Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

Victor Davis Hanson - The Urban-Rural Divide in America

**  Victor Davis Hanson - On the urban/rural divide in the United States.

Excerpts:

. . . . The media figures who report on the election are urban denizens. Few have any idea of why half the country votes as it does. So they just assume that pollsters, like themselves, are better educated, smarter, and of greater value to society than those whom they often to fail to find in their surveys. . . 

That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour.

So the originalist theories of the Founders — nursed on classical tropes found in bucolic, pastoral, and agrarian romance, and on the skepticism of human nature conveyed throughout classical political philosophy — was that in a republic, real diversity is needed to offset sheer numbers. That is, rural voices, always to be in a minority, provided checks on the exuberance and occasional danger of the volatile cities, prone to fads that could devolve into hysteria and worse.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON SPEAKS ON "THE TWO CALIFORNIAS"

I fail many times to post items that I share with others via email, a mistake on my part.  When I sent the following video to a friend he said he found it insightful and learned a lot.  That caused pangs of guilt that I had not posted it on my blog when first I listened to it.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor and public commentator on current events, talks about California being a combination of Massachusetts and Mississippi.  That situation cannot continue indefinitely.  Check out his talk below to see what he means.

HAS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION "EVOLVED BEYOND RACE" OR THE OPPOSITE?

Victor Davis Hanson says "the opposite" and foresees a probable eventual "polarization we have not seen in generations."   Oh my... !   VDH elucidates:

Did Jones [the black czar who just resigned] or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?

The Jones mess brings up a larger issue. Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: ASSESSING OBAMA & HIS ADMINISTRATION (SO FAR)

  Useful summary and insights.  Click here.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON - PREDICTIONS RELATED TO "THE AGE OF POST-JOURNALISM"

Here is VDH's perspective:

We have seen it all the last two years: Weeping journalists on election night; a journalist openly promising to help make Obama successful  ("Yeah, it is my job."); film takes of journalists cheering an Obama speech; the savaging of Sarah Palin and the hands-off treatment of Biden; soft-ball interviews and long puff-pieces on Obama as the young cool crusader;comparisons to JFK's Camelot, and on and on.

In the 3rd book of his history, Thucydides has some insightful thoughts about destroying institutions in times of zealotry—and then regretting their absence when there is a need for refuge for them. The mainstream press should have learned that lesson, once they blew up their credibility in the past election by morphing into the Team Obama  press agency.

    There will come a time in the year ahead when either Obama's unexamined past will come back to haunt him, or his inexperience and tentativeness in foreign affairs will be embarrassingly apparent, or his European-socialist agenda for domestic programs simply won't work. And as