Literary Corner: The Art of Sinking

This Cannibalistic Cycle

by Victor Davis Hanson

Diane Feinstein, Joe Biden, Nancy
Pelosi, and the Democratic fossils
on the Senate Judiciary Committee
may in their golden years try to lumber
onto the departing progressive train,
but their septuagenarian and octogenarian
creaky efforts to get on board grow sad.
Joe Biden was reduced to threatening
to beat Trump up behind the locker room.

Diane Feinstein staged a clumsy eleventh-
hour ambush of the hearings that proved
pure bathos. Even leftists such
as Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren
fear that they are suddenly pseudo-revolutionaries,
compared with the new, far more radical Jacobins,
who in cyclical French Revolutionary style
call for massive repeals of all student debt,

free tuition, packing the Supreme Court,
Medicare for all, a specified end to fossil
fuels, quotas based on identity politics,
and an abolishment of Immigration and
Custom Enforcement. No one quite knows
how far this cannibalistic cycle will go.

AOC v. VDH

Giovanni de Min. Spartan women wrestling, fresco, 1835-36. Villa Patt, Sedico, via .scclub.  

Victor Davis Hanson denounces the educated classes for the enjoyment and edificaton of the unlettered readership of the National Review:
T

rumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council on Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.

But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?

You can tell by his plain, colloquial language that he's a hardscrabble man of the people himself, at ease with chainsaws.

Profane and Rambunctious

One disadvantage of a largemouth. Via AnimalSake.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, celebrated military historian and literary stylist, in the National Review Online, on Harry Truman ("The Bigmouth Tradition of American Leadership"):

Harry Truman talked too much. He swore. He drank. He played poker. He was petty to the point of stooping to spar with a music critic who dismissed his daughter’s solo performances. His profanity was an open secret, as well as his temper. His advisers constantly cautioned him to tone it down.

As a Missourian who had once gone bankrupt and recouped with a political career though the help of the corrupt Prendergast machine, Truman carried a chip on his shoulder throughout his political career on the East Coast.

Yes, he's arguing here, on a somewhat circuitous path, that Truman (as compared to reticent, non-swearing, non-drinking, non-gambling Eisenhower) is pretty much the same as his alphabetical neighbor Trump.  Or "Think Andrew Jackson of [sic for "or", no copy editing at NRO] Teddy Roosevelt." (Disregarding the other cliché possibility of reminding us that TR advised everybody to "speak softly".)  Or William Tecumseh Sherman (as opposed to taciturn, but hard-drinking Grant, who was also, Hanson informs us, "naïve about the scoundrels who surrounded him"), or General Patton as opposed to General Bradley (who was "steady if not, on occasion, obsequious to his superiors in public and haughty to his inferiors in private", glad to hear he was occasionally not obsequious to his superiors, that's certainly praiseworthy):

Mercurial Is Not Always Wrong

Not saying Trump is exactly like Truman. "Yet":

For all his first-year achievements, an unpopular Trump is hardly yet an accomplished Patton or Truman. Nonetheless, we need to take a deep breath and concede that sometimes past mellifluous appeasement is more dangerous than present flamboyant deterrence — just as the sober and discreet can be more adroit in warping the Constitution through distortions and corruptions of the Justice Department, the IRS, the FBI, and the FISA courts than are the profane and rambunctious.

He's such a terrible writer. Lovely how he unlashes himself there from the mast of cliché ("take a deep breath") only to tumble into the rough sea of senselessness ("sometimes past mellifluous appeasement"). Glad to hear that Trump will be less adroit than some at warping the Constitution. I personally find the past to be always less dangerous than the present, but maybe that's just because I don't live there.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Bad writing from VDH

Googled "Fresno irrigator truck" but didn't find anybody with yellow false teeth. Photo from California Agricultural Technology Institute where they evidently lack a proper sense of tradition.

BooMan sets a take-home exam question:

Compare and contrast Victor David Hanson and Corey Robin.

Do they agree more than they disagree?

I thought, after looking at the essays (Hanson's in City Journal, Robin's in the groovier n+1) it was a pretty dumb question and drafted the following as a comment, then thought it might look like trolling and I'd better just put it here.

I can't see the relationship between the two pieces at all. 

VDH, a semi-retired historian of Classical Greece whose serious work is decades old, is doing a cliché-driven "analysis" of Trump's victory in November, featuring his usual shtik on the moral superiority of the deeply hierarchalized, conservative rural society, down to the fictional cartoon pictures of gnarled Mexican-American Trump voters and smooth-faced white Clintonites, to conclude that Trump was the True Conservative all along, and that's why he won. Like all Hanson's writing on political subjects it's not worth reading at all except for the fun of fisking and demonstrating what idiots the National Review staff writers are.

Robin, an important political scientist working now, is trying to say something original about what kind of president Trump is going to be operationally, based on an important concept that keeps getting neglected, the fact that the presidency is held by a committee, not a person (so that whether you think the person is excessively "left" or "right" or whether you "like" her or not is less important than the constellation of power around her), to conclude that Trump is not going to have a lot of institutional power to effect the change he's promised (which refreshingly doesn't assume he even knows what he's promised; too many people think he has some kind of coherent plan that he came up with himself to accomplish some particular goal other than "winning winning winning"). Robin could be totally wrong (I found myself furious with him during much of the campaign), or he could be getting to a plausible end by a poorly constructed route, but whatever he writes is absolutely worth reading.

Hanson's cartoons went like this:

Cheap shots: Piece in Our Time

At the counter-terrorism nuclear summit in Washington, April 1, via The Independent.

Because of all the dreadful things in our long national horror show, Obama's countless crimes and contempt for common decency, the worst, for Victor Davis Hanson, the thing that somehow caps them all, the most insulting, is... when he flashed a peace sign at an international meeting?

Really?

Imagine a Right-Wing PAC Campaign Ad in 2008 . . .

By Victor Davis Hanson — April 4, 2016

Then we take out the Taliban Coast Guard

Semi-eminent classicist and amateur hyperventilator Victor Davis Hanson (the name sounds like a white-shoe agency but he is apparently just one person) is in darkly prophetic mood over in The Corner:

Next year could be a frightening one, in the fashion of 1979–80.... The Obama administration is debating no-fly zones over Syria; more likely, it will have the same discussion over Afghanistan soon, once the Taliban drops the diplomatic veneer and comes back into town.

More likely than what? It seems most unlikely that the administration will be talking about no-fly zones in Afghanistan as long as the Taliban has no aircraft. That's all the [jump]