Victor Davis Hanson: The Generation That Built America Was The Last of Its Kind

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Our friend, your friend, and I’m a great admirer of David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter and author. He wrote a piece the other day in National Review. You were just talking about being uplifted by Hillsdale. Well, David is a little… He’s got a little bit of the Eeyore gene going on, and I know you can relate to that. 

And his essay was titled “America, History, and Futility.” And I just want to read its conclusion, and then, Victor, you can, you know, I’m giving you permission to expound on it. 

So here’s what David Mamet wrote: 

“A contemporary remarked that perhaps the pendulum will swing back, and that reason, courtesy, and patriotism will reemerge. But he was wrong, for he could only imagine their reemergence in those, our contemporaries, who understood these attributes as essential for a functional and prosperous society. But to the young, the American century is a disgrace and the American dream a shuck. Histories may be debated, but the irreducible core must be verifiable fact. And what a fact is determined only by Big Brother.” 

And here’s his conclusion: 

“I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation. I can’t even describe the current form other than as a civilization split into two factions, one decrying and the other exploiting chaos. I don’t know if prophecy as prediction actually exists, but I know, like Cassandra, that if so, it will do so in no useful form. I don’t know if the sun can actually supply enough power to run our cities, but I know there is nothing new beneath it.” 

Kind of depressing there, Victor, but maybe he’s kind of realistic. Your thoughts? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I’m prejudiced because I’ve always admired David Mamet, and I like him, and I know him. He’s a very courageous guy. He was beloved by the Left. He was a man not of the hard Left, but he was a liberal. And he finally got sick of it years ago, and, of course, they turned on him, and they turned on him professionally. But he had such a talent and such a name that he persevered. 

And that essay is kind of a siren song. He’s also saying throughout that essay that the problem with getting old is that you get disconnected, and you become an observer rather than a participant because of the energy levels, physical and mental. 

And then second, you get philosophical and you get angry because you know what was destroyed. 

One thing that’s a subtext, and I think it’s true of all of us, some of us in the boomer cohort actually knew people from the 19th century. And I was blessed because my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather were born in 1890 and 1888, 1889. 

So they came of age without electricity, without flush toilets, without tractors, using horses. Everything about them, from their worldview, was imprinted on their childhood in the late 19th century. 

So when I got to know them, when I was five, say, to 20, when most of them had died, everything about them, their language, their accent, their comportment, was completely foreign to the modern world. 

If I wanted to go outside, my grandmother said, “Be careful out there yonder. Don’t go out yonder. I’ll give the dickens to you.” What did that mean? 

Or, “I’ll take a switch to you, ha ha ha.” 

“Ain’t funny, McGee.” She used to listen to Fibber McGee in the ’30s, I guess. 

And “There’s the sunset, Victor. It’s sinking in the far, far west tonight.” 

All this. 

And they lived by nature. My grandfather would say, “The birds are nesting early. There’s a big  wind stirring up in the south, and that can’t be good.” 

Or when he’d say something, a moral lecture: “And that’s all there is to it. Now, Victor, there’s two types of people in the world. There are those who pay interest and those who get it. You got to be on the right side of the ledger. I wasn’t. Now that’s all there is to it. And when you get a $20 bill you earned, it’s a lot easier to spend it than to put it in the bank, so put it in the bank.” 

All of that parsimoniousness, shame culture, be careful. 

He would say, “When you got your license, I was worried. I don’t want to drive in and see you drive by me in town with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth or ink on your skin. You understand?” 

I said, “I do understand.” 

And then I had a Swedish grandfather who was really, really tough. They had that bad-seed notion. They didn’t believe in therapeutics. 

There was a neighbor family that was kind of affluent, and every one of them had been in jail. 

So I said, “Why are they… Is it because they had a divorce, Grandpa? What happened?” 

“Well, Victor, there’s a bad seed over there. There’s a bad seed. Now one of them’s no darn good. The other one, not much better. So it’s just a bad-seed family. That’s just all there is. They’re just bad seed.” 

They were pretty tough, but they built the country. And they were the last generation, I think, before the therapeutic generation took hold and modernism came. 

Not that I’m saying the 20th and 21st centuries weren’t great, but David Mamet remembers that too, that there was a different world. 

And I think, finally, to stop, I won’t keep going, but he has a… If I were to read all the things he’s written, and I’ve read a lot of them, about every couple of months he sends me an old book he got out of a bookstore, published in the ’20s or ’30s, and I read them, and they’re the same message. 

I think that the modern world, especially the education system, wanted to make people stupid. They didn’t teach the Constitution. They didn’t teach civics. They didn’t teach ethics. They didn’t teach classical literature. They didn’t teach anything about American history, and that wiped clean a slate. 

It was almost that they took the last 40 years of people and erased their brains, and it was completely empty vessels. 

And then they implanted… 

Once they had done that, once they had done that crime of omission, then they doubled down and had a crime of commission. 

Then they put in its place: “You’re racist, you’re sexist, tribalism, transgenderism, hate America. Our founding was awful.” 

And everybody was exposed to that, and they had no weapons to counter it because they had destroyed rhetoric and logic and classical philosophy. 

When they didn’t just destroy the classes and put in these dash-studies courses, they went in like a virus to the host and took a philosophy class or a Shakespeare class and turned it into “Shakespeare was gay,” or Western history was about slaughtering India. 

Everything. 

And the result is you see these people that don’t… It’s not that they’re hard Left. They don’t know anything. 

“River to the sea.” Well, what river? 

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” 

“Jews are settler colonialists.” 

Well, do they have a 3,500-year… The first time we ever read about Israel in literature, who was there? 

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” 

And so that’s what he’s lamenting, and he’s a very important voice. 

I’m glad that he takes… He’s in very great shape. He works out, and he’s a septuagenarian, but he’s in really good shape. And I’m glad he’s going to be around a long time because he’s needed. 

He’s absolutely right. The Left tried to, just like out of “1984,” turn whole generations into ignoramuses that didn’t know anything, and they had no inductive reasoning, they had no context. 

If you say these words to people, if you said column or cornice, or you said 1776, they don’t know anything. 

A lot of us watch Fox News and you have Johnny, right? Remember him? And he goes out on the beach and he says, “Who was the first president?” 

“Bill Clinton. Barack Obama.” 

“What’s the capital of Washington?” 

“Miami?” 

What happened in World War II? 

“They bombed New York.” 

No, they didn’t bomb New York. 

They don’t know anything. I mean it, nothing. 

Jack Fowler: I’m laughing, but you wince from the staggering… 

Victor Davis Hanson: You wince because you say these people are idiots, and because they know nothing, the Left succeeded in deprogramming, or programming, entire generations. 

And they put into that know-nothingness, because they had no defense, because they didn’t know how to reason or use logic, or they had no referent points, they could say, “Well, this is what Dante said,” or, “This is what Washington meant,” or, “I remember what Lincoln said.” 

They had none of that. 

So then they put in, “This is a safe space. This is a trigger warning. This is a theme house.” 

And these people just nodded, and so they came out, and they’re sheep. 

And then you have these elite people who were the worst of all, because these elite Leftists did get that training from 19th-century minds that are now in their 70s. 

But then they took that training and they blew it up for other people, selfishly saying, “We’re going to be the puppet masters, but we won’t want these little mannequins, these puppets below on our strings, to have any of the knowledge that we were given, or they might revolt.” 

Then every once in a while you’ll see somebody at Prager University or someone who wakes up, and then it’s like a revolution. It’s like somebody pulled apart the curtain, and they can see, “Wow, I didn’t know what was going on.” 

So that’s what David Mamet is trying to… 

He’s very pessimistic about the modern world. 

And I don’t know. I mean, when you have an atheistic, agnostic, secular, ignorant generation raised on precepts from bankrupt, discredited social science, then you get a… What’s her name? Lindsay Clancy. Is that her name? 

Jack Fowler: Lindsay Clancy. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, that’s what you get. You get feminists out there supporting her, trying to raise a million dollars. 

Or you get a bill that says in Canada that if you kill your child in the first year and you can claim postpartum depression, then the penalties for first-degree murder are no more than five years. 

Something like that. Minimal. 

You get a hatred of young life and procreation and infants and the defenseless, and you get the attention turned to the psychobabble and melodrama of the person committing the crime.  

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