Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Victor Davis Hanson (born September 5, 1953) is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator.
Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush and was a presidential appointee in 2007–2008 on the American Battle Monuments Commission.
[1][better source needed] Hanson notes autobiographically that he was "a full-time orchard and vineyard grower from 1980-1984, before joining the nearby CSU" (California State University, Fresno) in 1984, to launch a classical studies program there.
[citation needed] Hanson was appointed as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, another conservative think-tank.[when?
[citation needed] He gave the Wriston Lecture in 2004 for the Manhattan Institute whose mission is to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.
In Fields Without Dreams (The Free Press 1996, winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award) and The Land Was Everything (The Free Press 2000, a Los Angeles Times notable book of the year), Hanson lamented the decline of family farming and rural communities and the loss of agrarian voices in American democracy.
The Soul of Battle (The Free Press 1999) traced the careers of Epaminondas, the Theban liberator, William Tecumseh Sherman, and George S. Patton in arguing that democratic warfare's strengths are best illustrated in short, intense, and spirited marches to promote consensual rule but bog down otherwise during long occupations or more conventional static battle.
Hanson wrote the 2001 book Carnage and Culture (Doubleday), published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries as Why the West Has Won, in which he argued that the military dominance of Western civilization, beginning with the ancient Greeks, results from certain fundamental aspects of Western culture, such as consensual government, a tradition of self-critique, secular rationalism, religious tolerance, individual freedom, free expression, free markets, and individualism.
To begin a discussion along those lines, the authors state, "The answer to why the world is becoming Westernized goes all the way back to the wisdom of the Greeks—reason enough why we must not abandon the study of our heritage.
favorably in Foreign Affairs and wrote that, "The great thinkers of the Western tradition—from Hobbes, Burke, and Hegel to Weber and Nietzsche (who was trained as a classical philologist)—were so thoroughly steeped in Greek thought that they scarcely needed to refer back to original texts for quotations.
In Sparta, where the population of citizens (male) were carefully socialized in a military system, no one seems to have differed from the majority enough to merit the death penalty.
But these differences are not sorted out by the authors, for their mission is to build an ideal structure of classical attitudes by which to reveal our comparative flaws, and their point is more what is wrong with us than what was right with Athens.
I contend that Hanson and Heath are actually comparing modern academia not to the ancient seminal cultures but to the myth that arose about them over the last couple of millennia.
"[14] According to Connolly, Professor of Classics at New York University as of 2016,[15] "Throughout history, the authors say, women have never enjoyed equal rights and responsibilities.
"[27] In the context of the Iraq War, Hanson wrote, "In an era of the greatest affluence and security in the history of civilization, the real question before us remains whether the United States – indeed any Western democracy – still possesses the moral clarity to identify evil as evil, and then the uncontested will to marshal every available resource to fight and eradicate it.
In response to Holder's speech, Hanson wrote a column, "Facing Facts about Race", in which he offered his own version of "the Talk", the need to inform his children to be careful of young black men when venturing into the inner city, who Hanson argued were statistically more likely to commit violent crimes than young men of other races, and so it was understandable for the police to focus on them.
"[32] The journalist Kelefa Sanneh, in response to "Facing Facts About Race", wrote, "It's strange, then, to read Hanson writing as if the fear of violent crime were mainly a "white or Asian" problem, about which African-Americans might be uninformed, or unconcerned – as if African-American parents weren't already giving their children more detailed and nuanced versions of Hanson's 'sermon', sharing his earnest and absurd hope that the right words might keep trouble at bay.
[37][38][39][40] In May 2016, Hanson argued that Obama failed to maintain a credible threat of deterrence and that "the next few months may prove the most dangerous since World War II.