Why did VDH go off the deep end?

[Epaminondas]

He used to be somewhat balanced. His views, though overall predictable, was eclectic and informed by his vast knowledge of history, similar to Krauthammer and his purview in medicine. Yes, he was a hawk, but

But since Obama, he's jumped on the Trump bandwagon and is clinging on for dear life, dolling out puff pieces and slapdash hatchet jobs on the Dem party in fast succession.

His latest gem on NR today is one that states literally, in earnest, that California is a "Third World State".
It's laughable on its face and he must know it.

Why does he do it? Is the pay by conservative media that good? Does he fear mediatic irrelevance, as few read history today? Has he gone senile?

He's stopped publishing serious history for over a decade now, just recycling his stuff from the early 90s.

It flummoxes me that someone who has made an editorial career out of retelling Thucydides's tale - of how Athens fell from her dominant position after her unjust (and failed) invasion of Syracuse - could possibly condone American unilateral interventions in Irak & Afghanistan.
Poor Thucydides.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

If you want to stay relevant, you write what people want to hear. And what conservatives want isn't "facts" or "reason." It's red meat and bloody shirts.

What's the alternative? The Weekly Standard tried taking the high road and got thrown in the dustbin. David Frum is radioactive, but he has family money to live off so he doesn't care.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Who!?

[Blue3]

Who is VDH?

[Nyvin]

Victor Davis Hanson

[Blue3]

Victor Davis Hanson

And who is that?

[Nyvin]

Victor Davis Hanson

And who is that?

A war hawk that nowadays is pretty much just a Fox News shill.

[dead0man]

worst.op.ever this week.

[Some of My Best Friends Are Gay]

I've never heard of him before, but it sounds like he's always been a loon based on what you've said about him.

[Epaminondas]

Victor Davis Hanson used to be a proper historian, really quality. As a teen I adored his books on Ancient Greece, and he's published at least 20. He reads Latin, he knows his Classics, he quotes Thucydides. He was a proper old fashioned Conservative intellectual, with a gift for writing - I only know David French, Kevin Williamson and Krauthammer who are on par with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgmR_5Hi2fw

His case baffles me as he violates my deep-held belief that history studies immunize you against Trumpism.

Now he has completely lost it, and pumps out article after article lauding Trumpism or criticizing the California hellhole where he lives. He's just a mouthpiece for authoritarianism, like Conrad Black, even though he used to be much more nuanced about everything just a decade ago.

I cannot get over this incongruity, not sure why. Money? Mediatic visibility?
Though the reaction here make me question how famous he really is.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

He grew up on a farm in central California in the 1950s.  Imagine being a conservative, seeing what his state has become.

[junior chįmp]

His case baffles me as he violates my deep-held belief that history studies immunize you against Trumpism.

Shouldn't baffle you at all. Smart people are stupid too.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

He grew up on a farm in central California in the 1950s.  Imagine being a conservative, seeing what his state has become.

The largest economy in the country, the 6th highest per capita income in the country, designing electronic devices that are used all over the world by billions of people, producing film and art that is enjoyed across the world.

But it's all for naught because, too many brown people?

[Beet]

California's problems are due to its very regressive tax structure where old money rich are still paying the same amount for their estates as in 1975, & keep newcomers locked out. Otoh Texas has a very progressive tax structure- nothing for income, slightly lower for sales, but property owners squeal. Warren & Bernie would love Texas more than Cali. (Now we just need the state ledge to expand Medicaid).

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

California's problems are due to its very regressive tax structure where old money rich are still paying the same amount for their estates as in 1975, & keep newcomers locked out. Otoh Texas has a very progressive tax structure- nothing for income, slightly lower for sales, but property owners squeal. Warren & Bernie would love Texas more than Cali. (Now we just need the state ledge to expand Medicaid).

Our tax structure is still relatively regressive for the simple reason that most working- and middle-class people keep most or all of their savings/wealth in the form of the primary residence that they own. Whereas the wealthy can own their house but then have a whole portfolio of stocks, bonds and businesses that don't pay a dime of Texas taxes. It's a wealth tax for the non-wealthy.

My personal preference would be for property taxes to be cut and to only apply to services directly related to property: drainage, neighborhood roads, utilities, etc. Everything else - education, social services, law enforcement, large-scale infrastructure - would be paid for by a progressive income tax.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

He grew up on a farm in central California in the 1950s.  Imagine being a conservative, seeing what his state has become.

The largest economy in the country, the 6th highest per capita income in the country, designing electronic devices that are used all over the world by billions of people, producing film and art that is enjoyed across the world.

But it's all for naught because, too many brown people?

because aggregate GDP and race are the only things that could possibly matter?

[pbrower2a]

Victor Davis Hanson used to be a proper historian, really quality. As a teen I adored his books on Ancient Greece, and he's published at least 20. He reads Latin, he knows his Classics, he quotes Thucydides. He was a proper old fashioned Conservative intellectual, with a gift for writing - I only know David French, Kevin Williamson and Krauthammer who are on par with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgmR_5Hi2fw

His case baffles me as he violates my deep-held belief that history studies immunize you against Trumpism.

Now he has completely lost it, and pumps out article after article lauding Trumpism or criticizing the California hellhole where he lives. He's just a mouthpiece for authoritarianism, like Conrad Black, even though he used to be much more nuanced about everything just a decade ago.

I cannot get over this incongruity, not sure why. Money? Mediatic visibility?
Though the reaction here make me question how famous he really is.

The problem is that our culture treats such an activity as 'marketing' on par intellectually with the traditional study of the Classics. Wise people used to learn Latin at the least (and optimally Greek as well), and by reading Latin literature they learned how the most technologically advanced society of its time and a culture with a true mass society could so badly mess up. Americans of a time thought that elite education gave people a caution and morality necessary for wise government. The Roman economy had elite indulgence as an objective and used entertainment (including the every-man-for himself chariot races or Ben-Hur, the gladiatorial games similarly every-man-for-himself in Spartacus, and the infamous events of casting Christians to the lions in Quo Vadis?) as the opiate of the masses, and not repeat such.  

I'm not going to deny the importance of business; it is just that entrepreneurialism did not depend upon high levels of intellectual refinement. Success in business, as opposed to success in bureaucratic operations, does not depend upon intellectual refinement. It depends upon wise choices, kissing up to customers, and hard work, none of which has any connection to conjugating the verb essere, declining the nouns filius and filia, or knowing how Perseus successfully dispatched Medusa. The Founding Fathers knew better about Greece and Rome than we do today -- but they did not build railroads, find and exploit oil, establish department stores or giant slaughterhouses, create empires of mediocre fast food, or design electronic goodies or the software that runs them. The mutual contempt between a plutocrat like Donald Trump (who really is a horrible person) and the intellectual applied as much to Roy Kroc, Henry Ford, John Davison Rockefeller II, Cornelius Vanderbilt, or Avery Montgomery Ward. Sure, the plutocrats recognized the need for attorneys, engineers, research scientists, and software designers but those were to know their place in the order, people of comparative privilege in a hierarchy of possession of the assets and the toil to create those assets.

The problem is that by forgetting the classical knowledge we make the same mistakes as the Romans by making entertainment the opiate of the masses, fostering severe inequality of economic result, and sponsoring an elitist class of crony capitalists with connections to corrupt and fanatical politicians. Victor David Hanson gets some of the problem right -- but he misses the hazards of amoral capitalism. If profit and its fruits (as bureaucratic or political power and indulgence in ways that degrade most of the people) are the objectives of all human existence, then we put ourselves at the risks of re-establishing peonage... and wars for profit. We end up with politicians who believe that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as such suffering brings about capitalist power, capitalist profit, and capitalist privilege. Note well that in the prime example of moral failure of the capitalist class in the last century, a young and unscrupulous demagogue convinced the warmongers of a previous war who had waxed fat off the meat-grinder war that had ended fifteen years earlier that he could make them huge profits from rearmament and an aggressive foreign policy, with the suppression of the Left who allegedly got in the way, by being more competent -- that is, ruthless and callous.

As far as I am concerned, those plutocrats who profited off slave labor in the camps deserved ropes around their necks just as much as did sadistic guards and leadership in those camps and the administrators who filled those camps with people doomed to a Hell worse than anything that Dante could imagine. But this happens when people fail to heed so simple a truism that character is destiny.

...But who needs to read Thucydides or Plutarch when one has the Kardashian family on the idiot screen or can run up a score of twenty zillion on a video game? Or have a tailgate party in the parking lot before the gladiatorial game between the Raiders and Chargers? Or numb oneself to rap 'music'? We divert ourselves at the expense of creating the nightmare of amoral capitalism that leads to either concentration camps under fascists or a Communist bloodbath.

[Beet]

California's problems are due to its very regressive tax structure where old money rich are still paying the same amount for their estates as in 1975, & keep newcomers locked out. Otoh Texas has a very progressive tax structure- nothing for income, slightly lower for sales, but property owners squeal. Warren & Bernie would love Texas more than Cali. (Now we just need the state ledge to expand Medicaid).

Our tax structure is still relatively regressive for the simple reason that most working- and middle-class people keep most or all of their savings/wealth in the form of the primary residence that they own. Whereas the wealthy can own their house but then have a whole portfolio of stocks, bonds and businesses that don't pay a dime of Texas taxes. It's a wealth tax for the non-wealthy.

My personal preference would be for property taxes to be cut and to only apply to services directly related to property: drainage, neighborhood roads, utilities, etc. Everything else - education, social services, law enforcement, large-scale infrastructure - would be paid for by a progressive income tax.

Eh, then tax stocks, bonds, and businesses. A lot of the working class don't own a residence at all. An income tax is always going to be more regressive than a property tax since the primary difference between the rich and poor is differences in wealth, not income. Economic mobility depends on income, economic caste depends on wealth.