Victor Davis Hanson
Works and Days
Pajamas Media
1/2/2013
…an alignment of the planets is favoring America as never before — as long as we do not do something stupid to nullify what fate, our ancestors, and our own ingenuity have given us. But unfortunately that is precisely what is now happening.
…The New Hubris
These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.
There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.
Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.
Read the News and Weep
That is not conspiracy talk, but simply a distillation of what I read today. On the last day of the year when I am writing this, I offer you just three sample op-eds…
Read the entire article at PJ Media.
Update: Poll: Majority Sees America as Declining Power, Facing Economic Difficulty and Rising Crime Rate
Update 2: via Instapundit:
SCARY TIMES: “In some ways the anti-white-man rhetoric that has become standard and acceptable lately is the worst sign of all. If the term ‘hate speech’ has a meaning, it most definitely would apply to a great deal of what has been said recently about that despised group. Those who are first to shriek ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ when criticism is launched against a group defined as oppressed (blacks, women) are turning the tables and dissing white men with impunity. It is both hypocritical and vile, and especially offensive when cloaked in the sanctimony of those on the left who believe they occupy the moral high ground (that would be everyone on the left).”
The Obama presidency has certainly been clarifying. Which is probably why gun sales are up.
Update 3: Obama ‘Has Brought Us to Our Knees. He Is Lowering Our Standard of Living.’
