DAILY SIGNAL: Victor Davis Hanson’s Message to America for Its 250th Birthday
The following is an excerpt of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Victor Davis Hanson for the “Signal Sitdown,” which premieres on the Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 am EDT on July 2.
Portions of this interview are featured in Daily Signal’s new documentary “Sacred Honor: The Declaration That Defines a Nation,” premiering at 8:30 pm EDT on Daily Signal’s YouTube page.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Bradley Devlin:On July 4th, they approved the Declaration of Independence, and that document is signed over the course of the next few months. But these men, by signing that document, 56 men mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in support of the Declaration and under the providence, the providential hand of God.
When you think about that moment, how heavy that must have been. Tell us a little bit about the intensity that wasprobably inthat room as they pick up that quill and sign the Declaration.
Victor Davis Hanson:Well, they were all there because their peers had selectedthemor the people had selected them. Andsothey were men of education, they were men of stature, they were men of, many of them, of land and wealth.
Andsowhen they signed that, and they didn’t really have an army, and they were taking on the most powerful military in the world that was reaching its apex, then what they were really saying is, “If this doesn’t work, all the generations following me aregonnabe destitute because I’mgonnalose all the land, all their inheritance.
“I’mgonnaprobably losemy life. I’mgonnabebrandeda traitor a rebel.”
And they knew that whether they succeeded woulddeterminehow they were seen. If they failed, they would be called traitors and rebels. If they were successful, they might berevolutionaries or idealistsor founders. But at that point they signed, the odds, if we had to make a bet, I think most people would’ve bet on the Crown, given the comparative resources, even though it was a distant theater.
Sothey were undertaking a very improbable mission that might end in their disgrace, their bankruptcy, and their death. They would behangedto set an example. And it wasa very dangerousthing to do.
Bradley Devlin:When you think about the Roman Republic 250 years into its history,it’sexpanding,it’svery strong,it’sstill on the rise.
And here we sit today, 250 years into the American Republic, hoping to keep it alive for the next 250 years. Thatwasn’tthe case for Rome. 500 years into its history, the Roman Republic is gone. It has turned into an empire.
If you would,compare and contrastthe Roman Republic 250 years in versus the American Republic 250 years in, andperhaps howwe preserve our republic for longer than Rome did.
Victor Davis Hanson:Well, what destroyed the Republic starting in the mid-second century BC with, say, the destruction of Corinth and the accumulation of what is now most of Greece or all of North Africa with the destruction of Carthage in 146 or Caesar’s complete annexation of Gaul, a million slaves that they brought in, was that as they had.
Once they developed this system of stable government and they mastered the legions, and they were yeoman agriculturalists from Italy, and they were wonderful fighters, they found that they could expand exponentially both north, south, east, or west.
But the problem was that this republican government was not set up for that. Itwasn’tdesigned for that. Itshouldn’tbe designed for that. So once, when you sent someone out with an army supposedly to defend the borders of Rome, but really preemptively to expand them, once they went into places like modern-day France, or they went into Ionia, the rich parts of modern-day Turkey, or they went into the Nile area, they found that there was greater, far greater wealth outside of that than Italy.
And these people then weregoverningas prefects or generals. They were governing areas withpopulations and moneyand territory that were far greater than what the Republic was, run by the Senate and the two consuls.
Sothis led to the Sulla and Marius rivalries. But their armies were… A man could come from the provinces with a richer army, a bigger army, and more importantly, a more battlefield army than the Senate could raise.
Andsowhen Caesar crossed the Rubicon in the last gasp of the Republic, Pompey just fled because here was a guywho’dbeen battle-hardened for 10 years in Gaul. He had enormous amounts of money he expropriated, and the Senate was completely enfeebled.
Sothe Founders knew that, but in the case of the United States, they were very worried that you might have.That’sone of the reasons Aaron Burr was so dangerous, or they thought he was.
He was so notorious because somebody could go out to the West and carve out a territory, and that’s why they were later so paranoid about the Mormons in Utah, that there would be people that would go out and get territories and create fiefdoms that would be not just immune from the federal government but might be more powerful than the federal government, and a good story is when [Gen. William Tecumseh] Sherman went through the march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, then he went up from the Carolinas.
He had an army of sixty-five thousand people. And they were, these were not the army of the Potomac that were Irish and German immigrants that were being killed, wounded, and then right off the boat being replenished. These were hardcore farmers that had marched and lived off the country, and they were dressed in rags by the time they got to the military parade.
And the first thing that the German military attaché is, “This man is more powerful than anybody in Washington, and that army could beat any army in Europe.” And theydidn’tknow what Sherman wasgonnado with it. They thought, “Wow, he’s taken over the whole South.He’smarching up here.He’svery angryat the Secretary of War.What will hedo?”
And then hekind of playedwith that for about a day or two before he disbanded it.Sothe Republican governments are not equipped very well for overseas conquest. Andthat’swhy in our history, every time that we tried to in the Spanish-American War, we tried to deal with the Philippines, there was a great outrage.
Youdon’twannaannex Cuba. Youdon’twannaannex the Philippines. You can be a caretaker.You can nurse them along, but it’s very against our creed because I think Pat Buchanan said, “A republic, not an empire.”And that was the idea that an imperial rule would distort republican government, and Rome was the best example.
Nobody really mentioned that the principate and the empire lasted for five hundred years. And in Rome from, say, 31 BC to, Idon’tknow, 476, there were local councils that were democratic, not democratic, but constitutional. And they functioned as they always had. It wasjustthe imperial government was autocratic, and the Senate wassort of ajoke.
But they were afraid of that. And especially when you had this large territory they kept absorbing, theydidn’thave enough people to defend it. They knew it was very wealthy, and they really, they were worried about slavery, what would itwould takeoff on the frontier. So that was a concern.
Bradley Devlin:All these concerns and yetthey’reable to prudently navigate these political circumstances, give rise to this great country you and I both call home.
If we’re not going to go the way of Rome, even though our system is set up to hopefully avoid that, for us to avoid going the way of Rome, how do we recover the statesmanship and the politics of the higher nature of our founding and bring that into today and pass that down to posterity?
Victor Davis Hanson:Well, I think itwas about 50 years ago that we stopped in our K through 12 schooling system teaching what we used to call ethics and civics. In other words, how to be moderate. I went to a rural school two miles away and we had those courses and they entailed everything about being a citizen.
“Mr.Victor, would you come to the front of the room?We’regoing to shake hands withprincipal.Let’ssee how you shake hands. No, youlookhim right in the eye.Don’tbe too firm. Don’t be too weak.”
And then every morning, “Gracie Martinez, would you please choose your national anthem today? Is it going to be ‘God Bless America,’ ‘America the Beautiful, My Country ‘Tis of Thee,’ the American ‘Star-Spangled Banner’?Which is it,Gracie?”
And she would pick and we’d allsingand she would go around the room. And in the classrooms, there were all the president silhouettes and then without the names. And we had tests as early as third grade to look at the silhouette and thenidentifythe president. And they were not inthe orderof theirpresidencies.
They were all mixed up. That was just commonplace ata very poorrural school that was 90% Hispanic.Soif youdon’thave a civic education and youdon’thave courses in classical ethics …It was always, “You don’t have any money, Victor.You’regoing on the campus,you’regoing on our littleplaygroundand you find a wallet and it has $10 and there’s no driver’s license.What do youdo?”
“Well, you don’t have money. Why don’t you just take it? Nobody knows who it is.”
“No, you take it to Mr. Cagle, the principal, and you write out areportand this is why.”
Wedon’tdo that at all.It’ssituational now. And then the other thing is they were able to. They had an idea once the Anglo-Saxon British experiment was working and there started to become early immigrants from Germany especially, and Scandinavia, and then later from Eastern Europe, and then from Russia, and then from Southern Europe.
They were able to incorporate them as citizens, and they had a guiding principle that they came to the United States. Wedidn’tinvite them. They came here. And they,it’sthe brutal bargain we call it now. They said to them, “You can have your flag on ceremonial days. You can have your food, your music, your literature, your everything that will enhance the American experience.
“But do not tamper with the core. Whether you like it or not, wedon’thave an official religion, but we are a Judeo-Christian country that imbues our values.Here’sthe Constitution,here’sour judicial system. Don’t try to change that.”
That’sa very differentconcept from the current one that “We’re lucky to have you.Thank you for coming, and we don’t want to judge you.”
And we have53 million peoplethatweren’tborn in the United States, 16%, highestwe’veever had, 27% here in California. And wedon’tdare question your culture versus ours. And maybe asI think the late Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburgsaid, “Maybe we have a lot to learn from the Constitution of South Africa,” she said.
Or the President of the United States, Barack Obama said, “Yeah, we’re exceptional in the sense only that Britain thinks they’re exceptional and the Greeks think they’re exceptional.”
Soif you don’t have that inclusive citizenship that we’re all on the same page no matter what are we look like, what, no matter what race, but we’re all part of this melting pot and we’re a nation of ideas, and that’s the ultimate expression of the Declaration.
If you say all men are created equal and you don’t specify a national religion, then everybody can come here regardless of their race, regardless of their origin, as long as they understand that there is a cultural ethos that came from the founders and there is a foundational document, the Constitution.
And then federalism, constitutions of the various states.
But wedon’thave that now. We have people coming all over andalmost theirfirst reaction is “Well, what is in it, what is in it for me? What do I get? AndI’ma victim and you. I have claims against the majority.”
And I think that would be so foreign to what the countrywas.
Even John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what you can, what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That waskind of themantra of the 1960s. Sothat’sa very bigworry today that… And that I think it, that people like Samuel Huntington or Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were not necessarily conservatives, but they, at the end of their lives, theywrotebooks like “Who Are We?”
And they,they saw that this diversity wasvery dangerousto the country. And when you add the migrations to it, four to five million people leaving blue states to red states because of federalism, basically they’re saying that the federal, the blue state model is a failure and the red state model is preferable regardless of ideology.
Thenyou’readding a geographical force multiplier to ideology, and wehadn’tseen that in this country since 1850s and ’40s, where if you were in the South, youwere forslavery. If you were inNorth, youweren’t. There was a kind ofa borderbetween.
But pretty much if you go to Tennessee, Texas Florida, Alabama Idaho, Montana,it’sa different country than California or New York or…itreally is.
Not just in the way people think and act, but in the infrastructure and things working. The elections in Californiadon’twork, and the budgets of California and New Yorkdon’twork, and the big cities of Chicago and L.A. are not working. Andthat’ssomething that’sgonnabemore and morean issue as the country starts to self-select and divide.
And I can envision a period, ifit’snot dealt with, that in 30 or 40 or 50 years, you would create two distinct cultures. And there is a geographicalcomponent. Most of them are to the south, not all.There’ssome up in thenorthbutit’sgoing to bea very differentcountry. Italready isright now.
I’mvery worried about it. I drive three and a half hours to Palo Alto, and I can tell you the San Joaquin Valley, when I did that as a student at Stanford, there wasn’t much difference, and now they’re completely different.
I go to Stanford andI’mverycarefulwhat I say,very carefulwhenI’min a restaurant or something.
And it’sjusta different experience. And here,there’sa tolerance for any … thereare all sorts of people who are politically different. Andit’sjust completely different.
And I don’t know how to express it, but when I get tense when I drive to the Bay Area now and park my car, and then I go on the campus, and even not even on the campus, downtown Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton.
They havea very differentidea of what America should be than people in the foothills of California or in red state America. Andthere’snot really anybodywho’strying to reconcile those differences.
Idon’tknow if they are reconcilable. One is a utopian view that human nature can be changed if you have enough power and leverage, and the other is tragic view that it’s not a therapeutic view, that we’re born imperfect and sinful, and we have to be very careful what we do, and we need custom, tradition, honor, religion, community, family to suppress our natural excesses.
The Leftdoesn’tbelieve that. And sothat’ssomething that Idon’tknow if the Founders.I think they, they thought federalism would curethatand the frontier and federalism would serve assort of apressure valve. Frederick Jackson Turnermaybe withthe frontier, and then more importantly, federalism would create different…
And then they found out that federalismcreated the Civil War.Andfederalism cured the Civil War as well, but at the cost of seven hundred thousand lives. But when you see what people are saying and doing,itjustit’s. We’regonnahave to have a… At some point,we’regonnahave to have, not a revolution, but a national come toJesusmoment.
Idon’tmean that in a religious sense, but just saythese,this is not working.I think everybodyagrees the open border was not working, and massive immigration without audit or health backgrounds or anything was not working.I think both partiesagree that$31 trillionin debt is not working, and there’s precedence for that in the Roman Republic.
You wouldn’t believe how many people in the Roman Republic, from what we can tell, thought that you could bring in Huns, Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths across the Danube and Rhine, and they would be good Roman citizens without having to assimilate or interact.
And they turned outinverysmall numberscompared to the Roman population, but that was the end of the Western Empire.
And the Byzantinesdidn’tdo that and lasted for a thousand years.
Bradley Devlin:Well, to avoid the fate of one Roman Republic we hope that our American Republic, structured, built on the foundation that wasRome and Greeceand Jerusalem continues to survive for another 250 years and beyond.
Victor Davis Hanson:I hope so.I’mconfident it will.
Churchillalways wasright. He said we always do the necessarythinglast.
The necessary thinglast.
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