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Does Hanson’s apparent abandonment of neocon ideology mean anything?
As Steve Sailer has said, Victor Hanson is more rhetorician than logician, so it may be a mistake to place too much stress on his apparent abandonment of the universal democracy ideology, as perhaps I did in my recent item on him. Nevertheless, the reversal in his rhetoric is stunning. Last April Hanson said that what we are fighting for in this war is a “free and tolerant mankind.” But now he’s saying that if Muslim countries give us trouble, we should rain down destruction on them and not worry about rebuilding or democratizing them afterward.
So, should we see Hanson as a significant intellectual figure who by reversing his prior views is announcing an important shift in mainstream conservative thinking, or should we see him as a kind of gentile version of Thomas Friedman—an overly emotional writer who spills out his contradictory feelings from one column to the next, and whom we should more or less ignore? Email entry |