Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Dragging America Back to the Dark Ages

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. 

The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world.  

Maybe we’re progressive regressives, and I don’t mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period. 

Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly A.D. 500 to around A.D. 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. 

There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime. 

But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne. 

I should remind everybody that around 536, Santa Sofia was created, the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from the mass production of crossbows to eyeglasses was a product of the medieval period, even if, as I said, the daily lives of most people were wretched. 

Now let’s switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips. 

The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI. 

Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley. 

You look at the homeless camps all over our major cities. People are just out in the open fornicating, urinating, defecating, injecting drugs. There’s tons of feces that has to be removed, and it’s so strange in this modern medievalism. 

We have sophisticated researchers who go into a hospital in Chicago or go to a cancer center in San Francisco and have to check the bottoms of their shoes to make sure they don’t have feces as they go into their space-age laboratories. 

It’s really funny. In the medieval period, public hangings and beheadings were sort of public events that people flocked out to see. Is that any different than our glorification of murderers? 

And there is a difference. Luigi Mangione, they named an opera after him in California. The killer of Charlie Kirk brought people jubilation. I won’t even get into Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and became every woman to the feminist left.  

At least in the medieval period, they knew that the murderer had done something wrong and was being punished. In the post-medieval period, we are glorifying that murderer, and that’s really striking. 

And so what I’m getting at is we are the most regulated, the most advanced, the most modern, the most scientific society in history, even as we can’t solve problems that were solvable, and the medieval period would have died to know the solutions that we have in our hands to make sure we have clean water, to make sure there is no crime, to make sure there is no disease, to make sure that people don’t defecate on the street. But we don’t do it. We willingly don’t do it. 

Now, the question to finish is why? 

We have an elite that has embraced a very toxic ideology throughout history, and that is mandated, government-sanctioned equality of result. And they have divided, therefore, to further that ideology, the world into victims and victimizers, an arbitrary classification, sometimes based on class, but increasingly on race. 

And once they identify someone as a victim who’s not responsible for his plight, then it’s the duty of the society to allow him to express himself. If you have a lot of teenagers who want to loot a jewelry store, then you say they were hungry and they needed food.  

If you see homeless people living on the street, then it was because of something the majority culture did to them. 

And the result of that is when people engage in very dangerous antisocial behavior, an elite will tell the rest of us that they’re not subject to law enforcement. or they’re not subject to the laws that apply to the rest of us. 

But there are two really pernicious addenda here. 

Number one, the people who do this on the Left, who believe in this mandated equality and a binary of victim and victimizer, are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. Nancy Pelosi‘s home is not surrounded by homeless people. Jane Fonda doesn’t have to trip over people injecting drugs when she walks outside her door. The Hollywood stars in Malibu who champion the homeless have very clear security. You can’t get near their homes. 

In other words, we, the lab rats, are those upon whom they experiment. 

And there’s another reason as well. It’s not just that they experiment on us. and this ideology is not applicable to itself, but more importantly, they believe that they are morally superior because most of them are agnostics or atheists. They have lost their God, but they have found it in a post-Enlightenment caring, abstract though it may be, for victims. 

And when you put this religious element to it, because it makes no sense to allow medieval diseases and medievalism to dominate your cities in crime, filth and homelessness, but they do it. They feel morally superior, and it gives them meaning in their life in a way that we, the majority, find not morally superior, but morally repugnant. 

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