A triumph of wishful thinking
James P. writes:
Victor Davis Hanson thinks (hopes, prays, imagines) that the California that once was, will someday return:
1. “Liberal unionism” and the expansion of the budget will be checked at the ballot box.
2. “At some point, the state’s southern border will finally be closed, and with it the unchecked yearly flow of illegal immigrants.”
3. Mexicans will be magically transformed! “California Latinos could soon resemble California Armenians, Japanese, and Portuguese—whose integrated, assimilated, and intermarried ethnics usually earn more than the state’s average per-capita income.”
4. The inherent “conservative tendencies of the Hispanic middle class” will cause them to elect non-liberals.
Hanson vows to remain in California until these wonderful dreams come true!
LA replies:
I’ve been saying for ten years that Hanson is an overwrought liberal fool, and this proves it. In my view, Hanson has done more damage to conservatism than any other single person, with his nonstop voluminous flow of words, published prominently in the conservative media, that contain no conservative or anti-liberal understandings, but only quibbles with liberalism and endless amounts of analysis of the psychological and characterological flaws that make liberals behave in the bad ways they do. Hanson never criticizes liberalism as a belief system, as a set of principles, because he himself is a liberal and shares those principles. Yet conservatives have kept defending him because he lives on a generations-old family farm, which somehow made him a real conservative; and because he wrote a book criticizing illegal immigration.
Ed H. writes:
Victor Davis Hanson is waiting for the transformation of the Hispanic population into traditional, conservative Americanism. As a liberal he assumes that all peoples, all cultures, are fundamentally the same. The lethargy and failure of Latin America is just the result of a lack of opportunities, not the expression of much more intractable differences. Based on these assumption, when can he estimate the “Hispanic Transformation” will occur?
1. The upward mobility allowed to the working class by an expanding industrial world-dominant economy is a thing of the American past. Full employment and high wage jobs for the undereducated working class are gone. No wealth accumulation is possible and working class Americans today live from paycheck to paycheck, supplemented, of course by food stamps. So how are Mexican peasants going to be anything but a ever more radicalized force for Third World socialism? Which point will be arrived at first, the miraculous transformation of Mexican peasants into the middle class or the degradation of everything into the Third World? Tomorrow is the most important election in American history, which side of the Socialist/Conservative divide will the Hispanic voters of California fall on? Statistics should soon be available. Upon review please revise your estimated date of the “Hispanic Transformation” into traditional Americanism.
2. In the past the assimilation of foreign cultures into the United States was the result of fierce and often violent compulsion by mainstream society. Our inherited vocabulary has lots of colorful epithets stigmatizing Jews, Blacks, Italians Poles, Germans, Swedes, and everyone else under the sun. We are told this is a terrible racist legacy which we have rightly left behind. But was it, really? What was all this about but the forced assimilation of alien cultures into a higher culture producing a unified whole with white European and largely Anglo Saxon values in the ascendancy. Where is this force now? Again, what will happen first, the degradation of everything into the Third World or the elevation of these people to the formerly ascendant now vanishing European high culture? Can Mr. Hanson please be more accurate as to when the Spanish-language government publications, commercial ads, radio stations, and Spanish speaking politicians making promises to Latinos in Spanish will come to an end?
3. Comment if you will, Mr. Hanson, on the central role of intellectual culture in the establishment of the wealth of nations. Compare if you will the reading habits of backwoods “hicks” of 150 years ago, for example, American Protestant pioneers reading the Bible by candlelight, or memorizing Latin epigrams in one-room school houses and then using the energy derived to found colleges, and medical schools, or the norm of white European self -education that turned out an endless stream of self-directed self-motivated geniuses that put together prototype cars in farm workshops or built airplanes in bicycle repair shops. Please give example of any kind of intellectual vibrancy in the Hispanic population of California with is 65 percent dropout rate. Look hard, you might find some example amongst the torpid peon masses stupefied in front of the electronic media. And, under liberal rules, if you find one example that’s all you need to nullify the reality of the whole. And having found this minuscule group of exceptions to the rule please estimate when they will be able to produce the Hispanic Transformation of the remaining millions of Latinos which he anticipates.
Within the above parameters, can Mr. Hanson please proved a more accurate estimate of the date of the forthcoming Hispanic Transformation?
LA writes:
I’ve sent Hanson’s e-mail address to Ed H. and encouraged him to send his comment directly to Hanson.
Alex P. writes:
James P. writes:
Hanson vows to remain in California until these wonderful dreams come true!
Or until the reconquistas expropriate his farm and expel his entire family from Nuevo Aztlan. Whichever comes first.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 05, 2012 09:14 AM | Send