I posted below a segment from a Hugh Hewitt-- Victor Davis Hanson conversation. I want to post another segment from that same conversation but on a different topic. Hugh Hewitt asks Professor Hanson "Has this happened before...when the world's only or greatest power self-destructs from within?" VDH responds:
"Absolutely. Absolutely. You can read the speeches of Demosthenes in 350 BC. You can read Petronius' Satyricon. It was talking about a bankrupted lead at Rome who made fun of the legionnaires who were guarding the Rhine and the Danube, so they could have these lavish feasts back in Rome. You can look at the illness that was in the British aristocratic society in the 1920's and '30's, that made fun of people like Churchill. And this is what we, in America, collectively, have to guard against, that we don't allow these people, these affluent elites, who are cynical, skeptical, nihilistic, and we can't let them adjudicate what America is about. And because we all know that the people overseas that we're fighting, the terrorists, the Islamicists, the Islamic-facist movements, they find resonance with these people. These people don't mean to deliberately help them, but their attacks dovetail at a time of war with the people that we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.