lost and is now permanently out of federal office, she can do no connivers any good and so the money dried up and the Foundation is reeling—proof of sorts that the entire operation was a pay-for-play enterprise of the sort that earns most people an indictment.
Actually hubris is a result of Koros (instability and excess resulting from power and wealth) that leads to leads to Hubris (overweening arrogance) to Ate (madness and self-inflicted destruction) and ends in Nemesis (divine and fated retribution), which is all the stuff of tragedy, given that the sequence is usually associated initially with people of talent and good intentions.
All this may certainly apply to Trump’s earlier business implosions, and it fits Bill Clinton perfectly, and Obama may end up the same way.
My point is that in 2016 the choice was not between two characters as much as two agendas: I preferred a foreign policy of deterrence backed by military strength as a better way of preventing wars and interventions, an end to doubling the debt, zero interest rates, and record low GDP growth, a stop to illegal immigration and racial polarization, a restoration of the health care system, and efforts at tax and regulatory reform to restart the economy, as well as renewed energy production—all as a mechanism to help the so-called forgotten man, the middle classes who were the losers under globalization.
I saw far greater hope that Trump might enact such an agenda, and no hope that Hillary Clinton would.
As far as character flaws, pick your poison. His I thought were mostly rhetorical (as you note with your unease about his limited vocabulary) and in the private sphere; hers were concrete and at the public expense, from her cattle futures fraud, to her Wikileaks scandals to the Clinton foundation criminality to her callousness and lying about Benghazi. Hillary as you know is a serial liar, from the mundane (her landing in the Balkans under sniper fire) to the existential (lying to the families of the Benghazi dead).
You might have noted that we survived Bill Clinton committing sex acts in the Oval Office bathroom with a subordinate intern less than half his age (the sort of thing that gets a professor fired summarily), and then lying about it under oath, resulting in his disbarment—the sort of crudity I think you are implying disqualifies one for high office?
Obama, remember, tapped the communications of AP reporters, monitored the communications of James Rosen of Fox News, droned US citizens, bombed Libya without congressional approval, granted amnesties of the sort that he had once warned were unconstitutional, lied about the ACA, and simply chose not to enforce various federal laws he found at odds with his progressive agenda.
If you are arguing that Trump is a Frankenstein monster, then the Dr. Frankenstein creator is surely Barack Obama whose executive orders, partisan rhetoric, nullification of federal laws, and abject ruination of the Democratic Party at the state, congressional, and presidential level all empowered Trump.
So far job growth and the stock market are up; Trump’s appointments in the national security sphere are centrist and heralded. His selections from the business and military fields are a welcome change from the tired retreads from academia and government. And his illegal immigration initiatives and energy agendas are overdue.
As far as hubris, self-reflect: in the last 90 days liberal commentators and pundits have variously called for Trump’s murder, his immediate removal for health reasons, his impeachment, and his resignation.
His phone calls to foreign leaders and communications have been illegally tapped (and so note that the media is now backing away from their Russian collusion charges that proved so far groundless, as they worry more that intelligence agencies’ tapping and the leaking may be exposed as the felonious acts they were); his wife has been accused falsely of prostitution and immigration fraud. Trump himself has been falsely accused (in print) of urophilia and suffering from neurosyphilis.
One New York Times columnist has begged the IRS to commit a felony and send him the Trump tax returns; another compared his election to the mass deaths of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Is not all that indicative of classical madness that will surely lead to an accounting? Trump, the supposed buffoon, polls higher in the public’s estimation of veracity than does the highbrow media).
On the larger topic of the “elite,” I think we could say that those in Bakersfield or Des Moines did not give us record debt, serial corruption in the IRS, VA, GSA, or EPA, and a world in free fall abroad. Here in California the best and brightest managed to deliver the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation resulting in infrastructure and schools rated near the very bottom in state-to-state comparisons. The Orville dam is a metaphor of elite indifference to existential problems while it pursued transgendered restrooms and bobcat health.
Sincerely,
Victor Davis Hanson
Justplainbill's Weblog 
Dr. Hanson’s response to Southern Poverty Law Center [c]
From An Angry Reader:
Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center:
Cf: (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/22/american-freedom-alliance-event-blames-immigrants-california’s-destruction)
“They keynote speaker for the event was Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institute (sic) fellow and author of Mexifornia, a book that romanticizes the California of old, when whites were a large majority of the state’s population. Davis Hanson (sic) talked about how in parts of California, you can go 10 miles in another direction and it ‘looks like you’re in a different country.’ Hanson also attacked California’s Democrats, saying:
We don’t want assimilation so we’re going to give you as much amnesty, sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, we’ll do whatever we can so you can remain tribal in your outlook. Your tribal racial and ethnic identity is essential, not irrelevant to your character.
Hanson also expounded upon the reconquista conspiracy theory promoted by anti-immigrant activists. It stems from the ‘Plan Espiritual de Aztlan,’ a document produced by MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) in the 1960s calling for Chicanos to reclaim land. It is not endorsed by any mainstream groups, but for nativists it serves as the genesis of a conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.
Davis Hanson ended by saying, “The state is regressing into a Third-World country.” He also attacked undocumented immigrants, essentially claiming they are incapable of being law-abiding residents, stating, ‘When I came to the States, the first thing I did was break the law, so why would I follow the rules out of necessity now?’”
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Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:
Dear Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center,
A few preliminaries: Mexifornia, written nearly 15 years ago, was not a romance about “white” California, but a warning that if assimilation, intermarriage, and melting-pot integration continued to be caricatured and eroded, and if massive immigration continued to be illegal, non-diverse, and not based on ethnically blind meritocratic criteria, then one day California would be faced with ethnic polarization, given its various ethnic groups, large numbers of struggling newcomers without legality, English, or high school diplomas, and a state unable to meet its commitments to ensure first-rate public education, infrastructure, transportation, and safety for all its residents. I feel the book was prescient; if you disagree, find an argument instead of using the buzz word “white.”
You state that MEChA advocated “reclaiming” land for “Chicanos,” but then incoherently state that such a supposition is a “conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.” Is it a fact or a “claim,” both or neither? And what are “mainstream groups,” given that MEChA for decades has had a sizable presence on most California and southwestern campuses and claims a number of prominent alumni.
When you write “essentially claiming” rather than quoting what I actually wrote in full, we know that “essentially” is a catalyst for more fiction to follow.
In general, I rarely have seen a puerile attack like this in which everything you have alleged is demonstrably false. Since there was an apparent video of my 30-minute speech on “Two Californias” (presented at a Los Angeles symposia on the crisis of California) about the inordinate wealth of the Pacific Coastal strip from La Jolla to Berkeley and the poverty of the state’s interior, you obviously choose not to quote from it accurately if much at all.
And it is easy to see why, since my argument did not serve your circular purposes of fabricating “hate” in turn to whip up hysterias in turn to raise money in turn to justify your comfortable existence in turn to fabricate more “hate.” In contrast, you found that reporting the truth—the lecture offered statistics on education, energy, health care, infrastructure, and taxes in suggesting that Californians are not receiving value for the inordinate taxes and regulations they endure, largely because of incompetent, one-party governance—would have been of utterly no value to your careerist and financial aims.
The lecture was not even on illegal immigration per se, but on the tripartite role of (a) Silicon Valley’s and coastal California’s vast wealth and (in the case of multibillion-dollar tech companies) corporate exemptions from traditional antitrust scrutiny, (b) the aggregate flight of nearly 4 million middle class Californians to no-tax or low-tax states, and (c) the aggregate effects of massive illegal immigration in which the traditional allegiance to melting pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage has waned due to politics, sheer numbers, and illegality.
Let me detail your fabrications in the order you made them:
1) One truly can go 10 miles in one direction in California and see the radical change from affluence to dire poverty. And that abyss is, as I noted, because that 1/3 of all welfare recipients in the nation live in California, where 1/5 of the population lives below the poverty line, and a fourth of the residents were not born in the United States and in many cases do not have English facility or high school diplomas, critical in a competitive market economy.
I suggest the SPLC staff drive just 3 miles from Woodside or Atherton to Redwood City or East Palo Alto and see whether my assertion is flawed. The proposition rests, as I noted and you omitted, on the fact that California is both the wealthiest of states by a variety of measurements and also by some data the poorest. Or as I colloquially put it, California is a sort of weld of Massachusetts and Mississippi under single state governance.
I am writing this reply on an avenue in which there are numerous houses with inoperative trailers, shacks, and near lean-tos arranged around a single-family dwelling, compounds in which the poor live without proper zoning, in structures that do not meet building codes, and under conditions that would be empirically described as Third World.
Less than 4 miles away there are also 10,000 square-foot gated mansions. That dichotomy illustrates California culture, demography, and governance, in the medieval sense of two classes rather than the past three.
The contrast certainly does look like two different countries: again, in the sense that in the gated mansions English is spoken, there are all the accouterments of upward mobility, and gates keep others out; in the multifamily/trailer residences, Spanish only is spoken, residents are often here illegally, and poverty is endemic. The contrast reflects a vanishing middle class and a state politics designed to reward the connected hyper-wealthy and subsidize the poor and to ignore those in-between—which is why the latter may have fled in droves.
Your next assertion is a flat-out untruth: “Hanson also attacked California’s Democrats, saying: We don’t want assimilation so we’re going to give you as much amnesty, sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, we’ll do whatever we can so you can remain tribal in your outlook. Your tribal racial and ethnic identity is essential, not irrelevant to your character.”
I did not say what you are alleging, but made it very clear that the quote was a reflection of the mentality of the Democratic elite and the La Raza activist leadership. A simpleton in journalism can fathom that the collective “we” is not the person “I, Victor Hanson” but refers to progressive groups, as I carefully noted, who are not eager to see assimilation, integration, and intermarriage proceed in rapid fashion. Such a development might result in a fully integrated immigrant society (in the fashion of the 19th-century and early 20th-century trajectory of Italian-Americans), one that would be less helpful to Democratic tribal politics. Even with the quote out of context anyone can see through your childish effort to suggest the quote reflects my own sentiments rather than my views of the operating principles of progressive identity politics activists.
You allege: “Hanson also expounded upon the reconquistaconspiracy theory promoted by anti-immigrant activists. It stems from the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlan,” a document produced by MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) in the 1960s calling for Chicanos to reclaim land. It is not endorsed by any mainstream groups, but for nativists it serves as the genesis of a conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.”
In fact, I did not discuss in detail Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans seeking to “take back” land, nor did I even go into detail about the racist heritage of MEChA, which is becoming an embarrassment only because its racist sloganeering (e.g., “a bronze state for a bronze people” “everything for the race, nothing for the others”) was so egregious that it has been airbrushed off MEChA sites. What I did say was that La Raza was and is a racialist term (“the Race” [sc. Latin radix] and deliberately employed to resonate racial chauvinism—illustrative of an unfortunate effort to divide and polarize groups.
I added and you omitted that the 1960s rebirth of the term in popular usage was similar to Franco’s and Mussolini’s political use of Raza/Razza (Franco wrote a novel Raza), as a way of copy-catting Hitler’s racist use of the German Volk to denote race as the key criterion of citizenship and definition of one’s “essence.” Apparently, the National Council of La Raza (a key element of the Democratic Party coalition) was recently embarrassed into agreement. After the election of Donald Trump, it suddenly has changed its name to UnidosUS from the former “the race”, and that is a laudable improvement. (Note what Cesar Chavez once said about the La Raza movement: “Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro. We had a stupid guy who just wanted to play politics with the union, and he began to whip up La Raza against the white volunteers, and even had some of the farm workers and the pickets and the organizers hung up on la raza.”)
What do you mean when you write “nativist”? Someone who objects to racist terminology, and supports melting-pot integration and assimilation—in contrast to ethnic bigots like those in MEChA and La Raza groups who insist that their race defines their personas to the exclusion of others? What an Orwellian mindset, in which integration is defined as nativism.
You end your slander by more untruths: “Davis Hanson ended by saying, ‘The state is regressing into a Third-World country.’ He also attacked undocumented immigrants, essentially claiming they are incapable of being law-abiding residents, stating, ‘When I came to the States, the first thing I did was break the law, so why would I follow the rules out of necessity now?’”
Would you quote from the transcript of the speech? If you would, you will see that I ended with a call for unity, adding that there had to be more integration between poor and rich, and the restoration of a middle class, given that the state cannot do well when there is such an abyss between classes and a shortage of revenue to address long neglected infrastructure.
I did not attack undocumented immigrants, but said that the restoration of law (such as the end of illegal sanctuary cities and the enforcement of existing immigration statutes) is essential, yet would be difficult when millions of immigrants have not just entered the country illegally, but have done so as their first choice when arriving at a new homeland—a decision that the host de facto unfortunately overlooks or perhaps even rewards. When one breaks the laws without consequences, it insidiously erodes all laws and chaos is the inevitable result.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been in the news recently as a recipient of millions of dollars of grants from large corporations and movie stars, so I am not denying that fictions like the present one are effective in more or less leveraging money through hysteria. Yet your methods are not justified by your ends; the former are reprehensible and the latter self-centered. A growing number of Americans are learning about your group and discovering that when it cannot uncover hate, it invents it—and finds the ensuing smears and slanders quite profitable, resulting ironically in short-term lucre, but in the long-term continued diminution of your reputation. For a fair account of the meeting and speech, see http://citizensjournal.us/afa-focuses-decline-ca/
Davis Hanson
[In various venues, I have had people use the SPLC as a source. It is not. As Dr. Hanson refutes its nonsense, I must point out to all who use it, that, like the ACLU, it is a Leftist agenda agency and not a reliable, non-biased, source.
This is especially directed toward those who criticize without doing extensive research, or at the least going beyond wikipedia, a notoriously inaccurate source.]