Dr. Hanson is one of the great wise men of our era, and his writings are always worth reading. A recent one appears at hoover.org. Ten Paradoxes Of Our Age. Here's a shorthand version of it:
1. The prosperity of consumer capitalism does not necessarily lead to constitutional government.
2. Once a nuclear power doesn’t mean always a nuclear power.
3. The European Union has realized that its efforts to transform a successful common market and effective free trade and travel zone into a continental pan-European national state are in crisis.
4. The more non-Westerners abandon their homelands and flee to the West—especially en masse and illegally—the more these immigrants ironically seek to replicate in their new country the very cultural conditions they forsook.
5. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Germany’s neighbors feared its power, expansionism, and unification schemes, as well as its tendency to become petulant in its victimhood.
6. The Middle East is not the center of the geostrategic universe. ...The real crisis is not the tension between Israel and the Arab nations, but rather it is Israel and its Arab neighbors’ fears of an ascendant Persian Shiite Islam.
7. The great immediate dangers to Western Civilization are not hunger, global warming, inequality, or religious fundamentalism, but obesity, consumer culture, utopian pacifism, multiculturalism, declining demography, the secular religion of political correctness that threatens the right to free speech, an inability to protect national borders and to create a common culture rooted in the values of the West, and an absence of belief in spiritual transcendence and reverence for past customs and traditions.
8. The great dangers to modern constitutional government and a free press come not from silly and easily identifiable right-wing racists and bumbling fascists, but rather, as George Orwell saw, from glib social utopians.
9. The goal of government in a Western constitutional state should be conceived of in terms of economic growth, such as by achieving an annual GDP rate of 3 percent or greater, an unemployment rate of 4 percent or lower, and a rising middle-class per capita income—not an increase in state subsidies, state bureaucracies, and state regulations.
10. Crudity in popular politics, as now witnessed in Europe and the United States, is never to be welcomed. But if transient coarseness is sometimes the price of dissolving calcified and destructive norms, and is constitutional, then it is an acceptable antidote to suave institutionalized mediocrity.
Good points, all of them. Number 4 really hits home: "immigrants ironically seek to replicate in their new country the very cultural conditions they forsook." Yep. Those of in high immigrant states are seeing that particular phenomenon.
We'll all miss Charles Krauthammer and his brilliance. And while this post by no means is an attempt to compare them, Dr. Hanson will help fill the void left by Krauthammer.
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10:27 AM 6/12/2018
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