Restoring Citizenship

>> Victor Davis Hanson: One of the common things that happens to societies, they become self-delusional.

>> Karina McKenna: Hi, my name is Karina McKenna. I just graduated from Temple University with a degree in economics. I'm very curious. In approaching Social Security insolvency with declining birth rates and an aging population, do you think that immigration could be a possible policy option to restore population growth in this country?

Thank you.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it can certainly be both a corrective and a destroyer of it, depending on how it's used. So if you've let 10 million people into the country and they have very little wherewithal, then they're going to need to draw on federal entitlements, and you know, it's fungible money.

Some of it is going to be disability, Social Security, disability, health care, etc. So we have somewhere between 20 and 30 people who. 30 million people who are heavily because they come from some of the poorest countries. On the other hand, if people come legally and they're audited and they're diverse and that happens as well, and they tend to be not always, but if they tend to be admitted on meritocratic grounds, they tend to be a little younger rather than family considerations alone, then yeah, you're bringing in a lot of people to a country with a declining birth rate and they can widen the pool of contributors.

But what's happening now is that the immigration solution is either negative or it's nullified by the fact that the people coming in are drawing, at least initially, on Social Security, various disability and corrective medical things that were really never part of Social Security in its early years.

So it's an open question, we'll see what happens, if we had legal only immigration as we did in the past, and we allowed a very generous number of people, say one million a year rather than 10 million unaudited, and they came from all over the country and there were particular standard basis for admittance.

And we know from research that assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are accelerated when people come from diverse areas and they don't concentrate in particular compounds, so that was the idea of the melting pot. But we know that that will make the average age of the population lower. It has in the past, and that's something that will happen; it's very problematic when both candidates pander.

I mean, Donald Trump said that he wasn't going to tax Social Security income. That's going to cost about 1.4 trillion. I have no objection to that. He just has to say, well, here's where the other 1.4 trillion comes from. It's like tips on. I think it's great not to tip service workers, but just tell us where the other $1.9 trillion comes from.

That's all, and we're not thinking like that. That's why we're $36 trillion in debt. We have a $1.3 trillion service bill every year. With the interest rate as it is, it's higher than the defense budget. So this is not sustainable, and both parties are culpable. Another question. Yeah.

>> Speaker 3: Hi, Dr. Hanson. Thank you so much for your talk today. My question is in light of the recent riots in the UK between various religious minorities, particularly Muslims, and secular or Christian communities. A fundamental tenet of the West is the freedom to believe what you want and the freedom to practice the religion of your choice.

Of course. But it seems to me that, throughout the west, whether it be all across Europe or in America, there are ideas and sort of communities who have their sort of cultural axioms and their sort of primal beliefs that are incredibly disparate from the traditional conception of the culture that has been practiced for hundreds of years.

How do we maintain that freedom to believe what people want to believe in, but at the same time make sure that there is a sort of overarching sense of citizenship, an overarching sense of belonging to a culture that shares the same axioms or fundamental beliefs? Thank you.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it requires some candor that can be uncomfortable, but the truth is, if you look at the west today, as exemplified by Europe and the United States, and to a lesser degree, or to an equal degree, excuse me, a lesser degree of South Korea and Japan, but a similar degree of the former British Commonwealth or present Australia, New Zealand, Canada.

There is a commitment, and there is a much greater commitment to diversity and multiracialism on the idea, the premise being that we really don't care what your superficial appearance or religious affinities as long as you adopt a common core. And what would I mean by that? Come in from any country, enrich us with your food, with your fashion, with your music, with your art, but do not tamper with our constitutional order.

Bring Mexican food, but we do not want the Mexican judiciary. Bring in calypso music, but we do not want the form of government in Haiti, for example, that we were very blunt about it, and that's why people came. And so it wasn't so much whether a person came from a country that was antithetical.

It was more than when they came, our ancestors said, we didn't make the decision, you did. For some reason, and we don't even want to know the reason. You don't like Hungary, maybe it was the communist revolution of ‘56. You hate Castro, fine, we don't care. You don't like Islamic treatment of women or homosexuals, but you made the decision, not us.

You came to this Western country and it's our role so you can be successful, to acculturate you. So here's the Constitution, here's the Declaration of Independence, here's our customs, here's football, here's all this stuff, and you're gonna be Americanized, as long as you do that, multiracialism does not become multiculturalism, and it works.

However, if you have an affluent postmodern west that has guilt about its affluence or its success, or for whatever reason, professional rewards for being hyper critical of the society and particular professions, entertainment, my profession, academia. And you are able to institutionalize that sense of uncertainty, then you send a message to people from antithetical societies that you can come here to the West and you can emulate all what you want from your former society.

But you get the benefits of a free market, a dynamic economy, sophisticated technology which is a product of unique Western rationalism, or freedom of speech, or freedom of science, or religious tolerance, or equality of women. And so what we're doing in the west is we are telling people from countries that are antithetical to our system that, well, we want you to come, but you can have your own traditions, you can have communities, you can have counties where there is not a freedom of the sexes, or you can be especially intolerant of homosexuals and you are gays in your community.

And we're not gonna interfere because that's diversity. And that has risen to such a level that these communities feel that they are pockets of their prior society within the West. And they get the benefits of Western benefits, technology, and the rule of law, but they can keep their cultural traditions that are absolutely antithetical.

So you end up with an Orwellian situation where somebody will come from a country and they will wave the flag and they will tell you how great that country is, and yet they fled from that country. Under no circumstances do they wanna go back for. I got, when I was a professor, one of my best students, after he was demonstrating and he was burning the flag of the United States and burning the flag, and waving the flag of Mexico.

And I said to him, I really, Jose, I had mostly Hispanic, you gotta tell me what you're doing. You're burning the flag of the country. Under no circumstances do you wanna leave, and you're waving the flag under, so no circumstances you wanna go back to what's going on. And he couldn't explain that, but he understood there was no downside to that, but there was an upside in the academic community, and so until that changes and the riots are going on, this is a perfect example of what I meant by a retribalization.

So you had a once former white majority in these particular communities, and then they were diverse. I don't think there was a problem as long as they were racially diverse. But people all spoke the same language. They had religious tolerance. They had the same idea about the sexes.

But that community felt that customs were being introduced that were antithetical to British normalities and traditions. And so they decided, well, if everybody is going to identify by their tribe or their religion, we're gonna do the same thing. And then they met the elite of Britain, that said, We're going to be asymmetrical.

This particular group can do this particular thing, but you can't emulate that particular group, and that ruins the equal application of the law. And that's gonna go nowhere but to Armageddon if that continues, because what you don't want to do in any society, you don't want 70% to tribalize.

And I can see it happening when I go to a supermarket in rural Fresno County. I never knew anybody, it's 99% Mexican American. My family is intermarried with Mexican American people. But now, when I go, if I see somebody who's white, they say, Hi, how are you? How's it going?

Everything okay? And I think, do I know you? And what he's trying to communicate is everybody is identifying by their tribe, and I'm you, and I now have something in common. Well, I have no more in common with him than I do. Jose Romero is my neighbor, but that's what's happening to society.

And when the majority does it, it's very, very dangerous. And the majority will do it, human nature's given what it is, unless we stop it all across the board. And that's what we're 60 years into. Martin Luther King, content of your character, not the color of your skin.

We've made enormous progress, but we don't wanna go backwards and emphasize something that's superficial, like our appearance, rather than our character and our innate personality. So I'm very worried about that. The United States, remember, was not. They had an advantage. They did not have a class system, so that they people could come and make it.

If you came from Mexico, and I've seen it happen in Fresno, if you're an Oaxacan and you came and you started a business and you became a multimillionaire, then the Cal State overseers board would want you to be on that. They didn't care whether you were Mexican or where you were born.

They wanted you because you were rich. And money and personal success were always a more successful barometer than innate race, that you can't change. So that was the American idea, everybody in Europe called us crass and greedy, but actually it was a more sophisticated idea that a person could be upwardly mobile based on their ability to make money and gain status and honor and help people or be impressive regardless of the race.

And that's what the great hope of America is. And you know, it's very ironic that people allege that Donald Trump is a racist. He may or may not be, but what he's the earning of the IRE of the Republican establishment. Forget about the left. They are very angry because he's trying to redefine the Republican Party not as an aristocratic bicoastal elite, but is a common workers’ party.

So what he's saying is, I think I will get a record number of Latinos and blacks to vote for me because the Punjabi truck driver, the African American plumber, the poor white Appalachian carpenter have more in common with each other than they do the elites that represent them.

So that white carpenter will not vote for Mitt Romney. He might vote for a black populist, or that black carpenter would not necessarily wanna watch Joy Reid if he thought there was another person who was interested in his class. So that's very interesting to watch to see if that happens.

And that's why, if people ask, Why does the Republican establishment hate this guy? Besides his crudity and his orange tan, all of his obvious foibles, I think one of the greatest things is trying to redefine class instead of race.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Question, yes, go ahead

>> Speaker 4: Dr. Anson, thank you for your insight.

My name is Connie Steady, I'm a student at Fresno State, part of Fresno.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Fresno State?

>> Speaker 4: Yeah.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Fresno State, my alma mater, while I was there for 21 years.

>> Speaker 4: And part of the honors program that you're an honors professor in. So my question is that when I observe my peers around me and young people, it seems that both with immigrant groups and people who have their generational roots in America, there's a decline in citizenship in the sense that apathy and indifference and even overtly anti-American sentiments are increasing.

Now, is there a way that you think we can reverse that, looking back into the past, either to antiquity or other periods? And is there a certain threshold or a point of no return where American citizenship and citizenry as we have known it won't exist anymore?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I'm afraid that American citizenship as we knew it doesn't exist, that's what I'm most worried about.

But in time, there have been age cohorts that have formed. I'll give you one example. So all these people were pulled off their 50% were farming. As late as 1939, 40, they were all pulled off their farms. They did not want to go and fight. The Germans, the Japanese, and the Ital, they went over there.

450,000 died. 12 million were in the military. They came back and said, I want something for this. These guys didn't fight, I was. And they created the GI Bill of Rights. They said the federal government is going to help us go to college. We're gonna have Veterans Administration for our health care, and we're going to have housing subsidies.

That was an age cohort, not a racial and age cohort, so if you're saying, can young people coalesce and try to be active for their interests or citizenship, they should. Because we had a wonderful question about Social Security, because you people are going to get less. You say you're from Fresno State.

If you look at. Ask young faculty members, they're not getting a defined benefit like I am. In other words, I get how many years I taught there, and for the rest of my life, I get free. They are getting a 401k because my generation took the money, and your generation pays for it.

Social Security will not, you will not get what I got, unless there's radical changes and the student loan program. I don't know how that happened, but. How the federal government made the mistake of getting in there. When this university, to take one example, has a $40 billion endowment, they could easily tell all of your students, we're going to subsidize your loan.

And I guarantee you, if they were on the hook for their loans, you would find classes that were easy to graduate. I don't mean the content, but they would counsel you. They would say, We want you to graduate in four years. Here's a job. We're gonna try to place you, we want you to pay this loan back as quickly as possible.

But when you take the moral hazard and you change the direction of it, then you get this. So your generation is very worried about it. I'm not worried about my generation. My generation is worrying about life extension and how long we can live, and new shots for this and infusions for that, and facial.

We want to live forever because it's such a good deal for us. But you guys are paid for.

>> Madison: Hi, I'm Madison. I'm an economics student at the University of Chicago. And just to follow up on that question, in an era where we're trying to preserve the integrity of American citizenship, how can we, in light of tribulation and like constitutional reinterpretation, maintain that integrity?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Constitutional and citizenship integrity.

>> Madison: Like reinterpretation of the Constitution?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it starts with education. If you ask most. I think we have this idea of education that it's expensive and it's not zero-sum. So if you have a therapeutic curriculum and you're talking about things that are not going to enrich you or as society, or they're not the building blocks that have worked in the past.

So you're gonna err your differences, or your particular tribal affiliations, or your grievances. Well, forget whether it's positive or it takes time. So when you look at the traditional curriculum, I go to Hillsdale College every year to teach. And you know what the first thing I noticed when I went there?

I went to the bookstore to look at the books, and I said, I'm going to count how many classes have a dash that says studies as a suffix. You know how many there were? Zero. Not one. No leisure studies, no recreational studies, no gender studies, no gay studies, no black studies, no white studies, no any studies.

These are therapeutic classes that are deductive. They start with no environment. This is the premise. And we're going to give you readings that make you agree with us at the end of the class. Rather than the old classical idea, this is the Constitution. What was education? Education was two things.

You're gonna be an inductive thinker. You're going to look at all the examples, and then you're going to come to your own decisions based on the analysis. But to do that, number two, you had to have a collective body of knowledge. Everybody had to know what a Doric pillar was.

They had to know what the Second Amendment was. They had to know what the tenth Amendment was. They had to know what impeachment was. They had to know who Abraham. If they had a shared body of knowledge and they had the inductive way of reasoning, they'd be a successful citizen and they would know something.

They would be taught in that process about the Constitution, and they're not. We did really corny things. I think your generation would die if you'd asked your grandparents. But I went to a first grade where there were four people who were not Hispanic. One was my twin brother.

And we paraded the flag about. Everybody had to sing God Bless America. America, tis of thee and the Star Spangled Banner every morning. And we fought to be able to carry the flags. And then we had something called diction, diction. And it said, Mrs. Evans, in a very patronizing way, said, All of you are competing with some of the best schools, and these people have had advantages.

And you just came from Mexico, and we're going to make you beat those people. That was the idea. So we all had to say, I have a stick shift Chevy, in unison. If we said, well, I have a stick shift Chevy. No, no, no, you don't. You have a Chevrolet.

If you aren't going to get a job interview, you have to speak the King's English better than somebody at a prep school. And we can teach you to do that. Can you imagine if you did that today? You'd be fired. But the point of it was, at least in some of these schools, was to inculcate these people, these people, us, with the building blocks of a classical education to compete.

And there were certain things that were timeless. Do you speak well? Can you write well? Do you know how to shake a person's hand? Do you know how to write a check? Do you know the basics of your civilization? Do you know that we don't do that anymore?

So we have people who are very therapeutic and they're very sensitive, but they don't know what to be sensitive or therapeutic about, it's very sad. Another question. Do you have one? Yeah, go ahead.

>> Jaden: Hi, Dr. Hansen. Thank you so much for your talk. I really enjoyed it.

My name is Jaden Stewart. I'm an undergraduate at Princeton University.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you.

>> Jaden: It seems today like a lot of people are losing trust in our governmental institutions, and it's leading to a lot of the decay that you very so eloquently pointed out. How do you think we can regain trust in those institutions and keep them enduring far into the future?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Did everybody hear that? How do we restore trust to our government? I would say just indict and convict everybody who lies under oath. What I'm saying is that if you had indicted Alexander McCabe for lying four times, or Brennan or Clapper, then I don't think Fauci would have lied.

Bring back the rule of law and make it applicable to people in the administrative state would be one thing we mentioned, education would be another. But the main thing I think people are looking for is a society of consequences. Everything is negotiable now. So we don't enforce criminal statutes, we don't enforce civil.

And it's both at the poor and the top end. So I think people are just really thirsting for consequences, that if you break a particular rule, then you pay the consequences, you don't get forgiven. And it's really this. I think a lot of the people, especially in your generation, just want to know what the rules are and that they're applied equally and they're enforced.

And nobody uses their race or their money or their zip code or their parents to get an exemption. But we are an exempted society. Nothing matters. And it's not an ideological. Both sides of the spectrum do it. But I think your generation. One other thing, I just finished a book about the end of everything.

How societies are destroyed in war. And one of the common things that happens to societies is they become self-delusional. So your society has brought up that America was number one, and we have the best military. But no one tells your society you're 36 trillion in debt run up by us, and you have the largest debt service in history, and we have a larger GDP, I think debt.

We have a lot of noted economists here can correct me, but it's either at World War II levels or above. But we're not at war. Our military was humiliated in Kabul. We're short 45,000 soldiers in our military, and the military does not like to talk about it. But if you go deeply into online resources, you will find that it is not blacks, not Latinos, not gays, not women who are not.

It's a particular demographic of poor white middle-class soldiers. And the reason I'm mentioning them is only for this reason. If you look at the death statistics in Iraq and Afghanistan, that particular Rubik died at 75% of all combat deaths, and yet they only represent about 33- 34% of the population.

So if you're Mark Milley or Lloyd Austin and you go before. For Congress and you say there's a systemic cabal of white supremacists in the Pentagon and you're gonna find them out. And then you sheepishly, two years later, sort of in December on a Friday afternoon, say, we didn't find anybody, but you've alienated an entire class, they're not joining.

And yet those are the people we depend on to go to the most God awful places in the world, and go to Helmand province. Well, I have nothing else to do. I'm an 18-year-old from Ohio. I'll go. My grandfather went to Vietnam, my dad’s great-grandfather went to the world.

That's, and we have offended the military and military acquisitions, recruitment. It's Afghan, we're not capable of defending ourselves, our financial structure is in shambles. The regulatory climate makes it almost impossible for people to buy homes because of the rules of zoning and construction. So I think if you look at the middle class and you look at the statistics can be deceiving.

But ask yourself, how many hours do people have to work to pay their taxes for the year? How many hours do they have free? Do they have parental control over their children? All these things are eroding, and these civilizations in history keep saying we're Carthaginians, Hannibal invaded Italy.

No, no, no, no, that was 50 years earlier. You don't have an empire, and the Romans are at Utica, and they're going to wipe you out. No, they can't. Nobody's ever breached the walls of Carthage, they can do it. We have that attitude. We're the United States. There won't be a nuclear war.

Putin's bluffing; he'd never do that. Kim Jong Un wouldn't dare touch us. The United States just watches people do things stupid when they think in a cost-benefit analysis, there's some advantage to be had, so we have to really go back to the basics. We are going to spend a lot on defense, we are gonna create deterrence, and then no one is going to question the United States’ ability to respond.

We will recreate deterrence, meritocratic immigration, generous meritocratic, limited government, limited regulations, balanced budget. We can do all of that. And if we do, it will be a second renaissance, but if we continue down we are on, it's just impoverishment and more and more decline. Usually, when you have decline and impoverishment, then you have sectarianism and revolution, civil war, etc.

I'm very worried, but we have to just take the idea. To answer your question, we are in bad self-created trouble. And we create it, we can get out of it. We can close the border tomorrow and make it legal. We can address the debt tomorrow. We can address the problems in the military.

I was reminded by Scott today that the Taliban had a military parade. Did you see it? They were parading all of our weapons. 50 billion that we just abandoned. Just think of that $50 billion we gave over to the Taliban. One of our presidential candidates said, contrary to the Second Amendment, I wanna confiscate and a mandated confiscation of assault weapons American citizens who purchased them.

Why would you say that when you gave 400,000 of them to the Taliban? The price of a Ram truck has gone up $20,000 for a consumer in the last five years, from about 55,000 to 75,000. Why would you put that burden on the Americans, given your economic policy, when you gave 70,000 brand-new trucks to the Taliban?

I mean, these are just. I know they're gestures, but they indicate a mindset that people in our government are not; they're not worried about the middle class. I don't know if we have another question or two, yeah.

>> Speaker 7: Thank you, Dr. Hanson. I think that after World War II, we rightly relegated Nazism to the dustbin of history.

And as a society, we've maintained that there wouldn't be anybody in this room, I would suspect that would have a good thing to say about Nazi Germany. But we didn't do the same thing with the ideas of Karl Marx, the most destructive ideology of the 20th century. And it remains alive and well at the very top portions of leadership in our country and in academia, and every other important place.

John Adams said that our Constitution was made for moral and good people, religious people, and it's wholly inadequate for any other. But with that wild idea of Marxism and government formation, there's also the moral relativism that comes with it, the idea that there is no one that you answer to for what's right and wrong.

It seems to me like the enemy is within the gates. When we consider there are enemies around the world, certainly that's important. But there's an enemy in the gates, and it's an ideology that we should have snuffed out, and it should be a pariah. But it's not. How do we do anything about that if it's not too bad?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Part of it is a historical artifact, take 1941, June 22nd, there was a great debate in the United States whether to extend lend lease to the Soviet Union, who had refused it in 1940 when they were part of the Nazi Molotov Ribbentrop Pakistan. But people were basically saying in 1941 we should have the same attitude that we have today with Iraq, we had in the 80s with Iraq, Iran, we'll let them both fight.

Donald Rumsfeld said let them both lose, but we made the decision that Hitler represented the more existential threat, and the Soviet Union could be useful. My point is that we went to war in an existential fashion with fascism, and we destroyed it, the Japanese version, the Italian version. And we never went to war with communism, partly because after that war became the nuclear age, and you could not have that type of all-out war against an ideology.

Even though you could argue that Mao killed 60 million of his own people, Stalin killed 25, and they were up at or way above Hitler as far as evil. And since then, we've seen what happened in Cambodia and other places, so we've never really galvanized as a country for this historical reason against a deadly communist menace.

The second thing is it's much harder to oppose communism because the veneer of fascism is that we have a super race or we have a talented elite and we're just going to rule by ourselves through fiat. Communism doesn't say that. It says we love the people, we want everybody to be equal.

Kamala Harris said the difference between equality and equity is that we don't start off all the same. So I think we should all in the back end be equal. What she didn't say is that people are different. Some people like to work, some don't, some are big, some are strong, some have sickness, some have, they're too different.

And if you want to make everybody equal on the back end, then you have to give that government the power to kill people. She didn't say that, but that's what's implied. So communism has a therapeutic message that's very hard to fight because it's all peace and brotherhood, and equality.

Who's against that? And so it takes a very sophisticated argument to remind people that to get the communist dream, not only would you not want it because you would suppress very valuable people in your community, and you would elevate people who had not earned it. But more importantly, you would need a degree of coercion that's frightening.

Orwell talked about it and too a novel, so it's gonna be very hard to eliminate that and it goes back to antiquity. Socrates said, apparently he said, according to a late source, Diogenes Laertes, I'm a citizen of the world. Everybody and he was a conservative, everybody's the same, and so cosmopolitanism, globalism, utopianism, socialism, Marxism, communism, it all has the same pernicious commonality.

Just give me enough power and I will rule and make you all equal. Now I need a guardian class that has to be exempt from the consequences of my own ideology. But give me the power and I'll create heaven on earth. And every time it's tried, it creates hell.

Thank you.