193: The Second World Wars & Case for Trump with Dr Victor Hanson

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Welcome to the Heroic Investing Show. My name is Gary Pinkerton and I co host this show with Jason Hartman. This is Heroic Investing, episode 193. Today my guest is Dr. Victor Hanson. Dr. Hansen is an American classicist. He's a military historian, columnist and a farmer of land that has been in his family in California for generations. He's been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Reviews, the Washington Times and other media outlets. I talk more about his background in the episode and it runs a bit long. So if you don't mind, let's just get to this interview with Dr. Victor Hansen. And I'm extremely excited to welcome a pretty incredible and accomplished military historian, professor and many other things. Dr. Hanson. Thank you so much, Dr. Victor Hanson, for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

You know, as I mentioned before we started the taping, I will have preceded this with a few more details about your background, but I love for the audience to be able to hear it from from the guests themselves. Would you please just explain a little bit about your history, your past? What got you into the love and vocation that you've carried for many years?

Well, I grew up in the house that I'm speaking from right now, the fifth generation on a small farm in Central California. I went to local public high school and then they had opened up recently at the University of California campus in Santa Cruz. I was there and I majored in classical languages. So I did that for four years. I went to Greece, I archaeology and then I got a PhD from Stanford in classical languages. And then at 26 I came home to help my grandparents farm and I did that for five years full time trees and vines. And then I went to the nearby Cal State Fresno campus and started a classics program. I did that for 21 years and then I went to Stanford's Hoover Institution where I've worked the last 16 years. And I commute once a week at an apartment in the Stanford campus from my farm here in Selma, California and written or edited about 24 books and I write the Tribune syndication and National Review and the new online Magazine American Greatness.

Wow. Listeners, you must go to his website and I'll just put it out now in case we forget later. But VictorHanson.com, just some tremendous, tremendous titles on here. Many of them are on military history, wars, maybe perhaps your most well known, the Second World Wars. A really extensive look at the subtitle, you know, the first global conflict and how it was fought and won. What got you so interested in military history?

Well, you know, I was a classical scholar and I was trained to be a critic, textual critic, of Greek and Latin text. And I didn't enjoy it all that much by the time I was finishing graduate school. So for my thesis, I wanted to write about something I knew growing up on a farm. And then also I always interested in military history as a kid. So I wrote a thesis called Warfare and Agriculture in Ancient Greece, about the wartime tactic of destroying the agriculture of an enemy. It's kind of an esoteric. It was published, but it wasn't a bestseller, obviously. And so out of that classics, I started writing about Roman and Greek warfare and then medieval warfare, then modern warfare and then world warfare. And so it was just a natural progression, although I still write about the ancient world, but not nearly as much as I used to.

Got it. What would you say, knowing kind of the makeup of the audience before your most recent release? And we'll jump to that a second. But that one aside, all of the books on military history, which do you think the audience should read first, they should dive into first?

Well, the two that have sold the best was a book I wrote in 2002 called Carnation, Landmark Battles in Western Civilization. And by that it was just why did Western armies from Greece to the medieval period, the Crusades or the Cortez or the British Empire, why were they able to project force so far away from their own homeland so effectively? And I went through the values that made up a lot of the assumptions of Western military. And then I wrote a book two years ago called Second World War, about how World War II was fought in the air, on the ground, beneath the sea and on top of the sea. And then I wrote a book called Ripples of Battle. That was my favorite book. How does a battle change history? Not politically, but affect the people that are in it. And I picked three battles, an ancient one, a Civil War battle, and a modern one on Okinawa. And I tried to show that out of that fighting, certain authors, musicians, politicians, became famous or infamous and that got killed or survived. And a battle like Shiloh really changed American history. But not necessarily just altering the course of the Civil War, but creating people like William Tecumseh Sherman or Lew Wallace, the author Ben Hur, which was sort of a paradigm or a simile of what he had experienced at Shiloh. But that book, for some reason, didn't sell as well as the other ones. So I think Ripples of Battle is the one that I like the best.

Nice. I appreciate you taking me through it. I was looking at that title while you were describing the Second World wars, wondering specifically what that was in the Ripples of Battle. You talk, as you said, about the impact it had on individuals, some specific individuals, famous individuals, and they were all physically in those battles. Is that what you mean?

Yeah. Ernie Pyle was killed, the famous war correspondent on Okinawa. That had a tremendous effect. The novelist and memorist E.B. sledge was on Okinawa and what he felt was very important. And there were certain people there whose descriptions of Okinawa so terrified or shocked the country, what they had experienced, especially in May, June and July, that it was pretty clear that after that battle they were going to drop the atomic bomb, because in July they didn't ever want to go through an Okinawa again. And so I talked about that and some of the commanders that were there and the it had on their lives and then later on other people. It had an effect on my life because my father's first cousin, whom they adopted as his brother, was killed there, and I was named after him. So I grew up sort of. You've always got to be a 63 US hero like he was, but it was very hard to, you know. But it's sort of what how battles ripple out and affect us in ways we have no idea, that we don't really appreciate.

Certainly that battle and the Second World War certainly shaped America forever forward. That's amazing. Let's change, though, to a topic that seems that you've started a new focus. I'm sure it's very much related. And this book is your most recent, not yet out, I think, right?

No, it's been out for a month, actually. It's been on the New York Times bestseller for five weeks. I'm pretty lucky.

I'm so sorry. That's awesome. And congratulations. Thank you. I don't spend much time, unfortunately, looking at those, but the title of this is the Case for Trump. And I take it in reading the excerpt from it, certainly it's a book that I'm going to go get as soon as we're finished here. It's a topic that really interests me. It is a Very polarizing political environment we've been in for the last few years. I take from my reading of it that you are Fairly pro on Mr. Trump and what he's trying to do for America.

Yeah, I think it is, but I didn't want to make him into a saner sinner. And I looked at the genre of Trump books and they were all pretty emotional. So what I wanted to do was just analyze how a guy without political or military experience defeated 16 really skilled Republican politicians, governors, senators, corporate CEOs in 2016. Then he went on to defeat the best funded candidate in the history of politics, Hillary Clinton, who had mostly supportive media culture behind her. And then contrary to expectations, in terms of the analytics of the first two and a quarter years of governance, whether we look at record low unemployment for minorities or near record unemployment for everybody, or annualized GDP growth or energy production, that he's got a pretty good record deregulation. And that wasn't supposed to happen. And so it's an analysis of the United States and why he got elected. What would the. How did he tweak a traditional Republican agenda that had been, he followed pretty closely? You know, always lower taxes, less government, stronger military, strict constructions, judges. But on that blueprint, he, he tweaked it and he said, you know, China is not fated to run the world and they're cheating, and that's the basis of their success in trade and commerce. And we're going to stop it. The middle of the country is hollowed out, but it doesn't have to be. We have good workers, cheap energy, we're competitive, we have a good trade system that's fair rather than just free. We'll do okay. And we can't have a sovereign nation with an open border. And immigration's gotta be measured and arcratic and legal and diverse. And finally, if you're gonna go overseas and get into an optional military engagement, make sure that the success in Kabul or Baghdad or Tripoli or in Syria can translate to long term American strategic advantage and a cost benefit analysis. And nobody had really said that, but those issues were tailor made to where the elections are always decided. These latest elections, that is, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida. He won the Electoral College that way. And then most people had no clue or no thought that he could ever do that. They were completely shocked the day after the election. And then they thought he was so chaotic without first president, without political and military experience. I said they felt that it would be impossible for him to govern. And yet he did, despite kind of chronic efforts, whatever one politics. I think everybody would agree that almost immediately Jill Stein sued to overturn the election, you know, wrongly charging there were invalid voting machines. And then we had the emoluments clause, the Logan act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller investigation, the collusion, Michael Corn storming Daniels, the tax return. But they all had a common theme of let's not wait till 2020, that Trump is so toxic that we have to abort his presidency somehow. And yet they all failed, even though the media was very supportive of him. And even the never Trump right was critical of their own party nominee and president. I was trying to analyze why all that, how do you make sense of all that? And boy, Trump had a different message. But at this particular time, a lot of people in the country on the conservative side felt that too long they had played by the Marcus of Queensbury role in campaigning and replying back to the progressives. And so Trump came along. And at this particular time, people did not want another Bush or McCain or Romney approach to politics. If Reverend Wright was a legitimate issue, then John McCain should have gone after him. That was the feeling. If Candy Crawley grabs that mike in the second debate, then Romney should have jumped up like Ronald Reagan and said, how dare you do that? But they didn't. People wanted some anecdote. And Trump, for all of his uncouthness and crudity, that's what people wanted. They wanted a fire. They did not want to go out in a limb and support a candidate and be sawed off by a candidate making fun of disowning his own base. That's what the books tried to do. And it also tried to explain why people hate him so much, whether it's his appearance or his accent or his bluntness or the fact that he doesn't have a usual resume. He doesn't care about the Council on Foreign Oil Relations or the World bank or the Brookings Institution, or he doesn't call past presidents wise men and say, President Bush, President Obama, President Carter, what should I. President Clinton, Give me some advice here. His success so far is almost a referendum on a supposedly essential resume of the past that he didn't have. And that bothers a lot of people, hopefully.

It also inspires a lot of people that, you know, I remember in grade school, people telling me that you can be president. Everyone in America can be president. Right. And I'm not saying I want to be president, but here I am at 50, not having taken any of the steps that apparently, you know, before President Trump were necessary. You Know, the kind of grooming as if it was part of the royal family of England. Right. You know, and have in the past, he's just demonstrated that all you, you know, you just have to want it and have a plan that fits better.

Yeah, I think that's right. And again, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And then abroad, I think his Jacksonian or nationalist or principle realism, whatever the term people use to calibrate it, is it's more or less we're going to help our friends and punish our enemies, and we're not going to get involved in areas or theaters that are not central to U.S. interests. U.S. interest is defined as trying to deal with Russia, trying to deal with China, being strong allies of Australia and Israel and Japan and South Korea and being sort of adversarial to Cuba and Venezuela and Iran. But we're not going to blur those distinctions. We're not going to get into transnational agreements or treaties that are not in our interest, like the Iran deal or the Paris climate accord or if we're going to stay in NATO. We have to ensure that everybody lives up to their promises. And that was quite radical for a president to say and to do that.

It definitely was. You mentioned that he embraced or defended the working people in America's interior, and then you said whom the coastal elite of both parties had come to scorn. Why did they come to scorn the working Middle America?

Well, I think part of it was globalization had so enriched the coast. And by that I mean the government in Washington had just exploded in size and compensation. And the banking industry of the east coast, especially Wall street, had become global. So they didn't just have 330 million customers, they had 7 billion. And out here where I am in California, Silicon Valley, Google, Facebook and Apple, along with Hewitt Packard, I guess in Yahoo were, and Amazon, although it's in Washington, they were now $4 trillion of market capitalization. And our universities, like Stanford or Harvard or Yale or Caltech became global universities. And the result was people on this coast, here and on the east coast became so wealthy they've never seen levels of that wealth. But people in the interior that had muscular labor that could be outsourced or offshore to whatever term we use, were impoverished. And the idea was that if you could move a plant where labor was cheaper or a farm where labor was cheaper, they did. And yet the diagnosis of that was backwards. They reversed cause and effect. It was almost as if the elites on the coast said, well, you guys didn't learn codeine or you took opiates so the jobs left rather than the jobs left, so you took opiates. Right, or.

Good point.

Nobody quite said, I like my wood floors, I like my granite counters, I like my stainless steel appliances, I like my arugula, but I don't care about the people who create that for me. Trump came along, of all people, and said, our farmers, our vets, our workers. He went to West Virginia, he said, I love big, beautiful coal. Hillary went there and said, I'm going to shut down this industry. So there was a perception of, I guess it would be called empathy in Trump that nobody had ever imagined he could display, at least display far more than Hillary. He seemed more genuine. He didn't change his accent toward the regional crowd or his appearance. He didn't wear flannel at state fairs. He wore that sort of ridiculous tie, shoes, hair, tan, queen's accent wherever he was.

Yeah, good points, very good points. I interviewed an amazing military veteran, three limb amputee, who is, he's just an inspiring guy, but he's leading. You may have heard of him, but he's leading a GoFundMe project that's more than GoFundMe nowadays. But they're building the parts of the wall on private property in Texas because they believe in what the President's doing and he's having challenges. So they're just pitching in. And I'm not saying that the wall is correct or not correct. What I'm saying is I haven't seen that kind of things happening in previous presidencies that I can think of.

I think that's true. Yeah. I think the people who voted for Trump, rightly or wrongly, saw that they felt things had accelerated so much into a trajectory they weren't comfortable with. Something had to be done. And by that I mean just eight or nine years ago, people could debate gay marriage and then it was permissible. Then if you didn't accept it wholeheartedly, then you were a bigot. Or people thought, you know, abortion should be legal, but rare maybe. But then if you didn't sign on to partial birth abortion or even infanticide, then you were diabolical. Or people believed maybe an affirmative action, but they suddenly it became with reparations, or maybe they wanted a little bit higher tax rate, 39% under Obama for the wealthy. But then it became a 70 or 90% wealth tax argument or high income tax bracket argument. And same thing with the green, therefore, solar panels and wind. If it's market, the market adjudicates that in a positive way. But suddenly it was the Green deal. So they saw the country on the left spiring out of control, and they thought to themselves, I can't sign on to this. This is a good country. Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean that you tear down its statue or change its names. And I don't want to go there anymore. And the Republican Party, whether it's Jeb Bush or whoever, they're not doing anything about it. And Mitt Romney's not going to do anything. But this guy, I'll bring him out of the closet like a gunfighter, like Shane or maybe George Patton or Curtis LeMay, and just turn him loose and confront this. And that's what they did.

Yeah, amazing stuff. Dr. Hansen, I know you have to go, and I appreciate the few minutes you've been able to spend with us. I Already put out VictorHanson.com can find all the books and great, great little snippets about the books. Of course you can find them on Amazon. What else should the audience know and where should they go?

They can go to my website that has a link victorhansonha n-o n.com and I have all my writing there and that's very accessible.

Wonderful. Again, thank you so much for what you've done to preserve American war history. I can't wait to read this most recent book. And again, just thanks for joining our audience.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Yes sir.

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