{"id":6637,"date":"2016-02-27T05:33:54","date_gmt":"2016-02-27T05:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/02\/27\/weimar-america\/"},"modified":"2016-02-27T05:33:54","modified_gmt":"2016-02-27T05:33:54","slug":"weimar-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/02\/27\/weimar-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Weimar America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another spectacular column<\/a> by Victor Davis Hanson.  I will resist the temptation to quote the entire piece.  <\/span><\/p>\n

On college:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Today\u2019s campuses have become as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic. To appreciate cry-bully censorship, visit a campus \u201cfree-speech\u201d area. To witness segregation, walk into a college \u201csafe space.\u201d To hear unapologetic anti-Semitism, attend a university lecture. To learn of the absence of due process, read of a campus hearing on alleged sexual assault. To see a brown shirt in action, watch faculty call for muscle at a campus demonstration. To relearn the mentality of a Chamberlain or Daladier, listen to the contextualizations of a college president. And to talk to an uneducated person, approach a recent college graduate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On Bernie:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Sanders has little appreciation that he is an artifact of free-market capitalism, which alone has created enough bounty for such a demagogue to call for massive redistribution\u2014in a way impossible for socialists any longer in exhausted Cuba, Greece, Venezuela, or any other command-economy paradise. Where does Sanders think his statism has worked\u2014China, North Korea, Bolivia, Cuba, or the ossified European Union?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On Hillary:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Mrs. Clinton is now like a tottering third-world caudillo\u2014she can\u2019t really continue on in politics and she can\u2019t quit trying if she wants to stay out of jail. Her possible indictment depends entirely on her political viability and utility. She and the once disbarred Bill Clinton might appear like tired, tragic dinosaurs, bewildered that politics have left them behind in their late sixties\u2014were it not for these aging egoists\u2019 routine petulance and sense of entitlement.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On Trump:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Donald Trump is probably not a serious student of the European 1930s, but in brilliant fashion he has sized up the public\u2019s worries over a Potemkin economy, exhaustion with wars, and namby-pamby leadership. His own remedy is 1930s to the core: nationalism, crude bombast, mytho-history, and sloganeering without much detail. Trump\u2019s trajectory is predicated on the premise that a jaded public cares more about emotion than logic, and how a leader speaks rather than what he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

In European 1930s street-brawling fashion, no one knows quite whether Trump is a 1990s Clinton Democrat, a 1980s Reagan Republican, or a Perotist misfit. He has thrown a ball and chain through the pretentious glass of American campaigning. Trump excites voters because he can profane, smear, interrupt, and fabricate\u2014on the premise that as a performance artist he reifies what they think but don\u2019t dare say about a corrupt political class and its warped, politically correct values. Trump reminds Americans what deterrence is: the supposedly courageous media, the so-called truth-to-power leftists, and the sober and judicious careerist politicians are all terrified how he might reply or react to their criticism. None of them want to spend 2-3 days trading smears with Donald Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On Pope Francis:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Not since Pius XII has a pope proved as mysterious and exasperating as Francis. He seems not to have transcended the parochial time and space of Peronist Argentina. The well-meaning and kindly pope acts as if he is unworried about the historical wages of leftwing authoritarianism and government-mandated redistribution. Why would a pontiff, protected by medieval walls and Vatican territorial security, blast U.S. immigration policy toward Mexican illegal immigrants?<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Obama\u2019s reelection, the southern border has been wide open, in naked efforts to recalibrate American electoral demography. The U.S. has taken in more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other country\u2014the only impediment for entry is being educated, skilled, with resources, and insisting on legality. The U.S. last year allowed nearly $80 billion to be sent in annual remittances to Mexico and Latin America, mostly from those here illegally. Certainly, Mexico, in a most un-Christian fashion, has built walls on its own southern border to prevent unlawful entry, published comic-book manuals to instruct its emigrants how to violate U.S. immigration law, and written into its own constitution repulsive racial prerequisites for emigrating to Mexico\u2014all to the apparent ignorance of the otherwise intrusively editorializing pope. Mexico\u2019s own obsession with exporting its indigenous people to the U.S. is predicated on historic Mexican racism, always emanating from grandees in Mexico City.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On segregation:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Segregation, not integration and assimilation, is the new trajectory of racial relations. \u201cWhite privilege\u201d is said to be such an insidious aid to career success that careerist whites like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Shaun King, and Rachel Dolezal will do almost anything to insist that they are really non-white. The president of the United States invited a rapper for a White House visit. The rapper's latest album cover shows a dead white judge lying at the feet of celebratory African-American men, with fists of money and champagne held in triumph\u2014in front of the White House<\/a>. Reality imitates art. Could the president give another Cairo speech about such symbolism?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Is it perhaps time to give dictatorship a chance?<\/span><\/p>\n

I would have liked to have read from Professor Hanson a comparison of the sexual decadence of Weimar Germany and that of Weimar America.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Another spectacular column by Victor Davis Hanson.  I will resist the temptation to quote the entire piece.  On college: Today\u2019s campuses have become as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic. To appreciate cry-bully censorship, visit a campus \u201cfree-speech\u201d area. To witness segregation, walk into a college … Continue reading “Weimar America”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}