Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He earned his PhD in classics from Stanford, and since that time he’s enjoyed a distinguished teaching and academic career. He’s widely published, the author of dozens of influential books, including a history of World War II, various titles of military history. Profess Hanson’s scholarship has earned him numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal and the Bradley Prize. He has also served as a visiting professor of military history at the U.S. Naval Academy, he has taught at Pepperdine University and Hillsdale college. His latest book, The Dying Citizen, is the topic of our conversation today. Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Thank you for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Your latest book, The Dying Citizen, even by its arresting title, makes quite a claim. Indeed, it’s an historical claim. It’s a moral claim. What’s behind that title?
Victor Davis Hanson:
Well, a lot of things. The first is the reminder that citizenship is not the norm in civilization. It came very late to civilization, 2,500 years ago, 7th century, Greece, B.C. And it’s fragile. Most of the 190 to 200 nations in the world today are not consensual. There’s no concept of the citizen.
The second was we used to have, I guess we would call them, exclusive privileges for the people who took on the burden of citizenship and would vote and audit their elected officials and participate in civics. But I can’t think there’s much distinctions left between a resident, whether a legal resident or an illegal. I mean, we have 800,000 illegal residents that are voting in New York elections. And same will be true here in California. Illegal residents or legal, they don’t have to be citizens to serve in the military. Used to be a prime signature of citizenship is only the citizen could leave and come back in their borders on their own volition. And yet, we see that there is no border in the south. In fact, there’s more passport control for citizens than … You and I wanted to go to Mexico, we would be further audited than somebody who just walked across the border.
Again, only citizens could participate in national elections. It’s a federal law that seems to be gone out of the way. I could go on. The only one I know that remains as the distinction between a citizen and a non-citizen is a right to hold office. And that’s already being whittled away by appointed positions here in California. So that was another one of my worries. And then finally, I felt that there were forces, centrifugal forces, from the bottom up. Ancient forces, tribalism, identity politics, open borders, and the attack on the middle class or refutal economy as a result. And then there were pressures from above—the permanent state, efforts to change the Constitution. And then of course, globalism.
Albert Mohler:
As you trace the history of citizenship, you might think that you would’ve divided your book into precitizens, citizens, and postcitizens. But the division of the book is actually precitizens and postcitizens. Do I make the correct inference that you’re making a point by leaving out that age of the citizen? Are you saying that we are in that postcitizen age or are you trying harken back?
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yes. I think I say at one point explicitly, we’re in the age of both precitizens and postcitizens. But citizenship itself is threatened.
And by that, I mean I can get up in the morning on my farm and go into a central valley town here and I would expect that a third of the population is not legal. Or I can drive over to Stanford University and I can be told that particular jobs will be reserved on the basis of how your superficial appearance, tribalism. So, whether it’s the elite or the underclasses, both of these pressures are squeezing the citizen. And as I said, there’s not a lot of privileges left.
I mention in the book, in the epilogue, we had 103 million mail-in or early ballots. Sixty-three per cent the last election did not vote on election day. That was never envisioned before. Abraham Lincoln had sort of soldiers’ ballots, but it was a one-time thing during the Civil War. And even then, it was very controversial. So, we’re altering the very institutions, whether it’s the number of 50 states or the filibuster or the electoral college or a nine-person Supreme Court, or the states’ prerogatives—not exclusive, but their main responsibility for setting ballot walls for national election. All of that is now under consideration and pressure by the elite. But on the other side, we have just two million people just walked across the border as well.
And we don’t really have a middle class in a lot of these blue states anymore, especially California. All the statistics show that, that the number of welfare recipients, the number of people living below the poverty line, is increasing. The number of billionaires and very wealthy people is increasing. And we’ve had about eight million people leave the state in the last 35, 40 years.
Albert Mohler:
Well, what we’re looking at is undoubtedly a political and a cultural crisis, but it has historical roots. And so, I want to take us back, as you begin your argument. You are a classicist, and you really begin in classical sources in terms of the definition of the civitas and of citizenship. You also point out that the framers of our constitutional order understood themselves to be in continuity with that tradition of citizenship. So, I’d like to take a moment and ask you to lay out the historical landscape, first, in terms of the American experience—what came before? I mean, in the classical inheritance, what was learned that the framers of our constitutional order saw as absolutely foundational?
Victor Davis Hanson:
Well, they were buffeted by these two enlightenment terms that had been very popular in the work of Rousseau or Montesquieu, and had gone back to the Renaissance, Machiavelli and others. And one was a republic and one was a democracy. Those were euphemisms for the Athenian model and the Roman model. And we sometimes forget that the Roman Republic lasted seven and a half centuries before it became imperial. But the founders, in their wisdom, liked the idea of citizens voting, but they did not like the Athenian model. Most of what they knew from that came from Aristotle’s politics, Euclid’s history, and some plays in which the democracy and the popular court, it killed Socrates. They had executed all of the residents of Milas.
So, there were these examples, and I’m just paraphrasing some of the things that come up in the Federalist papers or some of the notebooks of the founders. They felt that the people, if they were allowed, on any given day, without the bridles of law, tradition, and custom and a representative government between them and policy, could be quite dangerous. And so they tried to follow a model that had grown up in antithesis to Athens, at Sparta, at Crete, but especially at Rome, and that was a tripartite government. Legislative, the Roman senate, or the Greek boule. And then it was executive, whether it was an archon or two consuls. And then a judiciary, whether it was… In Sparta the ephors were the oversight. In Rome, they had censors and people like that—tribuni courts.
So, the idea was that they had a very pessimistic view of human nature, and they liked the Roman model better. And they thought that that would combine the people’s will, but it would be buffeted. And then they were very influenced by the laws, but Montesquieu, the idea of two houses. But that was a classical idea. The Athenian assembly, the Athenian boule, the Spartan gerousia, the upper chamber, and the popular ecclesia. And what they meant by that is, our House of Representatives keeps its finger on the pulse of America every two years.
And the whole house flips over, but that’s going to be balanced by people who have to be 30, not 25, to hold office, and are not popularly elected in the sense that they represent a state. They don’t represent 750 people like a representative does. And only one third of the Senate flips over a year.
So, they felt that this was the best they could find in the classical tradition and how it was interpreted and improved upon and eroded during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, English common law, as well.
Albert Mohler:
It’s interesting, even as you think of Washington D.C., the L’Enfant plan and Washington’s vision for the city. There was an effort to jump over, backwards that is, over the medieval period and to go to the classical sources right down to the architecture and right down to the depiction of our founders in classical garb. And that was a very interesting statement. It was certainly noted by Tocqueville and so many others. This is a statement of a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’. A ‘yes’ to that classical tradition in a new world and a new era. But it was also a ‘no’ to certain concepts they thought were very dangerous or certainly threatening to liberty.
Victor Davis Hanson:
I’m not sure they were all deists, that is, people who understood and appreciated the value of believing in a superior being, especially Jesus as Christ and God as we know it in the Christian sense, even though they might not have been all devout. But they certainly looked back. And they looked at the religious wars in Europe. They looked at the problem of succession in England, Henry VIII and the wars between the Anglican and Catholic church. The role of the pope and interfering in governments.
And so, they made it very clear that, while they invoke God throughout the Declaration and the idea that we are equal and we have inalienable rights given by God, they were very careful not to suggest that people had to have a particular religion. And that was argued on for the last 234 years. There’s people who said, “Well, in the Constitution and even in the Declaration as a secular view, and it’s neutral, but it should have been more positive.” And I think that the founders looked at Europe when the state had been religious and they felt, “You know what? We do not want a superior religious office, one and the same, appointed by the government.”
Albert Mohler:
Well, this would be a conversation for another time.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
But as a theologian, I simply want to say that the available intellectual tools of the 18th century in the European and the European American tradition, were so deeply steeped in Christianity. Even when they thought they were secular, they were not very secular. Their worldview was theological, even if they individually were not. And I think there would be a great deal of difficulty in jumping from the 18th century to the 21st century in imagining how even the most, say, deistic of our founders would imagine an aggressively secular modern state, in terms of the securing of values, which after all, the Declaration makes very clear. It’s an interesting question, but one we’ll have to leave for another time.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yeah. What they were trying to do was to ward off something. Part of it was because we were in a new land, we had all variable farmland. There were as opportunity. If you think about it in the context of the time, they avoided almost all of the pitfalls that the other European powers were undergoing. The Spanish idea that you could only be Catholic to immigrate, and part of the Iberian Peninsula to get into South and Central America, and had a state religion. They didn’t want that. And there really wasn’t a middle class in southern Europe at this time, as was developing in northern Europe. The idea that you could come to the United States or North American and you could be of any religion. And that was important, I think.
And then, they were very worried about, as I said, radical democracy divorced from traditional custom, but divorced from religion, as well. We should remember that just less than a decade after the Constitution was ratified, France went through these series of upheavals, where we finally had the Jacobins worshiping—pure reason. And they renamed the days of the week. They renamed the months. They renamed everything. They killed over six or seven thousand Catholic clergy. And the idea was, it wasn’t liberty injustice, or it wasn’t freedom. It was fraternity and egalitarianist. That is, not the American or inherited from the British, as well, equality of opportunity, but state mandated equity or equality of result. And you can see that, because we diverse from that path, we have been far more, I think, far more successful and a dynamic country because of that.
Albert Mohler:
And actually, offered far more continuity of liberty, by the way.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yes, Liberty was a … That’s a very good point. They made a distinction in all of their writings that it’s very easy to have freedom in the depopulated landscape. Freedom is a Germanic word—it has no Latin or Greek root–freiheit. And when people talk of freedom, that was one thing, the native Americans had freedom to do as they pleased because it was based on demographics. But to have freedom within a very urban environment or a freedom within civilization with laws, they needed a concept of libertas, the Roman idea that you can be free of the state’s … You need the state, and you have to live with people in close proximity, but you can still have a institutionalized freedom, which they call liberty.
Albert Mohler:
Now, you use the word citizen as really the template for your entire argument. It’s the fulcrum of your formula here. I was, as a boy, taught citizenship. The word ‘citizen’ was a constantly invoked word. And we had classes. There was a decorum of citizenship. There were the rituals of citizenship. I was a Boy Scout back in the golden era, I would say, and the rituals of citizenship, the God and Country award that one earned. And both church, in which I was very involved, and school, which at that time was the public schools, they reinforced this notion of citizenship. But I think as we fast forward to the year 2022, as we’re having conversation, there are many circles in the United States where that’s considered a dangerous, repressive, hegemonistic word.
Victor Davis Hanson:
It is. I think the left as we knew it … I mean, I should say, rather, the Democratic Party as we knew it kind of got all of their agendas satisfied in the sixties and seventies. By that I mean, they were very good ideas of social security, eight-hour work week, 40 hours a week, eight hours a day, overtime, disability. But they made the next leap in the eighties and nineties that they did not just want a level playing field, but they wanted a larger government. And this has an ancient pedigree, to come in and engineer how people thought and act in a collective sense. And it was going to be overseen by a self-appointed group of elite people. And they taught, they controlled all of the levers of influence.
Now they have that. The long march through our institutions is now complete. They control academia, K through 12, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, traditional media, Silicon Valley, foundations, even professional sports. Even though they don’t control or have influence over the majority of Americans, it’s very hard to communicate or retrieve information off the internet or watch the Super Bowl without that imprint of the Left. And that message, that subtext that’s always there, that you’re born into an unfair system. You perpetuated an unfair system. The system has to be destroyed or changed to our dictates. And we don’t need a majority consensus to achieve those goals, because our moral aims are such that they justify almost any means to achieve them.
Albert Mohler:
Professor Hanson, I read constantly. And try to get as much out of every book as it deserves, frankly. And a good many of the books that are published today are articles expanded into books. There’s just a lot of fill and a lot of space. That is not characteristic of your book, which is why I’m enjoying this conversation…
Victor Davis Hanson:
Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
…and why I greatly appreciated the book. I think, with an accomplishment that is fairly rare these days, every one of your chapters actually does important work. And I want to ask you, if I could just follow through your chapters.\
Because in a way that, frankly, doesn’t fit most conversations, your chapters do establish the points. And I’m just going to mention, before I ask you the first question, the chapters, you divide the book between precitizen and postcitizens. And as you talk about precitizens, you talk about peasants, residents, and tribes. Would you just walk us through those three?
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yeah. Well, citizenship was bound with the middle class and people were not shy in ancient philosophical work. So, Aristotle, positive about it. Plato, less so. But the idea was the very wealthy will always have greater means to change, warp, leverage government. And the poor will not be an independent voice because they will look to the state for sustenance. But the middle class, if they were property owning—I guess today that would be not a ten acre farm, but a house, or a 40 acre farm, in our experience—and they were economically autonomous. They could voice their disagreement or their views to both the wealthy and poor.
And so, it really… Citizenship rises in Greece to protect the small land-owning hop light soldier who wants to pass on his property. Property was very important in the creation of citizenship. And so, when you don’t have a middle class, whether it’s a feudal system where you have lords, then a keep, and then peasants. Or really, in California, I mean, we have between La Jolla and Berkeley, the largest number of zip codes with the highest incomes. We have greatest number of billionaires. We have the highest prices per square foot, electricity for house, electricity, gas, etc. And yet, we have one out of three people who are on public assistance, and 22% of the population lives below the poverty line, 600,000 homeless. And the middle class is leaving. We’ve got about eight million people that’ve gone to Nevada or Texas or Florida, Wyoming. And so, we’re becoming a feudal society and our legislature is a one-party system. So that is worrisome. And if you lose the middle class, I don’t think consensual government … There’s no record that it exists outside the middle class.
And the second one you mentioned was residency. And residency is really a euphemism for open borders. And that is, you’re going back to a pre-modern idea that, as a tribe and people come across a border or come in for a while and stay there and for economic or culture or military, they move on. They never get rooted. It’s tied into agriculture, as well. But they never get rooted into a place.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, describe what you mean by tribes.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Tribe is that you have your initial or primary allegiance to somebody who is either related to you directly by blood, or has a superficial appearance with you. Sometimes it can be linguistic or religious, but more often it’s ethnic and racial. I think I’ve been to every Middle East country and I always am curious when I go there, why such very wealthy places don’t always match the standard of living, let’s say, in Japan, or United States, or Europe. And a lot of people have said to me, “Well, we hire our first cousin. We don’t have meritocracy.” And so, the idea that birds of a feather flock together, that’s a line that comes out of Plato’s laws. That’s the most natural affinity that we all have. And yet, the United States is the only multiracial democracy, I think, in history that’s worked. Unless we think that India and Brazil are models to emulate. I don’t think so.
And we work because the original European population was able to [crosstalk 00:23:25] equal and they had God given rights. And then, through the amendment process, we expanded that so that race became incidental rather than superficial to who we are. But I felt, in the last 30 years, we’re re-tribalizing, as the country gets more ethnically and racially diverse. We went away from the melting pot and we absorbed what they call the salad bowl. That our superficial appearance or ethnic heritage is essential to who we are, not incidental. And there’s no evidence that I can think of that that’s going to work. It we follow that path, we have a rendezvous with the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Rwanda. And everybody will go tribal. Once one group goes tribal, then the other people, for their own survival, will go tribal.
Albert Mohler:
This is in the first half of your book entitled, Pre-citizens, and with those chapters, peasants, residents and tribes. You’re really pointing to three, say, necessary dimensions of understanding this concept of citizenship. With the peasants, you really are referring to the necessity of what you call ‘middleness’, the middle class. I can remember years ago, I guess nearly 20 years ago now, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay, I think, in national affairs, in which he simply said that democracy can’t exist without a middle class.
And without a middle class that can politically dominate the electoral landscape in such a way that neither of the alternatives can disrupt the political process.
And I think one of the points you make, by the way, in that particular chapter, your very first chapter, is the fact that, in some ways … And you don’t say this as a sentence. So I’m going to say it, and then you can tell me that’s not what you meant. We have set up a situation socially in the United States where it’s not so much that people are leaving the middle class to move up, but rather that we’re making it very difficult for people in the middle class to stay in the middle class.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yeah, I think what’s happened … There’s a lot of contributors to that. In the secular sense, globalization at the turn of the millennia was offered to us as a way of spreading westernization, and indeed, Americanization all over the planet. And it would bring to people in the Amazon basin or Mongolia or mountains of Peru, the same things that we have—antibiotics, eyeglasses, etc., popular culture, Hollywood movies. And it succeeded beyond our wildest imagination.
But it also began to change our economic system. And people who were captains of industries started to embrace these ideas, that if it’s the most efficient way to produce goods and services, I will outsource or offshore something. So, we literally took muscular labor and we devalued it psychologically, spiritually, economically. And the result was that a lot of the things we used to do very well, even though we have good infrastructure, we have cheaper energy costs than Europe or Japan, or even some of the poorer countries, we have greater security, we have a better banking system.
But nevertheless, in this very shortsighted fashion, we just wrote off the interior of the country, the so-called Rust Belt. And then we had an elite, maybe from Boston to Miami or from Berkeley to La Jolla. I should say Seattle to La Jolla. They had certain skills that couldn’t be xeroxed—law, media, insurance, investment, academia. And they had a seven billion person market now, plus—almost eight billion. And they became fabulously wealthy. And then they created exegesis to explain why they were wealthy. And it was because they supposedly had all these degrees, and they were better trained, and the people in the middle didn’t cope. And out of that, we started to say that everybody’s going to go to college because you don’t want to end up as an electrician or a plumber or a sheet lock hanger.
And the result is that this youth has 1.7 trillion dollars in aggregate student debt. A lot of them live with their parents. The age when people get married in just 20 years is gone from about 24 to 28. The first child, it’s gone to about 33, the age. Home ownership is now on the decline again, down to about 61% from 63 or 4. And it’s what Tocqueville called ‘prolonged adolescence’. And it’s really, you talk to these young people and they have just enough money in their debt. And they have these degrees in the social sciences or the studies courses to satisfy their appetites, but they’re not economically viable. So they don’t get married. And you can see it. We’re 1.7 now in our demographer fertility rate versus 2.1 just 20 years ago.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I had a wakeup call after I had spoken at a church in Nashville. And a very proud mom came along with her college graduating son, and obviously, the kid was very bright and told me about all his plans for life. And he was graduating with a baccalaureate degree. I won’t say the name, but a major private university in Nashville. And he was graduating with this undergraduate degree in French Literature. And I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. What are you going to do with that?” And he said, “I’m not sure, but probably a teaching position.” And I’m thinking, “Well, this is going to be a very rare position.”
But the bottom line is, this would be 20 years ago now, he had $180,000 in student debt. And I simply was astounded as I was standing there because I’m doing the math because I’m President of an academic institution and I know what kind of money he’s likely to make. He’s never going to dig out of $187,000 of debt unless he just does nothing more than serve that debt for the next 15 years. Which makes your point. He’s not going to get married. He’s not going to have children.
Victor Davis Hanson:
He’s not. He’s not.
Albert Mohler:
He’s not going to have a house.
Victor Davis Hanson:
And we pay for that because we, the government, guarantee those federal loans. And the whole issue of moral hazard just dissipates. And so, the universities, the elite universities in particular, have raised their rates of tuition, room and board, faster that rate of inflation. And they had these huge multi-billion dollar endowments that are not taxed, even though they’re highly political. I was a professor for 21 years. I’m classified as a professor, even though I’m a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. But I can tell you that a lot of the things that are going on in the university, whether it’s this archaic idea of tenure versus maybe five-year contracts where you fulfill particular conditions before you can be rehired. I think they’re all sort of starting to go by the wayside because more and more people are looking at this cost and then the politicalization and the mediocrity.
And you can really see, if you ask a university president. I have at many times. “Since you used to require the SAT and the ACT, many of them are dropping. Why don’t you have an exit exam so that we could see exactly how much better a person does on a standardized test four years or six years later?” And their argument on the SAT was to be meritocratic and then say, “Well, just because you went to this high school didn’t mean your ‘A’ meant the same as that high school.” But they never applied it to themselves. They never said, “Just because you got this BA from Stanford doesn’t mean it’s better from Fresno State’s BA.” And so you could kind of, not that you can prove everything with a standardized test, but they are very adamant.
And if you say to a university, “I think people should have the choice, one year and a half in a therapeutic school of education to be credentialed. But if they want to get a master’s degree in an academic subject, why can’t they? They can teach at junior college, community college, and universities. But not high school, grammar school.” So, I think a lot of these things are being overtaken by reality and you mentioned…
Albert Mohler:
Especially, you can see governors and states pushing back on this. And by the way, I’m President of an institution with thousands of students, and we take not one penny of state or federal or any other form of tax money. We have no participation in Title IV funding. And we pay a price for that. But we also have our liberty for that sake.
But that infusion of all that money is why. In other words, it should not cost anything like $70,000 a year to educate anyone. And that’s not paying for education. But nonetheless, that’s what it is.
Victor Davis Hanson:
You’re paying for the… I have this conversation almost weekly with parents who will call me and say, “My son got into Harvard, or Stanford, or Berkeley, or… But they also got in, they applied to Hillsdale College or St. Thomas … And I don’t know what to do. I know they’ll get a better education by not going to these places. I know they’re ripping me off, basically.” They say that. But I need that brand. It’s like a cattle brand. And I think universities now know that they will become increasingly secretive, especially with their repertory admissions, where they’re now, they’re keeping very quiet about it. But race and gender, but a particular race has been their central directive in admission and equity gradients. So, I think they’re going to get off their pedestal, especially on matters at tax exemptions and things like that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you see the pushback, especially in states where you have governors who are taking on the educational establishment.
And so, I’ve been shocked, frankly—pleased, but shocked—at efforts in Florida, Georgia, even recently in Texas, to redefine tenure and other … The sacred cows of this higher academic culture. And I don’t know how far they will get. I remember the optimism when President Reagan took on the Department of Education and how that ended in, what could only be described as conservative surrender. But when it comes to the governors, since they are looking at the budget, I think some of them really are moving into that space.
But here you talk about peasants, residents, and tribes, and you’re making the distinction in the second chapter between one who’s merely a resident and one who is a citizen. And citizenship provides not only identity and location, but a set of obligations. So now I want to ask you about something that’s not in your book, or more accurately, someone who is not in your book.
And so, here’s a Christian theologian just wanting to know, how in the world could you write about this without Augustine?
Victor Davis Hanson:
Well, I made a decision that I was not going to talk about non-secular literature. I mean, I say it three or four places that as a Christian, I think it’s very important. But I wanted to make the argument. If I made the argument that the catalyst for these sweeping economic changes and these distortions in what the founders intended was a moral one and it was because of secularism, agnosticism, atheism, satisfaction of the appetites at any cost, materialism, which I think it is, then I was going to lose a lot of readers. Because they were going to tell me, “Well, this is just a thinly disguised track for return to a particular type of religion.” So I didn’t do that. But I think I said enough places there that these are moral issues.
And ultimately…
Albert Mohler:
And by Augustine, I don’t just mean moral. I mean, if you said to me…
Victor Davis Hanson:
As you know, there’s this huge debate among conservatives about the nature of the economy and social spending. And whether capitalism is a Christian idea, and whether it creates too much inequality. And they’re starting to go back and look at the Hayek or creative destruction argument and say, “You know what? We, as conservatives, don’t want to bring another Walmart into our … Because it doesn’t pay our fellow man enough.” Or something like that argument. And I didn’t want to get into that in those terms.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah, that be a very fun debate. I’m in that debate constantly.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yep. Yep. And that’s been voiced to me 20 times.
Albert Mohler:
But what I meant by Augustine is that, so Augustine’s The City of God.
And I would argue changed the direction of political thought. Especially as he dealt with the city of man. Because what he did in speaking to Christians was to say that the city of man, that the earthly city, actually does have rightful demands. And that’s something that I think many, many Christians don’t understand. But it wasn’t just that he spoke of, as the apostle Paul, being a citizen of the kingdom of heaven and spoke of the heavenly city. That’s where all of our satisfactions are realized in Christ. But rather, it’s the fact that the earthly city has importance. Peter Brown, the great historian or antiquity, with whom I had some of these conversations on this program, he pointed out that Augustine basically gave a rationale for Rome, even in its decay, to continue to operate. And gave citizens marching orders—go plant fields, don’t let them go fallow, and maintain virtues. So, anyway, I’m just speaking up for Augustine. Because I can’t talk about Western history without him.
Victor Davis Hanson:
And Peter Brown wrote Augustine of Hippo, that wonderful biography. But if you read something by Jeffrey Desincore, or others, they’ll say that the forces that led to the reformation …
There were millions of acres of land, for example, owned by the church. And the conditions of land tenure were not subject to either political enlightenment or roles of free market economics. And that hurt people. And there were certain things that… And I think Augustine saved Christianity. Because whether they were the liberalist or the Manichaens, that he sort of took all of these strands of Christianity, and he molded them into something called orthodoxy, without doubt. And he was trying to do something, I think, in a much more difficult environment that the Byzantines, for all of our criticism of them, succeeded earlier and better because they lasted for a thousand years when Rome and the West fell. There was a need in both the Eastern and Western empire for some type of orthodoxy or some type of reference point, so Christianity wasn’t just entirely dispersed in those very fragile early days.
Albert Mohler:
The second half of your book is entitled Post-citizens, and you don’t wait until the second half to get to contemporary issues.
You go back and forth in every one of your chapters. But you talk about the unelected, the evolutionaries, and the globalists. You really hit maximum speed, so to speak, in your argument in those three chapters. The unelected and the rise of the administrative state, as you pointed out earlier, that’s not new. But it is newly ominous.
Victor Davis Hanson:
It’s not new. I mean, Belisarius killed 30 … I mean, in the Nika Riots, they put the bureaucrats of the blues and the greens together, and that was it. Or the El Escorial in Spain or Versailles. But what’s happened, I think, here, is that our expectations, especially after World War II, but even after the Civil War, they changed. And the individual’s relation with the state and felt that the state was no longer the guarantor of liberty and freedom, but of equality. And I guess what Roosevelt would call the four freedoms, and freedom from want, etc. And I think the other path had been to let the individual be free and then use the church, Christian religion, or even the state, to encourage people to be philanthropic and help their friend in need, so to speak.
But anyway, where we are now is we have two million federal employees. I think one out of every … Well, 40% of people work at state, regional, or local, or federal government. And the people that run it, if you look at them, and I point out examples in the books, they’re judge, jury, and executioner. They’re not just enforcing a law, they’re interpreting a law to the point where they’re making up a new statute. And then they’re using the power of the state to go after an individual in an executive fashion. And then they become a judge, and they adjudicate whether that executive action is legal or not.
And one of the things that really got me angry, right near here, I had a friend that was a farmer. He had a low spot in his field. I mentioned it in the book. Water piled up. Suddenly the state came in and said, “Well, the Environmental Inland Waters Way Act.” This was an inland waterway. And that person thought it was absurd. It was only about a foot deep. Nevertheless, they were able to go on his land, take water samples, say that there was too much drainage from nitrogen and try to shut his entire orchard down. And there was nothing in the statute that would ever have imagined that.
And then as I started to write, this started before COVID. But some of the themes that I was voicing, we had all had experienced Lois Lerner. Just on our own deciding which groups were worthy of non-profit status right before for the 2012 election. But then we had Anthony Fauci. And we had somebody in the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases suddenly was adjudicating whether you could collect rent or not. He was deciding whether rent should be suspended on his recommendation. He was telling us on Monday, masks were good. Tuesday, no good. Wednesday, you needed two of them. And on and on and on. And then meanwhile, he would go before Congress and under oath before the American people, swear that there was no gain of function subsidy coming out of the CDC or the National Institute of Health. It’s a complete lie.
And so, when you look at, one of the themes is, when you give people this amount of tripartite power and you lift all sanction or audit of them, then you naturally end up with a John Brennan, Head of the CIA, former Head of the CIA, two times under oath as CIA, just flat out lying to the people. Under oath saying, “We don’t run assassinations along the Pakistani border. We don’t spy on Senate compute.” These were lies. He admitted they were. Same thing with James Clapper when he said the NSA doesn’t spy on people or Andrew McCabe confesses on three occasions that he’s lied to a federal investigator. So, there was no accountability. And I think that it’s quite sad.
And then we talk about the military and they are acting in a way that’s not reflecting legislative oversight. So you wonder why now, when you look at poll after poll, that these agencies, CIA, NSA, FBI, Pentagon, they’re only polling 50 to 45% approval rating. And I think it’s because we have given so much power and there’s so much money in the New York/Washington nexus, that these bureaucrats feel that they have to adopt ideological stances for their post retirement career trajectories.
Albert Mohler:
And they live in such a social bubble.
Victor Davis Hanson:
They do.
Albert Mohler:
And you’re talking about a region so dominated by federal funding, and now, so flush with it, with all these stimulus bills and all the rest.
And by the way, so flushed with it that they can’t spend it all. And yet, at the same time, you have the administration, that would be the Biden administration, going and demanding more. Even though there’s money being held in all these states that the federal government’s complaining they haven’t spent yet. But you look at this, you realize, they’re recession proof. And so are people on tenure. The elites cushion themselves from the effects of all these policies. And frankly, they don’t have a farm where anyone can come and claim that all of a sudden their watered field is an inland waterway.
But that goes back to something else we were talking about. And what Drucker would call the knowledge workers and the people who work with stuff. Years ago, they said that the distinction between atoms, real stuff, and bits, or information. The reality is, and by the way, I’m a Christian theologian, again so I got to come back and say that the Christian worldview validates both the intellect and the body. But we are material beings. We’ve got to have stuff. We have to eat food. The environmentalists in California and the regulatory state would basically make it impossible to grow food in the bread basket of North America. So, how’s this going to end? I mean, even people who shop at Whole Foods have to have food.
Victor Davis Hanson:
It’s very dangerous because all of the things you’ve outlined have national security implication. Just take the Green Revolution. So now, here in California, we have the fifth largest reserves of natural gas or oil. The Monterey Shale Foundation is comparable to North … The Balkan field. We can’t touch it. We can’t touch anwar in Alaska. We’re going after lenders and pension funds and hedge funds so that they don’t invest their capital with fossil fuels. We went after Keystone and stopped it. We stopped all the federal leases. The result was that immediately, they projected additional 3 million barrels, by now, under the Trump administration. Now we’re 2 million less. And as a result, gasoline, I filled up diesel fuel yesterday, $6 and 10 cents. Just talked to a person, Mexican American fellow, who was very poor. And he has an old diesel pickup. And he had to go to three different places to fill it up. To find diesel, because there’s a $75 limit. And what are we doing? We’re asking Iran for oil. We’re asking …
Albert Mohler:
Venezuela.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Asking Venezuela, a narco state. We’ve just asked Vladimir Putin, before he went into Ukraine. We’re still buying his oil probably until this week. And we’re asking the House of Saud. So, and the left, I guess they’ve been telling us that the earth is a village. Why in the world is it cheaper, it’s better, and it’s more environmentally sound to have the Russians or the Venezuelans take something out of the earth in a way that we do much more environmentally sound. And when we help our own people. And then we become energy independent. And we don’t have to send young kids over there to fight to get access.
Albert Mohler:
It is insane. It can only be explained by ideology. It can’t be explained even-
Victor Davis Hanson:
Only ideology. It’s not empirical. It doesn’t make any sense other than ideology.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And you talk about the evolutionaries. And these, basically, are cultural Marxists. And I get a lot of heat for using that term, but I learned the term from the cultural Marxists.
Victor Davis Hanson:
They’re very proud of you. Gramsci and they are. They’re proud of it. And they feel that the system has to evolve constantly toward a sort of a nirvana of absolute mandated equality. And sharing of everything. And so, whether it’s, as I said earlier, you can really see it when they go after the Senate now. That’s a really hot topic.
Especially after the Joe Manchin era. They do not like the idea that 250,000 people in Wyoming have one senator and 20 million here. Even though the founders knew that equilibrium was natural.
Albert Mohler:
Right. It was intentional.
Victor Davis Hanson:
That they wanted to privilege the states. They want to make the Senate exactly like the House. And they want to expand the House to some fantastic number. Three, 4,000. So, they don’t like the system because it doesn’t bring them the desired results.
Albert Mohler:
Well, one of the Christian principles I take a bit of hope in. My ultimate hope in is in Christ. But there are structures of creation that God has put in place. And one of them is that cultures that still have to deal with stuff are very difficult to move unimpeded in an ideological direction of leftism. And so, I think that’s why the left’s so frustrated. Is that, I mean, they have been there … The people who identify themselves as cultural Marxists, to me, I’ve had my first year of college in 1977. So that’s not new. And they were certain that this dialectic could be playing out long before now. And so, there’s certain young people who see a revolutionary opportunity, but for the most part, they’re still shopping at Whole Foods. They’re still buying their clothes at Urban Outfitters. In other words, they haven’t actually a press for some kind of post material or post consumer culture.
Victor Davis Hanson:
No. No, I’ve expressed that a lot in writing. I have this idea that leftism or equality of result or Marxism, whatever term we use of its calibrations, is a psychological mechanism where people who really don’t feel comfortable with poor people or middle-class people. Or people who really are materialistic, they create this facade that they love humanity, but not humans. So, it’s, “We’ve got to stop and more. But I don’t really care about that guy around the corner with that old truck. I don’t want him around me. I don’t care.”
Albert Mohler:
Your last major chapter, Professor, is entitled “Globalists.” And this is a phenomenon we see all around us.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yeah, it is. It’s an ancient idea. The ancients had a word for it. In Greek, cosmopolitanism. Cosmos, world. Politai, citizen. Socrates supposedly said he was a citizen first of the world. Sounds nice, but when you expand the governing community to a world with all different sorts of political ramifications. Ethnic, social. It’s unwieldy. And it’s usually a facade for a few people, elite, to grab power. So, whether it was Alexander the Great’s brotherhood of man, people are still fooled by that. Alexander killed more people in Asia in his 10 years than almost anybody. But he called it the brotherhood of man. And the same with the Roman empire. The same with Napoleonic mercantile system in Europe. League of Nations.
So, they’re either one model where a particular enlightened ruler is going to destroy local and national sovereignty and harmonize everything, or you’re going to have a transnational body. And it’s funny how the dystopia that George Orwell described is exactly that. Everybody’s been reduced to three powers. East Oceania and et. But that consolidation of power is what drives people that are the architects of these global systems. And you can see it with the Great Reset and Davos, I talk about. These people, really, if you listen to them. Klaus Schwab. They really do want to override national laws, boundaries, sovereignties, and then have an elect group of people who just know better than we do. But they don’t have the power yet. So, they need transnational power. And they always do it with a smile, a suit and tie. And they deplore ignorance and etcetera. So, they’re very dangerous people. They always have been.
Albert Mohler:
We have to just a moment or so in conclusion. What’s your ground for hope?
Victor Davis Hanson:
My grounds for hope is that I don’t think the system has ever worked in the direction that we’re going into with a medieval two class system. So, I’m seeing now when I go to work, it’s funny. I see all these kids in their twenties with these degrees that we’ve talked about, but there’s a whole a whole other group of working Hispanic kids or lower class, so-called lower class, lower middle class white kids. And suddenly, in this economy, somebody needs an electrician.
Somebody wants to put a kitchen. And these guys have no debt, and they’re getting 50, 80, a hundred dollars an hour. They’re so in short supply. So, we’re starting to recalibrate our value system a little bit. The man who can come in, or the woman who get up in your attic and take that knob and tube wiring out, it’s much more difficult to do that than to major in sociology. And it’s much more beneficial for society. So, I think we’re starting to see a little bit of the return of value or muscular labor. Because the other system doesn’t work.
I think as we look at nationwide, I think there’s a sense that we’ve gone about as far as we can go with identity politics. If we go any farther, we’re going to have open civil strife. And so I think that the Martin Luther King content of our character is going to return because we have no choice. Putin, everybody’s worried about Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t care about who’s woke and who’s not. And our enemies don’t care about that. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that all of these theories that have been so pernicious the last 20 years, they got their way and they reached the ultimate extent of their practicality and they’re destroying the country. And I think we can see it-
Albert Mohler:
Reality has a way of intruding.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think there’s going to be a natural … You saw it in Virginia with the school board. You’re seeing it with a school board election in San Francisco. I think you’re going to see Mexican American people, I’m just speaking cause I live in a community about 90. That is going to vote for the first time, not 20, 30, 40, but over half will vote for a more traditionalist agenda. And I don’t think the left has any idea what’s coming.
Albert Mohler:
Professor Victor Davis Hanson, thank you for this book, The Dying Citizen. And thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Victor Davis Hanson, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
And until next time, keep thinking.