Author: Victor Davis Hanson

By A.D. 200, the Roman Republic was a distant memory. Few citizens of the global Roman Empire even knew of their illustrious ancestors like Scipio or Cicero. Millions no longer spoke Latin. Italian emperors were a rarity. There were no national elections. Yet Rome endured as a global power for three more centuries. What held […]

Truth is the lifeblood of democracy. Without honesty, the foundations of consensual government crumble. If the Internal Revenue Service acts unlawfully, our voluntary system of citizens computing their own taxes implodes. Yet Lois Lerner, one of the IRS’s top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency’s conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the […]

The Obama administration is facing scandals everywhere — using the IRS to punish political enemies, seizing the phone records of Associated Press and Fox News reporters, monitoring phone and email accounts of millions, and making up stories about what happened in Benghazi. In other words, the sort of government overreach that hardly raises eyebrows in […]

GIBRALTAR — From the heights of Gibraltar you can see Africa about nine miles away to the south — and gaze eastward on the seemingly endless Mediterranean that stretches 1,500 miles to Asia beyond. Mare Nostrum, “our sea,” the Romans called the deep blue waters that allowed Rome to unite Asia, Africa and Europe for […]

Ideas of the 1960s have now grown reactionary in our world that is vastly different from a half-century ago. Take well-meaning subsidies for those over age 62. Why are there still senior discounts, vast expansions in Social Security and Medicare, and generous public pensions? Five decades ago all that made sense. There was no such […]

Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news. We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exempt policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption […]

In Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles. True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess […]

Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to stop his mass killing and step down? Muammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship had then just collapsed under Western bombing. The murders of Americans in Benghazi and the subsequent postwar tribal mess in Libya were still in the future. In those heady days of 2011, the rage […]

The idea of a nuclear Iran — and of preventing a nuclear Iran — terrifies security analysts. Those who argue for a preemptive strike against Iran cannot explain exactly how American planes and missiles would take out all the subterranean nuclear facilities without missing a stashed nuke or two — or whether they might as […]

We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 — no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential outcome. There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion […]

Bring up Iraq — and expect to end up in an argument. Conservatives are no different from liberals in rehashing the unpopular war, which has become a sort of whipping boy for all our subsequent problems. The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently enumerated countless pathologies that followed Iraq. Yet to examine her list […]

For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won’t, at least not quite yet. “Peak oil” and our “oil addiction” were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than […]

Sometime in the new millennium, “global warming” evolved into “climate change.” Amid growing controversies over the planet’s past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced “climate change” could better explain almost any weather extremity — droughts or floods, too much heat or cold, hurricanes and tornadoes. Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned “affirmative […]

California now works on the principle of the mordida, or “bite.” Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state. Gov. Jerry Brown made that assumption explicit in his latest back-and-forth with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who keeps luring Californians to lower-tax, higher-employment Texas. […]

Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion-plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States — like an insolvent Rome and exhausted Great Britain of the past — was bound to re-examine its expensive […]

In his first term President Obama was criticized for trash-talking the one-percenters while enjoying the aristocracy of Martha’s Vineyard and the nation’s most exclusive golf courses. Obama never quite squared his accusations that “millionaires and billionaires” had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of “corporate jet owners,” “fat […]

Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline? Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, […]

Nothing about illegal immigration quite adds up. Conservative corporate employers still support the idea of imported, cheap, non-union labor — in a strange alliance with liberal activists who want the larger blocs of Latino voters that eventually follow massive influxes from Latin America. Yet how conservative are businesses that in the past flouted federal law […]

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm. Throughout history, we have seen that war can sometimes be avoided or postponed, or its effects mitigated — usually through a balance of power, alliances and deterrence rather than supranational collective agencies. But it never seems to […]

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly “war on terror” and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit […]

The horrific Newtown, Conn., mass shooting has unleashed a frenzy to pass new gun-control legislation. But the war over restricting firearms is not just between liberals and conservatives; it also pits the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution against each other. Apparently, in the sequential thinking of James Madison and the Founding Fathers, the […]

As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush’s chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that […]

The year 2012 saw the triumph of cold reality over pie-in-the-sky dreams. Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change in the hope that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, Obama ran […]

There is a different sort of racialist derangement spreading in the country — and it is getting ugly. Here is actor Jamie Foxx joking recently about his new movie role: “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?” Reverse white and black in the relevant ways and even a comedian […]

Who exactly were the rich who, as the president said, were not “paying their fair share”? The rapper Jay-Z (net worth: nearly $500 million)? The actor Johnny Depp (2011 income: $50 million)? Neither seems to have heard the president’s earlier warning that, “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Could both zillionaires simply have […]

We are still borrowing more than $1 trillion a year. Barack Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt in just his first term alone. Such massive borrowing is unsustainable. Someone somehow at some time has to pay it back. Obama would agree. He once alleged that George W. Bush’s much smaller […]

Classical explanations of conventional wars run something like this: An aggressor state seeks political advantage through military force. It has a hunch that the threatened target will likely either make concessions to avoid losing a war, or, if war breaks out, the resulting political gains will be worth the military costs to achieve victory. Wars […]

After his party’s devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama was re-elected earlier this month by painting his Republican opponents as heartless in favoring lower taxes for the rich. They were portrayed as nativists for opposing the Dream Act amnesty for illegal immigrants, and as callous in battling the federal takeover of health […]