VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Imagine the unimaginable
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.
Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.
In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war. A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal and a butcher who should be removed from power.
The traditional bedrocks of the American system — a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement and a credible criminal justice system — are dissolving.
Gasoline and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.
There is no Southern border. Expect more than 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.
Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle onstage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County DA refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.
Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race and politics determine whether the law is even applied.
Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president — in a first — casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.
Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria. Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.
There is no free speech any more on campuses. Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender or ethnic category.
When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.
What happened?
Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The United States has the largest combined gas, coal and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.
Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor nonparticipation and keeping interest rates at historical lows — at a time of pent-up global demand.
Once esoteric, crackpot academic theories — “modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory — now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.
The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful and popular.
Is it not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th century France to early 20th century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?
The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives and deliberate Cabinet nonperformance.
Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.
So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.
Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.
When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.