'Trump as classic tragic hero,' Prof. Victor Davis Hanson at Pepperdine conference
Channel: Democracy Broadcasting
Date: 2018-12-28

http://DemocracyBroadcasting.com Introduced by Pete Peterson, Dean, School of Public Policy, Prof. Victor Davis Hanson, compares Trump to tragic heroes in classical literature, at Pepperdine University conference, "Toward a Conservatism of Connection: Reclaiming the American Project" held June 2018. 
Pete Peterson: So without any further ado please join me in welcoming Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. (Applause)
Thank you very much i'm very happy to be back here at pepperdine for four years i drove seven 
 I think it was 16 Mondays Jim Wilbur asked me to teach here and i got to know the 405 the 101
and your traffic patterns but i came every sunday night and taught the graduate course at the school of public and i really enjoyed it it was a wonderful experience i thought i'd speak for about
30 minutes and open it up to questions have you noticed that donald trump incites civil war in every institution you're affiliated with at the hoover institution we're having a civil war at national review where i'm a writer we're having a civil war i think the war is over at the bradley foundation where i'm on the board but it's everywhere so i guess it's good in some sense that there's
a turmoil but i'd like to ask ourselves collectively whether trump was a catalyst or was he a symptom if he didn't exist would we have to invent him i kind of think that we would whether we knew it or not over the last 30 40 years of the end of the cold war and the globalized project
there were people who were not engaged in it or were not a beneficiary of it and they
had they were developing a different view of it and unfortunately when you have ideological
divides if they're compounded geographically as we know from the civil war then it's a force multiplier and if you look at what was happening on the east and west coast that of course had physical proximity to the the wider world you can see that and be reductionists if it's okay with
you anybody who had used muscular labor that pass could be xeroxed abroad so if you
were a small farmer and you were growing raisins the greeks could do it cheaper i couldn't really do it cheaper in real dollars but because of subsidies and eu practices and i saw uh the price
of raisins go from fourteen hundred dollars to four hundred one year wiped out about seventy percent of the people that lived on my avenue if you were a lathe worker if you were a fabricator if you were an assembler anything that could be done elsewhere physically anything that could not journalism academics law finance insurance was not only not xerox but it was magnified in value because the market went from 300 million to six or now 7.6 billion people and it tended to create a self-fulfilling prophecy it wasn't just enough that people in youngstown ohio or bakersfield
california were not as successful as people in palo alto it wasn't just that amazon or
facebook or apple or the google companies were all on the coast or 20 top universities in the world 17 of them in the united states harvard yale prince and cal texas they're all on the coast it's for all the major corporations it wasn't just that fact that was accentuated through globalization but we created a kind of ethos that we blame the victim as if well because that you're not
making that much money or somebody can do something cheaper abroad then it's your fault
and i really came it struck me about five years ago when i was talking to a person on the farm
um and he said to me well can't somebody do what you do cheaper and i said what do you mean
he said well you ever get up in the morning and somebody wrote a column in south korea better than you did and i said no he said no and he said well if they could don't you think you'd be replaced and i said yes and he really he had a point and i don't like to read things but i thought i would just read you a spectrum of what people said about the interior the people who were not connected in the global project and almost you'll see what i'm i had hundreds of these
examples and here's one from my own magazine national review kevin williamson this is
a cover story just two years ago the truth about these dysfunctional downscale communities that
they deserve to deny economically there are negative assets morally they are indefensible
the white american underclass is enthralled to a vicious selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles donald trump's speeches made them feel good so does
oxycontin what they need isn't analgesics literal or political they need real opportunity ...