Join America's Roundtable co-hosts Natasha Srdoc and Joel Anand Samy for a conversation with professor Victor Davis Hanson, best-selling author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America. Professor Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; his focus is classics and military history.
Hanson received a BA in classics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1975), was a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens (1977–78), and received his PhD in classics from Stanford University (1980).
The timely conversation brings to the forefront America's vanishing middle class and how government policies are impoverishing millions of citizens. Professor Victor Davis Hanson will provide his perspective on the influx of over 3 million illegal immigrants entering through the US southern border and its impact across the country. Key topics will also cover the significant erosion of the rule of law, and the weakening state of our national security.
The Washington Post reports on the data compiled on illegal immigrants — "The agency is on pace to exceed 2 million detentions during fiscal 2022, which ends in September, after tallying a record 1.73 million in 2021."
In an essay titled "A Quiet Destruction," Professor Hanson wrote,
"There is a common mentality evident in these pathologies and among those policymakers responsible for them. It is a strange new sense of justified entitlement among our credentialed elites in government and in private enterprise. As self-righteous moralists, they now assume that their deserved affluence, influence, and cultural superiority should exempt them from suffering firsthand the consequences of their own abstract theories and misbegotten policies that fall so heavily and so destructively upon distant and forgotten others."
Professor Hanson provides a clarion warning by relaying evidences of the looming peasant state:
"The result is the emergence of a new American peasantry, of millions of Americans who own little or no property. The new majority has scant, if any, savings. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. Most of what they buy, from cars to electronic appurtenances, they charge on credit cards."
The New York Times bestselling author explains the decline and fall of the once cherished idea of American citizenship.
Human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, and tribes. Yet the concept of the “citizen” is historically rare—and was among America’s most valued ideals for over two centuries. But without shock treatment, warns historian Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish.
In The Dying Citizen, Hanson outlines the historical forces that led to this crisis. The evisceration of the middle class over the last fifty years has made many Americans dependent on the federal government. Open borders have undermined the idea of allegiance to a particular place. Identity politics have eradicated our collective civic sense of self. And a top-heavy administrative state has endangered personal liberty, along with formal efforts to weaken the Constitution.
As in the revolutionary years of 1848, 1917, and 1968, 2020 ripped away our complacency about the future. But in the aftermath, we as Americans can rebuild and recover what we have lost. The choice is ours.
Articles and Essays by Professor Victor Davis Hanson:
The Sovietization of American Life
Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura.
A Quiet Destruction
The problem is not that government is doing too much or too little, but rather that it is utterly failing in those key tasks that must rightfully be its focus.
The Mercury News | Hanson: The American people are being forced to 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. (Link: https://victorhanson.com/imagine-the-unimaginable/)
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America's Roundtable is co-hosted by Natasha Srdoc and Joel Anand Samy, co-founders of International Leaders Summit and the Jerusalem Leaders Summit.
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