Friday, October 20, 2017

Demonizing the South to Purify the Nation

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Victor Davis Hanson is one of the most lauded and applauded historians of the “conservative establishment.” Honored by President George W. Bush, a regular writer for National Review, spoken of in hushed and admiring tones by pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Hanson is rightly regarded as a fine classicist and military historian, especially of ancient warfare. But like other authors who tend to cluster in the Neoconservative orbit, Hanson strays far afield into modern history, American studies, and into current politics—fields where his fealty to a Neocon narrative overwhelms his historical expertise.

And like other well-regarded writers of the Neocon persuasion—the far less scholarly Jonah Goldberg (in his superficial and wrongheaded volume, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning) and Dinesh D’Souza (in his historical mish-mash, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)—Hanson when he writes of contemporary politics or modern American history, writes with an agenda. But, unlike them, his arguments are usually more firmly based and less fantastical.

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