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"Appeasement guarantees war" - Victor Davis Hanson
3.8k Plays9 months ago
The most astute social commentators on the present are the people who have the deepest understanding of the past. As Mark Twain famously said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Historians are best placed to hear the rhymes of history in the news of the day.
There are few historians who have demonstrated such an aptitude and insight for understanding modern politics and culture as Dr Victor Davis Hanson. Victor is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written or edited twenty-five books, the latest of which is ‘The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America’.
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Transcript
Introduction to Guest and Themes
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. I've long believed that the most astute social commentators on the present are the people who have the deepest understanding of the past. As Mark Twain famously said, history doesn't repeat itself
00:00:31
Speaker
but it often rhymes.
History's Rhymes with Current Challenges
00:00:33
Speaker
Historians are best placed to hear the rhymes of history in the news of the day. And there are few historians who have demonstrated such an aptitude and insight for understanding modern politics and culture as my guest today, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. Victor is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
00:00:52
Speaker
He has written or edited 25 books, the latest of which is The Dying Citizen, how progressive elites, tribalism and globalisation are destroying the idea of America. His next book, ominously titled The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation, will hit the shelves in May. Victor, welcome to Australiana.
Identity Politics and Western Erosion
00:01:13
Speaker
Thank you for having me.
00:01:15
Speaker
I want to start the conversation by putting 2024 into a historical context. In The Dying Citizen, you cover a lot of the problems that modern America, and I would argue the West more generally, is facing today. Evisceration of the middle class, rise of identity politics, a rejection of the notion of sovereign borders, and the growth of the administrative state.
00:01:43
Speaker
To what extent are these cultural and geopolitical challenges unique to our times? And to what extent can you hear Mark Twain's rhymes of history here? What I was writing about the dying citizen, they're applicable throughout the Western world. And that includes Australia, the former British Commonwealth, the EU, Westernized South Korea, Japan. And it's a product of a
00:02:13
Speaker
Dilemma that the West had at the very beginning in Greece and Rome, and that is when you combine the best form of government, which is constitutional government, with the best form of economic activity, which is the protection of private property and free markets, even when you didn't have the word capitalism yet in the
00:02:29
Speaker
an ancient world. You create a lot of leisure, and you create a lot of freedom, and you create a lot of prosperity, and that tends to, over generations, condition the population to think they're at the end of history or they can have visions of utopia. Two things happen at that point. One, they forget how hard it was to achieve what their present state of bounty, and they tend to deprecate prior generations that don't live up to their own standards.
00:02:59
Speaker
Two, they ignore the essentials of civilization that are always
00:03:05
Speaker
a hair's breadth away from chaos. And that is things like borders and crime and energy and food. And they go for the optional. They don't address the felonies, but they do address the misdemeanors from a negative context. And what that means is right now in the Western world, we're worrying about whether there's three sexes or four sexes or five sexes. And you can't walk in Chicago even during the day.
00:03:32
Speaker
You have to be careful where you walk in San Francisco. It's a medieval city as far as human excretement on the sidewalk. And where I live in rural California, if I drive down any avenue within a mile radius, there's garbage all over there.
00:03:49
Speaker
open borders, and we've had 11 million people come into California the last 20 years, and a lot of the culture from Mexico has not yet been assimilated, so people just throw out appliances, etc. So what I'm getting at is these things need to be addressed in the Western world, but we're
California's Immigration Impact
00:04:07
Speaker
not doing it. People in Europe and the United States
00:04:10
Speaker
And in your country, if they're young people, they're not getting married at an age and having children that will replace the existing population. They're not able to buy a house easily. They're not able to find a job that allows them to be a member of the prosperous middle class. And yet, the people that they elect to office convince them that the existential questions are
00:04:36
Speaker
diversity, equity, inclusion, transgenderism, climate change. And so the result is that there's an anger growing up throughout the West about what it means to be a citizen. And do the citizens really have control of their own destiny? And do the elites, for a variety of reasons, treat people
00:04:57
Speaker
that are residents in their own country better than they do their citizens. Here in our country, you not only have to show a photo ID, but starting next year, you have to have something called a real ID. And to get that real ID to be able to fly, you have to have not just a driver's license, but a birth certificate or passport. And in addition to that, you have to have proof of residence in the state you have by either a title to a home or a power bill.
00:05:23
Speaker
As I speak, there are people being flown all over the United States who are not citizens, who have no requirement of any photo ID. And I could give you a thousand examples of that. So I think that malaise is, there's a historical precedent to it. Fifth century AD Rome, fourth century BC Greece, 15th century Byzantium, and I think we're suffering the same malaise.
00:05:46
Speaker
I want to pick out that reflection specifically on immigration and cultural assimilation. I'm aware that you wrote about this in quite a personal way in 2003 with your book, Mexifornia, which looked at your home state of California and the impacts of immigration on that state. If you were to write the next chapter to that book 20 years on, how has that story progressed?
US Border Policy and Immigration Issues
00:06:11
Speaker
Tell me, how do you feel about it in 2024?
00:06:14
Speaker
Well, when I wrote that book, I got bitterly attacked from the left, of course, but also from the free market right. I debated Roger Bartlett, the head of the Wall Street Journal of Time, wonderful person. And at my own institution, I debated Milton Friedman at a private event. And both of them wanted open borders and wanted the market to adjudicate.
00:06:36
Speaker
I guess I could sum up the right-wing libertarian position as when enough immigrants come across and wages are lower to bare minimum existence level, then it self-corrects. And I pointed out in those debates, you mean when Texas and Arizona are no different than Mexico, then there's no reason to come to the United States. And they did not refute that point.
00:07:02
Speaker
And so I'm afraid that if anything, I underestimated what would happen. And then here in California, we have about half of the nation's illegal aliens. And we don't really know the status of people here. 27% of the population was not born in the United States. Some of them are legal residents, some of them are citizens, but the majority are neither.
00:07:25
Speaker
And that has been an enormous burden. Half of all the births in California are Medi-Cal or subsidized births. And what that means is, in real terms, a couple of things. The infrastructure of California, to take one example, used to get about 30% of the budget. It gets about five to seven now. And health care gets about 50%.
00:07:44
Speaker
In addition to that, we have the highest taxes in the United States, 13.3%. We have the highest gas taxes. We have among the highest sales taxes, and we're running a $60 billion deficit. And there's things that our elites don't want to talk about. They'll talk about the money they spend on social services. So when we have a $65 billion deficit this year, Gavin Newsom, our governor, just approved $500 million.
00:08:10
Speaker
and additional health care for illegal aliens. But what they don't talk about are the more insidious things, and that is we have a huge underground economy of immigrants. And so from where I'm sitting, I can go buy almost anything. If you want a lawnmower, I can go buy it on the street corner. If I want a mattress, I can go to a swap meet. But all of that is on tax.
00:08:31
Speaker
So we have people, and the left calls them future entrepreneurs. This is wonderful. And there is something admirable about it, but there's not sales taxes or income taxes being collected.
00:08:43
Speaker
All of this was predicated on Silicon Valley. And then we had Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkeley. We had all the great corporations here. But we have lost now about, as I said, 10 to 11 million people. And the Silicon Valley, $9 trillion, two things have happened to it. It's starting to disperse to other tech centers where it's cheaper to live, like Austin or Charlottesville. But more importantly, there
00:09:12
Speaker
political agenda, whether it's banning gas stoves or transgenderism, it doesn't address these problems. And so we're having the middle and upper middle classes leave, and there's not a lot of expertise to replace them.
00:09:30
Speaker
And so we'll see what happens. The only chance that this state has to make it is that 45% of the state identifies Latino, and a lot of them are now working for the state, are private enterprise, and they're second and third generations, and they're highly taxed. And we'll see in the next election if the Republican MAGA boasts that they were going to obtain 40% of the Latino vote or 45% is true or not.
00:09:56
Speaker
My understanding is Trump has been increasing in popularity with Hispanic voters and that may be part of the story there. What I struggle with, and this goes to an article you wrote only I think a few weeks ago, you said that in one of the most surreal experiences in the history of the United States,
00:10:17
Speaker
Each night, Americans see video clips of thousands of foreign nationals crossing the border on mass with complete impunity, as if the entire corpus of federal immigration law had been dynamited. Stranger still, Americans have no real idea why these revolutionaries are destroying our border. And this is where I want to get to, because I think that's interesting that that old right wing libertarian view of open borders, which I think has largely fallen out of discourse
00:10:45
Speaker
more recent times. But what are the causes of this nihilism when it comes to border policy on the progressive side of American politics? Well, it's got so bad that for the first time they were well in
00:11:01
Speaker
Speech has been dropped and now they're more candid. They used to say that if you or I in this conversation objected to that, we were part of the Tucker Carlson great replacement theory. We were so worried about the death of the white race. And now they've dropped that. They've dropped it for two reasons. One, there are books and articles with the titles from people on the left called The New Democratic Majority.
00:11:24
Speaker
or demography as destiny in which they boast openly that so-called non-white people will be the majority. They are the ones, in other words, that are obsessed with tribalism and race. And number two is when they were called on it in the last two months, people as diverse as Bernie Sanders or Nancy Pelosi or Dick Durbin. I'm talking about the major players in the Democratic Party or Joe Biden. They have openly said, well, we want these people
00:11:53
Speaker
to do basically cheap labor. That's what they've said. They feel that either our, we have 40 million people who are on entitlement and not actively working. Our labor participation is only about 63%. It's down to 61 under Biden, I think. So we have plenty of people who could work, but they don't want that. And so what I'm getting to is,
00:12:19
Speaker
The corporate people want cheap labor in the hospitality industries, hotels, restaurants, meat packing, industries, agriculture. But the left and the center wants future constituents because coterminous with this onslaught have been efforts to change voting laws or to do it
Cultural Shifts in Political Debates
00:12:39
Speaker
de facto by reversing the state's traditional 30% mail-in or early voting.
00:12:46
Speaker
to 70% or 60% as we saw in the 2022 and 2020 elections. And so you can, and then in Berkeley or places on the East Coast, I think there's places in New York where they're actually allowing illegal aliens to vote.
00:13:01
Speaker
And so when you get eight or nine million people who entered illegally and there's no resistance to it on the part of the federal government, they're enabling it. It has to be that they feel that this is the constituency that will need a lot of federal help in terms of education, food, housing, legal support, grow the administrative state, big government, more taxes on the middle class, and most importantly, they will return that with fealty at the ballot.
00:13:31
Speaker
And we just saw the Supreme Court, as you noticed this week, say that it was illegal for Texas to try to enforce their border with Mexico when the federal government, whose prime responsibility it is, will not force it. And then people are rejoined, but there are 550 state and local jurisdictions in the United States. We call sanctuary cities or counties or states.
00:14:01
Speaker
in which the Supreme Court by default has allowed these jurisdictions to override federal law.
00:14:09
Speaker
and not cooperate or to reject ISIS efforts to deport people, even though in those cases the federal government is trying to enforce federal law. So it's okay for a state to nullify a federal law that's trying to be enforced, but it's against the law for a state to try to enforce a federal law that is not being enforced.
00:14:31
Speaker
and no one can figure that out other than ideology and politics. I really struggle with it because the consequences of this are disproportionately felt by those border states and yet they're being actively hampered in any attempt to try and fix it in absence of an effort at the federal level.
00:14:47
Speaker
I'm not sure where you are of the Australian experience. Now, admittedly, Australia is an island. It should be easier to protect the border. But at the same time, there was a very big problem with illegal immigration coming from boats throughout the early 2010s. And that's something which was largely resolved as a result of stronger border policies and things like offshore detention.
00:15:14
Speaker
and more active policing of the border via the Navy. And that now has bipartisan support, give or take. Do you think there is any possibility the US can reach some level of, if not consensus, can there can be more of a groundswell to actually resolve this issue than the kind of partisan way in which it is approached at the moment? Yeah, I think there was a kind of brilliant that the governors of Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida started to bust
00:15:44
Speaker
people up north, because they had all been sort of virtue signaling and performance arcing, if I could use that colloquial, how liberal they were about this issue. And then as soon as thousands started to come to their parks, their streets, their shelters. And there was an article yesterday that major parks and parts of Queens or the Bronx or even Manhattan are full of
00:16:09
Speaker
human excrement, trash, people going to individual homeowners' door and, you know, leaving jars of urine on it or almost give us some money or we're going to screw up your neighborhood. What one would expect when you're laying in millions of people without background checks and audits? So that is starting to affect people here. And unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this problem was solved
00:16:36
Speaker
in 2020 because the Trump administration came in and immediately it said it was going to build the wall. It was going to stop, catch and release. Refugee status would have to be requested in the country of origin. I had a whole menu. And what happened is hundreds of millions of dollars from left wing foundations were used to tie all of that up by cherry picking liberal judges. In addition to that,
00:17:05
Speaker
There was a media campaign that Donald Trump had created Auschwitz-like cages on the border to put children in. And that was even though these facilities were built by Obama. And in addition to that, people in the Homeland Security such as anonymous were writing op-eds bragging to the New York Times that they were undermining this administration from within
Trump's Populist Shift in GOP
00:17:27
Speaker
by deliberately nullifying executive orders and policies. Okay. I don't know how it happened, but by
00:17:35
Speaker
June of 2020, they had replaced about 500 miles of rickety fence. They had started on the last 1,000 miles, 1,500 miles. They built 27 miles, and it was kind of a prototype. They were ready to go. They had stopped catch and release. They made people request asylum from Mexico. They had really pressed President Obador, and the one thing
00:18:01
Speaker
And the only thing that he listens to, and that is a 10 or 15 percent tax on the $60 billion of remittances that are sent back to his government, largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. And it was working. And we almost had in the last months of his administration almost no illegal entries across the southern border for a brief window. And so this was a policy I don't think. And Joe Biden did not say he never campaigned on the idea that I'm going to open the border.
00:18:31
Speaker
even though a lot of us knew that he would. It was always, I'm going to heal America. I'm not an extremist. I don't tweet. That kind of stuff.
00:18:39
Speaker
So we have the, I guess what I'm saying is we have the formula or the menu to repeat that very quickly. We could stop it. And then you would have to, as far as the 8 million here, and there will be 10 million by the time the Biden term ends, I think you're going to have to deport a lot of people. And we know from experience, when you start deporting people, and Obama did it and Trump did it, it has an enormous deterrent effect because people across the border say, I do not want to borrow
00:19:09
Speaker
pay somebody $3,500 to get across and then just end up back and then being tagged that I can never come in again legally. And so we have the mechanism. It's I guess what I'm saying, it's that old Latin adage that the medicine was worse than the disease. We always felt the medicine. But if you get beyond that, we could solve it very quickly. Yes, I agree. And I think the parallel in Australia with offshore detention being a strong deterrent to boats arriving is a very apt one, even if
00:19:39
Speaker
there is a deportation campaign, you know, there is still the issue around simulation integration.
00:19:45
Speaker
You've written in the past that, and I think this was in Mexifornia, you bemoaned a loss of confidence in the old melting pot model of transforming newcomers into Americans. This raises the question of multiculturalism, which I think has been, questions have been asked around multiculturalism in Europe, in Australia and the US, particularly after October 7. Has multiculturalism failed in the US?
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's not only failed here, but it's failed even more dramatically in Britain and the European Union. It was a bastard idea from multiracialism. See, the West was the only culture, really, the only civilization.
00:20:29
Speaker
If you give what its pretenses were in the ancient world and then through the Enlightenment, that superficial appearance and theory was incidental to who we are. It was the humanity. All men are created equal. It didn't say just white people. The word white and black is not in the Constitution.
00:20:50
Speaker
And it doesn't mean that you're going to live up to those aspirations, but they are aspirations none the less. So the idea was the West was going to gravitate, if it need be, to a multiracial society with one caveat, that given the evolution of this culture that creates, as I said, this prosperity and
Trump's Legal Battles and Public Perception
00:21:08
Speaker
security, other people would want to come, your country especially, as you became more prosperous and secure and free, and they would not look like the people who created your system necessarily.
00:21:19
Speaker
But according to the Western idea of the melting pot, it would be incidental and a multiracial because they would all adhere to one culture. Who in Australia would care if a fiercely patriotic Australian who believed in the mission of Australia happened not to look like the people who founded Australia? Nobody would in Australia. That was the idea. But for political reasons, the left, especially because they always have an agenda that cannot
00:21:46
Speaker
It's contrary to human nature and it's never ratified through peaceful means. They always have to gin up a crisis. COVID or George Floyd or the September 2008 meltdown or Me Too. They always have to have this hysteria, the hysterical style. And then they...
00:22:04
Speaker
claim that this country was inherently racist, this system, I should say, and therefore it should be multicultural. Who is to say which culture is any better than the other? But here was the problem, that people are coming to your country from different cultures and they're voting with their feet. Nobody in Australia that's a native gets up one day and says, I just like the alternative model in New Guinea, or I really, really do want to go to Indonesia.
00:22:34
Speaker
or my goal is to get into mainland China. They don't do that. But people from those areas want to get into your paradigm. And the left doesn't know how to handle that. They never have. So then they say, well, it's because your paradigm worked because you exploited all of these people. And it assumes that
00:22:53
Speaker
these people, whoever the indigenous people are, were pristine and noble and the people who came in were evil. But when you look at the fundamentals of society, say in this country, cannibalism, slavery, violence, scalping, whatever pre-civilizational behavior, there wasn't much difference, to tell you the truth, but we just don't talk about it.
00:23:17
Speaker
I mean, if the Aztecs put 20,000 people on Templo Major in one weekend, and according to their own statistics, killed over 20,000 people by tearing their hearts out, we don't talk about that. We just say they were an indigenous people that Cortez conquered. And so all of this, what we're talking about is it's the heart of the Western citizen, of the Western paradigm, that the non-Westerner wants to be part of it.
00:23:43
Speaker
And part of that desire then is couch and inferiority, or they feel bad that they want to reject their own system and go to another one. And one of the ways they square that circle is they appeal to the guilt of the prosperous, secure, and free Westerner and say, you have to let me in, or if you have to give me this, or you must do this.
00:24:03
Speaker
and the Westerners lost confidence in his affluence, he doesn't say, well, we want you to come in, just come in legally, follow our rules, and you will be as Western or as Australian or as American as we are. We have no problem with your race, but you have to follow the paradigm, and that's not what the left wants.
00:24:22
Speaker
because they look at race. I think part of the thing is that class, the old Marxist paradigm, doesn't work in the West because of the dynamics of capitalism and upward mobility and fluidity. In Australia, you have a little bit stronger socialist parties than we do. But even in your country, it's not uncommon for a prosperous grandfather to have a failed grandson that didn't make it or to have a
00:24:50
Speaker
grandson who did make it. His parents were really poor, his grandparents were poor, and so you don't have a permanent exploited class. And the way that the left dealt with that in the West, they arbitrarily said race was immutable, important, essential, and it never changes, and therefore the person is a perennial victim.
00:25:11
Speaker
LeBron James is a victim, Obama is a victim, Oprah is a victim, regardless of their privilege, their money. And I think we're still dealing with that. And as far as immigration goes, I think you would admit that if Australia right now was seeing freighters of Eastern Europeans from, say, Viktor Orban's Hungary, or you had South Africans fleeing, they just said, we can't live under this new, we're all going to go to Australia, you would have an enormous
00:25:38
Speaker
resistance to immigration on the part of the left. I know we would in this country. And so they don't, I mean, they wouldn't say these people are refugees or they would say they're privileged or they're right wing or they're settler, whatever the word of disparagement would be. And so I think what it is, immigration is part of this larger question of using race on the part of the left
00:26:02
Speaker
to create permanent victims that have complaints and grievances against the majority population that have to be adjudicated with larger government, redistribution in income and taxes, reparations in terms of preference, and admissions and hiring, etc., etc.
00:26:20
Speaker
It's arguably the story of politics of the last 30 years is that the debate between the left and the right has moved from being a fundamentally economic debate to a debate about culture and identity. How do you think now the left has been
00:26:38
Speaker
incredibly successful at promulgating that argument in the institutions across academia, across politics, media, the corporate sphere. How do you think the right
00:26:51
Speaker
Let's keep it to America for the moment. How do you think the right has gone in being able to turn their focus from Reaganism and kind of a focus on free market economics to meeting the left where they are now, which is looking at the
Biden's Weakness in International Relations
00:27:04
Speaker
debate of the day being around politics, being around culture and identity? Well, you're absolutely right that in lieu of a majority, they control academia, entertainment, professional sports, K through 12, corporate boardroom,
00:27:20
Speaker
all sorts and variations of the media. And they were very successful in partly because of the civil rights movement. In this country, they just ended the question that the Democratic Party was the racist party. They just said, well, they were Democrats, but they weren't really Democrats like we were, even though the Republican Party had been the party of liberation since Lincoln. But I guess what's happened is the Republicans, they have not won
00:27:51
Speaker
The popular vote in terms of 51% since Mike Dukakis lost and George H.W. Bush beat him in 1988, every election since they either barely got 50 or below 50% and they lost seven out of the last eight popular votes. But at the local and state level, they were
00:28:11
Speaker
enormously successful. They won a majority of state legislatures. They still, I think, have a majority of governors, and they did pretty well in the House of Representatives, which suggests that something was wrong with the national signature, and what was wrong with the national party or the traditional Blue Stock and Republican. It was very easily
00:28:33
Speaker
caricatured as the Bushes or McCain or Romney, golf course, capital gains tax, free trade, regardless of what it did to the Rust Belt, optional wars in the Middle East, even though the poor white middle class was going over there and a majority of them and dying.
00:28:51
Speaker
And I don't mean that as a racially incendiary, but more of a factual matter that 73 and 75% of all the people who died in Afghanistan and Iraq were white males of the middle clouds, even though they only composed about 35% of the demographic. So there was a reaction to that. And that's why the left really, I know that Donald Trump can be very crude and cruel and he brings a lot of it on himself, but
00:29:18
Speaker
Part of the hatred of it, I mean, you saw it by osmosis applied to DeSantis as well, is they recalibrated the Republican Party to a national workers party. So for the first time, the majority of people who vote Republican or middle class and the Democratic Party is now transmogrified. It's no longer the lunch bucket or the middle class, as much as the bicostal, professional, upper middle class and hyper wealthy.
00:29:48
Speaker
especially Silicon Valley money, international finance money, law, media insurance, and then the subsidized poor of the big cities. And why they're really scared of this new MAGA movement, and they hate it, and that's why Joe Biden has called it semi-fascist or ultra-MAGA. He's called people dregs and scum and chumps, I think.
00:30:11
Speaker
kind of going beyond Hillary's irredeemables and deplorables or Obama's clingers is that it represents a really existential threat because if you have an effective and canny leader
00:30:26
Speaker
who really follows this agenda. It's a class-based agenda, and it says we're ecumenical, and we don't care how you look. But the problem is that globalization enrich people on the coast in the professional classes, which was fine. That was good to be enriched rather than impoverished. But people who had skills and occupations and expertise in the law, in tech, in banking, in financing, in insurance,
00:30:54
Speaker
They did very well because they had markets of seven billion suddenly. And people who relied on muscular labor and mining and farming and manufacturing and simply local repair people, they didn't. Their products were either destroyed by free market economics or whole companies and industries relocated and took jobs away. And so the Republican Party started to address that. And it really turned the tables and said the Democratic Party is a party of the ultra
00:31:25
Speaker
boutique left. I mean, they are the party that wants to take away your natural gas stove. They're the ones that want you to drive an EV that can only go 250 miles. And they're the ones that do this and this. And I think that has scared the Democratic Party, especially
00:31:43
Speaker
They haven't been able quite to explain why the supposed racist Donald Trump will get more black and Latino voters than any other of the Republican candidates that they've praised to the skies, albeit once they're out of office. They hated McCain when he was a senator, now he's canonized. Same thing with George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, all of them. But I think that hatred comes
00:32:08
Speaker
to the MAGA people because they're starting to get wise, that the Republican Party can really appeal to people on class rather than racial terms.
00:32:18
Speaker
And that almost inversion of the major political parties is playing out, not just in America, but we've seen variations of the theme in the UK with Boris Johnson taking the red wall and Brexit. And I think you have seen a variation of the theme in Australia as well. You mentioned Trump. Let's get to him. In 2019, you wrote a book titled The Case for Trump. In 2024, what is the case for Trump?
00:32:45
Speaker
Yeah, I wrote that book, How Trump Won. And my publisher, Basic, said no one will ever buy it with that title. And I objected. And they were absolutely right because it sold a lot of copies of the best seller. And I don't think it would have been. But the book is really what was his case and why did he win?
00:33:05
Speaker
And as I pointed out, he was kind of a tragic figure. When he came in in 2015 and 16, and he said, I have a set of skill sets, like I'm Shane or a Magnificent Seven or High Noon type of character. And I can fix the problem that your so-called leaders can't because they're worried about their reputations or they're ossified. And as he started to be successful, people then had a latitude and said, wow,
00:33:33
Speaker
The economy is going great. The borders closed. Crime is down. But he tweeted. And so they had the latitude then to refocus or recalibrate on the methodology that he used. And so I think that was part of the reasons that he didn't get reelected. There were other reasons I won't get into. But now he's back. And it's really, if you look at it, it's something that a lot of us didn't think would be possible. If you look at his nadir after January 6th, where all of the press
00:34:04
Speaker
said basically they bought this whole
Historical Lessons on Civilization Vulnerability
00:34:07
Speaker
line. I mean, it was a demonstration that turned into a buffoonish riot, January 6th, and anybody who broke federal law should be punished. But the idea that five people were killed when we know they committed suicide months later, the only person who
00:34:23
Speaker
died violently, was a Trump supporter who was shot while unarmed entering the Capitol. There was nobody ever arrested inside the Capitol with a firearm. The FBI will never tell us how many informants, even though Matthew Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize left-wing New York Times reporter, said he saw them everywhere. All of this stuff made that narrative destroy Donald Trump. So when you looked at the polls, say, in mid 2021,
00:34:50
Speaker
People like Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley were way ahead of him. And then the left did something that nobody thought they'd ever do. All presidents have disputes about presidential papers. Joe Biden took them out of the center as a vice president. Obama had a lot of them. Donald Trump did it flagrantly, and they entered his house in a spot right. Nobody thought they'd ever do that.
00:35:14
Speaker
We have Hillary Clinton and the Clintons. They've done so many things. Nobody would ever go after them after they leave office. Same thing with Barack Obama. And yet, the first thing we knew that these local prosecutors, Latita James, is prosecuting for overvaluing real estates in terms of a loan that the bank
00:35:35
Speaker
audited him, found him qualified, charged him interest, got the interest, got the principal paid back and never made a complaint and would do it again and yet he's being prosecuted for over-valuing his assets. Same thing with Alvin Bragg. We've never had anybody say that a non-disclosure agreement is a campaign finance violation. We've never had
00:35:57
Speaker
We've had people call registrars all the time and say, I know, hey, look, I won this election. There's got to be votes somewhere. And when Trump, he didn't say invent them. He said, find them. I know they're there. Stupid to do that, but it's not a criminal offense. And the same. So what I'm getting out is each time they had these indictments, he came back from the dead, so to speak. You would see him creep out because people said, I may not have liked Donald Trump, but I don't like what they're doing to the United States. And therefore,
00:36:26
Speaker
I have empathy for them. And then they went beyond that and they started to do things that we've never heard of before, like taking them off the ballot in states on the idea that he was an insurrectionist when he had never been charged, much less convicted of that crime in Colorado and Maine. And I think there's 17 other states that want to do it. And the result is that each time they went extra legally against him,
00:36:51
Speaker
The empathy went up and up and up. And so now he's going to be the nominee. He's leading Joe Biden and we're going to see a replay of 2020 in this sense. They will out-raise Donald Trump as they did three and a half billion to a billion dollars.
00:37:10
Speaker
We'll probably have 60 to 70% of the voters not show up on election day, which happened for the first time in 2020 under the guise of COVID. There is no longer a COVID threat, but
00:37:23
Speaker
The left was very clever in eight or nine swing states changing the voting laws. It's very hard to ascertain the validity of a ballot when you're mailing it in. Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million to really absorb the work of registrars in key states. And so the right knows this. They were completely caught off guard in 2008.
00:37:44
Speaker
20 in the way the left was in 2016. And it's just a question of will they have monitoring of the elections? Will they have transparency? And will Donald Trump be able to overcome the enormous amount of money that will be used against him?
00:38:01
Speaker
And will he be out of jail? And if he is convicted and jailed, there is no constitutional prohibition from a person running for president or being president with a felony conviction, much less. I think you can even legally campaign for president from jail, but would that be
00:38:22
Speaker
politically viable, would independent voters say, well, I agree with Trump, but I'm not going to vote for somebody who's, you know, it's one thing for Joe Biden to hide in his basement, but I'm not gonna vote for a guy who's in prison. So we don't, these are all known unknowns. We do know one thing that, we know two things, that Donald Trump, when he does, if he is elected and he is inaugurated, this time around, he has people around him,
00:38:50
Speaker
and he's prepared, he has experience, and they will not be an Omaroso or Scaramucci or all those strange Steve Bannon type people. And he will have a heritage foundation agenda that bam, bam, bam, bam, will start to do things if he wins the Senate and keeps the House. The other thing we know is he knows that he could probably get a large enough margin well above
00:39:16
Speaker
the margin necessary given voting irregularities if he modulated his demeanor. And by that I mean, every once in a while Donald Trump is very ecumenical. He gave a speech after
00:39:31
Speaker
the Iowa victory that he reached out and said, we've got to work together. We've got to have Democrats. We've got to get everybody. This country's in bad and they wouldn't even play it. When his brother died, somebody said, what did your brother die of? And he said that he was an alcoholic. And he said, oh, my God, can you imagine what I would be like on top of my personality if I drank? And when he's that way, he's and when people meet him in person, they like him. And so everybody has said he has that
00:39:58
Speaker
In him, he's not a vengeful person. He did not weaponize the FBI. He did not weaponize the DOJ. He did not weaponize the CIA. He did not weaponize Twitter. He didn't do all of these constitutional, extra legal
00:40:11
Speaker
subversions that we saw under the Biden administration. So I guess what I'm saying is there's this national, on his part, everybody says, well, he wants to be, he wants to be warm and he's, he has the ability, but he's, he's got a, what the Greeks called a harmartia, a fatal flaw of all tragic heroes. He can't do it. So he'll call Ron DeSant, DeSantemonias, or make fun of his shoes, or he'll call Nikki by her original Indian name. And
00:40:41
Speaker
So that means that there is that three to five or seven percent of suburban voters, especially women's suburban voters, that loved his agenda and will love his next agenda but won't vote for him because of that. And so that's the question everybody sees. He has to win the popular vote in the swing states by three to five percent, at least given the amount of mail-in ballots that will be cast.
00:41:08
Speaker
You started that answer and you ended that answer with a really interesting delineation. That is the delineation between Trump, the personality and the outcomes that Trump as a leader could engender. You are a classicist. I'm interested. Take me back to ancient Greece or ancient Rome. How throughout history have
00:41:34
Speaker
people reflected on that delineation between, say, the personality of a leader and when that potentially can be in conflict with the outcomes that that leader can bring to a society or an empire or a group of people? Well, they weren't, I mean, the Western tradition is a little different in antiquity because they have to
00:42:01
Speaker
They have to operate within a constitutional system, at least in the Roman Republic and Greek city state, as opposed to Eastern leaders that were autocratic by nature. And that's discussed most famously in Herodotus. But my point is, if a person was not a tyrannos or a dictator or a tyrant, like say Sulla,
00:42:28
Speaker
or Pisistratus in the Greek context, but they operated within constitutional norms. Their personal speech, I mean, classical antiquity says they like moderation. It's nice to have a soul on or somebody like that. But if they did things that they said things or their personal life, if you're Caesar and you're married three times, or Mark Anthony and you're drunk,
00:42:55
Speaker
are violent, are paracles, and you sort of ruled by fiat even though they elected you and you got yourself into a war that didn't work too well. People were willing to forgive personal indiscretions or excesses.
00:43:13
Speaker
if they brought results. And I think that's pretty clear that they didn't really care who they slept with. They didn't care how many times they were married. They didn't care about what they said about people. They did care were they a strong leader that promoted the interest of the people. And did they step down from power when they fell out of favor, I guess you can say that, under the republic.
00:43:40
Speaker
And then in the empire, that was no longer there and it was more or less did they deviate from traditional Roman values. So somebody like Claudius is an incompetent, but he was considered a good emperor. Somebody like Vespasian was a good emperor. Augustus was a good emperor because they advanced Roman interest and they didn't kill people extra legally. And then Caligula is a bad emperor. Tiberius is a bad emperor. Nero is a bad emperor. Galba is a bad emperor.
00:44:08
Speaker
the missions because they killed people and were violent. But the actual makeup of their character, at least the outward expressions, were not essential. So they would say in our race, they don't really care about Stormy Daniels. People would, they just said, did Donald Trump further the interest of the United States? And did he do so without observing the constitutional prerogatives that were given him?
00:44:36
Speaker
And I think for all the hysteria about January 6th, he stepped down and there were legitimate criticisms of the election, but he did finally realize that he was not going to win. And he had a lot of people around him that were bad advisors about voting machines, communicating with China and all that crazy stuff. So I think they would look at him favorably.
00:45:00
Speaker
They would not look at a leader who's weak and undermine the values and the interest of his own country. I don't think they would look at, they wouldn't say that Joe Biden or Barack Obama was an effective leader, especially because they were critical of their own country. And they felt that as Obama famously summarized it, we're exceptional in the way that Greece is exceptional.
00:45:26
Speaker
Every country thinks it's exceptional. And when people said, yeah, but you've got the greatest economy in the world, you've got the biggest military, you've got 18 out of the top 20 universities that are rated in research and science, it doesn't matter. We're just, they wouldn't like that at all, I don't think. Bill Clinton was a little different. He was a, he was sort of a pragmatist. He was a more in that strain of JFK or Harry Truman, Democrat.
00:45:52
Speaker
turned to the year ahead in geopolitics. So you wrote an article that was published on the yesterday in which you said, all our enemies are right now calculating how best to use their gift of the next 12 months from a non-composementist president and his neo-socialist team that either believes the US is at fault or much of the world's pathologies or is too terrified to do anything about them. What will the next 12 months in geopolitics look like? Well,
00:46:21
Speaker
The point I was making is that when you have a leader that is perceived as weak and you may have a leader that's perceived as strong, and I gave an example of Carter or Reagan or Buchanan and Lincoln and a few others, then the world thinks that this favorable situation as far as America's opponents and rivals won't last forever. If they knew that Joe Biden was going to be elected another term, there would be no sense of urgency.
00:46:51
Speaker
But they don't think that's going to happen because of his mental state and his unpopular views down to 38% ABC poll 33% and they Donald Trump is leading them and they know what Donald Trump was like. So I think in a lot of their calculus, they're going to say.
00:47:08
Speaker
if we're going to do something, we've got a year until January 20th of next year. And what would that something be? I suppose Hezbollah or Iran would think that they could start, I guess Hezbollah would start.
00:47:26
Speaker
To put it this way, whether Hezbollah starts to shell Israel with 120 rockets, I don't think is predicated on our response. It's predicated entirely on their perception of Israeli deterrence and the degree to which we supply Israel. If they think we're not going to supply Israel with replacement parts, they will attack Israel. Or if they think Israel after the worst day in their history since the Holocaust did not destroy Hamas,
00:47:52
Speaker
but let it off the hook, then they will attack Israel in the next year. If they feel Israel for any reason or cause has lost its deterrence, if Iran feels that, or the Houthis feel that they can shut down the Red Sea with impunity,
00:48:07
Speaker
and they can withstand these little retaliatory strikes and that Biden will not go further because he doesn't want to in an election year be responsible for a theater-wide war. And he doesn't. That's what he's scared of. Then I think they'll think the Straits of Hormuz will be open only to Chinese ships probably. The Red Sea now is open basically to Chinese and Russian ships and nobody else, the Houthis. I think that Putin
00:48:34
Speaker
I think he's worn down the Ukrainians and he may feel that I think he was at a point where if they had negotiated and said, well, Crimea and the Donbas were yours anyway before the latest attack in 2022 on February 24th. Well, just institutionalize that if you go back to the pre-war of 2022 borders, he probably would have done it. I don't think he'll do it now.
00:49:00
Speaker
And he might even feel like he wants to pressure, say, Latvia or Lithuania or something like that. And I think China has really upped the rhetoric on Taiwan. I think there'll be a serious discussion, but it won't be really about the United States. It'll just be simply in terms of China's interest. It'll have a discussion given our fertility problems and our economic problems.
00:49:24
Speaker
Is it good to distract the people by going after Taiwan? What's the cost benefit? How much economic damage will we versus what we gain psychologically or politically? But it won't be on, will the United States deter us or not? Because I feel right now that Joe, they think, I hope they're wrong, but they think Joe Biden either cannot or will not deter them. If they were to go into Taiwan, they don't think he will act.
00:49:51
Speaker
And I think that'll be increasingly clear as we get to the election. And if you listen to what Mr. Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, say or what leaks out from Davos or leaks out from these discussions, their paramount fear is that they are going to be blamed with a Jimmy Carter-like meltdown. In other words, when they entered office,
00:50:15
Speaker
and they said that the Houthis were no longer in the global terrorist list, or the Iran deal was now viable, or we're going to lift sanctions and give Iran $50 billion, or they're going to resume $700 million to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. All of that, and they dealt with Hezbollah and matters of oil and stuff in the Mediterranean,
00:50:39
Speaker
via the Lebanese government. They feel now, I think privately, that they destroyed deterrence and they empowered this. And now there's a possibility that these people will make stupid decisions in Yemen, in the West Bank, in Syria, maybe in Iraq, and they will have a theater-wide war and they will be blamed for it.
00:51:02
Speaker
bite the bullet and hit the Houthis hard, warn Hezbollah, warn Iran that they can stop all of their commerce and slaps. They won't do that. And rather, they think they can finesse or talk or appease their way out of it. And that's very dangerous. That's, I think, I was worried about. But by appeasement, you're going to guarantee war. It's sort of what Churchill said. You know, speaking about the appeasement people and
00:51:32
Speaker
Britain, but also applicable to France. They had a choice between dishonor and war, and they chose dishonor, and they ensured war. And these people had a choice between dishonor and deterrence, and they chose dishonor, and then they lost deterrence. They're going to get a war. You may have just preempted what is my final question. OK. That your book comes out in May, the end of everything. Our war was to send into annihilation.
00:51:58
Speaker
Question was going to be, what lessons should we heed from the past to avoid the wars of obliteration that have reoccurred throughout history? Some of those hotspots you've just mentioned, sounds like it, or that question of appeasement is one piece of that puzzle, but how would you extend on that?
00:52:15
Speaker
Well, I looked at four case histories, the Alexander and the Great's obliteration of classical Thebes and the Roman famous obliteration of Carthage and Cortes' obliteration of the Aztecs, and then the destruction of Byzantine civilization. And they all had a similar paradigm that, first of all, they all think it's not going to happen.
00:52:36
Speaker
We fought the Romans twice. They didn't destroy Carthage. We're the seven gated thieves. We're the home of Oedipus. He wouldn't destroy us. We've been here for a thousand years in Byzantium. We've always been able to marginalize or deal with assault. They're not going to destroy Constantine. That's their window on the west. So there's always this denial. When the war starts, there's always this idea that there's help on the horizon.
00:53:03
Speaker
the Venetians will come. We know they will. The Genovese will come en masse to visit the Aztecs. We're going to have all of the people of the lake will finally see that these foreign devils and they'll be on our side. And the Carthaginians kept thinking, the Macedonians will fight the Romans in another war and relieve the pressure. That doesn't happen. And usually
00:53:27
Speaker
They gauge their safety on two things, on precedent and former glory. So people say, the walls of Constantinople were never taken by land in a thousand years, maybe once by the Fourth Crusade by sea, but never by land. It's impossible. It's not going to happen. And we're the Byzantines. At one time, we had 75% of the Roman Empire reclaimed.
00:53:53
Speaker
So they talk like that. And then finally, the people they're opposed to are not thugs. They're kind of Putin-like characters. They're thugs, but they're very sophisticated. And Scipio Emilianis had a Scipionic circle of intellectuals, and Cortez was a barrister. I mean, he wrote very sophisticated legal briefs to Charles V and, of course, the Theban
00:54:23
Speaker
The Thebans felt they were the home of Pendar and Oedipus and all of this rich history. And so they felt that, and Alexander of course was, I should say, Alexander was
00:54:36
Speaker
He felt that he was intellectual, his Aristotle was his tutor. So a lot of people don't quite understand that people who are highly educated, or they have pretenses that they're civilized, or in the case of Metmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, he said that he had the biggest library of any of the Sultan. They don't understand. There's no connection.
00:54:58
Speaker
between intellectualism and morality or erudition or education. And so some of the worst people in history that destroy things say they did it for the Brotherhood of Man or they did it for
00:55:12
Speaker
spiritual purposes, or most importantly, they all regret it. You know, Scipio cried after he destroyed Carthage, so this is so bad, I shouldn't have done it. So did Alexandra, I really blew it, I didn't mean to do it. And so I think when we look at the modern world and we see certain areas in the world that are very vulnerable, these are usually peoples of limited population,
00:55:35
Speaker
They tend to be Western or pro-Western, and they're in very difficult neighborhoods. The Israelis, the Armenians, the Kurds, the Greeks, and they have historical enemies like the Turks or the Arab people around Israel.
00:55:51
Speaker
They're very vulnerable. And if they rely on the United States, the United States may not be there. If they think that they can appeal to the better angels of their enemies and of their nature, they're sorely mistaken. And if they get into a war, they have zero margin of error. And that's what happened. So that's what I was trying to say in the epilogue, that it's not human nature. Material progress is often accompanied by moral status or moral regress. It's not
00:56:19
Speaker
moral progress step by step with technology and prosperity. This has been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on Australia. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.