The wind whistles mournfully through the crotch-gaps in Victor Davis Hanson's moth-gnawed toga, and by such strange auguries, the Ancient One foresees Dire Portents and Dark Harbingers.
Are We Becoming Medieval?
In an age of technocratic elites, national unity is losing its charm.
Holy shit! We so totally are becoming medieval because of technocratic elites making national unity charmless! That is so totally dead on balls accurate!
A tourist mecca like Venice now boasts that it dreams of breaking away from an insolvent Italy. Similarly Barcelona, and perhaps the Basques and the Catalonians in general, claim they want no part of a bankrupt Spain. Scotland fantasizes about becoming separate from Great Britain. The Greek Right dreams of a 19th-century Greece without Asian and African immigrants who do not look Greek. Belgium increasingly seems an artificial construct, half Flemish, half French, with the two sides never more estranged. These days Texas and California do not even seem like two parts of a united nation, just as Massachusetts is growing ever more distant from Wyoming.
Golly. 2012 sure has been a momentous year, when all this happened for the first time ever in all of history.
Here at home, it is not just that taxation and government are different in red and blue states, or that for the last two decades national elections have hinged on what the shrinking number of purple-state voters prefer. Social and cultural questions are also dividing us, almost as much as slavery did in the 1850s. Fault lines over abortion, the role of religion, gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare, illegal immigration, and gun ownership are starting to manifest themselves regionally. We have long had the Blue–Gray game; soon will there be a Red–Blue Bowl? If Mexico plays against the U.S. soccer team in Merced, Fresno, or L.A., will the spectators root for the country in which they live or the country that they left?
Wow. Regional differences are starting to manifest themselves in America, something totally unprecedented in this nation, except for that minor Civil War outlier. (And fair enough: VDH carefully omits "race" as an American "fault line," because he is a Serious Scholar of The Past.) And also there is soccer, a sport where for inexplicable reasons American fans don't always yell the loudest in stadiums, despite soccer being America's Pastime and a National Obsession on a par with, say, badminton, or curling.
Europe may in the not-too-distant future end up as it was in the 16th century, before the rise of the nation state.
Feudalism: don't call it a comeback.
What?
Various longstanding European nationalist movements are opposed to the idea of the nation state? They want, what, monarchies?
Well, Dr. Hanson's the scholar! He can't possibly be talking out his ass!
If current trends continue, the United States may unwind in the reverse of the manner in which frontiers became territories and then states. No entity is ensured perpetual union. The process of forming nations and empires and then disassembling them back into small city states or provincial units is certainly not novel, but rather ancient, and more likely fluid and cyclical than linear — even if the process takes decades or at times centuries. When an empire or even a nation state can no longer guarantee locals that the increased security and wealth of a vast union makes it well worth transcending their parochial customs and ethnic profiles, then we have a Greece of 1,500 city states, or a medieval Europe of castles and moats.
So if you think gays can marry, you are accelerating the process whereby folks in Wyoming dig moats to protect themselves from soccer-loving Mexican immigrants. And you should be ashamed of yourself.
Voters are also disgusted with government, and feel that their overseers are not even subject to the consequences of what they impose on others: We expect the Obamas to trash the 1 percent as they jet to Martha’s Vineyard, or a zillionaire John Kerry to demand higher taxes as he seeks to avoid them on his yacht, or an upscale French Socialist president to have a home on the Mediterranean — or, on the other side of the ledger, social-conservative elites to speak and act like metrosexuals.
It is truly awful. Rich people who think they should pay higher taxes remain rich, while religious leaders who want to deny gay people equal rights talk like fags. Shit is fucked up and bullshit.
And...
Christ. There are entire paragraphs more of this bullshit. Tired now.
Anyway, VDH is mad that Obama is destroying the country by totally pretending that the GOP wants to restrict women's autonomy, redistribute wealth upwards, race bait, and pursue contractionary economic policies.
Remember: Victor David Hanson is as far as the American Right can go in regards to producing an intellectual.